Dr Paul Allen

“God chose us in Him…” This statement from Ephesians 1 is personal, not impersonal.  The us refers to Paul and his audience, and the ‘in Him’ refers to Christ.   Christ is the locus of the choice, not apart from him, not in the abstract, not merely in the mind of God but ‘in Christ’.  Now what exactly does that mean?  If the choice is personal and of person, and in the context of a person namely Christ, who exactly existed before the creation of the universe to be chosen?  Only Christ.   He was there, and even participated in the creation of the universe.  We were certainly not there.  Paul does not believe in the notion of pre-existent or immortal souls or a well of souls in heaven that at some point are placed into human bodies.   Election happens ‘in Christ’ because he is the Chosen of God, as the recent movie series’ title suggests.   Now since it is Christ who has been chosen to redeem humanity, it should be obvious that election is one thing, and salvation another.  Christ himsel

One of the issues we as Christians are constantly being confronted with today is, “How can you claim to know the only truth, how can you claim to serve the only God and still survive in a pluralistic society? Aren’t you necessarily, Christians, theocrats? Don’t you necessarily want to persecute everybody who disagrees with you?” I think the brilliance of Kuyper is to say, “Here is a way forward where we do not compromise our commitments to truth, but we find a way to develop a pluralistic society where we can live with one another without violating one another’s conscience, without violating one another’s abilities to live according to truth.”  I think if we were more Kuyperian in our thinking, we would be safe from some of our problems. He thought the world was wonderful, but in his analysis, he said, “The polar opposite today in Western society,” meaning the late 19th century, “is this tendency to the authoritative, tyrannical state on the one hand or utterly radical ind