The Elect

I had an interesting discussion quite a while back with a Calvinist about the Unconditional Election. This is one of the five points of Calvinism (which may be a topic for another day). Unconditional Election refers to the selection of those who will be saved at the beginning of time, based solely on God's mercy and not upon any particular action of these people. Before reading this, I would advise you to look at my earlier post, "In the Image of God," where I talk about my understanding of time, free will, and God's foreknowledge. I may repeat some of it, but I will try to keep my comments germane and mostly new.

My primary issue with the concept of Unconditional Election is that it, in effect, turns all of human history into some kind of farcical drama; a play of inordinate length and complexity for the amusement of a divine audience. At best, God becomes a tragic playwright, determining before the curtain rises who will still be standing on the stage at the end. At worst, it makes God an efficiency expert for a cosmic Human Resources office, mechanically generating a list of people to fire in order to maximize the productivity of Universe Inc.. Neither of those options sound like a loving God, willing to go to sacrificial lengths to ensure the well-being of humanity.

Personal feelings aside, while scripture does seem to hint at the possibility of this doctrine, more than a little creative theology is needed to contort those hints into Unconditional Election and Perseverance. These verses can be divided into two categories. First are verses which put salvation in the hands of God rather than something resulting from human effort (John 15:16, Romans 9:15-16, 2 Timothy 1:9). These at no point explicitly say that God selected particular individuals. They simply affirm that humans are incapable of paying the debt for our sin, and thus must rely on the grace of God. The second category contains verses indicating foreknowledge of both the qualities of individuals and God's plan for salvation (Ephesians 1:4-5, 1 Thessalonians 1:4-5). However, the fact that God understands biology well enough to know how many hairs will be on our head has nothing to do with knowing what we will do, and the fact that God knows His own plan for human salvation well in advance doesn't strike me as a surprise. God knowing and God foreknowing are not the same thing. God can be perfectly aware of every physical law, every biological process, and the content of his own mind without knowing who will accept His offer and who will reject Him.

From an intellectual perspective, the perceived need for these doctrines is rooted in issues of Greek philosophy more than scripture. As I've complained about Greek philosophy enough throughout this blog, I will leave it at this: the Greeks hated time because it was an undeniable form of change, and change equated to imperfection. Parmenides and his pupil, Zeno, were famous for denying both time and motion. Both, they claimed, were simply illusions. The Cosmos was a single, perfect, eternal, unchanging object, and was therein perfect. While most other philosophers moderated this idea, virtually all ancient thinkers agreed at least in principle. The only real opposition came from a little heard of gentleman name Heraclitus who indicated that the Universe works through paradox (like someone being both God and Man?). For God to be perfect, He must not be in any way affected by time, even with respect to knowledge. Thus, He knew prior to the creation of time what the entire content of that time would be. The inherent problem follows: The Fall was not only foreseen, but planned by God, and the selection of only a few to find the narrow gate was done up front, leaving the rest to condemnation. Sounds like a fun God huh?

A loving God, who wishes for none to be condemned (2 Peter 3:9) does not seem like the kind of God who would create individuals who He knew were never going to find salvation. For this to work, one of the following must be true: God is indifferent rather than loving, or God is impotent rather than powerful, or God is a liar and we cannot trust anything revealed to us. Somehow, none of these things sound like the God revealed to the Jewish people and in the person of Jesus. While one can perhaps get away with saying that God cannot be held responsible for our sin just because he knows it will happen, God can be held responsible for the condemnation of a man He created with the knowledge that said person would be condemned. Unless, of course, God was powerless within His creation. If God cannot interfere with the affairs of our world at all, then He cannot be held responsible because He may as well not exist.