NOTES for Rom 8:29-30
Paul speaks of Christians as the new people of God, as the Church in its spiritual dimension. In the rabbinic tradition of the Second Temple period, there was an idea that the people of God had been conceived by God even before the creation of the world. This, of course, does not mean that the fate of every person born a Jew is completely predetermined from beginning to end. After all, there were Jews who betrayed their calling to be God's people. And with the new people of God the situation is even less predictable, because people are not born Christians. But as a spiritual reality, in Paul's thought, the Church was conceived by God from the very beginning, and everyone who enters it finds himself among those whose life was predestined, perhaps even before the creation of the world. He becomes part of God's plan and God's people.
But one still has to enter the Church. Until that has happened, a person is in the world of chance, where nothing is predetermined and nothing is definite, where anything at all can happen to anyone, and where chance appears to a superficial gaze as freedom. But God does not deprive a person of freedom; each person is free to choose whether to live in the world of chance or in the world of God's definiteness.
Meanwhile, the discussion of the new people of God, of the Church, allows the apostle to raise the question of the scale of the process we know by the name of salvation. And that scale turns out to be truly universal. It is no accident that Paul says we are saved "in hope": indeed, the process of our sharing in the life of the Kingdom, of our becoming a living Torah and, accordingly, of the transformation of our nature has only just begun. It will plainly require time, and no small amount of it. Our earthly life can be only the beginning of this path.
And the path itself is inseparable from the process of transforming all creation as a whole. All of it, in one way or another, suffered because of the fall, whose cause was humanity. Therefore this situation can only be corrected as a whole, with both humanity and all the rest of creation in view. But then the path of a person's spiritual formation, his deliverance from the consequences of the fall, must inevitably be synchronized with the corresponding work that touches the rest of creation. And this path will be completed only with Christ's return in glory. For now, all that remains for us is to hope that everyone who has begun it will safely reach the end.