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Traditional Christian doctrines of election
produce many atheists. They often portray God as utterly distinct
from the universe. Omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient,
God’s sovereign majesty determines everything that happens
right down to the smallest detail. As a spectacular display
of divine power and glory, from all eternity God elects some
for salvation and others for damnation. In less severe interpretations,
God elects some for salvation and bypasses all others without
directly willing their damnation.
Either way, those whom God elects for salvation
will enjoy heaven forever and all the rest will suffer in
hell endlessly. Except as possible indicators of what God
has already decided, how one responds to God and to other
living beings has nothing to do with one’s eternal destiny.
This is entirely a matter of God’s unfettered will. It
is improper and impious to deny human freedom or to blame
God for human sinfulness, however. Although it may not seem
so, God is loving and worthy of our admiration and emulation.
To those who object that such expositions make
God appear capricious, the answer is often clear and certain:
human beings are not qualified to judge God! When applied
to God, human standards of right and wrong are worthless.
Some things are right and other things are wrong merely because
God commands them. If God had commanded exactly the opposite,
our correct moral judgments would be the reverse of what they
now are. God’s will does not merely tell us what it is
right or wrong; it makes these so. In at least this one case,
might does make right.
Donna Bowman, a professor in the Honors College
at the University of Central Arkansas, does not attempt to
rehabilitate these traditional views. This book, based on
her doctoral dissertation at the University of Virginia, begins
with a brief survey of the convictions of John Calvin in the
sixteenth century and quickly turns to Karl Barth’s very
different proposals in the twentieth. She compares and contrasts
Barth’s thoughts with those of Alfred North Whitehead,
a mathematician and philosopher in England and the United
States who died in 1946.
Using their different but overlapping concerns
to develop an alternative account that strives to be faithful
to genuine Christianity and experientially adequate today,
Bowman develops the first comprehensive Christian doctrine
of divine election from within the fold of process thought.
I recommend it highly, especially for those who like their
theology without cream and sugar!
At least three themes integrate Bowman’s
detailed constructive proposals. One of these is that divine
election pertains in the first instance to God’s own
self and that this self-determination includes God’s
decision to love all those who are not God.
A second is that divine election is a dynamic
in which others freely respond one way or another to God’s
love and God reacts to their responses. Far from being a unilateral
divine determination, divine election is interactive from
start to finish.
A third is that election is a call to service,
not status. Whenever God elects individuals or groups, God
invites them to do something that will enrich their lives
and enhance the lives of others. Because God elects everyone,
human and non-human alike, each one is invited to serve in
a way that is mindful of his, her or its opportunities and
limitations.
These three themes of election as Gods’
self-determination to be for all others, to interact with
all others and to invite all others to serve fit together
in Bowman’s proposals like the three sides of an equilateral
triangle.
Because we often think this way about other
things, it is easy for us to assume that, logically and perhaps
chronologically, first God "is" and then God "elects"
or "chooses" to love all others. This is exactly
the assumption that Bowman invites us to reconsider. Using
the different ideas of Barth and Whitehead to make her point,
which she rightly believes is more Scriptural than the traditional
doctrines, she collapses the distinction we often make between
God’s determination "to be" and God’s
decision "to be for us." Her way of putting things
enables us to deny that God’s love for all others is
either merely necessary or wholly contingent. It also implies
that God’s love does not find complete satisfaction among
the members of the Trinity, but that it also overflows to
all those who are not God.
Bowman’s suggestion is related to a larger
issue regarding language, religious and otherwise. We sometimes
suppose that declaring that "God is love" is akin
to saying that "the ball is blue" when in actuality
it is more like reporting that "the ball is round."
Though Bowman and others want to challenge us about this,
we tend to think that a ball can be either red or blue without
ceasing to be the sphere it is, that’s its color is merely
accidental to its essence. It is not possible for something
to be other than round and still be a genuine ball, however.
Likewise, if we are Christians, according to Bowman, we cannot
say that "God is" without also meaning that "God
is love." God is what God elects, and what God elects
is to love all others. Although love is not God, God is love!
Bowman’s book helps me make important progress
in my continuing attempts to find a path between and beyond
the views of free-will theists like Richard Rice and Clark
Pinnock, on the one hand, and process theologians like John
B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, on the other. I have long
agreed with the free-will theists that the actuality of all
those who are not God is a "gift" from God whereas
at least some process theologians leave the impression that
this may be a "given" for God.
In his typically insightful way, John B. Cobb,
Jr., has observed that the free-will theists attribute the
actuality of all others to God’s will and that the process
theologians attribute this to God’s nature. Although
this strikes me as probably right, Bowman’s book tempts
me to think that the distinction between "nature"
and "will" does not pertain to God without modification.
Instead, God’s nature is what God wills it to be and,
in and of itself, not as something different or later, God
wills to be for others.
This leads me to wonder if I, and perhaps some
others, would benefit from differentiating more sharply the
distinctions between the necessary and the contingent, on
the one hand, and the essential and the accidental, on the
other, instead of using the first two and the last two terms
as synonyms. This might allow us to say with the free-will
theists that the actuality of all others is not necessary
but contingent upon God and with the process theologians that
it is not accidental but essential for God.
In other words, precisely because God is who
God wills to be, God is not now, has never been, and never
will be "home alone." Although this possibility
makes sense to me, Professor Bowman is not to be blamed for
the use I am making of her excellent book!
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