Contrasting the Catholic and Reformed views of predestination, reprobation, and the elect

With an excursus on freedom and foreknowledge

Above: “The Last Judgment” by Michelangelo (1475–1564) in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.

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Author’s note: an insanely busy season has come to a close, as our old house sold and we are a month into a new home! I will be resuming my Whelton review in the coming week or so. I hope you enjoy the following essay—or at least find it helpful.

The Catholic view

The Catholic view begins with the universal salvific will of God:

… it is his will that all men should be saved, and be led to recognize the truth. (1 Timothy 2:4)

God so loved the world, that he gave up his only-begotten Son, so that those who believe in him may not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

He, in his own person, is the atonement made for our sins, and not only for ours, but for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:2)

God's will, spoken of in these passages, is antecedent (or prior) to the actual circumstances involving sin and free choice. The fact that God desires (antecedently) that all be saved does not mean that all will (consequently) be saved. This is a distinction between the antecedent and consequent (i.e., all things considered) will of God.  

Moreover, if God wills an end (universal salvation), then He provides the means to that end. Therefore, there is a universal means for salvation.

The elect refers to those chosen as objects of mercy or Divine favor and set apart for eternal life. I imagine that Reformed folks would agree with that much. As to how predestination and reprobation relate to the elect, the Catholic position allows for several viewpoints, so long as they remain consistent with three revealed truths or doctrines:

(a) At least in the order of execution in time (in ordine executionis) the meritorious works of the predestined are the partial cause of their eternal happiness; (b) hell cannot even in the order of intention (in ordine intentionis) have been positively decreed to the damned, even though it is inflicted on them in time as the just punishment of their misdeeds; (c) there is absolutely no predestination to sin as a means to eternal damnation.¹

The Council of Trent described predestination as a profound mystery, in the sense that God's judgments on the matter are inscrutable. That is why the Catholic Church allows varying interpretations within the limits of revealed doctrine.

Among the various interpretations debated in Church history, I find the following most plausible.

Providence concerns the ordering of things to their proper ends, so that they achieve them. Predestination is a part of providence. Specifically, it is God ordering (i.e., directing) man to his supernatural end, eternal life or union with God, which man is unable to attain on his own. St. Thomas Aquinas used an analogy of an archer who directs his arrow towards its target. (The obvious difference being that we, unlike arrows, are rational agents with free will.) ² 

Predestination, then, includes two things:

1. God’s loving will to give grace, given to all, by which the elect are saved. The grace is sufficient for each person but not equal among persons.

2. God’s foreknowledge of our cooperation with or resistance to that grace.

So, roughly, the elect are those that are predestinated, and predestination has two causes. 

• The first and principal cause is God who bestows the grace by which we may attain the eternal life that we are meant for.

• The secondary cause is our free cooperation with—or our free lack of resistance to—God’s grace.

God reprobates on account of foreseen sins and persistent resistance to the grace bestowed. And He predestines on account of foreseen cooperation with grace, which leads to real merits produced in us (e.g., the fruits of the Spirit). The logical ordering, based on the Romans 8:29-30, is foreknow, predestine, call, justify, and glorify, each one being ordered to the next one after it. 

But while God only predestined those He foreknew would cooperate with grace and persevere to the end, He has called many that did not cooperate and were not justified, and has justified many that did not persevere in justification and therefore were not glorified. "Many are called, few are chosen" (Matthew 22:14).

As Saint Francis de Sales put it: 

[God] willed all to be saved who would cooperate with the grace and favours He imparted to that end… God has prepared Paradise for those He foreknows as His; let us strive to be truly His in faith and in works, and He will be ours in glory. And it rests with us to be His; for though it comes of God’s Gift, He never refuses that Gift to any, but offers it freely to all who will heartily consent to receive it.

Without doubt, God prepared heaven only for those whom He foresaw would be His... But it is in our power to be His: for although the gift of being God’s belongs to God, yet this is a gift which God denies to no one, but offers to all, and gives to those who freely consent to receive it.³

This view might be called predestination post prævisa merita, and reprobation post praevisa demerita. Or, perhaps more clearly, conditional predestination and reprobation. God bestows sufficient grace to all, but all are free to resist it. The merits do not include freely cooperating with grace, but rather the fruits of the Spirit that follow regeneration, which comes from the cooperation.

The Reformed view

The Reformed view, as I have understood it, is very different. It maintains that predestination is based solely on God's will that some receive efficacious (i.e., irresistible) grace and be saved, while others do not. Moreover, the others are positively reprobated, not on account of foreknown sin or resistance to grace, but on account of God simply willing that they be damned—His consequent will. Grace is irresistible and not bestowed on all; it is the sheer will of God to bestow on some but not others. 

Finally, God causally determines every sin. The reprobate sin because they are causally determined to sin, and they suffer eternally because they sin; therefore, they suffer eternally because God causes them to sin. And the predestined enjoy heaven because they are causally determined through irresistible grace to be among the elect. 

That view might be called predestination ante prævisa merita, and reprobation ante praevisa demerita. Or, perhaps more clearly, unconditional predestination and reprobation, sometimes referred to as double predestination and reprobation. 

The Catholic Church condemns the Reformed position because it 

denied the universality of God's salvific will as well as of redemption through Christ (Wisdom 11:24, 1 Timothy 2:1), nullified God's mercy towards the hardened sinner (Ezekiel 33:11; Romans 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9), did away with the freedom of the will to do good or evil, and hence with the merit of good actions and the guilt of the bad, and finally destroyed the Divine attributes of wisdom, justice, veracity, goodness, and sanctity.⁴

Moreover, long before Protestantism, the Church consistently opposed the idea that God predestined men to hell and sin in the same way that He predestined the elect to heaven. The Reformed view is thus a novel one. 

Excursus: Freedom and Foreknowledge

You might wonder: if God reprobates on account of foreseen sins and persistent resistance to grace, and if He predestines on account of foreseen cooperation with grace, then wouldn’t His foreknowledge rule out human free will? St. Thomas Aquinas provided a helpful distinction which clears away one reason for thinking that free will is incompatible with divine foreknowledge. Consider the following:

1. If God foreknows that I will do X, then it is necessary that I will do X.

2. It is necessary that, if God foreknows that I will do X, then I will do X.

Think of the necessity operator—that is, what necessity attaches to—as meaning what must be the case no matter how the world might have turned out. If Christianity is true, then God would exist no matter how the world turned out, since God is necessary. Mathematical truths are necessary, so 2 + 2 = 4 would be true no matter how the world might have turned out. 

When we distinguish necessity in the two statements above, we see that the first statement is the reason why many would think that foreknowledge eliminates free will. But that statement is false, since God foreknows many things that might have been otherwise. The second is true, but by itself it poses no problem of incompatibility. The conditional as a whole is necessary, not my doing X.

1. Pohle, J. (1911). Predestination. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12378a.htm

2. Feingold, Lawrence, STD. "Man Elevated to Share in the Divine Life: Talk #9 on Predestination." The Mystery of Israel and the Church, Association of Hebrew Catholics Lecture Series, Series 9, Fall 2011.

3. Treatise on the Love of God, 3.5.

4. Pohle, Predestination, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1911).