The Election of Grace: A Riddle without a Resolution?

By Stephen N. Williams

Few issues in Christian theology have sparked as much controversy over the centuries as the question of election. In this book -- the inaugural volume of the Kantzer Lectures in Revealed Theology series -- Stephen Williams offers a rich and nuanced account of the doctrine of election, arguing that we should diminish the role of “system” in Christian theology.

After expounding the Bible’s teaching on election, Williams turns to questions of theological method and substance. He maintains that the subject of predestination must be considered in a wider biblical context than it often is and that we cannot expect to understand election within a comprehensive systematic framework. What matters is the relation of particular truths to the particulars of life, he says, not the systematic relation of truths to each other. Williams draws on and applies the insights of remarkable nineteenth-century Anglican leader Charles Simeon throughout his study, concluding the book with a cogent discussion of Karl Barth on election.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Mar 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781467443272

Stephen N. Williams

Stephen Williams is professor of systematic theology atUnion Theological College, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Book preview

Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Yellow Rose

The Kantzer Lectures in Revealed Theology

Sponsored by the

Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding,

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Series Editors

Thomas H. McCall • Douglas A. Sweeney • Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Published

The Election of Grace: A Riddle without a Resolution?

Stephen N. Williams

The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology

Nicholas Wolterstorff

The Election of Grace

A Riddle without a Resolution?

Stephen N. Williams

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2015 Stephen N. Williams

All rights reserved

Published 2015 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, Stephen N. (Stephen Nantlais)

The election of grace: a riddle without a resolution? / Stephen N. Williams.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8028-3780-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

eISBN 978-1-4674-4327-2 (ePub)

eISBN 978-1-4674-4287-9 (Kindle)

1. Election (Theology) I. Title.

BT810.3.W55 2015

234 — dc23

2014041181

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Series Foreword

Preface

1. Election in the Old Testament

2. New Testament Election

3. Dogmatic Limits

4. Dogmatic Difficulties

Appendix: Karl Barth on Election

Index

Series Foreword

The Kantzer Lectures in Revealed Theology are intended to be the evangelical equivalent of the celebrated Gifford Lectures in natural theology.

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 by a generous provision in Adam Lord Gifford’s will, in which he stipulated that the lectures be held alternately at each of the four universities of Scotland.

Since their inception, the Gifford Lectures have provided a quasi-­institutional, university-based framework for seeking knowledge of God on the basis of science, philosophy, and nature. Taken as a whole, the Gifford Lectures constitute a record of the most important intellectual trends of the twentieth century. However, though Lord Gifford expressed a desire that the lecturers be sincere lovers of and earnest inquirers after truth, he also stipulated that they treat their subject as a strictly natural science, . . . that of infinite Being, without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation.

While agreeing with Lord Gifford’s premise that all people should benefit from the knowledge of God that lies at the root of well-being, the Kantzer Lectures begin where the Gifford Lectures leave off: with a sustained focus on the knowledge of God located in God’s Word, on the self-presentation of the triune God in the history of redemption, and on its scriptural attestation that culminates in the person and history of Jesus Christ.

It is most appropriate that these lectures in revealed theology take their name from the late Kenneth S. Kantzer (1917-2002). Dr. Kantzer’s career spanned the course of the resurgence of North American evangelicalism and was one of the factors that spurred it on. Dr. Kantzer served as professor of biblical and systematic theology at Wheaton College for seventeen years, as Dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for fifteen more, and as editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. In 1984 he returned to Trinity, where he eventually became the first director of a Ph.D. program in theological studies. In each of these roles, he was motivated by a heartfelt desire that theology be of service to the church: Scripture was given to the church, and theology is a necessary work of the church, by the church, in the church, and for the church.

Dr. Kantzer’s most important legacy was not a monetary bequest but a divinity school: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. It was his vision to combine centrist evangelical theological convictions with a commitment to academic excellence. His concern was to help evangelicals major in the majors rather than the minors. In this sense, he was the epitome of the catholic evangelical. (The role of church tradition, he once wrote, is like that of an elder brother in the faith.) He was a model of graciousness who would criticize only after listening charitably. (Differences are not necessarily contradictions.) He was one of the first evangelicals, for example, to go to Basel and learn from Karl Barth. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University, where he wrote a dissertation focused on the knowledge of God in the theology of John Calvin. It is therefore fitting that the lectures that bear his name be located at the institution into which he poured not only the best years of his life, but also his passion, energy, and wisdom.

The Kantzer Lectures speak to what the sociologist Alan Wolfe describes in his book The Transformation of American Religion as the strange disappearance of doctrine in the church. All too often, biblical and theological doctrines have been displaced, discarded, or forgotten in favor of therapeutic, relational, or managerial knowledge drawn less from the canonical Scriptures than from the canon of contemporary popular culture.

The Kantzer Lectures address the crisis of theology in the church. In particular, they confront the powerful, and not entirely unwarranted, prejudice that theology is irrelevant and unrelated to real life. They do this by showing how the knowledge of God derived from revealed theology is indeed practical.

The special focus of the Kantzer Lectures is on the development of doctrine from Scripture and on the ways in which doctrine gives rise to the lived knowledge of God. Given the increasingly complex world in which the church now lives, there is nothing more practical, yet elusive, than Christian wisdom. Hence the aim of the lectures is not to add to the church’s stock of information — who, what, where — but rather to the church’s wisdom and understanding, and hence to the church’s witness and well-being. Revealed theology deals not with arcane or obsolete knowledge; theology is no trivial pursuit. On the contrary, as both Calvin and Kantzer insist, the knowledge of God is intrinsically linked with self-knowledge and with knowing how to live well to God’s glory.

If evangelical theology has a constructive contribution to make to the contemporary church, it is its passion to root Christian thinking and living in the realities of the gospel of Jesus Christ. To focus on revealed theology is not to bury our heads in ancient Palestinian sand, however, but rather to approach our era’s most pressing challenges with the resources of Trinitarian faith. The Kantzer Lectures provide a platform for this kind of Christian thinking, featuring prominent theologians committed to the project of faith seeking understanding, and to making this understanding practical. Hence the remit of the Kantzer Lectures in Revealed Theology: get wisdom; get understanding; get the mind of Christ.

Thomas H. McCall

Douglas A. Sweeney

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Preface

Out of the depths I cry to you, O L

ord

;

O Lord, hear my voice.

Let your ears be attentive

to my cry for mercy.

If you, O L

ord

, kept a record of sins,

O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness;

therefore you are feared.

I wait for the L

ord

, my soul waits,

and in his word I put my hope.

My soul waits for the Lord

more than watchmen wait for the morning,

more than watchmen wait for the morning.

O Israel, put your hope in the L

ord

,

for with the L

ord

is unfailing love

and with him is full redemption.

He himself will redeem Israel

from all their sins.

Psalm 130¹

My heart is not proud, O L

ord

,

my eyes are not haughty;

I do not concern myself with great matters

or things too wonderful for me.

But I have stilled and quieted my soul;

like a weaned child with its mother,

like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, put your hope in the L

ord

both now and forevermore.

Psalm 131

These two juxtaposed psalms serve better than any other two juxtaposed psalms to set the tone for the following brief sortie into the doctrine of election. The first instructs the heart, preparing us for inquiry in the mode of sinners who, discerning their sin, crying out from the depths and believing that God answers them in mercy, contemplate election with the eyes of forgiven and undeserving transgressors. The second instructs the mind, preparing us for inquiry in the mode of creatures whose minds’ eye should not be trained too high, not because there is darkness above, but because what it seeks to see lies beyond its perceptual field, in the realm of things too wonderful for me. Psalm 130 bids those who despair of their sin to wait; Psalm 131 bids those who despair of their ignorance to be at peace. Both conduce to hope and both conclude with the thought of a future in the hands of the God whom to know is to trust. In Scripture, the climactic future is a time of definitive apocalypsis, unveiling. We shall find reason to suppose that this applies to the truth about election.

Meanwhile, pending eschatological disclosure, is election a riddle without a resolution? To ask that question at the beginning of an investigation is to risk starting at the wrong end. If we start at the wrong end, we are liable to finish at the wrong end, perhaps finishing more or less where we started; start with a riddle, without justifying the starting point, and you will likely end either with an unproductive riddle or with the wrong answer. Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of the solution, observed Karl Kraus, tempting us to echo with rueful cynicism that only he is a theologian who can turn a solution into a riddle.² Karl Barth must be permitted an early intervention to voice his claim that election is the sum of the gospel.³ Hovering somewhere between talk of riddle and of gospel is Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between a mystery and a problem.⁴ Without prejudice to talk either of riddle or of gospel, we might provisionally admit at the outset that election enshrines mystery of some kind and to some degree.

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!

How unsearchable his judgments,

and his paths beyond tracing out!

"Who has known the mind of the Lord?

Or who has been his counselor?" (Rom. 11:33-34)

That is how Paul concludes a sustained treatment of election, and we can scarcely be faulted if we treat his rhetorical climax as our theological a priori. Admitting that it is risky to start out on our investigation with a knapsack purpose-­woven in the shape of a question mark and suspending decision on election as the sum of the gospel, we submit that Paul’s words supply us with prima facie support for the supposition that election may turn out to be a question whose answer, if it is ever attained, will be eschatological, and brook no premature theological anticipation. It remains to be seen whether or not it should be reckoned something of a riddle until then.

In tackling election, it looks as though we are tackling a peculiarly intractable issue amidst the host of other historically divisive and intractable issues in theology. At the beginning of his study, Paul Jewett observed that there is . . . something uncommonly persistent about the argument over election.⁵ An earlier twentieth-­century voice, granting that the treatment of any doctrine harbors its dangers, and caution is always necessary, proposed that warning was especially in order with respect to the doctrine of election.⁶ Although it is worth asking why this is so, if it is so, I shall not be doing so directly in this volume. Chaucer would doubtless have concluded that third-­millennium determination to pursue our chosen quarry is a sign that theologians are even more hopelessly incorrigible than are philosophers in their search for the stone that turneth all to gold. Ask any scholar of discerning; / He’ll say the Schools are filled with altercation / On this vexed matter of predestination / Long bandied by a hundred thousand men. How can I sift it to the bottom then?⁷ Better not try to sift it nor even to provoke an early quarrel about the casual elision of election and predestination, unless you have nothing else to do on the road to Canterbury.

Given the longevity and perdurability of the debate, what can we reasonably hope to achieve in yet another inquiry? Is there not something bordering on the tragicomical in the supposition that someone should aspire to say something fresh, helpful, and illuminating on this subject, certainly in public? Ambition is the death of thought.⁸ Nonetheless, two associated factors informed the attempt to investigate the doctrine of election which here sees the light of day. The first was the suspicion that the unresolved persistence of the relevant cluster of questions, particularly when Scripture was regularly used as a court of appeal on opposing sides, was due to the fact that there was something wrong with the way the whole problematic was set up. Struggling to come to terms with her theological background, Harriet Beecher Stowe exclaimed: There must be a dreadful mistake somewhere, and, working through her struggles, her renewed verdict was unchanged: There must be a dreadful mistake somewhere.⁹ Perhaps dreadful is too dramatic a descriptor to apply in the present case, but dispassionate scrutiny of the debate on election surely compels the theologian to keep an open mind as to whether Stowe’s sentiment has potential for transplantation.

The second factor was a perceived need to consider seriously the diagnosis of and remedy for the deadlocked condition of the Calvinist-­Arminian debate which Charles Simeon offered early in the nineteenth century, and to bring this into line with a fundamental and familiar proposal made by Ludwig Wittgenstein. For reasons which emerge at the end of this volume, it turns out that Simeon features more visibly in the following discussion than does Wittgenstein. If, in the course of this volume, I succeed in making Simeon’s proposals lively, I (truly!) shall not ask for much more.¹⁰ If reference to the Calvinist-­Arminian debate provokes a weary sigh or audible groan in the reader, it is more than understandable; not only can I sympathize, I can join. How can such a (portended) focus be justified in the post-­Barthian dogmatic times in which we live? More importantly, even if we decide that Barth has not successfully or satisfactorily advanced the discussion very much, is it right to sail by Christopher Wright’s warning in his valuable and detailed study The Mission of God? Between election in the Hebrew Scriptures of Jesus and election in the formulations of theological systems there sometimes seems to be a great gulf fixed. Few and narrow are the bridges from one to the other.¹¹ Well, our study begins with the Old Testament and ends with an appendix on Barth. I hope that, by the time we are through with a survey of the biblical materials, it will be clear why Simeon’s concerns remain ours. In recent conversation, two leading biblical scholars, theologians of fine quality, to boot, who believe in the need for dogmatic reorientation on the question of election, have expressed to me perplexity in connection with New Testament predestination. As a matter of fact, my interest in Simeon lies more in connection with theological method in general than in his specific involvement in the Calvinist-­Arminian debate, although these two things are inseparable in his thought and that particular debate was the occasion of his remarks and even contributed causally to his thinking on method.

I prelude the following piece in the key of lament and hereby post the wailing proposition that the systematic theologian is the least secure of all creatures operating within the subject-­domain called theology, or, if not insecure, a creature who has purchased his or her security at the price of avoidance. He — let me keep the masculine pronoun as a concession to those who will wonder if the following is simply self-­absorbed and self-­referential — cannot give his time to and may lack the competence for the detailed study and exegesis of Old and New Testaments on whose foundation he seeks to build. He cannot give his time to and may lack the competence for the detailed philosophical adumbration of logical argument whose rigor he seeks to incorporate. Historians shake their heads at his lack of learning; missiologists and practical theologians wait skeptically to see if anything relevant will emerge; radicals and postmoderns will not even bother to watch his antics nine-­tenths of the time, save with the semicurious gaze of the cultural anthropologist. Has any creature comparable to the dogmatic or systematic theologian ever appeared on planet earth — the only character on the scholarly scene who manifestly lacks the competence to fulfill his or her assigned responsibility, the devil’s walking parody on all two-­footed things?¹²

The following chapters will give ample cause for readers to conclude that their author is a fully signed-­up member of this sorry troupe. On the one hand, Scripture is my authority and exegesis my guide in what follows, but I shall not be able to devote proper attention to any one biblical text. On the other, the rigorous requirements of analytic philosophical argument cannot be met in the space at my disposal. Hence, reasons for reading Scripture in one way rather than another will be indicated without offering a detailed defense, and reasons for adopting one theological position rather than another will be indicated without providing a detailed demonstration. Treatment of historical theology will be amazingly thin, and the distribution of material in practical theology will be gloriously uneven. What, then, remains in the shrunken effort that follows, except evidence that the writer needs to get out a bit more? Perhaps that fine novelist and observer of humanity, Thomas Hardy, will help to preserve authorial dignity: Limitation, and not comprehensiveness, is needed for striking a blow.¹³ Or there is Leibniz: It is in limitation that the master primarily displays himself.¹⁴ It is better to resist such specious defenses and pretentious descriptions of what follows and simply say that this book constitutes an attempt to limn — and no more than that — a theological approach to election in stark dogmatic outline. As Austin Farrer put it in a volume which covers material relevant to my concerns, but is omitted from my discussion: I would rather, if I dared to hope it, provide materials for an exercise in understanding, than formalize a chain of argument.¹⁵ Philip Doddridge bequeaths to us a rubric for the whole study: If I err, I would choose to do it on the side of modesty and caution, as one who is more afraid of doing wrong than of not doing right.¹⁶

In short, constraints of space mean that no pretense is made of justifying everything for which I contend; what the reader will encounter is often more the description than the adumbration of a particular argument; theological assumptions or disclaimers as to the possibility of pursuing this or that trail powder the ensuing treatment. Were it not for human nature, these assurances should make for a mighty relaxed company of readers. Such a company should settle down tranquilly in the conviction that it need feel not the least pressure to change its position on anything, on the grounds that my essay makes no pretense to producing the arguments needed to secure its conclusions.

However, we should not expect the dove of peace to descend amongst us. If we confine ourselves, for a moment, to self-­styled evangelical North American exchanges, we note how sharp the conflict is in relation to the doctrine of election (inter alia). Some years ago, five contributors, adopting different positions, debated election.¹⁷ In the course of reading, one’s attention is liable to shift, at an early stage, from the content of the positions argued for to the form the argument takes. One of the contributors rightly identifies the difficulty attending the discussion, which lies not so much in theological disagreement as in the fact that a given protagonist is prone to judge that the other misses the clear teaching of Scripture.¹⁸ This contributor himself rejects classical Calvinism and Arminianism alike. He realizes that his interlocutors will take him, too, to be rejecting clear teaching, yet he cannot but express his own bewilderment at others’ doubt that he is representing Paul’s clear, systematic and all-­pervasive teaching on the heart of the matter at hand.¹⁹ Nevertheless, he knows that others will be bewildered that he should be bewildered.

A reader’s attention may then shift a second time, this time to the tone. Contributors go beyond frequent expressions of astonishment that others cannot see what is clear, to very strong indictments of each other.²⁰ Not all are guilty of this; one is noticeably more restrained than the others. The upshot is that the North American evangelical scene alone gives pause for thought to anyone who proposes to sidle in coyly with what might be regarded as a sixth view — and, in counting, we have not begun to train our eyes outside this particular constituency. In the preface to his Treatment concerning the Religious Affections, Jonathan Edwards observed: I am sensible it is much more difficult to judge impartially of that which is the subject of this discourse, in the midst of the dust and smoke of such a state of controversy as this land is now in about things of this nature, adding: As it is more difficult to write impartially, so it is more difficult to read impartially.²¹ If that is how it is when discussion is carried out amongst theologians who state unreserved commitment to the full authority of Scripture and make good that commitment by seeking to ground the essentials of their positions in sola Scriptura, it is hard to know how one can make effective headway on the wider scene.

Of course, perhaps we just have to be tough-­minded and thick-­skinned about the whole affair. If you find the kitchen too hot, don’t go in. Why is it so hot? How should we interpret the intraevangelical dispute, not only in its own right, but for the benefit of the wider theological scene? Sticking with the volume cited, I think it is no exaggeration to say that, on the authors’ own terms, we have three or four rival versions of Christianity here. Is it basically an exegetical dispute? Obviously it is, in part. However, the disagreement cannot be analyzed simply in exegetical terms. The relevant exegetical exchanges remind me of the first football (soccer) match in which our second son proudly took part in an Oxfordshire village at the age of six. What was lacking in the quality of football was more than made good in the quality of entertainment. Apart from the two rival goalkeepers, who were dividing their attention between trying to figure out what exactly was going on in the midfield skirmish and musing absently on the Great Issues of Life, what you saw on the pitch was two groups of ten small children crowded around the ball, trying to kick it. As the ball cannoned off unpredictably in all directions, the two combatant formations scuttled around the pitch like a flock of seagulls at the seaside on a summer afternoon, competing for a coveted piece of bread. Just so, in exegetical debate, the battle moves on text by text, skirmish by skirmish. I am not for a moment demeaning or ridiculing the exegetical task or those who participate in it. That would be self-­defeating as well as impious because I regard the exegetical task as theologically foundational and should wish to participate in it, along with everybody else, though as one less qualified than many. However, what the lads in that game obviously needed was some order and structure to their play, and what we theologians need to engage in fruitful exegetical debate, particularly when trying to interpret a theme stretching over the whole of Scripture, is obviously some robust rules of engagement.

Are differences better identified and addressed at the level of hermeneutics? It is true that the wider hermeneutical task is foundational to the more narrowly exegetical task it frames. Yet, are differences any less intractable on the hermeneutical level than they are on the exegetical level? We should certainly profit from meticulously examining competing hermeneutical frameworks in both the age-­old and the contemporary debates over election. Whether we should end up with a less colorful and more controlled version, on the hermeneutical level, of the exegetical tussle, I am not sure. However, the intraevangelical debate is characterized by a feature that is more striking and more disturbing than hermeneutical differences, and this applies a fortiori to the wider debate. We have in mind divergences in the way in which God is understood and portrayed. This is disturbing even more than it is striking. Picture it: an experienced Christian steeps himself or herself in Scripture; strives for purity of heart and not just clarity of mind; prays, as well as studies, diligently. Then, in a theological essay emanating from the place of prayer and study, she or he depicts the face of God as it appears to be depicted on the Bible’s pages. Another theologian, no less experienced, steeped, striving, praying, and studying, does the same. They compare portraits. Not only are they vastly different. Each does not see how on earth the other can get that portrait out of Scripture. Worse: they do not like each other’s pictures at all. It is a frightful child of a comely parent, with just enough family likeness to make one avert the face in dread, said one commentator on the theology of Nathanael Emmons.²² Multiply the number of theologians beyond two. It is not just that others’ portraits are deemed lacking in the quality of truthful representation. The flawed artist is deemed lacking in any sense of divine beauty. In a bleak moment, we might first succumb to an older translation of a Pauline text which represents us as seeing through a glass, darkly (1 Cor. 13:12) and then wonder whether Paul’s enigma (as the Greek has it) was ever supposed to license the production of a number of allegedly grotesque alternatives with which we must willingly put up in the church prior to the eschaton.

Keeping in mind Paul’s commendation of that charity with which he surrounds his reference to the enigma, we must surely be haunted by the question of whether we can all be worshiping the same God. If the face of Jesus Christ is the face of God, do we have not only one Jesus and many Christs, as Don Cupitt suggested long ago, but also many Jesuses?²³ Borges wrote: Diodorus Siculus tells the story of a god that is cut in pieces and scattered over the earth. Which of us, walking through the twilight . . . has never felt that we have lost some infinite thing. . . . Some feature of the crucified face may lurk in every mirror; perhaps the face died, faded away, so that God might be all faces . . . ?²⁴ If these words dismay foes of theological or religious pluralism, its defenders will point out that it is better to conjure up a scene of dispersal than a specter of distortion. Is this not a more felicitous prospect than the prospect of mutual recrimination?²⁵ Does postmodernity meet us at the end of the road, after all?

For myself, I hope and believe not, and accordingly throw my hat in the ring. This volume started life as the Kantzer Lectures given at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Trinity International University, Deerfield, Illinois. Six lectures were delivered there in 2009, warts and all, but the material is now presented in a different order. As the lectures have been considerably expanded as well as revised for publication, there is doubtless an accumulation of warts, which I can only hope does not amount to a plague. The week spent in Deerfield giving the lectures was most pleasurable, and memories of the occasion, both on and off campus, in academic and nonacademic contexts, flood back in a merry tide, as this volume (finally!) goes to print. I received outstanding and warm hospitality from a number of people, but I want to thank two in particular. Kevin Vanhoozer chaired the lectures with his customary combination of graciousness and vivacity, exercising his ability both to restrain himself patiently and to offer the occasional and well-­judged provocative challenge. Doug Sweeney, then director of the Carl Henry Center, gave consistent support and encouragement, keeping himself in the background, as far as he was concerned, but moving swiftly to the foreground, as far as any help to the lecturer was concerned. Thanks, gentlemen, for your patience with the delay in producing this manuscript.

Above all, I must thank my wife, Susan, for her characteristic and unfailing support through the process of writing this book. It is only exegetical conscience which prevents me from dedicating this volume eklektē kuria kai tois teknois autēs, hous egō agapō en alētheia (2 John 1).

1. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from the English Bible are from the New International Version (NIV).

2. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 193.

3. As Barth’s thought is treated in detail in the appendix, detailed citation of his work is often reserved until then.

4. G. Marcel, Being and Having (Westminster: Dacre, 1949), pp. 110-16. In this work, Marcel observed that we have acquired the execrable habit of considering the problems in themselves, i.e., in abstraction from the manner in which their appearance is woven into the very texture of life (p. 102). Cf. T. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), chap. 2.

5. Paul K. Jewett, Election and Predestination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 1.

6. G. C. Berkouwer, Divine Election (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), p. 7.

7. Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, in The Canterbury Tales (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 243.

8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 27.

9. Quoted by Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 327.

10. Elements in the argument set out in chapter 3 in connection with Simeon