God Has Chosen

The Doctrine of Election Through Christian History

Mark R. Lindsay

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830853236
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

"He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world..."Among the traditional tenets of the Christian faith is the belief that God chooses or elects people for salvation. For some Christians, such an affirmation is an indication of God's sovereign and perfect will. For others, such a notion is troubling for it seems to downplay the significance of human agency and choice. Throughout the church's history, Christians have sought to understand the meaning of relevant biblical texts and debated this theological conundrum.With care and insight, theologian Mark Lindsay surveys the development of the Christian doctrine of election. After exploring Scripture on this theme, he turns to the various articulations of this doctrine from the early church fathers, including Augustine, and medieval theologians such as Aquinas, to John Calvin's view, the subsequent debate between Calvinists and Arminians, Karl Barth's modern reconception of the doctrine, and reflections on election in the shadow of the Holocaust.On this journey through the Bible and church history, readers will discover how Christians have understood the affirmation that God has chosen.

Scriptural Traces of Election

FOR FAR TOO MANY PEOPLE, Christians and non-Christians alike, the doctrine of election is regarded with suspicion, doubt, and often not a little trepidation. As Karl Barth put it, for much of its history the idea of election has existed in an interpretive and receptive “twilight” that has transformed what should by rights be a joyful summation of the gospel into an odious and inscrutable dogma.1 Likewise, Barth’s Swiss colleague, Emil Brunner, noted that, in considering this doctrine, we enter “the danger-zone, in which our faith might be injured and our theology distracted into heresy.”2 There are, perhaps, two overriding reasons why this has been the case. On the one hand, the doctrine often seems to presume at its head a God of arbitrary caprice. Indeed, the doctrine’s general opprobrium is in large measure because it appears to be guided by neither rhyme nor reason but directed only by the mysterious will of a hidden God. For Theodore Beza, for example, the doctrine is founded not on the self-revelation of the triune God but on a God behind that revelation, “whose ways are past finding out.”3 On the other hand, it also suffers—or is thought to suffer—from that age-old doctrinal malady, “innovation.” Christians by and large have tended to be a conservative community, for which change and development is frequently associated with liberalizing heterodoxy. Stability and constancy act as proxy guarantors of dogmatic normativity, and any doctrine that seems to appear out of nowhere, as it were, is consequently in for a rough time.

Strangely, this is precisely the fate that has befallen the doctrine of election. While Augustine, Gottschalk, and Aquinas all spoke in differing ways about predestination between the fifth and thirteenth centuries, it was not until the sixteenth-century Reformation, particularly but not only through the influence of John Calvin, that the idea of election emerged with full force as an ingredient in Western theology. Nevertheless, while there is no doubt that Protestantism, most noticeably within the Reformed wing, has emphasized the doctrine of election to a degree not seen in either patristic or medieval writings, it is not thereby the case that this idea can or should be apprehended only lightly, as if it were a Protestant novelty.

On the contrary, the roots of this doctrine lie deep within the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. If the exegesis of those Scriptures has obscured rather than clarified the intent of the idea, that should not detract from the doctrine’s essential grounding in the Bible nor cause us to think of it only in the light of the last five hundred years. No genuine appreciation of the doctrine of election (and how indeed it is the sum of the gospel) is possible if we begin only, say, with Calvin and work forward. In this first chapter, then, we will explore just how ancient—and therefore un-innovative!—the idea of election is by considering a set of biblical texts (but by no means all) that foreground election as the most basic action by which God’s relationship with his people is expressed.

A SCRIPTURAL DOCTRINE

All doctrines are, or should be, grounded in the church’s Scriptures. That is an uncontestable axiom (at least rhetorically) across all Christian traditions.4 But what this means in practice is a more complex matter that differs in its enactment from doctrine to doctrine. The nineteenth-century historical theologian George Fisher rightly insisted on the centrality of Scripture as “the objective rule of Christian faith.”5 Yet his successors were equally correct to remind us that the appeal to Scripture “has operated in different ways.” Occasionally, the Bible is the “originating source” of a certain idea; more usually, it has been the provider of “confirmatory evidence for a conviction already reached.” Of course, we are also now much more ready to accept that the Scriptures, as partially products of human endeavor, were written in contexts that themselves need careful cultural exegesis. Nonetheless, such interpretive complexities notwithstanding, doctrinal appeal to Scripture must still be made.6

However, an understanding of what it means for a doctrine to be “scriptural” still evades us. For example, the doctrine of the resurrection is scriptural in a way that the doctrine of the Trinity is not. That is, while there may be any number of ways of interpreting what the resurrection of Christ was and means, that the New Testament attests it is not in any doubt. The doctrine of God’s triunity, however, is scripturally opaque. Although Dan Migliore contends that there is a “pervasive trinitarian pattern” to the witness of both Old and New Testaments, it remains the case that the doctrine of the Trinity itself must be extrapolated from the biblical witness rather than being found there in any self-evident sense.7 What, indeed, were the earliest conciliar debates about—at Nicaea and then again at Chalcedon—if not heated controversies over the correct extrapolation of trinitarian theology from the pages of Scripture? As Dietrich Ritschl has so eloquently put it, the notion that “regulative statements [of doctrine] are present in the biblical writings” is true only approximately and with severe qualification. Notwithstanding the obvious and necessary truth that Christian doctrine is grounded in, and based on, the testimony of Scripture, “scriptural doctrine” per se, if we mean by that a set of directly applicable formulations of normative theology, is largely a fiction.8

So how are we to approach and understand this strange doctrine of election and affirm its “scripturality”? It goes without saying that election is in the Scriptures, much as the resurrection is and the Trinity is not. God’s decision “to choose” (בָּחַר—baḥar) Jacob/Israel, the divine “knowing” (יָדַע—yada‘ ) of his people that suggestively connotes so much more than cognition, Jesus’ “calling” of his disciples (καὶ εὐθὺς ἐκάλεσεν αὐτούς—Mk 1:20)—each verbal metaphor depicts a God who initiates and then activates a will to have a relationship with others who are outside his own Godhead. Thus, and given that this whole book is predicated on the affirmation of God’s free decision to be with us and for us, it seems right that we consider the relevant Scriptures not so much as mere texts to investigate but rather as God’s conversation with us. Katherine Sonderegger articulates this beautifully when she says that the “dearness of Scripture” is that we are drawn by it into the presence of God, our eternal Teacher. No matter how strange and even alien some parts of the Bible are to us—and this not least in connection with the doctrine of election—to hear the words of Scripture is, says Sonderegger, to enter into the “penumbra of a welcome Light,” to “touch and love a token of the One who irresistibly calls us.”9 In affirming the doctrine of election as scriptural, we mean here that in the Bible’s various expressions of this idea, we encounter over and again this freedom of God’s call. As we shall see, even in its shadow side, the confession that God chooses to call and beckon us into conversation and encounter—some first, then others; not all at the same time, but eventually some; always for the sake and on behalf of all—is the scriptural attestation of what it means to be elect. In other words, the Scriptures themselves are our conversation with God about his greater freedom to enter into conversation with us, which we rightly denote by the idea of election.

But we must also mean more than this. Conversations have a tendency to be heard discriminately, with us hearing only what we wish to hear. No matter how conversational our approach to the Scriptures is—and conversational it must indeed be if we know that in and through them we encounter not simply textual fragments and ideas but, on the contrary, God’s attestation of his own self—the Scriptures must be for us not simply a dialogical sparring partner but the very foundation and testing ground of what we claim. Only if this doctrine of election, as we wish to propose it here, can legitimately be understood as a faithful representation “of what God has already said of himself, and continues to say,” will it stand up to scrutiny.10 Scripture thus becomes the starting point of all that we say and then the touchstone by which our and others’ expressions of this doctrine are judged. With this in mind, we ought now to turn our attention to a selection of key passages in both Testaments.

GENESIS 12:1-9

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the LORD appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the LORD and invoked the name of the LORD. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb. (Gen 12:1-9)

The story of Abram’s call, while perhaps not the most fantastical story in the Hebrew Bible, is nevertheless one of the most baffling. The creation of a universe ex nihilo may strike a somewhat more discordant note in an age so devoted to science and technology as ours. In principle, however, it is not especially problematic if you have already accepted the premise of a sovereignly powerful God. Similarly unproblematic are, on the acceptance of this premise, the sundry healing miracles (e.g., of the widow’s son in 1 Kings 17:17-24 and of Namaan in 2 Kings 5:1-19), the stopping of the sun (Josh 10:13), and the various other manifestations of God’s action in the natural world. This particular story, though, cannot be explained merely by reference to God’s presupposed almightiness, for the issue at hand is not power, but choice. As James Kugel puts it, the ancient and indeed only reasonable response to the call of Abram is “bewilderment”! What precisely had Abram done to deserve God’s promise that “he would become the ancestor of a great and mighty nation . . . [and would be granted] so many good things that his very name would turn into a blessing”? The only right and possible answer is nothing.11

Walter Brueggemann presses this idea further in linking Abram’s undeservedness with that small but vital biographical detail at the end of the preceding chapter: “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Gen 11:30). Such barrenness, says Brueggemann, “is the way of human history. It is an effective metaphor . . . [because] there is no human power to invent a future. But barrenness is not only the condition of hopeless humanity. The marvel of biblical faith is that barrenness is the arena of God’s life-giving action.”12

In other words, insofar as this passage is the first substantive introduction to Abram—the preceding verses in Genesis 11:26-31 being more about his father, Terah—its details provide no basis for extrapolating any merit on his part by which his divine call could have been justified. Indeed, it is exactly the deficit of merit, of which Sarai’s infertility is a sign, that is the point. God’s call is unexplained, precisely because it is unmerited, and rests only on God’s free decision. True, a later passage in Joshua has been exegeted by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scholars to prove Abram’s monotheism, in an effort to cite that as the reason for his being singled out.13 But Kugel reminds us that there is

not a single verse in the book of Genesis [that] actually says that Abraham believed in the existence of only one God . . . There is nary a hint, even in the Bible’s much later depiction of him, that Abraham’s beliefs differed in kind from those of the people he encountered.14

What we see in this story, then, is a confounding example of God’s freedom to choose one thing and not another—or in this case, one person and not another—not only for no good reason but seemingly for no reason at all.

Choice, ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Scriptural Traces of Election
• 2 The Doctrine of Election in the Writings of the Fathers
• 3 The Middle Ages
• 4 The Reformation and Early Post-Reformation Controversies
• 5 Public and Private Election in the Nineteenth Century
• 6 Karl Barth's Reconsideration of the Doctrine of Election
• 7 Reconstituting Election in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for God Has Chosen
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright