Читать книгу The Scandal of God’s Forgiveness - Edmond Smith - Страница 8

If it can be seen that God exercised his free will and prerogative in favor of Israel before Christ and that the Early Church needed to be “convincingly convinced” before it began in earnest to reach out to the Gentiles, and when as a nation God’s ancient people were accustomed to the fact they had been singled out by God to the exclusion of all the nations for his ancient revelation, then with respect to the New Testament use of such terms of “all” and “the world” and “many”, as related to the people for whom Christ died, a certain consensus may appear to be reachable by all believers regarding the frequent meaning of those terms, irrespective of any view of the efficacy of the atonement.

It may seem that no matter what view may be held about the way we come to salvation in Christ, that for both those who believe that salvation is conditional upon men exercising their alleged natural power to co-operate with God so as to make the death of Christ effectual, and those who hold to the belief that men are incapable of believing unless chosen of God to make Christ’s death effectual, the Jewish perspective of simply seeing “the world” in terms of peoples beyond the Jewish nation may seem embraceable to both groups when it comes to defining the terminology of “all” and “many” and “the world.”

Yet, those who espouse the view that Christ died only for the elect appear to be the sole champions of what is the Jewish perspective, seriously considering the fact that the Early Church at first comprised Jews only, and evangelized Jews only. Then, she reached out to both Jew and Gentile with the gospel in what seemed to her a most radical step, when once she was enlightened about the command to evangelize Gentiles also.

Is it possible for “free-willers” (for want of a better term and without appearing necessarily demeaning) to embrace the Jewish perspective also, where it is applicable, so that Christ is seen as having died for the whole of mankind? If one believes that salvation is contingent on free-will, and even acknowledges that the term “the world” as the Jews understood the term, can he still hold to the opinion that Christ died for every single Jew and every single Gentile?

However, it appears that “free-willers” treat the Jewish perspective with suspicion. It seems that they suspect that those who hold to Christ dying only for the chosen are seeking a poor escape clause in the Jewish perspective to justify their belief in what has been traditionally called Particular Redemption. Or, it seems like a wrecking ball that destroys the doctrine Christ died for all men. Yet, the Jewish perspective—reducing the terms such as “all” and “the world” to mean inclusively Gentiles as well as Jews in general—is only one of a number of arguments that those who espouse Particular Redemption advance for the doctrine.

John Owen, the great Puritan scholar of seventeenth century England, wrote a monumental work The Death of Death in defense of Particular Redemption, and in it refers to how the Jewish context needs to be considered when discussing the efficacy of Christ’s death. Owen says there are certain texts where “all” and “the world” are related merely to the breaking down of the division in Christ between Jew and Gentile. He says the Jewish context determines the first type of texts that seem to appear to support Universal Ransom through Christ’s death as “free-willers” see it, yet the first type is solely connected to the Jewish perspective in that it saw “the removal of all personal and national distinctions, (that is), the breaking up of all the narrow bounds of the Old Testament.”

Even though many may disagree with Owen’s view of the design of the death of Christ and cling to the belief that Christ died for every man, and that the redeeming work of Christ can be rendered ineffectual on account of man’s so-called free-will, it must be conceded by any right-thinking Bible believer that Owen is correct in identifying certain general and indefinite expressions from the Jewish perspective.

As the reader of the Death of Death can see, Owen enlists Jewish context for only one type of texts to support Particular Redemption, for Owen knew that such a perspective does not establish with complete solidity the truth about Particular Redemption. Owen held also that election and predestination of the redeemed without the obstructing contingency of free-will must also come into play for the complete establishment of what he held as the true doctrine concerning the object behind Christ’s death.

The Jewish qualifier may lend itself in a sense to a terminology that is general and indefinite. Yet it is common for those who hold to the autonomy of free-will in man, and who regard Christ’s ransom as universal in the sense that he has ransomed everyone, to not only view the use of such a qualifier by the adherents of Particular Redemption with suspicion—they persist in believing Christ died for all by ever stating “all” always means “everyone”, and “the world” means “everybody all over the earth.”

Yet the Jewish perspective ought to be viewed as more than a limitless qualifier in the New Testament. Even in our western culture ‘world’ concerning people often carries more than one connotation. We need to enter the Jewish mind when we survey the New Testament. We must view the coming of Christ through Jewish eyes, through the eyes of the race to which Jesus belonged, the race that even found among the formidable disciples of Jesus a refusal or a reluctance to consider the possibility of Gentiles being saved.

This book sets out to weigh up what proves to be a persistent note in the New Testament about the Jewish standpoint mainly, as such a standpoint contributes much to the light of accumulative evidence for the case of Christ dying only for the elect.

In summing as to what constitutes the perspective in mind, we say—

A. God has a free-will and has the prerogative to forgive or not

B. Those not released from condemnation, and not forgiven, still deserve their punishment

C. Israel as a nation was the unique object of God’s pleasure before Christ came, with the other nations being passed over in justice

D. No-one should question God’s prerogative to forgive, whether it is considered before Christ came or after he came

E. It was predicted that Gentiles would come to faith and Paul, who was to be the apostle to the Gentiles, was a subject prenatally of God’s pleasure for salvation whereby he became a model of the way Gentiles would also come to faith

F. The Early Church’s slowness to see that salvation also was meant for the Gentiles should lend itself to us contemporaries seeing the New Testament also through Jewish eyes; the evangelization of “the world” embraced evangelizing Gentiles; by “world” the Jews meant the Gentiles in particular

G. To interpret “all” and “the world” in terms of Christ’s death to mean salvation for every single person, whether Jew or Gentile, is to read into the terminology more than the authors of the New Testament intended

H. Although it appears that it is essentially those who espouse Particular Redemption that allow for a Jewish perspective on the matter of the atonement, it must be conceded that definite election was not necessarily in mind when the above terminology was always employed initially to describe those for whom Christ died, whenever the gospel was preached. All Jews and Gentiles were to hear the gospel as far as possible and, by hearing the good news, “the world” as comprising Jew and Gentile was simply in mind. Such terminology as the “world”, strictly speaking, did not have in mind the chosen for whom only Christ died.

I. Still, since God passed over all nations and chose only Israel for his revelation in ancient days, it became evident that God still exercises his prerogative to forgive. The ancient word directed to Moses is taken up by Paul when he contemplates the mercy of God for Jew and Gentile: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy; and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

In the following pages attention is paid to passages in the New Testament where the Jewish perspective should come into contextual play and elucidate our minds about the way to define such terminology as “the world”, “the whole world,” “all” and “many”—all this as related to election and predestination, to God’s prerogative to forgive, as to the subject of exactly who are the people for whom Christ died.

While it would be rare for anyone to question the right of a secular governing authority to grant a pardon for any one offender in a prison, when all may remain condemned and remain justly condemned so as to still suffer punishment and not receive a pardon, among Christians there are those of us who consider it scandalous to think that God chooses some for eternal salvation and exercises his prerogative to forgive them upon sending his Son specifically to die for them only. In the following pages calmly and objectively we need to survey exactly what the New Testament teaches about such things, particularly through Jewish eyes.