Bullinger and Calvin on Hebrews

Since Brian Lee (Johannes Cocceius and the Exegetical Roots of Federal Theology) has done us the service of doing the spade work what is cited below is Lee’s comparison between Bullinger and Calvin vis-à-vis their commentaries on Hebrews and their understanding of Hebrews 8, in particular.

“Clearly, the basic distinction between form and substance, expressed both in the commentary (ie Ad Hebraeos) and the Institutes, is in great agreement with Bullinger, insofar as it identifies a single, unified substance. Like Bullinger, Calvin believes that Hebrews 8 has the abrogation of the ceremonies in view. But Calvin speaks much more freely of two distinct covenants, the one ‘legal’ or ‘of the law,’ and the other ‘evangelical.’ Calvin does not draw a too-sharp distinction between the two periods, insisting that even he Fathers had the ‘writing of the law’ on their hearts. The difference between the two administrations should be viewed in a comparative sense, ‘between the less and the greater.’ For the sake of comparison only, the Apostle considers the dispensations according to what is peculiar or preponderant in each; we are not to presume that there was no gifting of the Spirit before the coming of Christ.

Yet there is more of an emphasis on the different natures of the two covenants here under comparison. The ‘solution to the problem’ of how the Fathers received the Spirit is that ‘There is yet no reason why God should not have extended the grace of the new covenant to the fathers.’ Grace, in an important sense, is not proper to the covenant of the law. As he states more clearly in his discussion in the Institutes, ‘The Law everywhere contains promises of mercy; but as these are adventitious to it (aliunde ascitae, ‘borrowed from elsewhere’), they do not enter into the account of the Law as considered only in its own nature.’ This soteriological contrast between Law and Gospel, though treated in a separate section of the Institutes, cannot entirely be distilled from the topic of the relation between the two testaments, but rather is essential to a proper expression of both continuity and discontinuity. As noted earlier, Hagen overlooks precisely the fact that these two topics are both distinct and related, wrongly inferring from one half of the discussion that Calvin believes in an unqualified ‘agreement of law and gospel.’”