Following Barth (and Torrance) Evangelical Calvinists, such as myself, work from a Christ conditioned supralapsarian doctrine of election/predestination. That might sound abstract and technical, and it important ways it is; but more importantly it has real life theological and practical implications in regard to who God is in a God/world relation. Cashed out properly, what we can come to see through this is that God’s wrath against sin is not something that must be arbitrarily expiated in order for something to be extinguished in God towards us. Instead it is because of God’s great love and grace that His wrath is kindled, and thus He finds a way in Himself, in the Son, to kill what would threaten the love relationship He desires to have with us. This is the source of God’s wrath; that the ‘very good’ He created in His image, imago Christi, was thrust into a world of ‘disconciliation’ to the point that this relationship with us was lost. Not only was this fellowship lost, but it was ultimately destructive and eternally damning to those who God would have eternal relationship with in the participatio He originally intended for in the creation; one that He brought back in the new-creation of resurrection in Jesus Christ. But this is the sort of theological trajectory a healthy parsing of a supralapsarian election can result in if we are careful to think it through the analogy of Incarnation.

Paul Hinlicky, as he is setting the stage for further development in his own (Lutheran) work, writes the following:

if Jesus Christ is not God’s second thought, an improvisation, as it were, then the wrath of God which God overcomes in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is anticipated in God’s eternal self-determination to create, redeem, and fulfill the world through the missions of Christ and His Spirit. This thesis agrees with Karl Barth’s Christocentric revision of the doctrine of election on the basis of the Lutheran teaching of the universality of the atonement, as I argued in Paths Not Taken.[1] Here I would add that this grounding of God’s becoming in time in the eternal Trinity’s self-determination issues in the kind of meditation on “God’s Lover for the World” that Bethge placed at the beginning of Bonhoeffer’s posthumous Ethics, taking the word “love” with the connotation of mercy, as laid out above. “Love is the reconciliation of man with God in Jesus Christ. The disunion of men with God, with other men, with the world and with themselves, is at an end. Man’s origin is given back to him. . . . And so love is something which happens to man, something passive, something over which he does not himself dispose. . . . Love means the understanding of the transformation of one’s entire existence by God; it means being drawn into the world as it lives and must live before God and in God. Love, therefore, is not man’s choice, but it is the election of man by God.” As election is election to membership in, and service (Eph. 2:10) on behalf of, the Beloved Community (Eph. 1:3-10), the eternal divine counsel is the starting point for a new kind of Christian “ethics” (before “good and evil”) which Bonhoeffer envisaged, i.e., concrete exploration of a qualitatively new form of life, “being drawn into the world as it lives and must live before God and in God.”[2]

As we read with Hinlicky, if we are attuned to such things, we can read apocalyptic theology between the lines of what he is writing. With his emphasis on ‘Man’s origin given back to him,’ and its passive reception vis-à-vis God, we sense how creational telos is all important in Hinlicky’s thinking; even as that is being riffed on from thinkers like Barth and Luther, not to mention, Bonhoeffer.

It is this reality that I find theologically rich: when we remove ourselves from the forensic frame, in regard to who God is towards and for us, what we end up with is a much richer conception of what in fact this whole plotline of life is about. We come to understand, if we adopt this evangelical framing of God, that God is not an angry despot with bloodlust electing to reprobate particular individuals throughout the annuls of history in order to find this sort of satisfaction. We realize through viewing God in His Self-revelation in Christ that God’s whole candor has always already been to be in deep koinonially-bonded union with us, us His counterpoints in whom He has desired to shower His love upon on in unconditional bounty. God is not first Judge, but Father; and when He is Judge He has freely elected to be the Judge judged in order to restore, but more, to recreate an eternally bountiful relationship wherein His Son is the forever God-human wherein all of creation’s purpose is grounded and actualized as God, in Christ, brings us into union with Him; indeed, as He has brought that union to Himself in the hypostatic union that coinhered and coinheres eternally in the Son. This is the good news, the Evangel that a properly delineated doctrine of election ought to provide for. The evangel requires a grammar, and I think what we have been engaging with in this post presents us with a hopeful grammar that helps us to better appreciate what in fact has been accomplished as we have focused on the Who of the Gospel based in its inner logic.

There is no doubt that God has wrath, and that He is just. But it is important to understand just what in fact defines or frames that. Indeed, it is the frame itself that allows us to comprehend, in intelligible ways, why God is angry to begin with. He isn’t angry because He is a Judge, or as a Judge; He is angry as a Father is angry when their child becomes wayward, when that child gets into a prodigal morass such that they end up in the coral of cob-eating swine. This is the alternative that we have sought to offer in Evangelical Calvinism. What counts as classical theistic or classical Calvinist theology these days offers the other alternative. It presents a view of God that is grounded in a mechanistic decretive understanding of a God who is juridical to the core. He might have love, but only a love that is purchased through a payment made. The view of God we offer, and the one Hinlicky has helpfully highlighted for us, sees God as loving us first that we might love Him.

[1] I finished this book, Paths Not Taken, by Hinlicky, a few months ago. I’d highly recommend it to you the reader. It represents an even more constructive engagement than does the current book by Hinlicky.

[2] Paul R. Hinlicky, Luther and the Beloved Community: A Path for Christian Theology after Christendom (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 113-14.