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Rev. Galley has recently finished a very interesting and lively course on the subject of Predestination. This is also known as Unconditional Election and sometimes as Selective Salvation. It is a very difficult and complex subject, fraught with mysteries and seeming parodoxes, but it is one of the core doctrines that the Presbyterian Church professes in its Confessions, particularly the Westminster Confession of Faith. It serves us all well to become familiar with this important and confusing subject.

This page does not attempt to go into all of the details and issues that were covered in the class but instead intends to point you to on-line resources where you can find out more about this controversial subject for yourself. And it is very controversial - hundreds (maybe thousands) of books and papers have been written about it, denominations have been created and splintered because of it, people have died for their beliefs either for or against it, etc. Almost no one professes to completely understand it, and very few, once exposed to it, profess to be comfortable with it. The reason is that it runs contrary to the innate character belief in man that man has a completely free choice in his destiny - free will. According to Predestination man does both have a free will and he does not. If you can understand that, then you're doing better than I am and you probably don't need this page.

Before you begin, keep this quote from Loraine Boettner in mind...

So, what is Predestination? In it's simplest form, you could say that it means that God chooses those who will be saved. No one can choose by and of themselves to be saved. A logical extension of this leads to the concept of Double Predestination - if God chooses those who will be saved, then He must also "not choose" those who will not be saved, whatever that might mean. I will not try to define either of these beyond that – you can use all of the sources given below for that. A comprehensive, and surprisingly a very clear and lucid and readable description of both can be found in Section III of the Westminster Confession of Faith entitled "Of God's Eternal Decree". There is a very good on-line version of the Westminster Confession of Faith here. Look at Chapter III. The Confession is short and sweet and I would recommend that you start there.

(It's interesting to note that the Westminster Confession of Faith does not completely take the full step to Double Predestination. The Confession says that men are "predestined" to salvation (God choses them for salvation) but that the unsaved are merely "foreordained" (which presumably means that God knows that they won't be saved but He is not given the blame – He didn't chose them for that fate). The concept of being rejected by God without hope of salvation is known as reprobation.)

As a next step in your studies, I highly recommend an article by Jane Dempsey Douglass, a professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. It provides a very good overview of the history of predestination, where it stands now in the Presbyterian community, its future (or lack thereof) and why it is important. You can view the article here. An article by Dr. Michael Horton, an associate professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in California is also very informative and helpful. It is here.

The Westminster Confession of Faith is a successor to the Canons of the Synod of Dort. There is an interesting article about the Dort Synod here. You can find the actual Canons themselves here. I myself have never found the Dort stuff to be all that helpful or illuminating.

There is a popular misconception that John Calvin (1483-1546 A.D.) is the "father" of predestination. He is not. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) advocated it in his writings, preceding Calvin by roughly twelve hundred years. The doctrine can also be found in many writings of the early church fathers and in all of the Gospels, in the sayings of Jesus and in the Old Testament. In fact, the concept of predestination is not even central to any of Calvin's writings. It appears that he himself had a considerable amount of difficulty with it. Nevertheless, he did, in the end, espouse it and you can find it in his later writings. (He really had no choice in the matter – it is a logical conclusion of his other doctrines.) The most famous of Calvin's writings is the Institutes of the Christian Religion. You can find a very good on-line version of the Institutes here. You want to look at Book III, Sections 21-24 for his thoughts on predestination. This site is a little confusing to navigate at first, but once you get the hang of it it's very useful and helpful. If you don't like that site, try this one.

(Another misconception is that Calvin founded the Presbyterian Church. He did not. Fellow by the name of John Knox (1505-1572) did that in Scotland. There is a wealth of information about Knox on the web. Here are two: English Bible History of John Knox. and John Knox - from the Catholic Encyclopedia (definitely Catholic-biased but informative nonetheless.)

You should also be aware that there is an alternative to Predestination and it is called Arminianism. It was primarily formulated by a man named James Arminius (1560-1609), although, as in the case of Calvinism, the Arminian ideas go well back to the early church fathers and Arminius was not the first to propose them. As best I can understand it, Arminianism seems to say that God is all-sovereign except in the matter of man's free will – man has complete free will (and ability) to either accept or reject God and/or Christ. Arminians seem to agree with almost all other principles of Calvinism except for the five "TULIP" biggies – Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints. Variations of Arminianism can be found in today's Methodist Church and in the Society of Friends (Quakers), among others.

Be warned, however, that before you jump into the Arminian camp because you are appalled about what Calvinism says and you feel that Calvinism is completely illogical and un-Biblical, almost every contradiction to the Calvinistic position can be raised in regard to the Arminian position. The common and typical problems and questions of whether or not man has complete free will or God is really all-powerful and all-knowing or can God create evil or does God really consign some people to hell stil raise their ugly heads even in the Arminian position. They don't go away – they just change form.

There is a fellow by the name of Loraine Boettner, D.D.a who is a predestination defender and who has written a number of books on the subject. I find his writings very helpful. You can find his The Reformed Doctrine Of Predestination here. And a number of his articles and sermons are here. He writes very well on the subject and he is very readable and understandable.

In all of my predestination studies, I kept coming across references to John Bunyan's (1628-1688) Pilgrim's Progress. It was written while Bunyan was imprisoned for preaching without a license and was published in 1678. It is said that Pilgrim's Progress "is second only to the Bible itself in number of copies sold through the ages and through out the world". I could never understand how a mid-seventeenth century work of fiction could be of any possible value in today's world. But then I read it. All I can say is that is an amazing allegorical presentation of the whole concept of predestination and salvation. You can find an on-line copy of it here. Many other of Bunyan's writings are available here.

For an opposing view (non-predestination), I found this book very good: God's Strategy in Human History by Paul Marston & Roger Forster, Wipf and Stock Publishers (no on-line version).

If you do enough investigation into the concept of predestination, sooner or later you will discover that down through the years it has been thought of as a "dangerous" concept. Even many churches which hold it as one of their doctrines seem reluctant to preach it, and many rarely do. There seems to be a thinking that 1.) It's too difficult to grasp (it is) and therefore is almost impossible to teach (again, probably true), and 2.) Many people will reject it based on its surface appearances (they probably will). I myself think that's not a very Biblical way to go about things. It is clearly a Biblical concept – you don't have to search very hard to find Scripture proofs for it. And the fact that it might be difficult, or even impossible, to understand doesn't seem to me to be a very good reason to not teach it and hide it away. There are many other difficult concepts in the Bible which are difficult to understand, sometimes apparently contradictory and lacking explicit description that almost all churches teach (the concept of the Trinity is one such example). I believe that if it's in our doctrine then we should try to understand it and somehow come to terms with it. You can't do that by hiding it away.