I observed in The Fire and the Rose that I don't preach universalism. And for good reason. The world needs to hear the judgment of Gospel -- that God, in Christ, is setting the world to rights, and that means some of the things we really do to one another (poverty, war, abuse, neglect, etc.) really aren't going to stand. The Gospel is good news proclaimed to the poor, imprisoned, forgotten of the world. But that good news, when heard from the vantage point of the oppressor, isn't good at all. It's bad news. The rich guy, to paraphrase Jesus, has the same chance getting into the Kingdom as the camel has getting through the eye of a needle. It can happen -- with God, all things can -- but it's probably not going to be comfortable on either the camel or the rich guy.
But what of predestination? Why don't I -- and more generally, why won't other preachers -- preach the Gospel as it's proclaimed in Paul?
When treated abstractly, as an explanation of why some are saved and others aren't, predestination must always function as an existential threat to our personhood and security. Two questions immediately arise:
That's why I think that preachers had better reclaim another idea I put forward in The Fire and the Rose: That preaching brings with it this "urgency of joy". In the New Testament, predestination is the good news of God in Jesus Christ. It's not a philosophical axiom or a doctrine to be feared. It's good news to be told -- with all the urgency of the joy known in Jesus Christ.
I know of no one who puts this matter more clearly than Karl Barth. In what is perhaps his most dangerous volume of Church Dogmatics, II/2, Barth says:
Jesus is the Messiah precisely in his election. Those of us who bear the name "Christian" do so precisely because we share in that election: God has called us "into Christ". Not for the sake of our individual salvation, but for the sake of the salvation of the entire world. (This is an idea that has been driven home to me most recently in reading Max Kim's amazing book, Irrevocable.) We share in Christ's death, his resurrection, his Spirit, his ascension, his return, his judgment of the world, his threefold task as prophet, priest, and king, his suffering, his kingdom, power, and glory. And we share in his election. That we do so is only another expression for the fact that election in biblical thought is never a purely individual matter. The election of the believer, as that of Israel and the Church, is an involvement in the divine election of Jesus.
The problems start happening as soon as you ask a particular question: "But what of the reprobate?"
The Calvinist temptation (and St Augustine nearly succumbed to it and perhaps arguably did) has been to explain human rejection of the gospel in terms of God's eternal decrees. The logic appears inescapable: If salvation is by election and grace alone, and if some reject Christ to their damnation, this would seem to imply that God unilaterally reprobates the non-elect. But the Gospel disallows the conclusion. The election of Christ Jesus is the reason why some are saved; but it's not the reason why some are not.
Hear me clearly here: Nothing in the Bible suggests that God created the world to save some and damn the rest. Zilch, nada, zero, nein. Nothing. Nothing in the Bible suggests that God elected Israel in order to damn the rest of the nations. Nothing. Nothing in the Bible suggests that God sent Jesus in order to save some and damn the rest. Nothing. Zilch, nada, zero, nein. On this matter, the Apostle John seems to me to be so very clear: "God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him" (3.17).
So that leaves preachers, I think, with a problem: How do we preach predestination in Christ?
Does it even make a difference that we preach it? Because, if experience is any indicator, it would seem we really don't like preaching it. I can't recall the last time I heard a pastor tell her congregation the Good News of God's activity in Jesus Christ to elect them.
Barth gives us a beautiful abstraction. Does that help us preach this sense of the New Testament's urgency of the joy found in Christ?
Truth be told, I love Barth's passage just cited. I love everything about what he says about Jesus as the Elect One of God. I applaud every effort to connect election to its christological roots. I applaud the evangelical affirmation that election occurs in the crucified and risen God-Man, intending the salvation of every human being. Yet this truth -- precisely because it's an abstract, third-person truth -- neither silences the condemning voices that come to us in the night nor liberates for a new future in the Spirit. Am I truly in Christ? Am I genuinely intended by God's electing grace? My sins are great, my faith and repentance too weak, my ascetical and moral efforts so manifestly half-hearted, my prayers ineffectual. What good is a corrected, improved doctrine of predestination to me? I still feel God's wrath. The troubling problem of assurance remains. What more must I do to be saved at the final judgment? In the end does the Gospel just throws us back upon ourselves to save ourselves? Trust me: I get it. I get Luther's absolute sense of divine judgment. Like I've said a thousand times before: If there's even more man in hell in the end of all things, you can be sure it's me.
This is why I think preachers should study patristics before they preach. I read Augustine's On Rebuke and Grace for the first time when I was in seminary. When Augustine deals with John 6.39 ("This is the will of the Father who hath sent me, that of all that he hath given me I shall lose nothing"), he asks a question: "Who are 'the all'?" According to St Augustine, the 'all' refers to the totality of those "predestinated to the kingdom of God, whose number is so certain that one can neither be added to them nor taken away from them". In other words: Predestination pertains to individual persons. But there's another way to read this. Maximus the Confessor interprets 'all' as referring to the human nature assumed by Christ in the Incarnation. Because human nature has been resurrected in Christ, all human beings will share in the resurrection, either to their salvation or damnation, depending on their free personal decisions. Predestination thus refers to the future state of embodied life, guaranteed to every human being by the paschal victory; it does not refer to the choices each individual must make in relationship to his Creator. Or to put the matter differently: Grace as resurrection is irresistible; grace as enhypostasization of eternal beatitude, resistible.
The resurrection is the one irrefutable, irresistable act of God toward all creation. That's the part I think David Bentley Hart makes the most clear in his All Shall Be Saved book.
But that way of putting it still leaves me with a problem. Human nature is predestined to glory, yet the choice to participate in this glory, and thus secure election in Christ, ultimately rests on our shoulders. We are the makers, for Maximus, of our final destiny. Following Maximus, what can the preacher say to us but believe, repent, make a regular confession, receive the Eucharist, pray and work harder? He or she will no doubt assure us of the synergistic assistance of the Holy Spirit, but the responsibility and burden remains. The pseudonymous Apostle exhorts: "Therefore, brethren, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall" (2 Peter 1.10) -- but the words don't dispel the terror and despair. My will is bound by passions and ego. Speak not to me of the predestination of human nature to glory. I am a sinner and I need Good News. Leave salvation to my devices -- any aspect of salvation whatever -- and I'll be damned.
This is why I think the Gospel of predestination can only be recovered if we make the theological shift of our pronouns. We have to move from what I call a "first person" theology to a "second person" proclamation.
If there's one thing I know as a pastor and as a human being: We humans all live under the existential dread and burden of judgment, wrath, alienation. Preachers don't have to tell me about my sin. I know it quite well, and, in those darkest moments I don't want to talk about, I know it honestly. My will is bound. I am, quite literally as St Paul puts it, "dead in my sins and trespasses". I don't need a theory to explain that. It's just the way things are. Really are.
We are trapped within ourselves. Sin really is "inordinate affection inwardly turned in on ourselves" as Augustine put it (incurvatus in se, in the Latin). I can't do one blessed or even damned thing to free myself from the contingencies of my finitude and its sinfulness. I've made my own damned bed and I'm going to die in it without someone does something from the outside. No matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, it is always the alienated ego who is trying and doing. Our vision is distorted, our desires corrupted, our self-righteousness determinative.
Given that condition, any preaching about an abstract Deity who does some decision-making on my part will always be heard as a threat to autonomy. This Deity is the transcendent, infinite, immutable, ineffable Other who stands outside us and above us. Which is why God, apart from the proclamation of Jesus Christ, is the intricate problem that needs to be solved. We don't fare very well without God, but introduce a philosophical picture of God into the equation, we don't fare very well with him either. Something in us like the anchor this philosophical picture of God gives us for truth, beauty and goodness. But he's still a threat: The Ruler, the Judge, the Almighty who gets in the last word.
The problem is when we "think" God up, as sheer abstractions ("absolute, immortal, infinite, timeless, passionless, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient" and the like) -- well, you can't be saved by that God.
Philosophical -- and even theological -- concepts can't save. I'm not saved by my theology -- even if it's a "unversalist" one. All theologians offer us are abstractions. Precisely as language about God, it cannot liberate nor bestow new life. No doubt it can be instructive, insightful, illuminating, yet is not the Word that raises the dead. "Lazarus, come forth!" What is needed is primary speech in which God is the speaker.
That, I think, is the difference between theological talk and preaching's proclamation. Theological abstractions cannot deliver us from our bondage to self, for we will always twist them to defend the autonomy of our false selves. What is needed is the predestinating God who speaks directly to sinners and elects them -- now, today, in the present -- to salvation in Jesus Christ. Election occurs not in the hidden heights of eternity but in the Gospel declared by the preacher.
The central question of predestination is not why or when. It's who. "You, now that you're in earshot. God has worked in Christ for you!" That's the language of the preacher. That is how you preach predestination.
The preacher preaches on the presumption that there is only one time: What Tillich called "the eternal now". The preacher acts on the presupposition that only the present-tense, here-and-now deed of God, the proclamation itself, can be the solution to the problem of God. The proclamation is the end result, the culmination, of the great acts of God in history. The preacher ought to have the consciousness of standing in that place knowing that the Word and sacrament are themselves the end (telos), the purpose of it all. The concrete moment of the proclamation is the doing of the mighty act of God in the living present. It's not a recital of past acts, but the doing of the act itself now. Only when there is an authoritative Word from God in the present tense do we escape the threat of the hidden God. Only then can a faith be created to stand in the face of that threat. As Paul wrote, "Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ" (Romans 10.17), "for ... it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe" (1 Corinthians 1.21).
Only the unconditional announcement, spoken to us in the name and power of the crucified and risen Christ, can free us from the tombs of our sin. Our alienation can only be overcome by the proclamation of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Folks ask me what, as an Evangelical Universalist, I think preachers can possibly preach and sound biblical. That's it. That's what we preach. I don't preach "universalism". I preach Jesus Christ, crucified, dead, buried and risen. That's the only hope we have of freeing ourselves from the hell we know.
We preachers need to take the language of the New Testament as the language of our lips. Declare to each member of our congregations the Good News of predestination: "You belong to the elect people of God. You have been chosen for eternal salvation. In Christ you are justified; in Christ you are and will be sanctified; in Christ you are and will be glorified. By the love of the Crucified you are predestined to the kingdom of everlasting life. Believe and rejoice!"
I believe this much: Every parish, every person, needs to hear that bold proclamation. They don't need theological abstractions. They need to hear the Gospel: That God in Christ has reconciled the world to himself.
But what of predestination? Why don't I -- and more generally, why won't other preachers -- preach the Gospel as it's proclaimed in Paul?
When treated abstractly, as an explanation of why some are saved and others aren't, predestination must always function as an existential threat to our personhood and security. Two questions immediately arise:
- Am I a free being or just a puppet?
- Am I one of the elect or one of the reprobate?
That's why I think that preachers had better reclaim another idea I put forward in The Fire and the Rose: That preaching brings with it this "urgency of joy". In the New Testament, predestination is the good news of God in Jesus Christ. It's not a philosophical axiom or a doctrine to be feared. It's good news to be told -- with all the urgency of the joy known in Jesus Christ.
I know of no one who puts this matter more clearly than Karl Barth. In what is perhaps his most dangerous volume of Church Dogmatics, II/2, Barth says:
The truth which must now occupy us, the truth of the doctrine of predestination, is first and last and in all circumstances the sum of the Gospel, no matter how it may be understood in detail, no matter what apparently contradictory aspects or moments it may present to us. It is itself evangel: glad tidings; news which uplifts and comforts and sustains .... The election of grace is the sum of the Gospel -- we must put it as pointedly as that. But more, the election of grace is the whole of the Gospel, the Gospel in nuce. It is the very essence of all good news. It is as such that it must be understood and evaluated in the Christian Church. God is God in His being as the One who loves in freedom. This is revealed as a benefit conferred upon us in the fact which corresponds to the truth of God’s being, the fact that God elects in His grace, that He moves towards man, in his dealing within this covenant with the one man Jesus, and the people represented by Him. All the joy and the benefit of His whole work as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer, all the blessings which are divine and therefore real blessings, all the promise of the Gospel which has been declared: all these are grounded and determined in the fact that God is the God of the eternal election of His grace. In the light of this election the whole of the Gospel is light. Yes is said here, and all the promises of God are Yea and Amen (2 Cor 1:20).Predestination intends Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God and second person of the Holy Trinity, the Messiah of Israel and the mediator and embodiment of the world's salvation. Because predestination intends Jesus, it intends Israel, elected by God to receive in her flesh the Savior of the world. Because predestination intends Jesus, it intends the Blessed Virgin Mary, chosen by God to conceive, birth, nurture and protect the Messiah of her people. Because predestination intends Jesus, it intends his body, the Church, the new Israel and elect company of the twice-born. And because predestination simultaneously intends Jesus, Israel, Mary, and the Church, it also intends the individual believer in Christ, who has been baptized into the death and resurrection of the Lord, incorporated into the eschatological community, and made an heir of the kingdom. The gospel of election proclaims to the baptized that through their sacramental incorporation into the incarnate Son of God, they participate in the divine Sonship and are destined to be with Christ in his kingdom. Jesus is the elect One of God. United to him we share in his divine election. To be in the Church is to be in Christ; to be in Christ is to be in God; and to be in God is to enjoy eternal salvation in the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Jesus is the Messiah precisely in his election. Those of us who bear the name "Christian" do so precisely because we share in that election: God has called us "into Christ". Not for the sake of our individual salvation, but for the sake of the salvation of the entire world. (This is an idea that has been driven home to me most recently in reading Max Kim's amazing book, Irrevocable.) We share in Christ's death, his resurrection, his Spirit, his ascension, his return, his judgment of the world, his threefold task as prophet, priest, and king, his suffering, his kingdom, power, and glory. And we share in his election. That we do so is only another expression for the fact that election in biblical thought is never a purely individual matter. The election of the believer, as that of Israel and the Church, is an involvement in the divine election of Jesus.
The problems start happening as soon as you ask a particular question: "But what of the reprobate?"
The Calvinist temptation (and St Augustine nearly succumbed to it and perhaps arguably did) has been to explain human rejection of the gospel in terms of God's eternal decrees. The logic appears inescapable: If salvation is by election and grace alone, and if some reject Christ to their damnation, this would seem to imply that God unilaterally reprobates the non-elect. But the Gospel disallows the conclusion. The election of Christ Jesus is the reason why some are saved; but it's not the reason why some are not.
Hear me clearly here: Nothing in the Bible suggests that God created the world to save some and damn the rest. Zilch, nada, zero, nein. Nothing. Nothing in the Bible suggests that God elected Israel in order to damn the rest of the nations. Nothing. Nothing in the Bible suggests that God sent Jesus in order to save some and damn the rest. Nothing. Zilch, nada, zero, nein. On this matter, the Apostle John seems to me to be so very clear: "God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him" (3.17).
So that leaves preachers, I think, with a problem: How do we preach predestination in Christ?
Does it even make a difference that we preach it? Because, if experience is any indicator, it would seem we really don't like preaching it. I can't recall the last time I heard a pastor tell her congregation the Good News of God's activity in Jesus Christ to elect them.
Barth gives us a beautiful abstraction. Does that help us preach this sense of the New Testament's urgency of the joy found in Christ?
Truth be told, I love Barth's passage just cited. I love everything about what he says about Jesus as the Elect One of God. I applaud every effort to connect election to its christological roots. I applaud the evangelical affirmation that election occurs in the crucified and risen God-Man, intending the salvation of every human being. Yet this truth -- precisely because it's an abstract, third-person truth -- neither silences the condemning voices that come to us in the night nor liberates for a new future in the Spirit. Am I truly in Christ? Am I genuinely intended by God's electing grace? My sins are great, my faith and repentance too weak, my ascetical and moral efforts so manifestly half-hearted, my prayers ineffectual. What good is a corrected, improved doctrine of predestination to me? I still feel God's wrath. The troubling problem of assurance remains. What more must I do to be saved at the final judgment? In the end does the Gospel just throws us back upon ourselves to save ourselves? Trust me: I get it. I get Luther's absolute sense of divine judgment. Like I've said a thousand times before: If there's even more man in hell in the end of all things, you can be sure it's me.
This is why I think preachers should study patristics before they preach. I read Augustine's On Rebuke and Grace for the first time when I was in seminary. When Augustine deals with John 6.39 ("This is the will of the Father who hath sent me, that of all that he hath given me I shall lose nothing"), he asks a question: "Who are 'the all'?" According to St Augustine, the 'all' refers to the totality of those "predestinated to the kingdom of God, whose number is so certain that one can neither be added to them nor taken away from them". In other words: Predestination pertains to individual persons. But there's another way to read this. Maximus the Confessor interprets 'all' as referring to the human nature assumed by Christ in the Incarnation. Because human nature has been resurrected in Christ, all human beings will share in the resurrection, either to their salvation or damnation, depending on their free personal decisions. Predestination thus refers to the future state of embodied life, guaranteed to every human being by the paschal victory; it does not refer to the choices each individual must make in relationship to his Creator. Or to put the matter differently: Grace as resurrection is irresistible; grace as enhypostasization of eternal beatitude, resistible.
The resurrection is the one irrefutable, irresistable act of God toward all creation. That's the part I think David Bentley Hart makes the most clear in his All Shall Be Saved book.
But that way of putting it still leaves me with a problem. Human nature is predestined to glory, yet the choice to participate in this glory, and thus secure election in Christ, ultimately rests on our shoulders. We are the makers, for Maximus, of our final destiny. Following Maximus, what can the preacher say to us but believe, repent, make a regular confession, receive the Eucharist, pray and work harder? He or she will no doubt assure us of the synergistic assistance of the Holy Spirit, but the responsibility and burden remains. The pseudonymous Apostle exhorts: "Therefore, brethren, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall" (2 Peter 1.10) -- but the words don't dispel the terror and despair. My will is bound by passions and ego. Speak not to me of the predestination of human nature to glory. I am a sinner and I need Good News. Leave salvation to my devices -- any aspect of salvation whatever -- and I'll be damned.
This is why I think the Gospel of predestination can only be recovered if we make the theological shift of our pronouns. We have to move from what I call a "first person" theology to a "second person" proclamation.
If there's one thing I know as a pastor and as a human being: We humans all live under the existential dread and burden of judgment, wrath, alienation. Preachers don't have to tell me about my sin. I know it quite well, and, in those darkest moments I don't want to talk about, I know it honestly. My will is bound. I am, quite literally as St Paul puts it, "dead in my sins and trespasses". I don't need a theory to explain that. It's just the way things are. Really are.
We are trapped within ourselves. Sin really is "inordinate affection inwardly turned in on ourselves" as Augustine put it (incurvatus in se, in the Latin). I can't do one blessed or even damned thing to free myself from the contingencies of my finitude and its sinfulness. I've made my own damned bed and I'm going to die in it without someone does something from the outside. No matter how hard we try, no matter what we do, it is always the alienated ego who is trying and doing. Our vision is distorted, our desires corrupted, our self-righteousness determinative.
Given that condition, any preaching about an abstract Deity who does some decision-making on my part will always be heard as a threat to autonomy. This Deity is the transcendent, infinite, immutable, ineffable Other who stands outside us and above us. Which is why God, apart from the proclamation of Jesus Christ, is the intricate problem that needs to be solved. We don't fare very well without God, but introduce a philosophical picture of God into the equation, we don't fare very well with him either. Something in us like the anchor this philosophical picture of God gives us for truth, beauty and goodness. But he's still a threat: The Ruler, the Judge, the Almighty who gets in the last word.
The problem is when we "think" God up, as sheer abstractions ("absolute, immortal, infinite, timeless, passionless, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient" and the like) -- well, you can't be saved by that God.
Philosophical -- and even theological -- concepts can't save. I'm not saved by my theology -- even if it's a "unversalist" one. All theologians offer us are abstractions. Precisely as language about God, it cannot liberate nor bestow new life. No doubt it can be instructive, insightful, illuminating, yet is not the Word that raises the dead. "Lazarus, come forth!" What is needed is primary speech in which God is the speaker.
That, I think, is the difference between theological talk and preaching's proclamation. Theological abstractions cannot deliver us from our bondage to self, for we will always twist them to defend the autonomy of our false selves. What is needed is the predestinating God who speaks directly to sinners and elects them -- now, today, in the present -- to salvation in Jesus Christ. Election occurs not in the hidden heights of eternity but in the Gospel declared by the preacher.
The central question of predestination is not why or when. It's who. "You, now that you're in earshot. God has worked in Christ for you!" That's the language of the preacher. That is how you preach predestination.
The preacher preaches on the presumption that there is only one time: What Tillich called "the eternal now". The preacher acts on the presupposition that only the present-tense, here-and-now deed of God, the proclamation itself, can be the solution to the problem of God. The proclamation is the end result, the culmination, of the great acts of God in history. The preacher ought to have the consciousness of standing in that place knowing that the Word and sacrament are themselves the end (telos), the purpose of it all. The concrete moment of the proclamation is the doing of the mighty act of God in the living present. It's not a recital of past acts, but the doing of the act itself now. Only when there is an authoritative Word from God in the present tense do we escape the threat of the hidden God. Only then can a faith be created to stand in the face of that threat. As Paul wrote, "Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ" (Romans 10.17), "for ... it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe" (1 Corinthians 1.21).
Only the unconditional announcement, spoken to us in the name and power of the crucified and risen Christ, can free us from the tombs of our sin. Our alienation can only be overcome by the proclamation of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Folks ask me what, as an Evangelical Universalist, I think preachers can possibly preach and sound biblical. That's it. That's what we preach. I don't preach "universalism". I preach Jesus Christ, crucified, dead, buried and risen. That's the only hope we have of freeing ourselves from the hell we know.
We preachers need to take the language of the New Testament as the language of our lips. Declare to each member of our congregations the Good News of predestination: "You belong to the elect people of God. You have been chosen for eternal salvation. In Christ you are justified; in Christ you are and will be sanctified; in Christ you are and will be glorified. By the love of the Crucified you are predestined to the kingdom of everlasting life. Believe and rejoice!"
I believe this much: Every parish, every person, needs to hear that bold proclamation. They don't need theological abstractions. They need to hear the Gospel: That God in Christ has reconciled the world to himself.