Take Your First Lessons on Election from Genesis
I’m doing a lot of pondering election while preaching through Genesis. I have a couple of thoughts.
I think the way CRC folks talk and think about election isn’t very Biblical. Genesis is one of the best books on election in the Bible because we know the most about the characters and God’s choosing is some of the clearest.
Consider the following:
God chooses Noah because he’s the most upright man in the world. God picks him and his family to save humanity from the flood. In the end, however, Noah hits the sauce, his son laughs and his descendants built a tower to look God in the eye. Fail.
God then chooses Abram. We have no idea why he chooses Abram but Abram is many things Noah was not. Abram is childless. Abram’s faith is uneven and spotty. Abram seems like a poor choice if God’s plan involves descendants and land and blessing others. Abram seems unqualified for all three which I think brings us to the point of election. In election God moves us towards what we need and where we need to be through the electing relationship. It is through the relationship between Yhwh and Abram that Abram gets tried and stretched and grown and changed. The relationship is the point of election as much as the tangible outcomes are.
God of course chooses Isaac, not Ishmael. By the time Isaac has grown sons, only two, Ishmael has been prolific enough to have an available daughter to marry for Esau who’s trying to get back into the family’s good graces. Ismael will be successful enough to have traveling descendants to sell Joseph into slavery, yet God’s choice was Isaac. Isaac had some success but was a man who lead with his appetites, appetite for taste and for touch. He didn’t listen well. He believed the stew and the goat’s skin rather than admitting the voice was that of Jacob. Again, Isaac seems like a poor choice.
Jacob of course is another stellar example. Esau by the time of Jacob’s return from Laban has 400 men. Isaac has women and children. Jacob is the guy who couldn’t take yes for an answer. When the guy who bargained and stole for birthright and blessing is promised far more than he could ask or imagine tries to cut a deal to keep himself in control.
Election is For History
The way I hear people talk about election it is too divorced from history. Genesis doesn’t do that. Election drives history. We talk about it as if it is some sort of divine lottery disconnected from events and choices. The book of Genesis sees it as seamlessly woven within history but not in some clumsy, ham-handed way. Election doesn’t seem to directly negate our choices, it illuminates them to reveal where they are coming from and where they lead.
CRC talk about election takes it out of history, but election is FOR history, not simply some outcomes beyond the age of decay.
In the way I hear people talk about election they make it sound unfair and mean-spirited, as if people are reaching for good things but God is shutting the door. Consider election within the words of Jesus “ask and you shall receive, knock the door will be opened to you.” Election is more the way in which God moves history forward by choosing those of us who seem most incorrigible in order to illuminate grace and glory.
Nowhere do we hear or see election undermining invitation. When Cain complains of Abel’s priority God extends him the same invitation.
Why We Resist Election
The place where election most rubs us the wrong way are the places where I take up the author’s pen and decide that history ought to chart its course along the outlines I imagine. What am I asking for in those moments of anger and frustration? I’m asking that the waves of the ocean be not powerful when I choose them to be benign, and that gravity exert its force episodically when I would rather it not apply to me.
God doesn’t let me dictate history beyond the power within the sphere’s that he’s already assigned to me for the same reason we don’t let toddlers operate heavy machinery.
Election as Story Maker
Election ought to bring the kind of hushed excitement and suspense that a story well told elicits. The moments when we see it make us gasp, bring us surprise and sometimes delight and sometimes fear. Election breaks us out of the machinery of karma and physics and opens up for us a universe where sinners are redeemed and the age of decay unwound.
Leadingchurch.com 
So election is about US choosing? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not being belligerent here. I like it! It makes sense! I have been recently wondering how in the world we have assigned divine election to some kind of divine lottery system when everything I see points to the reality on the ground: the means, the predispositions, the choice! Our choice and our choices.
Did Abram choose to have a relationship with Yhwh or did Yhwh choose to bless Abram? Yhwh’s choice to bless Abram was unconditional and free. Yhwh’s choice however invited Abram into a new reality. Yhwh choose Isaac not Ishmael. Yhwh choose Jacob not Esau. Those choices determined history and relationship.
As a Molinist, I get to have both divine election and robust, libertarian freedom. As Al Plantinga has pointed out, libertarian freedom is necessary in order to deal with the problem of evil. Without it, it is difficult to see how God isn’t responsible for evil. Like you, I look to Genesis, which IMO tells “The Best Story: Human Beings as Agents, made in God’s Image.”
; )
So divine election precedes human freedom. But does it determine it absolutely? I would say no way. But neither is human freedom of choice totally free: there are many influences, or one could even say determining factors. I know that is true in my experience: God chose me, but I am making choices every day. Is my story and relationship with God determined in a fatalistic way? No. I have choices to make in every aspect of my life. Is that choice totally free? No. It is conditioned in many ways by many factors, over all of which God is sovereign. But does that make me a robot? No, I am still an agent. Sounds like a contradiction. Molinism looks like a pretty good solution here. And since I have freedom to chose, I think I’ll chose being a Molinist!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molinism
One of the fun and useful things about Voices and a blog is the opportunity to see what people want to talk about. People want to talk about election even if preachers often avoid it (because preachers are skittish about conflict and controversy in their churches that they can’t manage.)
In the CRC (and other places) too often it always boils into “who’s in and who’s out” with the unhelpful side effect of cutting off the conversation with “God chooses so we should just shut up and sit on our hands” which seems rightly out of line with the whole nature of the having Christian divine revelation be so bound up in story. That’s why I think starting the election conversation with Abraham rather than an imagined pre-creational decree I think gets us off on a more helpful, more Biblical foot.
Perhaps a helpful question is “what is this conversation for?”
Most Calvinists I know have a lot invested in human agency. Despite the caricature I hear few Calvinists saying “oh just do what feels good because you don’t have any say in the matter.”
I’m not sure of the Molinist approach because it in some ways seems to beg the question of “why did God chose Abraham?” Because Abraham was in a favorable context to go to Canaan, barter his wife to Pharaoh for slaves and livestock but also to finally bind his son upon an altar?” It doesn’t highlight the difference between the election of Noah and the election of Abraham which to me is a fun and illuminating comparison.
Molinism becomes interesting if you consider the materalist approach that says the universe is a closed system. It almost seems to place God within the system. Abraham is predisposed by breading and context to choose better than Nahor or Fulano who sold goats in the next village. Does God choose Abram because he’s easy, or because Abram is hard. I assume many men in his country were successfully breading, why pick one married to his barren half-sister?
We really don’t know much about how God works and less about his motivation beyond his generosity.
A good forum for discussion indeed. And I guess one thing comes out here even though there are few voices here, is that there are so many ways to look at it. So many perspectives, so much diversity in opinions. It makes me think that we really don’t know and will never know. But we do have the freedom to explore, to propose, to imagine, to dream. So, let’s keep doing that but not hold too tightly to it all. There’s a lot more to be revealed! Hmm that comes from a song: “More to be Revealed” by Phil Keaggy, King, and Dente. Awesome song. Which brings to mind another song from the same album: “Something or Somewhere”. Here are my favorite lines: “I would like to say everything works just one way, but I’m sorry that I can’t. All the answers are not in my command, so I’ll fly with what I’ve got but I’ll step lightly where I land.”