While the church claims that (CCC 1307) “God predestines no one to go to hell, for this, a wilful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it till the end.” The paragraph goes on to talk about the church’s prayer for mercy in order that “all might come to repentance.”
Despite this, I have doubts in a way. I’ve said a number of times that my father appeared the night he died. At the end he gave this terrifying scream and disappeared. I think he’s in hell, for the simple reason that as far as I know he persisted in quite a number of mortal sins right to the bitter end, including cruelty to his own family.
However during the proceedings, he blurted out at one stage “I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!” Later however, he said, “I was WILLING”. My old pastor said, “I think he was VERY willing…” So that’s the “willing” bit taken care of.
But it doesn’t explain the bit about “always was doomed…” and about which I argued on that particular night. His immediate response was “Oh, it’s right, all right. You can see that from here!”
So let’s take someone like Kim Jong Il, the current leader of North Korea. Now he was born the son of Kim Il Sung, the original dictator of modern North Korea. As the heir apparent to an atheist, cruel regime, wth lots of privileges thrown into the bargain, and with negligible chance to hear the Gospel, in the face of intense persecution, what was the likelihood he was going to be “saved” as the fundamentalists would say?
I’d say it was almost nil. In one sense he was predestined to be lost by virute of being his father’s son. Oh, he’s willing, but the background to his life almost ensured he would not gain entrance to heaven.
Hitler? Pathological personality, which means he lacked components of a properly functioning conscience in the first place. Born into a period of history where he was caught up in World War I, and then lived through the humiliation of the Weimar Republic, unemployment, and taught extreme nationalism even at school. Again, in his case, how “free” was he?
Yet in the same class in lower school at one stage was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who would become one of the 20th century’s most notable philosophers. I don’t know if Wittgenstein became a Christian, but he certainly didn’t follow Hitler’s extreme example.
So I don’t know. I suspect predestination is operable. After all God has a plan. If that plan depended on nothing more than sheer free will, it would amount to nothing but chaos. Therefore there must be a principle at work that overrides the unmitigated expresssion of our free wills.
Even at the core of our daily existence, we are not free of physical constraints - we need air, water, food, clothing, and all the rest, and for most of us, a large part of our life is concerned with the means of obtaining those things. The system has been set up that way. So we are forced to do things we may not always enjoy doing by sheer necessity to begin with.
Is this free will? Or were we predestined to such constraints by a much higher intelligence when He was planning the whole scenario?
I think both predestination and free will operate. My father seemed to say so. He may have been predestined, but he was also VERY willing to do the cruel and stupid things that he did.
We’re left with the statement. “My ways are not your ways. As far as the heavens are above the earth, so are my thoughts above your thoughts”.
