Predestination, the eternal decree of God, whereby 'the elect' are foreordained to salvation. The correlative decree, whereby others are held to be foreordained to perdition, is commonly distinguished by the other term—Reprobation. The theory of predestination had its origin in the attempts of theological system to define the relations of the human and the divine will, and to reconcile the phenomena of human freedom with the belief in divine omnipotence. God's absolute will is represented by it as determining the eternal destiny of man, not according to the foreknown character of those whose fate is so determined, but according to God's own mere choice. They who are thus foreordained to eternal life are led to believe and live by the 'irresistible grace' of the Holy Spirit. In human salvation, therefore, God's will is everything, man's nothing. The principal scripture passage is Rom. viii. 29, 30. It was in the discussions between Pelagius and Augustine that the predestinarian view of the divine 'decree' was first fully evolved; and since their time opinion in the church has run in two great currents—the one perpetuating the influence of Pelagius, who regarded that decree as subordinated to the divine foreknowledge of human character; the other that of Augustine, who maintained the absolutism of that decree, and its independence of all prior human conditions. Pelagius recognised a possibility of good in human nature; Augustine denied any such possibility apart from the influences of divine grace. The one held that the choice of salvation lay in man's will; the other that man's will had no active freedom or power of choice since the fall. In 529 the system of Augustine was established by the Council of Arausio (Orange) as the rule of orthodoxy in the Western Church; but the reaction against the strictly logical nature of his dogma has been perpetually manifested by representatives of the more humane, though perhaps less logical doctrine of Pelagius, in every period of the church. Gottschalk, a German monk of the 9th century, carried the doctrine to its most extreme development. The Thomists (see AQUINAS), as predestinarians, opposed the Scotists, though Thomists insisted that God willed the salvation of all and has provided the means. The reformers Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were Augustinians, though the Lutheran doctrine as formulated by Melanchthon is plainly different from that of Calvin and the Reformed Church. Some Jesuits are Congruists or modified Thomists; others admit that predestination to grace, but deny that predestination to glory, is irrespective of merit. Jansenism was a revival of Augustinianism. Arminius and the Synod of Dort mark a new period of the controversy. With such opposite representatives as Laud and Hales, a large part of the Church of England 'bade John Calvin good-night.' The followers of Wesley and Whitefield differed on this great doctrine. Even the Presbyterian churches, or large sections of them, have modified their high predestinarian doctrine in at least the statement of it. The common Augustinian doctrine of the Calvinistic symbolical books is called 'infra-lapsarianism;' moderate Calvinists or 'sub-lapsarians' hold that the fall of man (lapsus) was foreseen but not decreed by God (thus trying to avoid ascribing to God the origin of sin); while extreme predestinarians or 'supra-lapsarians' affirm that God not only foresaw and permitted, but decreed the fall of man, overruling it for good. Jonathan Edwards (q.v.) is a modern representative of rigid Calvinism. Catholics hold that the question is one rather of metaphysics than of faith.
See the article WILL and works there quoted, and the articles on Augustine, Pelagius, Calvin, Jansen, &c.; the theological handbooks of dogmatics; Luthardt, Vom Freien Willen (1863); Forbes, Predestination and Free-will (1878); Canon Mozley, Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination (1878).