PM raises a good question to my charge that election, and God’s love with it, is arbitrary within Calvinist theology. He asks:
How do you derive
[A] God’s selection of any arbitrarily chosen member of the set of elect, x, is an arbitrary choice having no reason at all.
From this:
[1] God’s reason for choosing some arbitrarily chosen member of the set of elect, x, is not based on anything inherently worthy in them or on anything they have done.
I don’t see how you can derive [A] from [1].
I agree. In fact, I can see that you can’t derive [A] from [1]. And this is because of what I’ll call My “Token Choice Claim”:
it is easy to envision cases where you have two tokens of a type which are functionally indistinguishable but where you select one over the other(s) for non-arbitrary reasons.
Illustration of the TCC: Due to my excellent blogging skills I have been selected by the Ferrari factory to receive a new Ferrari 458 Italia with the understanding that I will faithfully blog about my driving experiences, thereby lending my golden touch to the prancing horse of Maranello. In a photo op the company parks in a parking lot thirty 458s which are identical except in paint color. Everything else, namely all the specs on the cars, are identical. And as the paparazzi snap their photos I am asked to select a car for my very own.
It is pretty obvious that as regards the worth and quality of the cars I could choose any one. They are functionally identical tokens of the type “Ferrari 458”. So I cannot select one over the others because it is functionally distinct from them (e.g. by having a more powerful engine, higher trim level or cheaper price).
And yet it is also clear that when the functional distinctions are non-existent there still could be any number of reasons why I choose the car I do select over-against the others. There could be, for instance, mere preferances operative. (Perhaps I prefer red paint over yellow.) Or there may be even more trivial reasons (e.g. I might select the one closest to me because it takes less energy to raise my arm and point it out).
Does scripture provide a hint that there are grounds like this based on which God might select his elect from a Calvinist perspective? Sure. I’ll even give a passage for you: Revelation 5:9:
“You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
Here the text says that God saved people from every tribe, language, people and nation. (By the way, that text provides a great argument for inclusivism since there have been many tribes, language groups, peoples and nations that never heard the gospel and at least some of them were saved by Christ.)
So for instance, it could be that the reason God elected Mr. Wei was because he wanted to complete his representative set of x amount of Chinese speakers and he already had enough Germans so that’s why he didn’t select Mr. Braun. And so it goes…
Since all human persons are functionally identical (i.e. all suffering from total depravity, and thus in automotive equivalents more closely resembling a parking lot of VW Things than of Ferrari 458s) the ones God does love he selected to love for other reasons known only to him but perhaps including
1. The need to complete representative sets of people groups for populating his new creation.
2. His preference for the aesthetic appearance of certain individuals over others.
Et cetera.
Like the choice of the red Ferrari over the yellow one or the one closest over the one farther away, these choices are not strictly speaking arbitrary. But the real question is, when functional distinction is removed, are there any grounds that strike us as compelling reasons?
Think about it. Possibly Mr. Wei is chosen by God to be an object of his unfathomable divine love because God needed one more Chinese person. Mr. Braun was chosen to be an object of his unfathomable divine wrath because God had enough Germans.
When we’re talking about a divine being who is maximally loving and the most perfect being there could be, does this not appear a bit counterintuitive?
