In our Protestant Reformed circles, we often orbit around terms like unconditional election, and its causal theory of determinism, as that is funded more broadly by an Aristotelian theory of causation. For classical Calvinists this total locus can be described as, what Barth identifies in the Latin as, the decretrum absolutum (absolute decree) of double predestination. This is the idea, roughly, that God, based on the gratuitous purposes of His own inner-divine will, chooses some (the narrow few) for election, and others (the broad many) for reprobation, and an eternal conclusion that results in the conscious torment of hell. This, in nuce, is how classical Calvinists (and Arminians, from different emphases) understand a doctrine of election and reprobation; they think it from God’s decree vis-à-vis individual people in abstraction from God’s humanity for them in Jesus Christ.

Alternatively, as an Athanasian Reformed, I would propose an understanding wherein all of humanity is Christologicam determinatam (‘Christologically determined’). This is really nothing new, if you have been reading me (or Barth or Torrance) for any amount of time. But I think this reality needs to be constantly reiterated, insofar that the deus ex machina of classical Calvinist doctrina on theological determinism is simply presumed at every turn in such environs. In an effort to re-alert the reader to what just in fact it means for humanity to be Christologicam determinatam, I thought it would be prudent to hear from Karl Barth, once more, as he cogently distills just what it means for God to choose all of humanity for Himself; that is, to choose all of humanity as first His humanity as primordially pre-destined for Himself the ‘Word to be incarnate’ (Logos incarnandus). He writes:

The true man who lived and lives here as the man of God and therefore in direct unity with God as the God of man, did not and does not live for himself, but as the “first-born of all creation” (Col 1:15), as the last Adam who in order is the first (1 Cor 15:45), he lived and lives for all men in the place of all. All people, therefore, are elected, justified, sanctified and called in Him.[1]

And:

In Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or of God from man. Rather, in Him we encounter the history, the dialogue, in which God and man meet together and are together, the reality of the covenant mutually contracted, preserved and fulfilled by them. Jesus Christ is in His one Person, as true God, man’s loyal partner, and as true man, God’s. He is the Lord humbled for communion with man and likewise the Servant exalted to communion with God. He is the Word spoken from the loftiest, most luminous transcendence and likewise the Word heard in the deepest darkest immanence. He is both, without their being confused but also without their being divided.[2]

This type of determination doesn’t come from an abstract gratuitous decree of God ‘behind the back of Jesus,’ instead this is a trinitarian determination, a pre-destination of God’s life for the world that He freely determined for Himself, and thus His history for the world in the person of Jesus Christ. This determination is personalist and thus dynamic, and not ontologically independent or at competition with who He is in se (‘in Himself’). Christological determinism, if we should call it that, is one that sees the person and work of God in Christ for the world together rather than apart. In contrast to the ‘absolute decree,’ that thinks humanity from some abstract determination of God apart from who He is for the world in Jesus Christ, Christological determinism is rife with the resplendence of God’s one being (ousia) working as One God, in perichoretic and coinherent union, for the one genuine humanity before God, as that has been freely assumed (assumptio carnis) by the eternal Son, Jesus Christ. The Christological determination to be with us, is first funded by His choice to be us, as both the electing God, and elected human as Barth so eloquently articulated this previously.

I set these two courses before you this day. Is it the decretum absolutum or the Christologicam determinatam? The former ends up separating the work of Jesus from the person of Jesus, thus reducing Jesus to an organan, a mere instrument of salvation. In this schemata Jesus becomes the ‘means’ by which God (the Father) purchases the elect for eternal justification. As such, Jesus might as well be a demi-urge of Gnostic flora and imagination in the absolute decree environ. While latterly, to be Christologically determined entails the notion that Godself, in all of his ineffable resplendence has stooped down in His person and done the work of salvation that we could not do ourselves. He came and personally personalized us in His person for us in Jesus Christ (an/ -enhypostasis). Christological determination thinks God, and His acts, from God rather than from an absolute decree as that is understood through the vestiges of God ostensibly littered about throughout the created order (can-o-worms).

Choose wisely.

[1] Karl Barth, The Christian Life, 125 cited by Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 57.

[2] Karl Barth, Humanity of God, 46-7 cited by Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification, 58-9.