>>The conundrum is/was ‘why evangelize?’- those who aren’t elect won’t respond, and the elect won’t need it since they aren’t choosing.
The answer to that is that the Christian life is more peaceful and fulfilling than that of Natural Man. As we’ve seen in the USA, the decline of cultural Christianity has affected the moral fabric of the nation. So, you evangelize because you don’t know who is the elect and who isn’t, and even though the elect don’t “choose” salvation, they do “choose” the Christian Life on Earth.
That’s also good advice. The better life through virtue resonated strongly with the Stoics and they probably constituted a lot of the early converts. It just doesn’t solve the question of ‘why evangelize?’ under the ‘dead man can’t choose’ view of election. Because under that view no one can choose anything.
I don’t think it’s really that a big a deal. It’s more a curious problem of logic that may not be able to be solved. Most Christians seem to operate as semi-Pelagians/semi-Arminians no matter what denomination they belong to. The arcane points of predestination and election don’t interest a wide audience.