Election

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.

God and Time

There are 6 conceivable views one could hold regarding God’s relationship to time:

1. God is timeless and time began

2. God is timeless and time didn’t begin

3. God is temporal and time began

4. God is temporal and time didn’t begin

5. God existed temporally without time and existed atemporally with time

6. God existed atemporally without time and existed temporally with time

5 and 6 are hybrid views which don’t get much attention, one of them for good reason, 5 seems pretty unlikely unless God existed in his own separate time before he created time and once he created time he became timeless.  That is indeed a strange view.  6 is not so strange for it is plausible that God existed timelessly without creation but temporally with time.  3 is not very plausible either since that would imply that God came into existence with the first moment of time and thus would have a finite past history, thus violating his eternality.

So we are left with 1,2,4, and 6 as options available to the traditional theist.  So which one is correct?

Does Satan really do anything?

So I was thinking about this topic today, and I noticed that anytime someone said anything like: “Satan did such and so;”   I always seemed to brush it off by thinking: “Well Satan didn’t really do anything because God is the one who controls Satan, so really God is the one who did it.”  I have come to the realization that my reasoning was false.

For consider, if Satan is a free agent, that is, minimally, his actions are not caused or determined by God, then Satan is free to choose to do something or not.  If he is, then God isn’t controlling him.  But since God is the master of the universe, he is sovereign, which means nothing comes to pass except either through God determining it to happen or God allowing it to happen.  I have already supposed that God doesn’t determine Satan’s actions, so God must allow Satan to do what he wishes.  If this is true, I can now find reason to say that Satan really does have power in the world.  For consider some action that Satan does, say possessing some pigs and making them drown in the river.  God allowed that action to happen.  But what if Satan would not have existed?  That directly implies that the pigs then wouldn’t be drowned in the river.  So there is at least one action that would not have occurred if Satan didn’t exist.  God allowed Satan’s action, but didn’t determine that he do it.

Now I can see why Satan has causal power in the world, when before I most likely would have dismissed such talk as nonsense.