Third Meditation: What Is a Person? 135
rest left reprobate, solely as a display of divine might; God's
faithfulness is his own affair. Well then, so far, so Augustinian.
But then also, again, so purely conditional: that "what if ... ?"
must be strictly observed. For, as it happens, rather than offer-
ing a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul
is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form,
at the very brink of despair. He does not stop there, however,
because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It
is so obviously preposterous, in fact, that a wholly different
solution must be sought, one that makes sense and that will
not require the surrender either of Paul's reason or of his con-
fidence in God's righteousness. Hence, contrary to his own
warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God's justice;
and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously reject-
ing the provisional answer (the "vessels of wrath" hypothesis)
altogether, so as to reach a completely different- and far more
glorious-conclusion. And, again, his reasoning is based en-
tirely upon the language of election in Jewish scripture.
Throughout the book of Genesis, that is to say, the pattern
of God's election is persistently, even perversely antinomian:
Ever and again, the elder to whom the birthright properly be-
longs is supplanted by the younger, whom God has chosen in
defiance of all natural "justice." This is practically the running
motif uniting the whole text, from Cain and Abel to Manasseh
and Ephraim. But-and this is crucial-that pattern is one not
of exclusion and inclusion, but rather of a providential delay
and divagation in the course of the natural "justice" of primo-
geniture, as a result of which the scope of election has time to
be immensely widened, so that ultimately it takes in not only
the brother originally and "justly" excluded by the law of pri-
mogeniture (Jacob, for example), but also the brother (Esau,
for instance) who had been "unjustly" pretermitted by God's