Partly, yes. Calvinists and Arminians disagree sharply about why God chooses, but most of them agree about what election is: God choosing individual persons for salvation. Dr. Chad Thornhill, Chair of Theological Studies for the Liberty University School of Divinity, came to doubt that shared starting point. After years in the Jewish writings of Paul’s era, he argues that Paul’s election passages answer a different question. They are less about how a person becomes one of God’s people and more about who God’s people are, now that Gentiles are coming in through Jesus.
That claim needs testing. If it is right, centuries of argument have been aimed slightly off target. If it is wrong, it is a clever way of changing the subject. The way to find out is to state the shared premise plainly, see why Thornhill set it down, and then ask what his reading can and cannot carry.
What do both sides of the predestination debate assume?
Start with the two positions at their strongest. The Reformed reading, shaped by Augustine and Calvin, holds that God chose particular people for salvation by his own free decision, apart from anything he foresaw in them. The classical Arminian reading holds that God chose those he foreknew would believe. The disagreement is real. It concerns the ground of the choice: God’s will alone, or God’s foreknowledge of faith.
Now look at what the two views hold in common. Both treat the election texts as answers to a question about individual salvation. Both read words like chosen, predestinate and called as steps in what theologians call the order of salvation, the sequence in which God chooses, predestines, calls, justifies and glorifies a person. The fight is over the first link. Neither side, in this setup, asks whether Paul was mainly describing that sequence at all.
Thornhill asks exactly that. In his reading, Paul is not mainly mapping how God deals with one individual from eternity to glory. The question Paul is answering, he says, is “who are God’s people,” rather than how individuals come to be among them.
If Thornhill is right, the Calvinist and the Arminian are both putting a question to Romans 9 that Romans 9 was not written to answer. Their answers might still be true as theology, drawn from elsewhere. They would simply not be what Paul was arguing in these chapters.
What the Jewish background changed for Thornhill
Thornhill did not begin as a critic of the individual reading. He describes holding the view common among Christians who do not read Paul through a Reformed lens: election is based on God’s foreknowledge. That places his starting point inside the shared premise, on its Arminian-leaning side. The view he argues for now, a corporate or collective understanding of election, is more often held by Wesleyans and Arminians. He adds that he does not consider himself an Arminian in the classical sense.
What moved him was reading. Near the end of his seminary studies he took a directed research course in which, by his account, he read through the Apocrypha several times. In his doctoral work he met the new perspective on Paul, associated with E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn and N. T. Wright. Thornhill says the movement is better understood as a new perspective on Judaism. Sanders argued that the Judaism of Paul’s day was not a system of earning salvation by good works. In Thornhill’s summary, salvation was graciously given within the covenant, and keeping the law was the response that maintained the relationship.
Thornhill accepts that correction in broad terms, but he faults Sanders on election, saying Sanders ends up “reading Judaism a little too Protestant.” That remark reveals his method. He is willing to charge even the scholar who broke the older consensus with carrying later categories into ancient texts. The test he keeps applying is simple: whose questions are we asking the text to answer?
The catalyst for his thinking on election, he says, was Mark Adam Elliott’s The Survivors of Israel, which helped him think through how Jews of the period understood being chosen. From there, Thornhill says, “the dominoes kind of started falling for what I think this meant for Paul.”
He did not find a verse that refuted his old answer. He found a background that made the old question look out of place. Reading the letters with that literature in view, he says, “you just start asking different questions about what exactly is going on.” The shift happened at the level of the question, and new answers followed from it.
One limit belongs here. In this conversation Thornhill reports where his reading of the Jewish literature led him. He does not walk through what particular texts say about chosenness. Anyone who wants to weigh his case on its evidence will need the book and the sources behind it, beyond a summary of his conclusions.
What question is Paul actually answering?
Thornhill names Ephesians 1-2 and Romans 9-11 as the densest election passages, and he also works through material in 1 and 2 Corinthians and Galatians. In each, he argues, Paul is handling tension between Jewish and Gentile believers. Two issues sit at the center. How are Gentiles included in a people that had been defined by Israel’s covenant? And how does Jesus as Messiah reorient the way Jews like Paul had understood that people?
The result, by Thornhill’s account, is that election becomes “a theological question that arises out of ethnic differences.” He says he had rarely seen the doctrine framed that way. Discussions of election usually stay inside theology from start to finish. Thornhill reverses the direction of explanation: “I think what’s driving the theological discussion in these letters is really these ethnic issues that are arising between what it means for these Gentiles to now be in God’s people.”
Does the text bear this out? Some of it plainly does. Romans 9 opens with Paul’s grief over his own people, Israel, and the problem he raises is whether God’s word to Israel has failed. His answer begins, “For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Romans 9:6). Two chapters later the same concern is still driving the argument: “I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid” (Romans 11:1). Whatever else these chapters teach, their stated subject is the identity and future of a people.
Ephesians is a useful test case because it cuts both ways. The letter opens with praise to God, who “hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love” (Ephesians 1:4). A careful reader should admit that the plural pronoun settles nothing on its own. “Us” can name a body, or it can name many individuals added together. The grammar fits either reading, which is why the background question matters so much. Context decides which question Paul is answering.
And the context turns quickly. By the next chapter Paul is describing Gentiles who were once strangers to Israel’s covenants, and he says of Christ, “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us” (Ephesians 2:14). The “both” are Jew and Gentile. A letter that opens with election moves straight to the merging of two peoples into one. That sequence is what Thornhill’s reading predicts. It is harder to explain if Ephesians 1 is a self-contained statement about the order of individual salvation.
The strongest objection
The best objection comes in two parts, and it should be stated with full force.
First, Paul’s election chapters do name individuals. Romans 9 discusses Jacob and Esau, and Pharaoh. Romans 8:29-30 lays out something that looks very much like the sequence Thornhill says Paul is not mainly describing: foreknown, predestined, called, justified, glorified. A Reformed reader will point out that Paul stresses the choice of Jacob over Esau was made before either child was born or had done anything good or evil (Romans 9:11). That looks like a point about individual persons and the ground of God’s choice.
A corporate reader has a real reply. When Paul writes, “The elder shall serve the younger” (Romans 9:12), he is quoting Genesis 25, where the Lord tells Rebekah, “Two nations are in thy womb” (Genesis 25:23). His next line, “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” (Romans 9:13), comes from Malachi, where Jacob and Esau stand for Israel and Edom. On this view, the individuals in Romans 9 are heads of peoples, and the argument concerns God’s freedom to define his people as he chooses. Both readings take the text seriously. Neither is forced to ignore it.
The second part of the objection is more philosophical, and it is harder to escape. A people is made of persons. Suppose God chooses a people, and individuals share in that election by being joined to it in Christ. The question immediately returns: how does any particular person come to be joined? Through faith, every side agrees. But is that faith God’s gift to some and not others, or a response God enables in all and some refuse? That is the Calvinist and Arminian disagreement again, now one step further down.
So what does Thornhill’s move actually accomplish? It does not dissolve the predestination debate. It relocates it. If he is right, the debate loses Romans 9-11 and Ephesians 1 as its main battleground, because those passages were answering a different question. Whatever is true about God’s grace and human response would have to be argued from texts that actually address it. That is a real consequence, but it is a smaller one than declaring the old debate meaningless, and fair readers should not inflate it.
What follows from the corporate reading, and what does not
The firmest conclusion concerns method, and Thornhill states it as a principle: “we can’t assume that Paul’s concerns are what Luther’s concerns were.” He is careful to add that this is not a claim that Luther got everything wrong. The point is about order. Before asking how Paul’s words fit later disputes, a reader has to ask what dispute Paul was in.
He presses the point with a question he puts to his students: “if we’re not putting Paul in that context, what context are we putting him in.” Then he names the alternatives: “Are we putting him in a 16th century context? Are we putting him in a fourth century context?” The sixteenth century is the era of the Reformers. The fourth century leads into Augustine’s lifetime. In Thornhill’s account, the Reformation conflict between Luther and the Roman Catholic Church over how a person is made right with God still frames how most people read Paul, and that conflict put the individual’s standing before God at the center. The foreknowledge view Thornhill once held answers the same question the Augustinian view asks. That is how a premise becomes shared: both sides inherit the question and argue only over the answer.
Lisa Fields names a common version of this problem: learning systematic theology first, then trying to make every passage fit its categories, and growing confused when a passage refuses. Thornhill would not call biblical interpretation more important than systematic theology, but he says it “should precede it.” He also names a cultural pressure behind the individual reading, saying Western Christians “need to get some of this over individualized westernism out of our blood.” That remark approaches the premise from the other side. A culture that thinks first about the individual will naturally hear election as a statement about individuals.
Several things do not follow. It does not follow that individuals are irrelevant to salvation. Thornhill himself insists that “transformation is salvation,” and transformation happens in actual people. It does not follow that the Reformed or Arminian accounts of grace are false, only that these passages may not be their best evidence. And it does not follow that Thornhill’s reading is settled. He argues it as the best fit with the background he studied, and others who know the same material read it differently. Faithful Christians hold different views on election.
One consequence does follow, and it is uncomfortable. If Paul’s election theology answers the question of who belongs to God’s people, then its test is practical as well as doctrinal. Thornhill says much of what Paul confronts, especially in Galatians, is “Jews that are expecting Gentiles to do the things that Jews do.” The unity Paul demands, in Thornhill’s reading, keeps ethnic distinctions in place while requiring each group to turn toward the other. Put in modern terms, he says, “it’s about racial reconciliation within God’s people.”
That changes what it means to get election right. A church can hold a carefully argued position on the ground of God’s choice and still fail the question Paul was actually asking. On Thornhill’s reading, the doctrine is tested less by how precisely a congregation describes God’s decrees and more by whom it is willing to call family without first asking them to become like everyone else in the room.