God's call: the summons by which he draws people into salvation and into his own people, and sets them toward their final glory
Every time this word appears in the New Testament, God is the one who calls. In ordinary Greek it was a plain, everyday word for a summons to court, an invitation to dinner, or even a person's name. The apostles took that pedestrian word and gave it one steady focus: God reaching out to claim a people for himself. It is a compact term for the whole movement of grace, from God's first approach to a person all the way to the glory he is calling them toward.
Within that single focus the word takes on a few recognizable shades. Most often it is the saving call that brings a person into the church and lays a claim on how they live. Once, in Romans 11:29, it names God's summons of Israel as a whole nation, a call he will never take back, an echo of the Hebrew theme of God calling his people by name (קרא). In two places it is named from its finish line rather than its start, the "upward" or "heavenly" call whose prize lies ahead. And in one much-argued verse it is stretched to cover the very situation a person was in when the call reached them.
The common thread is that this call is God's act, not a human choice or a career path, and that it always carries a life with it. To be called is to be given both a new standing and a way to walk. The passages that use the word are almost always tied to a plain instruction: live in a way worthy of the call, be counted worthy of it, make it sure by the way you live.
Nuances
Whether κλῆσις in 1 Corinthians 7:20 means the divine call itself or a person's station or condition in life at the time of the call. The dominant lexical judgment is that no Greek before Paul uses the word for occupation or station, and that Luther's rendering as Beruf (which gave German its word for a trade) imported that sense. A mediating position holds that Paul stretches the term to embrace the concrete situation in which the call was heard.
- majorityThe divine call itself; one's outward station is irrelevant to fidelity to the summons.; S. Scott Bartchy, Mallon Chresai: First-Century Slavery and the Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:21, SBLDS 11 (1973), 132-159; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (2014), 322-329; K. L. Schmidt, kaleo ktl., in TDNT 3 (1965), 491-493
- minorityThe social station or condition of life present when the divine call was heard, treated as a matter of indifference.; Will Deming, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy, 2nd ed. (2004), 156-163; Dieter Zeller, Der erste Brief an die Korinther, KEK 5 (2010), 249-257
- minorityThe divine call as concretely embodied in the situation one was in when called, a deliberate stretching of the term.; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2000), 544-565; David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians, BECNT (2003), 301-313
Disputed
Whether God's call in Paul is an effectual summons that always brings about the salvation it announces, or an invitation that a person can resist. Reformed readers point to the chain of Romans 8:30 and the irrevocable calling of Romans 11:29; Arminian and Wesleyan readers point to resistible-grace passages and to the imperative of 2 Peter 1:10 to make the calling sure. A range of mediating positions frames the call as corporate and vocational rather than as an individual decree.
- contestedAn effectual call that overcomes resistance and always accomplishes salvation.; John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (1955), 88-95; Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, BECNT, 2nd ed. (2018), 450-451
- contestedA summons that can be resisted; the called are those who in fact responded.; Ben Witherington III, Paul's Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (2004), 226-234; I. Howard Marshall, Kept by the Power of God, rev. ed. (1995)
- contestedA corporate and vocational call into the covenant people, rather than an individual soteriological decree.; N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013), 1408-1443; James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998), 508-513