This post is in that series of posts I recently said I would be writing in response to Roger Olson’s article at Christianity Today, the one where he sketches, a bit, our kind of Evangelical Calvinism. In 
this post I want to address a question that not just Olson, but others have been pressing as well. It is this question, here is how Roger Olson asks it:
How, they ask, can one affirm the universality of electing grace and deny free will with regard to being elected, while also affirming free will to reject the truth of one’s election?
That is a good question!
We, as the type of Evangelical Calvinists that we are, at least Myk and I, following Thomas Torrance, would want to emphasize what the New Testament does, what the self revelation of God in Christ does; the life of Christ. We usually assert that a person who has been objectively elected in Christ (‘carnally’) will also be spiritually united, as in the particular and concretizing humanity of Christ. That God’s Yes and No have been realized in Christ’s vicarious humanity of Christ, and thus salvation is both objectified and subjectified in Christ’s for us. But this leaves a nagging question, the question that Olson and others are asking. If we have such a strong sense of the objective and absolute work of God in Christ in salvation, then what of those who ultimately reject what is theirs in Christ? Our thinking would suggest that all humanity (because of Christ’s archetypal humanity as supreme over all of creation, Col. 1.15ff) is elect, and that their (our) reprobation has been taken care of by Christ becoming sin for us (II Cor. 5.21)—the so called ‘wonderful exchange’.
Here is what Myk and I offer in one of our theses from our book on election (this little snippet, there is more written in this thesis than what I offer here, but this bit are my words):
[T]hus election is grounded in a personal union with Christ through his “carnal union” with humanity in the Incarnation, and our “spiritual union” with him through his vicarious faith for us by the Holy Spirit. Christ, in this framework, is known to be the one who elects our humanity for himself; by so doing he takes our reprobation, wherein the “Great Exchange” inheres: “by his poverty we are made rich.” [Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism, 433.]
But Olson wants to know, if this is true, how it is that there are still people—and this is empirically observable—that subjectively, in themselves, reject their election from Christ. From whence is this capacity latent within them (or is it)?
Karl Barth would see the capacity within people as something that has been provided through the liberating humanity of Christ. That a person is now free. But for Barth, human freedom, grounded in Christ as it is (as it is for Torrance, and me, and I think the Apostle Paul, and Jesus in his dominical teaching), is freedom for God (not for the self). So the drag is still present, even for Barth’s opining; can someone reject their election, if in fact it is a Christ conditioned election, an election of Christ’s humanity for us, an objective thing that shapes God’s life to not be God without us in an through the elected humanity of Christ? We have freedom, but it is for God; how does this allow space for an existence, ultimately, that can be a no-God experience?
I usually respond (along with Myk Habets and Thomas Torrance), that given the conditions that have been shaped by the reality of a Christ conditioned election that it would seem that all people would respond in Christ’s Yes; that they too would say yes to God and no to themselves through the no of God’s contradiction of themselves in the elected reprobate humanity of Christ for us (II Cor. 5.21; Rom. 8.3). And so, ironically, using a ‘mathism’ we respond by saying that this is a surd, that there is really no conceptual space for them to say NO to their election in Christ; but they do, so there is no explanation other than to relegate this surdness to the abyss and inscrutable mystery of evil that is yet pervasive in and through creation (which longs to released from its futility).
Roger Olson thinks this represents an inconsistency in our method, that there is a requisite madness to our approach; that there is an absence of analytic and modal heft. But we are dialecticians, which means that we have room in our method to be dialectic. That we can speak of things which appear to be mutually implicating of each other, but in reality are not necessarily. We can speak of things that APPEAR to be mutually implicating, but recognize that they are actually mutually exclusive; that they are on different planes, even if they appear to be on the same one. We walk by faith, not sight; not irrationalism, but realism that finds its reality in the dynamic of God’s life in Christ. We could posit a double-election of sorts, that within the universal election of all of humanity, that there is an elect-elect. But I don’t know that I am totally comfortable with this; this reduces down to a classic double predestination, I think; and thus not an actual election of all humanity in Christ.
Does this really answer the question the way Olson wants it answered? No. Does it even satisfy my questions about this? No. But it seems like what we have left to us, revealed to us (Deut. 29.29). That said, I want more than this too! I plan on doing research on this (on the works of the Holy Spirit) for our next EC book (yes we have another one planned … one that will deal with questions of “so what?!).
I would still maintain that Roger Olson is wrong in holding that us EC’rs our inconsistent. We are only inconsistent if we follow Olson’s prolegomena, his theological method and resource. But if we don’t, and we don’t, and our approach leaves room for the kind of maneuvering that we do, then we are not inconsistent (self-referentially) vis-á-vis our prior theological methodological commitments.
Yes. This is exactly the surd we face! The question becomes: do we do theology from the empirically observable, or from what we can deduce from revelation? And how do we use scripture in that effort? It falls on both sides! It is always the Word of God, to the same extent that our preaching is—and it is always a human word, to the same extent that our preaching is. It is the normative ground by which our preaching is judged, as Barth says, but it is in turn normed and judged by God’s own self-revelation. It may still be true and false as it does what we do. It is only true as it does what God does.
Here we could easily get into Barth and philosophy. Martin Rumscheidt’s little yellow book with its translations, “The Way of Theology in Karl Barth,” is useful. But in any case, Barth’s answer is always going to be something to the effect that we can only do theology from the empirically observable when we ground the reality that we observe properly in its origin in God. Otherwise we can only do phenomenology of existence, and speculate on why the world looks the way it does. We simply can’t run a baseline comparison for the world as it is vs. the world as it ought to be. “Given X and X’, solve for sin.” We have to have a baseline, first!
The inconsistency isn’t in your method. The inconsistency is in us, in the world. And you’re right to aim squarely at freedom, though I’m not sure that I’m comfortable saying that our freedom in Christ is the root. I’d rather suggest that natural and original human freedom is the root, grounded in the imago Dei, which Christ recapitulates. But as Paul suggests, we may in any case misuse our freedom in Christ in the same ways, since it is true freedom. And for those that posit Christ original to the Godhead in creation, this is a difference that makes no difference. But in any case, freedom is the root of sin, the origin of our ability to will anything other than what God does, and work to make it so.
Any method that asserts the coherency of the resulting world with God’s active will is going to be able to make great theological use of the empirical—but at the cost of making the empirical itself the baseline for comparison. What is must therefore be in some sense as God wants it. Sin becomes purely relative difference. Judgment is exercised in ways that resemble cause and effect. God becomes very intuitive in such a system—but not very trustworthy. God might even be responsible for sin and evil. This is a problem.
But any method that asserts the incoherence of the world with God’s will can only do so, in the end, by positing a baseline that is not empirically observable. And at that moment, we begin to work against ourselves in total earnest! With revelation standing in contrast to observation, sin becomes absolute difference. As far as I can see from the tradition, this is the only way to have a truly consistent doctrine of sin: to understand it as the dissonance of two genuine but non-aligned freedoms, both acting on the world. We have to insist that both sets of agents are free and act out of freedom. The “bondage of the will” is only good as an explanation of three things: the natural limitation of the scope of our will, our lack of a reliable moral compass apart from relationship with God, and our corruption toward self-guidance and self-seeking behaviors. In all of these things, we must still be understood as genuinely free, under no external compulsion. As Paul says, we are just misusing our freedom. The dissonance is real, and we are responsible for it.
With such an understanding, the world as it is can be understood as a combination product of the work of every creature and the one God, all working at billions of cross-purposes every day. What can we observe, then, that God is responsible for? How can we know of God from the world? How can we tell what in the world is reliable? We’re stuck assuming that nothing is! God becomes utterly counter-intuitive relative to the world, because the way the world works is not the way God works. Even when God uses creatures as means, this only serves to prove the point! Once the character of God is so wholly other, we are forced to rely strictly on God’s verifiable actions in the world. Those, and not the world, are what we trust. And when they indicate something massively counter-intuitive, the world is wrong.
Which is where we’re at on salvation and election. What they indicate is that the world, with its freedom, is being corrected in love and restored to right relationship by God in God’s freedom. And so we know that the world has been judged, but we know it only because the verdict has come in Christ, and the sentence is being carried out in the Spirit. And yet we still know that the dissonance exists. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we will not relegate that dissonance to someplace else, or someone else. And we have evidence for judgment, as well as for the consequences of our actions. (And these are not the same!) But do we have evidence in Christ for a dual verdict? Do we have evidence for damnation as a verifiable sentence of God? I think pneumatology is a fantastic place to put this question, and I’m very glad Barth didn’t get to it in the end, because it leaves a bit of room for us!
Matt,
Let me chew.
Matt, all “revelation” is natural and empirical. I say that because the brain controls all the thought of a person and those thoughts are framed by metaphors we physically aquire in early childhood through empirical observation. Reading a book is only empirical, no eyes no revelation, no ears no revelation, as it is for all the senses. If this is true about how humans think, the dualism between empirical and revealed you start off with in your first comment seems to frame the whole discussion incorrectly. It is too easy to say revelation and then have no idea how it works, it has been used as a skeleton key for too long.
Olson’s problem, as stated above: “How, they ask, can one affirm the universality of electing grace and deny free will with regard to being elected, while also affirming free will to reject the truth of one’s election?”
The universality of electing grace is like the universality of creation. No creature had the opportunity to reject being created. Electing grace is the new creation, as in 2 Corinthians 5:17 – In Christ, we ARE a new creation. There is no free will involved in either “creation,” so, in my mind, Olson is comparing two things that should not be compared.
Jerome,
Good point. I think Olson’s primary problem, to dovetail with what you have eloquently stated, is that he doesn’t read this through a Christ conditioned lens. I.e. that we must abandon this dualism of grace and nature, and read both through the hypostatic union of God’s life in Christ. This way we can properly understand how nature and grace relate to each other in the person and work of God’s life for ALL of us, for ALL of creation. Olson’s problem is that he fails to deal with a radical and Christian, I would assert, conception of election/reprobation; one that is conditioned by Christ Himself, and not as a vapid humanity that can be conceived of as abstracted from genuine humanity that is only found from the archetypal humanity of Christ for us, with us.