Predestination: Between Sovereignty and Love
"For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son." (Romans 8:29) Introduction For centuries, Catholic theology wrestled with two paradoxical truths. First, God genuinely wills all to be saved, yet some are lost, and second, that salvation depends entirely on God's sovereign grace, yet man has free will. Two great schools emerged to try to resolve this. Their debate came to a head in the late sixteenth century when Dominican and Jesuit theologians argued their positions before the Pope. The Dominican position, most rigorously developed by Domingo Báñez, held that God predestines some to salvation and permits others to damnation apart from any foreseen merits or demerits, the divine decree preceding rather than responding to human choices. This preserved the absolute gratuity of grace and God's sovereignty, but made it difficult to say that God genuinely loves those He permits to be lost, or that His salvific will is universal...