Augustine changed his mind about predestination, and Christianity split along the fault line
If God knows everything in advance, can anyone truly choose? Predestination tries to answer that riddle. Before 396, Augustine thought grace rewarded people who said yes to God. Arguing against Pelagius, he reversed himself, insisting salvation comes from grace alone, and theologians have quarrelled over the consequences ever since.
In theology, predestination holds that God has willed everything that happens, especially the final destiny of each soul. It is a form of theological determinism, and much of the writing about it wrestles with how divine foreknowledge can coexist with human freedom.
The argument is older than the church. The Book of Enoch pairs determinism with dualism, Jubilees blends fate and choice, and Ben Sira insists God sets good and evil before people and lets them decide. Some at Qumran spoke of the chosen inheriting the lot of the holy ones. N. T. Wright thinks Josephus misdescribed the Jewish sects, whose real quarrel was over how God would free Israel; John Barclay replies that Josephus oversimplified rather than erred.
Paul's letter to the Romans, chapters 8 to 11, became the battleground. Brendan Byrne reads its predestination as applying to the community as a whole, Joseph Fitzmyer sees all humanity destined for salvation, and Douglas Moo finds some chosen for salvation and the rest for damnation. Early Christians were just as divided. Origen, in the third century, based predestination on God foreseeing each person's merits, even from a previous life. Valentinus sorted humans into three natures, one of them beyond saving, and Irenaeus attacked that scheme as unjust.
Later thinkers sharpened the question. Aquinas and William of Ockham probed providence and freedom, while Gottschalk, Calvin and Zwingli developed double predestination, the idea that God chooses both the saved and the damned. Churches still differ. Eastern Orthodoxy stresses cooperation between effort and grace, Catholicism says God never predestines anyone to sin, Lutherans accept election to salvation but not to damnation, Calvinists embrace the double form, Arminians tie election to foreseen faith, and Latter-day Saints reject predestination while teaching foreordination.
Source: Predestination
