Predestination and free will

Methodism rejects unconditional election and irresistible grace. John Wesley's sermon Free Grace argued directly against the Calvinist account of predestination he had encountered through George Whitefield, holding instead that grace is offered to all and can be resisted.

Double predestination and unconditional election are confessional doctrine in this Reformed tradition, per the Canons of the Synod of Dort, First Head of Doctrine, 1619.

The Arminian position: election is conditional on foreseen faith, and grace may be resisted.

Barth's doctrine of election reworks classical Reformed predestination Christocentrically, Christ himself as both the electing God and the elected human, a different account rather than a simple affirmation or denial of the older doctrine.

The Reformed position, confessed in the Westminster standards.

Predestination and election are addressed in Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles, in a moderate, pastorally cautious formulation.

Ashari theology holds that human beings acquire, kasb, responsibility for acts that God alone creates, a middle position between unconstrained free will and bare compulsion.

Double predestination and unconditional election are defined doctrine per the Canons of the Synod of Dort, First Head of Doctrine, Of Divine Predestination, 1619.

The Synod of Dort sat under this church's authority between 1618 and 1619, so its canons are the church's own answer, not a borrowed one. Election is unconditional, resting on God's good pleasure and not on foreseen faith, and the canons state reprobation as a decree too, while insisting that God is in no way the author of sin. The five heads answer the Remonstrants point by point.

The Formula of Concord teaches election to salvation only. God's eternal election is a cause of the salvation of the elect, it says, but God is in no way the cause of anyone's damnation, which rests on man's own resistance to the word. That is single predestination, and it was a deliberate refusal, stated some forty years before Dort, of the double decree the Reformed churches would confess there.

Jafari theology holds neither compulsion nor total delegation, but a matter between the two, amr bayn al-amrayn, the formula attributed to Ja'far al-Sadiq himself.

The Formula of Concord, Article XI, Of Election, teaches election unto salvation as gracious and certain in Christ while explicitly rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of a parallel predestination to damnation, holding that condemnation is caused by unbelief rather than a hidden decree.

Mutazila theology affirmed unconstrained human free will, earning its early adherents the name Qadariyya, on the ground that a just God could not punish acts He himself predetermined.

Twelver Shia theology holds neither compulsion nor total delegation, but a matter between the two, amr bayn al-amrayn, a formula attributed to the sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq.

Sunni theology, in its dominant Ashari and Maturidi forms, affirms both God's prior decree and human acquisition, kasb, of responsibility for acts, a middle position between compulsion and unconstrained free will.

The Arminian position, held across most Anabaptist churches.

Arminianism taken as the answer to the same question, conditional election and a universal atonement.

The Reformed position: election is unconditional, resting on the divine decree rather than on foreseen faith.

The Eastern position, which declines the Western framing: foreknowledge is not causation, and synergy between grace and the will is assumed rather than argued.

The Eastern position, in common with the Eastern Orthodox churches.

The Arminian position, inherited through the Wesleyan and Holiness stream.

Unconditional election taken as the answer to the predestination question, against the conditional reading below.

The Tridentine settlement, which permits both the Thomist and the Molinist schools inside it and condemns neither. Grace is efficacious, and the will remains genuinely free.

Zaydi theology is Mutazili in method and holds that a human being is the real author of his own acts, since God cannot justly punish an act He alone created.

Its final canon rejects double predestination to evil even while affirming grace's priority over the will.

The Synod ruled on predestination and free will against the Remonstrant position.