Extra-Calvinisticum
Quoting William Plachner, Domestication of Transcendence, Lousiville, 1996, (p. 66) : "In the famous extra-Calvinisticum, Calvin insisted, against Luther, that something of God's infinity remained uncaptureable in God's finite self-revelation in Jesus Christ...this does not imply, I think, that what we know of God is false, but only that, while true as far as it goes, it is necessarily limited to our finite capacities. Calvin's real concern here seems to have been to preserve the reality of the Incarnation, which appeared to him threatened by a view in which even Christ's humanity took on divine infinity and thereby ceased to be really human." .
If we accept that the extra-Calvinisticum's motto, Finitum non capax infinitum (the finite is not capable of the infinite), is a sound insight, it would appear that Künneth is adjusting or even giving up a strictly Lutheran view on the subject, while simultaneously providing a new and better explanation for the significance and resolution of the Lutheran and Calvinist debates over the presence of the body of Christ. In separating the issue from the Eucharist, and in essentially coming down on the side of Calvin's principle, Künneth has driven a wedge into dogmatic discussions of God that would prohibit such discussions apart from the doctrine and the historical reality of the Resurrection : in fact, he has conjoined them in the person and work of the Son, the bearer of both the infinite (in latent, pre-existent, and divinely right form) and the finite, through the vehicle of servanthood to both God and man. It is important to remember that for Künneth, Christ assumes our mortality in more than the fashion of "putting on the clothes of our flesh" (the Gnostic view of appearances), but that he is not half-human, nor is Jesus subordinated to "time-bound humanity" : he is the transcendent Son. For Künneth, steering a path between Gnosticism on the one hand, and empirical Liberalism on the other, does not mean accepting the neo-Orthodoxy of the paradox theologians. If we accept Placher's "post-liberal" reasoning on the subject, the answer as to how he does this is that he returns to the issue of the extra-Calvinisticum : that is, he returns to a wrestling with Christology that accepts the Nicene Creed, but that (unlike Logos Christianity), is unwilling to interpret the difficult Pauline passages about the Recapitulation and the relationship between the Father and the Son solely in light of a simplistic and literal reading of the first chapter of John.
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