162 Apokatastasis: Four Meditations
wrought structure of this or that orthodoxy. To take a few obvi-
ous examples: The broad mainstream of Western Christian
thought from the late fourth century on - albeit with many
significant exceptions-has insisted that God's elect are eter-
nally chosen not on the basis of God's foresight with regard
to them, but solely as an act of sovereign power; and yet the
only two verses in the New Testament that explicitly address
the matter (Romans 8:29; 1 Peter 1:2) say precisely the oppo-
site. Reformed tradition has long propounded the nauseating
doctrine of "limited atonement" ( and, if you are unacquainted
with it, I will not rob you of your enviable innocence); and yet
the sole scriptural pronouncement on the matter (1 John 2:2)
rejects the notion out of hand. No principle is more deeply
embedded in the soil of Protestant belief than the assertion
that we are saved not by works but "by faith alone"; and yet the
only appearance of this phrase in the whole of the New Testa-
ment (James 2:24) is in a verse that exactly contradicts such a
claim. And how many modern Evangelicals think of salvation
as something one receives by "accepting Jesus" as one's "per-
sonal lord and savior," even though such language is wholly
absent from the New Testament, and even though all the real
scriptural language of salvation is about a corporate condition
of sacramental, moral, and spiritual union with the "body of
Christ"? There are very venerable theological answers to all
these apparent difficulties (well, except for the last one); but,
of course, they are all disingenuous (in a quite unintentional
way, no doubt), and consist mostly in ridiculous attempts to
explain why the texts in question mean not what they say, but
precisely what they deny. It has always been thus. That long in-
ventory of seemingly universalist scriptural pericopes that I
supplied in my Second Meditation has been explained away,
in its every discrete item, again and again down the centuries