Intro
The influence of Existentialism upon modern Protestant theology is unmistakably evident, particularly in the liberal wing of the church. In fact, there are several theological schools that have been stamped with the “existentialist” label, primarily in order to communicate that they are what they are because of their existentialist influence. However, when looking at these theological schools such as Barthianism or Radical Lutheranism one quickly notices how different these “existentialist” traditions can be from one another. This is because Existentialism itself is not a body of doctrine, but a particular set of themes and a particular use of those themes.1 The themes include the emphasis on the individual, existence, absurdity, faith, and being. This allows existentialist philosophy to exist and thrive in all kinds of theological traditions. For this reason, this paper will look not for the definitive theology of Election that all existentialists must and will have, but common themes and their influence upon the doctrine of election that these theologians otherwise would have had. Election serves here as the perfect choice to test the influence that existentialism has upon one’s theology since Election is arguably the most objective of doctrines that relates to the human recipient, rooted in the Divine nature of God Himself and thus being a direct work of God. It is in the Existentialist’s synthesis of Divine Election and Human subjectivity, individuality, and choice wherein one can see just how much and in what ways existentialist philosophy impacts one’s theology.
Election
The doctrine of Election itself itself when worked out, looks differently across different traditions, even within traditions. The Reformed view differs from the Lutheran view, and the Lutheran Intuitu Fidei differs from the Lutheran unconditional particular election. Yet in all of these disagreements the goal is the same, to find assurance in the doctrine of election. For the synergists, this is found in the assurance that we have the capacity to be saved by the gift of prevenient grace. For the Calvinist this assurance is found in the sovereignty of God. For the Lutheran it is in the revealed God on the cross. Existentialists may find themselves in any of these theological traditions. The existentialist is particularly at home in a discussion on how to find assurance, considering the fact that one of their main themes is the angst or dread that one feels in the interaction with themselves, with God, with opportunity, or in any way with the transcendent.
To begin with the basic confrontation of the self and the doctrine of election it must be said that this doctrine states that God has chosen before the foundation of the world to elect people to Himself. At first this may not sound like a threat or cause for dread, but when paired with Law and Gospel it becomes very clear what is being said. Those who believe in Christ will be saved, those who do not believe will be condemned, and not this only, but God has chosen those who will be saved. The source of the dread is found in-between an uncertainty of God’s will for us as persons, and our feeling of responsibility to respond to the gospel in faith. For some traditions it may be that God’s will for us is either heaven or hell. In which case the dread is found more-so on the side of God, our response being something that we cannot move into action or resist when it begins to move and the assurance must then be posited to be an internal sign of election through a change in affections or a moral betterment. For those holding to Election Intuitu Fidei such as Johann Gerhard it is said that God creates faith in all through the means, but it is only those who persevere to the end in this faith that He then elects, the assurance being found in some assurance that the game is in a sense, at least not rigged.2 For those who hold to the Lutheran view of unconditional particular election such as Pieper, it is said that God elects a definite number of people to persevere in this faith, but that we cannot know who they are since this is a hidden decree, the assurance being found in a looking to the revealed will of God on the cross and somewhat trying to ignore and or avoid this sovereign decree of the hidden God.3
In working through this confrontation and cause of dread between the I-Thou dialectic in an existentialist way the doctrine of election can be addressed in relation to particular themes of existentialism. Presupposed here is already the theme of confrontation and dread, so this will not be discussed directly. The first theme to work with is the theme of individual.
The Individual
The individual is a primary theme in existentialist philosophy and theology. It is the subject of all that follows in the list of themes. It is the individual who has faith, the individual who’s subjective perspective is considered, and the individual who is in the state of being. The individual when speaking about election is no less important. For when one considers election they must consider two things primarily, the elector and the elected. This itself forms the foundation for the I-Thou dialectic. This dialectic confronts us indirectly. Just as Forde draws upon the concept of Law as that which strikes terror in our hearts in all things including the blowing of leaves in the wind, so too does this apply to big theological concepts.4 When we hear that there is an elect people the Adam in us is struck by the Law, under the accusation that he is not among that number. This happens naturally because the old Adam does not receive by faith, but earns by works. He can never accept that he is elected by the Father in Christ because he cannot see past the reasons for God to have not chosen him. He cannot make the leap of faith beyond reason to apply that objective promise of election to himself and to live and be the elect of God.
Classically the concept of the individual’s freedom and the election of God are synthesized in two mutually opposing ways. Firstly, one might hear this proclamation, that God has elected a people, and they may be primarily concerned for the freedom of the elected person. If God elects and chooses those who are saved then what of human freedom? What of human responsibility? And most importantly, what of universal grace? Can it truly be so that the hidden God and the revealed have such diametrically opposed goals regarding the salvation of humanity? This leads to some placing the emphasis upon the elected one as the individual who’s freedom is protected. Yet we know that it is God who is the one who is free, our wills are bound. God is the only individual who has free will. Yet we remain individuals. However, as Tillich rightly notes, while we exist as individuals we only exist rightly in “being” when we participate in and through God who is the ground of all being and existence.5 Is through being united to the true individual that we exist as individuals, and it is only through being united to this free individual that we are free to “be” free.
With God being the individual at the centre of the discussion our task then turns to understanding Him rightly in this context. The way that existential theologians understand the hidden/revealed God distinction bears a large influence upon the theology of election that they put forward. If one separates the will of the hidden God from the will of the revealed God they make the concept of two opposing wills within God a possibility, which is more common in theology than it should be. However, the hidden God may very well not be against us, but His hiddenness prevents us from knowing His will for us. If He is hidden we cannot know of Him, let alone know what He wills for us. But we do know and confess that there is but one God. This one God is revealed to us in Christ, the hidden mystery of God’s will for us revealed in the holes that reside in His hands and feet. In Christ the hidden God is revealed as God for us. These are not two separate Gods, but one God. While there remain things about God that are hidden, what has been revealed is truly revealed. It is truly revealed that God willed to save us in Christ and in no wise does Scripture anywhere suggest that this true exists in paradox with a hidden will to exclude you from salvation. Yet many seeing this accept it only to then turn around and throw doubt upon this again, saying that indeed the revealed God wills to save us but the Father who is hidden may not. This is nothing but divine schizophrenia, perhaps even polytheism. There is but one God who has one will to save all humanity and it is seen in our forgiveness at the cross.
Faith
Regarding faith as an isolated concept, we look to Kierkegaard to present to us the basis of faith and its necessity, stating firstly that we cannot know anything for certain on the basis of historical fact.7 With historical fact there will always be doubt, and we will only ever be dealing at most with probabilities, not certainties. Things must be believed by faith, but not just believed by faith in a general way that is disconnected from us, truth must be believed in a personal and objective way applied to ourselves as individuals. Kierkegaard positted that the improbability of a belief is concurrent with the passion that it must be believed. Faith, as Kierkegaard states, is the infinite passion, therefore that which we believe in faith is infinitely improbable.8
In the case of election, it is infinitely improbable that God would choose us from before the foundations of the world. While it looks like a hopelessly unlikely situation simply as far as numerical chance is concerned, knowing that some are chosen and seeing the vast amount of people in the world, the prospect becomes even worse when we take into a count how unworthy we are personally to receive anything from God. It is in the realization that all are unworthy that we see that the entirety of our fate hangs upon God’s will alone and that there is no evidence in ourselves that would otherwise indicate what God’s will for our salvation is other than the cross itself and what God says the cross means for us. The hinge that the cross pivots on in its application to our personal salvation coincides with our election. The Word of God tells us that at that cross all sins are paid and that in and through Christ I have died to my sin and risen again, but it is the subjective application of these words by faith that makes this Word of Gospel true. This is what Kierkegaard means when he says that truth is subjective and it is also what distinguishes the Lutheran doctrine of Universal Objective Justification from Huberianism.9
We affirm that some are chosen to be saved from before eternity, we know that Christ was slain for all for the forgiveness of sins, we know that Christ is the lamb slain for all from before the foundations of the earth. In here we find the restoration of being, unity with God through Christ. In here we are elect unto the restoration of our being and our humanity. It is in unbelief and rejection of this gospel that we fall again, and fall deeper into the oblivion of the absence of their election unto forgiveness in Christ Jesus. Yet the existence of people who reject the grace of God and eternally perish in spite of it has brought into question not only the power of God, but His will for us as individuals. The problem with this line of thinking is that it again forgets to recognize the unconditional nature of God’s election. God is not asking you to believe that you are worthy to be elect, He is proclaiming to you that you are elect in spite of your unworthiness. It is the old Adam and him only who demands a reason for this election and therefore Adam, and only Adam who brings the second fall, not the lack of God’s electing grace.
Election is a proclamation of God to be received in faith against and contrary to the reason and the accusation of our own hearts. This can be understood in light of the self-confrontation, where the wrestling with impossibility is not from God, who has proclaimed an unconditional gospel where the hidden and revealed God intersect in Christ crucified, but where the old man rises up to accuse himself in a last ditch attempt to foil God’s plain of unconditional grace and mercy. When the individual rejects this promise, or lets doubt swallow it under the self imposed demands and accusations of the Old Adam he chooses to be in himself, who is the negation of goodness and existence itself, rather than to be in Christ, therefore consigning himself to utter lack or utter absence in order to be the god of nothing, crying out to the nothing he rules over, “non serviam.”
As is seen here, for most existentialist theologians, or theologians influenced by existentialism, election is seen as gospel, not as a secret decree of the hidden God but as a loud universal proclamation of God’s choice to save humanity in and through the life and death of Jesus Christ the Son of God incarnate which was proclaimed as for all.10 Classically a great distinction has been brought in to separate election from justification. But this is not a natural distinction. The election of God is His choosing to save us in and through Christ thereby justifying us. We are elect unto justification. While many existentialist theologians went too far such as Jenson, who understands them to be one and the same thing, they are certainly not two different things with two set of subjects.11 One cannot be justified without being chosen to be so. Once this is grasped one sees that there is nothing in the text of Scripture that would lead one to believe that there is any election to anything else. Many have placed election beyond justification, that some justified are elect to persevere, some have limited the amount that God chooses to justify. These are errors. For the Scriptures are clear as to who God set out to save, and they are clear as to who’s sins are atoned for, it is all men. God’s will for man has been good news since the beginning of time. It was God who created us in the garden to be with Him. That was good news. From the beginning there was never anything that we had to do dwell with God, we were created into covenant with Him, not in order to work to merit one. Just so, after we fell by our own volition it was God who chose to become man Himself to redeem us from sin, death, and the devil even without our asking. That was purely good news, but it was we who did not believe it. The bad news is not a necessary reality, but is a creation of our own hands that has to be manifested by our unbelief. It was not God who said that there is a people condemned, but it was the people who exerted themselves over and against the good news of God to create a status of condemned upon themselves so as to rely on none outside themselves. While Kierkegaard posited positive faith in the promises of God as a leap into the black unknown it is actually quite the opposite. It is God who has leapt into our blackness to fill it with colour and being. It is us who have placed our hands over our eyes to hide from this reality of God imminently confronting and filling the blackness. God is as He has proclaimed Himself to be, savingly present and universally gracious. Faith is merely the acceptance of God as He is, namely, savingly present and universally gracious.
Subjective
While this concept of an objective choosing of all men in Christ may seem radical and even heretical to many, it is not different from the doctrine of Universal objective justification. Many come to this with such a conclusion because they feel that to make God’s election resistible is to make His will mutable. However, they do not feel this way if justification is made resistible. It cannot be worse for God’s will to be resisted than it is for God’s declaration of innocence at the cost of His own incarnation, suffering, and death to be resisted. In fact because of their inseparable connection, one cannot be justified unless they were first chosen in Christ to be so, lest we have people accidentally getting in on God’s plan of salvation where He did not will them to be. There has never been a forced entry into Christ’s body by the un-chosen. There has only been a refusal of God’s will and God’s promises.
With most Lutherans accepting Universal Objective Justification one would think that they would connect this to their work on election, however, it is not so. Because of this, existentialist influence has been “blamed” for creating the theology of an objective universal election of all people in Christ. In part this accusation is true and has grounding in reality. However, it is more correct to speak of classical philosophy’s influence on theology as the reason for election and justification having been separated into the will of hidden and revealed God respectively. They have done so by making election a naked decree that must by necessity be immutable and made justification a hypothetical possibility.
The solution here is just as it is with creation and with Justification. God unconditionally created us into covenant with Him and recreated us with Him in Christ. It is always us who hide from this revelation. Our rejection and hiding from God’s creation or His justification of humanity does not make it mutable. Hiding from the ever-present reality of the saving God in Christ Jesus does not make it any less present, it just shows our stubborn rejection of His universal and objective grace.
Just as it is with Objective Justification it is with Election, not because they are the same thing as Jenson has stated, but because they are inseparably connected in Christ where the Father’s will is made known and accomplished. Humanity is objectively chosen to be recreated in Christ Jesus for unity with God and objectively this has happened and is now declared from pulpits weekly. However, just as our justification at the cross is of no benefit to us if we reject it neither is our being chosen in Christ Jesus, unless it is received by faith at a subjective level.
Being
Concerning the theme and concept of being. God is being itself, just as God is the individual. For us to be good is for us to be in the image of God. For all goodness is in God. Evil itself is the lack of good. God is good itself. This is not to introduce pantheism or panentheism into the discussion as many far left theologians have done – and they too are often influenced by existentialism when doing so. This is to say rather, that just as God created all things as good, He created it in and through Himself. The fall, and all sin along with it was not something that God created or something in Him, through Him, or otherwise caused by or even related to Him. Sin is purely and truly a lack or absence of God, and therefore of goodness and being too. When speaking of being then, one needs to be speaking of God and unity with Him.
Therefore, to speak of one as being elect, we are speaking of to be in unity with God in and through Christ in that recreation just as it was in our first creation. No one is “being” elect without first “being” in Christ, nor are they elect without being in Christ. For all who are elect are elect in Him and through Him.12 Yet God is not only merely the ground being, goodness, and election, both elect and elector in that He is both God and man.13 In being God He is the elector, He is the one who all is elected in, through, and for. Yet being man also, He is the elected, chosen to dwell in unity with God eternally. It is in Christ becoming man that humanity is elect unto recreation and being in and through God in Christ. Therefore to be is to be with, in, and through Christ. Election is not exempt from this truth.
Conclusion
To conclude, the doctrine of election among existential theologians is at the same time greatly varied and greatly unified. When the doctrine of election is thought through along existentialist lines and according to existentialist themes it tends to take on a revealed gospel form rather than the hidden and almost torturous nature that it often takes in more classical schools of theology. It does this by focusing on the individual and His freedom to be as He is, which in the case of God is to be good, gracious, and savingly present, and in the case of man, is to be saved by God and in union with Him by grace. This savingly present God confronts the sinner who then doubts and hides from Him, to raise himself up to be the god of nothing rather than to be a part of existence, under the God of everything. Faith receives the truth of this savingly present God, making His objective presence a subjectively lived and experienced reality.
Bibliography
Allen, Diogenes. Eric O. Springsted. Philosophy for Understanding Theology.2nd Ed. Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.
Forde, Gerhard. Where God Meets Man. Minneapolis: Augsburg publishing, 1972.
Jenson, Robert W. Carl. E. Braaten. Christian Dogmatics.Vol. 2. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2011.
Kenny, Anthony. A New History of Western Philosophy. Oxford, NY: Oxford, 2010.
Paulson, Steven D. Lutheran Theology. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.
Pieper, Francis. Christian Dogmatics.Vol. 3. St. Louis: Concordia, 1953.
Schodde, George H. Ed. The Error of Modern Missouri. Columbus, OH: Lutheran Book Concern, 1897.
Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951.
1Diogenes Allen, Eric O. Springsted, Philosophy for Understanding Theology, 2nd Ed. (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), pp. 190.
2George H. Schodde, Ed, The Error of Modern Missouri, (Columbus, OH: Lutheran Book Concern, 1897), 444.
3Francis, Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 3, (St. Louis: Concordia, 1953), 478-479.
4Gerhard Forde, Where God Meets Man, (Minneapolis: Augsburg publishing, 1972), kindle location 102.
5Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 2, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951), 239-240.
7Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, (Oxford, NY: Oxford, 2010), 980-981.
8Ibid
9Ibid
10Steven D. Paulson, Lutheran Theology, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 18.
11 Robert W. Jenson, Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 2, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2011), 134.
12Samuel, H. Nafzger, Ed., Confessing the Gospel: A Lutheran Approach to Systematic Theology, Vol. 2, (St. Louis: Concorida, 2017), 1252-1253.
13Robert W. Jenson, Carl. E. Braaten. Christian Dogmatics.Vol. 2. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2011), 137.
