ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 86 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> We've been asking some tough questions. I want to ask another. And this is one I heard just yesterday as I struggled to comfort a person with a dieing relative. She asked: Why are some saved and not others? What would you say to that? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: This question takes us a little bit beyond Article IV of the Augsburg Confession. But that's fine. Because this is a topic that also belongs in our Dogmatics 2 course here. And that is the doctrine of election or predestination. You can use the words interchangeably. And to start answering your question, David, I think what I will do is refer to a number of scripture passages and try to build up a picture for you about what the scripture says about this issue. The first one of these comes from Ephesians Chapter 1. And let me read Verses 4 and 5. "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight." This is referring to God chose us. "In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will." So this is one of the classic passages that deals with the doctrine of election. And you see -- and I bring it up not only because it asserts predestination but also just so you get a sense for what the terminology means. Because when it says he chose us, the Greek word for chose there is ***ec lego. And we get the word elect from this word chose. And that's what elect means. Is that God chose us. And then you also see the word predestined in the passage, too. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons. That's why I say election and predestination in Lutheran theology at least are interchangeable terms. And what it means is that God did not simply foresee that we would be his children. But he actually chose us to be his children. He caused that to happen. And he had that intention from the beginning of the world. Now, as I said in the answer to the last question, when Lutherans talk about salvation, we want to make the point that God is totally responsible for salvation. And that raises a question, especially for -- for any theology that has a strong doctrine of grace it raises the question: What about the people that are not saved? Does that mean that since God is totally responsible for salvation that if they are not saved, it's because he didn't want to save them? That's the question that just naturally arises here. And I think the only way to answer this question is to search the scriptures and to see: What do the scriptures say about God's will for saving humanity? Does God want to save the world or does God just want to save a few people? And one of the passages that deal with this I think we need to keep in mind is I Timothy 2 Verse 4. God wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. Okay. So in other words, the answer is God wants to save everyone. Now, it's difficult to see how these two positions fit together. But this is, in fact, what Lutheran theology says, is that when -- that God elects some people to salvation and causes them to be saved. But at the same time if someone is condemned, it's not because God wanted them to be condemned. It's totally their responsibility. So there again is this pattern of Lutherans want to confess the total -- two total responsibilities. God is totally responsible for salvation. Humanity is totally responsible for condemnation. So if someone is condemned, they cannot say, "Well, God didn't elect me." No. Because God -- scripture tells us that God wants everyone to be saved. So if you're condemned, then it's your own fault. On the other hand, if someone is saved, they can't say, "It's because I chose God." No. God chose them. God is the one that elected them for salvation. You can see this notion playing out in a passage we referred to before. And that is the account of Judgement Day in Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats. You know, before we were referring to this passage for other reasons. But I think it also applies to the question of election and predestination, as well. If you look at what the king says to the sheep as compared to what he says to the goats, you see this asymmetry playing out. That God is responsible for salvation. And that humanity is responsible for condemnation. Here is what he says to the sheep in Matthew 25 Verse 34. "Then the king will say to those on his right 'Come, you who are blessed by my father. Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world." So here we have another assertion of the doctrine of predestination. That the kingdom of God is, in fact, an inheritance. And you don't earn an inheritance, you get it by virtue of being in the family. And not only is it an inheritance, but it's an inheritance prepared before the creation of the world. So this is what we mean by predestination. God planned to give us this inheritance even before we were created. Now, then the passage goes on to say, "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat." And then that ties into our previous discussion of what does justification mean? And it's got these two different senses. In the Pauline sense it means that God imputes righteousness to us so that we stand holy before God. And in James' sense it means that that -- imputed righteousness then plays out in our lives in works. And those works are evidence of the faith that we have. And this is exactly how the king cites these works -- "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink" -- is that these works then are the evidence. So that's how it works with the sheep. The goats, on the other hand, are a little bit different. And this is in Verse 41. "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'" And he goes on, "For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat," et cetera. So notice how this is a little bit different. Here the cursing, it just says, "you who are cursed." It doesn't say that they were cursed from the foundation of the world. It doesn't teach that God from before creation decided to send some people to hell. Furthermore, when you look at the eternal fire, who is it prepared for? The fire is not prepared for the goats. The fire is prepared for the Devil and his angels. So there again is evidence that it is not God's intention from eternity to send some people to hell. Rather as I Timothy says, "he wants all to be saved."So that when some are condemned, it's their own fault. It's not that God had planned this from the foundation of the world. So here are our two total responsibilities. And sometimes this paradox goes by the phrase ***crux thaelagorem, which is the Latin phrase meaning the cross of the theologians. And the idea there is this is simply the cross you have to bear as a Lutheran theologian is you don't have an answer as to why some are saved and not others. There is no answer to that question. We don't know. What we do know is that when someone is saved, it's totally God's doing. And when someone is condemned, it's totally their own doing. Now, I think it's helpful to compare the view which I've just articulated which is the Lutheran view to two other views on this issue. And these two other views are perhaps easier to understand than the Lutheran view. But they do not take into account all of the scriptural evidence that we've just rehearsed. One of the views is that of Calvinism. And that is that according to classic Calvinism anyway, God is, in fact, totally responsible for salvation. So they agree with the Lutheran theology on this point. However, God is also totally responsible for condemnation. So -- and you can see why that's attractive. Because it makes sense at least. That if God is responsible for salvation, then if somebody is not saved, it must be because God didn't want to save them. So that would be a consistent teaching of Calvinism. The problem is that it does not harmonize with those scripture passages that speak of God wanting to save everyone. Now, Calvinists do try to deal with those passages. It's not that they ignore them. They will pause at different kinds of wills of God, which I'm not going to go into here. But I'm just pointing out that Calvinism has this what's called double predestination. That God is responsible both for salvation and for condemnation. Which is logically -- that works out. And it doesn't have the difficulty of the Lutheran position, which is that it's more paradoxical, it's harder to explain. The other logical approach to this is that of synergism. And synergism is a word that means that God and humanity work together as opposed to Monergism, which would be the opposite of synergism. Monergism is where God does it alone. You recall the Lutheran and Augustinian theology are Monergistic in different ways. But the synergists would say that starting with the side of man, that man is, in fact, responsible for his own condemnation. God holds man accountable for that. And so that part agrees with Lutheran theology. But if humanity is responsible for its own condemnation, then it makes sense that humanity must bear some responsibility for salvation, as well. So the thing that distinguishes someone who is saved from someone who is not saved is their decision. That here they decided to cooperate with God and here they haven't. So that would be the position of synergism in that there's human responsibility on both sides. And that's what distinguishes those who are saved from those who are not. Whereas in Calvinism, it's God's decision that distinguishes those who are saved from those who aren't. But in Lutheran theology, there's no answer to your question, David. Why are some saved and not others? We can't answer. All we can say is that when -- when those are saved, that's God's doing. And when others are condemned, that's their own responsibility. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***