Election continues to be a contentious issue for many in the orthodox Christian church; I don’t intend on alleviating that tension here. In this post I will focus on contrasting the classical Reformed understanding of election with Thomas Torrance’s classically Christologically concentrated orientation of election (the reason I say ‘classically’ in regard to Torrance is because his doctrine reaches back into the patristic period with particular inspiration provided by none other than Athanasius).

The Westminster Confession of Faith says this with reference to election/reprobation:

Chapter III

Of God’s Eternal Decree

I. God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.

II. Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions; yet has He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.

III. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death.

IV. These angels and men, thus predestinated, and foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed, and their number so certain and definite, that it cannot be either increased or diminished.

V. Those of mankind that are predestinated unto 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, has chosen, in Christ, unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith, or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature, as conditions, or causes moving Him thereunto; and all to the praise of His glorious grace.

VI. As God has appointed the elect unto glory, so has He, by the eternal and most free purpose of His will, foreordained all the means thereunto. Wherefore, they who are elected, being fallen in Adam, are redeemed by Christ, 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, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only.

VII. The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extends or withholds mercy, as He pleases, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.

VIII. The doctrine of this high mystery of predestination is to be handled with special prudence and care, that men, attending the will of God revealed in His Word, and yielding obedience thereunto, may, from the certainty of their effectual vocation, be assured of their eternal election. So shall this doctrine afford matter of praise, reverence, and admiration of God; and of humility, diligence, and abundant consolation to all that sincerely obey the Gospel.[1]

Pretty common stuff for anyone who has had any exposure to classical Calvinism, five-point-calvinism so on and so forth. The focus of election is on particular individual people from the mass (as Augustine would say) of humanity. Beyond just its assertion as the biblical reality what stands behind the classical soteriological understanding is a theory of causation primarily given legs by Aristotelian modus in its late medieval and post-medieval forms. In other words what we get is a pretty mechanical understanding of how God relates to his creation (through decrees). The driving requirement for this type of relationship between God and humanity, in regard to its mechanical logico-causal nature, is a need to keep God immutable, impassible, and simple as that is defined not by Revelation but by Hellenistic categories relative to Pure Being.

Contrariwise, Thomas Torrance offers a doctrine of election that is genuinely shaped by God’s Self-revelation and the relational, personalist, dynamic reality inherent therein. Torrance also appeals to a certain theory of cosmology when he speaks of election, but he does so more in the negative rather than the positive. What I mean is that he uses Einstein’s theory of relativity to relativize something like what we get in Ptolemaic or Newtonian understandings of causality vis-à-vis the universe when we think of how God might engage with the creation (as illustrated by electromagnetic field theory etc.). As a result Torrance has the means by which to offer a theory of election that can indeed be driven by a Logocentric understanding of God’s relation to a world which he created out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) thus being fully contingent upon his Word in which the logoi participate in and from his Logos. Torrance writes:

Eternal election becomes temporal event confronting people in Jesus

Once again, we cannot now pursue this further into the doctrine of the church, which is the doctrine of the corporate election moving into history as the body of Christ. But at this point we must look back again at the incarnate life of Jesus Christ in light of the threefold mysterion, prosthesis and koinonia. The eternal prothesis of God has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, has become history. In Jesus Christ, the prothesis became encounter, became decision in the living temporal relations with which we men and women have to do in our interactions with one another. Election is the person of Christ, true God and true man in one person, the union of the Father and the Son in eternal love incarnated in our flesh, and bodied forth among sinners. And so men and women in history, in their temporal actions and relations, in the midst of their temporal choices and decisions, are confronted by the Word made flesh, with the eternal decision of God’s eternal love. In Jesus Christ, therefore, eternal election has become temporal event.

Election is thus not some static act in a still point of eternity. Election is eternal pre-destination, moving out of its eternal prius into time as living act that from moment to moment confronts people in Jesus Christ. This is living act that cannot be abstracted from the person of Christ. On the contrary, here the person and act of Jesus Christ are one. Election is Christ the beloved son of the Father, and the act of election in him is once and for all, a perfectum praesens, an eternal decision that is ever present. God’s eternal decision does not halt or come to rest at any particular point or result, but is dynamic , and ever takes the field in its identity with the living person of Christ. As such election is contemporary with us, acting upon us and acting upon us through our reactions in the personal relations of men and women which it invades and which it sets into crisis. It does that by facing them with the ultimate decision which God has already taken in his love on our behalf and now sets forth in Jesus Christ, but it confronts us with that ultimate decision in such a way that we are summoned in decision before it. What do you think of Christ? Who do people say that I, the Son of Man, am? Who do you say that I am? That is precisely what we see taking place in the whole ministry of Jesus as he penetrated into people’s lives by his compassion, and revelation, and confronted them as the truth in the form of personal being, as election in the form of personal being.

That is the dimension of depth in which we are to see everything that Jesus did and said and was during the three years of his ministry as he pressed toward the cross, and the cross itself we see supremely in its setting in that context of the divine mysterion, prothesis, and koinonia.[2]

Clearly an alternative way to think election, but not one that is foreign to the tradition in the church; we just must look back further beyond medieval times; we must look back to certain patristics, primarily Athanasius (and later, Maximus the Confessor).

It’s not as subjective though as it might seem. If Torrance is right to appeal to Einstein rather than Ptolemy (and Aristotle) when it comes to thinking about cosmogony and causation relative to its application in Christian theology, then to think of the world from purely mechanical means (and thus not personal)  is much too reductionistic and not correlate with the way the universe, relative to the order (taxis) God has placed within it, works.

From God’s Self-Revelation in Jesus Christ we know that God relates and mediates himself to the world, and us creatures in it, not through decrees, but through his dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Rather than being droned into the belief in order to be “orthodox” one must simply follow the normal means of theological inquiry ostensibly provided for by some sort of monolith reading and appropriation of the trad[ition], it is advisable, and Protestant, to continuously engage with the tradition of the church through, yes the patterns provided by something like Chalcedon, but to understand that such patterns are pregnant and inchoate in such a way that they can be continuously life giving and reinvigorating for the theological task. I submit to you that Torrance’s offering of election is an example of how one can engage from withIN the trad, but not allow certain accretions of that trad to out-dictate what the pressures of God’s own life, and its implicates, ought to dictate as we continuously are pushed up against him in dialogical mode (prayer) and encounter with his glorious Self in the face of Jesus Christ.

[1] Westminster Confession of Faith, Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics, accessed 12-17-2017.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 179-80.