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is the consummation of humanity, the first born from the dead, the aim and goal of creation. Billings seeks to show how the believer’s union with Christ does not negate reciprocity, that is, it does not objectify the individual so as to do violence to the other. Yes, he notes, in Calvin the accent is on justification, however, that is only half of the story. Calvin maintains a doctrine of duplex gratia wherein both justification and sanctification are held together in the person of Christ.17 The individual is not left in an infantile dependency upon Jesus Christ, but is instead engrafted in and made a participant in the triune life of God. Again, Billings suggests that Calvin does not do violence to the individual by turning him into a pure passive receiver of grace, as Milbank is prone to think, but rather Billings’ reading of Calvin pushes towards a theology of grace that we could talk about as an “activating reception.”18Grace awakens, or in traditional parlance – regenerates, the believer that he or she might lead a life of “piety and love through the Spirit.”19 One final point from Billings’ article before moving on to one of his more recent publications: Billings notes that Milbank is operating within a dichotomy that would be altogether foreign to Calvin. In Billings’ estimation, and I think he is dead on here, Milbank is operating within a (modernist?) dichotomy of unilateral and bilateral giving.20 Calvin never knew of such a distinction. Instead for Calvin, both unilateral and bilaterial forms of giving - that is, justification and sanctification - are both held together in the person of Jesus Christ. There is no talk of agency that can be abstracted from him (how could there be?); for St. Paul tells us that it is in Christ that we live and move and derive our being. The question is not, how do we retain our agency in relationship with Jesus?; rather, something headed in a more constructive direction might ask, what kind of agency do I have in my relationship with Christ?. Billings writes, “In Calvin, identities are not ‘fixed’ in such a way that sharing in another makes us less like ourselves. Rather, it is by living in the Spirit, by participating in Christ, by becoming ‘one substance’ in Christ that we find our full identity as creatures.”21 Billings concludes this great section of his article by referring to the believer’s union with Christ as a “differentiated union.”22 What I take it that he is suggesting here is that in this Christ-relationship, the believers’ identity is not subsumed into Jesus’s, but is rather preserved in a differentiated fashion. Thus, just as in the perichoretic relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, the identity of each (hypostasis) is maintained, so too, in the believers union with Christ the believer’s identity is never lost. But to reiterate Billings’ point raised above, 17 Billings, “John Milbank’s Theology of the “Gift” and Calvin’s Theology of Grace: A Critical Comparison.” 90. 18 Ibid., 91 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 92 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.