CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 7
The Gospel and World History
THE GOSPEL, that Jesus preached is the good news of God's universal reign. It is directed to the whole human and cosmic reality. And yet it is also bound up with particular names of people and places belonging to particular cultures. It speaks of the story of Israel, one people among all the peoples, and of the man whose Hebrew name was Joshua, one man among all the billions who have lived. Its language and its fundamental symbols belong to the cultural world of the eastern Mediterranean, and therefore in the cultural worlds of Africa, India, or Japan they are foreign.
I have referred in passing to this scandal of particularity, and now we must face it squarely. To a devout Hindu, heir to four thousand years of profound religious and philosophical experience, there is something truly scandalous in the suggestion that, to put it crudely, he or she must import the necessities for salvation from abroad. "Is it really credible," the Hindu will ask. "that the Supreme Being whom I and my ancestors have loved and worshipped for forty centuries is incapable of meeting my soul's need, and that I must await the coming of an agent of another tradition from Europe or North America if I am to receive his salvation? What kind of a god are you asking me to believe in? Is he not simply the projection of your own culture-bound prejudices? Come! Let us be reasonable! Let us open our treasures and put them side by side, and we shall see that your symbols and mine are but the differing forms of one reality shaped according to our different histories and cultures. If God is truly God - God of all peoples and all the earth -- then surely God can and will save me where I am with the means he has provided for one in the long experience of my own people."
Who can deny the reasonableness of this plea? And one does not need to go to India to hear it. It can be put with equal force to the missionary who proposes to go, not to India, but into the factory or dockyard of his or her own city. "Don't imagine." the missionary will be told. "that you are going to take God into the factory. He is there already. He has been at work there long before you cane on the scene and lie will be there after you have gone. Your job is to learn what he is doing in the world which is already his, not to introduce him to a world from which he is absent.'"
The scandal of particularity is at the center of the question of missions. To he more precise. it is the problem of relating God's universality to his particular deeds and words. God is over all and in all; not a sparrow falls to the ground without his will. Yet the Bible talks of God acting and God speaking in particular times and places. How are these related'? With what propriety can we speak of particular acts of God if God is universal Lord of all'? How can we relate this universality to this particularity?
The attentive reader of the Bible will note how constantly these two themes are interwoven without any apparent sense of incompatibility. In Romans 10:12-13 Paul makes a statement of sweeping universality: "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. For, 'everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.' " But this leads him straight into the assertion of the need for the missionary to go and preach (Rom. 10:14-I5). In John 4:24, the text that has often been used to deny the need for "form or sign or ritual word" in religion. "God is Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth," follows immediately on the blunt statement that describes the Samaritan worship as ignorant and asserts that "salvation is from the Jews" (4:22). Universality and particularity do not contradict one another but require one another. How can this be so'?
I
The answer is to be found in the doctrine that permeates and controls the whole Bible - the doctrine of election. From the beginning of the Bible to its end we are presented with the story of a universal purpose carried out through a continuous series of particular choices. God, according to the biblical picture, although he is the creator, ruler, sustainer, and judge of all peoples, does not accomplish his purpose of blessing for all peoples by means of a revealer simultaneously and equally available to all. He chooses one to be the bearer of his blessing for the many. Abraham is chosen to be the proneer of faith and so to receive the blessing through which all nations will be blessed. Moses is chosen to be the agent of Israel's redemption; Israel is chosen to be a kingdom of priests for the whole earth. The disciples are chosen that they may be "fishers of men" (Mark 1:17) or, :n another metaphor, that they may "go and bear fruit" (John 15:16). The church is a body chosen "to declare the wonderful deeds" of God (I Pet. 2:9).
This is the pattern throughout the Bible. The key to the relation between the universal and the particular is God's way of election. The one (or the few) is chosen for the sake of the many; the particular is chosen for the sake of the universal.
To speak about the doctrine of election is to risk a curt dismissal. The history of Christian thought provides enough reasons to explain the disfavor in which the doctrine is held. And today we must add the fact that any suggestion of limited privilege touches the raw nerves of contemporary bourgeois guilt. "Elitism" is the unforgivable sin. Why, then, should we burden a discussion of mission with the doctrine of election? What is at stake'?
1. What is at stake is the full integrity of our nature as human beings. If that seems a surprising statement, look again at the initial protest. What lies behind the deep, emotionally charged protest of the person who asks. "Why must I look elsewhere for the source of my soul's salvation" Why cannot God deal with me as I am, as the person I am with the cultural and religious identity that I have?" At the heart of that protest is the conviction that my own identity and my own destiny are, in the last analysis, mine alone. It is no accident that this protest has been most clearly articulated in India. and the Indian experience has deeply influenced Western thought through many contacts over two and a half millennia. The two most influential philosophical schools in Hinduism have been the Samkhya and the Vedanta. According to the former, all reality exists in two forms - the physical and the spiritual. The latter consists of an infinite number of personal monads that have been enmeshed (for example. through a human body) in the physical world. Liberation, in this perspective, means the disentanglement of the soul from its involvement in the world of nature so that it may achieve its proper freedom as an independent monad. According to the Vedanta as developed in its most logical form by Shankara, the ultimate reality is identical with the true self, not the self that can be the object of thought, but the self that is the eternal subject, pure consciousness, pure spirit. Although there are thus very important differences between these two systems. they are at one in understanding the central being of the human person as a spiritual monad that does not require either other persons or a created world for the achievement of its true destiny. Salvation, or liberation, or realization concerns the soul as a pure monad. Human beings are ultimately spiritual, and the world of things and of other persons is marginal to their eternal destiny.
The biblical vision of human nature and destiny is very different. The human in the Bible exists only in relationship with other persons and only as part of the created world. In both the creation stories of Genesis these two points are insisted upon. Humanity exists only in the double form of man and woman. The image of God is present in this relatedness-in-love (Gen. 1:27). And it is immediately added that "God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it' " (1:28). Human life from its beginning is a life of shared relationship in the context of a task - a task that is continuous with God's creative work in the natural world. In contrast to those forms of spirituality that seek the "real" self by looking within, the Bible invites us to see the real human life as a life of shared relationships in a world of living creatures and created things, a life of mutual personal responsibility for the created world, its animal and vegetable life and its resources of soil and water and air. This, and no other, is the real human life, which is the object of God's primal blessing and of his saving purpose. Consequently, the vision with which the Bible closes is not the vision of a purely "spiritual" existence, but the vision of a city. The city is the symbol of humankind's supreme achievements in "subduing the earth," as it is also the scene of their most horrible perversions of that divine commission. The city of the Apocalypse is a gift of God, not a product of human wisdom. But it is a city, and the city is the place where the human calling to mutual relatedness and the human commission to subdue the earth have their sharpest focus.
In short, the Bible invites us to see the really human, but not by looking within and finding at the core of humar reality a purely spiritual entity that is the object of God's saving purpose. On the contrary, it invites us to see the really human as the life of mutual responsibility for the created world and therefore to see God's saving purpose in terms of this real world of real people.
And this is because God is no solitary monad. The unreal picture of human beings as isolated spiritual monads belongs to the same world of thought as the picture of God as an isolated spiritual monad. The reality is not so, God, as he is revealed to us in the gospel, is not a monad. Interpersonal relatedness belongs to the very being of God. Therefore there can be no salvation for human beings except in relatedness. No one can be made whole except by being restored to the wholeness of that being-in-relatedness for which God made us and the world and which is the image of that being-in-relatedness which is the being of God himself. A glimpse of this is given to us in the consecration prayer (John 17) where Jesus prays that those who believe may be made part of the very unity of the divine being, united by that which binds the Father and the Son, which is nothing other than the glory of God (20-23).
The biblical insistence that God's universal purpose of salvation is accomplished through the choosing of particular people arises from this fundamental insight concerning human nature. If each human being is to be ultimately understood as an independent spiritual monad, then salvation could only be through an action directed impartially to each and all. But if the truly human is the shared reality of mutual and collective responsibility that the Bible envisages, then salvation must be an action that binds us together and restores for us the true mutual relation to each other and the true shared relation to the world of nature. This means that the gift of salvation would be bound up with our openness to one another. It would not cone to each, direct from above, like a shaft of light through the roof. It would come from the neighbor in the action by which we open the door to invite the neighbor in. But the neighbor would have to be sent (Rom. 10:14). There would have to be one called and chosen to be hearer of the blessing. The blessing is intended for all. But the blessing itself would be negated if it were not given and received in a way that hinds each to the other. God's way of universal salvation, if it is to be addressed to human beings as they really are and not to the unreal abstraction of a detached "soul." must be accomplished by the way of election - of choosing, calling, and sending one to he the bearer of blessing for all. The biblical doctrine of election is fundamental to any doctrine of mission that is addressed to men and women as they really are in the fullness of their shared life in history and in nature.
In one of the glowing passages of the New Testament where the universality of God's purpose and the particularity of his calling are brought together in a single vision (Eph. 1:3-14) the writer speaks of the cosmic range of God's purpose but links it firmly to God's action in choosing and calling a particular people. The purpose that God has in view is nothing less than the uniting of the whole cosmos ("all things in earth and heaven") with Christ as their head (1:10). It is for this cosmic purpose that "he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world" (1:4). The choosing is "in Christ" and not otherwise. There is no election apart from Christ. as some theologies have seemed to suggest. Christ is himself the chosen one, the beloved who was acclaimed as such at his baptism, but was in truth the beloved Son of the Father from before the foundation of the world. It is through him and in him that those little companies of believers in Ephesus and the other Asian cities have been chosen, "destined in love" (1:5). "appointed to live for the praise of his glory" (1:12), and entrusted with the understanding of the "mystery" of God's purpose to "unite all things in Christ" (1:9-10). It is all the action of the Father, who has freely chosen them in his beloved Son and assured them of the completion of what he has begun by giving them the Spirit - "the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it" (I 1: 14)The whole action has its origin in the eternal being of the triune God before the creation, it has its goal in the final unity of the whole creation in Christ: and meanwhile the secret of this cosmic plan, the foretaste of its completion, has been entrusted to these little communities of marginal people scattered through the towns and cities of Asia Minor.
To any cultivated pagan who chanced to read this letter, the contrast between the vision of a vast cosmic purpose and the present reality of pitifully weak and insignificant community drawn (apparently) from the least influential elements in society must have seemed laughable. To many in later ages, especially when these little communities had grown into powerful institutions, it has seemed not merely laughable but scandalous and immoral. Can it really he believed that God, who is creator of heaven and earth, by whom and for whom all things exist, has concentrated his purpose of salvation on these minuscule communities in the little world of the eastern Mediterranean. leaving the millions in China and India and Africa, who at the same moment are living, praying. suffering, and dying, outside of the realm of salvation until they are "discovered," many centuries too late, by the explorers and missionaries of these chosen people? If this doctrine of the election of a chosen people appointed to be the bearers of salvation for all humankind seems intolerable to many sincere Christians in the twentieth century. has it not really been intolerable from the beginning?
2. I f we are to respond to this protest we must take account of the distortion and misunderstandings of the biblical teaching about election that have through the centuries given just ground for the protest. If these can be clearly identified, the way will be open for a restatement of the doctrine of election that will show the true relation between the universal and the particular in God's work of salvation.
(a) God. according to the Bible, purposes the salvation of all. "He desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (I Tim. 2:4). His primal covenant of blessing is for all, without conditions, and it includes the blessing of the earth for humankind's sake (Gen. 9:1-17). But when humans forfeit this blessing by their self-confident imperialism (Gen. 11:1-9), God chooses one of the families of humankind to be the bearer of the blessing on behalf of all (Gen. 12:1-3). This family is in no way superior to the rest of the human race. The ancient stories repeatedly emphasize that the conduct of the "pagan" is more noble and righteous than that of the elect. One could cite. for example, the contrasting conduct of Abraham and Pharaoh (Gen. 12:10-20), of Isaac and Abimelech (26:1-1 I), of Jacob and Esau (compare Gen. 27 with 33), and the story of Jonah already discussed. But the Old Testament repeatedly portrays the chosen people as falling into the illusion that they have a privileged position with God that insures them against disaster. Through the repeated hammer blows of defeat, destruction, and deportation, interpreted by the faithful prophets, Israel has to learn that election is not for comfort and security but for suffering and humiliation. As blow follows blow there is the repeated temptation to think that God has forgotten his covenant and abandoned his people. But again and again there is a prophetic call to recognize the hand of God, who will never cancel his covenant but whose unshakable purpose it is that Israel shall be the witness that manifests his sovereign glory to all the nations. Israel's election means that it is called to be servant and witness of the Lord for all the nations, not to be ruler of the nations. To be the elect is a fearful responsibility.
(b) There is a further and more subtle way in which election can be and was misunderstood. It is at the center of the struggle that Paul waged with those who insisted upon circumcision as a necessary condition for membership in the church. It is also at the heart of many of the perplexities that surround the discussion of the uniqueness and universality of the gospel today.
At the center of the story of the Bible is the fact of God's covenant with Israel. God not only chose and called Israel among all the nations, he also bound Israel to himself in a covenant of which the visible sign was circumcision. When the covenant was renewed after the deliverance from Egypt there was annexed to it ("added" is Paul's word in Gal. 3:19) the body of instruction that is usually referred to as "the law." But what is the relation between the law and the covenant? Is the law attached to the covenant in such a way that the former conditions the latter, that is to say, that the blessing promised in the covenant is conditional upon fulfillment of the law? This seems to be the natural way, and indeed the obvious way, to understand it. A covenant implies two parties. Both sides must keep it. Those whom God chooses to call into covenant relation with himself are certainly called to a fearful responsibility. There is no question here of a privilege that does not carry the corresponding responsibility. But surely we can argue that if the elect do keep the law and so fulfill their part in the covenant, then they do have a privilege that the pagan, outside of the covenant, does not have.
This seems obvious. It seemed obvious to the Jewish Christians with whom Paul was in controversy. If it is true that God has chosen Israel to be his covenant people, and if he has attached to the covenant laws that are binding on the covenant partners, and if I am an Israelite who keeps these laws, then surely I have a standing before God that the pagan, who is outside the covenant and does not keel) the law, cannot claim.
Paul armed himself with all the reason and passion of which he was capable in order to demolish this position. No one can claim rights against God. No one can claim privilege with God that is denied to others. There is no partiality with God. He will judge all alike, Jew and pagan, all by the same measure (Rom. 2). "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). The covenant is nota contract. It is an action of pure. free grace. In its initial form as given to Abraham it is simply a free promise of universal blessing that is to embrace all the nations (Gal. 3:8). It is not a contract that offers a conditional promise provided that the law is kept. The law is not part of the covenant (Gal. 3:15-18). What is it then? What is its place in God's dealing with Israel? Paul's answer to this deserves careful attention.
He characterizes the role of the law in a threefold way (Gal. 3:19-29): "It was added because of transgressions, till the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made: and it was ordained by angels through an intermediary."
(i) It was added "because of transgressions." This strange phrase becomes clear if we look at the whole argument and at the related argument of Romans 5:18-21. In fact all - Israel and the pagan world -- fall short of God's glory. Nowhere is there a kind of human living that simply reflects the glory of the Trinity. Law performs the function of bringing this fact to clear expression. It destroys any possibility of a claim against God. It destroys the possibility of construing the covenant as a contract. It closes every door for men and women except the one that God has opened - the way of free, sovereign, overflowing kindness. It "shuts up all under sin in order to have mercy on all" (Rom. 11:32).
(ii) The law was added "till the offspring should come." It is provisional, that is, it looks forward to that by which it will be superseded. namely. that relationship of sonship which is made possible by the coming of the Son. He alone can bring us directly into the life that the law cannot offer - a participation in the glory of the Trinity (Gal. 4:6; cf. John 1:14 and 17:22-23).
(iii) The law was "ordained by angels." To Jewish piety the tradition that angels participated in the revelation of the law in Sinai was a symbol of its transcendent greatness. For Paul it is an evidence of the fact that in the law we are not dealing directly with the being of God but with one of the subordinate agencies (the "powers" to which God allows a limited and delegated authority over human affairs: cf. I Cor. 2:5-8; Rom. 13:1-6; Col. 2:15). For those who have been liberated by Christ, to allow the law again to control them means to accept the slavery of "beings that by nature are no gods" (Gal. 4:8).
To summarize Paul's argument, then, the covenant is not to be turned into a contract. It is not then a bargain that will entitle a person to claim rights from God on the ground that he or she has fulfilled its conditions. The covenant is an act of the free grace of God: it is the unconditional promise of blessing to be received by faith.
(c) But is it, then, quite unconditional? Is it not conditional upon faith'? Here we open up a further stage of the argument. Every wellinstructed Christian will agree that no one claim rights against God on the ground of the "work of the law.'' But what about faith? Is not faith the indispensable condition? It is, says Paul, "those who are men of faith who are blessed with the faithful Abraham" (Gal. 3:9). Must we not say, then, that the blessings of the covenant are for those who have faith and that consequently those who do not have faith are excluded from the covenant? Are we not, therefore, back again with the idea of a privileged elite who can expect from God a blessing that the unbeliever cannot claim'? Has not the doctrine of election led us inexorably back again into this morally intolerable cul-de-sac'? And what are good Christians to think when they see the unbeliever, or the people of other faiths. showing evidence of the blessing of God as impressive as that to be seen in Christendom'?
The crucial instance of unbelief, as far as the New Testament literature is concerned, is the fact that the majority of the people of Israel have not believed in Jesus. The unbelief of his own kinsmen is the source of Paul's deepest perplexity and anguish (Rom. 9:1-3). They are God's chosen, God's covenant people, God's beloved (9:4). Yet even in his covenant faithfulness God always retained his freedom - the sovereign freedom of the creator over his own works (9:6-29). In fact, Israel has been guilty of trying to turn the covenant into a contract, of trying to establish it claim upon God based upon their own fulfillment of the law (9:30-10:17). And therefore God has hardened their hearts. It is not that he has rejected them (unthinkable thought!) but that he has hardened them (10:18-11:10). Does that mean that, being unbelievers, they will be destroyed? Perish the thought! No, the purpose is that through their rejection of the gospel it may reach the Gentiles, and so they in turn will receive it back from the Gentiles (11:11-16). But this means that the Gentiles must equally recognize that they have no claim against God. The unbelief of the Jews has created the possibility for Gentiles to be received by a miracle of pure grace ("contrary to nature") into the life of Israel. If they now begin to "boast over the branches" - that is, to imagine that their faith gives them a claim upon God that the unbelieving Jews do not have - then they too will be cut off from the life of the true Israel (11:17-24). Thus, though God's tactics may seem strange, his strategy is clear. It is to destroy every claim in order to leave the way clear for grace. It is to thwart every device for turning the covenant into a contract. It is "to consign all men to disobedience that he may have mercy upon all." Thus the unbelief of Israel does not mean their final rejection; it is part of God's wonderful strategy. The purpose is both that "the full number of the Gentiles I shall] come in" and that "all Israel should be saved" (1 1:25-32). This salvation can only he in mutual dependence and relatedness. As I said earlier, the corporate nature of the salvation that God purposes is a necessary part of the divine purpose of salvation according to the biblical view that no one could receive it as a direct revelation from above but only through the neighbor, only as part of an action in which one opens one's door and invites one's neighbor to come in. The reader might have objected that there was a flaw in the argument, for whereas "the nations" could only receive salvation through Israel, the elect nation, Israel itself. would apparently receive the gift directly "from above," and not from the neighbor. But in fact, says Paul, Israel will receive the gift of salvation only by opening its doors to the "heathen."
It is here in this argument of Romans 9-11 that the inner consistency of the biblical doctrine of election become most clear. There is no salvation except in a mutual relatedness that reflects that eternal relatedness-in-love which is the being of the triune God. Therefore salvation can only be the way of election: one must be chosen and called and sent with the word of salvation to the other. But therefore also the elect can receive the gift of salvation only through those who are not the elect. The purpose of God's action for salvation in Christ is nothing other than the completing of his purpose of creation in Christ. It has in view not "the soul" conceived as independent monad detached from other souls and from the created world, but the human person knit together with other persons in a shared participation in and responsibility for God's created world.
To summarize what has been said so far in this chapter, we have found in the biblical teaching about election the clue to the problem of the relation between the cosmic universality of the kingdom of God which we proclaim and the particularity of the history with which we are concerned: Israel among all the nations, Jesus among all the religious leaders of world history, Christianity among all the religions. But we have seen that the doctrine of election has to be guarded against perversion in three ways - ways that represent three degrees of subtlety.
(i) At the simplest level we have to guard against the perversion that regards election as the conferring of a privileged status. This is the perversion against which the prophets of Israel constantly had to fight, and we have to fight it in the Christian church.
(ii) At a more subtle level there is the perversion that turns the covenant into a contract, so that those who keep the law are entitled to claim the blessing promised in the covenant. This was the issue in the conflict between Paul and the Judaizers.
(iii) At a still more subtle level is the perversion that, starting from the true statement that God's promise is to be received by faith, converts faith into a ground upon which we can make claims upon God's blessing over against the unbelievers. This is the issue in Paul's argument of Romans 9-11, where he has to warn the believing Gentiles that they must not boast over the unbelieving Jews, for God's purpose is to save both the Gentiles and "all Israel." Even the unbelief of the Jews is taken up into God's strategy of grace. Among the Jews there is a believing minority "chosen by grace" (11:5). and the unbelief of the majority is the means God uses not for their destruction, but for their ultimate salvation through the witness of the believing Gentiles (11:11-12).
11
At this point in the argument two questions press for an answer, and we must deal with them before going further. Briefly stated they are as follows:
1. The exposition given so far of the doctrine of election may seem to lead straight to universalism, that is, to the doctrine that there can be no possibility of final exclusion from God's salvation.
2. The exposition has taken for granted the biblical picture of world history as centered in a series of "acts of God," among which his act of choosing, calling, and sending a people to be the bearers of his universal purpose of blessing has the central place. How can such a view of world history be sustained in the face of the picture of the history of the world produced by the work of modern historical science?
I would answer as follows.
1. There can be no doubt that just as the perspective of the Bible is the whole history of humanity and of the cosmos, so also it is full of what one may call universalist overtones. The primal covenant with Noah is an unconditional promise of blessing for the whole human race. The covenant with Abraham looks to the blessing of all the nations. In the New Testament Paul. as we have seen, thinks of "all Israel" and "the fullness of the Gentiles" being gathered into Christ's salvation. In one of the passages where he draws a parallel between Adam and Christ he writes. "As one man's trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man's acts of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men" (Rom. 5:18). The salvation we share in Christ seems to be as universal as the sin we share in Adam. The Fourth Gospel speaks of Jesus drawing "all men" to himself (John 12:32) and of his taking away the sin of the world (John 1:29).
On the other hand, there are equally clear and much more numerous passages, especially in the New Testament, that speak of a coming judgment and of the possibility of being rejected. Nothing could exceed the gravity and solemnity of the warnings about this that are given in the teachings of Jesus and Paul. All the strands of tradition that are woven together in the New Testament bear witness to this. We would part company with the New Testament altogether if we ignored it.
I believe it is essential to hold firmly together both the universalist perspective of the Bible and the clear teaching about judgment and the possibility of rejection. Let me try to spell out in detail what I believe this involves.
(a) We must reject the kind of rationalistic universalism that argues from the omnipotence of God's love to the necessary ultimate salvation of every soul. The very easiness of this syllogism ought to warn us against it. It does not give serious attention to the freedom and responsibility that God has given to the human person. It moves in a different world of thought from that of the Bible.
(b) We must refuse to engage in speculation about the ultimate salvation of other people. In the many references to final judgment in the teaching of Jesus, the most characteristic feature is the emphasis on the element of surprise. Normal expectations will be proved completely wrong. Those who were sure of their acceptance will find themselves rejected. The last will be first and the first, last. The righteous will be shocked by the generosity of the Lord to other people (Matt. 20:1-6) and by his severity to themselves (Matt. 7:21-23). Therefore we are warned not to take upon ourselves the judgment that is God's sole prerogative (Matt. 7:1-5). It is in line with this that when the disciples ask, "Lord, will those who were saved be few?" Jesus swiftly replies with a direct warning to the questioners: "Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able" (Luke 13:23-30). The question of eternal salvation and judgment is not a basis for speculation about the fate of other people; it is an infinitely serious practical question addressed to me.
(c) A study of the very large number of references in the teaching of Jesus to the possibility of rejection at the final judgment shows that the prime target of this warning is precisely the people who are sure of their own salvation. It is directed not to the outsider but to the insider. It is those who say "Lord, Lord" who will find themselves rejected. It is the "sons of the kingdom" who will be cast out. It is the branches of the vine that will he cut off and burned if they do not bear fruit. As always in the Bible, it is the elect who come under severe judgment. The one who is appointed steward is tempted to think he is master and so falls under judgment. Here we touch again the point that was discussed earlier: that God's saving purpose works by way of election means that those who are chosen and called fall into the temptation of imagining that they have a claim on God that others do not. God must destroy this claim, for otherwise the sovereignty of grace will be undone. So the warnings of judgment are addressed primarily to the elect.
(d) At the risk of wearisome reiteration I must insist that the whole issue is misunderstood if it is argued in terms of the mathematical completeness of the number of the saved, conceiving them as an uncountable number of individual souls. The universalism of the Bible will not be understood if we are thinking in terms of a multitude of spiritual monads and asking about the destiny of each one conceived as a separate individual. The universalism of the Bible consists in this: it shows us that God's saving purpose is addressed to the whole of his work in creation and to the human person, who has his real being only in his participation in this whole work. Salvation is a making whole and therefore it concerns the whole. This means. in terms of my own spiritual life: (1) 1 am never permitted to think of my own salvation apart from that of God's whole family and God's whole world; (2) at no point - not even at the point of death - am I permitted to turn my back upon my neighbors, upon that bit of the world's life in which I have shared. which I have tried to serve, and without which I would not be a human being at all; (3) the end to which I look, for which I long, and in which I will rejoice, is not that I am saved but that my Lord shall "see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied."
(e) But the biblical universalism is wholly compatible, and in fact requires. the acknowledgment that there remains the fearful possibility of missing the mark, of falling short, of being rejected. There is a narrow path to be walked between two errors. On the one hand, the recognition of the possibility of rejection may lead into a self-centered anxiety and a drive to secure one's own personal destiny by a flurry of activity and piety. On the other hand, the assurance of God's grace may lead to a false sense of security, to that "hardening" of which Paul accuses the Jews. How does one find the true balance between a godly confidence in God's grace and a godly fear of God's judgment? The whole secret of the Christian life lies here, and Paul gives us a trustworthy clue to it in those passages where he likens the discipline of his life in Christ to the discipline of an athlete. Of his own ministry he says, "I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should he disqualified" (I Cor. 9:27). And in the wonderful passage (Phil. 3) where he is thinking about his own life, its past, present, and future, he sees himself as an athlete in a race. He has not yet won the prize. It is before him. He presses on with both eagerness and confidence because Christ has already claimed him.
This is as far as possible from speculation about the question "Are there few that will be saved?", from the kind of discussions about the possibilities of salvation for non-Christians, from the arguments about universalism that are common in some missionary discussions. The Bible is universalist in the sense that it is realistic about what human life really is - not the coexistence of a multitude of independent spiritual monads, but a participation with other human beings in a world that God has made, is making, and will make new. God's salvation is directed to these real human beings in this real world. But this universalism also takes absolutely seriously the freedom and responsibility that God has given to every human being, and therefore it acknowledges the necessity of judgment and the possibility of rejection. The Christian life is lived in the life-giving tension between a godly fear and a godly confidence.
2. We must now look at a second difficulty that besets us in taking the doctrine of election as the clue to the understanding of the role of mission in world history. We have taken the Bible as our guide, and the Bible is essentially narrative in form. Its form is that of a universal history. It contains, indeed. much else: prayer, poetry, legislation, ethical teaching, and so on. But essentially it is a story. In our discussion hitherto we have relied uncritically on this story. We have talked about acts of God in choosing, calling, delivering, and sending his representatives to be the bearers of his saving purpose. By what right do we talk in this way, and how does this talk relate to the history of the world (and of the eastern Mediterranean area) that we read in the writings of secular historians?
(a) The world is, of course, full of stories. Many of them are told over and over again. They appear in different forms in different cultures. They are treasured. retold, and sometimes embroidered with additional detail, because they "say" something that is true of human life always and everywhere. In many cultures, not only in that of Israel, the basic understanding of a people about "how things are" is embodied in stories stories about the creation of the world, about the first human beings, stories of death and the afterlife, stories of the struggle between good and bad in human life.
What place should these stories have in our total understanding of how things are? One very influential way of looking at them is to see them as varied illustrations of truths that are eternal and universal. Their truth does not lie in their "happenedness," in their accuracy as a record of anything that really happened. Their truth is independent of this; it is to be found in that which they point to and illustrate and which can be verified now and always in experience. The important thing is that "this is how things are" and not that "this is what actually happened."
The philosophy of the Greco-Roman world that has so much shaped our modern Western culture has predisposed us to look at these stories in this way. The truth about how things are is to be expressed in timeless statements. When we read that God is "infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passion, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute" we recognize that we are in a world different from that of the Bible. I The Bible remains in the world of stories. Its God. in the famous words of Blaise Pascal, is not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. The Bible does not tell stories that illustrate something true apart from the story. The Bible tells a story that is the story, the story of which our human life is a part. It is not that stories are part of human life, but that human life is part of a story. It is not that there are stories that illustrate "how things are", it is that we do not begin to understand how things are unless we understand how they were and how they will be. Our so-called eternal truths are the attempts we make at particular moments in the story to grasp and state how things are in terms of our experience at that point. They are all provisional and relative to time and place, as we recognize when as twentieth-century people we read the seventeenth-century language of the Westminster Confession. The reality with which we have to deal is the story - the story that begins before the creation of the world, ends beyond the end of the world, and leads through the narrow road that is marked by the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses, Anios, Paul. and, name above every name, Jesus.
(b) But this claim that we have in the Bible not just "stories" but "the story" brings us face to face with the questions raised by modern scientific historiography. There are other ways of telling the story of the world, and they do not find these names from one of the minor ethnic communities of the Near East in any way decisive for the history of the world. How is this biblical story related to "world history" as it is understood in a modern school or university? There is a large literature on this question, wh;,.y is perhaps the most important issue in the dialogue between the gospel and the contemporary culture of the Western world. (If this book were being written in a different cultural context, one could best discuss this question in the section on the gospel and the culture of humankind, for the "modern scientific historiography" of which we speak is a product of a particular culture and is by no means to be seen as something universal. Writing in the present context, however, the questions must be faced at this point.)
Modern scientific historiography involves asking such questions as the following about all the stories that are told: What is the source of the story? Does it come iiom eyewitnesses or at secondhand? What evidence is there about the credibility of those who saw, reported, or retold the story? What was their purpose in telling the story? To whom were they telling it'? What interests and influences would be likely to shape their telling? What collateral information do we have from other sources that bears on these events? For the asking of these and similar questions historians are continually sharpening their tools and accumulating and organizing more information bearing on the story.
But all these tools are handled and this information is arranged by human beings, whose work is also shaped by the interests and influences of their time and place and culture. The directions in which they decide to probe, the questions they ask, the weight they give to different witnesses and different types of evidence, the analogies by means of which they try to understand the events and characters reported, the models by means of which they organize their material - all are shaped by the culture of which they are a part, by the experiences, hopes, and fears of that part of the whole fabric of human society in which they have their place. It is obviously as true of the work of the historian as it is of every kind of study that we can only understand anything by relating it to the experience we already have. The language we use, the models and analogies without which we cannot make sense of a mass of information, are all furnished by the experiences of our time and place. History has to be continually rewritten because, in the words of E. H. Carr, history is a continuing conversation between the present and the past.
(c) The data of the historian are records of happenings that were recorded because they were significant for someone. The historian in turn selects a tiny fragment of all this material on the basis of what is significant to him or her. But how does one decide what is significant? If one is writing the history of a relatively small institution, such as a school or college, the problem may not be very difficult. The volume of recorded happenings is small. Everything that has been significant in the life of the college can be told within one volume. But how does one decide what is significant? One decides only on the basis of a view, implied or explicit, about what has been significant in the life of the nation of which the college is a part. And to ask this question in the life of the whole human society. What events are significant for human history as a whole? One cannot answer that question without some idea, if only a provisional one, about the shape of the human story as a whole. And our ideas about this are shaped by our cultures. A "history of the world" written in Oxford will be very different from one written in Warsaw, in Peking, or in Madras. The same recorded facts are equally available to all, but the selection, organization, and interpretation will be different because the whole human situation is understood differently.
People cannot tell a story well unless they have seen the meaning of it, unless they have "seen the point." Normally the point is clear only at the end. Our difficulty is that we are still in the middle of the story: we can investigate the past, but the future is hidden and we do not know the end. Our different ways of expressing our different pictures of the story are our ways of expressing our different beliefs about its end. We could amend E. H. Carr's sentence to read: History is a continuing conversation between the present and the past about the picture.
Since the future is hidden from us, how can there be a universal history -- a picture of the whole story that is equally valid in Oxford, Warsaw, Peking, or Madras? How can the real significance of any event anywhere be understood in a way that is valid for all? It can happen only if the point of the story has been revealed even before the story has come to its end.
(d) I have deliberately used the word "revealed" because at this point we cannot avoid the concept of revelation. Such concepts as "research," "study," and "observation" are irrelevant at this point. No amount of research will enable us to see the point of a story before the story is finished. The inductive method, which begins by examining all the data, is here futile. A very simple metaphor will illustrate the point. If you come across a building site where work is going on, and if you wish to know what is being built and for what purpose, it will not be possible to satisfy your curiosity by measuring the holes in the ground and examining the building material that is being assembled. You cannot know what is going on, much less make intelligent proposals for action, unless you have been told whether it is to be a private house, or an office, or a factory. The architect must tell you; the end product is still in his or her mind and on the drawing board. You can learn the architect's plans only by receiving what he or she has to tell. At this point the concept of revelation is not an alien intrusion into the process of responsible human knowing. There is no other possibility.
Within the Christian tradition the Bible is received as the testimony to those events in which God has disclosed ("revealed") the shape of the story as a whole, because in Jesus the beginning and the end of the story, the alpha and the omega, are revealed, made known, disclosed. On the basis of this disclosure, therefore, it is possible to have a universal history, a way of understanding the whole story that is not determined by a starting point in the particular culture, time, and place where each of us stands. (I realize this statement immediately raises a whole range of new questions, for the Bible itself has its context in one particular culture situation, and the Christian who confesses Christ as the meaning of history does so in a way that is conditioned by his culture. These questions will he dealt with in Chapter 9.) In fact, the idea of a universal history has come into our culture from the Bible. The great religions of Asia have not been interested in the construction of a universal history. All the religions that have their origin in the Indian subcontinent have seen the human story in terms of recurring cycles. The movement of time is interpreted on the basis of our experience of nature, which is the experience of continually repeated birth, growth, decay, death. and new birth. In Hindu thought the whole cosmos is involved in this cyclical movement. Each age (kalpa) of many millions of years comes to an end and is replaced by another. The story can never come to a point. There is no poim: in a circle, and so there is no story to tell. There are only stories.
(e) It appears to be only in those parts of the world where the faith of Israel has been at work that the idea of universal history has been present. In Europe since the time of the birth of the church the biblical picture of history has coexisted with and has often been overshadowed by the classical picture, with its recurring cycles. Biblical language was bent into a cyclical shape, so that humankind's future was seen as a return to a past innocence - "Paradise Regained." But insofar as the European mind conceived of history as a meaningful story, the meaning was drawn from the Bible. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment this biblical framework was gradually replaced by one that, continuing the biblical idea of an ongoing purpose and a real end of the human story, replaced God by humans as the bearers of the meaning of history. The "Idea of Progress" was born. History was seen as the story of the progressive development of human knowledge and skill and the progressive achievement of human mastery over nature and emancipation from bondage to ancient tradition and custom. The people of the Enlightenment, modern Western Europeans living in the Age of Reason, were the leaders of human progress. The meaning of the story as a whole was to be found in the progressive victory of human science and skill, informed and guided by reason, over all the ancient traditions and dogmas by which humans had been, and still were. fettered.
It is obvious that if universal history is understood from this point of view, the story the Bible tells has to be reinterpreted. It becomes part of that sector of human affairs which is called "religion." Insofar as "religion" is still recognized as a significant human activity (albeit one that belongs to the private rather than the public sector), the stories about Abraham, Moses, and Jesus will have an important place in the "religious instruction" period of a school curriculum. But in the class period devoted to world history they will have a much less important place than, for example, the development of Greek science and philosophy, Roman law and political organization, or modern technology. Inevitably also, as has been taking place ever since the eighteenth century, the Bible narrative itself will be reinterpreted. The models and analogies proved by the modern scientific worldview will be used to reinterpret the historical evidence available in the Bible and other ancient records. The Christ of faith - Jesus as he has been interpreted and understood within the tradition that has accepted the Bible story as the "real" story of humankind- will be set aside, and the search will be made for Jesus of history - Jesus as he can be interpreted and understood within the axioms and models furnished by the post-Enlightenment understanding of the human story.
(f) We are now in a position to attempt a direct answer to the question about the relation of the biblical "story" of God's dealing with humankind by the way of election to the story of humankind as it is told in a modern history of the world.
The biblical story is not a separate story. It is not a special history ("salvation history") apart from human history as a whole. The whole story of humankind is one single fabric of interconnected events, and the story the Bible tells is part of it. The study of the Old Testament runs out into and draws upon the work of archaeologists and historians working on the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt. The study of the New Testament cannot be done in isolation from the work of secular historians of first-century religion, politics, and culture in the eastern Roman Empire and from such discoveries as have been made through the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. No fence can be erected around the biblical story; it is part of the human story ("The Word was made flesh" ). Therefore it is and must be open to all the critical probing of the historian. The scholar must be and is free to test every part of the ground and to use all the skills that the modern study of history has developed. If, in the supposed interest of faith, we try to keep the critic out, we are in effect denying the historicity of the story and turning the gospel into a myth. The historical scholar must come in with all the tools of the trade.
The debate begins when we ask not about these tools, but about the underlying presuppositions, axioms, models, analogies, and paradigms. Naturally he or she will bring these along too. It cannot be otherwise. As I have said before, none of us can begin to understand anything except by relating it to what we already know, and therefore to the models by which we have hitherto organized our experience. The devout Hindu comes to the biblical story and does not find it difficult to interpret Jesus in terms of the concept of a jeevanrnuktu. The Hindu's "life of Jesus" will be constructed by organizing the material around this concept. A Marxist who studies the Gospels will form a picture of Jesus on the basis of his or her fundamental understanding of the forces that shape human life. The Western academic whose basic axioms and models have been shaped by the developments of European thought in the past two hundred years will likewise interpret Jesus in terms of those models. This, he or she will be convinced, is the "real" Jesus of history, as contrasted with the Jesus of traditional Christian dogma.
The Christian believer looks at the same data, but he or she brings to the interpretation of them the presupposition that the point of the whole human story has been revealed here: that in Jesus the whole meaning of the story is disclosed; that everything else, including all the axioms and presuppositions and models developed in all the cultures of humanity, are relativized by and must be judged in the light of this presupposition. And the presupposition is the one that has shaped and been borne by the believing community that is the church, from the first disciples to this day. This is expressed in great credal affirmations that the church has used through the centuries. It is from within this presupposition that the Christian seeks to understand the biblical story. The biblical story is not a separate story: it is part of the unbroken fabric of world history. The Christian faith is that this is the place in the whole fabric where its pattern has been disclosed, even though the weaving is not yet finished. Christian faith is thus a way of understanding world history that challenges and relativizes all other models by which the meaning of history is interpreted.
(g) As soon as these words are written a host of questions arise. Every Christian is both a member of the universal church and also a participant in a particular culture. There is not one Christian interpretation of Jesus: there are many different ones, shaped by different cultures. The church itself is a changing reality, and its confession of the faith has changed and must continue to change. Within the New Testament itself there is not one single "model" for interpreting Jesus. All these things are true, and we must consider their bearings on our main theme in a later chapter (Chapter 9). Here I must try only to summarize what has been said up to this point about the relation between the biblical story with its center in the history of God's election and the story of humankind as it is told by the secular historian.
(i) The Christian's confession is the confession of a faith regarding the meaning and end of the human story as a whole. This confession compels one to challenge every understanding of the human story that looks to an end other than that which is disclosed in Jesus.
(ii) Believing that the biblical story is part of the whole history of which life is a part, the Christians refuse to allow the biblical story to be excluded from the critical questions that are properly put to all historical records. It is essential for them to know "what really happened." But they will also be ready to explore and question the hidden presuppositions that underlie every exercise in historical inquiry.
(iii) The presuppositions with which Christians come to the biblical story are those that have shaped the community of believers from the first disciple onward. Christians draw these presuppositions from that sharing in the life, worship. and obedience of the community. It is of the essence of this community that in it people of many different cultures, times, and human situations are, in spite of their differences, united in the confession of Jesus as alpha and omega.
(iv) Since the Christian faith is a faith regarding the meaning and end of the human story as a whole, this faith cannot be confessed except in the context of the actual secular history of the present hour. To he specific, this must mean a provisional interpretation of the meaning of contemporary secular events (discerning the signs of the times) and concrete action in the various sectors of secular life directed toward the true end for which God has created humanity and the world (Christian obedience in the common life). In other words, the question of the relation of the biblical story to the whole story of humankind is a question that has to be answered in action. The Christian confession about the meaning and end of history can make good its claim to truth over against other interpretations of human history only through actions in which this confession is embodied in deed - and in suffering. If the Christian confession is true, the Acts of God do not cease with the Acts of Apostles.
We have now, therefore, to go on to ask: What are the actions by which the believing community will fulfill God's purpose for it as the community chosen, called, and sent with a view to the salvation of the world?