How Vast is Our Saviour's Work?

Removing Scales From Jaded Eyes

One of the more interesting biblical questions facing Christians is the course and progress of the Gospel in the world. Because Christians are now numbered in the West as a small minority tossing in a vast ocean of rebellion and unbelief, many (Christians and Unbelievers) are tempted to make the mistake of projecting the present into the future, to conclude that in any generation only a small number will be saved.

This is no idle or abstract subject, akin to the discussion about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  For one's expectations of the future determine in great measure how we live our lives now.  Teleology matters.  If we understand that God has indeed declared the progressive and comprehensive christianization of the earth our present lives in this vale of tears will have a decidedly different timbre. 

This issue is something which we very definitely must not subject to "newspaper exegesis"--that unhappy procedure of determining the teaching of Scripture through the filter of what we read in the news every day. Old Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield cites Bishop William Temple (1913) on the matter:

The earth will in all probability be habitable for myriads of years yet. If Christianity is the final religion, the church is still in its infancy. Two thousand years are as two days. The appeal to the "primitive church" is misleading: we are the "primitive church".

But why should we hold to the position that the Church is still young? Because Christianity is yet in the minority. Warfield again:

. . . it is the constant teaching of Scripture that Christ must reign until He shall have put all His enemies under His feet--by which assuredly spiritual, not physical conquest is intimated; that it is inherent in the very idea of the salvation of Christ, who came as Saviour of the world, in order to save the world, that nothing less than the world shall be saved by Him; and that redemption as a remedy for sin cannot be supposed to reach its final issue until the injury inflicted by sin on the creation of God is repaired, and mankind as such is brought to the destiny originally designed for it by its creator.

But what of those passages where our Lord intimates that few will be saved, such as when He said, "Many are called, but few are chosen." This damning statement cannot be stripped out of its redemptive context and made into a universal principle of redemptive history. Our Lord was speaking of the last days of the Jewish apostasy, where, due to the prevalent Unbelief and almost universal rejection of the Messiah, judgement fell upon that people in AD 66-70. Warfield cites W. G. T. Shedd:

Some . . . have represented the number of the reprobated as greater than that of the elect, or equal to it. They found this upon the world of Christ, "Many are called, but few are chosen." But this describes the situation at the time when our Lord spake, and not the final result of His redemptive work. But when Christ shall have "seen of the travail of His soul" and been "satisfied" with what He has seen; when the whole course of the Gospel shall be complete, and shall be surveyed from beginning to end, it will be found that God's elect, or church, is "a great multitude which no man can number, out of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples ,and tongues" and that their voice is as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saving, "Hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth." Revelation 7:9; 19:6

B. B. Warfield, "Are They Few That Be Saved?", Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1968), p.349f.