The Elect

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Eph 1:3-4).

Election, aka predestination, is a hot topic among Protestant Christians today, so there really is no “mere evangelical” approach, yet it’s too important a topic to ignore, if only because it is such a hot topic. And besides the drama we create, the New Testament uses the language of election too frequently to ignore it.

The basic idea of election is that God chooses who will be saved. There are various ways people have tried to understand that concept and to reconcile it with other truths we see in scripture such as human responsibility. The Reformed view (of which Calvinism is a subset, even though that name is often used by non-adherents to refer to the entire umbrella of the Reformed perspective) says that God literally has a predetermined list of who will be given the ability to believe in Christ. The Arminian view is that God knows who will believe if given the opportunity and has made a list of those people beforehand.

Those are the extremes. In the middle are people who hold mostly to one view but not quite all the way (eg, “four-point Calvinists”) and people who freely mix and mingle the positions. The average modern Baptist is, in my experience, mostly Arminian with a little Calvinism mixed in. Then there are those who stake out alternative positions by applying Molinism (or “middle knowledge” — the idea that God knows what “would happen if ...”).

Finally there are those, like me, who simply refuse to try to reconcile the tension between God’s sovereignty and human will and responsibility. The scriptures teach both, so how they coexist is taken as a mystery — much like the Trinity or the dual natures of Christ — that human beings simply cannot understand, a mystery that we just need to make peace with.

Those are the “camps.” Now I want you to put all of that out of your mind, because it doesn’t matter. How salvation, how election, works is God’s business. We cannot know who is and who is not elect, nor does any understanding of election change the Great Commandments or the Great Commission.

So why does the Bible teach it? As my pastor in college put it, lo these many years ago, “election is about worship.” See how Paul treats it in Ephesians 1:3-6:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

This is one of my favorite passages of the Bible, largely because in the Greek the whole paragraph and the next are one long run-on sentence. Paul, normally so logical and eloquent, is tripping over himself to describe God’s magnificent and amazing love for us and the grace he has shown us. And it starts with this: “He chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.”

Election is not about figuring out who is going to be saved. Election is not about figuring out how salvation works. Election is about the glorious truth that, before the very foundation of the world, God looked through time and called you by name and said, “I want that one.”

He saw all the ways humans will rebel. He saw all of my sin. He saw all the blackest things I’m capable of. And he wanted me anyway. That is why we worship our electing, sovereign God.


Rather than recommend any particular books, my advice is, if you are inclined to study this topic, to read Calvinists on Calvinism and Arminians on Arminianism. A Calvinist’s explanation of Arminianism (or vice versa) will not be the strongest case for the view. Let each side present what they believe and why.