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Election and Ecclesiology in the Post-Constantinian Church1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Colin Gunton
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King's College London, Strand London WC2R 2LS, E-mail: colin.gunton@kcl.ac.uk

Extract

It is often enough averred that Calvin developed his doctrine of predestination in order to reassure believers of their status before God; it is even more often asserted that the overall effect of his teaching was eventually to subvert that assurance, or at any rate to turn it into a form of self-absorption that has an effect contrary to that for which the gospel frees us. Self-absorption is indeed among the besetting sins of Western Christianity, from Augustine onward. In each era, it takes characteristic form. In our day, it is among the prime dangers of the post-Constantinian Church, which, deprived, apparently, of once secure social and political status and role; diminished, apparendy, in numbers and influence, flounders variously in inaction, activism and political correctness in a sometimes desperate concern not to lose the attention of the—reprobate? In this paper, I propose to bring together the related themes of election and ecclesiology, with particular reference to the beleaguered situation of the Christian Church in a world which, as Robert Jenson has observed, is unique in being the first once apparently believing culture to have abandoned the Christian gospel. That throws into the limelight the problem of the, if not everywhere minority status, at least unique situation for the Church of rejection by the main streams of intellectual and cultural life.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2000

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References

2 I owe this point to McFarland, Ian, Listening to the Least. Doing Theology from the Outside in (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998), p. 70Google Scholar.

3 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, trans, edited by Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 19571975), vol. II/2, especially perhaps, §33Google Scholar.

4 Origen, Princ. 2.9.6; 2.6.3.

5 Trigg, J. W., Origen. The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-century Church (Atlanta: John Knox, 1983), p. 110Google Scholar.

6 Anselm of Canterbury, CurDeus Homo, I. 16–18. Notice the Origenist aspects of the following: ‘We cannot doubt that the rational nature, which either is or is going to be blessed in the contemplation of God, was foreseen by God as existing in a particular reasonable and perfect number, so that its number cannot fittingly be greater or smaller’ (Cur Deus Homo, I.16).

7 John Calvin, Institutes, 3.21–2.

8 I once preached on election in King's College Chapel, and one of the more intelligent of the listeners needed to see a copy of the script before she could be convinced that I had not propounded eternal and predestined reprobation.

9 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics II/1, pp. 615620Google Scholar.

10 Farrow, Douglas B., Ascension and Ecclesia (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999)Google Scholar.

11 ‘The covenant made with all the patriarchs is so much like ours in substance and reality that the two are actually one and the same. Yet they differ in the mode of dispensation.’ Calvin, Institutes, 2.10.2.

12 TeSelle, Eugene, Augustine the Theologian (London: Burns & Oates, 1970), p. 323Google Scholar.

13 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics II/2, pp. 3844Google Scholar.

14 TeSelle, , Augustine, p. 325Google Scholar.

15 TeSelle, , Augustine, pp. 324fGoogle Scholar.

16 See Robert Jenson's remark about the tendency to identify the work of the Spirit as a process, as the means of God's causal action upon us, rather than, say, his free personal relation with us. Jenson, Robert W., ‘The Holy Spirit’, Christian Dogmatics, edited by Braaten, C. E. and Jenson, R. W. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), Vol. 2, pp. 126fGoogle Scholar.

17 ‘Augustine states repeatedly that the gift of perseverance is a grace that “cooperates” with men…’ TeSelle, Augustine, p. 328. He appears to have bequeathed to the tradition two possibilities, inherent as both were in the ambiguities of his thinking about grace and freedom. The first is what became Calvinist double predestination, and we need not linger with it, except to say that it is preferable to its alternative. For some of the reasons why almost anything is preferable to ‘Arminianism’, see Jenson, Robert W., America's Theologian. An Appreciation of Jonathan Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. The second is a development of a doctrine of co-operating grace, which muddied the waters and still muddies them, as is shown by recent debate about the Joint Declaration on Justification. All such doctrines generate a doctrine of divine-human interrelation in which the human and the divine are in some way in co-operation or competition. The doctrine of grace displaces that of the Spirit, according to which human action does not cooperate with the divine because it is enabled by it. Only thus can action be seen to be authentically human without in some way appearing either to compete with, co-operate with or be overridden by divine action.

18 ‘The speaking of the gospel is the event of predestination in that the gospel gives what it speaks about, but this eschatological efficacy of the gospel is the Spirit. We must parody Barth: the Holy Spirit is the choosing God.’ Jenson, , ‘The Holy Spirit’, p. 138Google Scholar.

19 John Calvin, Institutes 1.13.14.

20 Owen, John, ‘Of Toleration’, Works, VIII, p. 171Google Scholar.

21 Owen, , ‘Of Toleration’, p. 183Google Scholar.

22 In dispute with Rome's over-realised eschatology, represented by Bellarmine, Owen points out that according to 1 Corinthians 11:19 ‘heresies’ are ‘for the manifesting of those that are approved, not the destroying of those that are not …’. Quoting 2 Timothy 2:25, ‘Waiting with all patience upon them that oppose themselves, if at any time God will give them repentance …’, Owen comments: ‘Imprisoning, banishing, slaying, is scarcely a patient waiting’ (p. 202).

23 ‘The Holy Ghost … is the immediate, peculiar, efficient cause of all external divine operations …’ Owen, John, A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit (London, 1674Google Scholar. Works, vol. III, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1862, pp. 160f.). See Spence, Alan, ‘Inspiration and Incarnation: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology’, King's Theological Review XII (1989), 5255Google Scholar.

24 John Owen, The True Nature of a Gospel Church, Works, op. cit., Vol. XVI, p. 29.

25 Jenson, , ‘The Holy Spirit’, p. 134Google Scholar.

26 Jenson, , ‘The Holy Spirit’, p. 135Google Scholar.

27 I thank Steve Holmes for this point.

28 Watson, Francis, ‘Trinity and Community: a Reading of John 17’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 1/2 (1999), 167183 (181)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.