Undeception

This is the conclusion of a series. The first two installments are:

Part 1: Romans 7 and 8

Part 2: Gracious Sovereignty

As I stated in Part 2, I reject the notion that foreknowledge is prescriptive. I hold to the conviction that there is an interplay between man’s choice and God’s choice. One cannot rationally hold a robot responsible for the destruction it wreaks if it merely follows the software intentionally programmed to make it destructive. Yet the Bible throughout calls people and nations into account for their own choices and decisions.

In Romans 9, Paul gives two examples of “vessels of destruction”, Esau and Pharaoh. Reformed theologians will often argue that these vessels only have the appearance of choosing wicked behavior: in actuality, they (like everyone else) have no free will to choose; my position is that they had the actual ability to choose, and if God were left out of the equation, their nature and character was bent so that they could only hardly have chosen any other way than they did This may seem a trifling distinction in practice, since if God creates people in full knowledge of what good or evil they will do, if He chooses the “hardware” with which they make their decisions, it’s hard not to see that God is passively determining the path of certain people one way or another. However, do not forget that He is said to not be willing that any should perish (2 Pe 3.10), that He takes no delight in the death of the wicked (Ez 18.32), and that “God desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Ti 2.4). Taking these passages into consideration implies that, as a rule, He supplies mankind with “hardware” that could go either way, and only occasionally has He stacked the deck one way or another, as it were. I explained in Part 2 why Pharaoh, for instance, was chosen to be a vessel of destruction; Paul is very clear that vessels of and honor and destruction were chosen only for the purpose of fulfilling “His purpose in election” (Ro 9.11). What is this purpose?

In short, His purpose was very clearly laid out in Romans 9 through 11. It is to extend salvation to as many as possible, not to force water down the throat of one half of humanity and dehydrate the other, but to give all humanity an appealing salt block from which they would acquire and recognize their own thirst. I believe that purpose has, by and large, been accomplished. That’s why I began with and will now end with discussion of Ephesians 1. Please allow me to quote the relevant passage in its entirety.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will-to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment-to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession-to the praise of his glory.

Some have seen that Paul refers to “we” and “us” in Ephesians 1, to the effect that “we, who were the first to hope in Christ” (v. 12) were those predestined, in stark contrast to “you also” (v. 13) who received salvation subsequently; sometimes this is meant to refer to a distinction between the Jews to whom Christ came and the Gentiles who were grafted in later. I think there’s a much better argument to be made that the “us” and “you” comments aren’t meant to be fully contrastive. For one, Paul in the previous verses never delimits “us” to any particular group that did not include the Ephesian Christians, and so the natural reading for the audience would have been to infer Paul’s “we” and “us” as including them. Regardless, I think those who “first believed” refer not to the Jews who served God under the Mosaic Covenant, but the followers of Jesus, who James said were “a kind of first fruits of all creation” (Ja 1.18) because they received the promise of the New Covenant while the Old was still passing (He 8.13; 2 Co 3.11); that Christian and not pre-Christian Jewish believers are the referents here is strongly suggested by verse 9, in which Paul describes “us” as those to whom “the mystery of his will” was made known (Gk. gnorizo; cf. the same verb used in reference to Paul’s understanding of the mystery of the Gentile’s induction to the faith in Ep 3.3). Whether one sees this group as comprising the first century believers in toto or simply the original believing Jews (e.g. the Apostles), it depends on if one buys the “we/you” co-reference argument I laid out above. Regardless, no one can deny that Paul in this important “predestination” passage, explicitly limits the scope of predestination to a “first” group. Are we in the twenty-first century the “first” anything?

The election Paul refers to in Ephesians and Romans had a contemporary (first-century) relevance. It served the purpose of extending God’s redemption: the hardening of Israel meant for the purpose of grafting the Gentiles into the tree of faith described in Romans 9-11 is described as God’s method of offering salvation to more than simply the original believers. From Jacob and Esau to Pharaoh to the “first fruits” Christians, God’s purpose for election, to advance His plan of redemption, was fulfilled at the time of the revelation of those believe in Jesus as the true sons of God (Ro 8.14-19) and the casting out of the slave woman (Ga 4). “The redemption of those who are God’s possession” was the completion of the salvific work when life after death was secured at the Resurrection of the Dead.

My understanding, then, is that we can’t equate Paul’s and Luke’s “elect” with modern Christians, although I am not presumptuous enough to preclude the possibility that God may continue to “elect” here and there in order to advance redemption yet further. I think the majority of humanity lies somewhere in the middle ground between the vessels of honor and vessels of destruction whom He has weighted in one way or the other for the purpose of wooing those vessels for whom free will remains virtually untethered. Free will and sovereignty are interlocked aspects of the same machine: foreknowledge precedes predestination, and predestination is how God reacts to His advance knowledge. God has situated certain people and groups within history as His sovereignty has need, and has “locked in their votes” so that He receives all glory from their actions (Ep 1.14b).

It becomes more and more obvious to me that eschatology is not just the fringe doctrine I once thought it was.

Technorati : calvinism, eschatology, predestination, theology

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