23. XXI. Is There a Limit to Salvation?

XXI. Is There a Limit to Salvation?

Now, why are some called and not others? Is this just or right? And what has Paul to say about those who are not foreordained and called? They are many. What is their fate? What is their place and part in the purpose of God? The Apostle’s purpose does not lead him to answer this question, although it is one which must justifiably and necessarily rise in the mind of every person. Paul was not writing philosophic treatises, but stimulating and hortatory letters. He knew the nature of a Graeco-Romano-Judaic audience. It was not the problem of the fate of the uncalled that could interest their thoughts or touch their hearts. The melancholy tone that always becomes the permanent characteristic of a long-established paganism was already deeply fixed in the minds of his Graeco-Roman hearers. He had to rouse in them hope, love, and faith, all nearly dormant forces in their nature, so far as the higher forms and aims of those forces were concerned. He had to give them something worth living for and worth dying for.

It was quite useless to set before such minds and eyes a picture of the misfortune of those who were not called. No misfortune could be worse than what they already endured. No lot could be more wretched than that of a Roman noble as their poet Lucretius painted it: “sick of home he goes forth from his large house, and as suddenly comes back to it, finding that he is no better off abroad. He races to his country house, driving his carriage-horses in headlong haste; he yawns the moment he has reached the door, or sinks heavily into sleep and seeks forgetfulness, or even hurries back again to town. In this way each man flies from himself, and hates too himself, because he is sick and knows not the cause of the malady; for if he could rightly see into this, each man would relinquish all else and study to learn the nature of things, since the point at stake is the condition for eternity.” (Lucretius, iii. 1059-1069, shortened from Munro’s rendering.)

Such was the frame of mind in which the mass of pagans dwelt, and in which they prayed and made vows for salvation. To words of threatening or denunciation of future suffering the ears of such men would be deaf Lucretius in the passage immediately preceding has just been declaring that all threats of punishment in a future life were mere fable, and that the only reality lying behind such denunciation was the ceaseless misery that men suffered in their present life on earth.

Such people had no faith in the present, and no hope for the future: they were filled with a thorough disbelief in the world around them, and utter despair as to the future. Threats and terrors meant nothing more to them in the future than they were already suffering in the present: with these their whole horizon was clouded.

Paul had to recreate the better nature of these men; and this he did in the only way possible, viz., by recreating their belief in the goodness of God, and with this their hope, and as a result their power of loving and serving. It was a matter of no interest to him to discuss speculative questions or even to set forth a complete and well-rounded system of philosophy. Those to whom he addressed himself did not want a system of philosophy; they wanted life, hope, salvation. Their vows and their prayers were all for “salvation”.

It must not, therefore, be concluded from Paul’s almost total silence on this subject, the fate of those who were not called, not foreordained, not justified, that he had never thought about it. To a certain extent he recurred to his fundamental principle that God is good, and took refuge in the unfathomable depth of the Divine counsel; “His decisions cannot be sought out in detail, nor His ways traced; (Romans 11:33.) for who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been His counsellor?” The entire plan of the universe and the whole purpose of God cannot be comprehended by man. We have to reach, by faith and by direct insight and by the natural power of believing, the truth that God is good, without being able to prove it logically; we have the assurance in our heart that this axiom is true, but we cannot demonstrate its truth to one who disbelieves it.

Further, we must accept the world as it is. We have to deal with the universe and its facts, and it is folly to think we could improve them if we had our way, or if we had been consulted. “Who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it. Why didst thou make me thus?” (Romans 9:20.) It is the idea of a child or a fool that, if he had had the making of the world, he could have made a much better one. The Apostle, whether intentionally or not, has given very little indication of his views regarding the choice of those who are called and the fate of those who are not called. While many are not called, yet there stands always the axiom that God is good, and that therefore His purpose, however incomprehensible to us, must justify itself in the final and complete view; but that fundamental principle must not be pressed to the dangerous extreme that the grace of God will in the simple sense save everyone. Paul does not teach a universal salvation. He does indeed speak of God’s purpose “to reconcile all things unto Himself” (Colossians 1:20; cp.Php 2:9-11.); but he does not explain this further, and leaves it in apparent contradiction with his general teaching (as contained, e.g., in Php 3:18, Php 1:28; Romans 2:4-8, etc.). As passages like Romans 3:7 f., Romans 6:1 f., Romans 6:15 f. show, Paul had reason to fear lest, by insisting that the infinite grace of God must triumph in the long run, he might do harm to the raw pagan hearers, who would be inclined to ask, and who did sometimes ask. Why should we not continue to sin, and trust to the sure love and grace of God to save us from the consequences? He replies that there is a judgment, that the choice must be made between sin and righteousness, and that there is punishment for sin: and he makes it clear that salvation can be attained only in one way, and that those who miss that way cannot be saved, but lose the lot of life and the grace of God. He does not, however, dwell much on this aspect of the justice of God; but prefers, whether from his own natural bent or owing to experience of what was most efficacious, to lay emphasis on the free offer of salvation to all. His teaching and his mind were filled with the thought of eternal life in Christ. He spoke little about the doom of death, and that little was expressed chiefly in his earliest teaching to the Thessalonians (though it also appears a good deal in his second letter to Timothy).

There remains in Paul’s public teaching, so far as his letters reveal it, a certain unsolved discrepancy between his fundamental axiom of the goodness of God and his dicta as to the death, or destruction, or wrath, that awaits the unrepentant. This we must admit. It is not our business to set forth a complete system of philosophic teaching, but simply to state what Paul taught. He leaves us to accept through the power of faith this discrepancy between the fundamental axiom, which is true and necessary, and the other fact which we can neither deny nor explain. There is, however, a possible opening to a reconciliation of the discrepancy, which will be alluded to in Section XXV.