of God’s beneficence but cannot be practiced unless it rob a man of all his
senses and degrades him to a block.’^40
Much more could be said on this topic of Calvin’s view concerning the role
of grief and delight in our human existence; but we must move on to take note
of some of what he says about human beings as bearing the image of God.
Calvin gives an interesting twist to the familiar idea of theimago dei:we
mirror God; so when God beholds us, Godfinds himself mirrored. In creating
human beings in the image of God,‘the Creator himself willed that his own
glory be seen as in a mirror’.^41 Consequently, when God beholds human
beings, God‘beholds Himself...asinamirror’.^42
A consequence of the fact that each human being mirrors God, and thus
mirrors God back to Godself, is that we, as human beings, are unified at a deep
level with each other: to see another human being is to see another creature
who mirrors God and who thus delights God by mirroring God back to
Godself. No more profound kinship among God’s creatures can exist than
this. Furthermore, each of us mirrors God in the same respects—though some
do so more, some less. Thereby we also, in a derivative way, resemble each
other. One could say that we image each other, that we mirror each other. As
Calvin puts it,‘We cannot but behold our own face as it were in a glass in the
person that is poor and despised... though he were the furthest stranger in
the world. Let a Moor or a Barbarian come among us, and yet inasmuch as he
is a man, he brings with him a looking glass wherein we may see that he is our
brother and neighbor.’^43
There were those in Calvin’s day who argued that the image of God in us
can be, and in some cases has been, obliterated. Calvinfirmly disagreed:
‘Should anyone object, that this divine image has been obliterated, the solution
is easy;first, there yet exists some remnant of it, so that man is possessed of no
small dignity; and, secondly, the Celestial Creator himself, however corrupted
man may be, still keeps in view the end of his original creation; and according
to his example, we ought to consider for what end he created men, and what
excellence he has bestowed upon them above the rest of living things.’^44 There
is nothing that can happen to a human being, and nothing that a human being
can do, to bring it about that the image of God in that human being is
obliterated. A human being’s mirroring of God can be painfully distorted,
blurred, and diminished; it cannot be eliminated.
(^40) Calvin,InstitutesIII.x.3. (^41) Calvin,InstitutesII.xii.6.
(^42) ‘Sermon on John 10:7’; quoted in T. F. Torrance,Calvin’s Doctrine of Man(London:
Lutterworth Press, 1952), 59.
(^43) ‘Sermon on Galatians 6:9– 11 ’; quoted in R. S. Wallace,Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian
Life(Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1997), 150.
(^44) John Calvin,Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. Rev. John King
(Grand Rapids, WI: Baker, 1989). Genesis 9:6, 295–6.
90 Nicholas Wolterstorff