Objection 40

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

Romans 8:29, "whom he did foreknow" means God elected those He foresaw would believe.

Foreknowledge in Scripture, applied to persons, is covenant love, not advance information: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth" (Amos 3:2. God was not unaware of Assyria's existence); "the Lord knoweth them that are his" (2 Timothy 2:19); "I never knew you" (Matthew 7:23, said by omniscience, therefore relational, not informational). The verse says whom He foreknew, not what He foreknew, persons, not decisions. And the foreseen-faith reading destroys itself: if God elected on foreseen faith, election is a redundancy (God merely ratifying man's choice), Romans 9:11 is falsified ("the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works"), and 1 Corinthians 4:7 loses its force: "who maketh thee to differ from another?" On the foreseen-faith scheme, the honest answer is "I did", the one answer Paul's question is built to forbid.