There are several ways of thinking of how God saves people in Christianity. I hope to make an outline of them here. First, we can ask, who does God save? We can divide election in to two categories, individual and corporate. In individual election, God chooses certain beings to be saved, in corporate, he chooses a group of beings to be saved. We can also ask on what basis does God save? We must then distinguish between conditional and unconditional election. If God elects unconditionally, then he saves a being without any requirement on the being’s part, or, without the being having to do anything before God saves it. On the other hand, if God elects conditionally, then there is some prerequisite that a being must satisfy before God saves them.
So if we put these categories together we get these options:
(1) Unconditional individual election, (2) unconditional corporate election, (3) conditional individual election, and (4) conditional corporate election.
I can think of Christians who have held each of these positions. Calvinists and people who hold to Reformed theology typically embrace (1). Universalists can either hold (1) or (2), that is God can save everyone by choosing every individual to be saved or choosing the whole human race to be saved. Most non-reformed people and Arminians embrace either (3) or (4).
It can be hard to distinguish between (2) and (4) though. In (2), God decrees that a group of people shall be saved no matter what, perhaps the Jews as an example. But this doesn’t say if or how people can become a part of that group. Perhaps one has to do something in order to become a Jew, but once one is a Jew, one is saved unconditionally. But that seems kind of strange, wasn’t salvation supposed to be unconditional? Perhaps then according to (2) God chooses who will become a part of that group unconditionally too. (4) can also be thought of in these two ways. In one case, God chooses to save a group of people only if the members do something first, say accept his grace. Then even if one becomes a member of that group, one would still have to do that thing also. Or God could choose who comes into that group unconditionally but then still have a condition for that group. So perhaps in the case of group election, we should be careful to spell out how one becomes a part of the group and then how one becomes saved after that.
