cristian84:
I was wondering what the church’s teaching on predestination is, and how does it differ from the protestant understanding on predestination.
The Catholic Encyclopedia article is a good place to start.
Basically all Christians believe in predestination (except for those recent theologians who deny God’s foreknowledge; but that’s an unorthodox position, although I’ve heard a priest teach it in RCIA). Predestination means that people are saved because God has graciously chosen to direct their lives toward the goal of eternal life.
The question is whether predestination is based on God’s foreknowledge of our acts (i.e., that God sees that we will respond to grace, and chooses us because of that). This is probably the view held by most Christians today. But historically Western Christian theologians (the Orthodox really haven’t given it a whole lot of thought, as far as I can tell) have seen huge problems with this (ever since Augustine), because it makes God’s gracious predestination of us dependent on our (logically) prior works. (Logically prior means that on which something is based, even if it happens later. So if God foresees that I will respond to grace and persevere in it, and chooses me on that basis, then my actions were logically prior to God’s choice.)
So the vast majority of classic Western theologians–including the two greatest Western theologians, Augustine and Aquinas–have held that God’s choice to save certain people is logically prior to their actions. I respond to grace (the grace that is offered to all people) because God has chosen me, not the other way round. Aquinas’s way of putting it was that God’s knowledge is causative–God doesn’t know things happen because they happen, rather they happen because God knows them (this applies to everything; Augustine was more narrowly interested in the problem of human salvation).
This raises two serious problems. First, it’s generally agreed among Christians that some people, tragically, will reject God’s grace and be lost (though some recent Catholic theologians have suggested that we can
hope that all will be saved, which would put a whole different light on this entire discussion). The view I’ve been describing (which is usually called the “Augustinian” view or “predestination ante praevisa merita”–predestination without regard to foreseen merits; I’ll refer to it as PAPM for short) leads inevitably to the conclusion that in some sense it’s also God’s choice that leads to those people being damned. The Catholic Church has made it very clear that this
cannot be followed out to its logical conclusion. In some way theologians who teach PAPM
must distinguish between the way God causes human beings to be saved and the way He allows (note the different verb) other human beings to be damned.
For theologians with broad philosophical interests, like Aquinas, this shades into the more general problem of evil. Note that Aquinas thought that all Divine knowledge is causative–things happen because God knows them. But it would seem to follow that evil things can’t happen, or if they can that God can’t know about them. Both Augustine and Aquinas held, like Plato, that evil is a privation of a good–it’s a sort of hole where a good ought to be rather than a thing itself. Aquinas could use this idea to argue that God does not cause or know evil because evil isn’t a thing. Rather, evil happens when a created thing falls short of the perfection for which it was made (this includes everything from a cow failing to give milk all the way to a serial killer on a rampage). As I understand him (and I got nailed for my discussion of Aquinas on evil on my preliminary exams five years ago, so I may still be all wet on this), Aquinas thought that God “causes” evil in the sense that He allows the created thing to fall short–he doesn’t move within it in such a way as to produce the good in question. God “causes” evil by inaction, which in Aquinas’s metaphysics isn’t causing it at all, since God is never obligated to act in creation (except of course where He has already promised to do so). Similarly, God “knows” evil by knowing that the corresponding good isn’t there. He doesn’t know Hitler’s hatred of Jews directly–He sees the (presumably rather few) good qualities in Hitler, and since there are so few He knows indirectly the vast gaping holes where the other virtues ought to be.
