8 The Bible as Universal History
There is surely no part of Christian teaching which has been the subject of so much ridicule and indignant rejection as the doctrine of election. How absurd for intelligent, educated people to believe that almighty God should have his favorites, that he should pick out one small tribe among all the families of humankind to be the special objects of his attention. Is it not simply a piece of ignorant egotism? There can be few places where this is felt more keenly than in India, with its immensely ancient and venerable traditions of religious experience and sophisticated theological reflection. How can one believe that almighty God has hidden the secret of truth for all these centuries from the great saints and scholars of India, the men and women who were composing some of the greatest religious literature in the world at a time when the tribes of western Europe were wild barbarians, and that India should have to wait three thousand years to learn the secret of eternal salvation from the descendants of these barbarians? But the scandal is certainly not peculiar to India. It was Rousseau who said that he could not understand why, if God had something to say to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he could not say it directly but had to go through Moses to say it.
And yet it is plain that the doctrine of election is central to any true exposition of the Bible. From the very beginning God chooses, calls, and sends particular people. God is always the initiator. The words of Jesus to his disciples, "You did not choose me; I chose you," are in line with everything in the Bible from beginning to end. We can, of course, if we wish, convert this language into the language of religion. We can say that the great figures of the Bible from Abraham to Peter and Paul had religious experiences which led them to think that God had called them in some special way. And one cannot say that these statements are untrue. But they leave open the question whether these religious experiences corresponded to any objective reality, whether in fact almighty God did choose and call and send them, or whether they merely thought that he had done so. Without question the point of view of the Bible is that God chose Abel and not Cain, Isaac and not Ishmael, Jacob and not Esau, David and not his elder brothers. Their religious experience, if we want to use that modern phrase, follows on the fact of the divine choosing and calling. But can we believe that almighty God, creator of heaven and earth, does act in this seemingly arbitrary way? Why Jacob, that sly, cunning, self-seeking man, and why not Esau-a man who is portrayed in Scripture as what we might call a perfect gentleman?
The first step toward an answer to these questions is to ask what assumptions lie behind them. What is implied in the complaint that I ought not to have to depend on another for that which is necessary for my salvation? One has only to pose this question to uncover a whole set of assumptions which have to be questioned, assumptions which go to the heart of what it is to be human. Some of these assumptions have a very long and venerable history, and here I am thinking of the Indian traditions which have taken it as self-evident that the knowledge of God and the path to salvation must be in the last analysis a matter for the individual soul. Of course the seeker may need the help of a spiritual guide, but in the end the journey must be made alone. Salvation, if we wish to use that word for that which is understood as the goal of human being, is in the end a matter of the relation between the individual soul and the Eternal. It is in accordance with this way of understanding matters that the initiative lies with the seeker: he must search for and find a spiritual guide, and he may well go from one to another until he finds the guru who can lead him. The guru is not sent out by God to seek and find lost souls. It is for others to seek him.
Modern Western culture has worked with analogous assumptions. Kant's famous slogan "Dare to Know," in which he summed up what was meant by enlightenment, was a summons to the autonomous human reason to trust its own powers and to dare to question the accepted traditions. Of course, as in the Indian tradition, one needs teachers on the way, but in the end it is for the individual, in the autonomy which is his right, to use his or her own reason to arrive at the truth and to hold it. Clearly the exercise of human reason is something which takes place not in a vacuum, but within a socially embodied tradition of ra tional discourse. No reasoning is possible except by the use of language, and language expresses the way in which a particular body of human beings has learned to grasp and cope with the world. In that sense human reason can never be totally autonomous. But the rationalism of modern culture has never accepted the idea that it was finally and irrevocably dependent on a particular tradition of human reasoning. The aim has been to subject every tradition to the scrutiny of reason, including every tradition which claimed to embody a particular divine revelation to one group of people. Yet, as Alasdair Maclntyre has shown (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?), it is an illusion to suppose that there is available to us some kind of pure rationality existing in a disembodied state and therefore capable of passing judgment on all the various ways of grasping truth developed in particular socially embodied traditions of rational discourse. It is enough to remind ourselves once again that no critical act is possible except on the basis of a whole complex of beliefs which are assumed a-critically as the grounds on which one can criticize the belief under discussion. This complex of beliefs will itself be the product of a particular socially embodied tradition of reasoning.
We can only understand the biblical teaching about election if we see it as part of the whole way of understanding the human situation which is characteristic of the Bible. Here, in contrast to both the Indian and the modern Western views, there is no attempt to see the human person as an autonomous individual, and the human relation with God as the relation of the alone to the alone. From its very beginning the Bible sees human life in terms of relationships. There is no attempt to strip away the accidents of history in order to find the real essence of what it is to be human. Human life is seen in terms of mutual relationships: first, the most fundamental relation, between man and woman, then between parents and children, then between families and clans and nations. The Bible does not speak about "humanity" but about "all the families of the earth" or "all the nations." It follows that this mutual relatedness, this dependence of one on another, is not merely part of the journey toward the goal of salvation, but is intrinsic to the goal itself. For knowing God, for being in communion with him, we are dependent on the one whom he gives us to be the bearer of this relation, not just as a teacher and guide on the way but as the partner in the end. There is, there can be, no private salvation, no salvation which does not involve us with one another. Therefore, if I may venture to use a metaphor which I have used elsewhere, God's saving revelation of himself does not come to us straight down from above-through the skylight, as we might say. In order to receive God's saving revelation we have to open the door to the neighbor whom he sends as his appointed messenger, and-moreover-to receive that messenger not as a temporary teacher or guide whom we can dispense with when we ourselves have learned what is needed, but as one who will permanently share our home. There is no salvation except one in which we are saved together through the one whom God sends to be the bearer of his salvation.
What I have called the logic of election becomes very clear in that passage of the Letter to the Romans which has often been used as a basis for false teaching about election. I refer to Romans 9 through 11. For Paul it is axiomatic that God has chosen Israel uniquely among all the nations. And yet Israel has, as a nation, rejected God's chosen Messiah. How is this to be understood? Does it mean that God's purpose has been defeated? No. Does it mean that God has cast off his chosen people? No. How, then, are we to understand it? First, we must understand that God retains his freedom. Election does not give us claims against God. This has always been clear, for not all the descendants of Abraham are chosen. No one can find fault with God for this. Like the potter working with his clay, God has the freedom to dispose of his creation as he will. He could make some vessels for honor and some for destruction. Paul does not say that he has done so, but only that, if he did, we would have no ground for complaint. This is where false conclusions have been drawn from Paul. The whole passage makes clear that God has not done what he might have done. He has not made some for honor and some for destruction. What he has done is to consign all men to disobedience in order that he may have mercy on all (11:32).
How can this be so? Again we ask: what is the meaning of Israel's rejection of the Messiah? Paul's answer is an astonishing one, but it fits exactly what I call the logic of election. God, says Paul, has hardened the heart of Israel so that the gospel which they reject will-so to saybounce off to the Gentiles. This is exactly what was happening in city after city where Paul was turned out of the synagogues and went to the Gentiles. So the apostasy of Israel has brought salvation to the Gentiles. Does this mean that Israel is lost? No! Impossible! God can never cast off his chosen people. As proof of this he has kept a remnant (as so often in the past) as pledge that Israel is not rejected. The small company of believing Jews is the pledge that Israel is not cast off. And how is it all to end? The answer is that this hardening of the heart of Israel is until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved (11:25). In the end, therefore, it is through the Gentiles that Israel will be saved. So the logic of election is complete. I said earlier that in the biblical view there could be no salvation straight from above through the skylight, but only as we open the door to the neighbor whom God has appointed to be the bearer of salvation. It might have seemed that this was not quite true, since Israel, in the person of Abraham, received the message direct and not through any human messenger. Yes indeed, but we learn that it is not enough to be descendants of Abraham. They have no privileged status. In the end the chosen people, the elect, will have to receive salvation through the nonelect-the Gentiles. The logic of election is complete. Not just at the beginning but all the way until the end, salvation involves us with the neighbor whom God chooses to be the bearer of salvation, and there is no salvation otherwise.
In the light of this crucial passage we can expose the false ideas which have gathered around the doctrine of election and which have made it unacceptable to many Christians as well as to others. In the first place, and most obviously, there is the idea that election is election to privileged status before God. This false belief is something against which the prophets of Israel had constantly to contend. It is indeed true that in many moving passages of the Old Testament we are told of God's undying love for Israel, of his commitment to its cause. Yet this love and commitment are to Israel as the instrument of God's purpose of love for all the nations, and when Israel interprets God's love as a license to do as it pleases chastisement follows. In a classic passage Amos says in the name of God, "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins" (Amos 3:2). As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that to be God's chosen people means not privilege but suffering, reproach, humiliation. Israel is called to embody in her own life God's agony over his disobedient world. And in the New Testament this comes to its final manifestation in that God's chosen one is called to suffer the ultimate agony of a death which carries God's curse, on behalf of all peoples. We know that this disastrous misunderstanding of what God's election means has persisted right through the history of the Church and to the present day, so that Christians believe that as Christians they have a claim on God's love which others do not have. The trenchant words of Paul have been quietly ignored in the history of the Church: "There is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him" (Rom. 10:12). But that recognition, so far from eliminating the doctrine of election, becomes for Paul the very basis for that doctrine, for how shall they call on him of whom they have not heard, and how shall they hear without a preacher, and how can they preach unless they are sent? It is the universality of God's saving love which is the ground of his choosing and calling a community to be the messengers of his truth and bearers of his love for all peoples. Once again we have to remember that neither truth nor love can be communicated except as they are embodied in a community which reasons and loves.
But there is also a second, perhaps more subtle way in which the doctrine of election is misunderstood. Granted, it may be said, that election confers no special privilege but rather great responsibility, must one not agree, nevertheless, that where those who are chosen and called do what is commanded, they have a claim on God which others do not? Again Paul's argument precludes such a conclusion. God's grace is free and unconditional. We cannot turn the covenant of grace into a contract. No one, whoever he or she be, can establish claims on God's grace which exclude others. God's electing grace calls into being a people charged with the responsibility of being the bearers of his universal salvation. He commits himself to them. But they can never establish exclusive claims on him. His grace is free and his covenant cannot be converted into a contract.
There is a particular form of this misunderstanding which is also exposed in this Pauline argument. Let it be agreed that our obedience to God's command, our good works, do not entitle us to make claims on God by which others are excluded. Let it be agreed that we are, in Paul's favorite phrase, justified (put right with God) by grace through faith alone. Is it not clear, then, that those who have this faith have a claim on God which unbelievers do not have? This seems to be the assumption against which Paul is warning the Roman Christians. To those who evidently were tempted to a certain self-satisfaction because they were believers and the majority of the Jews were unbelievers, Paul writes: "If some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches.... Do not become proud but stand in awe. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you" (Rom. 11:17-21). God's electing grace, his choosing of some to be the bearers of his salvation for all, is a matter for awe and wonder and thankfulness: it can never become the ground for making claims against God which exclude others. God does not choose to save some and to destroy others. (He has consigned all to disobedience in order that he may have mercy upon all.) His grace is free and sovereign, and there is no place for an exclusive claim on his grace, a claim by which others are excluded. This obviously has great importance when we come to consider the relation of the gospel to the world religions.
Fourth, there is a way in which the doctrine of election has been distorted by separating it from the doctrine of Christ. We surely go far astray if we begin from a doctrine of divine decrees based on an abstract concept of divine omnipotence (a concept which all too obviously falls into Feuerbach's description of theism as the projection of our human ego onto the heavens). We have to take as our starting point, and as the controlling reality for all our thinking on this as on every theological topic, what God has actually done in Jesus Christ. It is in Jesus Christ that, as Paul says, we are elect from the foundation of the world. Jesus is not a latecomer into the world. He is the one in whom and through whom and for whom we and all things exist. And the things that happened when he took our human nature and came among us as a man make clear what the meaning of God's election is. It is, as Paul says in the passage we have been looking at, that God has consigned all to disobedience that he may have mercy on all. The cross of Jesus is the place where all human beings without exception are exposed as enemies of God, and the place where all human beings without exception are accepted as beloved of God, objects of his forgiving grace. No one is excluded from the scope of that prayer: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." It is for all. And yet just as the universal and unbounded grace of God could only be made known through this historic deed wrought out at one place in the world and at one point in history; just as it could only be the action of God's grace by having the concreteness, the particularity, and therefore the limitedness of one particular happening which can only become known to others if it is told by one person to another; so also it is made known not by some cosmic spiritual illumination but by being communicated to certain specific men and women who had been chosen as witnesses and prepared beforehand for that role. The risen Jesus did not appear to everyone. He did not appear (as is often foolishly asserted) to the believers; there were no believers before he appeared to them. He appeared, as the Scripture makes clear, to those who had been chosen beforehand as witnesses. They are chosen not for themselves, not to be the exclusive beneficiaries of God's saving work, but to be the bearers of the secret of his saving work for the sake of all. They are chosen to go and bear fruit.
To be chosen, to be elect, therefore does not mean that the elect are the saved and the rest are the lost. To be elect in Christ Jesus, and there is no other election, means to be incorporated into his mission to the world, to be the bearer of God's saving purpose for his whole world, to be the sign and the agent and the firstfruit of his blessed kingdom which is for all. It means therefore, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear, to take our share in his suffering, to bear the scars of the passion. It means, as Paul says elsewhere, to bear in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of the risen Jesus may be manifest and made available for others. It means that this particular body of people who bear the name of Jesus through history, this strange and often absurd company of people so feeble, so foolish, so often fatally compromised with the world, this body with all its contingency and particularity, is the body which has the responsibility of bearing the secret of God's reign through world history. The logic of election is all of one piece with the logic of the gospel. God's purpose of salvation is not that we should be taken out of history and related to him in some way which bypasses the specificities and particularities of history. His purpose is that in and through history there should be brought into being that which is symbolized in the vision with which the Bible ends-the Holy City into which all the glory of the nations will finally be gathered. Butand of course this is the crux of the matter-that consummation can only lie on the other side of death and resurrection. It is the calling of the Church to bear through history to its end the secret of the lordship of the crucified.
Before leaving the subject I must append two matters which may have been suggested by this discussion. One is this. It will be obvious that there is a logical connection between what I have been saying about election and the point about the nature of rational argument which I have been quoting from Maclntyre. I referred earlier to what Maclntyre calls one of the characteristic illusions of our culture, the idea that there is some sort of rationality which exists apart from any particular human society and which can therefore provide criteria for passing judgment on all the traditions which different human communities have developed and cherished. This is an illusion. There is no rationality except a socially embodied rationality. That rationality which can lead to a true understanding of reality as a whole will necessarily be a rationality embodied in a particular society. The Christian community, the universal Church, embracing more and more fully all the cultural traditions of humankind, is called to be that community in which a tradition of rational discourse is developed which leads to a true understanding of reality, because it takes as its starting point and as its permanent criterion of truth the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It is necessarily a particular community among all the human communities. It cannot pretend to be otherwise. But it has a universal mission, for it is the community chosen and sent by God for this purpose. This particularity, however scandalous it may seem to a certain kind of cosmopolitan mind, is inescapable.
The other point is of a quite different kind. Does the argument so far point to universalism, that is to say, to the doctrine that as God wills all to be saved, all will in the end infallibly be saved? Certainly the passage we studied in Romans has a universalist ring. "The full number of the Gentiles will be gathered in and all Israel will be saved." Paul's vision is truly cosmic and universal. His earlier description of Jesus as the new Adam also points in that direction. "As one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all" (Rom. 5:18). And yet the same Paul can say of himself that he must exercise the strictest self-discipline "lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified" (1 Cor. 9:27). It seems to me that the whole nature of the gospel requires us to maintain this tension and not to try to resolve it either by a rationalistic universalism which denies the possibility of finally missing the mark, or by increasingly fruitless arguments about who will and who will not be saved. When Jesus was asked the question about whether few or many would be saved he declined to answer it but sternly warned the questioner to strive to enter the narrow door that leads to life. His often repeated words about the reversal of expectations (the first shall be last and the last first) and the parables which suggest that those who are confident will find themselves excluded and those who never expected it find themselves welcomed, all point in the same direction. There is a kind of confidence which leads to complacency, and there is a kind of anxiety which leads to selfish efforts to save oneself. It seems to me clear from the whole New Testament that the Christian life has room both for a godly confidence and for a godly fear. The contrast between these is not a contradiction. If I know that God in his limitless grace and kindness has chosen and called me to be a bearer of his grace for others, my trust in him will not exclude the awareness that I could betray his trust in me, and that very awareness will drive me closer to him. This is a deeply personal relationship. It excludes, I think, the kind of rationalistic universalism which I have referred to. It also excludes, I think, any temptation to set limits to God's grace, or to write off any human being as beyond God's redeeming love.