CHAPTER 9
ELECTION IN CHRISTIANITY
NEW TESTAMENT
Within the New Testament we see a scriptural shift toward soteriological understanding of election and a more binary perspective—but these texts, too, are multivoiced. They incorporate many themes from Tanakh related to chosenness: (near) death of the beloved son, Davidic kingship, suffering on account of election, and the call to live righteously in covenantal faithfulness with God and the teachings of Torah.1 Some elect individuals, like Mary, simply find favor with God (Luke 1:30). Jesus is especially marked as chosen (Luke 9:35), and a voice from heaven announces at his baptism, “You are My Son, whom I love” (Mark 1:11 NIV). Like the servant of God mentioned in Isaiah (Matt. 12:18ff), like the seed of Abraham (Gal. 3:16), his election represents God’s initiative of love toward humanity and the world.
New contexts and new ideas, however, created the chemistry for metamorphosis. In his outreach to the Gentiles, Paul problematized the emphasis on Torah observance. Apocalyptic expectations and developing ideas regarding the afterlife, common to several expressions of Judaism in the late Second Temple period, profoundly impacted the young community of Jesus’s disciples, as did Platonic hierarchies of the spiritual over the material world.2 Early in the Jesus movement, election became powerfully linked to spiritual salvation. Salvation in Hebrew Bible generally refers to physical rescue (yeshua, available to all), and some New Testament texts do not specify its significance. When Paul writes to the church in Thessaloniki (2:13), “But we must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth,” he does not define salvation (soteria). The passage in Ephesians 1:3–14 is similarly indefinite. Other texts, however, link salvation explicitly to the gift of eternal life, sometimes with an intimation of predestination. In Acts, Paul and Barnabas invoke Isaiah’s charge to be a light to the nations as authorization for their conversionary mission: “For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, ‘I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles, so that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’ When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and praised the word of the Lord; and as many as had been destined for eternal life became believers” (13:47–8). With this emphasis, election addresses the crisis of human finitude.
While endowing election with different meaning, the New Testament still frames it in familiar terms, especially by claiming the mantle of Israel. In Romans 4, Paul proclaims, “It depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all [Abraham’s] descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham” (4:16). He is building the case for being elect without the Sinaitic covenant, since Abraham’s special relationship with God preceded revelation of Torah, and he affirms that “the promise” is both for Jews and for all the followers of Jesus. Further along in Romans, Paul asserts the seemingly paradoxical beliefs that salvation is exclusively through faith in Jesus—and that the Jews are beloved regarding election, for the gifts of God are irrevocable (Rom. 9–11).3 Yet Hebrews 8:13 mentions “a new covenant” and states that “God has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.” Mark 16:16 (generally considered a late addition) also announces a supersessionist doctrine: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” What appears in some New Testament texts as a defensive posture, arguing for the legitimacy of its community’s interpretation and observance, is wielded offensively in other passages to claim that those who accept Jesus as Christ are the true Israel. They are the chosen ones.
Many texts can be interpreted in diverse ways—e.g.,: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:28–29). Modern Christians may receive Paul’s teaching here as a liberative vision of equality, flattening differences that lead to conflict. Jews, on the other hand, often experience it as an attempt to erase Judaism.4 Most likely, it was an appeal to Christian unity, not meant to indicate much of substance about the remainder of the Jewish community or the world. A similar concern lies behind Colossians 3; enfolding diverse identities into the body of the church leads to the compelling verse, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience” (Col. 3:12).5
The core of the New Testament canon witnesses to that moment in history when Christianity still understood itself as a type of Judaism and religious identities were very much in flux. Internal conflicts coarsened the discourse of difference.6 In Galatians 4, for example, there is an allegory identifying those who embrace the Sinai covenant as Ishmael—in other words as children of the servant-wife Hagar, enslaved by their observance of Torah. Isaac, the “biological ancestor” of the Jews, represents instead the followers of Jesus, heir to the promise. Presumably Paul intends to discourage this Gentile community from thinking they must observe Jewish practices. In fleshing out the parable, however, he appears to strip Jews who reject Jesus of their election: “What does Scripture say? Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave shall not inherit with the son of the free woman” (Gal. 4:30).7
While the Jesus movement differed from other Second Temple Judaisms by removing the mitzvot as an obligation of chosenness, attitudes toward “the Law” in New Testament are not universally negative.8 After all, Jesus was an observant Jew. Luke 2 emphasizes how Mary and Joseph followed Torah instructions for circumcision and purification. Various passages portray the importance of just practice (James 2:18–26, Matt. 25’s parable of the sheep and the goats). Even the famous verse in 2 Corinthians 3:6, “for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life,” so often cited as a critique of legalism, can be understood to refer only to overly literal reading or observance that ignores spiritual intention.9 The Apostolic Council made clear that the easing of required observance was designed to simplify the path for pagan converts (Acts 15). Yet Paul appears to develop a negative attitude toward the nomos, and his Epistle to the Galatians later became foundational for portraying the covenant of Torah—which the Jews believed gave meaning to their chosenness—as a prison and a curse (see 3:10–12, 19, 23). Thick in imagery from Tanakh, 1 Peter identifies the law as the cause of the Jews’ fall and transfers the status of the elect to Jesus’s scattered followers, giving them courage in the face of Roman persecution: “They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people” (2:8–10).10
At times, New Testament appears to limit access to God as well as salvation.11 When Ephesians 2:11–22 speaks of both Jew and Gentile having access to the Father by one spirit, it means through the particular path of Christianity. In John 14:6, Jesus announces, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Some contemporary commentators interpret it to mean that Jesus controls access but one need not be Christian to know God, or that Jesus simply seeks to reassure his disciples who were anxious about his imminent departure. Like Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 7:7—“Knock and the door shall be opened for you”—it signals God’s commitment to make a path for the faithful.12 Yet the verse in John is frequently interpreted as an exclusivist theology of religions, and John 15 speaks of Jesus as the true vine and God as the vinegrower: anyone who does not abide in Christ is thrown away like a barren branch, tossed into the fire and burned. 2 Thessalonians 1:6–9 also claims that those who do not know God and obey the gospel of Jesus will suffer eternal destruction.13 Such passages reduce Kaminsky’s “three categories” (elect, non-elect, and anti-elect) to two.
Competing with other streams of Judaism for converts made it critical to demonstrate the superiority of the new covenant and the efficacy of its election.14 Polemic was an effective tool to undermine those who made contradictory claims, stimulating ferocious denunciation of the unconverted Jewish community.15 Pharisees receive particular rebuke, as in the seven woes of Matthew 23. Like Tanakh’s polemic against the Canaanites, New Testament’s assault on the Pharisees reveals the special hostility provoked when delineating an other who is too-much-like-us.16 The disciple circle surrounding Jesus and the proto-rabbinic community of Pharisees each presented a reform platform that sought to distill essential religious values through close reading of scripture and the charism of their leaders. Yet all “the Jews” were vilified: according to the Gospel of John, Jesus calls them children of the devil, not of God (8:43–4). In Acts 7, Stephen testifies before the Sanhedrin that the children of Israel repeatedly rebelled against Moses. He claims they are stiff-necked, uncircumcised of heart, always opposing the Holy Spirit, and that they persecuted the prophets, killed John the Baptist, and betrayed Jesus to the Roman authorities. Several of these charges are repeated in 1 Thessalonians, which then concludes: “The wrath of God has come upon them at last” (2:16).17 The early Christian community, still struggling against Roman oppression, could not have known how devastating this rhetoric of othering would become after they held the reins of imperial power.
Many condemnations of the Jews within New Testament draw from self-critical portions of Tanakh, but read with a “schism of judgment and promise.” Rosemary Radford Ruether lamented, “By applying prophetic judgment to ‘the Jews’ and messianic hope to ‘the Church,’ Christianity deprived the Jews of their future. They also denied to the Jews the record of their greatest moral accomplishment, the breakthrough from ideological religion to self-critical faith. By the same token, the Church deprived itself of the tradition of prophetic self-criticism. . . . Prophetic faith was converted into self-glorification and uncritical self-sanctification.”18
Although the schism deepened over time, there are important cautionary notes to the emerging church communities within New Testament. Paul warns followers, for instance, not to be arrogant as inheritors of election; they too might lose it (Rom. 11:20–21). Jesus teaches against self-righteousness (Matt. 7:1–5); James counsels against presumptions of divine favoritism and critiques selfish ambition disguised as religious leadership (2:1–13, 3:1–18). These warnings echo the concerns of the prophets in Tanakh as vital articulations of self-critical faith. There are also more embracing universalist messages, as in 1 Timothy 4:10: “We have put our hope in the Living God, who is the savior of all men and especially of those who believe.” The diversity of voices leads to intense debates about Christian theology and leaves open inclusive possibilities for reading.
While New Testament displays substantial problems with difference, conquest is less of an issue: the entire collection is composed and redacted when the elect wield no political power. In fact, the historical context of imperial Rome stimulates religious teachings of peace and prophetic critique of oppression. Jesus’s parables can be read as subversive challenges to unmask the destructive dynamics of domination.19 The beatitudes in Matthew 5 and the tribute to love in 1 Corinthians 13 challenge Roman hegemony by proclaiming the spiritual power of the poor and the meek. They glorify righteousness and kindness rather than conquest: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. . . . Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Matt. 5:3–7).
It would be a mistake to imagine there is no embrace of redemptive violence in New Testament, but it generally relates to the chosen ones as victims—crucifixion in the gospels and martyrdom in the book of Acts. As Calvin Roetzel commented, “The modus vivendi of the elect is suffering.”20 While imagery in Ephesians 6:10–17 depicts victorious combat, it is a spiritual battle. Even Jesus’s ominous word that he has come not to bring peace but a sword reads as rhetorical violence (Matt. 10:34). Conquest is eschatological, especially as expressed in the book of Revelation’s martial discourse.21 It is not until Christianity becomes the religion of empire that the dangerous potion of conquest and election begins to seethe.
THE DEEPENING OF DIFFERENCE
In the history of Christian exegesis, we see that the ultimate fate of the unchosen was a critical issue for the early Church. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa posited that everyone can be restored to friendship with God (apokatastasis); punishment may endure for a long time, but God is victorious over sin and death. All will finally share in the grace of salvation—conscribing the dangerous ramifications of election.22 Even Cyprian’s (third century) classic statement, extra ecclesium nulla salus (outside of the church, no salvation), did not originally mean to exclude non-Christians from divine grace; rather, it was directed as a chastisement to Christians who refused to submit to the bishops’ authority. While the idea of universal salvation enjoyed popularity for a time, many came to believe that it compromised divine justice and the centrality of faith. It was ruled contrary to Church doctrine at the Council of Constantinople in 543. There nonetheless remained a tradition of apokatastasis throughout the history of Christian thought, especially among mystics and more broadly since the Renaissance.23 Self-critical voices like that of St. Isaac the Syrian (seventh century) also limited the dangers of election in other ways; he asserted that the idea of eternal punishment is incompatible with a loving God, and encouraged compassion for all humanity regardless of faith.24
Another argument addressed the merits of election. Augustine explained: they were not chosen because of their goodness (either demonstrated or foreseen by God), because they could not be good if they were not chosen. They were not chosen because they believed, because they could not believe if they were not chosen. Grace is not grace if we maintain the priority of merit.25 Calvin echoed this concept of unconditional election, accentuating divine glory rather than the vindication of one human being over another—dampening tendencies toward chauvinism.
Yet there are also examples that illustrate election’s dangerous division between us and them. Damage was often done by erasure, taking over the status and scripture of the Jewish community. Church Fathers consistently reinforced the notion that Christians had become God’s elect: “True spiritual Israel,” Justin Martyr (100–165 CE) called “those who have been led to God by this crucified Christ.”26 Magnifying hermeneutics evident within the gospels and epistles, they saw Jesus prefigured everywhere in the “Old” Testament: he is the seed of Abraham, recipient of the divine promise.27 He is Isaac, the beloved son bound for sacrifice.28 He is Moses, extending his arms like a cross to prevail against Amalek.29 He is Isaiah’s suffering servant, chosen by God.30 The commandments were also understood as figures that presage the coming of Christ. Circumcision, for instance, was read as a symbol for removing one’s fleshly nature, fulfilled in Jesus’s resurrection that allows the elect to transcend physical existence.31
Exegetes believed the church was similarly prefigured to highlight her chosen status, and began to read “carnal” Israel (the original biblical community identified in New Testament as the Jews) as a type, a foil for the spiritual Israel that arose in Jesus’s wake.32 The church is signified by Abel, with the preferred offering of faith—rather than Cain, who represents the Jews with their earthly observances.33 She is the family of Noah, saved by water and wood, just as Christians are saved by the waters of baptism and the wood of the cross.34 Typological exegesis is extensive in patristic literature, and Church Fathers frequently portrayed the Jews with their minds veiled because they did not find intimations of Christian gospel in their own scripture.35 (Nonetheless, Ephraem, Origen, Jerome, and others hired Jewish teachers for text study.) In remaking the story of Israel into the story of Jesus and his followers, the interpreters authenticated their identity as God’s chosen people.
This theology of replacement, also known as supersession, had a tremendous impact on Jews and Judaism.36 It was Augustine who provided a theological rationale to explain the continuation of Judaism after the gospel theoretically rendered the Jewish covenant obsolete. He affirmed that God chose Israel and gave them the law for their benefit. Yet Jews remain in what Augustine viewed as a fossilized form in order to serve as witnesses to the truth of Christianity; they must live in misery to demonstrate that there is no salvation without Christ. Viewed as Cain, they are punished for their crime and doomed to exile, but also protected by God with the “mark” of their continued observance. For this precarious role, he found the perfect prooftext: “Slay them not, lest My people forget; scatter them in Your might” (Ps. 59:12).37 As Augustine’s strategy became normative, it promoted a certain tolerance but it also painted Jews as the quintessential other, whose fate was dangerously woven into the narrative of Christian vindication. The post-Nicene Church Fathers saw confirmation of divine election in their ascendancy to empire, and they required the Jews’ suffering to prove it as well.
Polemical literature dealing with Judaism included a growing list of calumnious accusations that came to be known as the teaching of contempt.38 David Nirenberg identified “the vast stockpiles of anti-Jewish stereotypes” as “the product of conflicts between Christians, conflicts in which each party strove to claim the mantle of ‘true Israel’ for itself, and to clothe the other in the robe of ‘Jew.’” The figures were rhetorical rather than real Jews. Denigrating them and their faith with fervor became a demonstration of credibility; as Erasmus and Luther quipped during a much later sectarian struggle, “If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian.”39
The tone of anti-Jewish discourse grew more strident once Christianity was officially recognized within the Roman Empire, and subsequently became the religion of the state. Adversus Judaeos, John Chrysostom’s series of sermons delivered in Antioch in 386–387 CE, painted a particularly hateful portrait. Challenging Christians who seemed attached to elements of Jewish practice and worship, he called the synagogue a dwelling of demons (also a theater, a whorehouse, a den of thieves, and haunt of wild animals) and later declared Jewish souls full of demons also. He identified Jews as “the common disgrace and infection of the whole world” and urged Christians not to exchange even a simple greeting with them in the marketplace. Within the first sermon alone, he accused them of overpowering lust, plundering, covetousness, abandonment of the poor, theft, dishonesty in business, and more. He deemed them ready for slaughter, citing the end of a parable in Luke 19:27: “As for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and slaughter them in my presence.” Scholars contextualize his remarks within the increasingly fervent drive for Christian unity and the genre of psogos, a no-holds-barred polemical style. Unfortunately, however, accusations like these became staples in the history of antisemitism, eventually bursting the bounds of Christianity to infect other cultures as well.
Hostility did not remain in the verbal realm. There were physical assaults and discriminatory legislation, including restrictions against Jews proselytizing, intermarrying, owning slaves, building new synagogues, practicing law, serving in the imperial administration, testifying against a Christian, receiving public honor, or holding office.40 Some of these disabilities extended to all individuals who were not Christian according to current orthodoxy, but Jews served as the essential Other for construction of the elect Christian self. In later periods, persecution grew to include prohibitions against owning land, exclusion from many trades, forced disputations, public burnings of the Talmud, identifying garb, ghettoization, expulsions, libels, and pogroms.
The precise relationship between rhetorical and actual violence, or polemic and discriminatory legislation, is difficult to discern. This study assumes only that which is in direct evidence: the images were used to justify actions against the “other.” The edict of expulsion from Spain in 1492, for example, claimed that Jews and Judaizing corrupted the faith of the elect.41 As Jerusha Rhodes observed, “While there is not always a necessary connection between negative depictions of religious “others” and intolerant actions, at the very least negative depictions can be used as fuel for already kindled fires.”42
After the rise of Islam, there was a new enemy, one with universal theological and imperial ambitions to rival Christendom’s. According to Muslim sources, the encounter did not begin this way. Early biographies of Muhammad record him dispatching a group of followers to take refuge from Quraysh persecution by going to the Christian king in Abyssinia. The monarch was particularly impressed by Qur’an’s teaching about Jesus and offered them protection.43 Christian records address a slightly later period, penned by those in the East who lived in territory captured by advancing Muslim armies. Having perceived Christian conquest as a sign of divine election, they grappled with the theological implications of a rapidly growing Islamic empire. The first instinct was self-critical, a temporary scourge meant to purify the Christian community, or a sign of the imminent apocalypse.44 Then Christian leaders began composing apologetics to defend their scripture and doctrine against charges of taḥrif (textual or interpretive distortion), idolatry, and irrationality.
There was also substantial production of polemic. John of Damascus (676–749) contested the religion of the “Ishmaelites” as another in the long line of Christian heresies, a forerunner to the Antichrist.45 The ninth-century Risalat al-Kindi defended doctrines challenged by Islam, such as the Trinity, and presented Muhammad as an oversexed, materialistic idolater who enriched himself through trade, raiding, and marriage to a wealthy patron. He claimed that Muhammad pretended to be a prophet in order to rule over his tribe, and that Qur’an was a product of satanic law composed by Muhammad. Rites such as washing before prayer and fasting during Ramadan were presented as useless efforts to purify the body while the soul remained corrupt.46 Again, self and other were mutually constructed; each critique was designed to highlight the superiority of Christian scripture, theology, and praxis. Such works were written for Christian readers to confirm their status as God’s elect, even as they were subject to Muslim rule. “Denigration of the other can be used to defend one’s own intellectual construction of the world.”47
It is evident in art as well. Leaving aside images that demonized Muslims and Jews as monstrous or damned,48 we examine instead the beautiful and disturbing statuary of the thirteenth-century Strasbourg Cathedral. The Church is represented by a noble woman, staff and chalice in her hands, crown upon her head, looking boldly into the future. The Synagogue is also a woman, but she holds a broken spear, the tablets of divine instruction hanging limply at her side. She is gazing down—or she would be, except that she is blindfolded. Gentler variations still deployed Synagoga to reveal Ecclesia’s destiny. An ivory tablet from the Bamberg Cathedral (c. 870) shows a crowned Synagoga seated in front of the Temple, with the earth in her hands. There is no humiliation, yet Ecclesia steps up to take possession of the office and rank of her predecessor as determined in Christian salvation history. A window in the abbey church of St. Denis (twelfth century) illuminates an eschatological Concordia confirming Christian election: Jesus stands with arms outstretched so that his body becomes a cross, one hand on the head of the Church and the other on the head of the Synagogue, having removed her blindfold.49
There were relatively sympathetic portrayals of Jews and Muslims that humanized the “other,” like Peter Abelard’s poignant lament set into the mouth of a Jew: “Whoever thinks that we shall receive no reward for continuing to bear so much suffering through our loyalty to God must imagine that God is extremely cruel. Indeed, there is no people which has ever been known or even believed to have suffered so much for God . . . and it should be granted that there can be no rust of sin which is not burnt up in the furnace of this affliction. . . . Nowhere but heaven may we enter safely” (Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian).50
In a sermon on Susannah, Abelard admired the Jewish people’s commitment to teaching sacred texts to all their sons, showing up Christian devotion.51 James the Conqueror, a central figure in the thirteenth-century Reconquista to establish Castilian rule over the Iberian Peninsula, expressed admiration for the “Saracens” and promised to protect their religious freedom; he also refused the order of Pope Clement IV to expel Jews and Muslims. Still bound up with Christian election, these actions formed the backdrop of his self-portrait as a righteous crusader for the true faith.52 An Italian Dominican friar, Riccoldo da Montecroce (1242–1320), admitted how the gardens, architecture, wealth, and learning of Baghdad enthralled him—yet he was distraught that God would allow Saracen subjugation of God’s elect.53
And the dangers of othering continue to lurk, easily redeployed. In 1523, Martin Luther composed an essay, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” arguing that Jews had not converted in large numbers because they were treated poorly and shown only a popish mockery of Christianity: “If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property.”54 When Jews failed to embrace Luther’s reformed tradition, however, he composed On the Jews and Their Lies (1543).55 Abandoning the evangelical project with the Jews, Luther advocated “merciful severity”: burning down their homes and synagogues and stripping them of legal protections.
SPIRITUAL AND PHYSICAL CONQUEST
The implications of empire shaped Christianity’s development from the outset. As Catherine Keller commented, “Whether colonized or colonizing, Christianity has not existed in abstraction from empire. There is no pre-colonial Christianity.”56 Before it became the religion of Rome, before it was even a licit religion, it began to contemplate a different sort of conquest. Hellenism’s universalist philosophy helped solidify its vision of a single universal faith: the community was elected to bring the whole world to God through Christ.57 Pagan polemicists skewered Christianity for its global pretensions, given its late and provincial origins, carried along by “poor country bumpkins” (Porphyry’s late third-century Against the Christians). They invoked what is currently called “the scandal of particularity.” If Christ is the way of salvation, what about all those souls who perished before his arrival, and those in the far reaches of the empire? How can God leave so many people out?
The idea of spiritual conquest developed in early Christian literature. Origen (182–254 CE) and Eusebius (263–339 CE), for instance, argued that Christ’s “wonderful sojourn among men synchronized with Rome’s attainment of the acme of power” (Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel 3.7) so that the apostles could successfully reach and convert a broad swath of humanity. “How else was it possible for the Gospel doctrine of peace, which does not permit men to take vengeance even upon enemies, to prevail throughout the world . . .?” (Origen, Against Celsus 2.30). This distinction between spiritual and military conquest was important. Prominent voices in the early church questioned Christian involvement in imperial warfare due to its entanglement with Roman army religion and the shedding of blood. Election required a different path.58 Although scholars no longer maintain that the pre-Constantine church represented a uniformly pacifist tradition, there is a significant record of ethical and theological struggle with religiously inspired political conquest.59
The seesaw of power between pagans and Christians in the centuries before and after Constantine left behind a discourse rife with irony and the seeds of contemporary pluralist argument, in which each side challenged the imposition of spiritual and physical domination. When Christians were being persecuted, Lactantius (240–320) wrote a passionate brief for freedom of religious conscience, challenging the pagan authorities’ claim that they sought to promote Christian welfare: “Do they then strive to effect this by conversation, or by giving some reason? By no means; rather, they endeavor to effect it by force and tortures. O wonderful and blind infatuation! It is thought that there is a bad mind in those who endeavor to preserve their faith, but a good one in executioners.” He proclaimed that “nothing is so much a matter of free-will as religion.” Without it, religion ceases to exist (Divine Institutes 5.19).
As Christianity gradually became the official religion of the Roman Empire, however, the tables were turned. Pagan arguments that religious diversity should be tolerated because humans cannot attain perfect truth by a single road—and that human diversity is testimony to God’s desire for multiplicity—mostly fell on deaf ears.60 Evangelism readily translated to the political and military realms. “Christianity did not invent Roman universalism,” admitted Alexei Sivertsev. But by combining it with Tanakh’s messianic universalism and early Christian apocalyptic expectations, “Late Antique Christianity succeeded in producing a comprehensive and coherent ideological framework that tied together the destiny of imperial Rome with that of Christ’s kerygma.”61 Election was linked to conquest as religious and political leaders imagined seizing the whole world for Christ.
Beginning in the fourth century, there were state-sponsored and independent persecutions of non-Christians. Pagan worship was banned, its vestiges in imperial functions were erased, and temples were razed.62 When a group of monks plundered the home of a pagan magnate their leader, Shenoute (388–466), declared, “There is no crime for those who have Christ.”63 There were synagogue burnings, assaults and forced conversions—even though Judaism officially remained a licit religion. In 418 CE, Severus of Minorca sent a letter to his fellow bishops urging that they follow his lead in attacking Jewish communities “so the whole breadth of the earth might be ablaze with the flame of love” and consume the Jewish “forest of unbelief.”64 Thinkers like Ambrose and Augustine constructed a “just war theory” that authorized violence to advance the purposes of religion.65 Election’s capacity for self-justification makes it more menacing.
There were also voices that complicated Christian thinking about conquest. Sulpicius Severus (363–425) and Paulinus of Nola (359–431) continued to express concern about military service, even in a Christian army. Canon law prohibited clergy from becoming soldiers and vice versa, and there were significant rites of penance for shedding blood no matter what the cause.66 While imperial legislation often magnified restrictions on non-Christians, emperors also had a stake in political and economic stability, so they sometimes rescinded or declined to enforce oppressive measures. In 598 CE, Pope Gregory I declared papal protection against forced conversion of Jews and wanton destruction of synagogues. When protections were violated, regional church officials sometimes mitigated the violence. As the Crusaders of 1096 viciously attacked Jewish communities along the Rhine and Danube en route to the Holy Land, for example, Bishop John in Speyer and Archbishop Ruthard in Mainz took steps to protect the local Jewish populations. Appalled by the wanton violence, Pope Calixtus II issued another protective order for the Jews (c. 1120), forbidding forced conversion, physical harm, confiscation of property, and the disturbing of festivals or cemeteries. During the Second Crusade (1145–1149), Bernard of Clairvaux issued letters condemning attacks against the Jews in Rhineland communities and even visited the region in part to stem the virulently anti-Jewish preaching of the monk Ralph.67
The Crusades represented the Christian empire’s most dramatic engagement in physical conquest. Monastic orders were militarized, including not only the Knights Templar but also some that were originally founded to address poverty and illness. As usual, religion was not the only factor in justifying conquest: economic and political fears, images of physical violation, and demonizing the enemy all stimulated desire for battle. Sides were drawn by religious division, however, and rhetoric evoked strains of chosenness to motivate the troops. Pope Urban II issued a call to arms at Clermont (1095), reportedly addressing the Catholic Franks as a “race beloved and chosen by God.” He argued that the Crusade was a holy war, commanded by Christ, capable of remitting sins and guaranteeing salvation.68
Medieval Christian voices that questioned the sanctity of religious violence were rare. Even exceptional figures such as Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), recognized for his expansive compassion for all of God’s creatures, supported the Crusades.69 A dramatic exception was Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), describing his vision after the fall of Constantinople in 1453: “The King of heaven and earth stated that the sad news of the groans of the oppressed had been brought to him from this world’s realm: because of religion many take up arms against each other and by their power either force men to renounce their long-practiced tradition or inflict death on them. There were many bearers of these lamentations from all the earth.”70 It is an outstanding example of self-critical religious perspective, even though his sensitivity to the suffering did not change the geopolitical realities. It was only forty years later that Pope Alexander VI issued Inter caetera, with its doctrine of discovery to legitimate Catholic claims to lands occupied by non-Christians.
DISTILLING THE VALUES OF ELECTION: GOD’S INITIATIVE OF LOVE AND EMULATING CHRIST
Despite the evident difficulties, election prompts compelling themes within Christian thought—just as we saw with Jewish ideas of chosenness. One is its emphasis on God’s faithful effort toward restoration and reconciliation. Growing out of dynamic and multivocal possibilities, the now-familiar doctrine was framed by Augustine: Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden transformed human nature, causing every person to be born in a depraved state, a massa damnata (condemned crowd). It is God’s grace to save the elect, available through faith in Jesus as Christ, enabling these individuals to attain eternal life. The controversial question of who is saved tends to obscure the fundamental notion that election represents God’s continuing initiative of love. By drawing sin and salvation into the concept of election, Christianity addresses two existential human crises—our failings and our finitude—with faith in God’s ongoing efforts to help us overcome them.
Those who see orthodox teachings around sin and salvation as rife with their own problems may discover more elastic conceptions in Christian tradition than they imagine. When Irenaeus introduced the concept of original sin, he did not interpret Genesis 3 as a cosmic fall and did not believe that humanity was stripped of its moral freedom as a result of Adam’s sin.71 He, Clement of Alexandria, and others who debated the Gnostics specifically challenged the inevitability of sin, choosing instead to emphasize human freedom and moral responsibility. Building controversy surrounding the teachings of Pelagius, however, prompted the Councils of Carthage (418) and Orange (529) to confirm the Augustinian teaching of original sin as the orthodox position.72 Even so, the Eastern Church developed the theology in less absolute terms, and the Roman Catholic Church recorded countervoices. Abelard’s commentary on Romans, for instance, maintained that humanity inherits Adam’s punishment of mortality, but not a state of sinfulness.73 Whether sin is seen as something one does or a condition into which one is born, Jesus’s incarnation represents God’s continuous effort to make forgiveness possible: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace” (Eph. 1:7 NIV).
The linkage of salvation to election need not focus on who gets a ticket to heaven. Brock and Parker argued that many Church Fathers considered multiple aspects of “paradise”—material and spiritual, personal and collective, awaited and fulfilled—including the flourishing of God’s creation.74 Themes of communal and historical salvation, traceable within New Testament and early Christian writings, only slowly gave way to an emphasis on individual and spiritual possibilities. And still God’s concern for the redemption of history could not be wholly obscured.
Even in the modern age, when individualistic, otherworldly concepts seem predominant, numerous Christian theologians resisted the trend by reclaiming the life-affirming, historically embedded notions of salvation history and focusing on collective redemption. Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) rejected the idea that God chooses particular individuals for salvation.75 Karl Barth identified the covenant with Israel as the beginning of God’s work as consummator of creation, working with humanity through the textures of history to advance God’s purposes.76 Numerous Christian voices today affirm theologically pluralist ideas of salvation, persuaded that God’s initiative of love for creation has no bounds.77
A second essential theme is identification with the incarnate and crucified Christ. Candida Moss described it as a “web of mimetic practices that writers and church leaders sought to inculcate in their audiences and congregations.”78 Origen, for instance, wrote in his commentary on Romans 6:11 of being “dead to sin” and “alive to God” in imitation of Christ, through wisdom, peace, righteousness, and sanctification. Other Church Fathers invoked the model of Jesus to promote diverse virtues such as patience and obedience (Tertullian, “On Patience,” ch. 3–4), or forgiveness (Chrysostom, “Homily 17 on Ephesians”). For early Christians, often persecuted by the Roman Empire, suffering became the mode of identification most evocative of election. Allusions to suffering of the elect community in New Testament developed in patristic literature into a thick discourse of martyrology, where the chosen most fully emulate the salvific sacrifice of Jesus by offering up their lives for their faith.79
Christian art frequently depicts martyrs and holy men in the pose of the Crucified One. Peter Brown noted, “This identified him not only with the sufferings of Christ, but also with the unmoved constancy of his election and the certainty of his triumph.”80 Subverting the idea of martyrs as victims, Christianity sought to signal victory over persecutors and over death itself. In “The Martyrdom of Polycarp,” for example, Polycarp was reportedly impervious to the flames so the executioner stabbed him; a dove flew out from his body, along with blood that extinguished the fire, “and all the crowd marveled that there was such a difference between the unbelievers and the elect.”81 Glorification of these martyrs at times made the lure of self-sacrifice too strong, and Church Fathers had to caution their followers not to seek out death. More broadly, the contemporary theologian Jürgen Moltmann warned, “The cross is not and cannot be loved.”82 Jesus’s crucifixion represented a courageous facing of suffering and confrontation with death, but not its celebration.
After Christianity became magnified rather than marginalized by imperial power, the sacrificial posture of the elect became more of an intrafaith issue, but it remained linked to chosenness and the imitation of Christ. Anabaptists in colonial America provide a rather late example: frequently persecuted by established Christian authorities, they viewed their status in eschatological terms that rendered their suffering purposeful: “Even though persecution and martyrdom should not be actively sought and would never merit salvation, they were regarded as prominent signs of election and the surest way of ‘imitating’ Christ.”83
While contemporary aspirations to emulate Jesus often focus more on his tending to “the least of these” (Matt. 25), suffering is still recognized as a risk of discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer asserted that the quest for truth in societies that lie, or for goodness in cultures that reward duplicity, necessarily entails suffering, which discipleship endows with meaning.84 James Cone’s liberation theology focuses on the election of the African American community, chosen not to imitate Christ in redemptive suffering, but to take on the responsibility of freedom—willing to stand against all things that oppose liberation. It involves suffering because it requires a confrontation with evil, but suffering is not its purpose. Noting that Hebrew Bible devotes enormous attention to freeing the Israelites from slavery and to protecting vulnerable persons, he claimed that “God’s election of Israel and incarnation in Christ reveal that the liberation of the oppressed is a part of the innermost nature of God. Liberation is not an afterthought, but the essence of divine activity.”85 The elect are called to reflect this commitment in their very being.
Even refined concepts of election cannot permanently rid themselves of dangerous dross, but themes emerge from historical Christian tradition that work against ideas of conquest and othering. Divine grace can inspire humility. Mission, evangelism, and witness can be reimagined so that they are no longer bound to imposing Western or Christian dominance. Some leaders have argued that mission “ought primarily to mean being resolutely but sensitively Christian in the presence of others; evangelism ought basically to mean responding, when asked, why Christians believe and act as they do; witnessing ought most fundamentally to mean the living of a compassionate Christian life.”86 One can identify with Christ, not in judgment but in goodness. Conviction of God’s redemptive power can expand one’s vision of salvation, communal as well as individual, invested in this world and the next, and resisting division of the world into the saved and the damned. Chosenness thus becomes a central paradigm for imagining God in ongoing relationship with the world and inspires the elect toward a divinely ordained purpose.