Predestination
Theological doctrine that God wills all events, especially the soul's fate.
Predestination is the theological idea that God has willed all events, especially the eternal fate of each soul. It often tackles the free will paradox, where God's all-knowing nature seems to clash with human choice. This view is a type of religious determinism, specifically predeterminism or theological determinism.
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History
The Book of Enoch has been interpreted by some as presenting a deterministic worldview mixed with dualism, while the Book of Jubilees appears to blend ideas of free will and determinism. Ben Sira supports free will, stating that God places both good and bad before humans, allowing them to choose. New Testament scholar N. T. Wright claims that Josephus’s account of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes is fundamentally wrong. Wright argues their real debates were about how and when God would physically free Israel from foreign rule, not abstract predestination.
The Essenes, he says, withdrew to wait for divine intervention, while Pharisees believed people must actively follow God’s law to gain freedom. John Barclay counters that Josephus’s description is an oversimplification, not a complete error, and that real theological differences over fate and free will did exist among these groups. Francis Watson, using the first-century document 4 Ezra, argues that Jewish predestination beliefs focused on God choosing to save certain individual Jews.
Some members of the Qumran community may have believed in predestination, as the text 1QS says God caused his chosen ones to inherit the lot of the Holy Ones. In the New Testament, Romans 8–11 addresses predestination.
Views of Christian branches
The Eastern Orthodox view was summarized by Bishop Theophan the Recluse in response to the question of the relationship between the Divine provision and human free will. Roman Catholicism teaches the doctrine of predestination; the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that to God all moments of time are present in their immediacy, and when He establishes His eternal plan of predestination, He includes in it each person's free response to His grace.
According to the Roman Catholic Church, God does not will anyone to mortally sin and so to deserve punishment in hell. Augustine of Hippo laid the foundation for much of later Roman Catholic teaching on predestination, and his teachings on grace and free will were largely adopted by the Second Council of Orange. Thomas Aquinas' views concerning predestination are largely in agreement with Augustine. Lutherans historically hold to unconditional election to salvation, though some do not believe that certain people are predestined to salvation but that salvation is predestined for those who seek God.
Lutherans believe Christians should be assured that they are among the predestined, but they disagree with those who make predestination the source of salvation rather than Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection. Unlike some Calvinists, Lutherans do not believe in a predestination to damnation, teaching that eternal damnation results from the unbeliever's rejection of forgiveness and unbelief. Jacobus Arminius formulated Arminianism, which affirms the compatibility between human free will and divine foreknowledge but its incompatibility with theological determinism; thus predestination in Arminianism is based on divine foreknowledge, involving conditional election on the one who wills to have faith in God for salvation.
Types of predestination
In common English parlance, the doctrine of predestination often has particular reference to the doctrines of Calvinism. The version espoused by John Calvin is sometimes called double predestination because in it God predestines some people for salvation (unconditional election) and some for condemnation (reprobation), which results by allowing the individual's own sins to condemn them. Calvin defines predestination as the eternal decree of God by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man, stating that not all are created on equal terms but some are preordained to eternal life and others to eternal damnation.
On the spectrum of beliefs concerning predestination, Calvinism is the strongest form among Christians, teaching that God's predestining decision is based on the knowledge of his own will rather than foreknowledge concerning every particular person and event, and that God continually acts with entire freedom to bring about his will in completeness while not violating the freedom of the creature. Calvinists who hold the infralapsarian view of predestination usually prefer that term to supralapsarianism, perhaps to block the inference that they believe predestination is on the basis of foreknowledge.
The different terminology distinguishes the Calvinist double predestination version of infralapsarianism from Lutheranism's view that predestination is a mystery. Double predestination, or the double decree, is the doctrine that God actively reprobates, or decrees damnation of some, as well as salvation for those whom he has elected.
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