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Letters Seventeenth
Sunday in Ordinary Time |
The Catholic Telegraph
July 26, 2002As Paul approaches the end of this long main section of his letter to the Romans, he begins to summarize. The whole project of salvation is due exclusively to the goodness of God. This goodness is not erratic or unpredictable, dependent on God’s momentary impulses, but a carefully planned out project of kindness and generosity. That’s the theme of this Sunday’s reading.
The text begins by pointing out how "all things" contribute to the well being of those who are the beneficiaries of God’s initiative and who, consequently, love Him. By "all things" Paul probably means the elements of salvation that he has just been speaking about. Human sufferings, creation’s destiny to glory and its groaning till that glory is fulfilled, Christian hope, the Spirit-filled prayer of the believer: it’s all part of a highly articulate plan on God’s part. Note that the love for God that the text mentions is a result of people being called according to God’s purpose and not the cause of their being called.
In the rest of our reading, Paul explains and expands what he has just said. First he reminds us of God’s purpose. Everything that God did as part of His saving plan had for its purpose to reconfigure human beings into the image of His Son, Jesus. Christ Jesus was to provide the likeness, the genetic material, as it were, according to which an immense family of sisters and brothers, all sharing and extending the life of Christ, was to be born.
Next he tells us how God’s project is brought to fulfillment. It is a five step plan, expressed in the passage’s verbs: foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified. From all eternity, God knew what He wanted to do and had decided to take whatever steps were necessary to bring salvation to human beings ("Those He foreknew He also predestined"). Next came the implementation of the plan: the call to faith and baptism. Those who accepted what God offered were "justified" (i.e., made holy in Christ), and were given the beginnings of what would eventually become the life of everlasting glory with Christ in heaven.
This passage from Romans is very important in the history of Christian theology because it is the basic Scripture text about predestination. "Predestination" is the term used to refer to God’s foreknowledge and arrangement of events, and the theological speculations about predestination are concerned with who is chosen by God for salvation and who is not. Are some destined by God to eternal damnation while others are destined to eternal happiness? If so, is it possible to determine on what basis God makes this decision? Is it in view of God’s knowledge about how the individual is going to spend his or her life, or is it a matter of God’s free and arbitrary choice? These questions occupied the attention of St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, the fathers of the Council of Trent, and centuries of post-Tridentine theologians.
Catholic teaching on this matter is that God predestines nobody to evil, but wills the salvation of all human beings. The only people who are not brought to salvation are those who delierately refuse it. This refusal is the result of the exercise of their free will, an exercise that God permits but does not cause.
The thing to remember about this Sunday’s reading is that its subject is not God’s relationship with individual saints or sinners, but His general plan for salvation. Paul’s point here is that our heavenly Father is not a capricious God who blesses or mistreats His subjects according to whim, but is rather a careful planner who brings together into one concerted undertaking a whole symphony of individual saving elements. This certainly has consequences for God’s relationship with individuals, but these relationships evolve in accord with God’s general scheme of salvation. God cares about me because God cares about us all.
Sometimes Christian believers are ridiculed for their constitutional optimism, for their conviction that everything will turn our all right in the end. "Pie in the sky when we die," is the way the enemies of faith put it. But our confidence in the final future is not a mindless conviction, an unrealistic fantasy to distract us from the grim reality around us. It is a deep religious conviction, based on what God’s own word tells us. There is a plan at work. It is God’s plan and its final outcome will be what God has planned for it to be. We may not understand how God’s plan applies to each and every detail of our individual human existence, but that doesn’t mean that there is no plan or that God’s project has gone astray.
And how do we know that there is such a plan, that what we hold as God’s word is true? We know because we have already experienced a part of the execution of the plan in our own individual lives and in our participation in the life of the community of Christ which is the Church. The individual history of each believer includes the assimilation of Christ’s teaching, participation in His sacraments, personal growth as a result of our membership in His community of faith. We know there is a plan because we have been part of it. We know that it is God’s plan. And we know that it is good.
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Conversation Questions.
In what specific ways have I experienced God’s saving providence?
What would our life be if God had not made plans for our salvation?
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