FREE WILL AND PREDESTINATION: AN OVERVIEW

Free will and predestination constitute a polarity in many of the religions of the world: is salvation determined by a divine choice or is it a matter of personal self-determination? Free will in this article does not refer to the general philosophical problem of the will's freedom but to the specific meaning and function of willing and self-determination in the process of salvation. Some religious thinkers have sharply distinguished between the will's freedom in the material and civil affairs of life and its freedom or unfreedom with regard to the spiritual life, and it is with the latter that this article is concerned.

At least two ways of thinking about the freedom of the will in spiritual matters have been common: free will as a freedom of choice, whereby one does freely what one has also had the power to choose to do, and free will as the absence of compulsion, whereby one willingly does what one does without actively choosing what is done. The latter has been described as voluntary necessity. In the first of these meanings of freedom, freedom seems incompatible with divine determination; in the second, it does not, and is opposed not to causality but to constraint.

Predestination as it is treated in this article is separated from the general consideration of providence, determinism, and fate, and refers only to the voluntary divine choice of certain groups or individuals for salvation. Sometimes predestination is considered as a part of divine providence, namely, that aspect of the divine determination of all things that refers to the supernatural end of souls, as opposed to the determination of persons with regard to all else or of the natural order. But predestination is to be sharply distinguished from some forms of determinism and from fatalism, which do not necessarily involve the theistic concept of a personal deity making conscious choices. Determinism may mean any one of a number of systems claiming that all events cannot occur otherwise than they do, sometimes without reference to deity. Fate suggests an impersonal determining force that may even transcend the gods.

The terms election and reprobation have meanings related to predestination. One traditional use of these terms considers predestination the larger divine act, which encompasses the separate decrees of election (predestination to salvation) and reprobation (predestination to damnation). Reprobation, however, is seldom used now, and election is more commonly simply substituted for predestination, because it seems more positive in its connotations. In biblical studies, election has been the preferred term for referring to divine choice.

Predestination has been considered not inevitably contradictory to free will. Sometimes both are held together as paradoxical, yet complementary, aspects of truth; but more classically, free will is understood not as freedom of choice but as voluntary necessity. That is, where freedom means the absence of compulsion, necessary acts determined by God nonetheless can be freely done. Almost all predestinarian theologies have therefore maintained that the predestined will acts freely and with consequent responsibility for its actions, even though it lacks the power to choose its actions. In this sense of freedom, even the decree of reprobation has been seen as compatible with responsibility and not as entailing a divine compulsion to do evil. This compatibility of free will and predestination has historically been a commonplace of Augustinian and Calvinistic theology in Christianity, and of Islamic theology through its doctrine of acquisition. Even such a materialistic determinist as Thomas Hobbes thought that necessary acts were entirely voluntary and therefore responsible acts. It is this that sharply distinguishes predestination from fatalism, which may entail compulsion to act in a certain way. Roman Catholic theology refers to any predestinarian doctrine that proceeds without reference to the will's freedom as the error of predestinarianism. Only in rare cases in Christian and Islamic theology has that way of understanding predestination appeared.

Occurrence in the History of Religions

The issue of free will and predestination in relation to salvation arises in those religions that believe in a personal, omnipotent God, and thus has appeared mainly in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But it has also occurred in ancient Greece and India among certain groups that have had a similar religious understanding.

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greek monotheism, centering on the figure of Zeus, came near to personal theism in Stoicism, particularly among the later Stoics who believed in immortality. They considered Zeus a universal mind and will determining all things, including the virtue by which good persons resigned themselves to the inevitable; through this providence elect souls triumphed over the sufferings of earthly existence.

Judaism

In Judaism, the Deuteronomic tradition especially accents Yahveh's choice of Israel as his people. In the Hebrew scriptures, the stories of Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah show God's choice of particular persons to fulfill special offices. But this election, whether of persons or of the group, is grounded by the Hebrew scriptures in the divine initiative, not in the chosen object, and involves special tasks and responsibilities more than special privileges. The will's freedom of choice in obeying God's commandments is clearly asserted in many passages of the Hebrew scriptures, as, for example, in Deuteronomy 30:15–20. The apocryphal book of Ben Sira asserts that God does not lead persons astray but created them with the freedom not to sin (15:11–17).

Josephus Flavius, in describing the Pharisees to his Hellenistic audience, said that they considered all events predetermined but still did not deprive the human will of involvement in decisions about virtue and vice. The Sadducees he described as rejecting determinism altogether (Jewish Antiquities 13.171–173; Jewish War, 2.162–166). The Essenes were the most predestinarian of the Jewish groups, if the Qumran texts are to be attributed to them. The Qumran literature teaches that God created the spirits of men to be cast in the lots of either good or evil and that salvation is divinely initiated and based on God's choice. Nonetheless, the Essenes also maintained human accountability for evil. Elsewhere in the Judaism of the Hellenistic age, Philo Judaeus upheld the will's complete freedom.

Rabbinic literature taught both God's foresight and providence directing all things and human freedom of choice with respect to the doing of good or evil. A saying of ʿAqivaʾ ben Yosef juxtaposes them: "All is foreseen and yet freedom is granted" (Avot 3:15). Some rabbinic sayings suggest that everything about a person's life is determined by God except for the soul's obedience to God (B. T., Ber. 33b, Meg. 25a, Nid. 16b). This matter did not become a serious question for Jewish thinkers until contact with Islamic speculations in the tenth century, when Saʿadyah Gaon took up the problem. He and all the medieval Jewish philosophers maintained the will's freedom of choice. But Maimonides alluded to the view of "uninformed" Jews that God decrees that an individual will be either good or evil when the infant is being formed in the womb (Mishneh Torah, Repentance 5.2).

Christianity

Predestination has had a more central place in Christian thought. The theme of predestination to salvation appears strongly in the Pauline literature, especially the Letter to the Romans. For Paul, predestination results from the divine initiative and is grounded in grace, so that no one may boast of being saved by his own efforts. Paul also speaks of God's hardening of the hearts of unbelievers (Rom. 9:18).

In spite of the numerous New Testament references to predestination, patristic writers, especially the Greek fathers, tended to ignore the theme before Augustine of Hippo. This was probably partly the result of the early church's struggle with the fatalistic determinism of the Gnostics. Augustine, writing against the Pelagians, taught that God predestined to salvation some out of the mass of sinners, passing by the rest and thus leaving them to just condemnation for the sins they willingly committed. Augustine thought that the will was unable to do the good that God commanded unless aided by grace. To do evil willingly was a slavery to sin from which grace rescued those whom God had chosen. Augustine had many medieval followers in this doctrine, including Gottschalk in the ninth century, who stated the doctrine in an extreme fashion, and Thomas Bradwardine in the fourteenth century, who opposed those he considered his Pelagian contemporaries. Thomas Aquinas was also a predestinarian, but he treated the doctrine in the context of God's providence as a whole. On the other hand, such medieval Scholastics as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham sought to reconcile God's prescience with human freedom of choice.

In the Renaissance and Reformation there was a revival of predestinarian thinking. Lorenzo Valla was the main representative of determinism among Renaissance philosophers, while almost all of the major Protestant reformers found the doctrine of predestination useful in their insistence upon the primacy of divine grace in salvation. Luther (and Lutheranism, in the Formula of Concord) soon backed away from the extreme predestinarian teaching of his early Bondage of the Will and taught only election to life, with the possibility of falling from grace. The Reformed churches, following their teachers Huldrych Zwingli, Martin Bucer, John Calvin, and Peter Martyr Vermigli, gave the doctrine an important role in the defense of grace in salvation and also taught double predestination, but still insisted on the freedom of the will, which they understood in the Augustinian sense of voluntary necessity. Later Scholastic Reformed theologians, such as Theodore Beza, William Perkins, and Franciscus Turretinus, gave the doctrine of predestination a central role in their theological systems. An important eighteenth-century defense of the Reformed view of predestination and the freedom of the will came from Jonathan Edwards in colonial Massachusetts. The Church of England adopted the predestinarian theology of the Reformers in its Thirty-nine Articles and in the first century of its existence generally taught the Reformed view of the matter.

The Roman Catholic theology of the same period, especially that of the Jesuits, stressed human responsibility in the process of salvation, with Luis de Molina maintaining the position of "congruism," that is, of grace as efficacious according as the will cooperates with it. Countering this was a revival of Augustinian theology, represented by the Spanish Dominican Domingo Bañez and by Cornelis Jansen in the Netherlands. The Jansenists in France, including Blaise Pascal, considered the Jesuits Pelagian. Predestination has not been an important theme in more modern Roman Catholic theology, and Catholic treatments of Augustine tend to focus on other aspects of his thought.

In the later history of Protestantism, emphasis upon predestination has generally declined, and freedom of choice in salvation has frequently been asserted. From the beginning, few of the Anabaptists were predestinarian. Some of the early Protestant reformers, including Heinrich Bullinger and Theodor Bibliander, were cautious in their treatment of predestination, and the Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) asserted that God predestined to salvation those whom he foresaw would believe. This assertion of the will's freedom of choice in salvation came to be known as Arminianism and gained ground among English Protestants throughout the seventeenth century. In the next century John Wesley adopted it as the theology of Methodism, and it generally made headway among evangelicals who wanted to be able to make straightforward appeals for conversions. Thus its avowal by the nineteenth-century American evangelist Charles G. Finney influenced many in the formally Calvinistic Presbyterian and Congregationalist denominations, although his contemporary, the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge, continued to uphold double predestination in its Scholastic form. The liberal Protestant theology of the nineteenth and early twentieth century usually rejected any form of predestinarian theology. But in the twentieth century, two Reformed theologians, Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, have attempted reformulations of predestination while abandoning its more unpalatable features.

Islam

Free will and predestination have been important issues in Islamic thought. Basic to Muhammad's religious experience was a sense of God's power, majesty, and judgment. The Qurʾān exhorts submission before the divine sovereignty and declares even that "God leads astray whom he pleases and guides whom he pleases" (sūrah 74:34). But the Qurʾān also presupposes choice on the part of persons who have been summoned by revelation. Early in the history of Islam, the predestinarian emphasis was reinforced by a general Arab cultural belief in fate, and some Muslims thought that God permitted Satan's irresistible incitement to evil. But one of the first groups of Islamic philosophers, the Muʿtazilah, argued that, however much other events were determined beforehand, there was a free human choice of good or evil. Later Muslim theologians, emphatically teaching predestination, nonetheless tried to reconcile it with free will through varying interpretations of the doctrine of acquisition. According to this doctrine, man is regarded as voluntarily willing his actions and thus "acquiring" them, even though God has created these acts so that they occur by necessity. Such a viewpoint has many parallels with Augustinianism, and generally Islam is no more fatalistic than is Christianity.

Hinduism

The main traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism do not posit a personal deity with an omnipotent will, and thus the polarity of free will and predestination in relation to the salvation of souls has not been so prominent as in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The doctrine of karman can constitute a kind of determinism whereby an individual's lot in life is determined by his behavior in past lives, but the doctrine can also imply that a soul is in charge of its future destiny; its modern proponents therefore sometimes consider the doctrine to imply freedom more than fatalism. But in either case, karman is usually seen not as the willing of a personal deity but as the workings of an impersonal force.

However, some schools of Hinduism maintain personal theism and an omnipotent God and consequently wrestle with the problem of free will and predestination. For example, the Vaiṣṇava sect of Madhva (1238–1317) believed that Viṣṇu predestined some souls to blessedness and others to damnation, simply for his good pleasure and not because of the merits or demerits of the souls themselves. A more cautious theology of predestination appeared in the interpretation of the Vedanta by Rāmānuja (fl. c. 1100). He taught that the souls of some persons were led to repentance by a divine initiative, but he also held that the choice of good or evil nonetheless included personal acts performed by means of a God-given freedom. Rāmānuja's followers divided over the extent to which divine power controlled souls. The Teṅkalai, or "cat school," taught that God's irresistible grace saves some souls the way the mother cat carries her young by the nape of the neck, while the Vaṭakalai, or "monkey school," taught that God's grace and the human will cooperate in salvation the way the infant monkey clings to the mother.

As a Phenomenon of Religious Experience

The notion of the freedom of the will in relation to salvation arises out of the everyday experience of free choice and personal responsibility. There seems to be a human need to feel in control of one's life. Modern experience has been especially characterized by a sense of autonomy, and this has abetted the assumption of the will's freedom of choice with reference to salvation.

Belief in predestination, on the other hand, represents and abstracts from the experience of creatureliness before the majesty of the divine. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) who first looked at predestination as a transcript of subjective piety, concluding that it was an element in the religious person's consciousness of dependence upon God. Following Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto attempted a phenomenology of the "creature feeling" that he thought lay behind the doctrine of predestination. As Otto interpreted it, the idea of predestination was rooted not in speculative thought but in religious self-abasement, the "annulment of personal strength and claims and achievements in the presence of the transcendent," and thus was "an immediate and pure expression of the actual religious experience of grace." The one who receives grace feels that nothing has merited this favor, and that it is not a result of his own effort, resolve, or achievement. Rather, grace is a force that has grasped, impelled, and led him. Predestination is thus a numinous experience of awe in the face of the mysterium tremendum.

Besides being rooted in the human sense of createdness and of grace, predestination as a religious phenomenon also depends on a sense of trust and confidence in the reliability of the divine and in its power to complete what has been begun in the creature. Such belief in an ordered world and rejection of the sheer fortuitousness of things is an important element of much religious consciousness and leads to a sense of assurance about God's purpose and about one's own spiritual security. Ernst Troeltsch thought that it was in the interest of the assurance of salvation that predestination became such a central doctrine in Protestant theology.

Belief in predestination may also be regarded as arising from the search for a purely spiritual religion, for it has the effect of stripping away all concrete mediation and leaving the soul alone before God. It was this that led Max Weber to consider belief in predestination as functionally related to the process of the elimination of magic from the world. This aspect of predestinarian religion has been greatly attractive to religious reformers, for the doctrine can become a means to sweep away much accumulation of religiosity.

Another aspect of belief in predestination as a matter of religious experience is that it has had the effect, not (as might be supposed) of giving rise to fatalistic acquiescence, but of energizing the will for the fulfillment of divinely assigned tasks. Thus Calvinist theologians spoke of predestination as election to holiness.

As a Problem of Religious Thought

While beliefs concerning free will and predestination may be rooted in religious experience, they are also connected to certain intellectual concerns and puzzlements. One motive for such reflection has been the simple observation that some believe while others do not—is this fact the consequence of personal freedom of choice or of divine predetermination?

Reflection on divine omnipotence has led to the inference that the divine choice must be the determining factor in salvation. If some things were excepted from the general principle that all things occur by virtue of a divine causality, then God would seem to lack the efficacy to bring his purposes to fruition. Even the bare acknowledgment of divine foreknowledge seems to entail determinism, for if God knows what will happen from eternity, it must necessarily happen in that way or else his knowledge would be rendered erroneous. And though it may be argued that God foresees actual human choices, nonetheless when the time for those choices arrives, they cannot be other than they are; this is precisely what identifies an event as predetermined. Opponents of this viewpoint have maintained, however, that foresight is not a cause and that therefore a foreseen event need not be a determined one.

Still, the doctrine of predestination has probably been rooted primarily not in this kind of consideration but in the theological need to maintain the gratuitousness of salvation. To connect this with predestination effectively rules out any possibility of human merit.

Theologies that have asserted the will's freedom of choice in salvation have, on the other hand, focused on different theological needs, primarily those of preserving human responsibility in the process of salvation and God's goodness and justice in the governing of his creation. If salvation is entirely God's gift, how can those left out be held responsible? In the modern period, the Augustinian definition of freedom as absence of constraint has not been widely persuasive, in spite of the fact that many elements of contemporary thought, especially in relation to heredity, have provided some basis for considering human freedom in this way.

The problem of theodicy, in Christian thought in particular, seems almost inevitably to rely on the assumption of human freedom of choice in salvation. Even the Puritan poet John Milton, in seeking to "justify the ways of God to man," fell back upon an assertion of such freedom.

Several considerations may be brought forward in religious thought in order, if not exactly to solve, then at least to extenuate this problem. One approach is simply to acquiesce to the polarity of free will and predestination as a paradox. Another consideration is Augustine's argument that God exists not in time but in the qualitatively different state of eternity. Thus since for God there is no past or future, there is no priority of time for his foresight or decree in relation to the events of salvation; priority is implied only by our inadequate language. A further Augustinian consideration is that, since the evil of an evil act is a deficiency of being, it requires no divine causality at all. Evil is only a falling away from the good (and from freedom) and hence needs no positive causality.

See Also

Election; Fate; Free Will and Determinism; Grace; Justification; Theodicy.

Bibliography

There are several useful introductions to the subject: C. H. Ratschow, Erich Dinkler, E. Kähler, and Wolfhart Pannenberg's "Prädestination," in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3d ed. (Tübingen, 1957–1965), and Henri Rondet and Karl Rahner's "Predestination," in Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, edited by Karl Rahner (New York, 1968–1970), both of which give an extensive bibliography in several languages; Giorgio Tourn's La predestinazione nella Bibbia e nella storia (Turin, 1978); and Vernon J. Bourke's Will in Western Thought: An Historico-Critical Survey (New York, 1964).

Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1923), 2d ed. (London, 1950), offers a classic phenomenological analysis of the problem. Discussion of the general historical significance of predestination appears in my Puritans and Predestination (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), pp. 191–196. For the Bible and ancient Judaism, see Harold H. Rowley's The Biblical Doctrine of Election (London, 1950), Eugene H. Merrill's Qumran and Predestination (Leiden, 1975), and George Foot Moore's "Fate and Free Will in the Jewish Philosophies according to Josephus," Harvard Theological Review 22 (October 1929): 371–389. Two rather traditional Christian theological investigations of the problem, the first Protestant and the second Roman Catholic, are Gaston Deluz's Prédestination et liberté (Paris, 1942) and M. John Farrelly's Predestination, Grace, and Free Will (Westminster, Md., 1964). A more recent Christian theological treatment is Paul K. Jewett, Election and Predestination (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1985). For Indian thought, see Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's Indian Philosophy, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1927–1931), pp. 659–721, 731–751, and Rudolf Otto's Die Gnadenreligion Indiens und das Christentum (Gotha, 1930), translated by Frank H. Foster as India's Religion of Grace and Christianity (New York, 1930). The standard work on this subject for Islam is W. Montgomery Watt's Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam (London, 1948).

Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. (1987 and 2005)