C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 57 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Patton opens with a confession: everyone remembers where they were when they first heard the doctrine of election, the way people remember where they were for great public events. His own mother handed him Romans 9, and he spent three hours in his room trying to prove it could not be true. This session makes the strongest case the Reformed tradition can make, that God’s choice of his people is unconditional, grounded in nothing in them. Listen for how Paul answers his objectors in Romans 9, and notice that the teachers are as disturbed by the doctrine as you may be.
Patton recalls being handed Romans 9 by his mother, reading it with disgust, and retreating to his room for three hours to figure out how it could not be true. He never managed it. The teachers’ first point is pastoral: Paul taught election to every church he planted, often very early, and referred back to that teaching in his letters. Most churches today do the opposite, hiding the doctrine for years, so that people build their whole picture of God on its opposite and then cannot bear the shock when they finally meet it. Whatever position you take, they argue, election must be taught early, to children and to new disciples, because everything else will be built either on it or against it.
The issue in this section is framed carefully: it is not whether the Bible teaches election, since everyone who reads the Bible sees that it does. The issue is what it means to be elect or predestined, and how one answers that question places them in one theological tradition or another. Two positions have divided most of church history: unconditional election and conditional election, with a third mediating position saved for the end of the unit.
The lecture walks through the word group. To elect, from the Greek for calling out or choosing, appears in Romans 8:33, who will bring a charge against God’s elect; in Romans 11:7, the chosen obtained it and the rest were hardened; in 2 Timothy 2:10, Paul endures everything for the sake of the chosen; and in 1 Peter 1:1, Peter writes to the chosen ones. To predestine, meaning to mark out beforehand, anchors Romans 8:29 and 30. To choose appears in 2 Thessalonians 2:13, God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation. To foreknow appears in 1 Peter 1:2, chosen according to the foreknowledge of God. And to appoint appears in Acts 13:48: when the Gentiles heard, as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed. The teachers press the plain force of that last verse: those appointed and those who believed are one and the same group, not two, so that without the appointing there is no believing. At face value, they conclude, these texts present God choosing by himself; it takes some other theology to make them mean something else.
Everything turns on what freedom means. Libertarian freedom, the Arminian definition, is the power of contrary choice: whatever the circumstances and influences, you can go the other way. The Reformed definition says people are free only to act according to their ability, and fallen people have no ability to choose God; they are free to sin, with a wide variety of sins to choose from, but the one thing they cannot choose is God. Unconditional election is then defined: God’s choice of people for salvation from the beginning, conditioned on nothing in them, good or evil, foreseen or present, resting on his sovereign purpose alone. It is not arbitrary, the teachers insist; God has reasons, but the reasons are in him, not in us.
A timeline carries the position through history: Augustine, whose debates with Pelagius established it; the Council of Orange in 529, where the church affirmed it and condemned both Pelagianism and the halfway house of semi-Pelagianism associated with Cassian; Thomas Aquinas; then Luther, Calvin, Whitefield, and Spurgeon. Augustine’s summary line is quoted: the human will does not attain grace through freedom, but freedom through grace. The lecture also places the doctrine in the TULIP acronym: total depravity leads to unconditional election, and the course will fill in limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance as it goes, since the acronym happens to track the whole order of salvation. The teachers add a historical caution: Arminius himself thought he was refining the Reformed tradition rather than founding its rival, and both camps have pushed their founders further than they went.
The first argument is logical rather than textual: if man is totally depraved, election must be unconditional and individual, because if election waited on man’s choice, no one would be elect. Romans 3 says there is none righteous, no one who seeks God, not even one. Jeremiah 13:23 asks whether the Ethiopian can change his skin or the leopard his spots; neither can those accustomed to evil do good. Titus 3 describes us as enslaved to various lusts, not merely fond of them. So even if Scripture never used the word election, the doctrine would follow from the doctrine of man: the God who finds no seekers must himself do the seeking.
John 6 is called the strongest teaching on election outside Romans 9 and Ephesians 1. No one can come to Christ unless the Father draws him, and Christ will raise that one up on the last day: the drawn and the raised are the same people, none lost. No one can come unless it is granted by the Father. All that the Father gives to Christ will come, not might come, and none who comes is cast out. And in John 15:16 Christ tells his disciples, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to bear fruit. The teachers weigh the standard reply, that this is only about the apostles, and find it hard to sustain: the verse sits in the middle of the upper room discourse, which the church applies broadly everywhere else.
A hand goes up in every class at this point: I remember the day I chose Christ. The teachers let the tension stand. Personal experience says we chose; the texts keep saying he chose. Perhaps, they suggest, we should watch the language of our evangelism, whether the biblical way of speaking is being replaced by the language of our experience. The question is left open deliberately: watch how the texts develop.
The heart of the session is a slow walk through Romans 9. After Romans 8 promises that nothing can separate God’s people from his love, an objector answers: Israel was chosen too, and look at Israel; your security is worthless. Paul replies that not all Israel is Israel; God’s promises were always made to a remnant he chooses, and Jacob and Esau prove it: before the twins had done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose in election would stand, not by works but by his call, the older was set to serve the younger. Then comes the diagnostic feature the teachers prize: Paul anticipates exactly the objections we would make. Is there injustice with God? If God had meant conditional election based on foreseen faith, here was the place to say so and calm everyone down. Instead he goes deeper: I will have mercy on whom I have mercy; it does not depend on the man who wills or runs, but on God who has mercy; he raised up Pharaoh for this very purpose, and he hardens whom he desires. Why does he still find fault? And the answer is Job’s answer: who are you, O man, to answer back to God? The fact that Paul’s objectors object exactly as we do, the teachers argue, is strong evidence we are reading him correctly.
Two shorter arguments follow. First, predestined, chose, elect, appoint, and foreknow all appear in the active voice with God as the actor; one would need a preexisting bias to read them conditionally. Second, salvation is by grace alone and for God’s glory alone. If election is conditioned on foreseen faith, then something in me, however small, distinguishes me from the person who is lost, and I could stand in heaven and say the difference was that I believed. The teachers retell an illustration they credit to James Montgomery Boice to make the point: no one in heaven will answer the question why are you here with anything but I do not know, it was nothing in me. Ephesians 2:8 and 9 is exegeted closely: the that in and that not of yourselves is neuter in Greek while faith is feminine, so what is not of ourselves is not merely faith but the whole of salvation, and no one may boast.
The final argument turns prevenient grace against itself. By definition prevenient grace must level the scales exactly, giving every person of every time an equal chance, a genuine fifty-fifty. But then the outcomes should be roughly even, and they are not: in Noah’s generation, one man believed. And God himself determines where and when every person is born; being placed in a believing home rather than a home with no gospel is itself part of predestination. The uneven distribution of salvation, the teachers argue, is fatal to the idea that everyone stands at the same balanced scale.
The class is invited to object, and the teachers answer as Calvinists while refusing to pretend the position is comfortable. Does election make prayer and evangelism pointless? No; on the other side, if prayer decides salvation, then some people are lost because someone else did not pray enough, and the intercessor shares the glory. Both sides carry baggage; what settles doctrine is what is biblical, not what is palatable, for the palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity. Patton then shows his own heart: he holds the doctrine and is genuinely disturbed that God did not choose everyone; he even confesses a hope he calls foolish, that some divine loophole might save all, though he knows the Bible does not teach it. Since the elect are not labeled, as Spurgeon quipped, we evangelize everyone. Believers are as dependent on grace after conversion as before it, and the closing prayer thanks God that, however we define it, he elected us: nothing in us drew his choice, and the mystery can be left in tension before him.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all sixteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What pastoral argument do the teachers draw from Paul’s practice?
2. How did Patton first meet the doctrine of election?
3. How does the lecture frame the real question about election?
4. What point do the teachers press from Acts 13:48?
5. How do the two definitions of freedom differ?
6. What happened at the Council of Orange in 529?
7. What historical caution do the teachers give about Calvin and Arminius?
8. Why is the first argument for unconditional election called logical rather than textual?
9. How does the lecture handle the claim that John 15:16, you did not choose me but I chose you, applies only to the apostles?
10. Why do the objections Paul anticipates in Romans 9 matter for interpretation?
11. If Paul had meant election based on foreseen faith, what do the teachers say he would have done at Romans 9:14?
12. What does Patton argue from the neuter that in Ephesians 2:8?
13. What is the point of the illustration the teachers credit to Boice?
14. How does the uneven distribution of salvation argue against prevenient grace?
15. How do the teachers answer the charge that election makes evangelism and prayer pointless?
16. What honest confession does Patton make about his own position?
All sixteen correct. Lecture 2 is complete.
Patton says everyone remembers where they were when they first met the doctrine of election. Where were you, and what was your first reaction? Looking back, was your objection to the text itself or to what it would mean about people you love?
The teachers suggest our evangelistic language, choose Christ today, may owe more to our experience than to the Bible’s way of speaking. Compare that language with John 6 and Romans 9. Should the way we present the gospel change, and how?
Whenever it comes down to it, the teachers say, the question is what is biblical, not what is palatable. Where in your own theology are you most tempted to let palatability lead? What would it look like to hold the hard text and the tender heart together, as Patton tries to do?
Paul asks in Romans 8 who could ever bring a charge against God’s elect, and answers his own question: it is God who justifies, so no accusation can stand.
The lecture ends deliberately unresolved: the teachers want the conflict alive in your mind for a week, driving you to God in awe, anger, confusion, or pleading, because the doctrine either knocks you off a foundation built against it or settles you deeper into grace. Sit with Romans 9 itself before the next session, where the teachers switch sides and give conditional election the strongest defense they can make.