Who are the elect in the Bible? Are the elect those God set aside for a purpose out of all humanity? What does the bible mean when it uses the word predestined and what does it mean when God foreknew?

In Christ,

Odo

You go right for the easy ones huh?

<smile>

Odo...

If no one else takes a shot at answering you, within a couple of days, then I will.

-ray

Odo:

It's a coincidence that your question came up in one of the regular publications I subscribe to this month. Hope this answer helps you get started in understanding.

BOB

PRESDESTINATION POINTERS

Q. In reading some literature on the Rosary, I found the following line: "Devotion to my Rosary is a spe­ cial sign of predestination." I have always had a problem understanding and explaining that word. Can you help?

&#8212; Lois Malik, Elmhurst, Ill.

A. Join the club! This theological position has been proposed in problematic ways at various points in history: at the time of St. Augustine, during the Protestant Reformation with John Calvin, and with the Jansenists in the 17th century.

The Epistle to the Romans speaks of God's predestination of "those he foreknew" (8:29). A Catholic under­ standing of this doctrine attempts to safeguard God's absolute sovereignty, His universal salvific will and human freedom. Thus we read that God "wishes all men to be saved" (1 Tm 2:4); if that is true, then He grants all men the graces necessary to respond. A failure to live a holy life, then, is not God's fault in having deprived us of His all-powerful grace, but a matter of our rejection of it. Even more to the point, we can never suggest that God "wills" certain individuals for eternal damnation, which would be counter to His desire that all human beings be saved.

The sticking point seems to be that of divine foreknowledge. The average person reasons, "If God knows every­ thing, then He clearly knows who will persevere in grace until death and who will not. Therefore, by creating such persons as He knows will not be saved, God wills their condemnation." That analysis, however, is flawed. If I see someone with all the symptoms of lung cancer and prognosticate that, given all the known variables, he will end up losing one or both lungs, I have not caused the situation; I am simply declaring the obvious. And although all analogies limp (especially when they deal with divine realities), I think we can make the connection to our present concern.

I suspect that what your Rosary pamphlet is trying to say is that someone who is faithful to this devotion gives external evidence of cooperation with God's grace and can thus have a reasonable assurance that he will be saved. For my money, I prefer to avoid the term "predestination" because of its troubled history and because of the great difficulty involved in explaining it in a totally orthodox fashion.

Father Peter M. J. Stravinskas
The Catholic Answer
January/February 2003
pp.13-14

Dear Friend,

I really want to say that "elect" is something the East really doesn't use all that much, unlike the West. But I'd hate to think that I would be the cause of Marshall and RayK going to extra trouble to dig up patristic and scriptural evidence to prove me wrong . . .

The East sees our relationship with God as a dynamic one and this dynamic aspect doesn't end when we will be in full union with God and Christ in Heaven.

"Elect" is therefore not a "state" (or a "place" ) where one can say, "O.K. now I'll relax since I've reached the certitude that I'm going to Heaven when I die."

There is nothing more damaging to the spiritual life than such a view.

We can never know the outcome of God's judgement of us. We can only continue to struggle, to pray and to otherwise partake in the Life of Christ.

In a sense, "elect" is when we've come to realize this, our utter dependence on God's Grace and Heaven as a continuous relationship with God and Christ. To stand outside that relationship of Grace, that Divine Life is to truly be cut off from God, it is truly hell.

"Elect" is not a punctuation mark, like a comma or a period.

It is an open-ended sentence.

Alex

Dear Odo,

My contribution here is to remind that God is outside of time and space, which are both only parts of the created world. God sees and knows all that ever has been or will be since he stands outside of these that he created.

Our efforts are only procreative. That doesn't mean that we should subscribe to the "clock maker" cosmology that says "God created it, wound it up, and then sits back and watches it tick."

Our God is intimately involved in our lives. His Word walked here and died here. His Spirit blows here and fills the Church. This is the "providence" of God.

When a child is born or we are saved from a sickness we say, "hand of God." And when an airplane falls to the ground we say, "hand of God." In fortune and misfortune, good and bad, we say "hand of God." After all, didn't he allow even Satan to test his servant Job?

So he elects, predestines, and foreknows, but all within our own efforts. Or as someone said, "He only allows us the struggles that he knows that we can endure." We may or may not choose to endure them.

He is not bound by our parameters, but we by His.

With love in Christ.