Re-Imaging Election: Divine Election as Representing God to Others and Others to God
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
In Re-Imaging Election Suzanne McDonald offers a fresh approach to the doctrine of election from a Reformed perspective, first by seeking greater acknowledgment that election is not only “in Christ” but also “by the Spirit,” and second by building on the scriptural and theological links between the doctrines of election and the image of God. McDonald here combines an analysis of John Owen and Karl Barth with those links to develop a constructive proposal that posits representation (representing God to others and others to God) as a fruitful category for understanding the nature and purpose of election. In doing so, she seeks to restore the robust pneumatology characteristic of the earlier Reformed tradition without losing some of the central insights from Barth’s christological re-orientation of the doctrine.
While Re-Imaging Election is firmly rooted in the Reformed tradition, the re-expression of the doctrine presented here opens up new possibilities for dialogue across the theological spectrum and offers suggestive directions for reclaiming an often-divisive doctrine in the life of the church.
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- Offers a fresh approach to the doctrine of election from a Reformed perspective.
- Combines an analysis of John Owen and Karl Barth.
- Provides suggestive directions for reclaiming an often-divisive doctrine in the life of the church.
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I. Posing a Pneumatological Problem
- 1. Election, the Image, and the Spirit: John Owen
- 2. Election, the Image, and the Spirit: Karl Barth
- 3. Election “in Christ” in Barth: Some Pneumatological Queries
- II. Re-Presenting the Image; Re-Imaging Election
- 4. Sketching Some Scriptural Contours
- 5. Election, the Spirit, and the Ecclesial Imago Dei
- III. Election to Representation in Dialogue
- 6. Some Problems, a Parable, and the Parousia
- 7. Owen and Barth: Beyond the Impasse
- Epilogue: Glancing Backward, Looking Forward
- Bibliography
- Index of names and subjects
Any attempt to revise the doctrine of election today has to go through Karl Barth. Suzanne McDonald builds upon his legacy even as she seeks to introduce critical modifications. For her, election has to do with the priestly work of a community empowered by the Holy Spirit to represent God to others and others before God. The last-named form of representation is of special interest to her. The Christian community represents others before God in that it holds the personhood of the apparently rejected within the sphere of God’s promised blessing and, thereby, bears their rejection in itself. That such a thesis would provoke questions about the relation of Christ’s work to the work of the church is, of course, inevitable. McDonald’s book will further conversation not only about the doctrine of election but also about the state of Reformed theology today.
—Bruce McCormack, Princeton Theological Seminary