"Personal
studies have led me more to believe we are chosen."
-- I am glad both for the
fact that you have studied, and, as you say, have come to the realization that
we were chosen. And as with
predestination, that is something that all Christians, whether Calvinistic or
not must believe, because, as with predestination, the Bible
clearly teaches it. The problem, as
you know, is that many Christians don't think twice about these truths, which
really lay at the very heart of coming to a full-orbed view of the nature of God
and of the Gospel.
As for the fact that every Christian must have a view of election, the
differences are over the nature of election, and on what basis God chose to save
us. In the final analysis, there are
really only two possible views of election; either Conditional Election or
Unconditional Election (there is a third view that I will touch on, but it
really is not plausible).
Conditional Election, is the Arminian/non-Reformed view.
As the name suggests, this view states that God's election of an
individual to salvation is based on a condition; specifically, the condition of
belief. Essentially, God chooses
those whom He knows will choose Him. The
common way this has been articulated is that God looked down the corridor of
time to see who would choose Him, and He then "elected" those that He
foresaw would elect Him.
The other view, which is the Reformed/Calvinistic view and which was held
by all of the Protestant Reformers (and many others throughout church history),
is known as Unconditional Election. Again
as the name suggests, this view states that God's election of individuals to
salvation is not conditioned upon anything in the individual,
either actual or foreseen. Rather, God elected whom He would save before the
foundation of the world according to His mercy, grace, and the kind intention of
His will alone.
There is another view known as Corporate Election, which posits that God
did not choose individuals to salvation; rather, Christ Himself is the elect
one, and God chose the "entity" known as the church, which would be
made up of individuals who believed in Christ.
I suppose one way of articulating this is that God chose Christ and the plan
of salvation, not the persons of salvation.
Now, there is a sense in which we can say that election is corporate,
i.e., that God did choose His church, His bride, etc., collectively.
However, election goes beyond this, because God's church, His
bride, His body, is made up persons, and it is these
persons that are referred to as the Church, the Bride of Christ, etc.
The Corporate Election view really is implausible for number of reasons,
and really has never been a widely held view.
One of the biggest problems with this view in my opinion is that it
simply fails to explain, if not altogether ignores, the personal pronouns in
such passages as John 6:37, Romans 8:28-33, Romans 9, and Eph 1:3-6.
Read those passages and look at the number of times words such
"us" "whom" "we", "those", etc., are
found. It is clear that God
elects/chooses individuals to salvation, not merely an
impersonal entity, and God chose more than a mere plan; He chose to save persons.
This article (http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=384)
is a short yet very good reply to the Corporate view of election that also
touches on why election must be unconditional.
This is why I said earlier that the two most prominent views held
throughout church history are Conditional and Unconditional Election.
Historically, the dispute has primarily been between those two views.
Once
again a basic understanding of church history is important so that we can get
our bearings so to speak on the doctrine of election.
After the first few centuries of church history through about the time of
Augustine (4th century AD), the Reformation and its aftermath again
serves as the most significant time in church when this doctrine came to the
fore. The Reformers, in strict
reliance upon Scripture, and in complete consistency with their understanding of
the Gospel of grace, God’s sovereignty, and man’s fallen nature, taught
unconditional election. This
view was directly attacked by Erasmus in his critique of Reformation teaching,
which Luther responded to in his Bondage of the Will.
As
a matter of fact, in a very real sense, the Reformation itself hung on this very
doctrine of unconditional election, because the thing that was at stake was the
Gospel of grace itself: is salvation
all of grace or just partly of grace?
Is salvation completely owing to God’s grace, or is man’s effort and
works somehow involved? While
many tend to think of the doctrine of justification by faith alone as the
primary or only concern of the Reformation (is one saved on the basis of faith
plus works, or by faith alone? As
noted earlier, the Reformers taught that justification was by faith alone), this
is not quite accurate because in order to understand the doctrine of
justification by faith alone, one must also understand what lays behind that,
namely, the doctrine of man as it relates to the fall and his will, and God’s
grace.
At
issue is whether or not faith itself is a gift.
Does our ability to believe in the Gospel come from within us; something
that we are able to muster up in our own strength
(i.e., free will), or, is faith itself something that God must work in us if we
are ever going to receive the Gospel because our wills our bound in sin?
The unconditional view of election recognizes that man is indeed
completely fallen; he is totally depraved. Every
aspect of his being has been corrupted by sin; his mind, his emotions, his will.
If man is ever going to be saved, God Himself is going to have to be the
one who takes the initiative, and who accomplishes the salvation of the
individual because the individual is completely powerless and unable to even
incline himself in the slightest direction toward God; if we are ever to be
saved, God Himself must first
choose us, because in our fallen state all we ever do—all we are capable of
doing—is rejecting God. If
God did look down the corridor of time, He would not see anyone who would choose
Him. Instead, all He would see is
people who are dead in the trespasses and sin.
All He would see would be people that are described the following ways by
the apostle Paul in Romans 3:10-18, Romans 8:7, and 1 Cor 2:14:
Romans
3:10-18
"There
is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands, no
one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become
worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one."
"Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit."
"The poison of vipers is on their lips."
"Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness."
"Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their
ways, 17 and the way of peace they do not know."
"There
is no fear of God before their eyes."
Romans
8:7-8
"the
sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so.
Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot
please God."
1
Cor 2:14-15
"The
man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of
God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand
them, because they are spiritually discerned."
These
passages make it abundantly clear that not only does fallen man not even seek
God, he also lacks the ability in and
of himself to submit to God (he cannot
do so). Man is, as Luther and the
other Reformers taught based on the words of Jesus, in total bondage to sin;
slaves of sin who must first be set free from their bondage in order to embrace
God (John 8:34-36). This is absolutely antithetical to any kind of “free”
will theology.
So,
in terms of the doctrine of election, it is quite impossible that God would
choose us on the basis of something good that He foresaw in us; it is quite
impossible that God would choose us because He foresaw that we would choose Him,
because, as the few passages quoted above make abundantly clear, there is
no one who even seeks God. There
is no one who is able to “choose” God. In
order for salvation to even be possible, God must do the electing, God must do
the regenerating, God must do the saving…all of the
saving. This is what the Reformers
so passionately proclaimed and defended against the man-centered, works based
“gospel” of
Rome
.
The
Reformers to a man held unswervingly to the doctrine of unconditional election
and in effect the Gospel of grace. It
didn’t take long though for a man-centered emphasis to creep into the
Protestant churches, most significantly, as mentioned earlier, during the
Remonstrance (Arminian) objections leveled against the Reformed Church in the
Netherlands in the early 1600’s. The
Arminian party, in direct contradiction to the Reformers and in perfect harmony
with
Rome
, advanced the Conditional View of election.
To their credit, this was entirely consistent with their free will
theology. The Reformed Church
responded by reasserting the doctrine of Unconditional Election, which is
perfectly consistent with their view of God’s sovereignty, man’s depravity,
and the Gospel of pure grace.
Today,
many who claim the name Protestant or Evangelical are far removed from their
spiritual forefathers. J.I.
Packer, who translated Luther's Bondage of the Will and wrote an
introduction to it, writes:
“Much modern Protestantism would be neither owned nor even recognized by the pioneer Reformers. The Bondage of the Will fairly
sets before us what they believed about the salvation of lost mankind. In light of it, we are forced to ask whether Protestant Christendom
has not tragically sold its birthright between Luther's day and our own.”
"Whoever puts this book (The Bondage of The Will) down without having realized that evangelical theology stands or falls with the
doctrine of the bondage of the will has read it in vain. The doctrine of free justification by faith only, which became the storm-centre of
so much controversy during the Reformation period, is often regarded as the heart of the Reformers' theology, but this is hardly accurate. The truth
is that their thinking was really centered upon the contention ... that the sinner's entire salvation is by free and sovereign grace
only. ... Is our salvation wholly of God, or does it ultimately depend on something that we do for ourselves? [i.e., does it rest on
our “free will.”]. Those who say the latter (as the Arminians later did) thereby deny man's utter helplessness in sin, and affirm that a form of
semi-Pelagianism is true after all. It is no wonder, then, that later Reformed theology condemned Arminianism as being in principle a return to
Rome
... and a betrayal of the Reformation. ... Arminianism was, indeed, in Reformed eyes a renunciation of New Testament Christianity in
favor of New Testament Judaism; for to rely on oneself for faith [which is the libertarian free will view] is no different in principle from
relying on oneself for works, and the one is as un-Christian and anti-Christian as the other."
So, that is a very basic and broad brush history of the issue.
Next, to get a clear understanding of the doctrine election and of these
two views, we must first understand that this doctrine is really predicated upon
both our doctrine of God and our doctrine of man.
I more or less touched on these things in my historical survey above.
In terms of our doctrine of God, a couple of questions to keep in mind
with regard to the doctrine of election would be:
1.
Is God truly absolutely sovereign, or is He only partially sovereign?
2.
Is God truly the Potter, or is He merely a "reactionary," i.e.,
one who stands
idly by and only
reacts in response to what His creatures do?
In
terms of our doctrine of man as it relates to the doctrine of election, we might
ask these questions:
1.
Is man totally depraved as a result of the fall, so that he is unable to
incline
himself to the
spiritual good, or is man only partially depraved as a result of the fall, so
that he still retains what Dr. R.C. Sproul calls "an island of
righteousness" whereby man can still incline himself to the spiritual good?
2.
What is the determining factor between one person being saved and another
not being saved?
Is the determining factor God's grace and mercy alone, or is there
something inherently good or better about the person who is saved?
3.
Or to ask this in a more personal way, why did I receive Christ, while my
unbelieving neighbor
doesn’t? Was it because I was more
righteous, or more wise, or smarter, than my unbelieving neighbor?
Or, was it God’s grace alone that makes the difference between me and
my neighbor?
Those questions will really be helpful to keep in mind as you wrestle
with this issue.
Now, here is just a brief recap of the differences between Conditional
and Unconditional Election: Conditional
Election teaches that God saw something good in man (such as a foreseen act of
faith), and on that basis God then chooses him for salvation.
Unconditional Election teaches that there was nothing good in man, and
that the only thing that God would foresee in man is rebellion and idolatry.
Hence, God's choice of man to be saved is not based on anything good in
man, whether actual of foreseen, but solely according to mercy and grace of God,
and the kind intention of His will. Hence,
one view (Conditional Election) posits something good in man, and the other
posits something good in God as the basis for election.
Christians
need to think very carefully about this, because what is at stake
is the very nature of the grace of God. Grace,
being defined as the unmerited favor of God, cannot be earned, and cannot be
gained by something good that we do. To
me, this is one of the biggest problems with Conditional Election.
No matter how we slice it, to say that God's election of individuals to
salvation is based on God looking down the corridor of time and seeing who would
believe in Him is an explicit denial of the whole concept of grace because it
makes God's choice of them something that is deserved and earned because they
were chosen based on something good they did.
It also makes God a respecter of persons, because God would be giving His
favor based on something He saw in one person and not the other.
Finally, such a notion is not divine election at all.
Rather, it is man who is essentially posited as the sovereign
over all things, and does God the "honor" (evidently) of choosing Him
with God being completely passive. Man
here is the author of his own salvation, with God being a passive on-looker in
the drama of redemption who simply places a stamp of approval as it were over
man's decisions. But election is active, not
passive. God is the one who elects
according to His own purposes. God
is not a passive on-looker in the drama of redemption; rather, He is the Lord
and author of our salvation, and the sole sufficient cause of our salvation.
To really highlight the differences between these two concepts of
election, I remembering hearing a non-Calvinistic teacher recently proclaim, "I'm elected because I selected."
Notice where the emphasis is:
I.
The emphasis is on man and his
decision, not on God and His grace: because I did
something, God then responded. This
is completely backwards, not to mention the fact that it gives the individual
room to boast, and in essence makes man the cause of his own salvation (which is
essentially works salvation). (to
illustrate how backwards that statement is, the biblical view would be "I
selected because I am elected." See
Acts 13:48).
To the question of why God elected him, he can proudly pound his chest
and say, "because I selected…" This is
completely antithetical to the Scriptural witness.
As one that holds to Unconditional Election, my answer to the question
would stand in stark contrast to the answer given by that man.
In answer to the same question of why God elected me unto salvation, the
only answer I can give is that I was elected, not because of anything good in
me, because I was a wretch (and still am a wretch in and of myself), but
solely by the grace and mercy of God, and I ascribe every bit of my
salvation, even my faith, to God’s grace alone.
Had God not chosen me according to the kind intention of His will, I
would have never in a million years "selected" Him.
Without knowing anything else about the issue, I'm convinced that most
Christians, if presented with those two statements, would say that there is
something not quite right with the statement made by the guy who said he was
elected because he selected. This
is why I think that most Christians are intuitively "Calvinistic" in
their understanding of their salvation. It's
when they begin to try and reconcile their faulty preconceived views of free
will with God's sovereignty that they begin to entertain the possibility that
such a statement may be the truth of the matter. The
great theologian of the 1800’s, Charles Hodge, made these comments that I
think bear serious consideration:
“It
is the intimate conviction of every believer, founded upon the testimony of his
own consciousness, as well as the Scriptures, that his salvation is of God; that
it is of him, and not of himself, that he has been brought to the exercise of
faith and repentance. So long as he
looks within the believer is satisfied of the truth of these doctrines.
It is only when he looks outward, and attempts to reconcile these truths
with the dictates of his own understanding that he becomes confused and
skeptical…the path of duty and safety, is to receive as true what God has
revealed, whether we can comprehend His ways unto perfection or not.”
(Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol II, p. 348).
On
a side note, it is has also been stated before by others that all
Christians are “Calvinists” on their knees.
In other
words, whether we realize it or not, we all pray basically assuming the truth of
Calvinism. No one prays according to
Arminian theology. For example, we
pray that God would open our eyes, or that He would bring a certain person to
faith. We pray that God would so
move by His sovereignty that He would bring to pass what it is that we are
praying for. But, where is “free
will” in all of this? Charles
Spurgeon illustrates the truth of this in his sermon Free Will A Slave:
(full sermon found here: http://www.the-highway.com/Freewill_Spurgeon.html):
“...Any
one who believes that man's will is entirely free, and that he can be saved by
it, does not believe the fall...But I tell you what will be the best proof of
that; it is the great fact that you never did meet a Christian in your life who
ever said he came to Christ without Christ coming to him. You have heard a great
many Arminian sermons, I dare say; but you never heard an Arminian prayer - for
the saints in prayer appear as one in word, and deed and mind. An Arminian on
his knees would pray desperately like a Calvinist. He cannot pray about
free-will: there is no room for it. Fancy him praying:
"Lord,
I thank thee I am not like those poor presumptuous Calvinists Lord, I was born
with a glorious free-will; I was born with power by which I can turn to thee of
myself; I have improved my grace. If everybody had done the same with their
grace that I have, they might all have been saved. Lord, I know thou dost not
make us willing if we are not willing ourselves. Thou givest grace to everybody;
some do not improve it, but I do. There are many that will go to hell as
much bought with the blood of Christ as I was; they had as much of the Holy
Ghost given to them; they had as good a chance, and were as much blessed as I
am. It was not thy grace that made us to differ; I know it did a great deal,
still I turned the point; I made use of what was given me, and
others did not-that is the difference between me and them."
"That is a prayer for the devil, for nobody else would offer
such a prayer as that. Ah! when they are preaching and talking very slowly,
there may be wrong doctrine; but when they come to pray, the true thing slips
out; they cannot help it. If a man talks very slowly, he may speak in a fine
manner; but when he comes to talk fast, the old brogue of his country, where he
was born, slips out. I ask you again, did you ever meet a Christian man who
said, "I came to Christ without the power of the Spirit?"
If you ever did meet such a man, you need have no hesitation in saying, "My
dear sir, I quite believe it-and I believe you went away again without the power
of the Spirit, and that you know nothing about the matter, and are in the gall
of bitterness and the bond of iniquity." Do I hear one Christian man
saying, "I sought Jesus before he sought me; I went to the Spirit, and the
Spirit did not come to me"? No, beloved; we are obliged, each one of us, to
put our hands to our hearts and say-
"Grace
taught my soul to pray, And made my eyes to o'erflow;
'Twas grace that kept me to this day, And will not let me go."
Anyway, much, much more to say about all of these things, which is where
the resources I will recommend will be of great assistance.
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