Now in modern philosophy there is the notion of a limiting concept. It is based on Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal. We know nothing of the noumenal, yet we have to project an idea of God into it and talk as if there were a revelation from this God to man. It seemed to me that there ought to be an equivalent Christian view of the limiting concept and of the as-if idea. Such doctrines of election and freedom must be thought as limiting one another or, as supplementing and