PREDESTINATION, as a theological term is used in three senses : (I) God's unchangeable decision from eternity of all that is to be; (2) God's destination of men to everlasting happiness or misery; (3) God's appointment unto life or "election" (the appointment unto death being called "reprobation," and the term "foreordination" being preferred to "predestination" in regard to it). In the first sense the conception is similar to that of fate; this assumes a moral character as nemesis, or the inevitable pen alty of transgression. Sophocles represents man's life as woven with a "shuttle of adamant" (Antigone, 622-624). Stoicism formulated a doctrine of providence or necessity. Epicurus denied a divine superintendence of human affairs. A powerful influence in Scandinavian religion was exercised by the belief in "the nornir, or Fates, usually thought of as three sisters." In Brahmanic thought Karma, the consequences of action, necessi tates rebirth in a lower or higher mode of existence, according to guilt or merit. With some modifications this conception is taken over by Buddhism. The Chinese tao, the order of heaven, which should be the order for earth as well, may also be com pared. According to Josephus (Antiq. xviii. 1, 3, 4; xiii. 5, 9) the Sadducees denied fate altogether, and placed good and evil wholly in man's choice; the Pharisees, while recognizing man's freedom, laid emphasis on fate ; the Essenes insisted on an ab solute fate. This statement is exposed to the suspicion of at tempting to assimilate the Jewish sects to the Greek schools. In Islam the orthodox theology teaches an absolute predestination, and yet some teachers hold men responsible for the moral char acter of their acts. The freethinking school of the Mo'tazilites insisted that the righteousness of God in rewarding or punishing men for their actions could be vindicated only by the recognition of human freedom.
The question of the relation of divine and human will has been the subject of two controversies in the Christian Church, the Augustinian-Pelagian and the Calvinistic-Arminian. Pelagius maintained the free-will of man and regarded grace as only an aid to freedom. Augustine held that God's grace alone is effectual and irresistible; He chooses whom He will have (election) and whom He will leave to perish (reprobation or praeterition).
At the Reformation the Augustinian position was accepted by both Luther and Calvin. Melanchthon modified his earlier view
in the direction of synergism, the theory of a co-operation of divine grace and human freedom. Calvin wavered between the supralapsarian view that the fall was decreed in order to give effect to the previous decree of election and reprobation, and the sublapsarian of a "permissive decree—a volitive permission." This view repelled Arminius. According to Calvinism God's election unto salvation is absolute, determined by His own in scrutable will; according to Arminianism it is conditional, de pendent on man's use of grace. The Synod of Dort (1618-1619) which affirmed the sublapsarian without excluding the supralap sarian form of Calvinism, condemned the views of Arminius and his followers, who were known as Remonstrants from the re monstrance "which in four articles repudiates supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism (which regarded the Fall as foreseen, but not decreed), and the doctrines of irresistibility of grace, and of the impossibility of the elect finally falling away from it, and boldly asserts the universality of grace." In the Church of Rome the Dominicans favoured Augustin ianism, the Jesuits Semi-Pelagianism; the work of Molina on the agreement of free-will with the gifts of grace provoked a con troversy, which the Pope silenced without deciding; but it broke out again a generation later when Jansen tried to revive the de caying Augustinianism. The Church of England has passed through several disputes regarding the question whether the Thirty-Nine Articles are Calvinistic or not; while there is some ambiguity in the language, it seems to favour Calvinism. At the Evangelical Revival the old questions came up, as Wesley fa voured Arminianism and George Whitefield Calvinism. In Scot land Calvinism was repudiated by James Morison, the founder of the Evangelical Union, who declared the three universalities, God's love for all, Christ's death for all, the Holy Spirit's work ing for all.
While retained in the creeds of several denominations, in the public teaching of the churches the doctrine of predestination is less emphasized. The problem is the reconciliation of human freedom with divine foreknowledge. It has been argued that, if God allows His activity to be limited by human freedom, He may also so limit His foreknowledge as to know free acts as possible and not al actual.