Predestination and election

The dispute over predestination is not about whether the New Testament uses the language of election, which it does, but about what follows from it for human freedom.

Augustine arrived at his position arguing against Pelagius in the early fifth century. Pelagius held that human beings can choose the good by nature and that grace assists rather than creates the choice; Augustine held that the fall left the will genuinely unable to turn to God, so that any turning must be produced by grace, and that God's choice of whom to save is therefore prior to and independent of anything foreseen in the person. Why some and not others, he declined to explain, calling it a judgement inscrutable but not unjust. The councils of the fifth and sixth centuries endorsed Augustine against Pelagius and against a milder position that made the first movement toward God human, without endorsing every implication he drew.

Calvin followed Augustine and pressed the logic. If God elects some, he necessarily passes over the rest, and Calvin was willing to call this reprobation and to say it is decreed. The doctrine is stated in the Institutes with a note that it is a dreadful decree, which Calvin regarded as no reason to deny it, and its function in his theology is pastoral as much as speculative: salvation is entirely outside the believer's control and therefore entirely secure.

Arminius, teaching at Leiden a generation after Calvin's death, accepted the corruption of the will and the necessity of grace but argued that God gives prevenient grace to all, restoring the capacity to respond, and that election is God's decree to save those he foresees will believe. This preserves genuine contingency in the human response while denying that anyone saves themselves. His followers, the Remonstrants, set out five articles in 1610.

The Reformed and Arminian camps are the loudest but not the only positions.

Catholic theology affirms predestination and denies that it destroys freedom, and then divides on how. The Thomist school holds that God moves the will efficaciously from within, so that the person freely does what God has determined; the Molinist school, developed by the Jesuit Luis de Molina, posits a divine middle knowledge of what each free creature would do in any circumstance, allowing God to elect by arranging circumstances without overriding choice. The Congregatio de Auxiliis, convened between 1597 and 1607 to settle the quarrel, ended with Rome permitting both and forbidding either side to call the other heretical. The Jansenist movement, closer to Augustine and to Calvin, was condemned in the seventeenth century.

Eastern Orthodoxy has largely not framed the question this way, having never adopted the Augustinian account of inherited guilt that generates it, and reads the language of foreknowledge and election without the doctrine of an unconditional decree. Lutheranism takes an asymmetric position, affirming that the saved are saved wholly by God and denying that the lost are lost by any decree, and declines to resolve the resulting tension.

Outside Christianity, the nearest analogues are instructive rather than identical. Islamic theology debated qadar, divine decree, with a similar structure: the Mutazila argued for human power to create one's own acts in order to preserve God's justice, while the Ashari school developed the doctrine of acquisition, in which God creates the act and the human being acquires it, becoming responsible. Jewish tradition preserves the rabbinic saying that all is foreseen yet freedom is given, and has generally been content to hold both without systematising. Hindu and Buddhist accounts of karma pose the problem differently again, since there the determining agency is the person's own past action rather than another's will.