Predestination

“In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”

— Ephesians 1:11

Predestination is God’s eternal decree fixing beforehand the destiny of every rational creature, angels as well as human beings, appointing some to everlasting life and leaving others to their sin and its just condemnation.¹ It names the decree’s own application to persons, not God’s whole plan for everything that comes to pass: “predestination concerns the eternal state of rational creatures and the steps or means leading to it.”² Its positive side, appointing some to life, is election; its negative side, leaving others to just condemnation, is reprobation; Reformed theologians call the pairing itself “double predestination.”²

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Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession devotes its third chapter, “Of God’s Decree,” to God’s eternal purpose, and states:

“By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated, or foreordained to eternal life through Jesus Christ, to the praise of his glorious grace; others being left to act in their sin to their just condemnation, to the praise of his glorious justice.”¹

The Westminster Confession states the same paragraph’s positive clause in nearly identical terms but closes it differently: “some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others fore-ordained to everlasting death.”³ Where Westminster pairs “predestinated to life” with “foreordained to death,” symmetrical verbs on both sides, the 1689 pairs “predestinated… to eternal life through Jesus Christ” with “left to act in their sin to their just condemnation,” a passive rather than an active verb for the negative side. Both confessions teach the same substance, but only the 1689 avoids stating the negative clause in a verb that mirrors the positive one.

The confession adds, a few paragraphs later, a caution about how this doctrine itself should be handled:

“The doctrine of the high mystery of predestination is to be handled with special prudence and care, that men attending the will of God revealed in his Word, and yielding obedience thereunto, may, from the certainty of their effectual vocation, be assured of their eternal election; so shall this doctrine afford matter of praise, reverence, and admiration of God, and of humility, diligence, and abundant consolation to all that sincerely obey the gospel.”⁴

Biblical Basis

Paul traces a single chain from eternity to glory: “those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son… and those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Rom. 8:29-30). Believers were chosen “in love,” “predestined… for adoption… according to the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:4-5, 11). Predestination is not confined to who is saved; Scripture applies the same word to what God ordained would happen: the church at Jerusalem prayed that Herod, Pilate, the Gentiles, and Israel had gathered against Jesus only “to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27-28), naming Christ’s own death as something predestined rather than merely foreseen.

Scripture also extends the term beyond human beings. Paul charges Timothy to observe his instructions “in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels” (1 Tim. 5:21), and Jesus speaks of coming “in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38), a settled company distinct from the “angels who sinned” and were cast down to judgment (2 Pet. 2:4).

Doctrinal Implications

Double predestination is not a symmetry

Reformed theology has never been able to avoid the term “double predestination”: Scripture recognizes God’s active sovereign will not only in election but in the negative events of history, hardening, blinding, and rejecting particular persons, not merely responding passively to sin already present.² But “double” does not mean the two halves work the same way. Gill defines reprobation’s first act as “non-election, or preterition… a passing over them or passing by them, when others were chosen,” concluding from the fact that some were elect that others, necessarily, were not.⁵ Charnock states the same distinction from the side of God’s holiness: “Reprobation, in its first notion, is an act of preterition, or passing by. A man is not made wicked by the act of God; but it supposeth him wicked,” so that God “leaves a man in that guilt and filth wherein he beholds him” rather than producing it.⁶ Reformed theologians reach for exactly this vocabulary, permission, preterition, dereliction, to keep election’s positive, effecting cause of faith distinct from reprobation’s negative, permissive cause of condemnation, even while granting that the distinction takes real theological work to state carefully rather than dissolving the tension outright.²

The predestination of angels

Predestination’s scope is not limited to the human race. Gill opens his own chapter on the subject by defining it as covering “the two branches of election and reprobation, both with respect to angels and men; for each of these have place in both,” citing “elect angels” (1 Tim. 5:21) against those “reserved in chains… unto the judgment” (2 Pet. 2:4).⁷ Pictet draws out how angelic and human election differ: angels who stood were not fallen and then rescued, as elect human beings are, but were “confirmed in holiness” by a decree that fixed them permanently against any future apostasy, and needed no mediator, since “where there is no sin, there is no room for mediation.”⁸ Reprobate angels, by the same token, received a severer judgment than reprobate men: God “hath not thought fit to spare any” of the fallen angels, where among fallen humanity he graciously raises some from their ruin.⁸ Boettner draws the same asymmetry from Scripture’s own language: fallen angels “are left outside of His benevolent purposes,” while “His mercy is infinite in that it rescues the great multitude of His elect” from among fallen humanity.⁹

Historical Development

Predestination’s basic shape in Western theology was already set by Augustine’s break with Pelagius over grace and the human will, but the term itself, and the specific charge that Augustine’s doctrine amounted to “double predestination,” became a live controversy in its own right three centuries later. Gottschalk, a ninth-century Saxon monk, studied Augustine’s writings closely and openly confessed double predestination as Augustine himself had taught it.¹⁰ For this he was condemned and imprisoned, even though the earlier councils of Orange and Valence had themselves affirmed Augustine’s doctrine of grace and the Semi-Pelagian party that opposed Gottschalk remained numerous and active in his own day.¹¹ Boettner judges that little further emphasis fell on the doctrine of predestination between Augustine and the Reformation, naming only Gottschalk himself and, centuries later, John Wycliffe, “the Morning Star of the Reformation,” who preached the same absolute sovereignty and foreordination Luther and Calvin would later develop at length, alongside the Waldensians, who held predestination as one of their own distinctives well before the Reformation began.¹²

The Reformation was, in Boettner’s own description, “essentially a revival of Augustinianism,” carried forward by Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli alike.¹² It was substantially through Calvin’s own defense of the doctrine against Albertus Pighius and Jerome Bolsec that predestination entered the confessions of the Reformed churches, examined and confessed again at the Synod of Dordt against the Arminian Remonstrance, and from there into the Westminster Confession and the Baptist confessions that followed it.

Opposing Views

Arminianism holds that God’s predestination of individuals is conditioned on his foreknowledge of their free, Spirit-enabled faith and perseverance, rather than being unconditional in itself, so that the ultimate ground of the difference between the saved and the lost is each individual’s own foreseen response rather than an unconditional decree fixing it beforehand. Roman Catholic theology, following the Council of Trent, holds that grace assists but does not unilaterally determine a person’s response, and that the elect are those God foresaw would freely cooperate with the grace offered to them.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t “double predestination” make God the author of sin exactly as he is the author of faith, an equal and opposite causation on both sides? Reformed theology denies the symmetry rather than the term. Election works through an effecting cause: God’s Spirit produces the faith he has decreed. Reprobation works through preterition, a passing by rather than a producing: God “is not the efficient, but deficient cause” of the ruin he leaves the reprobate in, the way withdrawing a support is not the same act as supplying a blow.⁶ The doctrine still requires real theological care to state without either collapsing the distinction or denying that God’s will governs the negative side of history as genuinely as the positive, and Reformed writers have not pretended otherwise.²

If Scripture speaks so sparingly about the predestination of angels, isn’t it presumptuous to say anything about it at all? Pictet raises this caution before answering it: “Upon this subject it is far better to be silent, than to speak much, lest we be in danger of ‘intruding into those things which we have not seen.’ A few observations however may not be unnecessary.”⁸ The confession states the same caution as a general rule for the whole doctrine, not only its application to angels: predestination is “the high mystery,” to be handled “with special prudence and care.”⁴

Doesn’t teaching predestination breed either pride in those who feel assured of their election or despair in those who doubt it? The confession answers that rightly handled, the doctrine works the opposite effect, affording “matter of praise, reverence, and admiration of God, and of humility, diligence, and abundant consolation to all that sincerely obey the gospel.”⁴ The assurance offered is tied to “the certainty of their effectual vocation,” a life of obedience to the gospel, not to speculation about the eternal decree considered apart from its fruit.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” §3. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 3, “Of God’s Eternal Decree,” §3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 3, §7. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book II, chap. 3, “Of the Decree of Rejection of Some Angels and of Some Men.” ↩
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, Discourse XI, “On the Holiness of God,” 146. ↩ ↩²
Gill, book II, chap. 2, “Of the Special Decrees of God, Relating to Rational Creatures, Angels, and Men; and Particularly of Election.” ↩
Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), book V, 215-216. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 67-68. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 166. ↩
Boettner, 264-265. ↩ ↩²