God wishes that all men be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). At the same time, he foreknows who will be saved, predestines, and chooses them (Romans 8:29-30; Ephesians 1:3-5).
Over the centuries, Christians have struggled to reconcile apparently incompatible and contradictory aspects of salvation. God’s foreknowledge, predestination of the just, and efficacious grace appear to leave no room for human freedom or responsibility. They appear to entail fatalism instead. They also appear arbitrary, thereby making it more difficult to reconcile belief in God’s providence and goodness with the widespread evil, injustice, and suffering that exist in the world.
Much of the debate on these issues—between Catholicism and Reformation Christianity, Jansenists and Jesuits, Báñezianism and Molinism—has been informed by St. Augustine’s anti-Pelagian teachings. However, these are not just problems with which theologians grapple. They shape our understanding of the spiritual life and cooperation with divine grace.
In this interview, Taylor Patrick O’Neill discusses predestination and some of the best books on it.
Dr. Taylor Patrick O’Neill is a professor at Thomas Aquinas College. He is the editor of She Orders All Things Sweetly: Sacra Doctrina and the Sapiential Unity of Theology (Cluny Media) and author of Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin: A Thomistic Analysis (CUA Press).
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Is predestination a biblical doctrine? It is. That is why St. Augustine is so important. Prior to him, other Church Fathers had certainly discussed predestination and the importance of grace. However, it was really during the Pelagian controversy and St. Augustine’s response to it that an Augustinian reading of Scripture emerges.
Augustine pulls from St. Paul these great lines on predestination, and election. These lines in Scripture become the foundation and backbone for St. Augustine's condemnation of Pelagianism and his doctrine of predestination, foreknowledge, and providence.
There has been an ongoing debate over predestination since at least the fifth century. What are the main phases or stages of that debate? It is one of the main areas on which not only has much been written but there have also been disagreements among theologians, Church Fathers, and even doctors of the Church.
There are areas in theology on which much has been written but where there is also more agreement than disagreement. This is an area where there is much disagreement. As a result, it can be hard to parse out exactly what the Church has and has not taught.
Nevertheless, the Pelagian controversy is the first major moment of this debate. It was an ongoing debate that lasted several hundred years. For example, St. Prosper of Aquitaine, a disciple of St. Augustine’s, wrote almost exclusively on it and against some other theologians.
The next major moment is the De auxiliis controversy, for which a whole congregation of the Roman Curia was set up. It began shortly after the Council of Trent. Reformation theology had its own doctrine of grace, election, and predestination. In responding to it, the Church did some soul-searching. That reignited the debate over predestination. The dispute was primarily between Dominicans, who held a sort of Thomistic position on predestination (which came to be known as Bañezianism), and Jesuits, who argued for what comes to be known as a Molinism.
During the last hundred years there has been a smaller debate among Thomistic theologians over whether the traditional Augustinian-Thomistic position differs sufficiently from Jansenism. This is the tail-end of a third major period, in which the Church dealt with Jansenism and a latent quasi-Calvinism.
What are the main magisterial pronouncements on predestination? This is a little tricky. Maybe there are not as many as we would like. However, there are several major moments.
The Council of Trent is the touchstone. At it, the Church responded to certain theologies of grace, free will, justification, and predestination. Its condemnations of some of the errors of Luther and Calvin provides, by way of negation, a minimum definition of what the Church holds.
The Church has not defined anything beyond that, but drawing primarily from Trent and some regional councils that it quotes (for example, the Council of Orange), it does seem to teach definitively a handful of particulars.
For example, it teaches that that election and predestination is ante previsa merita. In other words, God does not call or elect those who are saved merely because he passively foresees the good they will do. Rather, God is in some regard the active cause of the good that we do.
There is another principle that it is essential for all Catholics to hold: God does not command the impossible. We know this by way of negation. The Council of Trent condemns Calvin for saying that the good to which the law calls them is impossible for some people because they are reprobate or do not receive the necessary grace. Instead, the Church teaches that it would be unfair to punish someone who does not have the ability to do the good. It is always the case that we are capable of doing the good to which we are called.
These are a couple of things that the Church has clearly and definitively taught. However, the Church has not stated explicitly which exact position on predestination is correct and de fide.
“We tend to think about grace and free will as if God were passive with regard to our will, intervening occasionally, but remaining hands-off for the most part."
What is the key to understanding divine predestination aright? It is essential to start with Scripture.
St. Augustine draws much of his teaching from a couple of passages of St. Paul. That is where we need to start. Paul asks the rhetorical question, “What have you that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:17). The answer is clearly, “Nothing!”All the good that we have comes primarily and fully from God, who is the good. There is a single source of goodness. All the goods that we possess—the good of our actions, right reason, or upright will—participate in God’s goodness. They only exist because, in some way, they are a gift from God.
It is essential to start there and recognise that grace is gratuitous. It comes from God first and does not arise on account of something that we have done and that forces God to give it to us.
Second, any good that we have results in some way from God moving us,either through grace or some natural motion.
This puts the primacy of God in its proper place. We recognize that we are radically contingent upon God for all of the good that we have. We do perform meritorious acts and merit the beatific vision in some sense, but even these are a gift from God. Merit is grace for grace, St. Augustine says. God gives us grace to do the good. We do the good because of that grace and then, because we have done the good, God gives us even more grace.
In discussing predestination, it is essential to start with the primacy of God, his love, and the divine will to give us grace. It is also essential to remember that we do not constrain God to give us grace.
A second point is that we tend to think of the divine will and the human will as competing against one another: as if God removes my room to act freely to the extent that he influences my action.
The tradition has put a lot of effort into explaining how God can, even unfailingly, cause me to perform an action that is still completely free.
There is much in Scripture and the tradition about how God, in his inexhaustible providence, rules over all things, guides them, and orders all to the good. His ordering does not exclude human free action. Rather, our free action is incorporated into it.
“Whenever we convert or do good, God in some respect does not just give us the opportunity to respond to his call but actually causes us to perform the good deed."
Is there a difference between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches on the doctrine of predestination? That is an excellent question. Though I am not an expert on Orthodox theology, it does seem to me that there are differences between the Catholic Church and some pockets of Orthodoxy.
For example, there has been a little bit more openness to the doctrine of universalism—the belief that all human and maybe even the fallen angels are saved—among some Eastern theologians and traditions. Perhaps because of Dante and Milton, there is less openness to this notion in the West.
Could you explain, for those who are not familiar with the term, what you mean by universalism? We grapple a little bit more with hell and the notion of damnation. However, many of the Orthodox take the reality of hell as a given as well.
For the most part, many of the debates and controversies over predestination, infallible grace, and providence that take place in the West track very similar debates in the East, which does not use however Thomistic or scholastic language.
Some would contrast the Orthodox Church's emphasis on the synergy between God and man in the process of divinization with the Catholic teaching on grace. Does the Catholic Church also share this view of the cooperation between God and man? Absolutely. Again, it really depends upon what we mean by cooperation. The Augustinian-Thomistic tradition certainly emphasises man’s cooperation with God. However, we can think about cooperation in two different ways.
Many Thomistic theologians distinguish between subordinated cooperation and coordinated operation. In the latter case, two causes work together, without the one being contingent upon the other. A classic example of this is two people lifting a couch. Each is doing about fifty percent of the work but the one’s lifting his end of the couch is fairly independent from the other’s lifting the other end. If the one were to drop their end of the couch, the other person would still be holding theirs up. Two causes are working together, but each is on the same level of causality.
Instead of this kind of cooperation, the Augustinian-Thomistic tradition endorses subordinated cooperation. In subordinated cooperation, God and man work together, but each acts not on the same level, but on a different level and within his own order. Man’s causality is contingent upon God’s and subordinated to it.
An instrumental cause is a classic example of this. If I write on the blackboard, in one sense I am the cause of the writing, and in another sense the chalk is the cause. However, the chalk and I are operating on two different levels. Neither the chalk nor I is fifty percent the cause. Both the chalk and I are a hundred percent the cause, but in different ways and orders.
Similarly, whenever we do perform a good deed or meritorious act, we cause it along with God. However, instead of cooperating with God on the same level, our causality is itself the effect of God’s moving us to act. Our causality is contingent upon God’s, whereas the causality of one of the two people lifting a couch is not contingent upon the other’s.
This distinction is very important because we should not conceive our cooperation with God as if we were working back and forth with just another creature nor as if he were not sovereign over us. There is no pushing back and forth between us and God. He is immutable.
The Protestant Reformers often appeal to the authority of Augustine. Is there any difference therefore between the Catholic doctrine of predestination and that of Reformed Christianity? This is an excellent question and a big one. Primarily, two things differentiate the Catholic interpretation of St. Augustine from that of, say, John Calvin.
First, the Church rejects the notion of a positive reprobation. Calvin believes that God not only leaves certain individuals to their own sinfulness and permits them to continue in their sinfulness, but even actively moves certain human beings to commit mortal sin.
Second, the Church condemns Calvin’s belief that God does not in any way desire the salvation of all men. For Calvin, God positively wills against the salvation of some and so causes them to render themselves unsaved. He makes it impossible for those who are not saved to do the good that he commands them to do. Trent teaches clearly that we cannot claim that the good that we ought to do is impossible to us.
“God does not actively foreordain or predestine those who are not saved to hell."
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that, “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a wilful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end” (CCC 1037). However, as you just pointed out, many wrongly assume that, according to the doctrine of predestination, God decides who ends up in hell and who ends up in heaven. Do such misconceptions circulate because of superficial, incomplete catechesis? Another very good question. On the one hand, at the risk of sounding scandalous, for the Catholic tradition it is quite true to say that in some way God decides who goes to heaven.
The idea that God has predestined certain individuals, before foreseeing their merits, includes in some respect the notion that, out of his love, God chooses gratuitously to give to some a gift that is not owed to any human beings, not only saving them from rebellion against them, and turning them away from themselves, but even restoring us to the condition of our first parents in Eden, and elevating us to participate in the divine life. This radical gift is disproportionate to human nature. Not only is God not bound to save those who have freely chosen to rebel against him. He is even less bound to give them a gift that is infinitely beyond their nature: participation in the divine life.
It is tricky to say that God chooses to grant that gift to some individuals and not to others. However, that does not mean that his forcing them into heaven. Nor does it mean that he chooses them arbitrarily.
St. Augustine and St. Thomas find it tricky to explain therefore why some are predestined and others not.
Their answer is always that the divine wisdom is inscrutable. There may be some rationale but it is beyond what men can conceive. This comes across in Job. “Where were you when I was planning everything out? You do not see the whole picture.”
On the other hand, God does not actively foreordain or predestine those who are not saved to hell. Not only is it imprudent or impertinent to hold that God causes sin. It is impossible for him to cause the sinfulness of sin. Hence, it is impossible for him to move a person to damnation in the way that he moves the saints forward in the Christian life.
I would not put these misunderstandings down to a lack of catechesis but to the difficulty of these theological doctrines. Moreover, we do not tend to talk a lot about these theological doctrines or hear many homilies about them, maybe for a good reason. My guess is that, if anything, catechesis tends toward a kind of semi-pelagianism. We tend to think about grace and free will as if God were passive with regard to our will, intervening occasionally, but remaining hands-off for the most part. The idea that God could order the rational movements of the human will is anathema for us. It is as if he would thereby be robbing us of our freedom. Consequently, we believe that, although God presents us with grace, accepting it is ultimately up to us.
The classic image of Jesus knocking on the door is a fine image but it can imply that grace is simply a matter of Jesus knocking on each person's door and leaving it up to the individual, apart from grace, whether to open the door and accept him or leave him out in the cold. However, whenever we convert or do good, God in some respect does not just give us the opportunity to respond to his call but actually causes us to perform the good deed. He causes us to convert. Those essential elements are sometimes lost in catechesis.
The devotions to the Sacred Heart and Divine Mercy—corroborated by private revelations to saints and their subsequent incorporation into the liturgical year—were in part a reaction to the excessive rigorism and pessimism of Jansenism. Do these devotions indicate that we always need to think about predestination with the assurance that God calls us to repent and offers us his mercy? That is absolutely correct. At that time, Jansenism had become a big problem, especially in certain areas in Europe.
In a way, Jansenism constitutes a highly Calvinistic understanding of Catholicism. Ironically, it falls into the same error as Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism.
If you envisage providence as competing with our freedom, then you can follow one of two directions. You can follow the Pelagian direction and assume that, since our free will competes against God's providence, we need to either dial down one to safeguard the other. Pelagius wanted to safeguard human freedom.
Though he was rightly condemned by the Church, I have some sympathy toward him. He was trying to fix great moral and spiritual laxity. Many presumed they would be saved and seemed to act as if did not really matter what they did. Pelagius objected that it did matter. They were falling into grave sin but could commit instead meritorious acts that brought them toward heaven. He insisted that they needed to be very serious and disciplined in their moral life. That is why Pelagius, emphasised free will and the role we play in our salvation.
However, he maintained the error that the created will and grace were competitive. Hence, he dialed down the exhaustiveness of providence and the primacy of God's will and grace because he felt that he needed to do so in order to fit in free will, as it were.
For Pelagius, God simply gives us free will and the blueprint for holiness. Christ is our saviour only in that he is an exemplar for how we should act. Grace does not work interiorly or cause us to convert and perform good deeds.
Unfortunately, the Jansenists hold to the same erroneous view of the competitive relation between human and divine action but turn up the other dial instead. They stress the primacy of God and his grace but turn down the dial on human freedom. They thereby fall into quietism: it does not really matter what you do because everything is already predestined.
The devotions you brought up were meant to bring us back to the proper mean, where both dials are turned all the way up. Both God’s will and the human will are a hundred percent causal in bringing about the salvation of the saints.
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