7 The Logic of Election
It is customary to make a sharp distinction between historical religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which depend crucially on events in the past which can be specified as to date and place, and-on the other hand-religions such as those which have their origins in the Indian subcontinent and which-while revering teachers in the pastdepend not on the authority of these founding teachers, such as Gautama or Guru Nanak, but on what is held to be accessible to every human being apart from reference to any particular events in the past. Of course the distinction is not absolute. All the world religions have been developed through history in a continuing tradition of rational argument. No religion exists apart from such a historical tradition. And all religions appeal to the authority of great teachers in the past. Nevertheless the distinction is real. The truths which Buddhism teaches would (as Buddhists understand them) be true whether or not Gautama had discovered and promulgated them. But the whole of Christian teaching would fall to the ground if it were the case that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were not events in real history but stories told to illustrate truths which are valid apart from these happenings.
What is at stake in this distinction between a story which is a true story in the sense that it tells of something which happened at an ascertainable date and place in the past, and a story which is true in the sense that it communicates truth, truth which can be understood apart from the story? One may believe that Jesus' story of the prodigal son, his father, and his brother is true in the sense that it gives us a true picture of God and a true picture of two human possibilities; no Christian wants to claim that it is a true story in the other sense. Or, to come closer to the bone, it has often been pointed out that the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus has parallels in the myths of a dying and rising god, myths which are related to the recurring experience of winter and spring. What is at stake in the Christian insistence on the "happenedness" of the story told in the New Testament? Does it matter whether or not these things actually happened? Is it not much more important that we grasp for ourselves the meaning of the story? Is factuality a trivial matter compared to faith-as the Pietist rhyme suggests?
This couplet conveys exactly the Hindu reaction to the Christian's insistence on the "happenedness" of the gospel story. And his reasoning is powerful. What, after all, are we appealing to when we affirm this "happenedness." We have no direct contact with past events. We can only know of them at many removes through ancient documents, through traditions handed on by men and women whose fallible memories were at the service of strong personal and factional interests. In insisting on this element of factuality, do you not attach your eternal salvation to the very fallible and ever changing opinions of the students of history? What may or may not have happened in the past is of secondary importance: what matters is your living relationship with God now.
What, then, are the real issues involved in this debate? I suggest that they can be understood by looking at the phrase I have just put into the mouth of a Hindu or Pietist friend: "your living relationship with God now." The issue is this: Is this relationship with God something separate from your involvement in the ongoing life of the world, your family, your neighborhood, your nation in the family of nations? Do you have, or do you seek a relationship with God in which you can really turn your back on these other involvements? Or is your relationship with God necessarily bound up with your acceptance of the part God assigns for you in his purpose for his world? If the latter is the case, then your relationship with God cannot be separated from those acts in which God has revealed and effected his purpose for the world. Your life of devotion to God will be expressed in and through your involvement with history as you are now part of it. You will understand your own life as part of a story which is not a story made up by you, not just the story of your decisions and actions, but the story which is being enacted under God's creative and providential control in the events of contemporary history. It will be of the very essence of the matter that the events and places which you read in your Bible are part of the real world and the real history-the same world in which you live, and the same history as this in which you now participate and which is being chronicled with more or less understanding of its meaning in the daily bulletins in press and television.
How, then, shall I answer my Hindu or my Pietist friend who says: In that case you are handing yourself over to the tender mercy of the historical scholars? If everything depends on what really happened two or three thousand years ago, then it is the scholars who have been sharpening their historical-critical tools so assiduously for the past two hundred years who will have the last word. Go to the senior common room of a modern university and talk to the historians: they will certainly not accept your language about God's providential control of history. They will have, of course, varying views about the way history is to be studied, about their presuppositions, about the question whether or not one can properly talk about "meaning" in history. But they will certainly not respond favorably to your talk about God acting in history. What, then, becomes of your claim that Christianity is a historical religion, depending on the facts of history?
It is not only the historians who will be sceptical. If you move across the senior common room to where the theologians are sitting, you are likely to meet the same scepticism. There was a period, especially during the years following the Second World War, when the "Biblical Theology" movement was in the ascendant, and when much was said about the distinctiveness of the Old Testament way of understanding history as the form of God's self-revelation through his mighty acts. And in that period a secular historian who was also a believing Christian, such as Herbert Butterfield of Cambridge, could speak of God's providence "as a living and active agency both in ourselves and in its movement over the length and breadth of history" (Christianity and History, p. 112). Fifteen years later James Barr was delivering his lecture "The Concepts of History and Revelation," which was a comprehensive demolition of this whole way of thinking. The era of the socalled "Biblical Theology" was brought to an abrupt end, and today talk about God acting in history can be dismissed by the Bishop of Durham with his talk about laser-beam theology. Whatever may be the debates among the theologians, it is clear that divine providence is not a category normally used by secular historians in their work. From Augustine until the eighteenth century, European historians worked with a prov idential understanding of history. The past two centuries have seen great debates among historians as to what the method of their craft ought to be, and these debates continue. We shall look briefly at them in a moment. From the point of view of a theologian there is one question, perhaps a very simplistic one, which seems unavoidable. If God does not act in history, what meaning can there be in saying that God acts at all? And if there is no category in which we can speak of God acting, what meaning can we attach to the word "God"? Many of our contemporaries would, of course, answer "Exactly! The word 'God' stands for nothing real at all." The presupposition of most historical scholarship since the Enlightenment has been that God is not a factor in history.
Certainly any proposal to speak of God acting in history has to face intellectual difficulties of several kinds. An examination of them will be the best approach to a positive statement.
1. The first set of difficulties arises from the dominance of what we loosely call the modern scientific worldview. The sciences, both natural and human, have been so successful in uncovering the cause-effect links which lie behind all happenings that there seems to be no crack or cranny through which divine action could enter and influence them. "All causes are adequate to the effects which they produce" and all happenings are the result of sufficient causes. The door seems to be firmly shut against any intervention from outside this closed system. And yet everyone is conscious of exercising the power of personal decision expressed in action. All arguments designed to show that free will is an illusion break down into absurdity. The question how our consciousness of having the power to make personal choices is related to the operation of the cause-effect links which are studied by neurologists, physiologists, sociologists, and economists, of how the mind is related to the brain, is a matter of continuing debate. But no outcome of the debate can be accepted which simply denies our daily experience. Like every human being I know the difference between taking action as a personal decision, and being the victim of a force to which I did not consent. Perhaps the relation between them may be indicated in two ways. First, there is the difference between what we may call the inside and the outside of an action. From the inside I know that I did this because I decided to do it. A neurologist will describe my action in terms of the functioning of electrical impulses in the nervous system; a physiologist in terms of the movement of muscles, and a sociologist in terms of the conditioning I have received through my place in the class-structure of the society in which I live. Neither type of description invalidates the other; both have a proper place in understanding the action.
Second, one may describe the difference in terms of future and past. From the inside, so to speak, I see an open future in which what is to happen is still undecided; the outsider, on the other hand, has no opportunity to see this; she can only see the completed event, which is no longer undecided and fixed. As a fixture in the structure of events he can describe the way it is related to previous events. Once the event has happened it can be brought into a deterministic pattern of natural law. If there were no point of view other than that of the outside postfactum observer, then it would seem absurd to say that something called a personal will could interrupt the operation of natural law, as absurd as to suggest that the will of God might be a factor in history.
But, continuing this picture, there can be two kinds of outsider. There can be the outsider who observes my action simply as an event in the world of things and happening to be accounted for in accordance with generally observable patterns of cause and effect. From the point of view of this observer I am merely a case for the medical or psychiatric textbook, a statistic for the sociologist or the economist. And their examination and classification of my action is a proper and necessary exercise. But there can also be the outsider who is a friend and shares, to some extent, my own insider view of the event. He knows me well enough to understand why I acted in that way. The action becomes one of the ways in which our mutual friendship grows, in which she comes to understand me better. Or perhaps at first she does not understand why I acted in that way. If she is a complete stranger, that will not bother her. She has no interest in understanding why I acted. But if she already has reason to think that I am a reasonable person, she will ask me why I so acted and I will try to explain. The word will be needed to illuminate the deed. In other cases it may be the other way around: some act of mine will show her that I really meant what I said. The deed will validate the word. Both will be reciprocally and necessarily involved in a developing friendship.
If this is a correct picture of a kind of experience which is normal in human life, it seems to invalidate the idea that it is irrational to speak of God acting in history. We do not require a special kind of "laser beam" to insure that the decisions we make of our own free will are faithfully executed by our bodies. We are aware of no contradiction in the fact that something purely spiritual (an intention) can change the course of events in the visible external world of happenings. Nor is it difficult to understand how there can be two different but perfectly valid ways of understanding events, one the "outsider" view and the other the view of the friend who can, at least in some measure, share the "insider" view of the agent and can find in the events further sources of understanding of his mind and purpose.
2. This line of reasoning seems to me to be valid as far as it goes, but of course it leads us to further difficulties. Everything that I do is an expression of my mind except insofar as I am compelled by outside forces to act against my will. If, by definition, God is not under compulsion by outside forces, it would seem that everything that happens in the world is an expression of God's mind. Plainly the Christian tradition affirms that some things which have happened express God's mind, but not all. God reveals himself in history, we would say, but not all history reveals God. How can these two things be affirmed? In part the answer lies in the subject of our next chapter, the logic of election. In part it lies in our belief about the relation of the world to God. In contrast to the monistic, pantheistic, and panentheistic thinking which is always present as an attractive option, we believe that in his creation of the world God gave it a measure of independence and to that extent limited his own freedom. Things therefore happen in history which are not in accordance with the will of God but represent a contradiction of his will. But in that case what becomes of providential history? What grounds are there for saying that in this event God was active and that something contrary to God's will was in action? How are we to understand history?
All writing of history involves selection among the vast mass of possible material. This selection has to be on the basis of what is significant from the point of view of the story which the historian has to tell. His data, of course, are not the happenings themselves, but the evidence for these happenings available in documents, archaeological finds, and oral traditions. These data are themselves the products of some decision about what was significant enough to be remembered or recorded. At every stage decisions have been made and are being made about what is significant. Historians debate endlessly the question of meaning in history, but it seems clear that no history could be written at all without some presuppositions about what is significant and therefore about the meaning of the story. From Augustine till the eighteenth century, history in Europe was written in the belief that divine providence was the key to understanding events. World history as well as local histories (such as Bede's History of the Anglo-Saxons) were written from this perspective. From the time of the Enlightenment onward, history in Europe was mainly the history of nations, because the nation state was the bearer of the meaning of history as post-Enlightenment Europe saw it. When a move was made toward a universal history, the most prestigious example was that of Hegel, but it is very clear that his universal history culminates in the Prussian state. Arnold Toynbee endeavored to break from this tradition by taking civilizations as the unit of study, but in the story of the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations it is not clear that there is a criterion (which must necessarily lie beyond the stories themselves) of what is significant in the story of a particular civilization. As Eric Vogelin has written of Toynbee's study: "The wheels of civilization carry a vehicle that is not itself a civilization towards its goal" (Eric Vogelin, "The Intent of Toynbee's History," cited by Peter Russell in Historians Study Group, July 1986). Histories have been written on the basis of the belief that God has acted in the rise of the British Empire, in the development of the Aryan race, in the opening up of a manifest destiny for the United States. It is impossible to write history without some vision of its meaning from which judgments of significance can be made. And if there is no meaning, why be a historian?
The Christian tradition affirms that God has made his mind and purpose known to some (not to all) people through events in historynot all events but some, the memory of which is treasured in the Christian tradition. This affirmation is a cause of scandal, what is sometimes called the scandal of particularity. Nowhere is it felt more acutely than in India with its incomparably rich and venerable history of religious experience and exploration. But there can be no rational human being who does not at some time feel the force of it. If God is God, the creator, sustainer, origin, and goal of all that exists, how can the knowledge of him be restricted to particular segments of the whole human race? If it is true that God reveals himself in history, how can it fail to be true that his presence is to be discerned in all history. On what rational grounds can one single out particular happenings from the whole seamless robe of history and say: Here God acted; here he revealed himself? These very natural questions involve two kinds of difficulty. There is the religious difficulty of believing in a God whose ways appear to be arbitrary and irrational; there is the philosophical difficulty of assigning meaning to the very idea of God acting in history if his actions are defined in this way. The former, religious difficulties will be the subject of the next chapter; here we must look at what I have called the philosophical difficulties.
3. I have used the experience of the personal will in its relation to the functioning of our physical organisms as a partial, though only partial, analogy for understanding the idea of God's action in history. Even if we take this limited analogy, we know that while all the words and behavior of a rational person convey something of that person's character, nevertheless not all her words and behavior are equally significant. If one is to enter into a deep understanding of his most enduring and overriding purposes and commitments, one will have to attend to particular words and actions which communicate these. One will not penetrate to an understanding of them merely by careful observation of her behavior over a period. And a person will not be able to communicate her purpose in such a way that I can really grasp it, until I am ready for the communication. She is always the same person, but not all her words and deeds communicate the secret of her deepest commitments.
One can accept this as a partial, only partial analogy for God's communication of his purposes. God is the same always and everywhere and to everyone. This is why it seems to be the case that wherever human beings are found there are always evidences of some kind of awareness of God, however faint and confused. It seems impossible to doubt that this is the case. But, from the point of view of a Christian believer, it would be necessary to say that this awareness, valid as it is and much to be respected as it ought to be, does not of itself communicate the full understanding of God's purpose for human beings. It is necessary also to attend to the particular events and words which communicate that purpose.
The analogy of the self-communication of the human person through the acts and words of his physical organism is, however, only a partial analogy. The created world has been given a degree of autonomy, of independence from God's will which is clearly other than the rapport which exists between the human mind and the body when the whole person is in proper health. Not only are there regularities of cause and effect within the natural world which appear to work autonomously, but-much more significant for our argument-human wills have an autonomy which enables them to act in rebellion against the purpose of their Creator. It follows, then, that no overview of the total human situation can provide authentic knowledge of the purpose of the Creator. If we may use the term "general revelation" for that awareness of God which seems to be part of human nature wherever it appears (even when it is suppressed), we have to add that this general revelation, valid as it is, cannot communicate the purpose of God for his creation. How could such communication take place?
Here we must refer to what was said in the previous chapter about the socially embodied character of every tradition of rationality. There is no way in which one could proceed from some sort of disembodied rationality to the answering of the question. We have no alternative but to begin with one specific community, and the tradition of rationality developed within that community. There can in principle be no a priori rational ground for saying that it must be one community rather than another, Japan rather than Israel, for example. But there is rational ground for saying that it must be a specific community, the community whose tradition of rationality has developed from those events in which it believes that God has so acted as to disclose his nature and effect his purpose. What I am calling "the logic of election," the rationality of this specificity, this particularity, will be spelled out in the next chapter. Here I simply affirm that the Christian tradition of rational discourse through which Christians seek to understand and cope with reality necessarily takes its rise (as every such tradition does) from a specific series of events in history. Within this tradition we remember, retell, and celebrate a story its which we believe that God was acting in a unique way to communicate and effect his purpose for the human race and the created world. Clearly we cannot justify this move by appealing to some tradition of rationality drawn from elsewhere. It must be justified, can only be justified at the end. Its acceptance is an act of faith which looks toward the end of history. But what one can do is to spell out what is involved in this move and so to clear away misunderstandings of it, and this-very briefly-is what we must try to do in the remainder of this chapter.
1. James Barr has attacked this "revelation in history" model on the ground that revelation implies the making known of something previously or otherwise unknown and that the biblical record itself shows that God is not unknown apart from this biblical story. How is it possible, he asks, to speak of the Torah as revealed when historians can show that it has large areas of overlap with other legal codes of the ancient world of West Asia? For the same reason he criticizes Karl Barth for making so sharp a dichotomy between religion and revelation and placing the Bible entirely on the revelation side of the line. There is, says Barr, much religion in the Old Testament, and of course he is right. The use in the early books of the Pentateuch of ancient names for God, such as El Shaddai and El Elyon, and the identification of these as names for the God whom Israel knows as Yahweh, shows clearly that there is a continuity between the story which the Bible tells and the religious life of the peoples of the ancient world. Every missionary who seeks to proclaim the gospel in a new language has to rely on this continuity. He has to use one of the words which that language already had for God and which the people who speak that language used before they ever heard of the Bible. Without using that word the missionary cannot begin to communicate. In other words, what I have called general revelation is, in some way, presupposed. But it does not follow from this that the biblical story can be properly told simply as part of the history of religions in what Europeans call the Middle East. If there is a real continuity, as there is, there is also a discontinuity. God has done a new thing, but that does not mean that God was previously absent from the scene. The new thing is radically new and gives a new revelation of who God is and what his purposes are. In that sense Paul can say to his Gentile friends, "Formerly you did not know God." The fact that they had already a word, several words, for God means that they knew something, even if it is only the sense that "There is somebody here" which leads to the erection of an altar to an unknown god. But even an unknown god is not nothing.
It follows also that those who have been given God's self-revelation in Torah and prophecy can recognize the evidence of God's presence in nations and traditions outside Israel. Barr uses as one part of his attack on the concept of revelation in history the evidence of the Old Testament wisdom literature. Certainly this has much in common with material from other parts of the ancient world, and certainly it is not cast in story form. Yet it contains the repeated reminder that "The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom," and Yahweh has made himself known to Israel in his mighty acts. It is in the light of this knowledge which is Yahweh's gift to Israel that Israel can learn from and appropriate the wisdom which has been developed among the nations on the basis of that which God gives freely to all.
2. A second line along which James Barr mounted his attack on the Biblical Theology movement was directed to the distinction between events and words. The Biblical Theology movement emphasized the event character of God's mighty acts. Barr points out that much of what we may call revelation in the Old Testament is in the form of words, not events. From another angle there has frequently been an attempt to drive a wedge between words and deeds by saying that the locus of revelation is not in the words of Scripture but in the events which Scripture records. The implication is that we are free, if we will, to go behind the biblical writers who were giving their own interpretation to the events and find out for ourselves "what really happened." The Bible, it is said, is not revelation but the record of revelation, a record shaped by the particular circumstances and interests of the various biblical writers. And plainly we have many examples in the Bible of differing interpretations of the same events. Obvious illustrations of this can be found in comparing the accounts of the life of Jesus in the four Gospels. Shall we say that it is the events which reveal God, or the words in which these events are told in the biblical writings?
I suggest again that there is no way in which we understand anything, whether we are talking about understanding the will of God or understanding physics or politics, except by being part of a continuing tradition of rational discourse. The work of historians is within such a tradition. The question "What really happened?" can only be answered within a tradition of rational discussion about what is "real." As I have already said, all understanding of history involves interpretation of the available "facts," and these "facts" are the written or oral records which are available because at some point they were judged to be significant in relation to some tradition of rational discourse. History is being rewritten in every new generation and in every culture, because all the available "facts of history" (that is, the available evidence) has to be understood in the light of a developing tradition of rational argument. If we ask "What really happened?" at the time of the events recorded in Exodus 14, we may say that there was a strong anticyclone over the Arabian peninsula, or we may say that God acted to deliver Israel from the Egyptian army. The answer to the question "What really happened?" depends on the tradition of rational discourse of which we are a part.
The biblical record as we have it comes from a community which (with wide diversities of interpretation at many points) understood history in terms of a purpose of God to bring salvation to the world through a particular people among all the peoples of the world. This understanding is expressed in the words through which the events have been made known to us. We have access to the knowledge of these events only through the words which embodied the understanding of those who witnessed them or participated in them, and which have been treasured and handed on by those who shared this understanding. As Christians we are part of that community and have the responsibility to seek to interpret contemporary history, the history which is now in the making, in terms of the same belief. But we are also part of another rational tradition, the one which controls our public educational system, which sees history in other terms. We do not have access to bare uninterpreted "facts" (if indeed such things exist), but we can undertake the exercise of relocating the events of the biblical story within this other tradition, so that they have their meaning through their place in this tradition. We inhabit both traditions, and there is an internal dialogue within each of us between the two. It is open to us to interpret the story which the Bible tells in terms of one or other version of the reigning public tradition-as one strand of the religious history of the Eastern Mediterranean, for example; or, in Marxist terms, as an early example of a proletarian revolutionary movement. In all cases we are interpreting th events. In no way do we have access to "what really happened" apart from any tradition of rational discourse, and there is no external criterion by which we can decide in advance which tradition is the one to be relied on. If I am committed to seeking to understand what happened from within this Christian tradition, that is a decision for which I am responsible. But this decision and commitment is delivered from mere subjectivity by being made-as Polanyi would say-with universal intent. In other words, I cannot treat it as simply a personal decision; I am bound to publish it, to commend it to others, and to seek to show in the practice of life today that it is the rational tradition which is capable of giving greater coherence and intelligibility to all experience than any other tradition.
3. But, third, these statements need to be further corrected. It is not just a matter of personal decision. There is a personal decision involved. I mn responsible for my beliefs. But this decision is a response to a prior decision, to the decision of God who has chosen me to be part of that community which bears the secret of the meaning of history through history. Once again, we have to talk about the doctrine of election, which is the theme of the next chapter. At this point, and to complete the preceding argument, let me suggest one way of seeing how the particularity of those acts of God which we celebrate in the Christian tradition is related to the continuity of God's revelation of himself through all history, including the history of which we are now a part.
According to the Fourth Gospel, when Jesus was preparing his disciples both for his departure from them and for their mission to the world, he expounded to them the relation between that which had been revealed in his earthly ministry among them and that which they would still have to learn in the course of their mission among the nations. The essential elements in this Johannine passage can be expressed in seven points.
1. There has been a decisive and complete revelation of God in the particular event of Jesus' earthly ministry. "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (14:9).
2. Nevertheless there is much that they have still to learn. The Spirit of the Father himself will be their teacher, interpreting to them his revelation of the Father (14:16). This promise is to the Church and riot for the world, for the world cannot receive the Spirit (14:17).
3. Nevertheless this gift is not for the private possession of the Church; the presence of the Spirit will constitute Christ's witness to the world (15:27).
4. This witness, however, will be in the form of a contradiction of the world's most fundamental beliefs (16:8-11). The work of the Spirit will thus continue through the witness of the Church that contradiction of the world's fundamental beliefs which was historically enacted in the cross.
5. To the Church, however, the work of the Spirit will be "to declare the things that are to come," to interpret coming events, to be the hermeneutic of the world's continuing history (16:13).
6. In doing so the Spirit will "glorify" Jesus. It will become clear through this teaching and guiding of the Spirit that the crucified Jesus is truly Lord of history (16:14).
7. The scope of this work of the Spirit is as wide as the universe itself, for "all that the Father has" belongs in truth to Jesus (16:15).
What is affirmed here is that a particular community in history, that community which bears the name of Jesus, will be given, through the active work of the Spirit of God, a true understanding of historythe ongoing history that continues through the centuries after Jesus, an understanding which is based on the particular events of whose memory they are the custodians. But this privileged position is not for their sake but for the sake of the world into which they are sent as the witnesses to Jesus in whom God's purpose for his entire creation has been disclosed. What I am affirming, in other words, is that, just as the experience of Israel is to be interpreted not merely as a chapter in the history of religions but as the self-revealing action of God, so the history of the Church is to be interpreted not merely as one among the varieties of religious experience but as the fruit of the promised work of the Spirit of God. Such a claim cannot, of course, be disproved by any compelling rational argument, but it may well be laughed out of court as a piece of absurd arrogance. Therefore, before proceeding to spell out more fully what this claim might mean, we must now look directly at the element in this picture which is most offensive to our natural minds, the element of privilege. We must look at the doctrine of election.