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What do you think of the idea of predestination? That only those who have been predestined by God (from eternity past) can be saved: but not anyone else.
The doctrine can be found or at least intimated (possibly: depending on how you interpret them) in a few – though not many – passages of the Bible. The following are three that seem the clearest (key words highlighted; these translations are from the NRSV ue):
Romans 8
28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. 29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.[s] 30 And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
Ephesians 1
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. 5 He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will,
Acts 13
[After Paul had preached a sermon in Antioch of Pisidia]
48 When the gentiles heard this, they were glad and praised the word of the Lord, and as many as had been destined for eternal life became believers.
Other biblical passages can be and have been cited by believers in predestination – e.g., Matthew 20:23; John 10:29. You may have your own favorites!
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It’s a doctrine that many people find quite disturbing. If a person can be saved only because they were chosen by God, then actually no one has any choice in the matter, and no matter what one does, it doesn’t matter: God makes the decision. That also means, by implication, that someone who is not chosen (through no fault of their own) is condemned. So, well, doesn’t that mean God decides to send people to hell? The vast majority of people who have ever lived – billions of people. Because that’s what God has decided?
In a sense, this doctrine is a natural outcome of traditional Christian understandings that God is both all-knowing and all-powerful. If he literally knows “everything” then he knows who will choose to believe in Christ; but if he is all powerful, he can certainly convince them to do so. He chooses to do so only in some cases. In the modern world, he apparently has not chosen well over six billion people. By allowing them to be condemned because he knew they would be, he is in a sense determining that they will be (since he has actively chosen all those who will not be damned).
Ouch.
The doctrine of predestination is usually traced back to St. Augustine (354-430 CE), who was particularly concerned to stress that those who were saved were the ones chosen – and that (a) there was no way to understand the mind of God and why he made his choices and (b) humans nonetheless have free will. (most people find free will hard to reconcile with predestination).
The explicit doctrine of “double-predestination” seems to be implied by the doctrine of single-predestination — the claim that only those predestined were chosen (single-predestination), a view promoted already by St. Augustine. Double-predestination is associated principally with the theology of John Calvin (1509-64) and (especially) his followers, and was ultimately rooted in their understandings of divine sovereignty and grace.
“Sovereignty” means that God is the Lord and Master over all things and no one and nothing can usurp his all-powerful will. He is in control of all that happens. Humans themselves, of course, are responsible for their sins on some level, or at least must pay a price for their sins. And since all have sinned, all are condemned. But if some do not have to pay the price, God must have decided which ones that would be, since he is control of everything.
“Grace” means that God has freely (of his own volition) extended undeserved favor to some people, giving them salvation even though they deserve condemnation. They should be damned like everyone else, but God goes out of his way to show his graciousness to them.
In large part this combination of sovereignty and grace is meant to emphasize that no one can merit salvation, or earn it, or attain it on their own. Only God is sovereign. Only God can decide whom to save. For those who believe in predestination in most any sense, God determined in eternity past which of those he would save. The implication is necessarily that he didn’t choose everyone. But those who are a bit clearer and forceful about the doctrine state the conclusion more strongly. He predestined both the saved and the damned.
Every possible option connected to “predestination” has been rigorously debated among Christian theologians – from Augustine’s day through the middle ages through the Reformation to today.
I myself once held to the view (Hey – God himself is TOTALLY sovereign!). But I frankly haven’t given it a whole lot of sustained thought for, well, decades.
I’ve become interested in it in the last few months for a reason I bet you would never guess. German scholar Max Weber (1864-1920; last name pronounced Vey (rhymes with “hey”) – Ber (rhymes with, “her”) (accent on first syllable) is usually regarded as the founder of the academic discipline of Sociology. His most famous book is called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In it he argues that the economic system of capitalism owes its origins to Calvinist understandings of predestination.
WHAT? I’ll explain in my next post.
But FOR NOW: I’d love to hear your opinions about Predestination as a doctrine (one that still seems to me almost necessary for anyone who believes in an all-powerful and all-knowing God, but as problematic for anyone who really believes in free will.) What do you think?
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The Westminster Confession, a Calvinist (e.g., Presbyterian) document, says it this way (Article III.1):
God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.
That is rather dense. Here is my translation into plain English: Whatever happens, happens because God wills it to happen; but if something bad happens, it’s not God’s fault.
I think I read somewhere (it may have been in one of Robert M Price’s books) that, for Pre-destination to work effectively, no-one apart from God should know about it. Otherwise, it leads to endless speculation, general feelings of disgruntlement and all the other problems you can imagine. So, I guess, the logic is that, because we do know about ‘predestination’, therefore it can’t exist. Or can it? Perhaps that’s all part of God’s cunning plan – a colossal psychological double bluff 😉
The easy argument is that God made a way for individuals to be ‘saved’, and therefore ‘predestined’ all who follow that way to be among the saved group. In other words, the individual makes the decision as to which group he/she is in, and God’s work in ‘predestining’ is limited to making it possible for ALL who choose to, to be in the ‘saved’ group. An all-knowing God already knows which people will be in the saved group, even though he did not make the choice for them. He just knows how everything turns out in the end. What part of the debate over predestination does this view not resolve?
THe problem with that formulation is that it assumes that people can decide which way to go. The doctrine of predestination puts the choice in God’s hadn instead. It’s not that God knows which way they will go (that’s omniscience); it’s that he determines it.
I suppose if that’s the ‘doctrine’ then it’s stupid. Sorry, perhaps ‘pre-misunderstood’ is a better choice of words. So, how do YOU interpret the individual texts that mention predestination from what you think were the intents of the originators of those verses?
I wasn’t talking about the biblical views, but the Calvinist doctrines. When it comes to biblical passages (such things as being “called” even before one was born) I’d say most of them are meant mainly to emphasize the complete Sovereignty of God and to acknowledge that nothing happens outside his knowledge.
One concept that I was exposed to by one of my Sunday school teachers was differentiating between what is predestined and what is foreknown. Free will gives us the option to choose what we want to do. God knows which choices we will make (foreknown) but we are the ones who actually make that decision. For example, if a parent offers a child with a sweet tooth the choice between an apple and a candy bar, the parent knows which choice the child will make (the candy bar), but the child has the free will to choose between the options. The child is not predestined to choose either one, but the parent knows what the child will do. This idea has resonated with me and makes sense to me.
This analogy is pretty close to the Reformed view. The child with the sweet tooth in your example will always choose the candy bar in accordance with their nature. So, the child acts of its own will, but that will is “bound” to always choose the candy bar over the apple. In the Reformed view, humans who descend from Adam and Eve make choices based on their “Fallen” will and will always reject the gospel. For those whom God has predestined to eternal life, He changes their will by the new birth of the Holy Spirit, which allows and empowers them to trust in His death and resurrection for the remission of their sins. The Arminian (Free Will) view posits that God gives enough grace (prevenient grace) to all mankind to allow them to accept or reject the gospel.
I don’t find the doctrine as necessary as it first looks.
The pressure you describe is real, and heaviest where you put it: once election is tied to eternal punishment, the unchosen billions are not a small question. But the word “necessarily” is carrying more than it can. Single predestination implies double only if election already means a closed decree sorting individuals, from eternity, into saved and damned. That is one way of defining it, and the translation you cite leans that way: “foreknew,” “destined.” Defensible renderings, but renderings, and they stand exactly at the contested point.
There is an older way of reading election that begins not with a hidden list, but with Christ. God’s election is first disclosed in Christ, the beloved Son, chosen before the foundation of the world. Those who share in it are those who are in Christ by faith. So Christ stands as the mediator of election between the electing God and us, and that is what removes the appearance of arbitrariness. The decisive thing is not a list but a person.
This still gives up nothing on grace. A drowning man who takes hold of a thrown lifebuoy has not saved himself…..
……..The taking is real, and it is his, but it is the receiving of what comes entirely from the other side. So faith is genuinely a condition, and at the same time no achievement, no claim, no merit. The lifebuoy is grasped, but no one is saved by grasping; he is saved by being pulled in. That is why we are not forced into double predestination. There is no second decree standing in the way of salvation, because salvation was never a sorting in the first place.
That leaves your hardest case: those who never heard. I do not think Scripture gives us a full doctrine there, and I am wary of building one, in either direction. What it gives us is the character of the God we are dealing with: one who seeks the lost sheep, who runs toward the son while he is still far off. That God is loving and gracious, and that is what we are given to trust. I would rather rest there than turn it into a theory, just as I would not turn the lifebuoy into a calculation about who was eligible to catch it.
If I’m “predestined” then it follows that I’m freed from caring too much about religion at all since I’m already “in” or “out” no matter what. Which makes me curious why the so-called “Elect” seem to be the ones most obsessed about it. Doubts? Or is being obsessed a sign you’re “in”?
This reminds me of a wonderful 19th century Gothic novel entitled The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by Scottish author James Hogg. The novel concerns a staunch Calvinist who believes he is guaranteed Salvation and so justified in killing those he believes are already damned by God. Due to the tenor of the times Hogg had to publish the work anonymously. A wonderful satire of Calvinism and quite modern in feeling since it is written from the point of view of the killer.
Am a new subscriber, and find your blog very well done and informative. I am a strong Believer in God’s sovereignty, and as such, I believe that human free will has a large canvas upon which to operate, but if expanded too far, each individual will hit the invisible boundaries established by the sovereign God, and their thoughts, beliefs and resultant actions are eventually either reigned in or that individual suffers death. Similarly, a national leader can take a country up to the invisible boundaries established God, at which point their actions are thwarted (often by forces and unintended consequences of their original intent/actions). Net, human free will has hidden boundaries established by God that cannot be exceeded. So, maybe I am simplifying this too much, but that is how I see God’s sovereignty and human free will working together without tension until hidden boundaries (establish by God for each individual, leader, group, nation, etc.) are approached and hit.
The only path I have been able to partially accept is that we are all ‘pre-programmed’ with certain attributes (think genetics/DNA) and we do not have any choice as to where we are born, thus we are ‘destined’ or fated to have specific pre-set paths available to us per our inheritance, BUT we are able to follow different paths (maybe one more in line with God’s perceived overall plan) if we chose to and break the chains of our programmed destiny. As a former coder, I might say we have an opportunity to ‘debug’ our inherited code if we spend the energy to find the bugs in our body and spirit.
So I guess that might be called a ‘defaulted predestination’ theology?
I used to think predestination was ridiculous and that was one of the reasons I eventually converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity whose current apologists will bend over backwards claiming that predestination is not to be found anywhere in the New Testament because “Greek language nuances, Latin language problems, context, ancient thought isn’t modern thought, etc. etc.” and now I really don’t trust their theology either. God sure doesn’t seem to have a problem with people not understanding and endlessly arguing over theological principles derived from His Holy Book and supposedly unchanging Holy Tradition. My current position re predestination is “I don’t know and I don’t care.” If God actually cared he’d show up or send a divine representative to clarify the matter once and for all. But I guess maybe little ole insignificant me among the billions of other living and departed humans was predestined by God before the dawn of time to have this opinion so it doesn’t matter anyway.
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to be determined.
Ha! I get the allusion. I about tried a pun on it in my book, but wasn’t sure anyone *else* would get it….
There’s no way to prove or disprove whether free will exists. With that caveat, I tend to believe that there’s no free will, or if there is free will, it’s very minimal. For me, it’s mainly relevant to explaining why people behave as they do. My working hypothesis is “everybody always does their best under the internal and external circumstances.” Internal circumstances are mainly (1) understanding what the best way to behave is; and (2) ability to control one’s own behavior. External circumstances are the situations we find ourselves in. Internal and external circumstances can change, of course, so somebody may be capable of doing a particular action at one moment but not another. I think you can optionally add God to the equation, but the idea works equally well with or without belief in God. Whether true or not, this line of thinking has some practical advantages, like helping me not to feel superior to people to misbehave–and not hate myself if I do it. Hey, everybody’s doing their best, and hopefully their best will be better tomorrow than it is today.
For those who are believers, I recommend Thomas Boston’s “Human Nature in its Fourfold State”. This helps to make sense (within a Reformed world view) of the interactions between God’s grace, human will, and the effects of sin. One might also study Romans 9, which is often used by Reformed folks to show that God chooses on whom He has mercy and compassion, yet is glorified in judgment against those whom He hardens. Romans 9:19-23 may not be a very satisfying answer for modern sensibilities, but Paul seems to have tackled this question head-on.
When it comes to predestination, I must admit that I find it difficult to understand, including Weber’s. At least at present, it seems to me that the doctrine rests on assumptions about causality and temporality that may be more problematic than they first appear.
One thought, however, continues to trouble me. If many physicists are correct that time and space themselves began with the Big Bang, then the categories of causality upon which discussions of predestination often depend may not be as fundamental as we assume.
If there is an omniscient God, I wonder whether it makes sense to think of Him as existing within a temporal sequence at all. Perhaps God does not experience a succession of moments but exists in an atemporal reality in which all events are equally present.
If that is the case, then the ordinary categories of “before” and “after,” “cause” and “effect,” may not apply to God in the way they apply within our universe. Perhaps divine foreknowledge does not imply divine predetermination, because both concepts are being viewed through categories that belong to time-bound creatures rather than to an atemporal God.
This is one reason why I have difficulty finding predestination philosophically compelling.
Attempting to channel Paul… “No no no, you’ve got it backwards. God wants all humans to be saved in Christ, and He has made that the destiny of us all – if we accept it. If you do, then you’re claiming the predestined salvation that God provides for all humans. But he also gave us free will and allows us to opt out of that destiny if we choose.”
Of course, I actually prefer thinking the God of Abraham would indeed pick some for eternal bliss and some for infinite punishment. That’s much more his Old Testament style.
As a devout Christian, you have to believe that the triune God who is the omnipotent, omniscient creator of all sent himself to earth as a human to suffer and die to atone for the sins of everyone else. Everyone else that he also created in forms that would sin, knowing they would sin (he’s omniscient) when, being omnipotent, he could have created them without sin. And, this was his plan all along to change his relationship with his creations and bring salvation to them from himself. Rather than just forgiving them for sinning, or forgiving himself for creating the sinners… If you can believe that, believing some are predestined for heaven fits right in.
I reconcile God’s sovereignty/free will through His knowledge of counterfactuals (what every free person would choose in any possible situation). Before creation, God knew every outcome of every possible circumstance. Crucially, His foreknowledge is grounded in what free creatures would choose, not causally determinative of those choices. He knows what we’ll choose because we freely choose it (not because He foreknows it).
God then creates the world where His purposes are accomplished through the genuine/uncoerced choices of free creatures. He remains sovereign by choosing which world to actualize, while humans remain responsible for their decisions.
Regarding your passages, God predestines by sovereignly creating a world where He knew certain individuals would freely respond to His grace. In Romans 8, “foreknew” precedes “predestined.” God knew who’d freely respond to Him in this world, then predestined those believers to be conformed to Christ’s image. The focus is on His eternal plan for those He knew would be in Christ, not an arbitrary selection.
I read Ephesians 1 corporately: God predetermined that the body “in Christ” would receive adoption. Similarly, in Acts 13, God appointed individuals to eternal life by arranging circumstances in which He knew they’d freely believe.
Great article Dr. Ehrman. As you undoubtedly know, the idea of predestination is contradicted in other places in the New Testament. For example, 2 Peter 3:9, 1 Timothy 2:3-4, 1 Timothy 4:10, and Titus 2:11. The only way to reconcile these with the predestination stuff in Romans 8, Ephesians 1, and Acts 13 is to assume that some people are predestined for salvation while the rest are either saved or damned depending on whether or not they use their free will correctly to acquire salvation. In that case, no one is predestined to be damned.
That raises the question as to what percentage of human souls are predestined to be saved. If the people predestined to be saved are only those people Paul is writing to, in Romans and Ephesians, and only those people in Antioch of Pisidia, who heard Paul speak, then it could be argued that the percentage is quite small. A theologian could argue that a few people must be predestined for salvation in order to fulfill Yahweh’s prophetic plan. For example, if Paul is the fulfillment of Isaiah 49:1-6 and Isaiah 52:15 then Paul would have to have been predestined for salvation.
Weber and R.H. Tawney, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism” 1926 on the same theme, predestination.
As someone who doesn’t believe in free-will, my main issue with the problem of predestination is not the all-knowing or all-powerful parts of the Christian God’s proposed nature, but the all-good part of it. Other than that conundrum, predestination actually makes a lot of sense to me (as I already believe our destinies were ‘predetermined’, just by the natural laws of the universe and not by a supernatural being).
In a nutshell, I see the concept of predestination as a mumbo jumbo attempt to counter the legitimate questions of how an all knowing, all powerful and, supposedly, all loving God can allow bad things to happen to the people he created, as well as condemning some of them to eternal torment. Of course, all argument and further questions are cut off with the standard, “we just can’t know Gods will/mind”. You say it a lot better, but this is what it boils down to for me.
If all is predestined, there is no salvation. There is no need for salvation because it’s all worked out. Predestined people cannot be sinners in this picture because, if Paul’s words to the Ephesians are true, his people were chosen before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless. How, then, can they sin? No sin, no need for forgiveness, no salvation. But, that contradicts the idea that, “all sin and fall short of the glory of God”, doesn’t it? So, mumbo jumbo.
Gnostic Christian, Orphic Greek, and Kabbalistic Jewish thought considers incarnation to be an arduous, agonizing limitation for a soul that could otherwise be in the direct presence of God (in heaven). Even in other religions; Buddhism seeks to escape samsara.
The word “Damnation” comes from the Latin verb damnare…punish/sentence/fine. So “the fall”/sin seems to have “punished us” and we need to find a way out! Good News! There’s a savior for the world…the entire basis of Christianity. And in the end, the world itself and everything in it gets “saved”…death is defeated, evil is defeated, all diseases are cured, etc. But by definition, these are material concerns, in a material world. That’s NOT the heavenly view, because if you “make it back to God/heaven” you’re SAVED by default (and may be what could be deemed the ELECT).
So I think it’s all a matter of understanding. You either make it to God in heaven (sent by Christ), or you’ll be saved on the earth (Christ’s kingdom). Damnation is never breaking the cycle and getting out. The earth needs saving because you’re at lease partly cut off from God otherwise. So enter God’s right hand man, made manifest to save it.
Humans devise so many ways to control other humans.
Regretfully, history is full of examples where theological abstraction — arguments about election, trinity, grace, free will —and all those foolish debates pull focus away from lived practice. People fought wars over doctrines Jesus never explicitly taught. I find some of the developed beliefs to be embarrassingly foolish, if not destructive.
The irony is that predestination itself, as a doctrine, can become a distraction from the very life of discipleship Jesus was inviting people into — regardless of which side of the debate you land on.
We would benefit by returning to the authentic teachings, without influence from Rome and Greek philosophy. It is a mistake to allow Paul’s voice to override what Jesus taught.
People read whatever they want from scripture to fit a narrative. As a result we have developed a religion that Jesus would not recognize. Man strives for certainty in a world full of mystery.
Jesus’ teaching tends to hold the tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility without fully resolving it. So man wants to close the loop in an open system.
4th Century thology was well on his way to corrupting christianity from its orgin…
Paul in Romans gives us a good idea of his view of the Elect and predestination. In his letter to the Romans he is remapping the chosen people of God from being “only” Israel, to the Promise with Abraham as the father of “many nations”, and saying that it was predestined in that promise that the Gentiles (the whole world) would be included in the “Elect” with Israel. Paul was not “narrowing” who the Elect were, but doing the opposite by including the Gentiles as Gods Elect. So, Pauls “predestined” only infers that such was the orginal plan and foretold through prophesy such as Genesis 17 and Jeremiah 31:31-34.
I know I oversimplify things but if all are saved eventually the problem of predestination goes away. Where does it say people can’t respond to God’s immense love after death when they finally see the truth? Huge numbers of people never hear of God’s love and Jesus existence in this life, and for many who do their understanding is distorted by their own life experiences, upbringing and wrong information etc. I know the verse “it is appointed unto man once to die and after that that the judgement”. But that could mean restorative judgement rather than the assumption of meaning sending to heaven or hell which are not actually even mentioned in that verse. I am attracted to a good shepherd who does not forever lose ANY of his sheep, even if the sheep cause themselves a lot of pain along the way (sin does have its consequences).
I know a lot of people will argue the free will thing but is free will to believe really free if faced with an alternative of eternal conscious torment? Sounds coerced to me.
I will be honest I am very opposed to the doctrine of predestination. I call it monster god theology.
This isn’t a comment on the theology of this topic, at least not directly. The only thing I’ll say is that this idea is sort of inherent in Einstein’s block universe – that all of spacetime can be seen in one “god’s eye view”. In other words – all times equally existing as one “block” – past, present, and future. Since time (and space) are relative to each observer in the universe, Einstein proved that there is no privileged “now”. The present moment only exists relative to each individual and their relative speed and motion in relation to someone else in the universe. In this respect, we are all “predestined” inasmuch as our individual world-lines are already existent in this “block”.
Of course, it also has to be said that since each of us has no access to this “god’s eye view”, our individual present, past, and future is still very real to us, and therefore from our perspective our freewill can still be said to be very real. In this respect, a god with this view of “no-when” would see all and know all, but still apparently would not “cause” all. Figure that one out!
@karbinator
The interpretation you are alluding to is, as you probably know, called Molinism, after the 16th century philosopher Luis de Molina. God has “middle knowledge” of “counterfactuals of freedom” concerning every possible human being He might create: what would they do under such and such circumstances. He picks the circumstances. This is supposed to preserve human freedom. A good deal hinges on how human freedom of choice is properly to be understood. In any case I wonder – perhaps Bart knows – whether this line of thinking emerged from the old Jewish idea that God “foreknows” the destiny of those he has chosen to forward His agenda in important ways – thus, e.g., David, Jeremiah, etc. There, foreknowledge seems to me to effect a kind of divine commission of an individual, rooted in the cosmic order that God has ordained in the beginning for His creation. I entirely agree regarding Ephesians 1.
Wouldn’t the concept of predestination be explained by the theory of a “block universe,” thus bypassing the need for theological machinations? Albert Einstein, in his theory of Special Relativity, removed the idea of a universal “now,” leading him to conclude that the division between past, present, and future is an illusion. Max Tegmark, a MIT cosmologist, argues that our physical reality is a giant mathematical structure, within which the four-dimensional block universe naturally exists without a flowing arrow of time. We imagine that time flows and we have free will, but in reality all is “preordained.”
“ It’s a doctrine that many people find quite disturbing.”
Well I don’t find it disturbing at all – I think it is a piece of vacuous sophistry concocted by the faithful in order to be able to marvel at God’s mysterious ways while at the same time being able to discern all his nuances.
How long will we have to put up with this?
The doctrine of predestination leads inevitably to the conclusion that God is ultimately responsible for all human error, which in turn invalidates the concepts of sin and redemption. What is sin? Sin is whatever God doesn’t like and forbids. Who is God to first create humans, and then decide he doesn’t like them and condemn them to hell, because they violated some stupid rule, which he knew in advance that they would do anyway? None of that makes any sense. It has nothing to do with the way the universe is set up. Try finding any hints of sin, punishment and salvation in the cosmos, the lives and deaths of stars and galaxies, the Hubble constant, etc.
Nobody can be objectively certain of salvation. You may claim a subjective assurance from “the holy Spirit” but that assurance can be false. Calvin says: 3:21:5 “All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and accordingly as each has been created for one or the other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or death.” Calvin teaches that some reprobate may receive a similar inner witness (as the Elect) actually experiencing the grace of God to such an extent that they imagine themselves to be of the Elect. But since they are not, God (as Calvin believed) has no intention that their experience of His grace shall endure. From the outset, His intention is that they shall wither away and die. Calvin: “Thus we dispose of the objection that if God truly displays His grace, it must endure forever. There is nothing inconsistent in this with the fact of his enlightening some with a present sense of grace, which afterwards proves evanescent…There is nothing strange in God’s shedding some rays of grace on the reprobate, and afterwards allowing these to be extinguished.” 3:2:11, 12.
My view is that Jesus was stating karma as part of Christianity in the healing of the man at the pool (John 5:1-15) when Jesus said “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” . With that background, I believe that predestination means God’s unchangeable laws are predestined to be applied based on our human behavior.