One thing that I’ve regularly pondered and commented on is the concept of ‘Election’. That is: ‘to elect’ is from the Latin ‘electare’ which means ‘to choose’. As I’ve said elsewhere, it is one of those integral concepts to understanding the redemptive-history that is Scripture. It is not the sole domain of ‘Calvinism’ or Reformed theology. 
Rather, it ranks up in importance with ‘salvation’, ‘faith’, ‘priesthood’, ‘Torah’, among many others. It can’t be passed by, and, as I’ll hope to show, it’s implications are huge.
To recapitulate what I’ve said elsewhere: election, like every concept elucidated in Scripture, is grounded first and foremost in the Messiah. That means, as it is said in Ephesians (1:4), we were chosen IN HIM before the foundation of the world. I bold for emphasis, and one that can be lost behind how the debate usually goes. It gets trotted out that God had in mind a particular set of individuals which he chose to save. Thus, by logical strangulation, the atonement is only for those whom he had previously chosen. Otherwise, as someone like John Owen argued, it makes the singular council of the Lord confused. Christ dies for all, but the Holy Spirit only enlightens a few? It makes it seems that the persons are working at cross purpose.
And if we were to allow such a rational explanation to take precedence to biblical witness, it’d be absolutely true. I’m not familiar with Owen enough to say anything more, but it sounds like a dependence on Aristotelian logic. We start with a conception of Prime Mover, rather than being swept up into a peculiar tale beginning with the Word of God making the Heaven and Earth. Again, I’m not accusing Owen of sweeping away the Bible, I just don’t know and will leave it at that. It’s not relevant.
What I am after is the the concept of primacy. As I said above, it is stated that a particular group is held in mind that Christ then comes to redeem. What ends up being said is that this group ends up preceding the Messiah, when the Scripture has it the other way around. Christ isn’t merely to redeem Israel, which He does, but is, in Himself, Israel. Thus He is circumcised on the 8th day as an Israelite. When He is inaugurated by the prophet John, He goes out into the wilderness and faces temptation for 40 days. There are many more examples I could dive into, but let’s put it simply, as Simeon did:
“Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace,
According to Your word;
For my eyes have seen Your salvation
Which You have prepared before the face of all peoples,
A light to bring revelation to the Gentiles,
And the glory of Your people Israel”
And indeed, this Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ, brought a rising and falling of many in Israel. Therefore any talk of election must be grounded in the primacy of the Son of God. He was chosen before all time, and into that choice, that election, all are gathered into Him. There are not many sons, but many adopted sons and daughters, for there is only one eternally begotten Son. This has to do with Union, which I’ve also mentioned frequently.This is an essential understanding. For in it, we who follow Jesus both understand who we are, and where we’re to be going.
What I want to talk about are two major premises: 1) the inadequacy of a ‘Limited Atonement’ as such & 2) the nature of life in following Jesus.
First is understanding exactly what happened with Jesus in regards to Israel. Since Jesus is Israel, what happened to the old Israel of the flesh? Did it just transfer in a puff of smoke to all those who put faith in Jesus, or is there something more fundamental at work? As Paul argues, Israel was never defined as a nation of mere blood and bone, but one built upon promise. Israel was nothing before the miraculous working of the Lord, where a barren Sarah and a ‘dead’, for all intents and purposes, Abraham conceived of a child which was to bring about a hope. Israel was a nation of promise. A promise which echoed back to a promise made in the Garden, “the son of the woman will crush the serpent’s head”.
Here I want to present something other than super-secessionism. While the true Israel is constitutive of all those who believe on Jesus, it is grounded in Jesus. The catholic church is the spiritual heirs, but because of in whom it participates. In Paul’s imagery, fleshly Israel is an olive tree, from whom the promise would come. There is a wild tree of Gentiles too, but that’s not the hope. The hope is that these gnarled branches will find a place in Israel. But what is this Israel?
It’s Jesus. He’s the Shoot of Jesse, the little dusty sprout out of the Jews in whom the entire weight of the Law and Prophets lay. It is this tree that is fundamental. It is this tree, that new humanity arises. Jesus took the flesh of Adam’s race, and yet burned a new way forward. Adam’s tree is rotted and doomed, but for us little branches, there is hope elsewhere. There is hope on another a tree.
This is where I might sound Augustinian with his talk of the redeemed as those saved out of the massa damnata. That has part of the truth, but it doesn’t capture it all. Christ is not only Man for God in His atonement, He is God for Man. He is the Creator of all flesh. His love poured out as God is not only for a subset of humanity for all men. Living as Christ lived is not a religious addendum to humanity, a supernatural addition to perfect what nature has already provided. Following Jesus is to learn to live humanly.
Thus, the conception is not that those who face the judgment are those whose sins were never atoned for in the first place. No, Christ died not only for those who follow Him, those who believe, but for the entire world. What they have done is scorned the work of the Holy Spirit. How do I mean this? In the same way Jesus did:
“And when [the Holy Spirit] has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they do not believe in Me; of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more; of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.”
The Holy Spirit comes and reveals that man sins because they receive not their physician. He reveals justice and vindication of Christ, because He does not rot in a tomb, but has resurrected and ascended unto the Right of Majesty. He reveals judgment, because it means the powers and principalities, all that lay on side of the devil and his angels, have lost. The Son of Man has smashed the serpent’s head. If such things are rejected: that man has not wronged in rejecting Jesus, that He’s still dead, and death reigns, then they’ve blasphemed.
I know this is conflating two different passages of Scripture, but bare with me. The miraculous healing of Jesus, the Anointed One, the Man of the Spirit, was that very same testimony, though in a limited capacity. Jesus revealed that He indeed was of God, and that in undoing the curse, that is undoing the power of death, the Spirit testified of His majesty.
Therefore, in hearing the call to follow Jesus, and taking up our cross, we’re entered into that new tree. That is what baptism is: death and resurrection with Jesus the Messiah, a symbol infused with power and reality. We’re not elect, but elect in Christ. This doesn’t mean it isn’t the Lord who wills and calls, but we receive such within time.
I’m not limiting what the Lord sees and knows, but we’re not the judges. We defer judgment to the King who says “all whom my Father has given me shall come, and any who come to me I shall not cast out”. If we’re shackled to creational logic, as if God was just one more being amongst beings, then this makes no sense. But how could we understand that it is our Heavenly Father who feeds the birds, when we clearly see them pecking about for worms and other insects!
Therefore atonement may be said to be limited to those with the Messiah, but it is open to all, actually and truly. Again, there may be people who go about casting out demons, or proclaiming gospel, and end up meeting Jesus face to face only to hear: “I never knew you, depart from me law-breaker”. In fact, John put it in his letter that the brothers who departed and abandoned Christ were never really brothers in the first place.
This leads to my second point. Bonhoeffer called the commands in the Sermon on the Mount an “impossible possibility”. That is we’re given an imperative that we can’t do. Well, who does do and fulfill such commands? None other than the Commander Himself. The point is that it is not the old-tree that lives in such light, but the Root which is the True Tree. When we little branches are engrafted in, we can, by the life-giving sap, begin to live such. What has changed?
Love. Humanity, created to be in the Image who is love, is to be fully and flourishingly such in its other-oriented love. It is participating in this divine-life that we are really living humanly. Thus, our election is made sure and firm in how we love, for such is living humanly. This is not a call to introspection and analysis of works. The works issue is bogus anyway. We’re not on a treadmill of merit, but rather participate in the salvation wrought. To not love, as defined in the life and work of Jesus, is to not really be living, but bearing about a shadowy image.
However this is where the here-and-now meets the hope for a future. We’re engrafted and added, but such is a process. At once we’re apart of the tree, and, at the same time, becoming apart of the tree. We’re participating in the full humanity of Jesus, and learning to live humanly in the process, that is, we’re learning to love. This could be an existential crisis moment, and yea, Jesus even tells us to count the cost. However, the hope is not on our ability to hold on, but the strength of the thing being held onto. In other terms, it’s not our faith that saves us, but our trusting on the faithfulness of our King.
Paul thus tells us that we’re predestined to conform to the image of the Son. If we look to Jesus, like the bronze serpent in the desert, we see the hope of our future redemption. Just as Jesus was risen, so we will rise. It doesn’t mean we don’t work out such a salvation with fear and trembling. But it’s a confidence to trek ahead, and follow Christ without worry of losing such a redemption. The calling of God is effectual and He doesn’t lose His sheep.
If this post seemed to confusingly flip between the sovereign working of God, and man’s movements in this world: good, I’ve done some justice to the biblical evidence. We who do follow Jesus are branches pulled out of massa damnata by sheer grace, but the hope of such is open to all. Christ is the ground of our being chosen, and in such we are to be alive. Thus Augustine’s (in)famous statement:
“Lord, give what you command, and command what you will”
Amen.