For Calvin, the ladder is Christ — not...

For Calvin, the ladder is Christ — not in the facile explanation that “Christ is the way,” but that our ascent is profoundly bound up in Christ s ascension, by our participation in his ascent. In one deft move, Calvin has relocated “participation” from between impersonals (the soul in the divine nature) to personals (the human being in Christ, by the Spirit). Thus, a mystical encounter is not the goal (Calvin would hardly endorse an ascent to an ecstatic state); rather, the process itself is the mystical encounter. Nor is the souls “progress,” or the believers subjective experience as the…