Theopedia

Election

“He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.”

— Ephesians 1:4

Definition

Election, in Reformed theology, is the doctrine that God, before the foundation of the world, chose out of fallen humanity a definite number of particular people to be saved through Christ, a choice grounded in his own good pleasure and grace rather than anything foreseen in them, including foreseen faith.1 Election is the positive side of God’s eternal decree concerning salvation; the decree’s negative side, God’s just passing over of the rest of fallen humanity, is reprobation. Together with predestination, election also secures the means, calling, faith, and perseverance, by which the elect are actually brought to glory.

Confessional Witness

The Reformed confessions state this doctrine in substantial agreement with one another. The Second London Baptist Confession (1677/1689) devotes its third chapter, “Of God’s Decree,” to it, closely following the Westminster Confession’s own chapter of the same title.2 God has decreed “all things, whatsoever comes to pass,” yet without becoming “the author of sin” or removing “the liberty or contingency of second causes.”2 Within that decree,

“Those of mankind that are predestinated to life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to his eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of his will, hath chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of his mere free grace and love, without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving him thereunto.”3

The confession adds that election is not bare favor toward an undefined mass but includes the means by which the elect are actually saved: “they who are elected… are effectually called unto faith in Christ, by his Spirit working in due season, are justified, adopted, sanctified, and kept by his power through faith unto salvation; neither are any other redeemed by Christ… but the elect only.”4

The Westminster Confession states the same doctrine in nearly identical wording, adding that “the rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of his own will… to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sins.”5 The Canons of Dordt, drawn up specifically to answer the Arminian Remonstrance, give the sharpest positive statement:

“Election is the unchangeable purpose of God, whereby, before the foundation of the world, he hath out of mere grace, according to the sovereign good pleasure of his own will, chosen, from the whole human race, which had fallen through their own fault… a certain number of persons to redemption in Christ.”1

The Belgic Confession states the same doctrine more briefly, framed as the manifestation of both God’s mercy and his justice: “all the posterity of Adam being thus fallen into perdition and ruin… God then did manifest himself… merciful and just: Merciful, since he delivers and preserves from this perdition all, whom he, in his eternal and unchangeable counsel of mere goodness, hath elected in Christ Jesus our Lord, without any respect to their works: Just, in leaving others in the fall and perdition wherein they have involved themselves.”6 The Canons of Dordt add that, rightly received, “this doctrine of election is so far from encouraging remissness” that it instead affords believers “unspeakable consolation.”7

Biblical Basis

The New Testament describes God’s saving choice with a cluster of related terms: eklogē (election, choosing), proorismos (predestination), prothesis (purpose), eudokia (good pleasure), and prognōsis (foreknowledge).8 Paul tells the Ephesians that the Father “chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:4-5, 11). The same grammar recurs across the New Testament: believers are “chosen” (Mark 13:20; John 15:16; James 2:5), “predestined” (Rom. 8:29-30), objects of God’s “purpose” (Rom. 9:11; 2 Tim. 1:9) and “good pleasure” (Matt. 11:26; Eph. 1:5, 9), and known by his “foreknowledge” (Rom. 8:29; 11:2; 1 Pet. 1:2), a word that in these contexts carries the sense of God’s prior loving regard rather than bare advance information.8 Acts 13:48 states plainly that “as many as were appointed to eternal life believed,” and Paul tells the Thessalonians that “God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved” (2 Thess. 2:13).

Paul’s fullest argument comes in Romans 9. Before Jacob and Esau “were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls,” Scripture already declared that “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Rom. 9:11-13). The same chapter grounds God’s dealings with Pharaoh in his own sovereign purpose (Rom. 9:17-18) and answers the charge of injustice not with an appeal to foreseen human choice but to God’s rights as Creator: “Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?” (Rom. 9:20-21). The chapter closes by contrasting Gentiles who attained righteousness by faith with Israel, who “pursued a law that would lead to righteousness” but did not reach it, attributing the difference to God’s sovereign call rather than human effort (Rom. 9:30-32; 11:5-7).

Old Testament history already displays the same pattern before any of these terms are used. God’s choice runs through Seth rather than Cain, Shem rather than his brothers, Isaac rather than Ishmael, and Jacob rather than Esau, culminating in the election of Israel itself as “a people for his treasured possession… not because you were more in number than any other people… but it is because the LORD loves you” (Deut. 7:6-8).9 The choice precedes and explains the history; the history does not create the choice.

Historical Development

Augustine, Pelagius, and the patristic settlement

The doctrine’s post-biblical formulation begins with the controversy between Augustine and Pelagius in the early fifth century. Pelagius denied that Adam’s sin was imputed to his descendants and held that the human will remains free, after the fall, to choose good or evil without the aid of grace; on this view, predestination reduces to God’s foreknowledge of who will freely believe.10 Augustine, arriving at his position through the study of Romans, held instead that God’s elect “are not chosen because they believed but in order that they might believe.”10 Pelagianism was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and again at the Synod of Orange in 529, though Orange left the full extent of human corruption unsettled enough that semi-Pelagian tendencies persisted through the medieval church.10

Trent and the hardening of Rome’s position

At the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the Roman Catholic Church formally affirmed that fallen human free will is not entirely lost, that prevenient grace may be resisted, and that a believer who cooperates with grace merits eternal life by a “merit of condignity.”11 Trent’s own canons anticipate and explicitly condemn the Reformed doctrine of unconditional election, and teach that whether one is among the elect cannot ordinarily be known apart from special revelation.11

The Reformation and the Synod of Dordt

John Calvin (1509-1564) defended unconditional election at length against Albertus Pighius (1543) and Jerome Bolsec (1552), and it was largely through his influence that the doctrine entered the confessions of the Reformed churches generally.12 Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), a pastor and later professor at Leiden, came to read Paul’s argument in Romans 9 as concerning God’s choice of classes of persons rather than the unconditional election of particular individuals, a reading that put him in direct debate with the Reformed theologian Franciscus Junius.13 After Arminius’s death, his followers drafted the Five Articles of Remonstrance (1610), teaching that God’s election is conditioned on his foreknowledge of who would freely believe and persevere. The Synod of Dordt, meeting from November 1618 to May 1619, examined and rejected the Remonstrance, producing the Canons of Dordt as its confessional answer; the Synod’s own judgment on the logical order of God’s decrees was infralapsarian, treating the decree to elect as following the decree to permit the fall, though it did not condemn the minority supralapsarian position as unorthodox.14 The Particular Baptists who drafted the Second London Confession in 1677, republished in 1689, adopted the Westminster Confession’s chapter on God’s decree as their own, with only minor wording changes, situating their own confession within this wider settlement rather than departing from it.2

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic

Following Trent, Rome teaches that grace assists but does not unilaterally determine the sinner’s response; the elect are ultimately those God foresaw would freely cooperate with the grace offered to them, and human merit, enabled by grace, plays a real part in salvation’s final outcome.11 The Council of Trent has its own dedicated treatment of this position.

Arminian (conditional election)

The Five Articles of Remonstrance teach that God’s election of individuals to salvation is conditioned on his foreknowledge of their free, Spirit-enabled faith and perseverance, rather than being unconditional: God “hath determined, out of the fallen, sinful race of men, to save in Christ… those who… shall believe on this his Son Jesus, and shall persevere in this faith.” Arminianism holds that this preserves both divine foreknowledge and genuine human freedom, since the ultimate ground of the difference between the saved and the lost is the individual’s own, grace-enabled choice rather than an unconditional divine decree.

A related minority position, with roots in Arminius’s own reading of Romans 9 as concerning classes rather than individuals, holds that Christ himself is properly the one elect person, and that individuals become elect only derivatively, by being united to him through their own free response to the gospel; corporate election of this kind is sometimes argued from Paul’s language about a still-elect, hardened Israel in Romans 11:28-29.15 One dissertation surveying this reading against Paul’s own argument in Romans 9-11 concludes that individual election remains primarily in view there, without excluding a real corporate dimension to Israel’s own election.15

Objections and Responses

Election makes God unjust for choosing some and passing over others. Paul anticipates this exact objection in Romans 9 and answers it, not by appeal to any merit or foreseen response distinguishing the elect from the reprobate, but by asserting God’s own sovereign right: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy” (Rom. 9:15), a right he exercises even in Pharaoh’s case (Rom. 9:17-18).16 Since Jacob and Esau were, at the time of God’s choice, “not yet born, neither having done any good or evil,” Reformed theology holds that no difference in the two men themselves accounts for the distinction; the whole difference lies in the will of the one who calls (Rom. 9:11).16

Election destroys human liberty and moral accountability. This is the second objection Paul answers in the same passage, and he declines to answer it by appeal to human reason. Instead he asserts God’s rights as Creator over the creature and the universal guilt of all men as sinners (Rom. 9:19-24): the potter has power over the clay to make “one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use.”16 The Second London Baptist Confession similarly insists that God’s eternal decree, though it renders all things certain, is compatible with genuine human liberty, since it does not remove but rather establishes “the liberty or contingency of second causes.”2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Canons of Dordt (Dordrecht, 1619), First Head of Doctrine, art. 7. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Second London Baptist Confession, 3.5. ↩

  4. Second London Baptist Confession, 3.6. ↩

  5. Westminster Confession of Faith, chap. 3, sec. 7, quoted in Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 11, q. 22. ↩

  6. The Belgic Confession (Rouen, 1561), art. 16, “Of Eternal Election.” ↩

  7. Canons of Dordt, First Head of Doctrine, art. 6. ↩

  8. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩2

  9. Bavinck, chap. 9. ↩

  10. Bavinck, chap. 9. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  11. Bavinck, chap. 9. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  12. Bavinck, chap. 9: “It is largely thanks to Calvin that the doctrine of predestination was included in the confessions of all the Reformed churches.” ↩

  13. Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87. ↩

  14. Bavinck, chap. 9. ↩

  15. Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery of Israel’s Election and Hardening,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 132-190. ↩ ↩2

  16. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 11, qq. 21, 25-26. ↩ ↩2 ↩3