There are few texts more beloved among Christians than Romans 8.28, which confidently proclaims that “all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called in alignment with God’s purpose.” But this beautiful sentiment is grounded in an idea that many find far less comforting: predestination. Today I’d like to look at this more closely, focusing on predestination’s function here and elsewhere, and whether the ways it’s been interpreted in later Christian traditions (specifically the Augustinian and Calvinist traditions) is a necessary, or even likely, implication of the text.
[Note: the study today will be heavily informed by my previous study of this theme as it appears in Ephesians.]
Text
[28] And we know that all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called in alignment with God’s purpose. [29] For those whom God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, with the result that he might become the firstborn among many brothers. [30] And those he predestined, he also justified, and those he justified he also glorified.
Experience & Encounter
Laying my cards and biases on the table, the theme of predestination has always made me deeply uncomfortable. The student body seminary was split roughly in half between people who upheld it and those who rejected it, so I’ve been the middle of a lot a discussions about it. And frankly, the way my heart and mind work, I’d rather deal with the consequences of releasing God’s control over the universe just a bit, even with all the contingency that creates, than I am with the consequences of upholding that everything is predetermined by God.
But I’m pretty sure that what we talk about when we talk about predestination today isn’t exactly what Paul is talking about here. And so today I’d like to explore two related questions:
- Where does Paul’s language here come from?
- How does it connect to ideas we associate with it today, such as predetermination, and so-called ‘double predestination’, in which God chooses from eternity all who will share in God’s eternal life and all who will experience eternal torment?
Explore
There’s a split between the realm of thought in which we talk about predestination today and that from which the language developed. Today, questions of predestination are about God’s foreknowledge and power, and human freedom; in other words, they’re about metaphysics, what kind of universe we live in. But such concerns were completely foreign to the thought-world of the Bible. Rather, we find that language of predestination always arises in the context of election, a related but rather different idea. But at the heart of the issue lies the question: If God chooses Israel, or the Messiah, or the Church, what does that say about everyone else? We can break this down further:
- If God ‘chooses’ us, does this mean that God does not ‘choose’ others?
- If God has chosen and predestined us for salvation, does this mean that God created others who are predestined to damnation?
- What does this say about human freedom?
These are difficult questions to be sure.
Election in the Old Testament
As thorny as the idea of God’s choosing has become, it has its roots in some of the deepest layers of the biblical theological tradition, dating to the story of God’s selection of Abraham to be the patriarch of God’s chosen people (Genesis 12). In choosing Abraham, God was choosing Israel as a nation (e.g., Deuteronomy 7.6; Isaiah 42.1, 43.20). This was not about Abraham’s ‘goodness,’ and far from Israel’s tendencies towards faithfulness (their own histories and prophets are evidence enough of this!), but was entirely about God’s gracious choice. Individual election only comes into play when it comes to a specific vocation: Abraham was chosen to be the patriarch, just as Moses wold later be chosen to free the Hebrews from slavery, and David would be chosen from among his older, taller, and more impressive brothers, to be Israel’s king. Abraham’s story was at the heart of Israel’s self-understanding and identity: of all the people of the world, God chose them to be God’s possession, holy and blameless (e.g., Exodus 19.5). Four things are important for our purposes about Abraham’s story:
- Election is about God’s grace.
- Election is corporate; even here where God chooses one man, this one man embodies a people, all of the descendants within his chosen line.
- Where election language is used for specific individuals, it is vocational, that is, about being chosen to fulfill a particular role.
- Election is not an excuse for self-satisfied spiritual laziness, but involves living a life of God’s peace.
Election in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism
These four themes generally continue throughout Second Temple literature. But, we start to see discussion in this period about philosophical questions of human freedom and possibility of individual predestination. This tension is expressed well in the deuterocanonical book of Sirach. On the one hand, it contains the clearest passage on human freedom in the whole ancient tradition (15.11-20). But on the other hand, it also describes God creating differences, including differences between the holy and sinners:
Some he blessed and exalted,
and some he made holy and brought near to himself,
but some he cursed and brought low
and turned them out of their place (Sirach 33.12)
Unsurprisingly, such divisions become starker and more essential in apocalyptic literature, with its characteristic emphasis on the revelation of a cosmic war between good and evil (e.g., 1 Enoch 1.8f). Such literature is therefore full of the language of election, and ties it to its themes of God’s ultimate vindication of good.
The Romanized Jewish writer Josephus divided up the main factions of first century Judaism largely on their approach to human freedom: The Essenes (and other radical separatists) were strongly deterministic, in keeping with their black-and-white worldview and apocalyptic sensibilities; the Sadducees (the priestly party that wanted to appease Rome) strongly upheld human freedom over and against determinism or fate; while the Pharisees (the party of experts in the Law, from which Paul and rabbinic Judaism both emerged) struck a balance, upholding a strong sense of both divine providence and human free will (Jewish Antiquities 13.5.9). While this picture is likely oversimplified, it shows that a diversity of ideas surrounding the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom existed in Paul’s time. The description of the Pharisees’ position as trying to balance the two is particularly interesting considering Paul’s background within that movement and his own apparent insistence on both predestination and human freedom.
Rabbinic Judaism for its part is an interesting contrast to early Christianity since it represents in some ways an attempt to excise Judaism of apocalyptic influences after the utter disaster of the Jewish Wars against Rome. With so much of the more radical language surrounding election being grounded in apocalyptic imagery, it’s no surprise that rabbinic Judaism returned to the more cautious emphases of corporate election and the vocational responsibilities of being God’s chosen people.
Election in the New Testament
Ephesians 1 explicitly connects election with predestination:
Just as he has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world that we might be holy and blameless before him in love, Having predestined us for adoption as his own children through Jesus Christ, in accordance with kindly disposition of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, with which he has graced us in the Beloved … (Ephesians 1.4-6)
What we have here is the idea of messianic recapitulation: Israel’s election and destiny are rolled into that of its messiah, Jesus. We see this idea elsewhere in Luke 9.35, where at the Transfiguration, a voice from heaven, says of Jesus: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” Likewise, Jesus is given another of Israel’s titles, “my beloved” (e.g. Deuteronomy 33:12; Isaiah 5:1; Jeremiah 11:15 & 12:7) at his baptism in Matthew 3.17. Both of these ideas — being God’s chosen and God’s beloved — are then applied to those who are “in Christ”. So, in fulfilling Israel’s calling to be truly holy and blameless (and in fact, redefining and revealing what holiness and blamelessness looks like), Jesus in a sense becomes Israel, an Israel into which we as those who faithfully follow him participate. So, for example, 1 Peter refers to Christians as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (2.9). Similarly, Colossians calls the faithful “God’s chosen ones” (3.2), and in 2 Thessalonians, Paul writes, “God chose you as the first fruits for salvation” (2.13). Likewise, Paul calls Christians beloved in Romans 1.7, and in 1 Thessalonians 1.4 and Colossians 3.12, Paul connects both terms with the faithful. Here we again see the ancient Christian maxim, ‘We become by grace all that He is by nature’. We are chosen in him, the Chosen one, who has recapitulated the chosen people of God. We are beloved in him, the Beloved, who has recapitulated God’s beloved people.
So, generally speaking in the New Testament, election is a way of understanding how our Christian faith relates to Jesus and how, in turn, Jesus relates to Jewish salvation history. Far from being intended as a way of perpetuating exclusivity, what we have here is a way of understanding how ‘chosenness’ has been opened up to the whole world, no longer limited to a particular bloodline and culture.
(Because of this general scheme of how election is understood in the New Testament, I see no compelling reason to move away from the Old Testament’s corporate perspective. But, if you’re interested in a fulsome and fair assessment of the debate (that comes to different conclusions than I do), see Kruse 392f.)
Election and Predestination in Romans 8.28-30
The Ephesians passage is particularly relevant to Paul’s argument here in Romans 8. Both are in contexts of apocalyptic spiritual warfare, emphasizing God’s providence and protection for those who are ‘in Christ’. So, we really couldn’t be further from philosophical discussions of human freedom. The point is that God has a plan and purpose for us that no earthly or spiritual power can disrupt; therefore, we don’t need to worry but can be confident in our ultimate vindication.
As Witherington notes, the placement of 8.29-30 right after 8.28 is important:
[H]e has already spoken of believers loving God in v. 28, and that should be kept in view throughout the reading of vv. 29-30. … If vv. 29-30 stood alone then Paul would indeed sound like the most deterministic of early Jews…. But what the Romans needed to be assured of was God’s involvement, not their own, in the whole salvation process and plan. This text admirably stresses the hands-on nature of God and his providential plan. (Witherington 231)
He rightly concludes:
In short, and particularly in light of vv. 31-39, this comforting text is about the perseverance of the saints, not about the election of some to be saints out of a mass of unredeemed humanity, (Witherington 229)
And as Eberhart notes:
These prominent lines proclaim a pro-active God who procures salvation according to the protocol of love to produce a large family (v. 29). In this context, the term “purpose” does not imply a doctrine of predestination but has been chosen to reassure the vulnerable and troubled audiences in Rome that their lives matter in the grand plan of God for the restoration of the creation. (Eberhart)
Election in Christian History
It needs to be stated that a stronger understanding of predestination has been the norm across significant swaths of the Christian tradition, particularly those descending from Augustine and Calvin. But Augustine and Calvin are far from the sum total of the tradition, and on this point (among so many others), are not representative of it. In fact, the idea that some are predestined to salvation and others to damnation is entirely absent from the Christian East (see Origen, Chysostom, Theodoret, Isaac the Syrian, Gregory Palamas). In fact, if the East on the whole was going to err on one side or the other, it would almost certainly err towards universalism rather than a Calvinist ‘limited atonement’ and double predestination.
Challenge
For a fulsome discussion of election and predestination in the history of Christianity and the challenges to them, see my post in the Ephesians series. But to summarize, the doctrine of election has been greatly abused to justify all kinds of terrible actions that go against the whole spirit of the Gospel teachings. If we use it we must do so in the same spirit as the Scriptures: to emphasize God’s gracious love and our vocational responsibilities as people ‘chosen in Christ’, and with the proviso that there are plenty of examples in the Scriptures of those ‘not chosen’ still being blessed by God and the heroes of their own stories. Similarly, teaching on predestination must be nuanced. The New Testament makes four claims that are impossible to reconcile in a satisfying way, but which we must uphold nonetheless:
- God has ‘chosen’ and ‘predestined’ the faithful (Ephesians 1.4-5, Romans 8.29)
- God’s saving acts have the whole cosmos as their scope (John 3.16, Romans 5.18 & 11.32, 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, 1 Timothy 2.4, 2 Peter 3.9, 1 John 2:2)
- Human choice is real and matters (Deuteronomy 30.19, Jonah 3.4-10, Matthew 25:46)
- Not everyone will be saved (Matthew 7.21 & 25:46, Luke 3.17, 2 Thessalonians 1.8-9)
At the end of the day, when Paul talks about election and predestination, he’s not doing systematic theology: he’s writing to specific communities to address specific needs. In the case of Romans 8, he is encouraging them to remain faithful, confident that God is on their side and will ultimately vindicate them in their suffering. If we read anything more into it, that’s on us, and we risk missing the point of Paul’s message.
Expand
The aim of this post has been to address Paul’s language of predestination without losing sight of his aims in using that language. The interpretation that has emerged here fits our ‘expand’ criteria by helping us to focus on the vocational implications for our being called as part of God’s family rather than obsess over the fate of others. (Eyes on your own plates! and all that.) Plus, it expands our circle of empathy by reminding us that chosen does not necessarily mean exclusively chosen. As Paul has just said in the broader passage in which these verses are situated, God’s salvation plan is cosmic in scope and bigger than we could ever imagine.
Summary & Conclusions
Romans 8.28-30 offers a message of encouragement and comfort for people experiencing persecution, enslavement, and the normal array of suffering that comes with being human. His point is to remind them that God loves them and is greater than any power that might oppose them. (This will be made even more explicit in the next section of the text.) From all eternity, God has had a destiny for his Chosen One, and for all of us who are ‘chosen in him’. Nothing will get in the way of that destiny.
Any questions his language might raise for us about the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom are our own and not really relevant to Paul’s message.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 