The antipathy which is widely felt to the funda- mental evangelical postulate which brings the soul into immediate contact with God and suspends all its health on the immediate operations of God, finds an odd illustration in Albrecht Ritschl’s teaching that the direct object even of justification is not the in- dividual but the Christian society; and that “it is passed on to the individual only as the result of his taking place in the Christian fellowship and sharing in its life." This is, of course, only another, and very much poorer way of asserting the principle of the general universalistic construction: God does not in any stage of the saving process deal directly with individuals; he has always and everywhere the mass in view; and it is the part of the individual himself by his own act to lay hold of the salvation thus put at the general disposal. How different Luther with his: *It is not needful for thee to do this or that. Only give the Lord God the glory, take what he gives thee, and believe what he tells thee.” ® The issue is indeed a fundamental one and it is closely drawn. Is it God the Lord that saves us, or is it we our- selves? And does God the Lord save us, or does he merely open the way to salvation, and leave it, according to our choice, to walk in it or not? The parting of the ways is the old parting of the ways between Christianity and autosoterism. Certainly only he can claim to be evangelical who with full consciousness rests entirely and directly on God and on God alone for his salvation.
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CALVINISM
As many as were ordained to eternal life believed.—A cts 13: 48.
V CALVINISM
As over against all attempts to conceive the opera- tions of God looking to salvation universalistically, that is as directed to mankind in the mass, Calvinism insists that the saving operations of God are directed in every case immediately to the individuals who are saved. Particularism in the processes of salvation becomes thus the mark of Calvinism. Ав super- naturalism is the mark of Christianity at large, and evangelicalism the mark of Protestantism, so par- ticularism is the mark of Calvinism. The Calvinist is he who holds with full consciousness that God the Lord, in his saving operations, deals not generally with mankind at large, but particularly with the in- dividuals who are actually saved. Thus, and thus only, he contends, can either the supernaturalism of salvation which is the mark of Christianity at large and which ascribes all salvation to God, or the im- mediacy of the operations of saving grace which is the mark of evangelicalism and which ascribes sal- vation to the direct working of God upon the soul, come to its rights and have justice accorded it. Particularism in the saving processes, he contends, is already given in the supernaturalism of salvation and in the immediacy of the operations of the divine
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THE PLAN OF SALVATION
‘grace;~and the denial of particularism is construc- tively the denial also of the immediacy of saving grace, that is of evangelicalism, and of the supernaturalism of salvation, that is of Christianity itself. It is logically the total rejection of Christianity.
The particularism of the saving operations of God which is thus the mark of Calvinism, it is possible, however, to apply more or less fully (or, shall we say, with more or less discernment?) in our thought of the activities of God relatively to his sinful creatures (or shall we say, broadly, relatively to his creatures?). Thus differing varieties of Calvinism have emerged in the history of thought. As they are distinguished from one another by the place they give to particular- ism in the operations of God, that is as much as to say they are distinguished from one another by the place they give to the decree of election in the order of the divine decrees.
Some are so zealous for particularism that they place discrimination at the root of all God’s dealings with his creatures. That he has any creatures at all they suppose to be in the interest of discrimination, and all that he decrees concerning his creatures they suppose he decrees only that he may discriminate between them. They therefore place the decree of "election" by which men are made to differ, in the order of decrees, logically prior to the decree of creation itself, or at any rate prior to all that is decreed concerning man as man; that is to say, since man's history begins with the fall, prior to the decree of the
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fall itself. They are therefore called Supralapsarians, that is, those who place the decree of election in the order of thought prior to the decree of the fall."