This post is the text of the John Rodgers’ Lecture which I delivered at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge Pennsylvania (htttps://www.tsm.edu) on 30 October 2024. I am grateful for their permission to reproduce it here.
1.Why should we look at Article XVII?
In his famous ‘Litany of despair,’ first published in 1903, the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell declares that we must accept a completely pessimistic view of the universe and of our place as human beings within it. He writes that we must understand:
‘…that man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcomes of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.’ [1]
What Russell is doing in these words is setting out his worldview, that everything that is is a result of blind chance and is heading inexorably towards death. Now, as John Rodgers points out in his commentary on the Thirty-Nine Articles, Russell is not unique in having a world view. The fact is that everyone has one. To quote Rodgers: ‘There are no unbelievers or agnostics in the strict sense. This is true because we all have a worldview, a view of reality, a view of the way things really are.’[2]
What the Christian faith gives us is a worldview in this sense. It gives us a view of the way things really are. What I propose to do in this lecture is to explore the Christian worldview and as my starting point for this exploration I have chosen Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles, ‘Of Predestination and Election.’
The reason I have chosen this Article as my starting point is because at the centre of the Christian worldview is the Gospel, the good news of the being and action of God that has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ and that is witnessed to by the Old and New Testaments. It is the Gospel that makes the Christian worldview different from all other worldviews, theistic or atheistic.
Furthermore, as the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth notes in his Church Dogmatics: ‘The doctrine of election is the sum of the Gospel.’[3] The is because the word ‘election,’ means ‘choice.’ When you elect something, you choose to do it. For example, you might elect to have sausages for breakfast. Similarly, if there is an election this means that someone is chosen for some role. For example, the US presidential election on 5 November will be the occasion on which the American people will choose who is going to be the next president of the United States.
How this connects to the Gospel is that at the heart of the good news of the being and action of God is the fact that God has chosen, elected, from all eternity to be the God who calls the world and his human creatures into existence, and to become a human being in the person of Jesus Christ in order to rescue them from their subsequent captivity to the Devil and the power of sin, and bring them to that eternally good end which he has purposed from them all along. God did not have to do any of this, but he freely chose to do so, and his exercise of this free decision is what the Gospel, and hence the Christian worldview, is all about.
Article XVII is the classic Anglican statement of the doctrine of election and what I shall go on to argue is that if we pay careful attention to what the Article tells us about this doctrine we will be led to a comprehensive understanding both of the Christian worldview and why, in contrast to the cosmic pessimism of Bertrand Russell, acceptance of this worldview should lead us not to despair but to thanksgiving.
2. The contents of Article XVII
The contents of Article XVII run as follows:
‘Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby, before the foundations of the world were laid, He hath constantly decreed by His counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation as vessels made to honour. Wherefore they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by His Spirit working in due season; they through grace obey the calling; they be justified freely; they be made sons of God by adoption; they be made like the image of His only-begotten Son Jesus Christ; they walk religiously in good works; and at length by God’s mercy they attain to everlasting felicity.
As the godly consideration of Predestination and our Election in Christ is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons and such as feeling in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh and their earthly members and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: so for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the devil doth thrust them either into desperation or into wretchlessness of most unclean living no less perilous than desperation.
Furthermore, we must receive God’s promises in such wise as they be generally set forth in Holy Scripture; and in our doings that will of God is to be followed which we have expressly declared unto us in the word of God.’
3. Answering the epistemological question
The first question the contents of Article XVII raise is the question that all world view statements raise, namely ‘How do you know that this is true?’ In relation to what is said in Article XVII the answer is that there are two basic sources of information that lead us to believe that what is said here is true.
The first source of information is what we can discern through the exercise of our natural reason about the world we live in and about ourselves as human creatures within it and the first thing that our natural reason tells us is that contrary to what is asserted by Russell, the world, and we ourselves, are not here due to ‘causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving.’ Rather we are the deliberate handiwork of an intelligent creator.
What is still the classic statement of why we must believe this is that made by the Christian apologist William Paley in his 1802 work Natural Theology. He points out that if we see a watch we conclude that:
‘There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.’
Then when we turn to look at the world around us what we find is that
‘Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch exists in the works of nature, with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.’ [4]
The conclusion we must draw from this is obvious. Just as we must believe that the watch is the work of a watchmaker, so we must believe in the existence of an intelligent designer outside of creation, whom Christians call God. Despite the arguments to the contrary by atheist scholars such as Richard Dawkins,[5] the study of the world since Paley’s time has in fact confirmed rather than undermined his argument. This is because the more we understand the beautiful, interconnected complexity of the world, the more it looks like a piece of design rather than a random accident. To quote the American scientist Stephen Meyer:
‘Not only does theism solve a lot of philosophical problems, but empirical evidence from the material world points powerfully to the reality of a great mind behind the universe. Our beautiful, expanding, and finely tuned universe, and the exquisite, integrated and informational complexity of living organisms bear witness to the reality of a transcendent intelligence – a personal God.’ [6]
In addition, as John Haldane famously declared, the view that our reason shows that we live in a wholly materialist universe undermines itself because: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my belief is true’ [7] It is only if we believe that our human minds are the result of an intelligent creator who has created his human creatures with rational souls that we can have any trust in the validity of our own reason and hence of our understanding of the world.
The second thing our natural reason tells us is that the sense of right and wrong that is hardwired into human beings only makes sense if God is its source. Only a divine command theory of ethics which says that there is a wholly wise and good God who determines what it is right to do and makes this known to us can explain why we should do some things and not do others.[8] Furthermore, if we are honest with ourselves we also know that what we do fails to conform to what we know we should do and, as C S Lewis notes, this leads to the frightening conclusion that:
‘If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and we are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is helpless again.’[9]
Natural reason thus tells us that the world, and we humans as part of it, are the products of an intelligent and wholly good creator, but that we are necessarily in conflict with this creator because of the way we behave. In Christian terms it tells us that we are sinners who by our sins have put ourselves in conflict with God. ‘All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3:23).
4. Where Scripture comes into the picture.
This is where our second source of knowledge comes into the picture. In his great defence of the English Reformation, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Richard Hooker writes as follows:
‘Our natural means therefore unto blessedness are our works; nor is it possible that Nature should ever find any other way to salvation than only this. But examine the works which we do, and since the first foundation of the world what one can say, ‘My ways are pure’? Seeing then that all flesh is guilty of that for which God hath threatened eternally to punish, what possibility is there this way to be saved? There resteth either no way unto salvation, or if any, then surely a way which is supernatural, a way which could never have entered into the heart of man as much as once to conceive or imagine, if God himself had not revealed it extraordinarily. For which cause we term it the Mystery or secret way of salvation.’ [10]
The point that Hooker is making is that while natural theology can teach us that we are sinners who need to be saved from our conflict with the God who created us, it cannot tell us how this can happen. The only solution there can be is a supernatural one and precisely because it is supernatural it would need to be revealed by God himself or else we could not know it.
As Hooker indicates, the Christian faith tells us that a supernatural solution does exist and has been revealed to us. This is what Christian theology has called ‘the Mystery’ or ‘the secret way of salvation’ and what Article XVII refers to as ‘his counsel secret to us.’ If we ask where we can have access to this secret counsel the answer, as I have already indicated in my introduction to this lecture, is through the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. That is why at the end of Article XVII those who are anxious about their salvation are told to accept ‘God’s promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in holy Scripture.’ If we want to know whether we can be saved from our conflict with God, and, if so, how, it is to the Scriptures we must turn.
5. The Scriptural basis of the first paragraph of Article XVII
It is because what I have just said is the case that the first paragraph of Article XVII, which describes how fallen human beings are saved, is based on the teaching of the Scriptures. Specifically, it is based on four passages from Paul’s letters to the Romans and Ephesians.
In canonical order, the first passage is Romans 8:28-30 in which Paul declares:
‘We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.’
The second passage is Romans 9:23-24 in which Paul describes God’s desire:
‘…to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles…’
The third passage is Ephesians 1:4-5 in which Paul writes that:
‘[God the Father] chose us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will…’
The fourth passage is Ephesians 1:11-12 in which Paul states that:
‘In him [Christ] according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will, we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory.’
Building on these four passages of Scripture, the first paragraph of Article XVII begins, as we have seen, by declaring that:
‘Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby, before the foundations of the world were laid, He hath constantly decreed by His counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation as vessels made to honour.’
6. God and time
I have already explored what is meant by God’s ‘counsel secret to us’ and the next point to explore about this opening sentence of Article XVII is what it says about the relationship between God and time. The sentence tells us two things about this issue. First, God’s purpose is ‘everlasting,’ more precisely as the word aeternum used in the Latin version of the Article tells us, it is ‘eternal,’ not just lasting throughout time, but transcending time. Secondly, on the basis of that purpose, God has ‘constantly decreed’ something ‘before the foundation of the world.’
All this could be read as meaning that when we talk about ‘predestination’ what we mean is that God has an eternal purpose on the basis of which he issues a permanent decree before a fixed point in time, namely the foundation of the world. Now, from our point of view, as creatures who live in time as fish live in water, all this is perfectly true. However. It is only a partial truth because, although we live in time, God does not. Time is part of the created order and God dwells outside it, just as he lives outside the geographical restrictions which his creatures inhabit. In the words of the early Christian philosopher Boethius: ‘God abides for ever in an eternal present’ and as a result:
‘…His knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present, and embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and the future contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place.’[11]
This point, which has traditionally been accepted by Christian theologians, is developed by the Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock in his lectures on The Existence and Attributes of God. Charnock writes that:
‘God knows all things from eternity, and, therefore, perpetually knows them: the reason is because the Divine knowledge is infinite, and therefore comprehends all knowable truths at once. An eternal knowledge comprehends in itself all time, and beholds past and present in the same manner, and therefore his knowledge is immutable: by one simple knowledge he considers the infinite spaces of past and future.’[12]
A further aspect of God’s eternal existence noted by Charnock is that there is no succession in the decrees of God, his decisions concerning what will be. God does not decree first this and then that as we do, but everything eternally. As this is true of things in general, so also it is true of God’s decree that he will save his human creatures from the power of the Devil and of sin. In Charnock’s words:
‘There is no succession in the decrees of God. He does not decree this now, which he decreed not before; for as his works were known from the beginning of the world, so his works were decreed from the beginning of the world; as they are known at once, so they are decreed at once; there is a succession in the execution of them; first grace, then glory; but the purpose of God for the bestowing of both, was in one and the same moment of eternity. ‘He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy’ (Eph 1;4). The choice of Christ, and the choice of some in him to be holy and to be happy, were before the foundation of the world; they appear in their order according to the council and will of God from eternity. The redemption of the world is after the creation of the world; but the decree whereby the world was created, and whereby it was redeemed, was from eternity.’ [13]
What all this means in relation to the first sentence of Article XVII, is that God has known and decreed from all eternity, that there will be a world, that it will Fall into sin, and that a certain body of people will be brought through Christ to everlasting salvation.
7. God’s knowledge and decrees and the existence of free will
Once one says this people generally start to become uneasy because they think it means that the Fall and sin were inevitable, and that those who are saved have no choice but to be saved and in consequence the lost have no choice, but to be lost. How can it be right, they ask for God to cause the Fall and sin to occur, to then punish people for sin, and finally to save some while rejecting others?
The problem with this objection is that it confuses God’s eternal knowledge and decrees with some form of absolute determinism. God’s knowledge of things to come is because they will be, and they will be because he decrees that they should be, but this does not preclude God decreeing, and therefore knowing, that certain things will occur as a result of the exercise of free will by his rational creatures. For example, God eternally knew that Judas Iscariot would betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver and therefore Jesus, sharing the divine knowledge, correctly predicted it would happen (Matthew 26:14-16, John 13:21-30). However, this did not mean that Judas had to betray Jesus. What God eternally knew and allowed was a free decision by Judas to do so in the knowledge that this decision would form part of the process by which the world would be saved.
What is true in the case of Judas is also true in the case of the Fall of Adam and Eve and the existence of sin in general. If we ask whether God knew that the Devil would turn from God and other fallen angels with him, that the Devil would cause Adam and Eve to turn from God and that the result would be, as Article XVII puts, ‘curse and damnation,’ then the answer is ‘Yes.’ If we asked whether he decreed that these things should be allowed to happen, then the answer is also ‘Yes.’ However, if we ask if he forced them to happen then the answer is ‘No.’
What God knew, because it was real, but which he did not determine [14] was that some angels and all human beings would misuse their free will. As C S Lewis explains, such misuse of free will was not inevitable (‘curse and damnation’ did not have to happen) but the nature of free will made it possible (and therefore when it happened real and therefore eternally known to God). To quote Lewis:
‘God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – a world of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily, united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.’[15]
Some people might argue, of course that the creation of a world in which the misuse of free will could occur was a mistake given the state of conflict in the universe that has resulted. However, as Lewis comments:
‘If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will. – that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when he pulls the strings – then we may take it it is worth paying.’ [16]
8. God’s response to the Fall
As well as knowing that the Fall would occur, and allowing it to occur, God has also eternally decreed what he will do about it. To repeat what is said in Article XVII, he has decreed ‘to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation as vessels made to honour.’
To make sense of this this teaching we have to first understand that according to Article XVII and to the Christian tradition as a whole, one of the other things that the Scriptures teach us about God is that he eternally exists as a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit who are three persons (or personal, conscious centres of divine existence), each of whom possesses all the attributes of deity and hence is fully God, and each of whom is distinguished from the other two solely by the fact that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and that the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son.
When Article XVII talks about ‘Christ’ what it is referring to is the reality known as the incarnation, the reality foretold in Isaiah 7:14 and 11:1-9 and fulfilled in Jesus’ birth from the Blessed Virgin Mary (Matthew 1:18-25, Luke 1:26-2:7) that God the Son would take upon himself a human nature descended from the line of King David[17] in order to undo the results of the Fall and bring about a new start for the human race.
How did he undo the results of the Fall and bring about this new start? In the words of Barth in his Dogmatics in Outline:
‘God Himself, in Jesus Christ His Son, at once true God and true man, takes the place of condemned man. God’s judgement is executed, God’s law takes its course, but in such a way that what man had to suffer is suffered by this One, who as God’s Son stands for all others. Such is the lordship of Jesus Christ, who stands for us before God, by taking upon Himself what belongs to us. In Him God makes himself liable, at the point at which we are accursed and guilty and lost. He it is in His Son, who in the person of this crucified man bears on Golgotha all that ought to be laid on us. And in this way he makes an end of the curse.’[18]
Why did God cross the frontier into our world and our creaturely existence? So that by taking our nature upon him and thus identifying himself with us as the second Adam (Romans 5:12-21) he might bear the curse that our sins deserve. By so doing as God the Son in perfect obedience to God the Father he broke the power of sin and death and inaugurated for us the new life of righteousness and everlasting blessedness that is manifested in his resurrection and his ascension to the right hand of God.
When Article XI of the Thirty-Nine Articles declares ‘We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and not for our own works or deservings’ it points us back to the truth just outlined. Why does God account us righteous and therefore eternally blessed? Because in Jesus Christ God has crossed the frontier into our world, taken our sinfulness upon himself, and given us a new life of righteousness instead.
9. The application of Christ’s saving work in the lives of the elect
According to the New Testament, what God did in Christ, he did for all human beings, for all of the genus humanum (Mark 10:45, Romans 5:18-19, 1 John 2:2). This is a key point to which we will return later on in this lecture, and it means that all human beings, whoever they are, can truthfully point to the cross and say ‘God did that for me.’
However, what we learn from New Testament passages such as Ephesians 1:1-14 and Romans 8:28-30, is that God has also decreed from all eternity that at any given moment in time there will be a set of individuals (the ‘elect’ or the ‘chosen’ referred to in the first paragraph of Article XVII) who have been called by God out of mankind to experience the benefits of what God has done for all of humanity.
We shall look in the next section of his lecture at why God has decreed this this should be so, but in this section, I want to consider how what God the Son did for human race as a whole becomes effective in the life of these particular individuals.
This issue is addressed in the second sentence of the first paragraph of Article XVII. As we have seen, this runs:
‘Wherefore they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by His Spirit working in due season; they through grace obey the calling; they be justified freely; they be made sons of God by adoption; they be made like the image of His only-begotten Son Jesus Christ; they walk religiously in good works; and at length by God’s mercy they attain to everlasting felicity.’
This, says, the Article, is how the saving work of Christ is applied in the case of each individual member of the elect.
The first thing to note about what is said in this sentence in the Article is that it does not describe a simple sequential list of stages which an elect person has to go through to get to eternal life with God in the world to come. It is true that being saved starts with an obedient response to God’s calling to repent and believe the Gospel and ends with the enjoyment of ‘eternal felicity,’ but justification, adoption, being re-made in the image of Jesus Christ and walking ‘religiously in good works’ are not sequential stages of the Christian life. Rather, someone who accepts the Gospel in faith is simultaneously justified, adopted as God’s child, starts the process of being re-made in God’s image, and begins to live God’s way.
The second thing to note is that although baptism isn’t mentioned it is assumed because the Anglican Reformers were clear that baptism was a non-negotiable part of being a Christian since, as the Prayer Book catechism puts it, when someone is baptized they receive the ‘inward and spiritual grace’ of ‘A death unto sin, and a new birth unto righteousness; for being by nature born in sin, and the children of wrath, we are hereby made the children of grace.’ If we ask how this works in the case of infants, the answer is that this grace is given to them as well, but for it to be fruitful in terms of attaining eternal felicity, grace has to be consciously accepted once the infant is old enough to decide for him or herself.
The third thing to note is that God’s gracious action in bringing people to eternal salvation does not take the form of forcing people to believe. As Thomas Cranmer wrote in Article X of the Forty-Two Articles of 1552 (the first version of what became the Thirty-Nine Articles):
‘The grace of Christ or the Holy Ghost by Him given doth take away the stony heart and giveth an heart of flesh. And though those that have no will to do good things, He maketh them to will, and those that would evil things, He maketh not to will the same: yet nevertheless He enforceth not the will. And therefore no man when he sinneth can excuse himself, as not worthy to be blamed or condemned, by alleging that he sinneth unwillingly or under compulsion.’ [19]
God does give people a new heart in fulfilment of his promise in Ezekiel 36:26-27, but in so doing he does not override or obliterate their free will. The reason for this is that God wishes to fulfil his original intention that there should be human creatures who possess free will and are therefore capable of genuine love and goodness, and who love and obey God on this basis. Saving people by turning them into automata would frustrate God’s entire creative purpose and by so doing give the Devil an undeserved victory.
Nevertheless, it is also true that we cannot save ourselves by our own unaided strength. As Article X of the current Thirty-Nine Articles makes clear, without God’s prevenient grace we will never repent, never believe, and never be saved. The question therefore is what kind of analogy helps us to understand grace that effectively enables but which does not compel. As Oliver O’Donovan suggests:
‘…. We would do as well to choose an analogy from the moral influence which operates between persons – the way in which another person’s radiant goodness calls out the best in us, another person’s love makes us love, another person’s learning incites the desire to study – as to reach for concepts of mechanical causation and necessity. Such analogies are, of course, themselves too weak – how could the moral influence of another human being be sufficient to suggest that redemptive power of God? – and to cling exclusively to them would lead us to the sentimentally debilitated deity of romanticism. Nevertheless, they suggest better than a row of dominoes can ever do how it can be that our wills are actually set free by an influence which bears upon us from outside.’ [20]
If we ask about the instrumental means by which God’s non-coercive grace operates, a helpful description is given by William Tyndale who declares that repentance and saving faith is brought about by God through the internal witness of his Spirit and the external witness of his Word:
‘The Spirit of God accompanieth faith, and bringeth with her light, wherewith a man behold himself in the law of God, and seeth his miserable bondage and captivity, and humbled himself, and abhoreth himself: she bringeth God’s promises of all good things in Christ. God worketh with His Word, and in His Word: and when His Word is preached faith roots herself in the hearts of the elect; and as faith entereth, and the Word of God is believed, the power of God looseth his heart from the captivity and bondage under sin, and and knitteth and coupleth him to God and to the will of God: altereth him, changeth him clean, fashioneth, and forgeth him anew; giveth him power to love, and to do that which before was impossible for him either to love or do; and turneth him unto a new nature, so that he loveth that which he before hated, and hateth that which he before loved.’ [21]
If the saved are saved without the obliteration of their free will, the same is true also of the damned. The damned are damned not under divine compulsion but of their own volition. To quote the staunchly Reformed Anglican theologian J I Packer:
‘… what does it mean to lose our souls? To answer this question, Jesus uses His own solemn imagery – ‘Gehenna’ (hell in Mark 9:47 and then other gospel texts), the valley outside Jerusalem where rubbish was burned; the ‘worm’ that ‘dieth not’ (Mark 9:48), an image, it seems for the endless dissolution of the personality by a condemning conscience; ‘fire’ for the agonising awareness of God’s displeasure; ‘outer darkness’ for knowledge of the loss, not merely of God, but of all good, and everything that made life seem worth living; ‘gnashing of teeth’ for self-condemnation and self-loathing. These things are, no doubt, unimaginably dreadful, though those who have been convicted of sin know a little of their nature. But they are not arbitrary inflictions; they represent, rather, a conscious growing into the state in which one has chosen to be. The unbeliever has preferred to be by himself, without God, defying God, having God against him, and he shall have his choice.’ [22]
As O’Donovan observes, the fact that God does not compel anyone to be saved or lost is reflected in the fact that unlike the Westminster Confession which says that God ‘particularly and unchangeably’ predestines some men and angels to salvation and others to damnation,’ [23] Article XVII teaches only ‘predestination to life’ and:
‘… does not teach a particular predestination of named individuals; there is simply the decree to save those ‘chosen in Christ’. There will be a company of the redeemed gathered around Christ the Representative: ‘All that the father gives me will come to me’ (Jn. 6:37). Who they will be is not specified before the foundations of the earth. God has predestined a community but not its individual members. This point is underlined in the third paragraph, where we are instructed as a matter of correctly reading Scripture, to understand the promises of God ‘generally,’ which is to say, generically, as addressed not to particular elect individuals but to the class of human beings who will hear and obey God’s word. That individuals arbitrarily refuse to hear is not to be explained by reference to divine decrees.’ [24]
If we ask whether this view of the matter calls into question God’s sovereignty along then the answer is ‘No.’ God’s absolute sovereignty is his ability to achieve whatever good end he chooses to achieve. If it the case that the good end he chooses to achieve involves the free decision made by human beings in time, then his sovereignty is not in the least compromised by their making such free decisions. Such decisions are precisely what he has decreed should happen.
If we further ask whether God is running the risk that the community of the redeemed will not exist because no one will chose to hear and obey God’s word, the answer is again ‘No.’ There is no risk because in his eternal knowledge God knows with infallible certainty that there will be ‘a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.’ (Revelation 7:9).
10. The purpose of God’s election
Another key point rightly made by O’Donovan is that, as in the case of the election of the people of Israel under the old covenant, the election of Christians out of mankind under the new covenant is not an arbitrary decision that they should enjoy a salvation that is denied to others. Rather, God chooses people precisely so that those who are chosen may be the vehicles through which His salvation can be shared with those around them. To quote O’Donovan again:
‘How, then, shall we understand the phrase ‘out of’ mankind? First, we must say, as the Article does, that we are chosen to enjoy that salvation which God has wrought for mankind in Christ. But then we must add that our election out of mankind, like that of Christ himself, is intended to serve mankind. We are to be carriers of the blessing which is for the rest of mankind as well as for us. He, the Chosen One, was chosen that we might be chosen ‘in him.’ We are chosen in him that others may be chosen in him through us. Election is like the effect of a magnet passing over iron filings; the magnet picks up some filings immediately, and then, through them, picks up others, which pick up others, and so on. Election is not election unless it works through us, as well as being enjoyed by us.’ [25]
Understood in this way, predestination is not a contradiction of the truth that ‘God desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth’ (I Timothy 2:4). It is, rather, the means by which this truth is put into effect as God works out His purposes in human history. As Karl Barth insists: ‘we cannot follow the classical doctrine and make the open number of those who are elect in Jesus Christ into a closed number to which all other men are opposed as if they were rejected.’ [26] We have instead to think in terms of God’s eternal will to bless humankind in Christ being put into effect in history through his constant calling of individual men and women both to enjoy this blessing for themselves and to be the means which God uses to call others so that they can enjoy it too.
Furthermore, the purpose of the existence of the elect community (of which the ‘visible church’ referred to in Article XIX is the institutional form) is not just that they will call other human beings, but that they will bring salvation to creation as a whole. Very often the ‘everlasting felicity’ to be enjoyed by the elect of which Article XVII speaks has been seen in terms of the perfect spiritual happiness which they will enjoy. A good example is the famous prayer by the seventeen century Anglican poet and theologian John Donne:
‘Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
into the house and gate of Heaven,
to enter into that gate and dwell in that house,
where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light;
no noise nor silence, but one equal music;
no fears or hopes, but one equal possession;
no ends or beginnings, but one equal eternity,
in the habitations of thy glory and dominion,
world without end.’ [27]
This way of understanding the final destiny of God’s people is true as far as it goes, but what it overlooks is the biblical teaching that God’s people are called to help creation as a whole achieve the good end for which God made it. In Romans 8:30, as we have noted, Paul declares that the final destiny of Christians is to be ‘glorified’ and as Tom Wright notes, in Pauline thought glorification means:
‘…. glorious sovereign rule, sharing the Messiah’s saving rule over the whole world, and that is what the whole creation is waiting for. It is waiting for us, for you and me, for all God’s children to be revealed. Then, at last, creation will see its true rulers, and will know that the time has come for it to be rescued from corruption.’ [28]
To put the same thing another, way, human beings were created to ‘have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’ (Genesis 1:28) and the final destiny of God’s people is to properly exercise that dominion forever in the world to come and by so doing enable creation as whole to reach its intended destiny.
11. The twin dangers of despair and presumption
The penultimate paragraph of Article XVII answers the question ‘What are the real-life consequences of the doctrine of predestination and election? Its answer is that the doctrine of election has different effects on different kinds of people.
In the case of ‘godly persons,’ that is to say, ‘such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh and their earthly members and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things’ the doctrine is full of ‘sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort.’ It greatly ‘establish their faith of eternal salvation to be enjoyed through Christ’ and ‘it doth fervently kindle their love towards God.’ If God has planned to save them through Jesus Christ from all eternity, then they can trust that he will being this plan to fruition, and if he has shown his love to them by planning to save them in this way then what else can they do but love him in return?
In the case of ‘curious and carnal persons,’ that is to say, those people whose approach to the doctrine of predestination is based on abstract intellectual curiosity, or those people who are unwilling to forsake sin and embrace a life of holiness, the Devil uses the doctrine to either lead them to despair, since they do not see how they can know whether they are elect or not, or to the recklessness (‘wretchlessness’) of a sinful way of life, which they justify on the grounds that if God wishes to save them that is what he will do, and how they behave will make no difference to the outcome.
The final paragraph of the Article addresses these two pastoral problems of people being led by the Devil into either despair or moral depravity. The solution to both these problems, it declares, lies in people coming to understand the twin truths that ‘we must receive God’s promises in such wise as they are generally set forth in Holy Scripture; and in our doings that will of God is to be followed which we have expressly declared unto us in the word of God.’
There is no place for despair because God’s promises of salvation contained in Scripture apply to everyone who belongs to the genus human being,[29] and who repents and believes (‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ John 3:16). There is no place for continuing unrepentant ungodliness because Scripture tells us that God’s will is that the elect should, with his help, turn from their former life of sin (‘Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity’ 2 Timothy 2:19).
In terms of understanding the Christian world view what these last two paragraphs of the Article teach us four things.
First, as we have already noted, if we want to understand the truth about God’s being and action and how we as human being relate to him it is not enough to rely on our natural reason. We must instead look to God’s word given to us in the Holy Scriptures as the final guide to our thinking and actions and ignore the voice of the Devil in our ear saying to us, as he did to Eve ‘Did God really say?’ (Genesis 3:2).
Secondly, a godly person is someone in whom the Spirit of Christ is at work, putting to death ‘the works of the flesh,’ those ungodly forms of behaviour which are contrary to God’s will, and causing them to think about ‘high and heavenly things,’ that is, the greatness of who God is, the magnitude of what he has done for them, and the eternal joy he has promised in the world to come to all those who put their trust in him.
Thirdly, the Devil, who caused the Fall in the first place. is still hard at work seeking to prevent people being rescued by God from the effects of the Fall.
Fourthly, as a result of the Devil’s activity there are two opposite kinds of people who are in danger of damnation. The first are those who fall away from God by despairing of God’s mercy, and the second are those who fall way from God by presuming on God’s mercy. What the first need to hear is the generic promise in God’s word that Christ came and died and rose to make salvation available for everyone and that therefore ‘everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved’ (Romans 10:13). What the second need to hear is the warning in God’s word that there will be a judgement with a dual outcome of both damnation and salvation (2 Corinthians 5:10) and that it is no use presuming that God will be merciful to us on that day if we have previously despised his mercy by being unwilling to accept the salvation that he offers and live accordingly.
12. In conclusion
In conclusion, what we have seen in the course of this lecture, as we have explored the teaching of Article XVII, is that the Christian worldview provides the antidote to the cosmic pessimism of Bertrand Russell. This is because it tells us that we are not here by accident, nor are we heading inexorably towards universal death.
We are created by the wise, loving and good Triune God, who has eternally determined a good end for his human creatures and for creation as a whole. In his eternal knowledge he has always been aware of the consequences of the abuse of free will by the Devil and by human beings, and he has eternally made provision to undo these consequences through the work of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit.
This divine provision makes a right relationship with God possible as a free gift for all human beings who will accept it in a way that respects their free will. All who do accept it will live joyfully forever with God, and will rule with God over a new creation, thus allowing creation as whole to achieve its intended goal.[30]
The Christian worldview also teaches that God’s respect for human freewill means that humans have the power to reject what God has done for them and so damn themselves forever. However, what they do will not affect the eternal joy of the new creation. As C S Lewis notes in his story The Great Divorce it will not be the case that the fate of the damned ‘gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.’[31] This is because, in the words that Lewis puts into the mouth of the Teacher whose role it is to explain truth to the hero of the story:
‘Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.‘ [32]
To put it simply, God will not allow the lost to prevent creation as a whole enjoying the eternal joy that they have chosen to reject for themselves.
Because the end of all things will be eternal joy in the new creation it follows that the instead of embracing the despair advocated by Russell, we who know this to be true should instead respond with gratitude and thanksgiving. In the words of the classic prayer of general thanksgiving in the Book of Common Prayer what we need to say is:
‘Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men; We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.’
Bibliography
Gerald Bray, Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1994).
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics , II.2 (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004).
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God (Robert Carter, 1874).
Martin Davie ‘Calvin’s influence on the Theology of the English Reformation,’ Ecclesiology Vol.6 No.3, 2010, pp.315-341.
Martin Davie Our Inheritance of Faith (Malton: Gilead, 2013).
C S Lewis. Mere Christianity (Glasgow: Fount, 1984),
Oliver O’Donovan, On the Thirty Nine Articles (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1986),
John Rodgers, The 39 Articles of Religion (Newport Beach: Anglican House, 2015).
Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic (Cambridge: CUP, 1996).
.
[1] Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1917), pp. 47-48.
[2] John Rodgers, The 39 Articles of Religion (Newport Beach: Anglican House, 2015), Kindle edition, p.38.
[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.2 (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004), p.3.
[4] William Paley, Natural Theology, Chapters I and III at: https://faculty.uca.edu/benw/biol4415/papers/paley1.pdf.
[5] See Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).
[6] Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis (London: Harper Collins, 2021), Kindle edition, p.517.
[7] John Haldane, ‘When I am Dead’ in Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto and Windus,1927), p.209. For an extended development of this point see C S Lewis, Miracles (Glasgow: Fount 1985), Ch III.
[8] See David Baggett and Jerry Walls, God and Cosmos – Moral Truth and Human Meaning (New York: OUP, 2016)
[9] C S Lewis. Mere Christianity (Glasgow: Fount, 1984), p.37.
[10] Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk1: Ch xi.5.
[11] Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Bk V.6 (London: Elliot Stock, 1897) Kindle edition p.14
[12] Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God (Robert Carter, 1874), Kindle edition, pp 331-332.
[13]Charnock, p. 292.
[14] C S Lewis notes that God ‘does not know your action till you have [freely] done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for him.’ (Lewis, p.146).
[15] Lewis, pp.48-49.
[16] Lewis, p.49.
[17] The term ‘Christ’ or ‘Messiah’ means an anointed king sent by God and descended from the line of David according to God’s promise to David in 2 Samuel 7:1-17.
[18] Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (London: SCM, 1985), pp. 118–119.
[19] Text in Gerald Bray, Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1994), p.291. This article follows Augustine in emphasizing the work of divine grace in the life of the believer, but it also declares that free will remains. As Peter White notes, this declaration reflects: ‘…a consensus amongst Edwardian Protestants that divine grace may be spurned and rejected, that it is not irresistible; human free will must play its part, first to accept or reject, to obey or not to obey, and having obeyed, then to co-operate.’ (Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, Cambridge: CUP, 1996, p.54).
[20] Oliver O’Donovan, On the Thirty Nine Articles (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1986), p.74.
[21] William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises (Cambridge: CUP/Parker Society, 1848) , pp.54-5. The sacrament of Holy Communion also fits into this process as a ‘visible word’ through which the Spirit works and brings about the results Tyndale described in lives of faithful communicants.
[22] J I Packer, Knowing God, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), pp. 169–170.
[23] The Westminster Confession, Ch. III.III-IV similar language is used in the Lambeth Articles of 1595, and the Irish Articles of 1615.
[24] O’Donovan, p.86.
[25] O’Donovan p. 87
[26] K Barth, Church Dogmatics II.2 p. 422
[27] John Donne at https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/resources-for-loss/a-prayer-by-john-donne-contributed-by-stuart-forster.
[28] Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone – Romans, Part I : Chapters 1-8 (London: SPCK, 2004) , p.151.
[29] This is what the Latin version of the Article means by the words ‘generaliter propositae sunt.’
[30] As C S Lewis speculates in his book Voyage to Venus ( London: Pan 1953) the renewal of this world may also be the means of bringing blessing to the universe as a whole, as the phrase ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ suggests.
[31] C S Lewis The Great Divorce (Glasgow: Fontana,1974) pp.110.
[32] Lewis, The Great Divorce, p.111.
