This is an illuminating study, carefully researched and incisively written. I learned a lot about Calvin, but also found many broader contemporary debates reframed in helpful light by Sanchez’s fresh approach to issues of political theology and particularly to the intricate relations between semiotics, sacramentality, and power in Calvin’s thought. I also appreciated Sanchez’s crystalline way of presenting key arguments from theoretical interlocutors from Schmitt to Foucault to Butler. A gift to the reader.  

A central achievement of this book, it seems to me, is in showing how supple and useful the frame of “resignification” is for getting at key features of Christian piety. Sanchez’s account is focused on devotional movements often described as renewal, conversion, or rebirth. By theorizing them as events of resignification, Sanchez is able to tease out subtle connections between piety and signifying practice across the Augustinian tradition, as well as to set up thought-provoking connections between Calvin’s approach to Christian piety and Nietzsche’s seemingly antithetical interest in a revaluation of values. 

There is a performative bent to the reading of Calvin, insofar as Sanchez argues for the embodied, affective, and pedagogical character of his theological concepts themselves. The primary way in which the concepts of the Institutes operate, for Sanchez, is not to describe or refer to some stable body of meaning which might be analyzed intellectually and made into a coherent theoretical system; rather, Calvin’s concepts are meant to induce an affective posture in the reader, to bring her into a particular type of relationship with divinity. At the social level, this performative reading inclines toward a process ecclesiology: “In fact, because the church only exists performatively—in its obedient exercise of Word and Sacrament—the church literally exists as perpetual reform.” (256) 

At the heart of this reading is what Sanchez calls Calvin’s “subjunctive” or “fictive” approach to theology. Rather than asking us to evaluate whether a given doctrine is so in the sense of being coherent or disposed to demonstration, theology written in the subjunctive mood asks the reader first to take it as so, to put it on or assume it as a distinct way of being disposed to the world–– which Sanchez calls an “affective reorientation” or “resignification” of world and self. Words here do not simply refer but act as a kind of “veil” which the reader adopts, and thereby becomes able to see “the world as if willed by God” (138) and to perceive “nature as if creation” (139). 

In his book on Paul, Agamben (a central interlocutor for Sanchez) follows Heidegger in pointing out the curious and central role of the subjunctive in the Pauline idea that the Christian live in the world “as if not.” The theological function of the as-if construction has also long fascinated me in relation to Luther, who uses it conspicuously in “The Freedom of the Christian,” where union with Christ is repeatedly figured along subjunctive lines, drawing on the legal fictions of marital and property law (Christ assumes the Christian’s sins “as if they were his”). When we add in the subjunctive character of key claims in Kant’s architectonic and philosophy of religion (memorably theorized by Hans Vaihinger’s 1911 The Philosophy of the As If), we can see Sanchez’s argument contributing to a fascinating portrait of the as-if construction’s wider role in Protestant thought, one meriting further systematic historical and theoretical attention. By bringing this picture into focus, as Sanchez indicates (pp. 192-3), we may also help unsettle the ossified association of Protestantism with sincerity, not exactly by refuting it, but by examining the performative and poietic dimensions of sincerity itself. 

Sanchez anchors the fictive interpretation of the Institutes in close readings of passages in which Calvin either makes explicit use of an “as-if” construction or qualifies an idea by setting it in the subjunctive mood. In some of the passages the subjunctive is less salient than others, but overall, I was convinced of the merit of this frame and its ability to get at important questions about what it means to practice as well as to think an idea. 

One confusion I had was that at times, it seemed there was little if any distinction being drawn between seeing the world as if willed by divinity and seeing the world as willed by divinity. For example, Sanchez argues that “Calvin thinks the exercise of seeing the world as if affirmed and then engaged by God will generate forbearance, reverence, expectation, and even love—all staging for pursuing the knowledge of God and ourselves.” (148) A page later she writes, “Through such practices, believers could repeatedly exercise naming themselves and other events under the sign of God’s care, which—according to the logic laid out in Book One of the 1559 Institutio – enables the materialization of the world as the theater of divine glory.” (149)

My question is about the difference between the as and the as if. Taking-as, arguably, is the structure of any semiotic activity, any conscious act. My mind does not perceive the table I am currently leaning against in a simple, comprehensive gulp; context, purpose, history, and relationships all inflect that and how and what the table means. So, I take the table as desk when it allows me to spread out my papers, as obstacle when I bump into it walking by, as theorized object insofar as it serves me as an example in this essay, etc. 

However, to take the table as if table, obstacle, or theoretical object seems to involve something else. I’d argue this sort of perception involves a rather more conscious sense that even as I take the table in a given way, I am also distinctively aware of the possibility that things might not be what they seem. Does this distinction—between the as of any signification and the as if of more explicitly fictive signification––matter to Calvin? To the reader of Calvin? Or is Sanchez asking us to consider that for Calvin to see the world as divinely created and to see the world as if divinely created are one and the same thing? It was hard for me to get a sense of Sanchez’s view on this point as she moves fluidly between the two constructions throughout the book. It is only in the conclusion that this ambiguity seems to be addressed: “Certainly, Calvin treats these privileged signs as true—as true. To appreciate the performative technology of Calvin’s resignification, it is important to hold both parts of the signature together in the tightest possible oscillation. On the one hand, these signs are revealed, which means they are unverifiable. The words that present them to the imaginative faculties of the reader do so through the operation of a language that is also fully ordinary and unable to shed itself of its vulnerability to context in which truth claims can never be more than ‘as if.’” (270) 

As I understand this passage, Sanchez does seem to be arguing for a continuity between as/as-if constructions in Calvin’s theology. If that’s so, one way to go would be to say that while ordinary acts of signification may not be expressed in the subjunctive mode, as (!) instances of taking-as, they do involve some subtly fictive element operating beneath the surface. This seems a plausible, and to me rather interesting claim. At some moments, it feels aligned with what Sanchez is trying to do: “Because the Word encounters us in flesh, it is by virtue of that appearance that the Word can also encounter us as ‘word’—as fictive mediation capable of recasting the terms through which we recognized ourselves.” (254) But if this is how all language operates––if all signs are seen as fictive mediations capable of recasting the terms through which we recognize things, others, ourselves––then it is not clear what the alternative to the fictive signification would be, nor what would make Calvin’s approach to pedagogy and writing distinctive.

Moreover, I am not at all confident that this is Sanchez’s claim or where she wants to take her interpretation of Calvin. Sanchez’s focus is not on Calvin’s theory of language but on his approach to theological language, indeed, on the moments where he is addressing the thorniest and most ambivalent points of providential doctrine.  On second read, I noted that a number of the subjunctive markers Sanchez isolates––“as if” but also “so to speak” and “as it were”––bear a strong resemblance to markers associated with apophatic theology. These tropes, as Michael Sells once argued, are used in apophatic writing to manifest the ineluctable failure of the human mind to grasp divine reality. In this way they serve as a caveat or check on claims to know. I take it as part of what is innovative about Sanchez’s account that she sees these formulations not as markers of unsaying, however, but of saying––albeit in a performative and poietic, rather than indexical, way. Here, unlike for Sells and perhaps Cher Horowitz, “as if” means more yes than no. So I am not sure where this matter stands for her.

A final point, touching on the stakes of the as/as-if question––Sanchez argues that one merit of grasping Calvin’s poietic approach to divine signification is to recover Calvin as a resource for contemporary critical projects aiming to redefine the relations among sacrality, signification, and sovereignty. Engaging throughout with Victoria Kahn’s call for a self-consciously fictive approach to power, Sanchez shows how for Calvin, “if the revealed will of God is fictive, and its power is the power of the signifying Word, it is performative––it makes things.” (146) While Sanchez admits in the final pages of the book that Calvin will likely not take us as far into the fictive as Kahn might like our politics to go, I find this connection insightful and appealing.

My concern, however, is that the critique of sovereignty Calvin offers seems to be inextricably bound to a critique of idolatry (see, e.g., passages cited on pp. 71-72, where idolatry is figured along with “artificial religion” as temptation). On one level this makes sense; to treat the relative as absolute can conduce to a politics of tyranny. But it is difficult to see how one would (or why one would want to) distinguish an as-if theology from what Calvin calls an artificial religion. Indeed, a merely selective acceptance of the fictive dimensions of power has long been at the root of Christianity’s imperializing attitude toward non-Christian gods and devotional practices. As J. Lorand Matory’s work on the history of the fetish has helped show, the idol is first of all a term for other people’s gods. And the illegitimacy of the fetish is not just about its status as a finite or material concentration of spiritual power, but also and especially about its having been made. In other words, if Calvin can help us in a critique of sovereignty and of the concentrations of worldly power only on the basis of such formations being seen as idolatrous, I worry about how this account will make sense of other sorts of claims and ways of practicing divine power in the world. It seems to me a lacuna in Sanchez’s wide-ranging account that the traditions once dismissed and oppressed by Christianity for the precise reason of their being fictive should not play some role in the attempt to recast a major work of Reformation theology, and with it Christian piety and the revealed will of God itself, as operating in a fictive key.  

On this note I am reminded of a line I underlined from Sanchez’s introduction: “What matters is not just how we treat those signs – whether as serious truths or as unserious tools. But also who gets to wield those tools and treat them as if truths.” (17) With this quote in mind I am fortified in my sense that Sanchez will have a way of helping me out of these distinct if related confusions, and I look forward to her response.

The hour of theology is come when a mythical configuration breaks down and its symbols that are congealed in a canon come into conflict with a new stage of human consciousness. When the symbols coined to express man’s encounter with the divine at a unique moment of history no longer coincide with his experience, theology tries to interpret the original symbols in order to integrate them within the context of the new situation: what was present in the myth is then only ‘re-presented’ in the theological interpretation.

(Jacob Taubes, “On the Nature of the Theological Method: Some Reflections on the Methodological Principles of Tillich’s Theology,” 195)

If Jacob Taubes gives us insight into the why behind theological signification—it’s function as a procedure that emerges in the crises between human consciousness and a symbolic order—then Michelle Sanchez clues us into to the specific style that Calvin brings to this process through his innovations on providence and incarnation in the 1559 Institutes. Attending to an element of Calvin’s situation that doesn’t typically inflect interpretations of his theological claims and practices, Sanchez sees his status as a refugee as significant for understanding how Calvin offers more than doctrinal concepts of providence and incarnation, but writes so as to inspire an embodied and exiled form of life in the world that is caught up in perceiving the world, church, and self through its source and sustenance in God. 

Calvin’s crisis of life in exile, experience of fragmented community, and suffering of displacement thus gives rise, on Sanchez’s reading, to a novel iteration of Christianity’s “original symbols” of providence and incarnation. This is Calvin’s style of resignifying the world in light of God’s creating, redeeming, and sustaining work. In addition to contextualizing Calvin in terms of his status as a refugee, Sanchez works throughout to situate Calvin within an intellectual history that spans ancient Greek thought, patristics, medieval scholasticism, and contemporary political theology. Thus, Sanchez seeks to connect Calvin’s theological formation with the very real sufferings and catastrophes that have been identified as an effect of sovereignty and its legitimation of exceptional social bodies through the identification of the body of Christ with the body politic of a sovereign state. 

Calvin and the Resignification of the World is a book that rewards careful reading and rereading. Much like the argument Sanchez forwards regarding the transformative effects of reading as figured in Calvin’s understanding of the relationship between the Word and the World, CRW is a book that clearly believes in the transformational power of reading, writing, and engagement with the world. The book’s rereading of the genre of Calvin’s Institutes characterizes them as a pedagogical text whose arrangement is crucial to the effect it is meant to have on readers. The Institutes serve as a means of embodied knowing as the reader is guided to the feel how the knowledge of God as creator leads to the knowledge of God as redeemer through the posture the reading of the institutes invites from its reader. And this twofold knowledge not only places humanity and the world in proper relationship to God’s sovereignty and the world, it also establishes the means of locating God’s sovereignty, not in the body of Christ, but in the natural world. The question that the book raises and that persisted in my own reading: what are the outcomes of such formation for rethinking key ideas of sovereignty and embodiment in political theology? To do so, Sanchez takes up doctrines of providence and the incarnation in the Institutes to consider how this transformative practice of reading aligns or diverges from recurring arguments about political sovereignty and the social body.

Much of one’s sense of the book overall will rest on what one thinks of Sanchez’s move to read Calvin’s situation as a refugee and his recasting of the relationship between exile and election as one that potentially sets him at odds with the state’s sovereignty. For my part, I think the approach is both illuminating and somewhat unconvincing. The set of questions generated by examining Calvin’s thought and life in this way absolutely clarifies and opens critical lines of question regarding the relationship of theology and politics to the formation of subjectivity at the affective and perceptive or psychic levels. However, the extent to which this style of resignification and subjective formation attests to a counter to sovereign power seems indecisive. This indecision need not be a disappointment of the text. In fact, I find that if one displaces the need for attention to this style of resignification and formation to radically undermine or displace the sovereign power of the state, the book becomes a helpful handbook in its own right.

Part of the gift of this book is that it is clear that Sanchez is using it as an occasion to think through something she herself remains open to understanding and investigating. The book and analysis has the air of catching wind of a curious and fascinating line of thought. This posture allows the reader to follow her lead, being guided through Calvin, perhaps as an intentional iteration of the process she explores in Calvin’s own writings. One question that emerges in my reading is, to what extent Sanchez thinks such practices of theological resignification are operative even when the modern reader doesn’t suppose them? The overlap of my writing this response with my rereading of Henri de Lubac on “spiritual understanding” seemed particularly serendipitous as it helped me clarify my own attempt to understand how ideas of order at the scriptural level are related to questions of embodied participation, sovereignty, history, and belonging. In this sense, Sanchez’s deep dive into the formative effects of Calvin’s sense of writing providence and incarnation also allows us to see its resonances throughout Christian theology. Sanchez makes apparent a kind of universal quality of creedal confessions of Christian theology in regards to the correspondence of the writing and its arrangement to a process of formation and resignification that shapes how one lives in the world. 

While scholarly attempts to replace “bad theology” with “good theology” sometimes seem to think theology does more than it can or equate the announcement of liberative theologies with their historical actualization, Sanchez offers another approach predicated on the cultivation of attention. And it is this attention to Calvin’s style of writing that gives insight into how theological formation happens at subjective, affective, and creaturely levels. At some level, the providential organization of everyday life sits at the heart of Calvin’s thought and sense of how the social world is constituted. On my reading, one might say that Sanchez’s book highlights an everyday or ordinary sensibility, a comprehensive perspective, and a historical enfleshment that makes Christian order not simply a conceptual frame, but the incarnation of a Christic symbolic order expressed in the world. This enfleshed order thus encompasses a field of sensibility, inhabitation, and vitality. The notion of a “living image” and related ideas of gestural forms of incarnation recurs in Sanchez’s book and Calvin’s thought as she foregrounds the visual pedagogy as a guidance of the attention to properly perceive the dynamism of creaturely life in light of God’s power. My own study of Christian figurality led me to wonder to what extent Sanchez see’s the resignification of the world in Calvin’s writing being congruent with figural readings more generally?

While Sanchez acknowledges how this form of resignification can serve unjust sovereign power, she also offers, contra Agamben, an argument that Calvin’s theology and its sense of glory is rooted in a providential affirmation of the world that “[effects the world] not by invading or overriding material conditions, but by assuming an intimate and active relationship to them” (169). As illuminating as this counter interpretation of Calvin is, I kept thinking of Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies and its troubling of ideas of intimacy and domesticity as somehow extricable from political economy and the state. The question of intimacies that are established through theological resignification of the world emerges as a pressing one. Rather than reading sovereign logics of mastery and joining as at odds, what happens when we understand forms of intimacy, joining, and continuity as part and parcel of sovereign rule as dispersed through a racialized social body via mastery? In this way, Sanchez’s book seems to provide a clearer view of how we might understand the theological at work in resignifying Africans and “New World” Indigenes so as to supernaturally convert them into “natural” slaves and savages, producing a political status of non-belonging or erasure through assimilation that nevertheless was predicated on a racial distribution of intimacy, joining, attention, and sustenance.

Sanchez highlights how the convergence of the providential and the incarnational arms of Christian order present a unique set of tools for governance. By making Calvin’s approaches manifest as tools or technologies of ordering the world through practices that educate perception, inscription, and desire, Sanchez also allows us to understand these tools of resignification as one of the means by which the New World projects rearrangement of flesh along a racial economy of redemption is established and perpetuated. The need to reproduce and perpetually renew the significance of this racialized world is an effect of the crisis of Christian order and Christian finitude in New World view. The ongoing history of the world in the wake of Christ’s death and resurrection generates an ongoing anxiety of order. And it is precisely these anxieties of order and finitude that seem to drive Calvin’s sense of providence and incarnation. 

As Sanchez argues, “providence is a discourse that has often emerged precisely when the figure of the living face the inevitability of death” (85). While we only get glimpses of attention to the topic in this text, I couldn’t evade the sense of domesticity that seems to underlie the text. The question of belonging, which I think stands as an ongoing question in Christian theology is apparent here: where does one belong, who does one belong to, what are the benefits of this belonging? Sanchez writes that the “formation of a new mode of existence,” (9) the formation of a new people, particularly as attested to in Geneva, is not a matter of creation from given forms of existence, but emerges “out of nothingness” (8). The questions of blackness and indigeneity would seem to trouble the “nothingness” out of which this new form is created. The point here is not that Geneva, itself, fashions a racialized nothingness, but that the means of people-making it offers depends on obscuring how the novelty it announces is actually a rearrangement of already existing materials. If this form of a people is announced as a new form but in practice depends precisely on the resignification of the world that also resignifies through racialization, then the fact that “creation offers an entirely new world to house a ‘people’” (9) through a sustaining affirmation of the world might provide “a different logic of sovereignty,” but one that illuminates how the oikos, particularly the Christian household of faith, depends precisely on obscuring how its practices and formations serve the production and reproduction of the political order and, vice versa, how the household of faith gains legitimacy precisely through the ability to evoke the difference between love and mastery on display. Given how creation and estrangement are resolved by understanding the world as a home for the exiled-elect, the questions of domesticity emerge precisely as they appear to trouble a political economy predicated on sovereignty and rupture or interruption. 

But if we don’t assume joining or the affirmation of the world as counter to mastery and the sovereignty of exceptional body, what emerges then? The book seems to posit a way that formation in Christian belonging of the sort that Calvin offers provides an alternative to “logic of mastery and submission” (210). In Sanchez’s view “learning is more akin to belonging… . Faith is the originary response to the suggestion that this kind of belonging might, in fact, be possible” (210). But, on my reading, we then have a problem of entanglement that exceeds Christian remedies precisely because Christian redemption and its production and reproduction of belonging through resignification is the re-ordering of existence that creates the problem it needs to solve. The Christian ordering of the world depends on the intimacies that its timeline creates to narrate both its proximity and distance to others. Though many read Christian supersessionism in terms of a rupturing sovereignty and exception, as a break or replacement, one can also read it (and assertions of post-supersessionist or soft-supersessionist theologies) as producing and reproducing the intimacies that Christianity depends on to make itself legible as that which governs the proper sense of the world. Just as the sequencing and ordering of Calvin’s Institutes reflects God’s providential and redemptive sequencing and ordering of time and space, Christian governance is meant to ensure the proper order of reading precisely because it is crucial to securing the promise of Christianity and its sense of fulfillment. 

My great enjoyment of Sanchez’s book and the richness of analysis and insight allowed me to wrestle with Calvin’s thought at a deeper level, and so gain a better appreciation of his impact as well as a more concerned perception of the extent to which the resignification of the world might leave some stranded in an unknown world. Forced to become legible in the terms of belonging that this order posits as legitimate, forced to come to terms with one’s own displacement and dislocation as an effect of a mission to reorder the world, what tools may be found here that would aid in addressing that theological resignification of the flesh through racialization? If nothing else—and there certainly is so much more than this in the book—Sanchez gives us attention as a starting place that we would all do well to carry with us.

Is it possible to reimagine political theology from within the Christian canon? Can we reconceive sovereignty by reinterpreting one of the greatest theorists of divine power? Is there a way to affirm this world, as humans and all other elements that make up Gaia live and breath, emit and decay, destroy and generate within it, without passively accepting its problems or, conversely, seeking to imposing our will to transform upon it? These are the questions raised by Michelle Sanchez’s brilliant, ambitious, and challenging book. Calvin and the Resignification of the World: Creation, Incarnation, and the Problem of Political Theology in the 1559 Institutes aims at nothing less than a new vision of political theology, shaken free of transcendent power as well as its immanent counterpart by a resignifying theology that equates divine sovereignty with incarnate—materialized—creativity. 

What is this materialized creativity? It is poetics, Sanchez says. World-making. The Institutes as a pedagogic, participatory text that works on and with its readers “in a dynamic continuum between language and local bodily activities” (24). This signifying process is not abstracted from the material conditions of the language users. Crucially, for Sanchez, Calvin’s own material realities inform a theology that refuses to privilege particular corporate bodies and persons. This claim that Calvin does not privilege particular corporate bodies and persons may startle readers who associate Calvin with theocracy and election. One of the delights of Sanchez’s work, however, is the way it repeatedly suggests we should think again, that our assumptions about the logical implications of Calvin’s teachings might be wrong. 

Consider, for example, the first line of the book’s introduction: “John Calvin lived life as a refugee” (1). This unusual description of Calvin—whose movements from Paris to Basel to Geneva to Strasbourg and back to Geneva are key details in any biographical account, but rarely assessed as evidence that Calvin was a displaced person—is the provocative premise for Sanchez’s project. Inspired Nicholas Terpstra’s account of how the ubiquitous “body” (corpus Christianum) metaphor influenced all notions of corporate belonging as well as Christian logics of expulsion and migration, Sanchez reads Calvin in light of J. Kameron Carter’s challenge to Giorgio Agamben’s theory of sovereignty. Agamben, Carter explains, highlighted the importance of the homo sacer but failed to reconsider sovereignty from that vantage point—the position of the abject, the inglorious, those “denied the position of the master…marginalized or denied the place of the center around which all difference is to be organized and governed” (4). 

Responding to Carter’s prompt, Sanchez considers the possibility that the abject who reorient the very notion of sovereignty include, in early modern Europe, Christian refugees within Europe. People like Calvin. Calvin himself. “If the early modern Corpus Christianum was itself constituted through the institutionalized management of narratives and practices materialized at the level of the body, then the abject of that body would be the refugees who were not executed, but whose position with respect to the health of the collective body was expunged as a peripheral impurity” (5). Sanchez gives us another chance at this challenging point, this time restating it as a question: “If such figures might reveal something of the underside of sovereign glory—or the extent to which that sovereignty is itself constructed and ritually perpetuated through the expulsion of the inglorious—then is it possible to harness a critique of modern sovereignty by beginning with the perspective of an early modern refugee?” (5, see also the version of this question on 146)

Reading and rereading this book, I have often paused at this question, always with the temptation to respond with a flat “no.” She’s talking about Calvin, I remind myself. Certainly Calvin is more complicated than his theocratic authoritarian caricature would suggest. But to align Calvin with the abject, the inglorious, those who view power from a position of exclusion. That feels like a reach. And all the more important for exactly that reason. What deconstructive readings do with texts alone, Sanchez seeks to do by reminding us of the multi-faceted realities of daily life, even, or especially, for those now canonized in positions of authority. 

For this reason, my skeptical “no” is always accompanied by an inquiring, uncertain “yes.” I am impressed by what the question reveals about Sanchez’s project, and method. It is no easy thing, to imagine and articulate alternatives to hegemonic models of corporate embodiment. Calvin’s 1559 Institutes does just that, she argues, but not if we read it for what we expect to find. It is difficult to affirm the world while disavowing the easy comforts of hope in a better future. Perhaps—a tantalizing perhaps—we will learn to do just that by participating in the Institutes’s pedagogic process. By the end of the book I was persuaded that Calvin’s Institutes persistently disrupts familiar assumptions about sovereignty, responsibility, and the relationship between human creativity and the world’s matter, and mattering, precisely because Sanchez’s own account of the Institutes repeatedly unsettled my own ideas of each in turn. 

Sanchez wants more, however—not just disruption, but a new reality, “a new materialization of creation” achieved “by resignifying it” (145). I am accustomed to thinking of Calvin’s Institutes as an exercise in perspective, as a work that prods and shocks and entices the reader to recognize the limits of their own perceptions, to shift their gaze from themselves to God, and to see then everything anew, through the “eyes of faith.” It is more challenging to experience this perspectival change as a new materialization of creation. I am not (yet) living my material reality differently as a result of reading Sanchez’s book. (Nor have I embarked on rereading the Institutes with Sanchez as my guide). But it is a testimony to the provocative ambition of the project that I judge it—and now the Institutes—against this standard, not just of the new perspectives it conjures for its readers, but by this question: what are the material effects of this pedagogic process? 

In thinking about, and aiming to experience, this new materialization of creation, I am helped especially by Sanchez’s alternative to Victoria Kahn’s argument about the world-making power of language. On Kahn’s account, this is a quintessentially modern premise, made possible by thinkers like Hobbes and Vico, who freed language from its servitude to theology and metaphysics, declaring it a self-sufficient form of creativity. Literature subsequently acquired a new authority, not because literature becomes the only way language is used creatively but because literary creativity reveals the fictionality of all language use, including theology and politics. In a regime structured by the conviction that we are the creators of the world we inhabit, fictionalized sovereignty superseded theological sovereignty. God in the sky was replaced by a guy with a pen. 

Sanchez points out that Kahn—like the modernity she celebrates—thereby rejects theology only to replace it with a creative power made in the image of the God it denied. The problem is not that Kahn or others fail to recognize the persistence of this particular theological structure. Instead, this failure is symptomatic of a persistent inability to see modernity’s insidious effects: it privileges the self-making individual over bodies marginalized or abjected by the power of personal and political self-creation. Two versions of fiction thus come into view. In Kahn’s version, language makes the world. In Calvin’s, language has the capacity to resignify the world. Kahn’s mode of fictionality abstracts from the material world. Calvin’s, by contrast, triangulates human and God with creation. And here, if I tilt my head (as Sanchez rightly suggests a reader might need to do), I have not just a glimpse but something approaching an embodied understanding of what Sanchez means by materialization, and how and why it is in play with Calvin in a way it is not for most theorists of language. For Calvin, knowledge of self and knowledge of God—each impossible without the other—both depend on divine revelation in and through the material world. The Institutes’s many references to material conditions and perceptions, are not incidental but essential. Calvin’s pastoral voice, his work’s innumerable invocations of human experiences of suffering and grief and joy and pride and uncertainty and despair, of actions and consequences and situations lamented or celebrated or disdained or embraced, all testify to Calvin’s insistence that the world should not be denied or escaped but experienced differently, offering the reader of the Institutes a “performative materialization” (140n50), “enabling new forms of participation within creation” (145).

Considering, finally, what these new forms of participation entail, and enable, it is worthwhile to peruse again the last few pages of Calvin and the Resignification of the World, where Sanchez returns to a comparison of Nietzsche and Calvin foreshadowed from the beginning. This incongruous pairing offers the reader the opportunity to consider how the book has provided new spectacles (to borrow one of Calvin’s favorite metaphors), the possibility of recognizing that “Nietzsche’s life-affirming asceticism and Calvin’s worldly asceticism” share not only “a way of using signs to cultivate the responsibility of the self to the world” but also “the insistence that the world—not the church, not the state, not conventional norms—offers the proper domain of signification and the proper site of the emergence of glory.” Calvin the proto-Nietzschean is no more familiar than Calvin the refugee and might well provoke the same initial resistance or dismissal. But if this is the reaction, it should give us pause, for in resignifying each of these thinkers, and their possibilities, Sanchez is practicing what she argues the Institutes teaches: poiesis, a fiction-making that is not unreal but, on the contrary, the ever-changing site of humanity’s created reality. 

Audacious. That is my immediate assessment of Michelle Sanchez’s bold and creative use of John Calvin as an interlocutor for modern political theology—especially Agamben—in an effort to weave a narrative other than Carl Schmitt’s tiresome fetishizing of authoritarianism through the misappropriation of divine sovereignty. And yet, I have some misapprehensions.

Sanchez chooses quite a stellar cast of modern and postmodern interlocutors when interrogating Calvin’s sacramentology to tease out a theoretical framework that is understandable and relatable to the secularizing discourse of modern political thought. Don’t misunderstand. I accept that the Protestant Reformation—and in particular John Calvin’s efforts to drag Christian spirituality out of the cloister and into the public square—contributed to the rise of secularism and the dominance of Enlightenment rationalism.

In fact, the appeal of Sanchez’s argument is that she provides a carefully contextualized historical analysis for understanding the political dimensions of Calvin’s understanding of the Body of Christ in its time and place while simultaneously constructing a viable political theology for the twenty-first century. Yet, there are certain temptations any scholar engaging the theology of John Calvin ought to avoid.

The biggest temptation is to read Calvin as a proto-modernist. I write this as someone whose engagement of John Calvin has been criticized for projecting a proto-liberationist reading onto Calvin.1 Therefore, it is vital to accept certain axioms when reading and interpreting John Calvin:

1. God is an agent in human history. More than that, God is the prime agent in human history for those who have eyes to see. By contrast, Enlightenment rationalism is built on the premise that what pre-moderns identified as divine action in the world modern science can explain by purely material means.
2. The Word of God enables us to see God’s action in the world. The image Calvin offers in Book 1 of the Institutes is that Scripture, as Word of God, serves as corrective lenses for our tired and defective eyes. In other words, Calvin addressed the Institutes primarily to those who have been reborn in Spirit, and not to the perpetuators of the secularized discourse of modern political philosophy and theology.
3. Whether in matters of theology or politics, Calvin was not a fan of unilateral decision-making. Calvin’s critique of kingship, hinted at in the prefatory letter to King Francis, underlying the chapter on civil governance in the Institutes, and expounded at length in his sermons on 2 Samuel, is that no human authority can wield absolute and unquestioned power. Therefore, while Calvin was not a proponent of armed revolution, he did advocate the removal of tyrannical rulers by duly appointed magistrates (serving as God’s anointed agents).
4. This distrust of authoritarianism is grounded in his theological critique of idolatry. Whether speaking about spiritual matters (the church) or temporal matters (civil government), Calvin accepts that the will of God is embodied in both the church and the state, but not identified or limited to either or both. In other words, God is present sacramentally in both the church and the state, for those with eyes to see, but to twist the doctrine of divine sovereignty to justify the unilateral and absolute power of the state (Schmitt) is anathema to Calvin’s understanding of God’s presence on the world.
5. John Calvin was very much a product of the sixteenth century. Thus, while a defender of human dignity who envisioned a role for the church in instructing and guiding civil governance, he was not a defender of modern political liberalism, egalitarianism, and universal enfranchisement. Simply put, Calvin believed we are all born into our divinely appointed station in life and there we ought to find our vocation and contentment, so while he contributed much to the formation of the modern state we ought not to judge Calvin by contemporary standards of emancipation, enfranchisement, and social mobility.

Michelle Sanchez has accurately identified John Calvin’s critique of idolatry (265) as the guiding principle behind Calvin’s theological analysis of civil government and the reason why rather than view the state as the embodiment of divine authority on earth—or for that matter locating the same power in the church, as the medieval Church advocated—John Calvin employs the metaphorical language of sacramental presence to describe the dual nature of divine action in the world. In Sanchez’s language, Calvin never conflates the sign with the signified, but always struggles to preserve the uncertainty, open-endedness, and fluctuating aspect of divine manifestation in earthen vessels (2 Cor 4:7).

As Michel Foucault, one of Sanchez’s many interlocutors brought into conversation with Calvin, has noted, practices that help liberate can very easily oppress. To counter Schmitt, divine sovereignty does not manifest itself in clear, unquestionable terms so authoritarian forms of government—whose ideal form is absolute dictatorship—cannot possibly originate in the divine will. John Calvin follows Augustine of Hippo insofar as he views civil government as a necessary vehicle for maintaining social order, and like Augustine would never argue that the state is the means by which God overturns our fallen condition.

And it is here that Sanchez’s book gives us a glimpse into the modern—or dare I say it—the postmodern Calvin. The kind of universal truth and objective certainty that Enlightenment rationalism strives for, especially in the natural sciences, lies forever beyond reach when discussing divine freedom and agency. Consequently, matters of theology and politics alike remain contestable and debatable, which is where Michelle’s book overlaps with my current interests.2.

Namely, how can we speak about divine agency—the concrete and real presence of God in the world—without confusing the sign for the thing signified. In other words, without making false idols of our theological constructs. David Tracy has opined, “Fragments are our spiritual situation.”3

In the modern era, the coherence and sweeping scope of theological systems has been called into question by the exactness of the natural sciences, so that Christian dogmatic claims no longer occupy a central place in Western intellectual thought. This dislocation of systematic theology in the post-Enlightenment era calls to mind one of the parables of Kierkegaard:

A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history etc.—and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in the immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge. 4

The ambitious projects of systematic theology now stand mostly empty. Perhaps it is time for the discipline of theology to abandon the Platonic paradigm, which views knowledge as eternal and unchanging, and embrace the Heraclitian by acknowledging the open-endedness and provisional nature of dogmatic claims.

We are witnessing the gradual collapse of the Enlightenment’s grand narrative, described by Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel as an “ideological Totality” that facilitated the conquest and colonization of America, Africa, and Asia by disguising “oppression” behind the promise of “progress,” a reality mourned by some and celebrated by others. While the demise of the modernist metanarrative is all but certain, the question still undecided is whether some other metanarrative will rise to take its place. The fragmentation of knowledge need not signal a collapse of social order, though conflicting narratives can generate political upheaval and social unrest—even violence—as evidenced by the Capitol uprising on January 6, 2021.  

Most postmodern religionists recognize theology will never again ascend to its former place as “queen of the sciences,” yet still view the collapse of religious certainty into innumerable revelatory fragments with some degree of hope. Some theologians, especially those identified with Radical Orthodoxy like Catherine Pickstock, pursue the postmodern reassertion of a distinctly Christian metaphysics: “we live in an era in which pre-modern metaphysical approaches to truth are returning to view, and to a renewed viability.”5 Instead of forcing these tensions to fit the old and worn out narrative—pre-modern religion versus Enlightenment rationalism—a different story needs to be told; one that embraces religious plurality while transcending sectarianism. 

Theology is afloat and rudderless on a Sargasso Sea of competing, sometimes conflicting narratives; it needs to navigate a distinctly theological yet non-totalitarian course that meets the challenges of our fractured existence. Instead of building comprehensive systems, theological work ought to be fragmentary, occasional, and open-ended; scholarly yet public facing while engaging the pressing issues of the day. In my own work, I have identified five loci—problematic “myths” that still shape the intellectual, political, and religious landscape—the discipline of theology must engage in order to contribute meaningfully to the postmodern discourse: (1) The myth of human uniqueness, (2) the myth of the free market, (3) the myth of political sovereignty, (4) the myth of Christian uniqueness, and (5) the myth of materialism. While by no means exhaustive, this brief list identifies the major existential crises confronting humanity and accentuates the need for an explicitly theological narrative voice within the dominant secularizing discourse. Michelle Sanchez’s wonderful book, Calvin and the Resignification of the World, serves as a guidepost and model for others like myself to follow.

Because my job at Iliff School of Theology is to teach the history of theology, I have had many occasions to be painfully aware that I was the only person in the room or on the zoom who didn’t despise Calvin. (A friend who is quite a good Calvin scholar wished me “good luck with those Arminians” when I took the job at Iliff. She has also referred to me, in a play on Peter Gay’s book on Freud, as a “Godless Calvinist.”) The issue is not simply free will and predestination, but the fact of moral repugnance at everything my students have heard about Calvin. And, at Iliff, it counts strongly against him that he is the deadest and whitest of the dead white guys. The argument of my dissertation advisor, B. A. Gerrish, that the central doctrine of the Institutes is not election but providence, that in fact Calvin places his discussion of “that dreadful decree” (Calvin’s own words) in Book III, which is about the benefits of faith, and not in Book I, which is about God, is a hard sell.

Michelle Chaplin Sanchez’s brilliant book operates at many levels: history, theology, political theory and political theology, secularization, among them. Perhaps most prominent is the level of pedagogy, and so I want to frame my comments in that register. The first practical result of this book in my life is that it gave me the courage to put Calvin on the syllabus of my introduction to theology class this winter. Can my students wrap their minds around Calvin, not the progenitor of American genocide (pilgrims, Thanksgiving, etc.), but Calvin the refugee? Sanchez’s central argument is that Calvin is not, or not just, a spinner of doctrines. Rather he offers his Institutes as a pragmatic interpretive guide to another interpretive guide (scripture). His project is that of an itinerarium, a pilgrimage or journey he takes the reader on that “enables a certain kind of living formation by activating memory and desire in the context of a teacher and a school” (62). 

I hope that the way Sanchez frames her argument will appeal to my students. The book begins and ends with fascinating discussions of political theology. In the world that Calvin is born into, the Corpus Christianum (the body of Christ) is a complex theological and social metaphor that operates on at least three levels. The church is the body of Christ (the Roman Catholic Church because it everywhere and always teaches truth consistently, and it can do this because of apostolic succession). The bread is the body of Christ (through transubstantiation, which makes this not a metaphorical but literal body of Christ). And the society is the body of Christ (the king being a human but also the earthly manifestation of divine rule). To quote Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, V, Proem, v. 10, (1596):

That power he also doth to Princes lend,

And makes them like himself in glorious sight,

To sit in his owne seate, his cause to end,

And rule his people right, as he doth recommend.

Now that’s sovereignty. To imagine society as a body means to imagine excrement and disease—the abject who must be expelled. The refugee. The  Institutes are an itinerarium or guide to the formation of a different kind of political subjectivity. “[T]he training on offer here is oriented around exercises of signification that train the believer to assume the right kind of posture before the sense in which the world itself signifies” (139). “Calvin’s providence reframes material creation as a domain of divine affirmation [the theater of God’s glory], as the proper site of transcendent divine glory—rather than, say, the church, and certainly rather than the state” (163). “This is not a blueprint for governmental power, but a more primary set of relationships to which governmental power must be held to account. . . . If the concept of a people—of “ourselves”—is to reemerge against a Corpus Christianum, Calvin’s text suggests it will have something to do with learning to signify our natural life the way that divine providence does” (175). This argument about bodily practices of subject formation that resist certain forms of sovereignty could not be more relevant to our current twenty-first-century context.

Sanchez’s book is paired on my syllabus with another book about formation, Willie James Jennings’s After Whiteness. I want to frame the introduction to theological education for my students not as an introduction to the history of doctrine but as an introduction to what Pierre Hadot calls the “transformation of the self.” In other words, theology not as a set of cognitive propositions, but as the “crafting of a certain kind of embodied subjectivity fit to read and navigate the material field of life” (Sanchez, 53). Jennings’s book shows vividly the possibilities of formation different than the formation towards mastery—a white male self-sufficiency derived from the plantation. Jennings, in ways that are interesting to put into conversation with Calvin, also wants to cultivate desire and attention to create academic communities that make “possible a reality of intimacy, communication, reciprocity, and mutuality that builds from a deepening sense of connection” (Jennings, 147). And so the quarter will be a balancing act in part, between Calvin the refugee and political transgressor and the critique of the kinds of Calvinist educational institutions that have exemplified and promulgated just the kind of mastery Jennings critiques.

Turning from pedagogy for students to pedagogy for myself, I want to frame the second set of reflections on Sanchez’s book by referring to the greengrocer of Vaclav Havel’s famous essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” The owner of a fruit and vegetable shop in Czechoslovakia in 1978 puts a sign in his window: “Workers of the world, unite!” He puts it there not because he agrees with or even thinks about the semantic content of the slogan, but because “if he were to refuse, there could be trouble. . . . He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life” (132). Havel describes Czechoslovakia in 1978 as “post-totalitarian,” not because it is no longer totalitarian, but because it is not a classic Stalinist dictatorship. It is totalitarian because of the millions of small actions individuals tolerate in silence, like putting a sign in a shop window. “For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system” (136). It is not a top-down sovereignty of totalitarianism, but a bottom-up, Bourdieu-ian one. The abyss between the “aims of the post-totalitarian system” (conformity, uniformity, discipline) and the aims of life (plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution) is parallel to the sovereignty of the modern world described by Agamben: “Modern governmentality exercises sovereignty by rendering unruly bodies manageable first by identifying their naturalized pathology (zoe) and then, by means of that knowledge, integrating them into an ever-more-refined disciplinary regime (bios) that constantly reproduces and reorganizes itself around implicit norms that are themselves naturalized through appeals to knowledge” (Sanchez, 153). Sanchez outlines three loci from which people might resist the governmentality (or providence, on some readings of that doctrine) that leaves no room for modes of human activity that prioritize human flourishing rather than production for the state or the economy. The Stoic locus is to cultivate ataraxia, calmness in the face of whatever the world throws at you. Early Christianity, in the figure of Boethius, advocates for the cultivation of hope. Calvin, who with his writings on providence and the incarnation points to God’s affirmation of the world, an affirmation that is prior to the church and certainly prior to the state, cultivates joy as a site of resistance.

I am not quite sure how to characterize our current situation. I am tempted to call it “post-democratic,” but Havel has already used this term for something very different. In Havel, post-democracy is a “parallel polis,” a non-bureaucratic, dynamic, open prefiguration of what might be the foundation of a better society. This is not our current situation. We have lots of plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, the characteristics Havel identifies as the aims of life. They are commodified and colonize every aspect of our lives. They run across lines and powers established by governments and states. They exploit global labor and data. They facilitate the doubling down on white supremacy. What is the site of resistance here?

Sanchez’s Calvin answers that we require a pedagogy of affirmation and joy beyond the institutions of church and state from which we can reform church and state. It is a pedagogy of the senses, and preaching and the Lord’s Supper play key roles. I find this a beautiful and potentially productive answer. For the godless Calvinists among us who do not keep the Sabbath and who will not be showing up for word and sacrament, I wonder where this discipline, this forming, this pedagogy can be found. I am hoping it might be found in some small way in my classroom (by which I mean online) this winter.