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 in any meaningful sense. The Jesuit position, developed by Luis de
Molina, took the opposite approach. God predestines after foreseeing those who
will freely respond to grace. But this also collapses under scrutiny as our
merits are themselves God's gift (1 Cor 4:7). As Augustine put it: "when
God crowns your merits, He crowns nothing other than His own gifts." A
predestination based on merits He Himself supplies is circular reasoning.
Pope Clement VIII ordered both schools to debate before the
Cardinals. The arguments ran for a decade. In 1607, Pope Paul V refused to
endorse either position. The question was formally left open and remains so to
this day. Both the Dominican and Molina extremes were ruled out whilst maintaining
that a chosen refusal of God is genuinely possible.
The framework that follows draws on the work of theologian William G. Most, navigating between these: predestination without merits and reprobation only in view of grave and persistent resistance to grace.
1. The Weight of the Word
Few doctrines provoke more heat than predestination. The
word itself carries weight: fate, destiny, decisions made before we were born
about events we cannot change. For some, it evokes a God of inscrutable
sovereignty whose decrees are final before we draw breath. For others, it makes
human choice a performance of a script already written.
Yet the doctrine arose not to make God distant and arbitrary, but to express something profound about grace: that salvation is not our own achievement, that from beginning to end it is a gift, and we are loved before we can love in return. The difficulty is real.
How can God's decision to
save be entirely gift whilst also being genuinely responsive to human freedom?
Is there a way through this without sacrificing either
divine sovereignty or human dignity?
2. What the Church Teaches
The Catechism is unambiguous on the essentials. God
eternally knows and wills His plan of salvation, and within that plan He
encompasses each person's free response to grace (§600). Salvation depends entirely
on divine initiative, with even the preparation to receive grace already grace
at work (§2001). Predestination is ordered toward salvation, never toward
damnation: "God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a wilful
turning away from God is necessary, and persistence in it until the end"
(§1037). Double predestination is explicitly rejected, since God sincerely
wills the salvation of every person (§1037).
3. The Pattern of Parental Love
In a reasonably good family, three things are true. The
parents want all their children to flourish, a desire that precedes anything
the children do or fail to do. No child needs to earn fundamental care; food,
shelter, and affection are given because the parents are good, not because the
child has merited them. A toddler does not earn breakfast. A teenager does not
earn welcome. As children grow older, boundaries are set and virtues developed.
Families have ways of relating to one another, of loving. and a persistent,
grave refusal to live communally has consequences. A son who becomes violent,
who refuses every attempt at reconciliation, may eventually find himself
estranged, not because the parents stopped loving him, but because he has made
the relationship impossible from his side. Yet his room remains, should he
return home seeking reconciliation.
Jesus taught this pattern. The Father in the Prodigal Son
runs down the road before the son’s confession is complete, before any amends
are made. The robe, the ring, and the feast are given because the Father is
good, not because the son deserves them. But the possibility of being
"lost" and "dead" was real. The elder brother, standing
outside in the evening air, refusing to go in, shows that even a life of
outward obedience can refuse the Father's love. The structure is exact:
universal desire for the good of all, unearned gift as the basis of the
relationship, and consequences only for grave and persistent refusal.
This is not just a metaphor. It’s how divine love operates.
4. Three Logical Moments
Based on this biblical pattern, William Most developed a framework that distinguishes three aspects of God's eternal
will. He called them “logical moments,” meaning not three points in time but
three things simultaneously true about God’s eternal will when He created time
and the universe. They describe the order of truth in what He knows and wills,
not a sequence of decisions.
First: God wills all to be saved. This is
explicit in 1 Timothy 2:4. Since to love is to will good to another for the
other's sake, this is the same as saying God loves every human person. The
strength of that love is visible in what it cost: the Cross. St Paul could say,
"He loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal 2:20), and each of us can
say this too. Before you were born, before you had done anything good or bad,
God willed your salvation.
Because God exists outside time, His will for your salvation
is not a benevolent policy toward humanity in the aggregate. It is a specific
love for you, for the person He has known from eternity, in your struggles,
your history, and your capacity for grace. Theologians call this His antecedent
or perfect will, what He desires eternally, without reference to human
resistance, before any question arises of how we respond.
Second: God sees who resists His grace gravely and
persistently. Grace is offered to all; some respond, others resist. But
resistance alone is not the issue, for we all resist at times, and grace is
patient and insistent. The question is whether resistance becomes so grave and
so persistent that the person closes themselves off from receiving what is
being offered. Only then does God, with regret, ratify what the person has made
final. This is reprobation, but reprobation because of and in view of a wilful and
persistent turning away from God, never as an arbitrary prior decree.
Theologians call this His consequent or permissive will, what He allows in view
of human choices, distinct from what He eternally desires.
Third: All others are positively predestined. Those
who do not make themselves incapable of receiving grace are positively
predestined, not because of their merits, but because in the first moment God
desired and willed this, and they are not stopping Him. The absence of grave
resistance is not an achievement. It means being open to what God is freely
giving. The initiative, the desire, the giving, all of this is entirely God's.
A natural question arises here. If God sustains us in
existence at every moment, could He not simply keep us open to His love? The
answer lies in what kind of gift freedom is. When God gives freedom, He gives
it genuinely, not as something He recalls when He dislikes how it’s used. A
parent who only permits a child to choose when the child chooses what’s right
has not given freedom. God sustains our existence and gives us real freedom,
including, tragically, the freedom to refuse Him. He will not coerce the
beloved into communion, because to do so would be to take back the gift itself.
Whether any soul uses its freedom to make that refusal
permanent is a question the Church leaves open. She holds both the reality of
hell and allows the hope that all may finally be saved, because both divine
love and human freedom are real, and she will not sacrifice either.
5. Pastoral Implications
On anxiety about salvation. Many
Christians live in quiet terror. Am I among the elect? Have I been chosen? This
framework dissolves that anxiety. If you are genuinely concerned about your
salvation, if you find yourself turning towards God rather than persistently
away, you are not among those who have made themselves finally closed. The very
fact that you care is evidence that grace is at work in you. Predestination is
not a hidden decree you must discover. It’s the gift God is offering you now. And
direction matters more than the distance home. The struggling believer who keeps returning to
God, however haltingly, is moving towards salvation. Hell is not the
destination of the weak or the doubting, but of the wilfully, definitively, and
finally closed.
The doctrine of hell is not primarily a deterrent. It’s a
diagnosis. It names an orientation that’s dangerous now: a self that clings to
self-sufficiency, experiencing grace not as invitation but as affront. The
elder brother's danger is not that he might end up somewhere terrible after
death. It’s that he’s standing outside the feast right now, whilst the Father
entreats him. The warning is present-tense. It calls us to notice whether we
are becoming the kind of self that finds gift intolerable, and to turn back,
whilst turning back is still the shape our freedom can take.
On evangelisation. If God wills all to
be saved and offers grace without limit, then evangelisation is not so much about
warning people they might be damned. It’s more about announcing the gift being
offered. We evangelise not from anxious urgency but confident joy. The Gospel
is genuinely good news, not a threat wrapped in an offer.
On prayer for the dead. The Church has always
prayed for the dead, which makes sense only if our prayers can help them. At
death, the fundamental orientation of the person becomes definitive, either
towards God or finally away from Him. Those oriented towards God may still need
purification, and our prayers aid that process. So we pray for all the dead
without presuming to know who needs purgatory and who, if anyone, is beyond
reach. This is not uncertainty about doctrine. It is humility about the hidden
workings of grace.
On those who have never heard the Gospel. The
Church teaches that salvation comes through Christ alone, but has never
required explicit knowledge of Christ. Vatican II affirmed that those who,
through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel but seek God with a
sincere heart and follow their consciences may be saved (Lumen Gentium §16).
This applies to the many millions across history born without knowledge of
Christ. God's love is not limited to the reach of Christian proclamation. What
He requires is a heart genuinely open to truth and goodness, which is, in the
end, a heart open to Him, however partially or imperfectly it knows His name.
This is not a reason to be indifferent about evangelisation. It’s a reason to
trust that the God who wills all to be saved has not abandoned those whose
proclamation has not yet reached them.
On those who have heard and walked away. A
different, painful question is carried by many: the adult child who was
baptised and catechised and then stopped believing; the spouse, parent or
friend who knew the faith, perhaps lived it for a time, and turned from it.
This is not the same situation as never having heard. The person who has genuinely
encountered the Gospel and freely, culpably turned away has exercised a real
freedom in relation to a real offer. The Church does not pretend otherwise, and
cheap reassurance here would be a disservice.
But several things remain true. We cannot know the interior
history of another person's faith, what wounds shaped their leaving, what grace
may have continued to reach them, what movements of the heart occur that are invisible
to us. The God who knows each soul from eternity, and whose grace is perfectly
suited to each life, does not abandon a soul because it has walked away from
the visible Church. The Father in the parable does not stop watching the road. The
Good Shepherd searches for the lost sheep. We entrust those we love to a mercy
that is wider and more persistent than our anxiety, not as consolation, but as
theological conviction. And we pray for them, because prayer for the living and
the dead is itself an act of trust in that mercy.
6. Two Objections
If God truly wills all to be saved and is omnipotent,
how can anyone be lost? Omnipotence does not extend to contradiction.
God cannot act against His nature and force free creatures to love Him, because
forced love is not love. His sovereignty is expressed not in overriding freedom
but in sustaining it, even at great cost. The Cross itself shows the grammar of
divine love: Christ does not compel the thief. He invites him.
If God's love is infinite, how can it ever finally
fail? Grace does not fail. What can fail is the human capacity to
receive it, damaged and hardened by persistent, habitual refusal. Grace is
infinite, but reception requires an openness that persistent refusal can
destroy. And this is where the mystery is deepest, and where the Church holds
the tension without resolving it.
Conclusion
Predestination is not fate. It’s not a closed list
determined before the world began without reference to how we live. It is the
doctrine of grace carried to its conclusion: that from first to last, salvation
is gift. We do not earn it. We do not even earn the desire for it. Every
movement towards God is already His grace at work in us.
The Church has refused to resolve this tension by
sacrificing either divine love or human freedom. She holds both, not because
she has solved the mystery, but because the Gospel insists on both.
Whatever the final accounting, this much is certain: no one
will be lost because God did not love them. No one will be lost because grace
was insufficient. No one will be lost because they were not chosen. If any are
lost, it will be because they chose, finally and irrevocably, to turn away from
the gift that was freely offered. And God, in perfect justice and perfect sorrow,
will ratify what they have made permanent.
God does not suffer passions imposed from outside, as
creatures do. But within the eternal life of the Trinity, there is something
analogous to what we call love's grief, not a disturbance of the divine being
but an expression of it. Love that is real wills the good of the beloved, and
when that good is refused, something in love itself responds, not as a passion
that overcomes God, but as the shadow that love casts when it meets refusal.
How, when or if that refusal becomes final, and what it
means for the soul who makes it, remains a mystery we approach with reverence
rather than certainty.
Epilogue
What follows does not resolve the questions this essay has
been circling. It pushes on its framework, drawing on something Molina
glimpsed, even if he pressed it too far. Where Molina went wrong was in
grounding predestination in foreseen merits, the merits God supplies. What that
insight illuminates within Most's framework is the depth and precision of
divine love: not that God predestines because He foresees our choices, but that
He orders creation with an intimacy that knows exactly what each soul needs and
offers it.
God does not merely foreknow what each person will do with
the grace offered. Being infinite in intelligence and existing outside time, He
beholds infinite possibilities: every variable in every possible creation,
every person, every circumstance, every suffering, every moment of openness or
resistance. And in creating this world rather than another, He has arranged
that each person encounters grace real and sufficient for salvation. Not equal
circumstances, for lives differ enormously, but the right grace for this
person, in this life, with their struggles and their history.
If grace is genuinely sufficient, and if divine wisdom lacks
no limit, is it possible that none will be lost? Not because refusal is unreal,
nor because freedom is coerced, but because mercy may extend further than we can
fathom.
The depths of that love are perhaps most visible at its most tested. Of Judas, Jesus said: "It would have been better for that man if he had not been born" (Mt 26:24). Those words are often read as a verdict. Within the framework offered here, they become something else entirely: a lament. The sorrow only makes sense if the love was real, the opportunity genuine, the love real.
A God who had never truly willed Judas's salvation would
have nothing to grieve. God did not encounter Judas at the Incarnation and
discover who he was. He knew him from eternity, knew his capacity for devotion
and his vulnerability to betrayal, knew every moment at which grace reached him
and every moment at which he turned away. The love that grieved over him was
not the love of one who had tried and been surprised by failure. It was the
love of one who had known, from before time, exactly what was at stake, and had
offered everything anyway. That is the sorrow behind the words. Judas, in the
immediate company of Christ, received perhaps the most concentrated grace in
human history. If that wasn't sufficient to guarantee his yes, it wasn't for
lack of divine generosity. And it’s the same love and sorrow that stands behind
every human life, however it ends.
If grace is truly sufficient and intimately suited to each
soul, and if God's wisdom is truly infinite, His love and mercy without limit,
then perhaps – perhaps - the world He willed is the one where every
soul, met by graces truly sufficient and intimately suited to who they are, will
finally say “Yes.” The Church allows us to hope for this without obliging us to
believe it. This hope does not deny the possibility of a final refusal. It
trusts that infinite love and infinite wisdom might order things such that the
possibility never becomes actuality.
We stand at the edge of the mystery. The doctrine tells us what is certain. The hope tells us what might be possible. And both together call us to trust a God who is Love.
I'm not sure I'm convinced by Most's three moments. If God wills all to be saved and they aren't, then we can't speak of God's 'will' here in any meaningful sense. Certainly, it isn't the same type of will that 'assigned to the sea its limit, that it would not transgress his command', and 'marked out the foundations of the earth'. This shrugs away a problematic (and explicitly universalist) verse by reducing will to the level of mere sentiment: more properly, God would like us all to be saved.
ReplyDeleteI agree that God is outside time and sees things differently to us. The photographer Sugimoto Hiroshi created a series of long-exposure prints in which he set up his camera in a cinema, and left the shutter open for the entire movie. The result is a dazzling white screen, where the hours of the movie are recorded in one single point. God, I think, sees history in this way, whereas we see only the thousands of feet of linear film. However, is this not conflating foreknowledge with predestination, terms which are used distinctively in Scripture? I also think that this makes it very difficult not to talk of double predestination - we're substituting 'predestined for damnation' with 'not predestined for salvation', which feels like a distinction without a difference.
I don't think I quite understand the point about all others being positively predestined. It seems overdetermined: if I offer no resistance to God's grace, then predestination is unnecessary. If I'm predestined (rather than foreknown) to not offer resistance, then my actions are irrelevant (and all salvation is a stage, and all the men and women merely players). But as St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote, 'our salvation does not depend on compulsion, but on our own will'.
Judas is an interesting case (incidentally, the NIV rendering of Jn. 17:12 takes liberties with the Greek to describe him as 'one doomed to destruction' in a nice nod to double predestination). Can we say that Judas ever - through his own delusions - encountered the real Christ? Just because something is right in front of us, it doesn't mean that we see it. Scripture is unclear, but Judas seems to have betrayed Christ out of greed, messianic zeal or satanic influence. Can he be condemned for this? Did he actually, in full knowledge, reject Christ - or if he had truly understood the one with whom he broke bread, would he not have crucified the Lord of glory? Again, the distinction between God's foreknowledge and predestination seems significant here, and I think we risk collapsing them into the same thing to try to avoid God seeming unjust.
Part 1
DeleteThanks for your thoughtful response. You’ve put your finger on exactly the points where the mystery presses hardest.
A couple of clarifications might help with what Most is trying to do.
First, when he says God “wills all to be saved,” he’s using the traditional distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will. The antecedent will is what God desires in itself - the good of the creature. In that sense, the tradition really does mean what Scripture says in 1 Timothy 2:4: God genuinely wills the salvation of every person. God’s consequent will includes what He permits in view of the creature’s freedom. So the failure of salvation is not a failure of divine desire, but the tragic possibility built into the gift of freedom itself.
So “will” here is closer to saying that salvation is what God positively intends for every creature considered in itself, even though He allows the creature to refuse that good.
On the three “moments,” I agree the language can sound temporal, but Most is trying to describe a logical order within God’s eternal act, not a sequence of decisions. For God, all moments are present to His eternal knowledge. The point is to preserve two claims at once: that predestination is entirely gratuitous, and that damnation is always connected to a real refusal of grace rather than a prior decree.
Part 2
DeleteThe “positive predestination” part is also easy to misunderstand. The idea isn’t that predestination becomes unnecessary if we don’t resist grace. It’s that God has willed our salvation from the beginning, and when grace is not decisively resisted, that intention can reach its goal. Even our not resisting is already happening within the field of grace God is giving. Salvation still originates entirely in God’s initiative. The absence of resistance is not a merit; it just means the gift isn’t being blocked.
In God, these are not sequential acts, since He does not peer down corridors of time or learn what creatures will do. What we call “foreknowledge” and “predestination” are ways of describing one eternal divine act from different angles.
Your point about Gregory of Nyssa is exactly right, though. The entire framework is trying to preserve that insight: salvation cannot be compelled. That’s why Most insists reprobation can only ever be “in view of” a persistent refusal.
On Judas, I find your suggestion compelling. One reason I framed that passage as a lament rather than a verdict is that Scripture leaves the interior story so opaque. As you say, proximity doesn’t guarantee recognition. It may be that Judas never fully saw Christ for who He was.
Where I think the tradition lands is simply that whatever happened in Judas’ heart, Christ’s love and grace toward him were real. The tragedy, if there is one, lies somewhere in that encounter between grace and freedom, but we are never allowed to see the final accounting.
You're welcome. Who else can I debate points of theology with, since the Ecumenical Patriarch won't return my calls? ☺️
DeleteI think part of the problem is that we're trying to codify something that is ultimately inexpressible. Predestination appears predominantly in St. Paul's writings (plus an occurrence in Acts 4:28 where it refers to the plan of salvation overall). I think St. Paul is using mystical language to describe how all things are within God's providence, which makes sense as he himself is rooted in the Hebrew tradition where everything is ascribed to God (e.g., Pharaoh's stubbornness, prosperity and calamity, good and evil), not because God is like a cosmic film director, but as a way of acknowledging that he is sovereign over all things. It can be no other way within a Christian cosmology, since nothing is outside of God.
We also cause ourselves problems by taking the meaning of predestination too literally. Our choices are paradoxically both free and inevitable. When I choose to do something, it's a free choice but, in reality, it's also the only choice that I could ever have made, because it's the choice that I did make. Thus, my choice is both free and predestined, but not scripted.
I understand the traditional distinctions between God's wills, although I've more often heard it applied to questions of theodicy. I still think that we do a disservice to the Timothy verse by eluding will into wish, though. In theodicy, we're abstracting and speculating about things that the Scriptures don't explicitly say, but here we have an explicit statement. The Greek behind it has a wide range of meanings, some of which are indeed analogous to a mere wish or desire (Jesus' words to the rich you man - 'if you wish to enter into eternal life...'), but the word seems to carry more weight when put into the mouth of God. 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice' has more power than a statement of preference - God commands it, you will (or should) do it. I also don't really see the point of a verse saying the God wants everyone to be saved, but they won't be - it almost seems like we should feel sorry for God who can't get what he wants, and it's out of keeping with the preceding verses that confidently commands prayer for everyone (not in the mere hope that a few would be saved - compare the more pessimistic outlook on a Paul's own ability to bring people to salvation in 1 Cor. 9:22).
The error of some of the Reformers was, by trying to maintain God's sovereignty and remove human agency from salvation, we were turned into automata. Most's suggestion that our not blocking God's gift is an act of God's grace in itself skirts close to the same problem. I think that the problem lies in our still considering our relationship to God to be between similar creatures who differ only in status. This is implicit in the language of salvation being given as a gift, and originating in God's initiative. Initiative implies a considered decision, which also implies that God makes choices and could have chosen otherwise, which I don't think is correct. God is more like the sun, which radiates light and heat because it is the sun, rather than a bulb that does the same because someone decided to turn it on. Language again breaks down here.
DeleteI would suggest that salvation isn't something that we lack, which needs to be given to us by God (our natural state in Eden lacked nothing). Rather, it's something that we don't realise we already have and that we have to be shown (the motif of Christ healing by opening eyes is all through the Gospels). Rather than being a gift we can refuse, salvation is more like two tuning forks of the same pitch, with a sheet of felt between them. As long as the veil is in place, when one sounds the other will not respond, or will only do so faintly. But when the veil is removed, when one sounds, both ring together. The same is true of the soul - when it vibrates at the same frequency as God, the language of choice and rejection no longer apply, it is just being what it is (although I may be preempting your other essays here).
I feel your pain. I’ve been frozen out of the Vatican since Cardinal # Fernandez took up his position.
ReplyDeleteYou’re right that we get into trouble when we start treating predestination as though Paul is sketching a metaphysical flowchart. The Hebrew instinct to ascribe everything to God as sovereign is deeply doxological before it is analytical. That’s a helpful corrective.
And I agree that language about “initiative” and “decision” can smuggle in creaturely categories. God is not weighing options the way we do. God doesn't react or adjust.
But I hesitate at the point where the language of choice dissolves once the veil is lifted.
Your tuning fork image is compelling; salvation as resonance rather than transaction. But I wonder whether resonance eliminates freedom, or fulfils it. If the veil is removed and the soul just is” what it truly is, does that mean there is no longer any meaningful possibility of dissonance? Or does freedom remain precisely in that unveiled clarity?
That’s where the Catholic tradition, and I, are not ready to let go of choice-language entirely. Not because I think of salvation as a contract offered and signed, but because I’m wary of a model in which refusal becomes metaphysically unintelligible once clarity is present. If refusal becomes impossible at that point, then hope turns into inevitability. I’m not sure Scripture or the tradition lets us say that.
On 1 Timothy 2:4, I share your discomfort with reducing God’s will to a mere wish. “Desires” in God cannot mean frustrated preference. But neither can it simply collapse into automatic realisation, or we risk making history necessary in a way that swallows tragedy. I’m holding together two things at once: that God truly wills the salvation of all, and that the creature’s response is not absorbed into that willing as a foregone conclusion.
Perhaps the real difficulty is that we’re trying to speak about a relation that is neither competitive nor symmetrical. God is not one agent among others, but neither are we illusory. How divine causality and human freedom coexist without one cancelling the other may be something we can only gesture toward.
Your point about salvation as unveiling rather than acquisition is deeply right. I just want to leave room for the possibility that even when the eyes are opened, the will is not mechanically aligned and that freedom, at its most lucid, is still freedom.
They don't know what they're missing!
DeleteI think the key here is what do we mean by freedom? In the 1950s, Isaiah Berlin suggested two types of freedom: positive (the ability to act as we wish) and negative (the removal of barriers and obstacles - the opportunity to act as we wish). What these have in common is that they allow the individual to choose to manifest (or attempt to manifest) their mental will in the physical world. We are uncomfortable with anything that appears to take away the power to choose equally, denying such a choice is freedom. Hence the observation that true love is not compelled or, as you've said, the question of whether the possibility of dissonance remains in my tuning fork analogy.
However, I believe that talking about freedom is a category error when it comes to things that we do by nature. When you fall in love with someone, or when you experience parental love towards a child or grandchild, this is not (normally) exercising a choice. But it would sound strange to say that one's love of a spouse or child was compelled and lacked freedom simply because it didn't result from making a conscious and rational choice (of course, we can make choices that sustain or dampen that love, but I'm not referring to those). Likewise, if God loves us because God is love by nature, I don't think that we would say that God lacks free will in loving us, although he cannot (as it were) do otherwise. Free will doesn't apply to things that do what they essentially are. So, in the tuning fork analogy, the resonance is a fulfilment of freedom as far as it makes sense to talk of freedom at all (and I admit that this describes a soul that's perfected, the rest of us are more or less dissonance at different times). St. Paul describes this when he talks about freedom being slavery to Christ. Christian freedom is not unlimited choice, but not needing to make a choice.
I don't see how refusal remains once clarity is present (presuming that clarity is more than a simple intellectual exercise). Within my own hesychastic tradition, the ultimate aim of the Christian life is theosis, union with God. As St. Athanasius puts it, 'God became man that man might become God'. Such a soul would be perfect 'as [our] Heavenly Father is perfect', so where remains imperfection? Christ also tells us that 'I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you'. As the godhead cannot reject the godhead, neither can the soul that 'with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, [is] ... transformed into the same image from glory to glory'. I don't think that Scripture allows us to maintain that refusal is metaphysically intelligible when clarity is present (with the caveat that this kind of union is very difficult in this life). On the contrary, I think that inevitability turns into hope: 'for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.'
I agree with most of what you have said. I think that the difference in our positions is that I don't believe that freedom, in the final analysis, requires an ability to choose wrongly. If we push that point, one might argue that being born was an act of compulsion that none of us chose and, as such, to accept or reject God is a compelled choice in the first place, and the freedom to choose is itself illusory. It would be akin to saying that Sophie's Choice was free and fair.
@HJ,
DeleteIs this the cardinal Fernández that some (arch conservative) Catholics refer to as "Kissy"? How could such a personage freeze any devout Catholic out of the Vatican?!
Romans 8:30
ReplyDeleteA golden chain?
Here is a short podcast with transcript.
https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/things-unseen-with-sinclair-ferguson/a-golden-chain-or-is-it
Yours in Christ, Geoff
Romans 8:30 is often called the “golden chain,” but Paul’s point there is pastoral assurance, not a full philosophical or theological explanation of how predestination works.
DeleteHe’s describing salvation from God’s side - the certainty that the work God begins He brings to completion. Paul elsewhere insists that God “desires all to be saved” (1 Tim 2:4) and warns believers not to fall away (Rom 11:20–22). This only makes sense if real refusal remains possible.
So the passage emphasises God’s faithfulness, not a closed list of the elect.
I think the author is right to point out that some understandings of predestination (I don't know which tradition he is within) can remove Christ from the equation. Although, to be fair, a lot of soteriology tends to reduce Christ to a mere agent, like a cog in the divine mechanism (and does worse to the Spirit).
DeleteSalvation is relational - which is the whole point of the abstract 'God' concept becoming man - it's not transactional or procedural. If everything is set in stone in advance (as the Norns wove fates), the incarnation becomes redundant.
Ferguson is Presbyterian. A prof/scholar/pastor.
DeleteThere are no benefits of salvation, outside the person of Christ, a believer's Union with Christ.
A book of his, which will take many of us outside our comfort zones, is, The Whole Christ, which looks at a real, historical theological dispute in a Church in Scotland, and grounds it in a continuing theological discourse relating to legalism and antinomianism. Both have a common source belief: doubt, disbelief in the Goodness of God and the place of repentance. Believers 'get' Christ, union with him. Yours in Christ, Geoff
Gadjo apologises for coming late to this particular party (though this time around he has actually found time to read all the article). He feels that God's desire for man to have freedom of the will is greater than His other desires. Why? Because, as has been pointed out here, true love is only possible if it is done freely, and love is the point of the gospel.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't think I agree with HJ's analysis of "merits". For sure, Christians should not boast about talents with which they have been endowed, but if, for example, they never bother to develop their musical gifts, they don't score any 'merits'... so it really is man's free-will choices that are being 'crowned', so it's not a circular argument. (On molinism, Gadjo has more problems with the 'character' of the souls that God places in any given world, and how that character is arrived at...).
Gadjo, thanks for reading the article and for your observations.
DeleteWe are closer than it might appear. The tradition has usually said that when God crowns our merits, He is crowning the free cooperation with the grace He first gives: the gift is His, but the response is genuinely ours. That is essentially the balance the article is trying to defend. God’s foreknowledge must preserve the same point: grace is primary, yet the human response remains truly free rather than mechanically predetermined.
One of the classic questions raised about Molinism is that if God knows how any possible person would freely act in any circumstance, it can sound as though each soul comes with a kind of fixed “character” across possible worlds. Critics naturally ask where that character comes from. It’s one of the issues William Most addresses.
In the article, Molinism is only mentioned as one proposed way of thinking about foreknowledge and freedom. The main point is simpler: whatever model we adopt, it has to preserve the same balance. Grace is primary, but the human response remains genuinely free, even though in practice that freedom is exercised within particular circumstances that can limit knowledge, opportunity, and therefore culpability. The soul’s “character” is formed over a lifetime of choices about cooperating with or resisting the graces offered by God.
Talking about possible worlds always sits a bit strangely with me, particularly in the way that Molinism seems to use it. It almost turns God into a giant chess computer, who works out every possible move and settles for the best one. I don't think a perfectly omnipotent being needs to run simulations.
DeleteMolina’s “possible worlds” are conceptual, not computational. A way of describing God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any circumstance, not actual mental trial-and-error. It’s a philosophical model, not a literal chess game.
DeleteYou’re right, an omnipotent God doesn’t need to calculate to pick the best outcome. “Middle knowledge” is more about explaining how divine foreknowledge can coexist with genuine freedom without implying God is constrained or “running simulations.”
My essay emphasises that God’s knowledge and grace engage the creature personally. The “possible worlds” language is secondary. It’s more a tool to conceptualise the mystery, not a literal model of divine cognition.
Yes, but the concept admits the possibility (or it's redundant), and I don't think the possibility is necessary.
DeleteI think there's a real danger in this kind of forensic dissection of, e.g., God's will and knowledge (in Molinism etc., not your essay). It gives the air of scientific taxonomy to the unknowable, and then people end up arguing about what is, effectively, linguistic groping around in the dark. Perhaps the reason that there are so many -isms is that a single exhaustive explanation is impossible, and we are all blind men trying to describe an elephant. Which is fine, as long as we realise that whatever bit of the elephant we have isn't the whole truth.
That’s a fair caution. Various “-isms” often sound more confident than the subject allows, and none can claim to have mapped the mystery completely.
DeleteThey arise as attempts to protect certain truths - that God truly knows, that grace is primary, and that human freedom is real. Different models try to keep those things from collapsing into Calvin determinism on one side or Pelagianism on the other.
I tend to treat them less as exhaustive explanations than as guardrails around a mystery that ultimately remains larger than any single system.
"when God crowns our merits, He is crowning the free cooperation with the grace He first gives: the gift is His, but the response is genuinely ours." Yep, we're on pretty much the same page.
Delete(Pelagianism may be misnamed, as it appears that Pelagius believed - or at least taught - hardly any of the things that Augustine accused him of).
I do think, thought, that we're often too busy analysing trees to appreciate the forest.
DeleteTrue, true. But try hugging a forest!
DeleteTry letting the forest hug you!
DeleteGood one 🙂. There's a sermon in this somewhere...
DeleteDidn't Augustine respond to Pelagius.
ReplyDeleteWhile a know little about Calvinism, from source, secondary commentators would lead me to conclude that much of the criticism relates to hyper- Calvinism or double predestination.
Scripture supports predestination, and self -directed study over a couple of years, I 'd conclude that the tulip acronym, holds together as do five digits on one one hand, starting with the Fall.
Where I may part with some of the teaching, is that predestination is best seen in the rear view mirror after conversion. I did not choose God, he chose me, loved me first, sort of wooed, so I didn't want anyone else, freely choosing to say yes to him bon his beauty Glory. The Glory of Gologotha, and Resurrection of my justification, his sinless perfection, righteousness mine, his active and passive obedience mine. And in union with Christ believers have already died and been raised in His, as attested in scripture. The blessed assurance is in Christ Jesus.
Yours in Christ, Geoff