2006 November 28 » Theological Musings

Archive for November 28th, 2006

Election: Individual or Corporate?

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

logging buddy Brad over at Broken Messenger has been doing some defense of Reformed Theology. Brad is a great guy to have discussions with because he understands disagreement without having to label his dissenters as heretics. So, I feel safe at Brad’s blog!

Recently, a commenter named Todd Dombrow commented about the Reformed belief of election. For those of you who are not quite familiar with that term, Reformed Theology teaches, based on various Scriptural mentions of election and foreknowledge, etc., that before creation even began, God ordained everything that would happen, including the fall of mankind into sin, the sacrifice of Jesus as the atonement for that sin, and the salvation of a subset of human beings through God-provided faith in Jesus. The ones who are foreordained by God to believe are called “the elect”, and they are the only ones for whom Jesus died (the Reformed belief called “Limited Atonement”), and the only ones who can ever be saved.

The discussion (found here) started with a comment by another commenter, Dustin, about how the Reformed understanding of election and foreordaining assumes that God is operating within time, and therefore is faulty. (I’m paraphrasing heavily here, so I hope I don’t misrepresent anyone’s views.) And this is where Todd’s comment comes into play. Todd wrote:

So is God’s predestinating work contingent upon those who will believe? This was indeed what the remonstrants believed to be true which was a repudiation of Calvin’s theology and support of Arminius. If you said this faith came from God then I’d say Amen. But if you say that faith in Christ is that which God views as the determinating condition for His electing purposes then I’d say I’m not sure that the bible supports such a position. See Ephesians 1 in particular for a clear picture.

This caused me to do some more thinking about the concept of election. Ironically, Brad and I had already agreed to work through some passages (which I intend to do, using this post as an intro to the topic) which he claims are only taken “at face value” by Reformed Theology (which I shall abbreviate now as RT). One of the passages that Brad brought up was a portion of Ephesians 1, to which Todd refers in his comment that I quoted above.

I’ll interject at this point that I struggle with RT and its teaching. This probably comes as no surprise to most of my readers, but I want to be open and honest here. I’m engaging some of this from a dissenting position. It’s not that I think all of RT is wrong. I certainly applaud certain elements of RT, namely:

A desire to elevate God above all else and maintain a high view of His sovereignty.
An attempt to read Scripture at “face value”
A desire to attribute salvation completely to the work of God
Among other things, I’m sure, that slip my mind at the moment

I’m personally not sure that RT actually succeeds at these desires and attempts, but I do applaud the desires I see in what I read from RT writers. I will leave the discussion of the success or failure of these for later posts as I engage the Scriptures Brad has pointed out. I will say, however, that I think RT starts with Scripture, but then possibly goes too far in its conclusions and propositions (what I often refer to here on this blog as “derived doctrine”). They call it “biblical theology” because they think starting with the Scriptures guarantees a biblical conclusion. But I think that may be somewhat wishful thinking at times.

Anyway…back to the topic at hand. As I thought more about the election/predestination concept, I realized that it would be foolish to disregard the concept altogether. After all, it is a biblical term! For example, Ephesians 1:4-5 says that “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world…[and] He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself….” Sounds pretty clear, right? Todd called it a “clear picture”. And so, RT claims to read this passage at “face value”, taking the “plain” meaning.

However, I would like to put forth another possibility and see if anyone has any thoughts in reply. The RT understanding of election is, from what I can tell, an individualistic concept. In other words, God elected each and every person who will be saved. In my response to Todd, I wrote:

Is it possible that the election (and Paul’s mention of it) is a corporate election — i.e., God chose a people, just like He did when He chose Israel as a people. Israelites were part of the people of God by nature of being born into that family. And foreigners could choose to join that group, collectively known as “the people of God”, thereby becoming part of “the chosen” by their own choice.

Now, this was a rather off-the-cuff comment that I’d like to flesh out a bit here. To do so, let’s look at some more from Ephesians 1. Specifically, I’d like to look at a fuller portion of Ephesian 1:4: “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him….” When I read this, that phrase “holy and blameless” jumped out at me. It sounded familiar. Sure enough, I found what I was looking for in Ephesians 5. Specifically, Ephesians 5:25-27 where Paul talks about husbands loving their wives:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.

I’ve bolded the words at the end of that passage because I think it sheds some light on what Paul is talking about in chapter 1. It seems that Paul is talking about the body of Christ as a whole, not merely individual human beings. He refers to the bride of Christ as a corporate body in the singular. He doesn’t say “that He might present to Himself all of the members of the church in all their glory”, but rather “the church in all her glory”. And the use of the phrase “holy and blameless” in both chapters seems to me to show a correlation.

So, in chapter 1, when Paul says “us”, does he mean “each of us individually”? Or does he mean “us” as a corporate unity? I think that it’s quite possible that this has a bearing on how we interpret the meaning of “election” and “predestined”. In other words, I think that is possible to maintain the “election” of the body as a whole, while not extrapolating that, of necessity, to refer to each individual person.

In my comment to Todd, I referenced the nation of Israel. In Romans 11, Paul references the nation of Israel as God’s people “whom He foreknew” (verse 2). So we see a parallel in the fact that God “foreknew” Israel and also “foreknew” the Church. And to that end, I look at Israel as an illustration. In the Old Testament, God references “the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord” (Isaiah 56) and shows that they receive the same benefits as a natural-born Israelite.

Additionally, in Ezekiel 44:9, God says, “No foreigner uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh, of all the foreigners who are among the sons of Israel, shall enter My sanctuary.” I think it’s understandable from this that a foreigner who was circumcised (both in heart and flesh) was treated as part of the nation of Israel and allowed to enter the sanctuary.

To me, this parallel shows the balance between election of an entire body (as a corporate entity) and individual choice to join with that body and become part of it. But, I’ll close by quoting my closing comment to Todd and open it up for discussion here: