A Catechism of Our Faith

Election

God calls His people, and in doing so He creates them as a people and gives them a purpose. This choice, not just for their advantage but for His purpose for creation, is what we mean by ‘election.’ However this does include His gift of salvation to the faithful.

Think of it this way. On the one hand we cannot save ourselves. On the other, what He wills come to pass. As a result we can say that it is only by God’s election that we come to be saved. This does not mean we don’t have a role, which God also gives to us. This also opens the question of election to eternal loss - here too it is God who allows us to be left to our own devices. The important emphasis is on His loving purpose for His creatures. These questions provide the bridge to matters having to do with the human person and the Christian life.

It is often helpful to remind ourselves what is not being said. Grace says we don’t have the power to save ourselves, nor are we partners with God in the effort. This is a core message of Paul, reiterated famously in the early 5th century by St. Augustine in his writings against the British monk Pelagius. Secondly God has the power to oversee history, including our beginnings and our end. (But as we have already said about His grace and our freedom, He has the power to work in and through our broken selves as well as upon us. Election displays how His agency is greater than ours in just this way).

The Living God

Christianity began in a world influenced by Greek culture (its era being called Hellenistic), and this included Greek philosophy.  Those thinkers had already theorized about one God who was high over all things, an example of this being Aristotle’s ‘Unmoved Mover.’  But the problem with Greek thinking about God was that, precisely because of His greatness, God was removed from time and from action.  Both involved change, and this was what the perfect and eternal One could not have.  God became for them a kind of distant monolith, a problem not unknown to the modern era.

You might say that the trick for early Christian thinkers was to borrow from Greek philosophy in the service of a God who became flesh (John 1;14) and who can act and speak in the world. By contrast the God of the Bible is a living God (Matthew 22:32), one who is independent of, but dynamic in, the world. Early Christian thinkers (and all since then!) can borrow ideas, but they need to bend and adjust them to describe a God different from that which their neighbors thought of.  Their God was indeed high, eternal, unchanged, but also free and creative, able to enter and act in His world.  He has a divine will as well as being. Time and creation are His, and He is not limited by them.  The Triune God is such a yet more glorious eternal and perfect One, alive. Philosophy prepares for, but could never say: ‘I am the living God- I was dead and behold, I am alive forever and ever.’ (Revelation 1:18).

As a postscript, this relation of borrowing but bending words and ideas from every philosophy to witness to the eternal and living God is true in our time too. What examples can you give for this? 

Google ‘Pascal’s coat’ and discuss.