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.”
Comments
Hi James, nice blog layout! And...
Hi James, I haven't said that I like the new blog layout.
This is really very helpful, as I think this is the way we treat regular church members in practice. It means, also, doesn't it, that we need to treat those who have stopped functioning as members of the visible community of God's people differently. Not as people to evangelise, but discipline. Who will be the first vicar to excommunicate all lapsed members of the community?
Absolutely
And, by discipline, we mean "seek to restore / win back"
The exhortation becomes "live what you are", not "start over again, and again, and again".
Which is where I think the "handing over to Satan" Scriptures come in. Sometimes, excommunication is the correct way to discipline. What we are saying when we do that is: "We will put you out of the church in the hope that you will repent and come back. But outside the church is the place to go to think on this option, because this is where you could spend eternity if you eternally unrepentant." That, in turn, means that we need to consider carefully when excommunication is the correct form of discipline.
Yes, how we treat people in practice
So that Eph 1:4 does not say "he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him (well, most of us anyway - you all know who I'm not including at this point, but let's not go there)."
I would like to see someone demonstrate a place where a person outside of the covenant is ever referred to as 'elect' in Scripture. It seems to me that the decretally elect/covenantally elect distinction is not something that naturally arises out of Scripture, but is an accommodation to the sloppy way in which some of these terms have been used historically.
BTW, it is good to see another theoblogger from North Staffs. When I am not studying in St. Andrews, I live in Hartshill in Stoke.
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