As stated for instance [here](https://christianpure.com/learn/protestant-christian-vs-reformed-christian/) and many other places, Reform Christianity has as one of its central precepts predestination, i.e. Gd has already chosen some of us for salvation and some for damnation. Logically, this would lead me to be a fatalist: nothing I can do will change my fate. How does Reform Christianity so vehemently argue against fatalism at the same time? This is not a smug rebuttal (which would be naive) but rather a genuine request for the details. The way I see it, this is all a side effect of the I suppose well meaning starting point of the sovereignty of Gd, logically leading to predestination - from here, there is either some nebulous cop-out or indeed an elaborate reconciliation of this and avoiding fatalism which I would find great intellectual satisfaction in learning.

If you want to be confused and stay confused, you've come to the right place. It seems that practically all the answers on any topic are answered as follows: Question- Should you come to a complete stop at a red light? Answer - It depends on whether you're translating from Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin or some other translation e.g. Substitutionary locomotion. Those sound good on paper, but they're just another way to say "I don't know". So if that's the truth, it won't hurt to just say so.

This question is NOT: * what does John Bunyan believe about predestination * is predestination biblically accurate? This question is: * Does "Pilgrim's Progress" take a position on predestination? * And if so, which chapter / section? Thanks!

"3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him." (Ephesians 1:3-4) In the above verse the Apostle Paul writing to the believers at the church in Ephesus is declaring that God the Father chose 'us' i.e. the believers, before the foundation of the world. If that were the case all the believers whoever was and is and will be believing in Jesus and thus become believers only those people were chosen to become believers much before their creation. That's basically predestination of certain individuals to become believers. However, that effectively leaves out all those who are not chosen by God to go to hell. In other words, it is God who creates certain individuals meant to go to heaven and others to hell. If the above statements were to be true, then, God will be unjust and unloving. Furthermore, it will be unfair for God to command his people to preach the gospel to all creation. In the light of the above conundrum how to understand "God chose us before the foundation of the world?"

Scriptures have clear evidence that God has already chosen some individuals for salvation. Here are some references... "When the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord; and **as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.**" (Acts 13:48) "And the Lord said to Paul in the night by a vision, “Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent; for I am with you, and no man will attack you in order to harm you, **for I have many people in this city**.” (Acts 18:9-10) "For those whom He foreknew, **He also predestined** to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified." (Romans 8:29-30) The above verses provide us ample evidence that God in His sovereignty chooses some individuals for salvation. Them He justifies and glorifies. Then we also see in the Scriptures... "And He said to them, “Go into all the world and **preach the gospel to all creation.** The one who has believed and has been baptized will be saved; but the one who has not believed will be condemned." (Mark 16:15-16) “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that **everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.**" (John 3:16) According to the reformed theology how can the above both sets of verses be reconciled?

I've often heard of the concept of Omniscience which is based on scripture that states God **knows all things.** > Isaiah 46:10 10 declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’ > 1 John 3:20 in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart and knows all things. > Psalm 139:4 Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, You know it all. Does this quality of God include knowledge of everything that does not yet exist nor has yet occurred on the earth? More specifically: ***Does God already know every action and decision every human will choose to make in the future? How does this correlate with the objective truth that He has included free-will in the design of His creation?*** Please provide scriptural support.

The Bible testifies that God has preordained many events or roles much before they came to pass. Likewise, the same Bible testifies to the fact the God knows the future events and roles. One of them or both of them give rise to the prophecies mentioned in the Bible. Preordination is obviously what God proactively plans or determines. Whereas foreknowledge implies that God is passively aware of what would transpire in the future. Either way, prophecies make sense because of these two qualities of God. Here is the question to protestant Christians, which one precedes the other?

This was originally part of [this question](https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/1478/do-we-have-free-will-or-is-it-an-illusion) However, it's really a separate line of logic (and therefore a different question, imo). If others prefer, I can remerge this into the original. ----- God is omniscient. He truly, literally knows everything. God knows whether or not I will sin. God can (and does) direct certain people to prevent them from choosing one way or another. [Exodus 4:21 (NIV)](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%204:21&version=NIV) >The LORD said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go. Clearly, this is an instance where God stepped in and prevent Pharaoh from making the decision. Since he controls decisions and knows what decisions I will make, do I truly have free will? Or do I only have free will in the inconsequential things (which isn't really free will, after all)?

Open theism posits that God possesses comprehensive knowledge of every possible future but is unaware of which particular future will be actualized due to human free will. Wouldn't this result in the same thing as Molinism? If God has exhaustive knowledge of every potential future, He knows precisely how each individual would act in any given situation. Thus, God would be aware of whether a person will ultimately be good or bad from the moment of their birth. Isn't this analogous to Molinism's concept of "middle knowledge"? One could argue that God's awareness of possibilities is so vast that He comprehends every conceivable outcome for an individual, not just every choice they might make. For instance, there exists a potential world where I become a terrorist, and another where I become a priest. God understands all these possibilities in perfect detail but is unaware of which one will unfold because it depends on my exercise of free will. However, wouldn't this contradict the Christian concept of the soul? This perspective seems to suggest that there is no inherent soul, and that a person's character is entirely contingent on circumstances. For example, if I had been born to strict Muslim parents, I might have become an extremist Muslim. If I'm not misunderstanding open theism, it appears to imply that a person's characteristics are solely determined by the random chance of their upbringing.

Both high and low Calvinists from this Wiki say that God authorized the Fall, by which all deserve to be condemned. Me: If there is no predestination at all, both Cain and Abel will end up in hell. From this link Calvinists teach that Ephesians 2:8 declares that *faith is given to the elect only.* Now, Hebrews 11:4 says: > By *faith* Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. ([NIV](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+11%3A4&version=NIV) , italics added) Me: because there is predestination, Abel will end up in heaven while Cain will still end up in hell. But [Genesis 4:7](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+4%3A7&version=NIV) says: > If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not > do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have > you, but you must rule over it. (NIV) My question: If God alone before the creation had already decreed that Cain would end up in hell, and that's why He will never give Cain faith, why did God say what He did to Cain in Genesis 4:7?

I believe God did not coerce the thief to the right to confess that Jesus is the Messiah, he did it because he loved the truth and out of his free will, the thief to the left also did not mock Jesus because the devil incited him but most probably because he wanted to appease the crowd. The actions of these two thieves , one in repentance and the other in rebellion caused them to go to different places in the afterlife. How do Calvinists who say God has already chosen the elect and our free will doesn't matter defend this? Also if God interferes with your free will to achieve a result where you go to heaven, then the race of salvation is not fair, or if He interferes with your free will to make you go to hell, makes him a crucial factor in your condemnation, which is not the case .

The Bible does state very many times that God already knows our earthly and eternal destinies. Jesus chose Judas Iscariot because he knew his destiny was to betray him. Jesus knew Paul would try to persecute the church in Damascus and intercepted him on the way. Jesus also knew the thief to his right will confess and they will be re united paradise the same day. My question is, if God already knows who gets to be saved and who doesn't, why should anyone make an effort to be saved when an individual's destiny is already known to God?

From [SEP](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/theodicies/#FreeWillTheo) : >#### 6. Free Will Theodicy > >With respect to the question of the justification of pain, cruelty, and other evils in relation to God, it is important to acknowledge the significant role played in theistic thought by appeal to the power of human free choice. We have seen above that many of the theodicies on offer rely on it. One prominent way to defend the goodness and other perfections of God in response to the evils of the world is to point out that, after all, God did not bring about the Rwandan genocide or the Holocaust or someone’s sexual assault. Instead, these were caused by human actions, which the theist may suggest were freely chosen by perpetrators. On the free will theodicy, God remains an absolutely perfect being even in light of the suffering in the world, because it is created beings who freely choose to harm each other (and non-human animals and the environment), and none of this is God’s direct doing. What goes wrong in our world is not the fault of God but rather the fault of the wrongdoers who use their power of free will to act badly. The free will theodicist holds that it is a great good that God gave us free will and allows us direct the course of our lives by way our own free choices (Swinburne 1998). The result of the gift of free will to the billions of people on the planet is a whole lot of bad consequences from evil choices, which God is justified in allowing because of the greater good of the gift of free will. > > Several problems face the line of thought that lays all the blame for the pain and suffering in the world on the bad free choices of created beings. One problem is this: even in cases of free actions that cause harm, if God is in control of the universe, then God at least allows the harm to be freely done to the victims by the perpetrators. God’s omnipotence indicates that God could have intervened to prevent a bad choice and could have intervened after the choice to prevent its most harmful consequences. God could cause someone who intends to rape to twist his ankle and fall to the ground, for instance, or to get violently ill, or faint, preventing the intended victim’s assault. In answer to the question of why God did not do that, there must be some good reason. Preserving the stability of natural laws is a good that is sometimes suggested here. (For relevant discussion see Swinburne 1998 and for a contrary view see Sterba 2019.) > > Another problem for the free will theodicy is that not all cases of suffering are brought about intentionally by human free choices, such as damage in the wake of hurricanes and the ravages of inherited diseases. Bad medical outcomes in surgical cases, too, do not always result from malicious intent or professional negligence. When a tornado rips through a town destroying some homes and not others, no human being freely chose for certain houses rather than neighboring ones to be destroyed, and no human being freely brought about the tornado in the first place. > > Another difficulty facing the free will theodicy is this: whereas some philosophers think that free will would be ruled out by the truth of causal determinism (the hypothesis that at each moment there is exactly one future, given the laws of nature and the events of the past), other free will theorists believe that we can act freely even if causal determinism is true. **Arguably it is crucial that the free will appealed to by a free will theodicist must be indeterminist (libertarian) in nature**. (For exploration of indeterminist accounts of free will, see Clarke 2003; Ekstrom 2000, 2019; Franklin 2018; Kane 1996; Mele 2006; O’Connor 2000.) **The free will theodicist thus must maintain that all compatibilist accounts of the nature of free agency, including those provided by Frankfurt (1971), Watson (1975), Fischer (2012), Nelkin (2011), and Wolf (1990), among others, are implausible accounts**. In citing the free will of created beings as the greater good that justifies God in permitting instances of evil or the facts about evil, the free will theodicist also needs to hold that causal determinism is, in fact, false and that we human beings do have **libertarian free will**. Without maintaining these positions, the free will theodicist lacks an explanation for the violence and cruelty in the world that shields God and preserves God’s goodness, since God could have established the initial conditions of the universe and decreed that deterministic natural laws govern all events, so that the events in the world unfolded to include none that are painful, harmful or wrong. **God could have done this even in worlds in which he created free (in a compatibilist sense) rational beings**. > > Here is an additional problem for the theodicy according to which God’s allowance of suffering is due to God’s desire to create beings with **libertarian free will** and to allow creatures to carry out their evil intentions as well as their good ones: such morally significant libertarian free will (in Alvin Plantinga’s (1974) terms)—or what Swinburne (1998) calls serious free will, which is **libertarian free will** with respect to seriously good and seriously evil potential actions—must have immense positive value, in order for it to be sensible to think that a perfect being would decide to create beings with that power. The claim that such serious **libertarian free will** is worth it stands in need of convincing defense. (This issue is addressed in detail in Ekstrom 2021.) Notice that there is a difference between a proposed causal explanation of evil and a divine justification for allowing evil. If the causal explanation for a vast range of cases of evil in our world is human free will, then still, in order to serve as a God-justifying reason for permitting those evils, it has to be a very great outweighing good for God to create beings with serious morally significant free will and not to intervene to prevent the consequences of their wrong choices. My understanding of [Calvinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_in_theology#Calvinism) is that Calvinists believe in *predestination*. But predestination seems to invalidate libertarian free will, which is a key premise in the Free Will Theodicy. **What is the Calvinist take on the Free Will Theodicy?**

Do all Christians believe in predestination? If not, for those who don't, how do they explain Romans 9:14 - 9:24? > 14 What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! 15 For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” 16 So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. 17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.” 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires. > > 19 You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? 21 Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? 22 What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23 And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, 24 even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles. The passage says some are "vessels of wrath prepared for destruction," and others are "vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory..." Also when it says "He hardens whom he desires," the implication is that when a person's heart becomes hardened, it is hardened by God in which case they did not do so of their free will. Both of these support the idea of predestination (the former more than the latter) and I want to know how a Christian who doesn't believe in predestination (or one who somehow harmonizes predestination and free will) would interpret this passage, particularly the things I mentioned.

How do Calvinists explain Luke 19:41-44: > 41 And when he drew near and saw the city, **he wept over it**, 42 > saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things > that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 For > the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade > around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44 and tear > you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they > will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know > the time of your visitation.” Why would Jesus weep for non-elect people if He Himself willfully passed over them when He elected people unto salvation before the foundation of the world?

I web-searched the expression, 'universal election', used on SE-BH, but without success. I keep finding information about 'universal salvation' which, I assume, is not the same thing. I am interested in when this expression was coined and by whom. I am aware that some say 'election' means that God foresaw who would 'choose Christ' and by looking into the future, as it were, he 'chose' those who would, in time, make this decision. I am also aware that some say 'election' conveys the concept that the Father, before the foundation of the world, purposed to beget sons and purposed to bring them to glory. But I have only today read the words 'universal election' and I am interested in which Christian groups use the word and what they, themselves, would understand by the term, and when it became common parlance.

[*Britannica* article on Calvinism](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Calvinism) states > Calvin had certain approximate and attainable tests. He did not > require the experience of the new birth, which is so inward and > intangible, though to be sure later Calvinism moved away from him on > this point and agonized over the signs of election. For Calvin there > were three tests: the profession of faith; a rigorously disciplined > Christian deportment; and a love of the sacraments, which meant the > Lord’s Supper, since infant baptism was not to be repeated. Persons > who could meet these three tests could assume their election and stop > worrying If Christ chose Judas to be a disciple, and if Christ is part of the Trinitarian Godhead being all-knowing and omnipotent... According to Calvinism, how is it that Christ elected Judas Iscariot to discipleship, one of Christ's inner circle, only to be betrayed by him? Calvinists would say Jesus predetermined Judas election to the discipleship because the Bible records he chose him. Because God chose Judas, is not a disciple predetermined to be saved? What happened in this example?

I'm an evangelical myself (Anglican) and I wonder how could we deal with this apparent contradiction. The question is whether there is a clash between the concept of predestination and 1 Timothy 2:4. Predestination, especially as articulated in certain interpretations of Calvinism, suggests that God has foreordained some people to salvation and others to damnation. In contrast, 1 Timothy 2:4 states, "God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth". ### Predestination Predestination, as understood in Calvinist theology, is the doctrine that God has chosen certain individuals for salvation before the foundation of the world. This choice is not based on any foreseen merit or action on the part of the individual but solely on God's sovereign will. This is often coupled with the doctrine of election, which holds that God's grace is extended to those He has chosen, and they will inevitably come to faith. ### 1 Timothy 2:4 1 Timothy 2:4 is often cited by those who argue against the Calvinist interpretation of predestination. The verse suggests a universal salvific will, indicating that God's desire is for all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. This seems to conflict with the idea that God has only predestined a select group for salvation.

I'm really trying to study the topic of election versus free will. A common theme supporting election is the difference between a general call and an effectual call. But there seems to be no differentiation in the original Greek between one call and another. For example, Matt 22:14 is often cited as a general call. Romans 1:6 is an effectual call. But both verses use the same Greek word for "call" (*κλητοὶ*, *klētoi*). I was hoping that the two theological terms would be based on distinct Greek words, similar to how various meanings of "love" are associated with five different Greek words (*agape*, *eros*, *philia*, etc). My question: who is deciding which verses refer to general vs. effectual? The term was coined by the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647. But other than that, **is there an objective vs. subjective translation/language standard to which we can scrutinize these verses**? Words matter and I **always** go back to Greek/Hebrew when studying. There are literally tons of examples if you just search your concordance or lexicon for "called."

For those that believe some are predestined to reject Christ, is the gospel still offered to them?