1 Introduction
What can we hope? What hope can the church offer as gospel? What hope in the face of climate change that threatens the very existence of life on our planet? What hope in a world drowning in refugees fleeing the horrors of violence? What hope as authoritarian, nationalistic forces portend the worst of the last centuries terrors? We can, of course, proclaim the great promises of scripture from the pulpit. The biblical narrative has a great deal to say about the future. Much of it is in image and symbol, but there is much as well that points to God’s work that touches our current lives that points beyond today to a tomorrow that exceeds our temporal existence. But on what basis? What makes this a ‘well-founded hope,’ as Hendrikus Berkhof once put it?1 Is what we say no more than a pipe-dream, a hope against hope? There is something about the human creature that won’t let go of hope. But is there, shall we say, an ontological basis for hope, not a hope based in the ‘being’ of reality, but on a firmer basis, the basis of the one Christians’ confess as God?
In this contribution, I intend to explore the ground for hope by examining the first head of doctrine of the Canons of Dort, the doctrine of election. This might seem odd at first glance. Why this old confession?2 And why this one in particular, steeped as it was (and to the extent it is still under discussion still is) in conflict? Dort may be old, few may refer to it in the course of everyday ministry, but it stands as a monument in the confessional history of the Reformed churches. And it poses a question that cannot be avoided: to what extent if any does the human participate in his or her salvation? Or: to what extent do we participate in the establishment of the foundation of a human hope for the future—or as we must now amend this, of the planetary hope for the future? To say “if it’s going to be, it’s up to me” is an answer. But does it hold? The Remonstrants gave one answer to that question. Dort another.
Finance-dominated capitalism encourages people to think of themselves in the same way that profit-maximizing businesses think of them: their persons represent capital that must be put to maximally productive use. Simply put: each person must take individual responsibility for making the most out of his or her own life, in a life project that spans the whole of life, both at work and outside it. If one fails at such a project, one has no one but oneself to blame.3
Our lives are our own project; if we don’t succeed, it’s our own fault. Is that where our hope rests, with ourselves? If this might even be the case with the individual human—and for a vast proportion of humanity this is not even a possibility—can we begin to follow this claim with the human community as a whole? At the least, the Canons offer a response in their insistence on election.
There is another reason that Dort might seem to be fallow ground for hope. Prima facie, Dort offers not hope but its very opposite. After all, on a superficial reading of the doctrine of election, hope is the last thing that comes to mind. God has decided the number and names of the elect and overlooked the rest. And that’s that. What more is there to say? The game is over before it started.
I argue quite the opposite. In the doctrine of election, we are met by a God who transcends our knowing. In fact, because election points to the eternal nature of God and God’s good favor, it opens us to a future that is not dependent on the human, but one that emerges from the heart of the God who engages creation from within God’s own self. And that is the basis for a well-founded hope, one that finds its substance in the action of God in history.
To assist me in this inquiry, I turn to the twenty-century Dutch theologian A.A. van Ruler (1908–1970). Van Ruler rather famously held to the doctrine of double predestination. While he left a number of reflections on election in
This essay researches Van Ruler not to offer a comprehensive explication of his doctrine of election, although I need to survey its broader scope. Rather, it is to ask how Van Rulers insights on election give us new insight into how we might read Dort on election as a theological foundation for hope. Can this enable us to confess Dort in the twenty-first century as an “historic and faithful witness” to the word of God?5
2 Van Ruler on Election
Van Ruler did not consider election to be the central doctrine in theology. He called it a hulpleer, a “helping doctrine.” He compared it to the relation between a potato and salt.6 The potato is a food that provides the body with sustenance. The salt gives it flavor. By itself, without the salt, the potato will keep the body alive, but there will be little to savor in the eating of it. Conversely, salt without the food makes little sense at all. The ‘potato,’ the food, is the doctrine of grace. At the heart of election is “[t]he power of God’s grace over the human soul in which it is God who decides the matter of eternal salvation and also accomplishes it, so that it does not depend on the human.”7 In discussing the method of approach to the doctrine of election, Van Ruler says that we do not begin with the consideration of the counsel of God, but “with the description
But grace gets us only so far. Because grace is not a ‘something’: “grace is not a thing, not a something, not a power, but favor Dei.”9 Grace is a way of talking about how God acts, that is that God’s actions are not contingent upon human actions. That God acts in Christ and through the Spirit originates purely from within God, and that God’s actions are for the good of God’s creation, including humans, is, in shorthand, grace. Indeed, in Van Ruler’s earliest elaboration of the doctrine of election, he spends a good deal of space on the nature of grace.
Election is the ‘salt.’ How, then, does the doctrine of election ‘spice up’ the doctrine of grace? It does so by reminding us of the subject of grace, and the nature of that subject. It is a way of claiming that behind grace is a God who acts. In discussing the meaning of the doctrine of election, Van Ruler says that the doctrine reminds us that we have to do with the living and active God, not the powers of the universe nor idols. However, this is a God who must be revealed to us. This is not the God whom we can access through our own devices. This active God is not a partner of the human but acts transcendentally vis a vis the human.10
In the last essay that he wrote, Van Ruler reproached those he called the ‘ultra-Reformed’ with their tendency to what he called the ‘predestination idea.’ By that he meant that certain Reformed theologians made predestination a principle upon which they built a system. Election is not a principle or idea, Van Ruler argues. It bespeaks the action of God, this particular God, the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ revealed, disclosed to humans.11
We can further elaborate by speaking of this as the eschatological act of the Trinitarian God.12 The God who acts, acts in Christ and through the Spirit. The ‘intention’ behind the act resides deep within God’s self. We cannot know the reason or cause. The cause, or the reason, for election is God’s self.13 Election
It is in this context that Van Ruler states that this is the meaning of “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). The ‘pre-’ in predestination is not temporal but logical. That is, this is not a report of God’s decision at a ‘time’ before God got around to creating the universe. Election is rooted in the eternality of God. Eternality, however, does not mean the infinite extension of time, but stands over and against time. “Eternality is better defined as independence of all time rather than a ‘space’ before all time.”14 Indeed, election is an historical act of God in that it happens in Christ and through the Spirit. Van Ruler claims that “one cannot remove eternal election to a conciliar decision of God before the reality of the cross and resurrection.”15 “The eternal election comes to lie in the events of cross and resurrection and that this election is eternal lies in the eternal sonship of him who died and arose.”16 Election, then, is historical, the eternal God acting in history. Indeed, it happened in what happened with Christ.
However, this is not simply a ‘looking back’ to what happened at Golgotha and the empty tomb. As historical, election is set within an eschatological horizon. It is not set within the structure of reality itself. In Christ and through the Spirit, we are ushered into a history that is not ‘set,’ so to speak. The new happens opening us to wonder.17 In fact, this has a good deal to say about how we understand ‘reality.’ Reality is in our meeting with God, Van Ruler claims, it is in the “dance of the deeds of God, his electing and rejecting actions. Because God is God in this way, reality has no ‘essence’: it vibrates (Noordmans) with election.”18 We are elect toward the future, so to speak. Recall, that for Van Ruler, theology is to “think from the end.”
However, this is not only to be understood Christologically, but pneumatologically. If only Christologically we remain stuck in a predestinatio dialetica (the logic of predestination). To fully grasp the predestinatio gemina (double predestination) we need to think pneumatologically.19 He states that the basic problem in pneumatology is the relation between predestination and
This, too, is historical in that it meets the human within her human history. We are elect in Christ, and now this happens to me, the individual.21 This, however, must be told to me, addressed to me. Because this is God who is not only the source of my salvation, but the means, this happens through preaching, gospel, admonition.22 This is the call of God on me, on the individual. Van Ruler goes so far in one place as to equate call with election.23 “The call itself is already election.”24 Called, elect, through the work of the Spirit, we believe. And this is our delight: “The deepest ground, the greatest delight, the greatest glory of the life of faith lies in the piece on election. Here faith experiences its real essence in the extreme, for the essence of faith is to be drawn outside oneself.”25
Talk of the Spirit in the context of election includes but does not end with the individual believer. The work of the Spirit is not limited to the ‘internal testimony of the Holy Spirit’ for Van Ruler. Indeed. The Spirit has to do with God’s presence in the world, ontologically. Van Ruler claims that this is best maintained in the doctrine of predestination.26 Howso? The eternal God acts historically in Christ and through the Spirit, now present as God’s own self. We talk about subjectivity and the Spirit in relation to the subjectivity of the human, my subjective self now regenerated through the work of the Spirit. But it is more, says Van Ruler. This is the subjectivity of God’s own self who “posits himself in existence and is present in it.”27 This will be important as we reflect on what we gain from the doctrine of election in our search for hope.
At this point, however, we can note that for Van Ruler this meant that while election was individual and personal—how do I come to salvation in Christ?—, it is not only personal. Biblically speaking, there is a certain plasticity to election. There is election of the church, for example: the church is
Here we can talk about the counsel or decrees of God, of what kept the old Reformed theologians busy. Recall that I noted above that Van Ruler did not begin with the counsels of God. He says rather, as he came to the end of his long discourse for a course on election, that the notion of the eternal decision leads us into the immanent Trinity. Election has to do with God’s own self and God’s intentions. What happens in history is the realization of Gods thought and will, God’s original intentions.30 This is not arbitrary, not willy-nilly. Here we are at Van Ruler’s larger theological project, theocratic thought, and looking to the kingdom of God, God’s future drawing us forward.
All this is a way of talking about the God who is the subject of the grace that turns toward the human (and creation) in love. But there is a darker side to election: rejection. Van Ruler accepts double predestination and does so in part because empirical evidence tells him so.31 But there is something deeper going on. In a difficult paragraph in his 1942 lectures, he claims that God does not simply permit evil, but God does more than that. God even ‘intends’ evil!32 He wants to insist that God is present in the midst of the horror. The horror is not beyond God’s action and control. So that he can claim that “only the doctrine of election gives us the fundamental power that enables us to walk through the dark chasm hurrying to the divine future, waiting on divine action.”33 “That is really the living, active, acting, militant God.”34 He would put it later that we are in the hands of God.35 In this is hope.
The upshot of this all is comfort, delight, joy even. Van Ruler compares this all with the child who is convinced of the self-evidence and the unshakeable reality of its parents’ love. So, too, the believer is convinced that “God is naturally graceful toward him.”36 Van Ruler cites John Calvin in the “certainty of our faith rests solely and completely on the promise of the gospel…it is only substantially strengthened by the doctrine of election.”37 Assured, confident, the child can play; she can delight in a true reality.38
How does Van Ruler’s doctrine of election further our reflections on the ground of hope as we ask how we can confess in communion with Dort? Let me say, first, that our take-away need not be what the Dort fathers intended, that is, it may move in directions they would not find compatible. But my intention here is not an exegesis of the Canons. It is, rather, to inquire whether the doctrine of election in the Canons is open to a reading that provides a theological foundation to proclaim the hope that scripture’s narrative offers. To that end, then, five perspectives gleaned from our foray into Van Ruler.
Hope does not rest with a human project. “A king is not saved by his army, nor a warrior preserved by his strength” (Ps. 33:16). There are plans afoot to save the planet from climate disaster through technological fixes. For that matter, history is littered with utopian schemes. And yet we stumble. The Canons begin with the doctrine of election. However, the first paragraph is clear: “Since all people have sinned and come under the sentence of curse and eternal death, God would done no one an injustice if it had been his will to leave the entire race in sin and under curse ….”39 The Canons characterize sin as rebellion. It is to turn against the offer of grace, to insist on one’s own way. The first word is love—whether we start in Genesis 1 with creation or Exodus 3 with liberation. Sin is only a second word, but it infects all of humanity. Nevertheless, within the reality of God, love is prior, it is “from the foundation of the world” (I/8).
It is a happy theological accident that election is the first head of doctrine. The order of the Canons does indeed reflect the order of the Remonstrations. Still, theologically, election comes first in the Canons; the ‘fall’ doesn’t come until the third head of doctrine; it follows not only election, but the means of salvation, the atonement. We begin with the God who chooses to turn toward the human in love. The ground of hope is not with us, with neither our projects nor our ability to carry those projects out.
Election points us to the eternality of God. “Before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace, according to the free good pleasure of his will, God chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the whole human race …” (I/8). Eternality not only transcends but encompasses time, so that the God who met us in the past awaits us in the future. Election is not simply something that happened ‘back then’
before the creation of time. Election comes from the heart of the eternal and infinite God. It happened at the cross and happens now in proclamation as the Spirit beckons us and beckons us forward. It is the call to the future, to God’s future. Jürgen Moltmann taught us to understand the biblical story as promise. The fundamental category is not the epiphany of God (or the gods) but promise. By promise we are set on the way to history. Moreover, God is future, before us. God is… a God with “future as his essential nature” as made known in Exodus and in Israelite prophecy, the God whom we therefore cannot really have in us or over us but always before us, who encounters us in his promise for the future, and whom we therefore cannot “have” either, but only await in active hope.40
Election, then, speaks of God’s call into a future, not a probe into the past. It is not about a predetermination of history’s course, nor of the individual’s eternal destiny. Nor is it to extrapolate the future from trajectories of the past. It emerges from the eternality of God that encompasses both past and future. But it is drawn eschatologically into the future. The call that beckons me is God calling me into that future and that call is, says Van Ruler, election itself.
This is nicely manifest in YHWH’s encounter with Moses in Exodus 3. Israel is elect, called forward out of oppression and slavery. And the one who calls gives Moses the name that is itself set in a future tense, “I will be who I will be.” Furthermore, when Moses asks for a sign, YHWH replies that the freed slaves will know that it is YHWH when they get to the mountain. They are called from the eternality/future of God into their own future, a future “on the way.”
Election entails liberation. The child is confident of the love of her parents and so is freed to play. Election brings about the liberation of the will. Our wills that have been bounded have been set free.41 “…[T]he will, now renewed, is not only activated and motivated by God, but having been activated by God is also itself active” (III, IV/12). To use one of Van Ruler’s favorite phrases, the human becomes a mannetje, something
we’d translate into Yiddish, a mensch. In salvation we are given back our humanity. We become truly human. In terms of hope, this means that election does not make us passive, but active. We may not know what the future looks like, not precisely. However, there are some things that we can know. We can “know with God.” Van Ruler will go so far as to say that we can “will with God.”42 We have hints and more in scripture of what God intends for God’s kingdom. We cannot know precisely what that will look like. My sense is that when we get ‘there,’ wherever and whenever ‘there’ is, we will look back and say, “Of course, that’s what we’ve been told all along.”43 But we need not know. The promise is such and the call is such that we are free to work, joyfully and with great energy.
Still, it must be added, that since election is in the call, and since we have heard the call, we are already within a future of hope. That is the work of the Spirit. We do know the work of regeneration. We have heard the declaration of forgiveness. Our past has been made truly past and we are turned toward the future. Hope has been given us. And this is ‘well-founded’ because it is the work of God, a work that has emerged not from ourselves, but from without, from God’s own self.
The human is not only freed to act, but is given to know, because it has been revealed and proclaimed—the act of the eternal Father in the Son now made known to the believer in the act of the Holy Spirit. And, graced, the believer knows that this is God’s good favor. Van Ruler allows us to speak of God’s eternal counsel, God’s original intention that is projected upon the screen of the eschaton, the intention that is manifest in the kingdom of God, present now in signs, but assured for the future. That original intention is the ‘pre-’ that while it may not be primarily temporal, includes the temporal. Hope, then, originates not at the cross, not even in the incarnation, but in the heart of God, originates from an intention that emerges from eternity, but invades and embraces the very human history that we live. In fact, to follow a Van Rulerian trajectory, God’s intention is very this-worldly: it includes not only human institutions, societies, governments, and so on, but creation itself.
Admittedly, this sets Dort in an eschatological framework that sits uneasily in early seventeenth century thought. But can election not only be set in that context, but in doing so can it provide a basis of hope? Finally, I move a step beyond Dort when I suggest that Van Ruler offers hints of reading election in such a way that it is not only individual persons who are elect, but a people, a church. Dort is clear that election is of particular persons. And, as we have seen, Van Ruler accepts that reading. But, as we noted, in a few places he suggests that election is also corporate. Dort does give faint hints of this. Many of its biblical references in the first head of doctrine are to passages that have Israel as the object of election. In fact, one of the classic references, Rom. 9:11–13—“Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated”—is perhaps best read as a reference to Israel and not primarily to two ancient individuals.44
Nor is this entirely absent from Dort. The call to me as a person comes through the proclamation of the gospel, a ministry (I/3). And, one must say, the ministry of the church. But staying with the individual we can say more. I am called to be a part of a people and God uses this people the incorporate me.45 This is perhaps most explicitly stated in Answer 54 of the Heidelberg Catechism where the Son of God “gathers, protects, and preserves for himself a community chosen for eternal life and united in true faith. And of this community I am and always will be a living member.”
Still, a greater prospect is grounded in the eternality of God. Hope is not only for the collection of individuals we know as the church. This is hope for the earth, hope for the nations, a hope that encompasses all history and all creation. The call of Abraham, the promise, was that through him “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).46
The ground of hope then is God’s self, God who turns toward God’s beloved creation. But the ground, the basis, makes for an expansive hope, a hope while the substance of which is revealed, it is never exhausted in its manifestation.
Berkhof, Hendrikus. Well-founded Hope. Richmond: John Knox, 1969.
Book of Church Order, http://images.rca.org/docs/bco/2019BCO.pdf.
Calvin, John. The Bondage and Liberation of the Will, ed. A.N.S. Lane. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996.
McDonald, Suzanne. Re-Imaging Election: Divine Election as Representing God to Other & Others to God. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2010.
Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Hope. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
Our Faith: Ecumentical Creeds, Reformed Confessions, and Other Resources. Grand Rapids: Faith Alive, 2013.
Tanner, Kathryn. “How Finance Capitalism Deforms Us.” Christian Century, January 16, 2019.
Ruler, A.A. van. Calvinist Trinitarianism and Theocentric Politics, trans. John Bolt. Edwin Mellon Press: Lewiston, 1989.
Ruler, A.A. van. De vervulling van de wet: Een dogmatische studie over de verhouding van openbaring en existentie (The fulfillment of the Law: A dogmatic study on the relationship between revelation and existence). Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1947.
Ruler, A.A. van. Reidans: adventsmeditaties (Round dance: Advent meditations). Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1974.
Ruler, A.A. van. Theologisch Werk, Deel III. Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1971.
Ruler, A.A. van. Verzameld Werk, Deel 4B: Christus, de Geest en het heil (Collected Works, Part 4B: Christ, the Spirit and salvation), ed. D. van Keulen. Boekencentrum: Zoetermeer, 2011.
Hendrikus Berkhof, Well-founded Hope (Richmond: John Knox, 1969).
Actually, the Canons of Dort are not a confession but an appendix to the Belgic Confession, clarifying particularly Article 16 on election.
Kathryn Tanner, “How Finance Capitalism Deforms Us,” Christian Century, January 16, 2019, 30.
This is early Van Ruler (1941–1942) who is still quite Barthian in his approach, and at the very time that he is moving from a Christological approach to a pneumatological one; see A.A. van Ruler, Verzameld Werk, Deel 4B: Christus, de Geest en het heil (Collected Works, Part 4B: Christ, the Spirit and salvation), ed. D. van Keulen (Boekencentrum: Zoetermeer, 2011), 109. Ironically, this is just as Barth is turning to his famous Christological approach to the doctrine of election. See Suzanne McDonald, Re-Imaging Election: Divine Election as Representing God to Other & Others to God (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2010), chapter 2.
The phrase “historic and faithful witness” is taken from the “Declaration for Ministers of Word and Sacrament” in the Reformed Church in America. The Declaration can be found in the Reformed church’s Book of Church Order, 130, http://images.rca.org/docs/bco/2019BCO.pdf.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 745.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 744. All translations are those of the author.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 564.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 592.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 752.
A.A. van Ruler, “Ultra-gereformeerd en vrijzinnig” (Ultra-Reformed and Liberal), in Theologisch Werk, Deel III (Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1971), 105–106.
Van Ruler compares the doctrine of election with the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in scripture. And while there are scriptural supports for the doctrine of election, the doctrine itself is not explicitly scriptural. However, scripture’s story can only be fully understood through the development of the two doctrines.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 577, 753.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 667.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 665–666.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 666.
A.A. van Ruler, De vervulling van de wet: Een dogmatische studie over de verhouding van openbaring en existentie (The fulfillment of the Law: A dogmatic study on the relationship between revelation and existence) (Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1947), 53.
Van Ruler, De vervulling van de wet, 353.
Van Ruler, De vervulling van de wet, 193.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 559.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 766.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 766.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 595.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 767. Emphasis in the original.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 541.
Van Ruler, De vervulling van de wet, 229.
Van Ruler, De vervulling van de wet, 229.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 652.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 767.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 671.
Van Ruler, “Ultra-gereformeerd en vrijzinnig,” 104.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 752.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 753.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 753.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 769.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 556.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 750.
Van Ruler, Verzameld Werk 4B, 557.
“The Canons of Dort,” I/1, in Our Faith: Ecumentical Creeds, Reformed Confessions, and Other Resources (Grand Rapids: Faith Alive, 2013). Hereinafter, reference to the Canons will be by head of doctrine/paragraph.
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 16.
This, of course, is Calvin, particularly as he exegetes Augustine. See John Calvin, The Bondage and Liberation of the Will, ed. A.N.S. Lane (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996).
See, e.g., Van Ruler, “Christ Taking Form in the World,” in A.A. van Ruler, Calvinist Trinitarianism and Theocentric Politics, trans. John Bolt (Edwin Mellon Press: Lewiston, 1989), 138. This is an expression of Van Ruler’s well-known doctrine of theonomous reciprocity. On this, see also Van Ruler, “Grammar of a Pneumatology,” 50–51, in Calvinist Trinitarianism.
This is the dynamic of the encounter on the road to Emmaus, Luke 24.
Van Ruler Verzameld Werk 4B, 564.
While one may go beyond the text of the Canons here, one hardly goes beyond a theology behind Dort, not if Dort is understood as an appendix to the Belgic (Dutch) Confession, Article 28, where there “is no salvation outside [the church].”
One finds this theme throughout Van Ruler’s works. In one place, in a volume of meditations, where he explicitly connects this with election, he says: “Israel is elect, it knows the good, there God has revealed the meaning of the world, the social ideal;” Reidans: adventsmeditaties (Round dance: Advent meditations) (Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1974), 94.