Election (Draft)
October 1, 2024

This is a short examination of the doctrine of election with an examination of a excerpt from "Elected to Salvation" on the The Thinking Fellows podcast (https://www.1517.org/podcast-overview/elected-to-salvation). This essay will focus on the Lutheran doction of single predestination and whether election is sufficient for salvation.

Definitions

Start by defining the following two terms. First, a person is saved or has salvation means that at death the person will not receive the punishment for their sins but enter into heaven. Having faith at death is the requirement for salvation. Christians will often say that they are "saved" when what they should instead say that they "believe" or "have faith" so that they would be saved if they died at that moment. Second, a person has been elected or predestined means that God decided the person would exist and be saved, and He made this choice before He created the world.

Necessity of Election

The standard Lutheran position regarding election is summarized with two conditional statements concerning the necessity of election to salvation.

(1) If one will be saved, then one has been elected.
(2) If one has not been elected, then one will not be saved.
(1) is used more often. It can be seen in the passage from the approximate 10-minute mark of the podcast:
If you are saved, it is wholly and completely that God in His love for you, chose you before the foundation of the world to be His own and then fulfilled that in real time and in real space by sending you a preacher to preach to you the Gospel, through the proclaimed Word and Sacraments, and the Holy Spirit worked through that to bring you to the faith and keep you in that faith, and that is why you are saved. And if you are not, it is because at some point you rejected that Gospel ... You are free to say no to God.

Sufficiency of Election

Now, consider the converse of (1) and (2):
(3) If one has been elected, then one will be saved,
which is equivalent to
(4) If one will not be saved, then one has not been elected.
Consider the following passages in support of (3) and (4). By (1), the sheep are of the elect. To check the converse, is it possible for their to be an elect person that is not a sheep? First, identify the argument of the first sentence. This must be done carefully because this is part of a discourse where Jesus is not speaking generally but instead talking to a particular crowd of people. The conclusion found in the sentence can be written as the crowd does not believe and one of the premises is the crowd is not of the sheep. Include the unstated conditional to complete the syllogism: The quotation suggests that (3) is false. Common Lutheran belief is that when God speaks then it comes to past. That is, when He works through means He can be resisted. But the election decree is not through means. The path to salvation is manifested in the world, but that decree made before the foundation of the world . So what is Calvin's error? Comfort requires (3) This is the position of Pieper. p479
Paul presents this in a most comforting manner when he points out that before the world began God ordained in his counsel through which specific cross and afflication he would conform each of his elect to "the image of his Son," and that in each case the afflictions should and must "work together for good" since they are "called according to his purpose." (Solid Declaration XI, 49)