{"id":1208,"date":"2010-05-21T06:05:02","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T13:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1208"},"modified":"2010-05-21T06:05:02","modified_gmt":"2010-05-21T13:05:02","slug":"soul-sorting-and-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2010\/05\/21\/soul-sorting-and-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Soul Sorting and Election"},"content":{"rendered":"

My third and (I think) final post on the “soul sort” narrative is up on Jesus Creed<\/a>. This one is about “election.”\u00a0 This topic ultimately is a deep mystery, upon which I offer my reflections as tentative at best.\u00a0 Here’s the conclusion of the post, but I encourage you to hop over to Jesus Creed and read the whole thing:<\/p>\n

\n

We, the Church, have been elected for mission<\/em>. <\/span>But this emphatically does not<\/em> mean that those outside the visible Church are forever outside the reach of God’s grace. <\/span>Barth’s approach is helpful here: <\/span>God has already said “yes” to all <\/em>of humanity in Christ. <\/span>The eschatological victory over sin, evil and death is sealed. <\/span>In my view — given what I know of God’s character revealed in Christ – <\/span>at the final judgment, only those who persistently reject God’s grace will remain outside the Kingdom. <\/span>Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Leslie Newbiggin, Donald Bloesch, Dallas Willard, and the like, were right: <\/span>it is wrong to suggest that all people who do not (as far as we can see) have access to the Gospel in this life are simply cast off by God. <\/span>(Whether God’s salvation encompasses an ongoing post-mortem “harrowing of Hell,” as many Eastern Church Fathers and contemporary Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians suggest, I do not know, though I personally suspect something like this is so. ) <\/span>Yet, as always, it is not for me to pretend to constrain what God can or cannot do, or to pry too deeply into His mysteries. <\/span>Judgment and salvation belong to God alone.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, we who know Christ go into the world with great hope and anticipation for the wedding feast to come, as people chosen by God for His mission of redeeming all of creation, trusting that nothing God has done or will do is in the slightest way unloving, unjust, unfair, or wrong, working out our own salvation, and content to leave the mystery of final judgment to our good and beautiful God.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My third and (I think) final post on the “soul sort” narrative is up on Jesus Creed. This one is about “election.”\u00a0 This topic ultimately is a deep mystery, upon which I offer my reflections as tentative at best.\u00a0 Here’s the conclusion of the post, but I encourage you to hop over to Jesus Creed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-ju","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}