Does God predestine us to salvation?

Ok, so I said I wouldn't be blogging as much. But I received an interesting e-mail from a reader who wanted to know my positions on predestination and free will. I have worked this out from time to time in other settings, but this e-mail gave me the chance to try and condense it into as few words as possible. My sense is that in Protestant evangelicalism, Calvinist predestinarians vastly outnumber Wesleyan Arminians. In the mainline church, people generally don't get into such potentially divisive issues as the manner of election. But since I come from a mainline church with an evangelical wing in it (and since I have some evangelical leanings myself), I think it's important to take this issue up. There's a lot at stake, after all.

Here is the gist of the response I sent to my reader:

The problem of election and predestination is, indeed, one of the biggest theological conundrums the church has had to face. It goes back at least to St. Augustine, over 1500 years ago. I am not a predestinarian, and in this I follow Wesley's Arminian take on Calvinist election. I'll explain where I stand as best I can, but I also want to point you to a couple of excellent Wesley sermons where he makes a case much better than I can. They are "Free Grace" and "The Scripture Way of Salvation." The first sermon argues against predestination as contrary to the character of God, and the second gives a positive explanation of how God's grace works preveniently, in our justification, and in our sanctification.

The problem with predestination begins with how far you take it. Some have argued that God predestines all to eternal salvation. This is called universalism, and it has never been accepted by the church (although contrary to what some people think, it is not a modern invention. Very respected church fathers such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa subscribed to a form of universalism). But if you reject universalism, you are forced to deal with how and why God elects some to salvation and not others. Most predestinarians who follow the logic of predestination all the way through (and Calvin was one of these) admit to what is called "double predestination", meaning that God elects some to salvation and others to perdition. That is, if we take God's sovereignty seriously, we must admit that he is in control of everything. By his will, some are eternally saved and others are eternally damned.

And it is at this point that Wesley disagreed based on the character of God. It doesn't really work to just cite Scriptural texts back and forth. Those texts (particularly from Romans) that speak of predestination can be easily countered by other texts that support the opposite point of view. For instance, free will theologians take Psalm 145:9 very seriously: "The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works" (KJV). Or they point to 1 Timothy 2:1-6, which reads (in part), "This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, the testimony to which was borne at the proper time" (RSV). But again, prooftexting only gets us so far. The question is, how to we interpret these texts?

Wesley, and Wesleyans (like myself), cannot abide by the notion that a God whose name is Love (1 John 4:8) would elect some of those who he created in his own image to eternal perdition. Indeed, the notion of creating beings in order to cast them into the fire makes God into a monster. "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23, RSV).

How, then, is salvation possible? Surely human beings who are corrupted by sin do not have the ability to choose God on their own. Left to our own devices, we will always choose Death over Life. And in fact, Scripture is adamant that our salvation is a gift from God and not the result of our own works (Ephesians 2:8). But the nuance that it is important to make is in how God's grace works on us. Grace does not begin to work in our lives when we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. That may be the moment of our new birth, but it is the result of something God has been doing preveniently since the moment of our conception ("Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" - Jeremiah 1:5, RSV). That grace heals us to the point where we can respond to God's call upon our lives. When we accept Christ, it is only because we have been restored by grace to the point that we can take those first tentative steps of faith. But when we received God's justifying grace and thereby are born anew, we can begin to walk the path of sanctification that brings about a more fully restored will within us.

You'll often hear Wesleyans talk about prevenient grace, justifying grace, and sanctifying grace. They're not talking about three different kinds of grace that have qualitative distinctions between them. They are rather speaking about the instrumental working of grace in our lives. And it is through God's prevenience that our free will is restored to the point of accepting the free gift God offers us of salvation.