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PREDESTINATION God’s foreordination of persons to a particular end, most commonly to a
particular eternal destiny and less commonly to a particular vocation or to a particular task.
Brief Introduction
Predestination is among the most important and controversial matters with which Christians, as
well as adherents to other monotheistic religions professing divine sovereignty (e.g., Judaism and
Islam), have historically grappled. In the Old Testament, predestination is a facet of Yahweh’s
reign over all that He created and sustains. Yahweh is the ruler of all history who can infallibly
declare the future before it happens (Isa 48:3–5; Dan 4:35), while other gods are the powerless,
ignorant, and lifeless creations of human beings (Isa 41:21–24; 44:9–20; Jer 10:1–16). Yahweh
predestined the nation of Israel among all the peoples on earth to be His chosen and holy people
(Deut 7:6; 14:2), a light to the rest of the world (Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought, 93,
234).
In the New Testament, predestination is salvific and christological (Shank, Elect, 198–200).
It is a loving act of God’s will (Acts 2:23) that occurs in Christ (Eph 1:11) before the creation of
the world, whereby God chooses, or elects, believers to be adopted as His children (Eph 1:4–5).
Predestination includes the goal of believers’ conformity to the likeness of Christ, such that
Christ will be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters (Rom 8:29).
During the Patristic and Medieval eras of Christian history, single predestination, or
predestination of the elect to eternal glory, was widely affirmed, with theologians split between
predestination based on God’s foreknowledge of future belief and predestination based on God’s
foreordination without reference to foreknown future acts (Allison, Historical Theology, 454–
56). Although most Muslims opted for predestination based on foreknowledge, some opted for
divine determinism of all human acts, good and evil alike, while others opted for human control
of all free choices, even precluding divine foreknowledge.
In the Reformation era, John Calvin (1509–1564) taught an unconditional double
predestination of the elect to eternal glory without reference to foreknown good, along with
predestination of the non-elect, or reprobate, to eternal destruction without reference to
foreknown evil. Calvin’s position was challenged by Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) and later John
Wesley (1703–1791), who maintained a conditional single predestination of the elect based on
divine foreknowledge of their faith (McGrath, Christian Theology, 467–69). A mediating view
between Calvinism and Arminianism was posited by Luis de Molina (1535–1600), who
maintained the compatibility of double predestination and human freedom by positing God’s
possession of middle knowledge, or scientia media (MacGregor, Systematic Theology, 66).
In the contemporary period, Karl Barth (1886–1968) delineated a reformulation of double
predestination, in which Jesus Christ is both the elected man and the electing God. By choosing
damnation for Himself at the cross, Christ chooses salvation for each individual. In Barth’s view,
all persons—including those who persist in their rejection of Christ—ultimately will be saved, an
observation that led critics to accuse Barth of universalism (McGrath, Christian Theology, 470–
72). The possibility, though not certainty, of universalism has been affirmed by the Catholic
theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) and the evangelical author and pastor Rob Bell
(1970–). However, the vast majority of evangelical theologians have rejected universalism, both
actually and possibly, based on the clear teaching of the New Testament that some persons will
go to hell (Matt 13:42, 50; 23:33; 25:41, 46; 2 Thess 1:9; Rev 20:15; 21:8).

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Early Hebrew Conceptions
In Genesis 12:1–3, God elected or predestined Abraham and his family to be a great nation
through which all the peoples of the earth would be blessed. As Andrew Hill and John Walton
point out, the Pentateuch affirms that Yahweh did not choose Abraham because he was more
righteous, more faithful, or more deserving than any other person. Rather, Yahweh’s election of
Abraham was an act of pure grace (Hill and Walton, Survey, 74). Likewise, God elected Jacob
and his lineage (i.e., the Israelites) to primacy over Esau and his lineage (i.e., the Edomites)
before the twins were born (Gen 25:23). A common theme in the Pentateuch and the Historical
Books is Yahweh’s sovereign election (‫ ָבּ ַחר‬, bachar) of the Israelites to form a theocratic nation
(Deut 4:37; 10:15; 1 Kgs 3:8). Such election of a people differs from the concept of election in
nonbiblical ancient Near Eastern texts from Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, and Assyria. In these
sources, divine election almost exclusively occurs in relation to political leaders. Thus, King
Shulgi of the Ur III dynasty (2094–2047 BC), the Egyptian King Sesostris I (1971–1928 BC), the
Middle Assyrian King Assur-nirari III (1202–1197 BC), the Middle Assyrian King Assur-resh-
ishi I (1132–1115 BC), and King Pi, who conquered much of Egypt (ca. 730 BC), all claimed to
be predestined to kingship by a prominent deity or deities from the time of their conception or
childhood (Brunner, Near Eastern Religious Texts, 28; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature,
116; Tadmor, History, 39). In the Pentateuch and the Historical Books, such election to office is
seen in God’s sovereign choice of Saul (1 Sam 9:17) and David (1 Sam 16:7–12) as kings of
Israel (Deut 17:15). The Pentateuch expands this election to include the priestly office, divinely
bestowed upon the Levites (Deut 18:5; 21:5).
Later Developments
In the Prophetic Books, individuals and nations are elected by God to specific tasks. Yahweh
chose Jeremiah to be a prophet before he was being formed in the womb (Jer 1:4–5). The servant
of Yahweh in Isaiah, a term which which sometimes refers broadly to Israel and sometimes
refers specifically to Israel’s Messiah, is called by Yahweh (Isa 42:1) before he was born and
while in his mother’s womb (Isa 49:1, 5). Underscoring the universal nature of Yahweh’s rule,
the prophetic books also depict Yahweh’s predestination of Gentiles, both groups and
individuals, to certain tasks (Paul, “Deutero-Isaiah,” 184). Hence Assyria was chosen by Yahweh
to chastise rebellious Israel (Isa 10:5–6), and King Nebuchadnezzar II is called Yahweh’s
“servant” (Jer 25:9; 27:6; 43:10) in conquering Judah, destroying the First Jerusalem Temple,
and exiling the survivors to Babylon (586 BC). The most celebrated instance of this phenomenon
is God’s election of the Persian King Cyrus (538 BC) to liberate the Israelites from the
Babylonian Exile and allow them to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple (Isa 45:1–7,
13). The pentateuchal concept that Israel was elected into an unbreakable covenant (‫ ְבּ ִרית‬,
berith) with Yahweh, or a reciprocal relationship embodying features of a marriage and a
contract, received expansion throughout the Prophets (Isa 24:5; 42:6; 54:10; 59:21; Jer 33:21;
Ezek 16:8; Zech 9:11; Mal 2:4). Jeremiah and Ezekiel prophesied that, following the Babylonian
exile, God would make a new covenant with His people in which they would be given new
hearts and God’s law would be written on their minds (Jer 31:31–33; 32:40; Ezek 36:26–27; Hill
and Walton, Survey, 431, 446).
Intertestamental Period through Time of Christ
The intertestamental period saw the rise of three major religio-political groups—the Pharisees,
the Sadducees, and the Essenes—each of which held a different view of predestination. The
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Pharisees maintained that God mysteriously predestined everything that occurs, but in such a
way that authentic human freedom is not undermined. Thus the righteous freely choose to be
righteous instead of evil, and the evil freely choose to be evil instead of righteous, but God
somehow predestines the righteous to their righteousness and the evil to their wickedness. Both
the Sadducees and the Essenes were uncomfortable with this tension, with each group choosing
one extreme over the other. The Sadducees affirmed human freedom and denied God’s
predestination of any event. The Essenes affirmed God’s predestination of every event and
denied human freedom, such that all things are divinely fated to occur and humans cannot do
other than what God has preordained. Of these groups, the Essenes were most clearly affected by
the Graeco-Roman philosophical doctrine of fate, though arguing that God, and not the Greek
Fates (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) or the Roman Fortuna, meticulously predetermined
everything that happened (Levering, Predestination, 15–17).
New Testament Developments
Several texts in the New Testament seem to clearly affirm that God predestined (προορίζω,
proorizō) those who would be saved. When Paul and Barnabas preached to the Gentiles in
Pisidian Antioch, “as many as had been destined for eternal life became believers” (Acts 13:48
NRSV). Paul explained the occurrence and purpose of predestination as follows: “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. 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 NRSV). The following chapter implies that God’s deliberate choice to predestine some
to glory means God’s non-choice of others (Spencer, “Predestination,” 950). Thus Romans 9:6–
13 indicates, on the one hand, God’s choice of Isaac, Jacob, and his descendants and, on the
other hand, His non-choice of Ishmael, Esau, and his descendants.
Further, some of the people of Israel were saved but others were not, as “the elect obtained it
but the rest were hardened” (Rom 11:7 NRSV). A prominent figure whose heart God hardened
was the pharaoh of the exodus (Rom 9:17–18; Exod 4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 14:4). Election entails
rescue from sin and guilt and receiving the gracious gifts of salvation. Throughout the history of
the church, the Pauline claim that God predestined those whom He foreknew (Rom 8:29) and the
corresponding Petrine claim that the elect “have been chosen according to the foreknowledge
[κατὰ πρόγνωσιν (kata prognōsin)] of God the Father” (1 Pet 1:2 NIV) have been understood
either as God’s choosing and therefore personally knowing the elect in advance (foreordination)
or as God’s knowing various truths about possible future persons and predestining them on that
basis (Carson, Divine Sovereignty, 253). Moreover, the New Testament suggests that
predestination affects the angels, for righteous angels are called “the elect angels” (1 Tim 5:21
NRSV).
Early Church
In considering the biblical texts on predestination, the early church strongly emphasized human
free will and self-determination while simultaneously asserting the sovereignty of God. Hence
the early church typically associated predestination with God’s foreknowledge of what
individuals would do or become. Justin Martyr (AD 100–c.165) and Irenaeus (c. AD 135–c. 203)
taught that God elects some persons, knowing before the foundation of the world that they would
be righteous, and that God does not elect other persons, knowing before the foundation of the
world that they would choose darkness. Realizing that Paul’s quotation of the exodus account
appeared to ascribe to God a greater function in human salvation or damnation than simple

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foreknowledge, Origen (AD 185–254) explained that God’s hardening the hearts of the non-elect
(like Pharaoh) logically follows the inherent principle of wickedness in those persons.
Accordingly, there are no conditions that can deterministically cause the human will to do either
good or bad, and whatever God makes of people is the consequence of preceding causes, i.e.
their own free and responsible choices to be righteous or to continue pursuing evil (Allison,
Historical Theology, 454–55).
The Apocatastasis and the Origenist Controversy
Another solution to the problem of predestination was offered in the late second or early third
century: God does indeed predestine everyone, but He predestines them all to salvation. This
became known as the apocatastasis: “the return to the original condition.” While the hope that
all would be saved took many forms. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, and
Gregory of Nyssa all seem to have held it to some extent or other (Sachs, 1993). None of these
fathers of the church explicitly teach this as something to be believed; rather, they express hope
in the infinite mercy of God.
From these early beginnings, some (who came to be known as the Origenists) took the idea
to its logical conclusion, and asserted that hell itself was reformative, not punitive. Augustine
wrote against this last, most fully developed form, summarizing it as the idea that “those whom
the Lord has said are to be punished with eternal pain—and the devil himself and his angels—are
to be freed after a long age to reign with the holy ones and enjoy the company of God” (De gestis
Pelagii). This belief was associated with Origen, but it is impossible to determine whether he
thought of it in the same way as those who later were known by his name. This final form—
including the salvation of the devil—was formally anathematized at the Synod of Constantinople
in 543, and condemned more generally (as a condemnation of Origenism) at the Second
Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 553.
Pelagianism and Augustine’s Response
Developed in the context of the Pelagian controversy, Augustine (354–430) articulated a doctrine
of predestination in which the believer’s faith in Christ is itself the effect of God’s gracious
choice. Prior to his interaction with the British monk Pelagius (c. 360–c. 420), Augustine
followed the early church’s conviction that predestination was based on foreknowledge. In other
words, he initially held that God looks out over the sweep of time, sees who will exercise their
free choice to accept Christ, and then elects them on that basis. However, this view was altered
through his refutation of Pelagius’ claim that humans are not born with a sinful nature inherited
from Adam and so do not have to fall into sin.
In response, Augustine proffered a doctrine of original sin in which Adam and Eve, by
rebelling against God, destroyed their mental faculty (and that of their posterity) to do anything
spiritually good—including freely accepting Christ. As a result, humans, in and of themselves,
are free only to choose anything on the limited spectrum from things that are both spiritually and
physically evil to things that are spiritually evil yet physically good (e.g., giving to charity to
attain self-recognition), but it is logically impossible for them to choose anything spiritually
good.
Since no one out of the fallen mass of humanity is able to believe through their unaided
volition, God chooses to elect certain individuals by giving them operating grace, which so
restores and strengthens the will that they voluntarily turn to Christ (MacGregor, Systematic
Theology, 22–24). Hence salvation and regeneration are entirely monergistic, where God is the
only worker and renewer of the will. Grace is given not because an individual believes but in

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order that an individual may believe, making faith itself a gift of God. Holding to single
predestination, Augustine did not believe that God decreed to damn anyone; the non-elect’s
reprobation occurs by permission only. However, those whom God does not elect simply remain
in their sin and ultimately merit eternal condemnation. To the charge that selective predestination
is unjust, Augustine appealed to divine mystery and insisted that, inscrutable as it may seem to
us, there is no injustice with God (McGrath, Christian Theology, 349–50).
Medieval Developments
Medieval theologians were reluctant to embrace Augustine’s doctrine of predestination. Finding
Augustine’s selective predestination in contradiction to 1 Tim 2:4, John Cassian (ca. 360–435)
asserted that it was blasphemy to maintain that God does not generally will all persons, but only
some, to be saved. In 529, the church convened the Synod of Orange to settle the conflict
between Augustinianism and Pelagianism. While siding with Augustinian theology on most
issues and taking a decidedly anti-Pelagian stance, the synod distanced itself from Augustine’s
doctrine of reprobation and maintained that, through baptism, people are given sufficient grace to
overcome the limitations of original sin and freely choose to embrace Christ (Allison, Historical
Theology, 457–59). This sacramentalizing of sufficient grace for salvation rendered anyone who
was baptized as potentially elect and largely eliminated the scandal of persons not being chosen
by God. By positing baptism as the ground of predestination (ratio praedestinationis), Anselm
(1033–1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) were able to maintain that God so providentially
orders the world as to choose who will be baptized (and thus be potentially elect) and who will
not be baptized, though this choice is actualized through the instrumentation of human beings.
Aquinas
Aquinas held that God is able to be provident because He completely transcends time. In the
eternal presence of pure actuality, God knows all creatures that He chooses to exist in time, and
God knows the providential ordering whereby He directs them toward their end or goal. Hence
the causality of God, who is the first agent, extends to all being. In Aquinas’ view, God’s love is
causal, as His love for the beings He creates consists in His will to communicate His own good
to others as far as possible (Levering, Predestination, 76). In this way God directly wills the
salvation of the elect, who choose to receive God’s love through the means of grace at their
disposal. Aquinas thus maintained that God predestines a person to salvation by arranging
whatever states of affairs help that person to freely reach salvation (Allison, Historical Theology,
461). That certain creatures are non-elect is solely due to the creatures themselves, who
voluntarily cause their own salvific failure by choosing not to believe in Christ and participate in
the sacramental life of the church. Aquinas also continued Augustine’s doctrine that God through
grace was able to move the human will to good—not by overcoming the freedom of the human
will, but by making it free to choose Him. As Matthew Levering points out, for Aquinas, “God’s
transcendent causality makes possible, rather than impairs, the freedom of created causality”
(Levering, Predestination, 78). So God permits the damnation of the non-elect without willing or
being morally responsible for it.
The Black Death
Since children were regularly baptized in medieval Europe, the emotional baggage surrounding
reprobation was practically rendered irrelevant for all living within Christendom. However,
Augustine’s doctrine of predestination was revivified as a result of the Black Death (1347–1350),
wherein one-third of Europe’s population perished in the bubonic plague. Since many of those
who died, although baptized, had not received the last rites, they were popularly thought to have
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perished in a state of mortal sin and were destined for hell. Pre-Reformation theologians like
John Wycliffe (ca. 1330–1384) and Jan Hus (ca. 1369–1415) argued that baptism was not the
ratio praedestinationis and did nothing to ensure one’s election. Wycliffe and Hus insisted that
people could not indirectly control divine election through baptism or through sacramental
reception in general, as election was purely the sovereign choice of God. Consequently, only
God knew who out of the institutional, visible church belonged to the true or invisible church
(Allison, Historical Theology, 577).
Reformation
The Reformation witnessed the greatest controversy over predestination and the widest diversity
of views on predestination in the history of Christianity. This diversity included renewal and
strengthening of Augustine’s position, reaction against this revived Augustinianism, and
mediation between Augustinianism and human free choice.
Martin Luther (1483–1546)
Trained as an Augustinian monk, Luther largely embraced Augustine’s doctrine of
predestination. This was especially seen in Luther’s debate with Desiderius Erasmus (1466–
1536); although Erasmus affirmed human freedom, Luther insisted that humans lack free will.
For Luther, this was a doctrine of comfort, as believers’ salvation may be taken entirely out of
their control and placed under the control of God alone. If our salvation lay under our control,
Luther averred that no one would be saved, since the devil would overpower everyone. But
because God’s predestination cannot fail, believers have unassailable hope in the face of sin.
Subscribing to unconditional election, Luther held that God’s decision to elect particular
individuals lay in His “dreadful hidden will,” which is not to be speculated over but to be
reverently adored (Luther, Bondage, 168). From personal experience, Luther was aware of the
distress that many of his contemporaries experienced concerning whether they were elect.
Luther’s antidote to this worry was for people to grasp God’s promise that Christ has rendered
satisfaction for their sin, given them His innocence and righteousness, and redeemed them from
death. Luther stated that everyone who clung to this promise could unmistakably infer that God
had empowered them to do so and therefore elected them from the world’s foundation (Kolb,
Luther, 102–104).
John Calvin (1509–1564)
Intensifying Augustine’s position, Calvin defined predestination as God’s eternal decree by
which He determined by Himself whatever He willed to happen with every person, creating
some persons for eternal life and others for eternal damnation. Calvin held to an infralapsarian
model of predestination, in which God first understands humans as fallen and therefore lacking
the mental faculty to accomplish spiritual good. Then God actively decrees to save some and
damn others in a double predestination. This predestination is part of the eternal and immutable
decree of God, established prior to the existence of those affected by the decree. Predestination is
unconditional because it is based on God’s free decision, not on anything in the elect or the
reprobate. Election occurs in order to make people holy, not because they would be holy
(Grudem, Systematic Theology, 677). Moreover, reprobation occurs for no other reason than that
God wills to exclude certain persons from the inheritance that He predestines to His children;
reprobation is not simply a matter of divine permission, as Augustine held (Calvin, Institutes,
3.23.1).
Calvin’s approach to predestination is very anti-speculative and is rooted in a conjunction of
his Augustinian doctrine of original sin and the data of Scripture rather than metaphysical
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conjecture. Anticipating possible objections to his doctrine of predestination, Calvin warned that
humans must not pry into the secret counsels of God and that humans must not go beyond the
boundaries of Scripture, instead embracing a “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia) of what
God has chosen not to reveal (Calvin, Institutes, 3.21.2). To the charge that predestination makes
God unrighteous, Calvin appealed to divine voluntarism in maintaining that the will of God is the
supreme rule of righteousness, such that everything God wills must be held righteous by the
mere fact of His willing it (Calvin, Institutes, 3.23.2).
Jacob Arminius (1560–1609)
Greatly troubled by Calvin’s double predestination, Arminius affirmed that election is based on
God’s foreknowledge of those who would believe in Christ and persevere in faith throughout
their lifetimes. Arminius expressed his own understanding of predestination under four divine
decrees.
1. God decreed to create the world and to appoint Christ as Redeemer, Mediator, and Savior to
pay for the sins of the world.
2. God decreed to save everyone who would receive Christ and continue in their belief.
3. God decreed to give all future persons the means (i.e., the Word, sacraments, and so forth) to
believe in Christ, making grace available to all.
4. God decreed to save particular persons based on His foreknowledge of who would believe
and persevere (Allison, Historical Theology, 468).
For Arminius, election does not occur apart from anything in the individual, making his model of
predestination synergistic (the joint result of human and divine activity) rather than monergistic.
Although denounced by the Reformed Synod of Dort (1618–1619), Arminius’ model would be
embraced by the General Baptists and the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (1703–1791).
Luis de Molina (1535–1600)
Offering a mediating position between Calvin and Arminius, Molina employed middle
knowledge to posit both God’s double predestination and the free choice of all persons to believe
or not believe in Christ. Molina defined God’s middle knowledge (scientia media) as His
knowledge, grasped logically prior to making any creative decisions concerning the world, of all
things that would happen in every possible set of circumstances. This includes knowledge of
how every possible free individual would respond to God’s prevenient grace, or grace that
overcomes the effects of the fall and supplies the ability to accept Christ’s salvation. Molina
viewed no possible individual as bad enough that he or she would freely spurn God’s grace in
every conceivable circumstance and no possible individual as good enough that she or he would
freely embrace God’s grace in every conceivable circumstance. Accordingly, middle knowledge
provides the key to God’s sovereign individual predestination. Thus for any possible individual,
God has the power to elect that individual by creating her or him in certain freedom-preserving
circumstances where God already knows the individual would voluntarily embrace His grace.
And God has the power to reprobate that individual by creating that person in other freedom-
preserving circumstances where God already knows he or she would voluntarily spurn His grace.
And God has the power not to create that individual at all by actualizing other circumstances
where the individual does not exist. This choice of circumstances (leading to salvation,
condemnation, or nonexistence) is unconditioned by anything about the individual, but depends
solely on the sovereign will of God (MacGregor, Systematic Theology, 72–79).

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Muslim Perspectives
Understood by most Muslims in a synergistic way, qadar (“destiny”) is the concept of divine
predestination in Islam and is the last of the six major articles of Islamic faith. Traditionally,
Muslims have affirmed that God possesses knowledge of everything in His creation, that God
gives humans free will, and that qadar exerts no causal influence over the choices people make.
However, the choices people make all belong to the domain of God’s knowledge. God
manifested qadar in writing the Preserved Tablet (al-Lauḥ al-Maḥfūẓ), which contains all that
has happened and will happen and will come to pass as written. However, a person’s action is
not caused by the contents of the Preserved Tablet. Instead, the action causes its inclusion in the
Preserved Tablet, due to God’s foreknowledge of all events without temporal restrictions. Hence,
mainstream Islam denies that God predestines anyone to hell. People will only enter hell on
account of the sins they freely committed, and no one will be responsible for the misdeeds of any
ancestor such as Adam.
There are only two Islamic groups representing the logical extremes concerning qadar. The
Islamic analogue to hyper-Calvinism, Al-Jabiriyah contends that people possess no control over
their actions, all of which are deterministically dictated by God. The Islamic analogue to open
theism, Al-Qadiriyyah, contends that people possess complete control over their actions and that
even God lacks knowledge of what humans will freely choose to do (Piamenta, Islam, 147–49).
Modernity
Karl Barth (1886–1968)
Rejecting the historic view of predestination as the absolute and unsearchable decree of God,
Barth put Jesus Christ at the center of predestination, such that Christ is Himself the divine
election of grace. Barth maintained that before time and space and before there existed any
reality distinct from God, God determined within Himself that the goal and meaning of all His
dealings with the universe was that in Christ, He would be gracious toward and unite Himself
with humanity (Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, 101–103). Barth asserted that Jesus Christ is the
electing God and that He is also the elected man. As the electing God, Christ elects all humanity
within Himself. According to Barth, Jesus “himself is this good pleasure, the will of God in
action.… He is not merely the revelation of the mystery of God. He is the thing concealed within
this mystery, and the revelation of it is the revelation of himself and not of something else”
(Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, 104). As the elected man, Christ is passively elected, not merely
as one of the elect but as the definitive Elect of God. For Barth, therefore, Christ does not stand
alongside the rest of the elect, but stands before and above them as the one who is originally and
properly the elect. In His human nature, Christ elects all the rest of humanity. But in order to
accomplish humanity’s election to salvation, Christ must also be elected to suffering. This causes
the wrath of God, under which all humans lie, to be transferred from all eternity to Christ in
whom God loves and elects them, and whom God elects at their head and in their place (Allison,
Historical Theology, 472).
Barth’s doctrine of election included the election of the community of Jesus Christ, made up
of Israel and the church. It also included the election of every individual, such that every sinful,
godless, and unrighteous person who rejects God’s election will have their rejection reversed by
the divine election of grace. In fact, Barth claimed the gospel of the church for man is the of the
impossibility of the choice to reject God and His election in Jesus Christ: “It testifies to him, in
opposition to his own choice, the gracious choice of Jesus Christ as the beginning of all God’s
ways and works, and therefore the futility of his desire and undertaking.… He cannot reverse or

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change the eternal decision of God—by which he regards, considers and wills man, not in his
isolation over against him, but in his Son Jesus” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/2, 316–17).
Hence, Barth was charged by his critics with teaching universalism, which he denied by invoking
God’s absolute freedom.
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988)
In his 1989 Dare We Hope Balthasar revisited the idea of the apocatastasis, pointing out that the
only version of the belief that had been formally condemned was the one that claimed hell was
reformative and the fallen angels would be saved. Regarding the question of human salvation, he
proposed that we consider the question of eternal damnation from the standpoint of God, asking
what God would lose if He loses any human being. In Jesus Christ, God has revealed His desire
to save all humanity. Influenced by Barth, Balthasar claimed that God—as absolute love—has
enmeshed Himself in the drama of human salvation even to the point of being abandoned and
dying a sinner’s death in our place. While granting that the loss of a segment of humanity is a
real possibility, Balthasar held that such a loss would constitute an unspeakable tragedy for God
and for each Christian, who is united in Christ to each member of humanity. Granted a share of
the mission of Christ in their baptism, Christians are called to hope and pray for the salvation of
all humans (Balthasar, Dare We Hope, 64–68).
While predestination is clearly part of the depositum fidei (deposit of faith), Balthasar argued
that a close reading of the biblical texts renders unwarranted the necessary limiting of
predestination to only a segment of humanity. That is, the portions of scripture that threaten
damnation are to be taken seriously as descriptions of the proper end of a stubborn refusal of
grace—but that they do not state that God, whose grace is irresistible in its sweetness, ever
allows anyone to die without softening this stubbornness. Thus, Balthasar insisted that while
Christians should view the prospect of eternal punishment with fitting awe, they should also hold
out hope that all humanity is predestined in Christ, the firstborn of all creation.
He is careful to distinguish hope from knowledge: “Brothers and sisters of Christ, created by
the Father for Christ, who died for them in atonement, may fail to reach their final destination in
God and may instead suffer eternal damnation with its everlasting pain—which, in fact, would
frustrate God’s universal plan of salvation. If we take our faith seriously and respect the words of
Scripture, we must resign ourselves to admitting such an ultimate possibility, our feelings of
revulsion notwithstanding” (Balthasar, Dare We Hope, 237).
Open Theism
Like those in the Arminian-Wesleyan camp, open theists conceive of predestination as corporate
rather than individual; but unlike those in the Arminian-Wesleyan camp, open theists do not base
corporate predestination on God’s foreknowledge of future contingents. Corporate election
maintains that God does not choose which individuals He will save before the foundation of the
world, but God chooses the church as a whole. Hence God chose before the world’s creation that
a group of people would be found by God through faith in Christ, namely, the church. God
elected to save this group, and it is up to each individual as to whether they join the group (Rice,
Foreknowledge, 52). The debate between open theists and Arminian-Wesleyan thinkers centers
on whether God foreknew prior to the world’s creation which individuals would become part of
the church and so receive His predestination. While Arminian-Wesleyan thinkers argue that God
foreknows the future choices of all persons, open theists claim that such foreknowledge would
lead to fatalism. However, this claim has been powerfully challenged by William Lane Craig,
who maintains that God’s mere knowing how persons will choose in advance exerts no causal

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power over their choices (Beilby and Eddy, Foreknowledge, 128–132). Nevertheless, open
theists like Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, John Sanders, and Richard Rice have avoided the
problem of fatalism by redefining predestination to mean God’s predetermination on behalf of
those who are or will be Christians, not who will believe or how certain persons become
Christians (Basinger and Basinger, Predestination, 159).
Rob Bell (1970–)
In his 2011 Love Wins, Bell questions whether the notion of eternal, conscious torment is an
essential truth of the Christian faith. Although Bell does not claim any particular view of hell as
his own, he does say that “it is fitting, proper, and Christian” to long for all to be saved (Bell,
Love, 111). Denying individual predestination and combining corporate predestination with the
potential for the reconciliation of all things (ἀποκατάστασις πάντων, apokatastasis pantōn), Bell
shares the view of Balthasar that Christians should hope that all human beings find
predestination through Christ. In this, he has been both criticized and defended by various
scholars both inside and outside the evangelical movement.
Implicitly denying Augustinian-Calvinism, Bell argues that Christians ought to seriously
question any conception of God according to which only a select few go to heaven by God’s
choosing them instead of others (Bell, Love, 64–70). But such a conception is not held by
Molinists, Arminian-Wesleyan thinkers, or open theists, most of whom affirm the existence of
hell by maintaining instead that many creatures freely choose to separate themselves from God
forever, a choice that God mourns but permits. Despite Bell’s questioning, most Christians
regard the existence of hell as firmly attested in Scripture and thus an indispensable article of the
faith.
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KIRK R. MACGREGOR

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