Retrieving Election

Begin with belonging. Churches (not just churches but many religious groups, regardless of the faith they espouse) begin from the opposite direction: they tell you that you don’t belong, that you will belong only if you believe what they believe, if you take the membership class, if you say the prayer, if you stop doing what you are doing, if you change. 

Take a Billy Graham altar call. You can still view them online. As Graham nears the end of his message, he begins sowing seeds of doubt in the gathered hearts: “I’m going to ask you tonight to make sure of your relationship to Christ. . . Do you know him? Are you sure of it?”  Are you sure you belong? “Do you want to receive him in your heart. . .? You get up and come here. . ..” Time is short: “You may never again in your whole life have a moment like this tonight. . . There may never be another moment when you are so close to the kingdom as you are tonight.” He adds a soup̨con of threat: “You have no promise of tomorrow.” And then, as his words trail off, the choir sings, “Just as I am without one plea. . ., and those bereft, pleading hearts move forward toward belonging. The whole choregraphed drama moves from outside to inside, from not belonging to belonging.

This is the way evangelical Christianity works. It begins by casting doubt: do you belong? Really? If you don’t, come forward, come to church, come to Jesus. It’s a successful message, a successful strategy. It builds churches. People want to belong. They live alienated lives. They feel somehow outside the pale. They want assurance that in life and especially in death they belong. 

A Biblical Case for Choice

You can build a biblical case for this faith. Start with Romans 10:9: “If you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised [Christ] from the dead, you will be saved.” Add 1 Timothy 1:15: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance: that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners . . ..” And 2 Corinthians 6:1: “. . . We entreat you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says, ‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you, on a day of salvation I have helped you.’ Look, now is the acceptable time; look, now is the day of salvation!” In these and other passages in the Bible, the arrow moves from sin to salvation, from outside to the inside, from not belonging to belonging: “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Peter 2:10)

Nevertheless: Begin with Belonging

And yet, for all that, I stand in a long tradition that suggests that this is not the place to begin. That to grasp the biblical message and the heart of the Christian faith, it’s better to begin with belonging. It’s how the catechism of my youth begins: Question: “What is your only comfort in life and death?” Answer: “That I am not my own but belong—body and soul, in life and death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ” (The Heidelberg Catechism, 1975 Christian Reformed Church translation, revised 1988). The deep biblical truth, this tradition insists, is that we belong, not because we have said the right prayer or come forward or pledged ourselves anew to Christ or joined the right church or believed the right things; we belong because God claims us. And if you begin with that theological idea—with belonging—the faith looks different than if you begin with your not belonging.

Retrieving Election

It’s this idea I want to retrieve. The Reformed name for it is “election,” but if we are to make any sense of it, we have to retrieve election from, well, election as it has been understood in the Reformed (and other) tradition. 

We might start with the word itself. “election.” “Election” is borrowed from ecclesiastical Latin, which borrowed it from the Greek. Borrowed words, especially those borrowed from arcane languages like ecclesiastical Latin and Greek, are typically used as abstractions. They are words that fit in a system. They don’t directly touch life as we live it.

In the past few days, I have been reading Julian of Norwich. Julian says that she is “unlettered.” She means that she did not read Latin, had not been trained in ecclesiastical Latin. She writes in English—Middle English—and as a result, her language is fresh and earthly. Part of the work of theological retrieval is taking words like “election” and “predestination,” and asking ourselves what they mean when we pry them out of our theological systems.

This is why I began this post not with “election” but with “belonging.” I might have begun with “chosen.” “Chosen” and “choose” are biblical words. They are concrete. They are family words. Because we live in family we understand what it means to belong and to not belong, to choose and not choose, to be chosen and not chosen. We have in our minds a working vocabulary of family relationships. We know the ins and outs, the complications of family life.

Family Stories

The Bible is mostly a family story. It begins (after a bit of space clearing in the first eleven chapters) with a family, the family of Abraham and Sarah. But it’s never just about Abraham and Sarah. The theme from the beginning (Genesis 12:1-3) is that this family is for the sake of others. As good families usually are. If you have been part of such a family, you know how this goes. You are told that because we are the Whoevers, we do things for others. We hold ourselves to a standard. We put others before ourselves. Much of the conversation in the Bible has to do with just this sort of thing. Again and again, it’s, yes, we are chosen but because we are chosen, we are held to a standard.

This story gets complicated when you get to the New Testament, where the idea of family is expanded. The New Testament goes at this in different ways. In John, Jesus is the one chosen (the “only-begotten”) and those of us who follow Jesus belong to the family because we belong to Jesus (see, for example, John 14:18-24). In Paul’s theology, we have been adopted into the family (see, for example, Galatians 4:5). But always, we are family not just for our own sake but for the sake of others. We are Christians for the sake of all the families of the world.

Ephesians and the Mystery of God’s Will

It’s this theme that Paul (whether Paul himself or someone writing in the name of Paul; scholars differ) so elegantly sets up in the opening paragraphs of Ephesians. He calls it “the mystery of [God’s] will” (Ephesians 1:9). He has in mind the disclosure to Paul, and now to the people to whom Paul is writing, that God means to make all people family. That this has always been God’s purpose. And that this mystery has been disclosed to Paul, as he says, “by revelation” (3:3), as well as to others (he mentions apostles and prophets), and now remakably to us, the readers of Ephesians. It’s for this purpose that Paul was chosen. It is for this purpose that we are chosen. We are those to whom the mystery has been disclosed so that we can, in turn, disclose the mystery of God’s intention to make everyone family to others until the whole world knows:

With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. (Ephesians 1:8-10; NRSVue).

Those of you who have grown up in the Reformed tradition may recognize these words from Ephesians 1. They and the verses that precede and follow them are in Reformed theology proof texts, along with a few other passages, for the doctrine of election. I approached them in this slow way to suggest that these verses have been misread. They have been ripped from their context in the letter to the Ephesians and in New Testament theology generally. 

The Reformed Reading of Ephesians

In Reformed theology this passage from Ephesians 1 is read as if it referred to individual salvation: heaven and hell. It’s said, on the basis of this reading, that we are selected by God from beyond all time before anything else existed for salvation or damnation. In this theology, there is no reason for God selecting me and not you (sorry) except, as the theologians say again and again, “God’s good pleasure.” God’s whim. 

But this is not what the passage—or the book of Ephesians overall—is about. The mystery to which it refers is not what happens after death but what was happening in Paul’s time and is still happening today: the revelation of a new way in Christ for the whole human family to be brought together at last. This is what was planned from the beginning to be revealed “at the fulness of time” (1:10).

In reading Ephesians 1, my eyes fall on verses 11-12. We catch Paul in mid-flow. (You should know that the whole section from 1:3 through 1:14 is a single sentence in Greek.) He’s talking about the Beloved (Christ; see verse 6): “by whom the lot also falls on us, being preordained . . . so that we, for the praise of his glory, have become those who spread hope ahead of time.” It’s for this that Paul was singled out by God. It’s for this that the Ephesians were included in the plan. It’s to this we are called. It’s this mission to which we belong.

From Belonging to Doing

Which is what beginning with belonging is all about. It’s not that one group has been selected by God for eternal bliss and another group to eternal suffering. It’s Paul, on whom the lot fell on the road to Damascus, waking up to a calling, a mission, a mission not to divide people, as he once thought, but to bring them together. It’s you and me becoming aware of the call of God on our lives, to in some way live “in praise of his glory,” spreading hope. 

And the mystery is that this lot should fall to us. It’s not that we have chosen this calling; the calling has chosen us. It’s not that we can explain why God would choose us for God’s purposes. The evidence is to the contrary; we are singularly unsuited for the task. But this has always been so. It was so for Moses. It was so for Mary. It was so for Paul. As it goes in Deuteronomy: 

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 7:6-8)

You are family. It’s not that you are family because you are good; you must be good because you are family. Begin with belonging. The biblical drama does not move from not belonging to belonging; the drama moves from belonging to responsibility. God has touched your life; touch others for God’s sake.

A Kid Growing Up Reformed

Enough, perhaps, but allow the old preacher in me to bring a bit of this home. In earlier drafts of this post, I had included a lengthy section on Calvin, on how Calvin’s perspective on election shifted from the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 to the final Latin edition in 1559, how in the course of his revisions of the Institutes he seemed more and more to lose the biblical thread, but that will have to wait for another time. Instead, I’ll turn to my own experience. It may be your experience as well.

I’ve told the story before, but perhaps it bears retelling, leaving out for the moment most of the details. Like many kids growing up in the church, I was adept at learning about God but oblivious to the presence of God. God played no part in my life. Until, that is, a friend of mine got Jesus. He went one weekend to an evangelistic event and came back to school full of Jesus. He told me that unless I too got Jesus as he had I was going straight to hell. I didn’t entirely believe him, but I did know that if belonging to Jesus meant what he said it meant I didn’t belong. My faith, such as it was, seemed pallid in comparison to his. He seemed to have something I lacked and wanted.

So I tried. I tried to believe in his way—to get Jesus. I couldn’t do it. At least, not for long. Until one day I realized that belonging to God was not something one did. I belonged to God whether I knew I belonged or not. Belonging was not the issue. God does not have conditional children: you are mine if. . .. The question was not whether I belonged but how I belonged. 

I have lived ever after in the light of that belonging. I believe that God’s lot fell on me, to paraphrase Ephesians. It’s fallen on you, too. What we have to work with prayer and worship and reading and contemplation is how we belong, each of us, for each of us belongs in our own way. Our life in God is the joy of discovering that way.

It’s what it means to be elect.

Clay