Election

Election
Oxford Handbooks Online

Election
Katherine Sonderegger
The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology
Edited by Kathryn Tanner, John Webster, and Iain Torrance
Print Publication Date: Sep 2007 Subject: Religion, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Online Publication Date: Sep 2009 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199245765.003.0007
Abstract and Keywords
At the heart of the doctrine of election lies the conviction that God acts, and that such
action is characteristic of and essential to the living God. Traditionally, this conviction
that God is an acting being has led Christian theologians to hold that election is an
ingredient in a larger doctrine, ‘predestination’. Predestination in turn consists of several
parts. All creatures are brought into existence and upheld in it through God's decree to
create and providentially to sustain what he has created. Even in its bare existence,
creation cannot be understood apart from the doctrines of election and providence. The
western tradition has taught that God's decree concerning the world includes a
determination of some human lives to salvation: this is election to life or glory. These
creatures are ‘the elect’, and are received into the heavenly city of God.
Keywords: doctrine of God, election, predestination, providence, salvation
AT the heart of the doctrine of election lies the conviction that God acts, i.e., chooses or
elects, and that such action is characteristic of and essential to the living God.
Traditionally, this conviction that God is an acting or self-determining being has led
Christian theologians, particularly in the Latin church, to hold that election is an
ingredient in a larger doctrine, ‘predestination’. Predestination in turn consists of several
parts. To begin with, God, an eternal being, wills or ‘decrees’ both himself and everything
creaturely. All creatures are brought into existence and upheld in it through God's decree
to create and providentially to sustain what he has created. Even in its bare existence,
then, creation cannot be understood apart from the doctrines of election and providence.
Human creatures, possessed of rationality and purpose, stand in special relation to the
creator: they each and as a whole have a destiny; they are eternally destined, that is,
‘predestined’, to live with or apart from God. The western tradition has taught that God's
decree concerning the world includes a determination of some human lives to salvation:
this is election to life or glory. These creatures are ‘the elect’, the remnant of the faithful,
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Election
and are received into the heavenly city of God. Paired with this doctrine of election to life
is a second determination, understood by some as equal to the first, and by others as
decidedly minor to it. The latter argue that God passes over some sinners and permits
them to remain in their sins; the former, that God determines or actively wills the
rejection or ‘reprobation’ of some sinners to eternal death, an eternity apart from grace
and glory. On either account, these sinners form the ‘mass of perdition’, the reprobate
who never turn from their sins and whose destiny is damnation.
(p. 106)Theologians stress that, in all these decrees, God is entirely just and right: to
elect is to set forth God's mercy; to pass over or reprobate, to set forth his justice. Though
predestination has been held to determine the eternal end of all human beings, in much
of the tradition this doctrine has not been seen as principally concerned with creatures.
Rather, election has served as a means to speak about God—the divine holiness, justice,
and glory—and about the unique relation of such a God to creatures, the relation of
grace. Traditionally, human beings do not initiate grace; rather, God remains the sole and
sovereign source and support of grace and of the life with him which this grace effects.
The ‘grace in which creatures stand’ does give rise to a creaturely response: by turns
understood as faith, holy living (‘sanctification’), or works of selfless love (‘merit’). But in
the traditional conception of election, such responses do not effect salvation nor do they
precede, logically or materially, God's decree. Rather, the tradition teaches that, in
predestination, God creates, elects, and determines all creatures to their eternal ends;
their life in gracious relation or ‘covenant’ with God is itself the gracious work of their
creator.
In all this, the doctrine of predestination shows the unmistakable influence of St

Augustine. Even as Augustine's late work is unthinkable without the letters of the apostle
Paul, so the subsequent debates about election within the medieval, Reformation, and
modern church in the Latin west are unthinkable without Augustine's teachings
concerning the ‘cause of grace’ and his turbulent, brooding reflections on the sinful will,
the creature's fallen state, and the dark mysteries of God's ways with his creatures
(Augustine 1980). Thus, in Augustine's shadow, predestination is a doctrine of grace
entire, from beginning to end, and God is the proper, sole, and sovereign subject of this
decree.
Augustinian convictions have prompted many dogmaticians to treat the doctrine of

predestination within the doctrine of God—Karl Barth (1957) is a celebrated modern
example—and to show how the act of election resides in, and yet does not alter, the
eternal nature of God. To be sure, this doctrine has found several other prominent sites
within systematic theology, for example, the doctrine of providence (ST 1a. 23, in Aquinas
1975), sanctification (Institutes 3. 21–4, in Calvin 1960), and ecclesiology
(Schleiermacher 1928: 533–60). And, in our day, new questions have been raised within
this doctrine. How is the election of the people Israel to be understood within Christian
dogmatics? How do the adherents of other religions stand in relation to election in Jesus
Christ? Does God elect or ‘preferentially opt’ the poor of this world? And in a question
inescapably modern, is election universal? Or, perhaps more conceptually framed, is
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reprobation a necessary element within the doctrine of predestination? These new

themes and loci will have their day, but it is best to begin with the tradition in the doctrine
of God.
(p. 107) I. THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION AND THE DOCTRINE OF

GOD
God elects. The nature of God is to be an electing being. What do we learn about the
doctrine of election when it is considered as constituent of the doctrine of God? We might
begin by asking whether God is in fact a being who can act or choose or decide in just
such a way. Some theologians, ancient and modern, have held that when we consider the
nature of God properly, we see immediately that God does not, indeed cannot, act in this
way: it is rankest anthropomorphism to attribute to God the act of choosing or
repudiating, ranking or selecting creatures. Paul Tillich appears to have been a member
of this camp. His doctrine of God captured an ineffable dimension of depth in symbolic
form, an ‘ultimate concern’ that grounds and sustains being. For Tillich, the doctrine of
election expressed in dense, historical symbols the existential struggle for meaning within
the polarities of freedom and destiny. But the ‘God beyond the God of theism’ does not
elect in a straightforward, non-symbolic sense (Tillich 1952). Tillich was not alone. Even
the young Karl Barth in his commentary on the letter to the Romans derides as
‘mythological’ the idea of the election of individuals either to life or to destruction (Barth
1968: 324, 358); such derogation of the doctrine of individual election by God is not
entirely absent from Church Dogmatics II/2 (Barth 1957).
These objections may strike us as peculiarly modern, and perhaps more philosophical
than theological in origin; but the problems they raise are far from new. Indeed, Colin
Gunton and Robert Jenson have devoted theological careers to exposing the philosophical
roots of ‘classical theism’, an ancestry, they argue, that in the early centuries of the
church had already obscured both the triune nature of God and the biblical inheritance of
ancient Israel. This is a complex charge, one that reaches deep into the sources of
theology and theological argument, but only a fuller exploration of the classical features
of the doctrine of God will allow us to assess more exactly how the doctrine of election
could properly be seen as an act of such a God.
From the patristic era forward, the nature of God has been held to be both eternal and
utterly one. These have led to the teaching that God is simple or, perhaps better said,
unique. The conceptual intuition here is that God, in order to be creator, must be not
simply first in a sequence of creaturely things—even first both temporally and in dignity.
Rather, God must be the radical source of all that is. God must be utterly other than the
cosmos made by him, in order that the cosmos may have a true origin and end in God.
This intuition is most famously expressed in Thomas Aquinas's designation of God as
prime mover, first cause, and necessary being (ST 1a. 2). The prophetic texts of Isaiah,
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long dominant in Christian reading of Israel's scriptures, underscore the radical

distinction of God from creatures. This ‘prophetic monotheism’, combined with a doctrine
of the creation of a temporal world, gives rise to a strong doctrine of divine uniqueness
and eternity.
Drawing on the language of Greek metaphysics, the early church theologians

(p. 108)
denoted God as atemporal, without parts, and without motion or change, that is, as
eternal, simple, and immutable. Now such a God, if he is to have attributes at all, must
hold them uniquely: God must simply be his attributes. Although there was some medieval
debate over this matter, dogmatic theologians were one in seeing God as radically free
from the substance–accident distinction that governs creaturely being. God's relation to
the cosmos is unique in turn. Not part of the creaturely realm, not subject to its motion
and decay, not waiting on its development or shadows of change, God is himself his own
relation to his creation—a doctrine known in turns as God's ‘ideal relation’ (ST 1a. 13, 7;
45, 3 ad 1) or ‘spiritual’ presence (ST 1a. 8, 1 ad 2). Far from denoting divine absence,
this spiritual relation allows classical theologians to underscore God's nearness to
creation, a closeness that is not external but internal to the creature—movement from
within, Thomas says (ST 1a. 105, 2 ad 1; 105, 4)—and sustains in being everything that is,
directing it to its end in God.
The doctrine of election conforms to the uniqueness and eternity of God. Systematicians
in every era have recognized that scripture speaks of God choosing, acting toward,
judging, and saving his creatures; the task, then as now, is to reconcile such acts with
such a simple and eternal being. A God who is utterly unique, utterly without need
stemming from imperfection, utterly free, sovereign, and eternal does not seem to be the
same Lord God of Israel who calls, elects, leads, and delivers his people. In other words,
can the God of such a nature be coherently conceived of as also the God who acts? How,
in such a unique reality, can God's being and God's act be reconciled?
A divine act could be considered merely ‘symbolic’ or ‘mythological’—a term made

popular by D. F. Strauss (Strauss 1972: 39–92). Conversely, some say that divine being
could be ‘liberated’ from ‘philosophical strictures’ to be the living, changing God of the
Bible. In the 1930s Karl Barth threw his full weight behind the second of these
resolutions: he decried ‘natural theology’, defending the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob’ against the ‘idolatrous’ ‘God of the philosophers’, the God of ‘classical
theism’ (Brunner and Barth 1946). It may well be that a resolution to this dilemma (if
such be sought) must be found by looking among these alternatives. Yet one value of the
early modern Protestant divines' study of election is their eagerness to find a third way to
resolve the dilemma of being and act in God. They were dedicated to a robust and
propositional realism in theology: God was truly known by creatures, and theological
statements truly expressed God's being and will—but only in a limited way! They
appealed to the Aristotelian-Ramist logic, popular among seventeenth-century Reformed
divines, which held that all concepts truly predicated of God are themselves simple and
timeless, but can be expressed by creatures only dialectically, in complex terms, and in
logical rank. Perhaps we might say that doctrines of God and God's acts cannot be fully
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reconciled without appeal—at least as a first step—to a doctrine of human knowledge of

and language about God. Indeed, we might discover here one reason to prefer the
Protestant scholastics' appeal to logic and linguistics over other (p. 109) alternatives: in
this way they held together the realist, metaphysical aspects of the doctrines of the divine
nature and action, yet they also acknowledged the unutterable and inconceivable nature
of these doctrines as simply and transcendently true of the God of Christian faith. We will
follow this path.
According to classical, pre-modern theists, God is no inert, simple, lifeless immobility.

Rather, God is pure act; God's being simply is act. God is supremely personal, a pure,
unceasing intelligence, a Holy Spirit. Now, if God is Spirit—a claim with resonance from
Origen to Hegel—then we must understand God to be intentional. That is, God's life must
be understood as thought, or better, as the act of thinking itself. But as there is no
thinking without content, so God's very life must intend an object, must reflect within
itself on the content of thought. (Augustine's reflection on the imago Trinitatis in the
human mind springs from considerations like these.) We should say that God decides or
‘determines himself’, in Barth's terms, in that God's thinking, as it is his very nature,
conforms entirely to his life and will. The being of God must comprise, in some
transcendental fashion, both intellect and will; and, in some simple fashion, these
‘faculties’ must be one with God's very life and essence. Students of the doctrine of
Trinity will recognize where this is headed: the constituents of thought are the persons of
the Trinity, the ‘incommunicable existence of the triune nature’, in Richard of St Victor's
phrase (quoted by Thomas Aquinas, ST 1a. 29, 3 ad 4). The Logos, reason, or intellect is
the personal distinction of the Son; the will, intention, or love, is the personal distinction
of the Spirit. These are of one nature with the origin of thought, the Father. Thus, the
doctrine of election—the divine act of choosing—is itself a triune act of the divine nature.
Within the traditional idiom of the doctrine of election, this intelligent act of choosing is
called the ‘eternal decree’. Central to this teaching is the claim that the divine decree is
not principally and first a decision about something or someone outside of God. The
intentionality of God is not principally directed toward the creaturely realm, to the
cosmos the Lord God has made. Rather, God, as living act of thought, intends and elects
himself: in the triune life God is his own object, the content of his own thought. For this
reason, the scholastics considered the divine decree an ‘internal act’: to decide or
determine is of the essence of God. From this reflection springs Barth's conviction that
the doctrine of election belongs to the doctrine of God and even more, to Christology, as
the eternal Son is both the electing and the elected God. Only small steps lead the
scholastics from this conception of the divine decision to the absolute decree (decretum
absolutum) of the early modern Reformed dogmaticians.
The divine decree must partake of the necessity, simplicity, and absoluteness of the divine
nature; indeed it is that nature. Nothing creaturely can determine or alter this decree, nor
can the decree depend upon the motion of anything outside of God—anything, that is, ad
extra. To capture the sovereign uniqueness of the decree, older systematicians spoke of
God's election as principally and first to his own glory: God's will is holy and his Spirit is
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glorious. The justice and mercy of God, refractions of the (p. 110) divine holiness and
glory, must also reside in the divine nature and carry the necessity of deity. The plenitude
of divine intellectual life is complete in itself, moving, choosing, and determining its own
eternal glory and holiness.
What then is the relation of this absolute self-affirmation in God to the cosmos and to
creatures which exist outside the divine life? How should we understand the divine
decree toward creation (the decretum ad extra)? Are there two, separate decrees? Or
only one, with two aspects or ends? Could one be transcendent and absolute, the other
immanent to and influenced by the creature? Classically, several alternatives have been
considered. We might hold that the divine decree ad extra just is the internal, absolute
decree. Karl Barth's Christological orientation of the doctrine of election falls into this
pattern. So too we might consider some process theologians to have identified the
internal and external decree in their contention that God ‘lures’ all life to and into the
unfolding divine life, a form of ‘panentheism’. Perhaps the Greek predilection for a
‘divinization’ (theosis) model of soteriology reveals a quiet identification of the two
aspects of the divine decree. But such positions are rare in Latin doctrines of election.
More common is the conviction that some distinction must be drawn between the divine
decision in which God intends himself and that in which he orders, governs, and intends
the end of all creatures.
One Latin pattern is to consider God to possess or, better, to exhibit a power that escapes
all creaturely strictures, an absolute power that is utterly free (potentia absoluta). To
conceive God properly, it was said, theologians must allow God's essence to determine
itself absolutely, apart perhaps from any logical contradiction. Late medieval scholastics
used this concept to acknowledge and explore the alternatives which God did not realize
in creation. This absolute power acts like a ‘limit concept’ in that it postulates a
distinction in God which cannot be known in itself and whose metaphysical reality we
cannot rightly conceive. (It may be that Barth's doctrine of the divine freedom serves as
just such a limiting concept in the doctrine of God.) The turn of God toward his creatures
is called the ‘ordained power’ (potentia ordinata), which consists in his will for all
creatures, his covenant or pact (pactum) with creation. Some theologians have
considered these covenants to have a history of their own: a covenant of works, followed
by one of grace; a covenant of law, then gospel; a ‘federalism’ first with Adam, and then
with Moses, with Christ, and with the church. A danger lurks here, however, a danger
terrifyingly alive to Luther. Should these conceptual distinctions be metaphysically
‘realized’, held to be real ‘parts’ of God, a sensitive conscience like Luther's could fear
that the absolute power is separated entirely from the ordained, and that the absolute
power becomes a ‘hidden God’ who in his sovereign freedom, holiness, and unpredictable
judgement is, in the end, the only true God.
A second pattern of relation between the decrees emerged in later Reformed circles and
built on Luther's and Calvin's fervent repudiation of the ‘hidden’ or ‘naked’ God implied
by the concept of potentia absoluta. In scholastic idiom we would say that the decree or
counsel of God (consilium Dei) or the inner act of God's own essence (opus Dei essentialis
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ad intra) is expressed or enacted toward creation in an outer act of (p. 111) God's own
essence (opus Dei essentialis ad extra). Notice here that we retain a distinction between
the inner and outer aspects of the act of God, yet the external aspect remains an act of
the internal being and essence of God. A danger lurks here, too. Now election becomes a
doctrine that carries the full weight of the divine uniqueness and eternity and can rest
only on the divine glory, his ‘good-pleasure’ (eudokia, beneplacitum)—almost a technical
term in classical Reformed dogmatics. There can be no ground to the divine election, just
as there is no foundation to God's own being: this constitutes his necessity or self-caused
existence. Even Christ cannot be the foundation of election on this understanding of the
decrees because the incarnate Word cannot precede the counsel of God but rather only
execute it.
A doctrine of election which follows this form takes the Augustinian ‘cause of grace’ and
intensifies it into an internal decree in which the glory and good-pleasure of God affirms
itself without taking into account the cause, the merit, or the redemption of creatures.
The holiness of God, including his justice and mercy, must be executed: the ‘vindicatory
justice’ of God carries the necessity of the divine being as much as does his mercy. The
‘double decree’ (predestinatio gemina) does not actually develop from a doctrine of sin or
the fall, but rather follows from the necessity of the divine being in act. Only those willing
to consider the divine decree toward creation to be contingent or fully separate from the
internal election of God could allow the divine justice to remain unfulfilled. (We will see
this pattern developed by Socinians in the post-Reformation period and by universalists in
our own.) What does remain open for debate for the classical, Augustinian dogmaticians
of election is the ‘order of the decrees’. Is the creaturely goal or range (scopus) of the
divine good-pleasure the creature as both created and fallen (creatus et lapsus)—an
‘infra-lapsarian’ position—or the creature possibly created and possibly fallen (creabilis et
labilis)—a ‘supra-lapsarian’ position? For Reformed dogmaticians, the infra-lapsarian
ordering (election ‘with a view to the fall’) was favoured, becoming the majority position
at the Synod of Dordt. But the supra-lapsarian ordering (election ‘apart from or before
the fall’) was not considered church-dividing; it continued to be held by a minority of
seventeenth-century divines and was endorsed, on other grounds, by Barth.
A final variant in these highly technical debates in the doctrine of election deserves
mention. Lutheran and Roman Catholic dogmaticians after Trent sought an ordering of
the decrees which did not, on one hand, entirely sever the divine act of election from the
divine nature and its freedom—God's election could not be dependent on creatures and
their dispositions—yet which also allowed the decree to be ‘conditioned’, to encompass
the faith or meritorious work foreseen in the graced believer. Systematically, we could say
that the doctrine of the divine being in act is coordinated with the doctrine of divine
omniscience, such that the doctrine of predestination reports how the creature, created
and fallen, is already either the object of grace—through faith or faith alive in works—or
eternally passed by. Foreseen faith or merit, each resting on the prevenient or eternal
good-pleasure and grace of God, is implied in the doctrine of ‘election to the book of life’.
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As all (p. 112) sides recognized, the danger in this pattern of the doctrine stems from the
threat to the divine sovereignty in election in that the act of God could be understood as
grounded on the human act—a pattern all sides considered Pelagian.
But in all these patterns, we see the divine decree, both internal and external, to carry
the necessity and simplicity of the divine nature, making predestination a sovereign and
infallible outworking of the divine glory in both justice and mercy. The human objects of
election must be chosen or reprobated, and that successfully, eternally, and utterly. Even
the ‘conditioned decree’ of seventeenth-century Lutheranism or the ‘middle knowledge’
of the Jesuit Molina did not countenance the power of a human creature to undermine,
change, or overpower the electing will of God. The logic of the classical doctrine of
predestination has struck many Christians, early and late, as ruthless and heartlessly at
odds with the God of pity and mercy extolled in scripture. Calvin famously called the
doctrine of election an ‘awesome decree’ (decretum horribile) (Institutes 3. 23. 7), and so
sturdy an orthodox Reformed theologian as Francis Turretin found himself leaning on
Paul's poignant hymn to God's mysterious workings (Rom. 11: 33–6) whenever he touched
on the decrees (Turretin 1992–7: i. 390). Yet it would be a misreading of the tradition to
call it unscriptural, or, indeed, pitiless. All major systematicians of this doctrine appeal
constantly and consistently to scripture, especially the ‘golden texts’ in Romans,
Ephesians, and the Gospel of John. Heightened in their piety was the sense of divine
holiness and creaturely need and fault, themselves both deep biblical themes. These
themes are muted in our day—at least in the academic, systematic theology of our day—
yet they cannot fall wholly silent, as the uniqueness and majesty of God are the
unshakeable reality confronting every creature.
As we have asked systematically about the relation of being and act in God, and the
divine decree ad intra and ad extra, so here we ask about the relation of the doctrine of
election to Christ's person as mediator and to his work as redeemer. More abstractly we
might ask, What is the relation of eternity to time, both in incarnation and atonement?
Has the incarnate Word brought the eschatological eternity into temporality, such that all
creaturely life has already met its end, its telos, even as creaturely time unfolds? More
concretely we might ask, When do we stand before the great judgement seat of Christ,
and where is his throne planted? Again, we begin where the tradition has: with the
doctrine of Christ's person, Christology proper.
II. THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION AND CHRISTOLOGY
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Jesus Christ, fully human, fully divine, is the incarnate Word, the Son sent into the world:
this is the Chalcedonian doctrine of Christ's person. Now, this person is the redeemer of
the world—but is the predicate ‘redeemer’ the eternal object of the (p. 113) divine
decree? Or is redemption the contingent work this eternal person does in the world now
fallen from its maker? We might put this another way: Is Christ's person his work; or is
his person distinct, logically and eternally, from his work? Could the Son, that is, remain
unincarnate? Could the incarnate one not be redeemer? On these questions turned the
medieval debate famously associated with Scotus about the necessity of the incarnation
and the contingency of the redeeming work of Christ. Regardless of the answer to these
questions, all agreed that the gratuity and sovereignty of divine election must be secured:
for any pre-modern systematician, creatures and their need could not impel or motivate
the divine act. Such considerations led the early dogmaticians, on all sides of this debate,
to stipulate that God ‘allowed’ or ‘permitted’ the fall, so that creaturely rebellion could
not overmaster, incapacitate, or ‘surprise’ the divine will. Rather, human history, even in
its sin, witnessed to and depended upon the eternal knowledge and will of God. Much of
the Augustinian conundrum of human free will and the puzzling questions concerning
human nature before and after the fall (ante et post lapsum) arise from the demand that
God remain timelessly sovereign and also that human creatures be temporally
responsible for sin. The fall thus serves as a ‘limit concept’ in the doctrine of the creature
much as did the two powers (absoluta and ordinata) in the doctrine of God. The doctrine
of the person of Christ must conform to the systematic decisions made concerning the
counsel of God and the fall.
Should the incarnation be a necessary act of God, we would then assimilate the doctrine
of election to the doctrine of Trinity. The missions of the persons would be one with their
processions: to be begotten as the eternal Son would be identical to his being sent to the
world. Just this may be the intent and structure of the often puzzling doctrine in Barth of
the eternal, enfleshed Christ (logos ensarkos). For the doctrine of election, then, we
would affirm here that the triune God eternally wills to be incarnate in the Son, and that
this decree comprises within it a temporal execution in first-century Judaea. Election
would be the doctrine of God's enfleshed nearness to creation, and the simple necessity
of the divine being in act would be expressed in the communion in time of the eternal
Word with the world. Redemption or deliverance from sin, in doctrines of this sort, has a
rather surprising relation to Christology. The salvation of sinners will be related to the
incarnate one either contingently or necessarily. If contingently, then, granted a fallen
world, the mission of the eternal Son takes on the task of redeeming sinners. If
necessarily, then the incarnate one in his person just is communion with God, and this is
precisely what redemption means. We might take Duns Scotus' Christology to follow the
first pattern, and Friedrich Schleiermacher's the second. In either case, we could find
here a systematic ground for a doctrine of universal election to eternal life.
The eternal mission of the Son would be to assume creaturely flesh and live among us as
a tabernacle of the divine glory. Or, to borrow Karl Rahner's phrase, there would never be
any ‘ungraced creation’ (Rahner 1978: 142–52). In time, the timeless decree of God to be
one with his creatures would insert into human (p. 114) history the eschatological end
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and telos of the creature, to be in harmony with the creator. The original blessing of God's
presence with us would be realized in Immanuel regardless of sin or of obedience. This
carries the rather odd effect of making Christ himself, in his person, the very election of
creaturely reality, its communion with God, or, perhaps, its redemption—all quite apart
from human sinners themselves. We would then read 1 Corinthians 1: 30 (‘Jesus Christ,
who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and
redemption’) to be a claim of identity in which our election to life simply is the person of
the incarnate one. The doctrine of election of individual creatures to life would first be
accomplished, completed, and perfected in Christ, and then applied or radiated out to
humanity. The purpose of human history would be the patient unfolding of Christ's own
election as the incarnate Word to the whole creation.
Such appears to be the form—though not the entire content—of Barth's doctrine of
election, in which Christ himself is the elected and electing one, while the election of his
community, and the individuals within it, is the secondary outworking of this divine
election of the Son. So too we might consider as representative of this understanding of
election Rahner's doctrine of the ‘supernatural existential’ enfleshed in the mediator, the
bearer borne by grace. We might also number among these those universalists who take
Christ to be the metaphysical and objective mediator of the whole cosmos, the lamb slain
from the foundation of the world, such that election is accomplished apart from the
recognition or belief of creatures.
Thus far the person of Christ. But how might the doctrine of the work of Christ, the
threefold office (munus triplex) of prophet, priest, and king, reflect the doctrine of
election and bear on the salvation of individual creatures? Here, the picture is
considerably more complex as the incarnation is not now viewed as a necessary act of
God. The incarnate one now takes on a task, carried out in a particular time and place,
leading from stable to cross, in the small villages and lakeside of Galilee and the teeming
capital and temple of Jerusalem. This work need not have been assumed by the Son, since
his mission is contingent. Yet it is the gracious will of the Father to rescue in the Son.
Thus the doctrine of election is both a free act of God and a concrete work of the
redeemer. How can such a particular event be the salvation of the world? And how can
such a concrete work be the universal deliverance of sinners?
Systematically, we see here the converse side of the Reformed doctrine of the absolute
decree: Jesus Christ is neither object nor foundation of election—not necessary to the
divine internal decree—but rather the instrument or means by which election is carried
out. In this light the details of Christ's earthly ministry and passion begin to do explicit
work in the doctrine of election. The moral exhortations of the Sermon on the Mount; the
miracles of feeding and healing; the call to bear the cross; the betrayal and desertion of
the disciples; the cross, grave, and empty tomb: all these are the means used by the Son
of God to redeem the elect. Doctrines of meritorious works, ‘condign’ or
‘congruent’ (truly worthy of God or merely treated as such), monastic ‘counsels of
perfection’, and saintly lives (p. 115) of sanctified virtue all spring from the attempt to
incorporate and follow the singular pattern of the earthly Redeemer. These particulars,
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that is, take on something of the ‘necessity of the past’ or what in Hegelian idiom is
termed a ‘concrete universal’. Election need not have been realized in just this way, yet it
was and so must be. Hence the striking talk of necessity and prophetic prediction in the
Gospel passion narratives, at once historical, contingent, and free, and at the same time
decreed, necessary, and inexorable. In Barth's terms, the covenant is history, the history
of the relation between this king and this people. Jesus Christ is now the object of
election in a fresh sense: he is anointed, as are priests, kings, and prophets in ancient
Israel, to intercede and sacrifice for a people, to rule and lead them, to proclaim to them
the will and truth of God.
The relation between the historical events of the Bible and the eternal disposition of
creatures before God has sometimes been referred to as a scandal of particularity. It may
be seen as the modern variant of the long-standing Latin teaching about the ‘remnant’
that will be saved, and the limited, finite number of the elect. Not everyone has been
reached by the gospel; not all cultures or eras have been included in the Christian
community. Indeed pre-modern dogmaticians were keenly aware of the severely limited
scope of the church and the faithful. Does this historical fact become the temporal
realization of the eternal decree toward creatures, that only a few be saved? In Christian
lands, the widely recognized disparity in individual responses to the faith was taken, on
some sides, to be a sign of election: only those whom Christ designated as his own would
‘draw near with faith’. Perhaps more striking in the history of the western churches is the
conviction, springing from these same roots, that the gospel must be brought to all lands
and peoples. On this view, Christian missions are a living and concrete expression of the
doctrine of election twinned with the ‘scandal of particularity’. Evangelists are the means
used by the redeemer to gather into one community the Lord's elect. Thus, history finds
its contingent yet necessary end when all the elect have been called: eschatology is the
consummation of the doctrine of election.
The contingent and particular character of this dimension of predestination gives rise to a
profound indeterminism in the reception of salvation, a problem known by turns as the
search for certainty (certitudo), or the ‘practical syllogism’. The historical presence and
visibility of Christian practice renders more, rather than less, acute the epistemic
question of individual election. Because singular and concrete, the question is existential:
Am I, a visible Christian among others, a member of the elect, the faithful remnant? On
what grounds may I be sure? Short of universalism in the divine decree, the answer to
these questions must take on an existential cast: in myself, my soul and life, I must
discern the ‘signs’ of election. Though sharply divided by teachings on the divine decree,
Protestants and Catholics have been united in their practice of introspection for
discerning the ‘testimony of the Spirit’ regarding one's election. Such introspection,
Augustinian in character, seeks evidence of the workings of the Holy Spirit in personal,
‘saving’ (p. 116) faith, in confidence in the divine promises, in holy living, and in
confirming, consoling attestations of divine favour and presence.
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Modern Questions
In our day, the problem of religious pluralism has on the whole stood in the stead of this
pre-modern quest for certainty of election. Here, the singularity and temporal
boundedness of Christ's redeeming work makes the doctrine of election troubling for
many Christians in a world of other beliefs. Are members of other faiths possibly among
the elect? If this is the case, how does Christ's redeeming work reach and apply to them?
If not, can reprobation be justly applied to those who have never knowingly rejected the
redeemer? Do questions of this sort underwrite Christian missions to adherents of other
traditions? Can a world of such diversity in belief and explosiveness in religious conflict
tolerate Christian claims to absoluteness in election in Christ? A doctrine of universal
salvation strikes many systematicians as attractive when faced with these dilemmas.
Karl Rahner's celebrated doctrine of the ‘anonymous Christian’ contends that non-
Christian belief implicitly reaches out to and lives by the gracious mystery that is made
permanent and visible in Jesus Christ (Rahner 1969: 231–49). More Christological still are
doctrines such as those of Barth or Hans Urs von Balthasar in which Christ's redeeming
work entails Christ becoming the sole and true rejected—the sinless becoming sin for us
—such that, in Balthasar's striking image, Christ alone descends in death to hell, indeed,
forms and in this way hallows or empties hell itself (Balthasar 1990: 148–88). Less
preoccupied by traditional claims of Christian finality, universalists such as John Hick
propose a deity of ‘noumenal’ reality (a reality beyond human knowing), expressed in and
recognized by the ‘phenomena’ (the human experience) of diverse religions—a variant, in
contemporary terms, of the Enlightenment distinction between rational and positive
religion. Theologians who favour the eschatological dimension of Christian proclamation
can make room for final decisions about Christ in the ‘eternal future’, realized now or
after death. Noteworthy in all these positions is the prominent place accorded to the
objective moment in the doctrine of election: being chosen by God is accomplished apart
from, and is logically distinct from, the conscious confession of Jesus Christ as redeemer.
It may well be that the systematic coordination of election with Christology, characteristic
of much modern theology, will give way in our day to the earlier coordination with the
doctrine of God, so that the absolute decree toward creatures is realized apart from any
means, even the believers' confession of this sovereign lordship.
In our day, Jesus Christ goes his way into the world, we might say, as the stranger, an
instrument of the Father's working who carries out his Father's business in season and
out, but whose name and countenance are known by but a few. (p. 117) Students of the
doctrine of election might ask whether such a portrait of the suffering servant, of an
earthly Jesus going his solitary way, deepens our commitment to his cause or distracts us
from his risen life and from the commandment to baptize in his name. The doctrine of
election in our day is shaped by our answer to this question.
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III. THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION AND ECCLESIOLOGY

Finally, we might ask how the doctrine of election may be systemically articulated with
the doctrine of the church proper, ecclesiology, and with theological description of
community, nation, and people. Central to modern biblical scholarship has been the
conviction that Jesus of Nazareth came to preach the kingdom of God, a realm or
community in which God reigned so that justice is done on earth as in heaven. Echoing
notes of earlier doctrines of covenant and pact, this emphasis upon the commonwealth of
God—to borrow Calvin's term (Institutes 4. 20. 8–9)—has raised for the doctrine of
election fresh questions about the aim and proper form of the divine decree. Has the
tradition rightly focused on the individual creature as human object of the decree? Or, as
both Barth and many liberation theologians have asked, is not the community the proper
and first object of election, after Jesus Christ himself? Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic
Constitution on the Church enunciated by the Second Vatican Council, made prominent
the phrase, ‘people of God’, as the fullest description of the church, folding together
distinctions of cleric and lay, visible and invisible, covenants of Old and New Testaments
(Lumen Gentium §§9–17, in Tanner 1990: ii. 855–62). Standing in the shadow here is the
doctrine of the election of Israel, God's chosen, and the relation of Christian doctrines of
election to Jews and Judaism, a theme taken up in Nostra Aetate, the path-breaking
declaration on the church's relation to non-Christian religions (Tanner 1990: ii. 968–71).
Scarcely any topic has awakened theologians more to the centrality of the doctrine of
election than this theme, the election of Israel, which has proved a deeper and more
troubling call to Christian conscience than that of religious pluralism itself.
Modern Questions
If the doctrine of election, in its creaturely aspect, is considered as principally corporate

in nature, systematicians would assimilate all other doctrines to this (p. 118) collective
purpose and scope. Liberation theologians—here we may take Gustavo Gutiérrez (1983)
as exemplary—have demonstrated the thoroughgoing transformation such an assimilation
sets in train. In the doctrine of election, the poor in history occupy the place of the
remnant within classical doctrine, and the just society, with its radical solidarity, occupies
the place of the sanctified community. Again, the formal problems raised by particularity
and the seeming caprice of the divine decree make themselves felt in this more
immanent, dialectical doctrine of the divine commonwealth or polis. The order of the
decrees, especially the relation of providence to election, finds its parallel in liberation
theology in the conviction that the elect, the oppressed, are found everywhere in the
universal, political history of humankind, so that the doctrine of providence is an
outworking of the doctrine of election. (In this, liberation theologians agree with Barth,
who ordered providence to election by and of Christ.) The poor, agents of God's liberating
decree, are the makers of world history, the shapers of the just society that is the
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eschatological goal of creation. The ringing endorsement by liberation theologians of the

‘unitary nature of history’ gives rise in new idiom to an old and robust doctrine of the
elected community as goal of human history.
But just who belongs by rights to this elect community? The Augustinian ‘cause of grace’
appears in this collective expression of the doctrine of election with even greater
complexity than in pre-modern dogmatics. Augustine's distinction between the earthly
and heavenly cities, itself a corporate translation of the parable of wheat and tares (Matt.
13), sets out an ecclesiology in which the elect community resided silently and without
marker in the greater community of Christian practice. In practice, however, there was a
tension between the Augustinian doctrine of sacraments and the Augustinian doctrine of
election. The place or locus of forgiving, justifying grace was the baptismal font; the locus
of the ‘medicine of immortality’ the Lord's table; the locus of renewing, restoring
Christian life the confessional or liturgical absolution. In sacramental life, the elect or
‘invisible church’ appears to be just the ‘visible church’, baptizing, feeding, and forgiving
its members in Christ's name and grace—and this squares uneasily with Augustine's
doctrine of election.
So too in contemporary systematics, the doctrine of the elect community stands in tension
with the doctrine of the sacraments and with visible Christian practice. In doctrines of
universal salvation, the tension is acute: the effective means of grace are sheared off from
the public, liturgical acts of the church because the grace that saves need not be found in
the earthly church at all. In liberation theologies the matter is more complex. The elect,
in one sense, remain a visible community within history: the oppressed and destitute. Yet
the formal nature of such an identification allows any number of different classes of
people to be defined as the elect, such that election becomes a social construction whose
essential nature remains known, if at all, by God alone. So too the sacraments, effective
signs of liberating praxis, are on the one hand visible marks of the true, emancipating
community; on the other, they are the common property of all just societies and just
(p. 119) practices, and thus in essence distinct from the acts of the gathered church. We
might also mention the secular version of the doctrine of corporate election, modern
nationalism. The influence of Reformed doctrines of election on the apartheid doctrine of
South Africa is well known. Race theories, especially in their hidden carriers in ‘blood and
soil’, are a perverse imitation of corporate election. ‘Manifest destiny’ is a secularizing
echo of the church as wayfarer. The hidden yet public character of the sacramental
means of grace is mirrored in the contested definitions of true citizenship, true
patriotism, and true membership in the superior class and race. The earthly city has its
decretum horribile too.
In the end, the doctrine of election in our day must return again and again to its roots,
the election of the people Israel. The entire vocabulary of the doctrine stems from the
biblical depiction of Israel as the beloved child of God, the heir, the chosen, the covenant
people dear to its maker. The representative intensification of the elect, from the faithful
remnant, to the seven thousand that have not bent the knee, to the anointed king or
prophet or judge: all these belong to the history of Israel as the creaturely object of divine
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election. The typological rehearsal of Jesus as the elect, beloved Son, prominent
especially in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, distils the history of ancient Israel
into the narrative of a single life. Little wonder that Paul's anguish in Romans 9–11 can
hardly be contained: the history of Jew amid Gentiles just is the unfolding of the divine
decree toward the world, the journey of those chosen ‘above all the nations of the earth’,
an election irrevocable and precious in the Lord's sight.
Yet out of these very same sources the Christian tradition has developed a doctrine of
corporate election in which the church of Jew and Gentile replaces or ‘supersedes’ the
people Israel as the true, elect people of God. According to this supersessionist view of
election, Jews and Judaism belong to the reprobate, cursed for disbelief and rebellion.
One is only incorporated into the true, elect community through the laver of baptism,
here seen as the conversion away from Judaism. From Nostra Aetate forward, many
Christian bodies have repudiated supersessionism, especially in the virulent form just
presented. Yet the conceptual and structural complexities of the classical doctrine of
election, from the eternal and temporal ordering of the decrees to the place of human
acts with regard to the divine being in act, remain underdeveloped in Christian doctrines
of Israel's election. Future systematic work in the doctrine of election may well take its
starting point from the classical problematic of the decree: How can the divine Triunity,
absolute and eternal in itself, turn to the creature, such that the history of the covenant
from Israel to the church of Jew and Gentile may be understood as an out-working of the
complex debates on grace and merit, foreknowledge and predestination, mediation and
redemption, reprobation and preterition, all in or through the person and work of Jesus
Christ?
The doctrine of election takes its origin from the conviction that God acts, chooses, or
elects first and properly himself, and then, secondly and graciously, (p. 120) the creature.
Though markedly different in idiom and range in our day from pre-modern doctrines of
predestination, still the doctrine of election will remain at the heart of theology's task so
long as God is seen as personal, and all his ways as just and true altogether.
References Suggested Reading

AQUINAS, ST THOMAS (1975). Summa Theologiae. London: Blackfriars.
AUGUSTINE (1980). Anti-Pelagian Writings. In Philip Schaff (ed.), A Select Library of the
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 1st ser., Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, vol. v.
BALTHASAR, HANS URS VON (1990). Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter. Edinburgh: T.
& T. Clark.
BARTH, KARL (1957). Church Dogmatics II/2. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
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—— (1968). The Epistle to the Romans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
BRUNNER EMIL, and BARTH, KARL (1946). Natural Theology: Comprising ‘Nature and Grace’
by Professor Emil Brunner and the reply ‘No!’ by Dr. Karl Barth. London: Geoffrey Bles.
CALVIN, JOHN (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion. Philadelphia: Westminster.
GUTIÉRREZ, GUSTAVO (1983). The Power of the Poor in History. London: SCM.
RAHNER, KARL (1969). Theological Investigations, iv. New York: Seabury.
—— (1978). Foundations of the Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of

Christianity. New York: Seabury.
SCHLEIERMACHER, F. D. E. (1928). The Christian Faith. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
STRAUSS, D. F. (1972). The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Philadelphia: Fortress.
TANNER, NORMAN P., SJ (ed.) (1990). Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols.
Georgetown: Sheed and Ward.
TILLICH, PAUL (1952). The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press.
TURRETIN, FRANCIS (1992–7 [1679–85]). Institutes of Elenctic Theology. 3 vols. Phillipsberg:

Presbyterian and Reformed.
BARTH, KARL (1957: 3–506).
BERKOUWER, G. C. (1960). Divine Election. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
CALVIN, JOHN (1960: 920–87 (3. 21–4)).
JEWETT, P. K. (1985). Election and Predestination. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
MAURY, P. (1960). Election and Other Papers. London: SCM.
PANNENBERG, W. (1991–8). Systematic Theology. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, iii. 435–
526.
Katherine Sonderegger
Katherine Sonderegger is Professor of Systematic Theology at Virginia Theological

Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia.
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Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: doctrine of God, election, predestination, providence, salvation

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

In all this, the doctrine of predestination shows the unmistakable influence of St

Augustinian convictions have prompted many dogmaticians to treat the doctrine of

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

reprobation a necessary element within the doctrine of predestination? These new

(p. 107) I. THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION AND THE DOCTRINE OF

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

long dominant in Christian reading of Israel's scriptures, underscore the radical

Drawing on the language of Greek metaphysics, the early church theologians

A divine act could be considered merely ‘symbolic’ or ‘mythological’—a term made

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

reconciled without appeal—at least as a first step—to a doctrine of human knowledge of

According to classical, pre-modern theists, God is no inert, simple, lifeless immobility.

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

II. THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION AND CHRISTOLOGY

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

III. THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTION AND ECCLESIOLOGY

If the doctrine of election, in its creaturely aspect, is considered as principally corporate

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

eschatological goal of creation. The ringing endorsement by liberation theologians of the

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

References Suggested Reading

BARTH, KARL (1957). Church Dogmatics II/2. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

—— (1968). The Epistle to the Romans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CALVIN, JOHN (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion. Philadelphia: Westminster.

RAHNER, KARL (1969). Theological Investigations, iv. New York: Seabury.

—— (1978). Foundations of the Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of

SCHLEIERMACHER, F. D. E. (1928). The Christian Faith. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

STRAUSS, D. F. (1972). The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Philadelphia: Fortress.

TURRETIN, FRANCIS (1992–7 [1679–85]). Institutes of Elenctic Theology. 3 vols. Phillipsberg:

BARTH, KARL (1957: 3–506).

BERKOUWER, G. C. (1960). Divine Election. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

CALVIN, JOHN (1960: 920–87 (3. 21–4)).

JEWETT, P. K. (1985). Election and Predestination. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

MAURY, P. (1960). Election and Other Papers. London: SCM.

Katherine Sonderegger is Professor of Systematic Theology at Virginia Theological

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

Subscriber: University of St Andrews; date: 26 January 2018

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