PREDESTINATION, a theological word, used to denote the eternal decree of God, whereby "the elect" are foreordained to salvation. The co relative decree, whereby others are held to be foreordained to perdition (though it might with perfect correctness of language be included under the same term), is commonly distinguished by the other term,. reprobation.
The theory of predestination had, like the doctrine of election (q.v.), 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 omnip otence. 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 salva tion, therefore, God's will is everything; man's, nothing. 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 recognized 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 west ern church; but the reaction against the strictly logical, yet essentially unmoral, 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. In the days of the schoolmen, the discussions of the Scotists and Thomists—after the reformation, the contests leading to the condemnation of Arminius in the council of Dort, and the widening separation that now divides the disciples of Calvin from those theologians who hold broader and freer views on the subject of the atoneinent—indicate the impossibility of the human reason and conscience ever resting satisfied with a merely and absolutely logical theory of the relations between the will of God and the moral responsibility of man. The tendency of modern inquiry seems to be to abandon the dis cussion of a point so obviously incapable of being determined by human intelligence, and to pursue, instead, examination into the moral and practical bearing upon our human conditions of that which we are able to learn concerning God and his will. The moral meaning of that will is of vital moment to men; the extent of its power over their own wills they, apparently, cannot determine.