For me, free will and predestination are challenging topics that I have never comprehended properly. When I read the following points in the chapter “Karma, Fate, and Free Will,” it further complicated the subject. However, as a bhakta, I always trust the Lord that everything works for me as I love Him. I wrote the above song in response to my reasoning on free will and predestination.
In Christian theology, we know how the controversy over free will and predestination dominated the theological field for a long time, and that even now there are those who follow the rigid predestination theory of Calvin. But by and large, it raged for some time and has since abated. “Two aspects are to be clearly distinguished from the start: the divine prevision which belongs to the order of knowledge, and predestination which involves much more. In the latter, God is envisaged as the creator and conserver of the world, the primary mover who moves all secondary causes, including the human will. He moves the will in such a way that its free decisions are ultimately effects of God’s primary causality. This is true of any human life as a whole, as well as of each individual decision.” {Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopaedia of Theology (ed.), 1969, Vol. V. P. 88.} [No publisher information is given—db]
From Bhattachari:
“As a consequence of original sin, mankind is assigned to predition but God saves from this massa dammata those whom he his {has?} marked out for salvation and these are infallibly saved. The number of the elect is predestined from eternity. God does not positively reject the rest, but permits them to assign to predition because of their sins. What appears primarily as an abstract metaphysical truth is in fact the concrete field of the subtle interplay of grace and freedom.” {Karl Rahner, 1969, pp. 88-90. No other information is given in the bibliography–db}. Theologically, this statement is wholly untenable because of its many self-contradictory statements, God has decided whom he will save; therefore, the rest will not be saved, but damned; so logically they are automatically doomed from the beginning of time i.e. long before their birth. How does God permit them to earn the doom through their own sins? A verisimilitude of free will is introduced: men get doomed through their own sinful actions. But by the very logic of the first premise, viz. God’s prior selection of whom he will save, the rest are pushed to sinful acts. They never had any real option from the teleological point of view; their option was essentially fate. Hence this pre-selection is not only a prevision, but a predestination which goes all the way from the doomed man’s pseudo-choice of moral action, his inevitable sinful choice and then his ineluctable dom. There is neither fair play nor grace in the cases of those who even before they commit one single sinful act are preordained to destruction. Free will is a mere eye-wash; it fails to take in any logically thinking mind. “It is man’s power of reason which is the basis of his free will, and free will is found in (p.100) neither plants nor animals,” {Boughton, G., Primitivism and Related Idem in Philo-judacus. John Hopkins University, 1946, p. 13}. This power to reason is an essential prerequisite of freedom of will and this is what is tacitly denied in fatalism. Neither a bening Providence, nor kindly Gods, nor a mechanism or power which dispenses justice would allow blind fate to co-exist with the freedom of human will which is pre-conditioned by human intelligence.— Sukumari Bhattachari, Fate and Fortune in the Indian scriptures, New Delhi, Foundations Books, 2014, pp. 100-101
The following is the response from Dr. Hoefer for this posting:
Muslims believe that nothing happens except that God wills it. They believe in absolute predestination, and there is nothing one can do to change it. Yet, they speak of free will, which is self-contradictory.
According to our reading of Scripture in the Lutheran tradition, it is God’s will that all be saved (I Tim 2:3). All the passages that speak of predestination only present it as a word of assurance to believers, never as a threat of condemnation (cf. Eph 1:5 & 11, I Thes 5:9, I Pet 1:2, Rom 9:23). We do not move to the “logical” conclusion, however, that some must be predestined to hell if others are assured that they are safe for eternity. We will only say what Scripture says, and we will speak of predestination only in the way that Scripture does. In addition, the word used in conjunction with predestination is foreknowledge (Rom 8:29, 11:2), not fore-willing. It is a mystery, as you indicate, but it is not a frightening and foreboding mystery, but a word of assurance and certainty for us.
God bless.
Herb.
17-09-2020
Revised 10-7-2024
Gurukulam
For me, free will and predestination are challenging topics that I have never comprehended properly. When I read the following points in the chapter “Karma, Fate, and Free Will,” it further complicated the subject. However, as a bhakta, I always trust the Lord that everything works for me as I love Him. I wrote the above song in response to my reasoning on free will and predestination.
In Christian theology, we know how the controversy over free will and predestination dominated the theological field for a long time, and that even now there are those who follow the rigid predestination theory of Calvin. But by and large, it raged for some time and has since abated. “Two aspects are to be clearly distinguished from the start: the divine prevision which belongs to the order of knowledge, and predestination which involves much more. In the latter, God is envisaged as the creator and conserver of the world, the primary mover who moves all secondary causes, including the human will. He moves the will in such a way that its free decisions are ultimately effects of God’s primary causality. This is true of any human life as a whole, as well as of each individual decision.” {Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopaedia of Theology (ed.), 1969, Vol. V. P. 88.} [No publisher information is given—db]
From Bhattachari:
“As a consequence of original sin, mankind is assigned to predition but God saves from this massa dammata those whom he his {has?} marked out for salvation and these are infallibly saved. The number of the elect is predestined from eternity. God does not positively reject the rest, but permits them to assign to predition because of their sins. What appears primarily as an abstract metaphysical truth is in fact the concrete field of the subtle interplay of grace and freedom.” {Karl Rahner, 1969, pp. 88-90. No other information is given in the bibliography–db}. Theologically, this statement is wholly untenable because of its many self-contradictory statements, God has decided whom he will save; therefore, the rest will not be saved, but damned; so logically they are automatically doomed from the beginning of time i.e. long before their birth. How does God permit them to earn the doom through their own sins? A verisimilitude of free will is introduced: men get doomed through their own sinful actions. But by the very logic of the first premise, viz. God’s prior selection of whom he will save, the rest are pushed to sinful acts. They never had any real option from the teleological point of view; their option was essentially fate. Hence this pre-selection is not only a prevision, but a predestination which goes all the way from the doomed man’s pseudo-choice of moral action, his inevitable sinful choice and then his ineluctable dom. There is neither fair play nor grace in the cases of those who even before they commit one single sinful act are preordained to destruction. Free will is a mere eye-wash; it fails to take in any logically thinking mind. “It is man’s power of reason which is the basis of his free will, and free will is found in (p.100) neither plants nor animals,” {Boughton, G., Primitivism and Related Idem in Philo-judacus. John Hopkins University, 1946, p. 13}. This power to reason is an essential prerequisite of freedom of will and this is what is tacitly denied in fatalism. Neither a bening Providence, nor kindly Gods, nor a mechanism or power which dispenses justice would allow blind fate to co-exist with the freedom of human will which is pre-conditioned by human intelligence.— Sukumari Bhattachari, Fate and Fortune in the Indian scriptures, New Delhi, Foundations Books, 2014, pp. 100-101
The following is the response from Dr. Hoefer for this posting:
Muslims believe that nothing happens except that God wills it. They believe in absolute predestination, and there is nothing one can do to change it. Yet, they speak of free will, which is self-contradictory.
According to our reading of Scripture in the Lutheran tradition, it is God’s will that all be saved (I Tim 2:3). All the passages that speak of predestination only present it as a word of assurance to believers, never as a threat of condemnation (cf. Eph 1:5 & 11, I Thes 5:9, I Pet 1:2, Rom 9:23). We do not move to the “logical” conclusion, however, that some must be predestined to hell if others are assured that they are safe for eternity. We will only say what Scripture says, and we will speak of predestination only in the way that Scripture does. In addition, the word used in conjunction with predestination is foreknowledge (Rom 8:29, 11:2), not fore-willing. It is a mystery, as you indicate, but it is not a frightening and foreboding mystery, but a word of assurance and certainty for us.
God bless.
Herb.
17-09-2020
Revised 10-7-2024
Gurukulam
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