Predestination is Plural

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The transition from Eastertide to Pentecost is not simply a matter of the narrative flow from Luke’s Gospel to Luke’s Book of Acts nor is it a matter of sequential chronology on the liturgical calendar. There is a logical dependence between Eastertide, when the church receives the full revelation of the Lord Jesus’s identity, and Pentecost, when the Spirit sends the church forth to gospel. As ludicrous as it sounds, the church is not merely the chosen transmitter of the gospel, she is herself, the creeds profess, part of that gospel’s content.

God has elected the church to proclaim the gospel. Likewise, God has elected the church to be an item of that very gospel.

This is so because Jesus is both personally the second identity of the Triune God and what Augustine called the totus Christus within the church. The totus Christus— the whole Christ— is the Lord Jesus risen as the head of his body, the church gathered around him in loaf and cup. Therefore, if the total Christ includes his body, the church is not what the theologians have termed an opus ad extra, a work in creation outside of God. Nor does the church belong to what those same theologians refer to as the economic Trinity, the outward and visible manifestation of the Triune life.

To put it as bluntly as possible:

The church as Christ’s body is not a metaphor.

It’s a metaphysical assertion.

Because the second person of the Trinity is the totus Christus, the body of Christ, the church, is inseparable from God’s own identity.

As scripture attests, the Father alone is prior to all being. In begetting an other, the Father speaks the creative Word. In creating, the Father orders all things and directs all things to the End that is the totus Christus. All of this is the straightforward witness of scripture:

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and FOR him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church.”

The Father’s originating election mandates the church.

That is, God predestines the people called church.

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This is what Robert Jenson contends when he writes:

“The unmediated and wholly antecedent will that is the Father dictates there be the church, as something other than the world or the Kingdom, and that this church be exactly the one that exists.”

The church is constitutive of God’s very own identity. This is why Karl Barth, reworking Calvinism’s notion of predestination, made the doctrine of election the hinge upon which the entire doctrine of God turns. God predestines the church. As odd as this claim may strike us, knowing as we do what a poor vessel this clay jar has proven over two millennia, it is, in fact, the foundational premise of St. Augustine’s two polities in the City of God. The church is “predestined to rule eternally with God.” The cities of this earth, by contrast, are predestined to pass away (so it’s silly for us to spend so much energy perpetuating partisan antagonisms).

In electing to be the Father of this particular Son, God predestines the church.

Many have tried to render this claim less audacious by positing the so-called doctrine of the invisible church. Christ’s true body, this attempt suggests, the actual disciples versus those just going to church because their spouse makes them, cannot be discerned in this age. The desire for an invisible church is the desire for a church without sin, and, just so, Christians without need of a savior.

As Jenson jokes:

“The church is not an invisible entity; she is, if anything, the all too visible gathering of sinners around the loaf and the cup. What is invisible is that this visible entity is in fact what she claims to be, the body of Christ.”

Once again the claim: in electing to be the Father of this particular Son, God predestines the church. An implication of the dogma emerges immediately.

Predestination is plural.

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And here we can glimpse just how the church invoked the doctrine of predestination as a comfort.

Predestination proclaimed the assurance, no matter what trials and tribulations afflicted the community of believers, no what losses and schisms she suffers, the church will nevertheless abide.

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“The church is predestined to abide, finally in God,” Melanchthon insisted, “the world’s polities (ie, the world’s POLITICS) are predestined to perish.” Predestination, then, is absolutely not an abstract doctrine, disconnected from Jesus Christ, primarily about the fate of individuals, as though God is a cosmic sorting hat. Predestination is a concrete doctrine about the Father’s election of Jesus Christ and so of his body, the church.

Predestination names the opposite work of sorting. Predestination names the Father’s decision to gather all the motley crew whom the Son has the poor taste to call his friends.

Or, as Paul puts it prettier in Ephesians, “He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.” Augustine said it even better, “Just this One [Jesus] is predestined, to be our head, and so many are predestined, to be his members.”

These two choosings are one event in God.

In other words, Jesus, the God-who-is-human, is a decisive event in God’s own life and the church, with the very unimpressive individuals who comprise this church, is the body of the person Jesus who is the same event in God.

Once the doctrine of predestination is presented, the question always rises nonetheless, “But how do I know I am among the elect?”

The fatal (and frightening) mistake made by ideas of individual predestination is that they posit a person’s predestination by God as a single event in eternity back before the actual events that comprise a person’s life, making that person’s reception of the gospel and his or her baptism into it inconsequential. However, such understandings of before and after are insufficient for the scope of the gospel’s evocation of Jesus’s pre-existence or his identity as the totus Christus.

As Robert Jenson writes:

“It is not that God has already decided whether I am or am not of his community. He will decide and so has decided; and has decided and so will decide; and so decides within created time. The eternal pre- of Christ’s existence, which is identical with the pre- of predestination, occurs also within time, as the Resurrection and as the contingency and divine agency of Israel’s and the church’s proclamation and prayer, visible and audible. Thus, to the penitent’s question, The confessor’s right answer MUST be, “You know because I am about to absolve you and my doing that IS God’s eternal act of decision about you.””

In other words, because the God who predestines is the God of the Bible, divine election is not an event lurking behind or above the event of Christ’s coming to me through the ministration of his body, the church. And that body, the church, is also the place where God applies predestination in the present. Baptism, as Luther said, is the Father’s giving of sheep to the Son’s fold.

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