Maybe some truth to "once saved, always saved"?

[porthos11]

Hi porthos,
Predestination and reprobation are truly catholic teaching. St Paul talks about predestination in the New Testament. The teaching of the Church on reprobation is that God predestines some men to eternal punishment on account of foreseen demerits. But reprobation must be understood according to God’s sincere and vehement universal salvific will to save all men. The CCC#1037 says “God predestines no one to hell.” God predestines no person to hell in advance or an absolute manner in any way whatsoever.
Theologians have struggled throughout the history of the Church on reconciling the doctrines of God’s foreknowledge, predestination, grace, and free will.
The CCC#600 simply says “To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination”, he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace.” I think this one sentence reconciles the doctrines of God’s foreknowledge, predestination, grace, and free will.

The older thomists and molinists theories on predestination cannot be reconciled with God’s universal salvific will to save. Their theories on predestination survived into the 20th century and probably in some circles even to today. These theories arose at around the time of the grace controversy in the Church which took place in the 16th century. It was a controversy on how grace is efficacious and took place between the Jesuits and Dominicans. The Dominicans led by Domingo Banez said that grace was of two kinds, namely, sufficient and efficacious. Efficacious grace infallibly moves man to perform a good act. Sufficient grace does not move man to perform a good act. To perform a salutary good act, God must give man an efficacious grace. By eternal decrees of His will, God predestines some men to heaven by giving them efficacious grace. For those who are not saved, God merely gave them sufficient grace. This can hardly be reconciled with God’s universal will to save nor even with free will.

Molinists on the other hand, defended free will and said that there is one grace, namely, sufficient grace. Sufficient grace becomes efficacious if man does not resist it but freely responds to it. Molinists were right on this point. They said that God foreknows if a person will resist or not resist His grace by His middle knowledge. If God puts a person in a certain set of circumstances and gives this person a certain grace, He knows whether that person will either accept it or not. The same grace given to a person in another set of circumstances may refuse the grace. Since God created the entire order of the world, He infallibly knows who will get to heaven or not. The same person who may get to heaven in one world order could be lost if God had created another world order. Whether a person is saved or not is entirely dependent on which world order God creates. For example, suppose God wants to save Mark. God creates a world order and places Mark in a certain set of circumstances by which Mark will infallibly accept God’s grace. God could have created a world order in which Mark would not be saved. Again, this theory cannot be reconciled with God’s universal salvific will to save all mankind.

The grace controversy was brought to the Pope. But the Pope, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, refused to decide on the matter and decreed that both the Jesuits and Dominicans could continue teaching their respective doctrines and that neither side should declare the other side heretical.

One of the principle problems for both the Jesuits and Dominicans was a doctrine they adhered too called “principle of predilection.” Why God saves one person and not another is simply because He loves one person more than another. Of course, this cannot be reconciled with God’s universal will to save nor with man shaping his own eternal destiny by freely resisting or not resisting God’s grace.

As the CCC#600 says: “When therefore he establishes his eternal plan of “predestination”, he includes in it each person’s free response to his grace.”

This statement of the CCC Fr. William G. Most elaborates on in his book "Grace, Predestination, and the Salvific Will of God. Fr Most goes over the history of these doctrines throughout the history of the Church and presents a solution corresponding to the CCC. I highly recommend the reading of the book. Fr. Most’s solution to the whole problem is simply this: man can resist or not resist God’s grace which is exactly what the CCC states.

blessings and peace, Richca

That’s what I’ve been stating all this time.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

I agree with that Pope who refused to take sides.

Hope to be back in December after eye surgery rids me of cataracts.

God bless you all. My prayers for you.

 

[tonyrey]

I agree with that Pope who refused to take sides.

Hope to be back in December after eye surgery rids me of cataracts.

God bless you all. My prayers for you.

We shall be praying for you, Charlie.

 

[N0X3x]

No, it doesn’t make sense. God doesn’t micro-manage our lives that way. If He did, you’d be seeing a slew of people dropping dead on the way out of the confessional.

That’s a very interesting question.

Of course, that would mean that all who are baptized in infancy are saved–that if God knows that an infant will eventually fall into sin and go to hell, God will cause that person to die in infancy. Indeed, even if people who grow up to commit great sins are eventually saved, in some cases one could argue that it would have been better for them to have died in infancy. Hitler comes to mind–even if somehow Hitler did not go to hell, it seems clear that he was closest to God when he was baptized in the Catholic Church as an infant than he was at any time during his adult life–even leaving aside the great harm he did to others!

In other words, the evidence seems clear that God can’t be expected, necessarily, to work this way.

Good point. It doesn’t seem that the evidence shows that God operates this way…

or does it?

I wonder what would happen if we researched every dead Catholic to see how recently they had been to confession before they died, and compared that to the average length of time between confessions.

If the results show that Catholics generally die soon after confessions (relative to half the national average length of time between confessions)… well, I think those results would be enlightening.

This is why the doctrine of predestination, particularly in its Molinist form, is so much more complicated than most people realize. If God chooses to allow a person to die outside in a state of grace, even though He knows that under other circumstances the person would have died in a state of grace, then we do indeed have a kind of predestination to damnation.

Quite right. The idea that God lets people die without consideration to whether or not they are in a state of grace seems to me to be a contradiction to God’s salvific will. if God truly desires all people to be saved, then he will, to the best of his ability, ensure circumstances in which their salvation comes about.

 

[N0X3x]

There is not one human who has ever lived that was incapable of committing, and dying in mortal sin.

Most human beings die before even making it out of the womb. I don’t see how these people have the ability to commit mortal sins before their death.

 

[N0X3x]

They said that God foreknows if a person will resist or not resist His grace by His middle knowledge. If God puts a person in a certain set of circumstances and gives this person a certain grace, He knows whether that person will either accept it or not. The same grace given to a person in another set of circumstances may refuse the grace. Since God created the entire order of the world, He infallibly knows who will get to heaven or not. The same person who may get to heaven in one world order could be lost if God had created another world order. Whether a person is saved or not is entirely dependent on which world order God creates. For example, suppose God wants to save Mark. God creates a world order and places Mark in a certain set of circumstances by which Mark will infallibly accept God’s grace. God could have created a world order in which Mark would not be saved. Again, this theory cannot be reconciled with God’s universal salvific will to save all mankind.

I agree with what others have said about most of the content of this post. It seems like a good summation of everything said up to this point.

My only contention is with the bolded sentence. Suppose there is no possible world where circumstances are such that all human beings can be saved. If this were true, God might create people in this world that he knows would be saved in other circumstances, just because he can’t save everyone and has to go with the world that maximizes people saved.