Andrew, this is a wise and helpful post! I find your reading of election in this context intriguing and enormously suggestive. Let me add another perspective on - or aspect to - election which seems to me to take your argument further.

Election serves not so much to grant privileges to the chosen community as it does to shape the lives and character of that community. It insists that the story by which the community lives is incarnated in its life and structures. In other words, the “truth” about election is not a proposition but a praxis.

If we take this seriously, we can lose our anxiety about the objective truth claims of our faith. They ought to be “objective” to us as a community in the sense that they give a distinctive christological shape to our coummunity and its view of and action in the world. Whether its “truth” extends beyond that community is ultimately irrelevant, in two senses: if we fail to live it out, we make a lie of it anyway; and it is the evangelical power (the sign character) of its incarnation that commends itself to people outside the community and draws them in.

This seems to me to draw us to the heart of the nature of Christian truth: it is truth-to-live-by rather than a set of propositions. It refuses a gap between theology and ethics, and demands that that which we profess become visible - incarnate- in the life of the believing community. In other words, it’s story-shaped existence - existence shaped by the Jesus Story.