The Demographics of Salvation The Puzzle of Barth, Armstrong and Election

The Demographics of Salvation

The Puzzle of Barth, Armstrong and Election

By Scout

 

Back in 1995, I was fairly well down the road towards leaving Armstrongism.  My journey was done with some trepidation.  I did not trust mainstream Christianity.  I had spent years believing it was grossly pagan.  It made me a little sick to think that I had unwittingly taken a stand against genuine Christianity by following cult “theology.” But I did all right with the transition for a little while. And then I ran into Calvinism.  

TULIP especially bothered me.  This is an acronym for the fundamental soteriological beliefs of Calvinism, including the belief in Election.  The U in TULIP stands for Unconditional Election. Suddenly my interest in Christianity waned.  Picture a balloon deflating and looking sad and flaccid. This was because Calvinism was at the forefront of the Protestant Reformation and Reformed theology advanced the idea that all things are pre-determined by God.  We humans are all like puppets dancing on strings with no free will. I felt that Calvinism was just as much of a cult as Armstrongism.  One had to deal with it.  It needed a disposition in my mind before I could proceed with Christianity.  I eventually arrived at a resolution over some years but the Calvinist view of Election had been the stickiest wicket. 

Now I believe that Calvinist Unconditional Election is right in a narrow but important way. I believe that Christians are elect in the Calvinist sense that God chose them before they ever lived and pre-destined them to be in the First Resurrection.  That may sound like I made it up so it would be good to look at some scriptures.

The Scriptures

Here are the scriptures from the Epistle to the Ephesians.  They are extraordinary: 

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: According as he hath chosen (eklegomai, the verb from which the adjective eklektos is derived) us in him before the foundation of the world (Cosmos), that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated (proorizo) us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will” (KJV, Ephesians 1:3-5)

To demonstrate this is not just Greek-influenced Pauline theology, we have the following statement from the very Jewish Peter:

“Elect (eklektos) according to the foreknowledge (prognosis) of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ:” (KJV,1 Peter 1:2).

Both of these scriptures speak of the members of the Body of Christ.   Paul and Peter use such heady terms as elect, foreknowledge and predestination.  Jesus speaks of the Elect as a separate population with a privileged understanding of the Gospel.  But through Paul and Peter the origination of the Elect is explained.  And the amazing statement is that those people who are now in the Body of Christ, the church, were elected to this state before the foundation of the Cosmos.  This means that somehow they had to exist before the foundation of the Cosmos.  And we know from the Book of Revelation that Christians will be in the first resurrection, will be priests and will reign with Christ for eternity.  And important to say, for reasons you will read later, that the non-Elect will not have these experiences. 

So, what we have is a demographic statement.  The Elect is a population of people chosen prior to the creation of the Cosmos to be servants of God and to be deployed on earth at various times and places as suits God’s plans (Church in the Wilderness or New Testament Church).  While that may seem to be a straightforward characterization, Election can be a complicated issue that raises many questions.  I am going to now briefly examine and question the views on Election of Karl Barth and Herbert W. Armstrong (HWA).  I have chosen these two because their views will cover the various denominations that stem from the Armstrongist Worldwide Church of God.

Karl Barth and Election – Elect through the Vicarious Humanity of Christ

About twelve years ago, I encountered the view of Karl Barth on Election.  I did not readily understand it and I still regard it as being novel.  I would not assert that Barth’s view is in error but I do regard it as not being exegetically as strong as some of the views found in mainstream Christianity, for instance.  Briefly, Barth regards the Triune God as the Elector and Jesus as the Elected Man.  Jesus then mediates Election to those who follow him.  This fits well with the doctrine of the Vicarious Humanity or Christ which centers on Jesus and which I adhere to.  Those who follow Jesus were called and predestined as stated in Ephesians 1 in Barth’s view.  He just has a novel way in which Election is applied.   But I have a problem with Barth’s view. 

The Barthian approach seems to be that everyone who comes to the mediating Christ becomes a part of the Elect, whether in the First Resurrection or the Second Resurrection. I believe that departs from the intent of scripture.  I think that people who are in the Elect become Christians during this Age and rise in the First Resurrection (Rev 20:4-5). They form the cohort of the chosen. Are they somehow inherently different from other people?  I don’t know.  And the people who rise up in the Second Resurrection are non-Elect.  Election applies to particular people and is not universal. 

I do believe that the Second Resurrection is also a pathway to salvation.  To make the mediation of Election a part of the salvific process for everyone is to assert that Election is focused on general salvation when it is actually focused on the First Resurrection.  This creates a demographic issue: the population of the saved is misidentified as the Elect when only part of that population is Elect.  Among the saved, the Elect will be priests reigning with Christ. (A mistranslation has it that some will be kings.   But the phrase kings and priests really should be translated as “kingdom of priests.” One might argue that in a theocracy it makes scant difference.)  

Herbert W. Armstrong and Election – It’s about When One is Called

HWA refers to Predestination rather than Election. I could not find a reference to Election in the writing HWA personally authored but my research efforts were only moderate.  Predestination is near enough to Election for this purpose.  Both ideas are rooted in God choosing. 

I believe that overall, HWA interprets Election accurately.  But there is a nuance that I think should be addressed. HWA wrote, “Predestination has to do with BEING CALLED. Not with being saved or lost” (HWA, “Predestination – Does the Bible Teach It”, Ambassador College, 1957).  My interpretation of what HWA is advocating is that a believer is predestined by God before the foundation of the Cosmos to be called at a certain time and nothing further.  At the time you are called, then your salvation becomes a matter of grace, faith and your generation of righteous works – the typical Armstrongist view – Jesus plus your own efforts to qualify.  The soteriology is wrong but the framework of events seems to reflect scripture.  But this is not quite the scenario that Paul described in Romans 8:29-30:

“For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.  And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

First, God is doing this.  This is not something that people choose to do.  And the implication is that God does this without loss of anyone who is a member of the Elect.  People do not choose to become members of the Body of Christ; they are called to it.  We might say: the set of people God predestined is the same set he called and the same set he justified and the same set he glorified.  This is a tight sequence and it is difficult to exegete it any other way.  I am not sure why glorification, which is future, is mentioned like it has already taken place.  This may simply mean planned glorification rather than actual glorification. 

What this means is that predestination doesn’t just extend as far as calling and no further as HWA asserts.  It means that predestination is the first step in an Election sequence that runs all the way to salvation.  And it is the same population throughout.  Nobody is lost. I know there are examples in the New Testament of people falling away after they apparently became Christians.  All I can think is that we do not have their full story and God must have recovered them later.  Armstrongism would permit some attrition of the original population as the process goes forward.  Armstrongism does assert a hell in which annihilation happens to some people.

The Upshot

I must label this writing an opinion piece.  It can’t be really anything else.  Election has been the subject of debate since the late 4^th and early 5^th centuries.   I am looking at only a little part of the debate in my essay. My goal was to raise a couple of salient issues.  What is important to see is that different theories of Election can result in different populations of the Elect, with regard to both size and profile.  The scripture goes only so far in developing the idea of the Elect and then trails off.  As always, we see through a glass darkly.  Yet, Election is an extraordinary doctrine in Christian belief. Karl Barth believes it is the central doctrine of Christian belief because it is about nothing less than God and his Will for humanity.  But it does not get much attention.  In my decades in the Worldwide Church of God, I do not recall ever hearing a sermon on Election.  Personally, I think the belief in love beats Election by a ways.  I believe that Election, however, is very important and, without a doubt, deserves much more analysis and air time than it gets.