Every time we learn of a step forward having been made in the presentation, preservation, and passing on of our sacred Orthodox tradition, we are most grateful and want to do our part in helping others become aware of this progress. For this reason, we are pleased to include these reviews of books, magazines, and other media. This review page will be updated once a month (depending on the time it will take to thoroughly read one of the multitude of Orthodox books available to us.)
The following review is a response to a large number of
inquiries and "Questions to the Editor," received by E-Mail and
correspondence. We asked Rev. Dr. Michael Azkoul to review the
article in question, which appeared in both the journal Orthodox Life
and on an informational website.
The Fathers have very little to say about "predestination," that is, from all eternity God has foreseen who among the members of the human race would spend the Age to Come with Him (salvation) and who would find themselves forever alienated from Him. The Fathers never doubted that God's decision to save or to condemn was based on the Foreknowledge of human faith and conduct or, as some have put it, "on man's foreseen merits." The Creator respected human freedom and, therefore, His Foreknowledge was not compulsory; it was not predeterminative.
In the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo revised the Christian teaching on predestination. He declared that God's Foreknowledge and Predestination are the same. The Knowledge of God accounts for the existence, nature and destiny of all things; and with special regard to salvation, by His eternal, just and secret counsel, He has preordained the destiny of each human being. Salvation is wholly gratuitous and arbitrary, human choices playing no role whatsoever in His decision.
If the idea of predestination has become a "problem" for some modern Orthodox theologians, it is the result of their reaching beyond the borders of inquiry set by the Fathers. The "problem" has come to modernity from Augustine through the Protestant Reformation, especially Calvinism. What must we believe to put the matter of predestination in Orthodox perspective?
1.
"On Predestination" is an interesting article written by Bishop Elias Minatios. In it he stresses the importance of human cooperation in the process of salvation (synergy). He sometimes overstates the case for human freedom..."God is omnipotent in His authority. Man is omnipotent in his freedom" (3 of 8). Man is not "omnipotent in his freedom" if only because it is limited by sin and death. Man's choices are only as perfect as his dispassion. Thus, Bishop Elias' definition of predestination..."predestination is the combination of divine grace and human will of the grace of God which calls, and the will of man which follows this calling" (1 of 8)...demands a slight revision. He is right to explain predestination as the union of two fundamental components...the Grace of God and the will of man...but these need further clarification. First, the expression "the Grace of God" needs to be explained in specifically Orthodox terms...Grace as the Uncreated Energies...terms which his article neglects to supply. St Gregory Palamas argued that, "if the divine energies are in no way distinct from the essence of God, then neither will they be distinct from each other; thus the Will of God will not be distinct from His foreknowledge, and so, either God does not foreknow all things, because He does not will all that occurs, or else He wills evil also, because He foreknows all" (Theol. Chap 100, PG 150 1189D). The failure to distinguish Essence and Energy was precisely Augustine's error.
Again, Bishop Elias, although recognizing that ultimately predestination is a mystery and the human will is part of that mystery, sometimes says too little and sometimes too much. We know that man's desire for salvation is initiated by God, a fact which the Bishop fails to stress. He also quotes the book of Romans, 8:28 ("For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son..."), but ignoring the verse ("to them who are called according to purpose") does not tell us that the correspondence between the Divine and human wills is the precondition of salvation. "The elect are chosen according to purpose," St Cyril of Alexandria wrote, "the purpose of Him Who called as well as the purpose of those who are called" (Comm. in Ep. ad. 7. VIII PG 74 829A).
Neither does Bishop Elias tie the words "He did predestinate them to be conformed to the image of His Son" to the concept of predestination. "The image of His Son" refers to the Church. We recall that St Matthew quotes the prophet saying, "Out of Egypt have I called my Son" (3:15), alluding to the return of the holy Family from Egypt to Palestine, but also to the exodus of the Jews from the land of the Pharaoh as well as the "exodus" of the New Israel, the Church, from the world and the clutches of the devil; in other words, predestination unto salvation is always linked to the Church ("the image of His Son"). Bishop Elias cites Romans 9:13 ("Jacob have I loved, but Essau have I hated"); but like Augustine, he errs by identifying these two figures as the individual elect and the damned rather than two peoples, the Christian and Adamic races.
Finally, there is nothing more surprising in this essay than the Bishop's ignorance of or indifference to, the declaration of St John of Damascus concerning predestination. "We ought to understand that while God knows all things beforehand," writes St John, yet He does not predetermine all things. He knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but does not preordain them...predetermination is the work of the divine command based on foreknowledge. But, on the other hand, God predetermines those things which are not within our power in according with His prescience. For already God in His prescience has prejudged all things in according with His goodness and justice." At the same time, "He is the Source of all good" and "without His cooperation and help, we cannot will or do any good thing. Yet, we have it in our power either to abide in virtue and follow God, Who calls us into ways of virtue, or to stray from paths of goodness, which is to dwell in wickedness, and to follow the devil who summons but cannot compel us" (Ex. of the Orth. Faith, II, 30).
2.
Why does Bishop Elias make no mention in this essay of Augustine's theory of predestination? It is difficult for me to believe that he was unaware of it. Perhaps, he hoped to sanitize that theory or even disguise the true nature of it. His Grace may be attempting to protect Augustine from the accusation of heresy with the observation that "the teaching on predestination is a dogma of faith, based on the Sacred Scriptures" (1 of 8). To be sure, it is a teaching of Orthodoxy that predestination is the divine judgment based on Foreknowledge but which, unlike the doctrine of Augustine, involves no compulsion. Leaving the views of Augustine untreated, the Bishop makes no distinction between a God Whose actions respects His creatures freedom and a God Who compels in them both virtue and salvation by an irresistible Grace; and no distinction between the theology of Augustine and the theology of the Church.
Augustine's theory of predestination is grounded on the false premise that banished from Paradise after his sin, Adam bound his offspring with the penalty of damnation, an offspring stained with the sin by which he had corrupted himself. The human race, born through "fleshly concupiscence, received the fitting retribution for his disobedience. From himself and his spouse (herself the occasion of his sin and his companion in damnation), humanity was burdened with the original sin throughout the ages, burdened with the manifold errors and sorrows down to the final and endless torment with the rebel angels." The "damned lump of humanity" (totius humani generis massa damnata), totally depraved and hateful, could expect nothing else from the Justice of God (Ench., 26-27 PL 40 245).
But Augustine did not take seriously the conclusion whatever God knows must come to pass, and since He knows all things, He is responsible for the fall of Adam and the corruption of the human race. Instead the Bishop of Hippo takes refuge in paradox and mystery (ibid., 98-100 189). But then, who can be saved, inasmuch as everyone deserves condemnation if only by virtue of the "original sin"? Surely, it is not man's desire to be saved, Augustine acknowledges, not his "willingness to run, but of God's Mercy...meaning precisely that the entire process is credited to God Who prepares the human will and then helps the will thus prepared" (ibid., 32 248). Thus, God decides who receives Grace, who is elect and who is reprobate (damned to hell), and no mortal, deserving of nothing, may presume to judge Him. The saved or "elect" are called "according to His purpose" (Rm.8:28). Those Whom He chooses are preordained from all eternity to persevere in the irresistible Grace of God..."irresistible" because, if Grace were "resistible," the evil in men would cause them to reject His mercy.
Augustine reminds us that "God foreknew believers; but He chose them that they might be so, not because they were already so" (De praed. Sanct., XVII, 34 PL 44 985). We play no part in His predestination. "He made His choice according to His good pleasure so that none might glory concerning his own will, but in the richness of His grace and good will" (ibid., 37,987). "I speak thus of those who are predestined to the Kingdom of God," Augustine declared, "whose number is so certain that none may be added to or taken from them...the number of the elect is certain, a number which is neither augmented nor diminished" (De corr. Et grat, XIII, 39 PL 44 940).
As an Orthodox bishop, Augustine might have said that the "elect" are members of the visible and historical Church; but he did not. For him, those predestined to glory belong to the hidden and "true Church," the invisible Church, known only to God. Augustine is thus the precursor to the Protestant reform idea of the Church. Such an ecclesiology radically alters the traditional understanding of the Church and her Mysteries. His theory of predestination surely changes the patristic teaching on God and Christ.
3
Orthodox believers should not be intimidated by the word "predestination." It has never been central to Orthodox thinking, because from the beginning it was understood by the Church as a mystery, even as God Himself is a mystery. The creature cannot fathom the ways of the Creator. "O the depth of the riches of God, both His wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out" (Rm.11:33). Augustine cited such passages to justify his theological speculations; the Fathers employed them to limit human curiosity. Their writings on this subject are not "difficult," as Bishop Elias seems to think. Very simply, they teach that God's ways are not our ways, His thoughts not our thoughts. His "way of knowing" humanly described as "Foreknowledge"...God, not subject to time, having no past or future, knows all things as present...is completely unknowable to His creatures, whether angelic or human.
In other words, the omniscient God bases His decision of our individual destinies on the way we received Christ, obeyed His Church, and sought to make all men our brothers. Contrary to Augustine and his tradition, each person is indeed intimately responsible for whether God predestines him to eternal life with Him or endless life with the devil. In a sense, each of us "predetermine" his own fate by our love for Him and our quest for "the Grace of the Spirit," if I may quote St Seraphim of Sarov. The Mercy of God is that Christ died for the human race, since it is the Will of the Blessed Trinity (wishes?) that "all men come to the knowledge of the Truth and be saved." He has done all that can be done in Love (John 3:16) to rescue the creature from death and evil; by the Cross he destroyed him "that had the power of death, that is the devil" (Hb.2:14).
Fr Michael Azkoul
