oakleys.org.uk

Pondering this some more, I can see entirely where the confusion arises.

Take my earlier post, where I said that

We can only know who is in the covenant, so we (in accord with Scripture) treat those in the covenant as elect.

What does that mean in practice? It means we treat them in the same way as we would treat someone we knew to be eternally decreed by God to be elect.

What does that mean in the specific area of how we talk of such a person? It means we talk of them in the same way as someone we knew to be eternally decreed by God to be elect.

That means we use labels like

• forgiven
• alive
• saints / sanctified
• …
• elect

Aah! Therein lies the problem. It is entirely correct – pastorally as well as systematically – to say to someone who is in the covenant “you are elect”. We don’t just treat them “as if they were elect”, we treat them “as elect”.

So we can say: “The person who is in the covenant is decretively elect of God”.

But that is not to flatten the categories of decretal election and covenant membership into one another. Because saying that such a person is “…decretively elect of God” is shorthand for “…treated in every respect as elect of God, because (as creatures) we can only know whether someone is a member of the visible church of God, and Scripture tells us to treat such people as elect of God unless we discipline them otherwise.”