A reader writes:
I was wondering if you could help me with a question about Church
teaching and destiny or the end of ones life. I hope this doesn’t come
off sounding stupid but… what does the Church teach, if anything, on
when we die.
If I am eating cold pizza for breakfast on Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at
7:57am, choke on a pepperoni and die. Did I die because I chose the path
to eat cold pizza this morning? Could I have gone on another day if I
had eaten Fruit Loops?
Or, was Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at 7:57am it was my TIME to go? So, if I
hadn’t eaten the cold pizza, at that exact time, I would have had a
heart attack, choked on a Fruit Loop, or an anvil could have dropped on
my head because my number was up and my choices in life had nothing to
do with my death.
Obviously the "choices" I am speaking of do not include actual dangerous
activities, smoking or anything like that.
If the Church doesn’t have a position on things like this, would you
please give me your opinion?
This is one where the Church has not formally advanced a teaching. The issue seems to involve two questions:
1) Does God predestine the deaths of individuals? and
2) Does God predestine particular ends or does he predestine the end with the means leading to it.
In regard to the first question, the whole subject of divine predestination is up in the air at the moment. We know that God does predestine things, but which things and the manner in which he predestines them is quite disputed.
Scripture uses language that at time seems to ascribe a greater role to God’s activity in predestining events, as if he were actively causing the event to take place, while other times it seems to ascribe a larger role to the choices of individuals, with God foreknowing and allowing the event and thus predestining it in a more passive sense.
In the Middle Ages the more active interpretation of predestination was assumed to be true. This was the position of Augustine & Aquinas, for example. While this view is still quite permitted, of late both theologians and the Magisterium seem to have been inclining more toward that more passive understanding of predestination. John Paul II and Benedict XVI (when he was a cardinal) have both said things that place strong emphasis on human freedom and responsibility and that suggest a view of God as allowing humans to make their choices rather than causing them to make their choices.
How that shakes out, only time will tell, but I don’t expect it to be resolved in my lifetime. The pressure to get a definitive settlement of how predestination works ain’t there at present (though this was a HUGE controversy a few hundred years back).
If one takes the more passive view then if you don’t eat the cold pizza (mmmmm . . . cold pizza)–or if you eat it more carefully than in your hypothetical–then you don’t end up dying.
But what if you take the more active view of predestination? Here is where the second question kicks in.
A number of years ago, back when I was a Presbyterian (and thus in a church that mandated an active view of predestination), I was once having a discussion with the pastor of the Church and its minister to college students. There were a number of really good theological minds in the congregation, and we often had discussions of a fairly theoretical nature. In this discussion the pastor was mentioning an idea that he’d heard from someone who suggested that if a particular person failed to preach the gospel to you then you wouldn’t have become a Christian.
He was very dismissive of this idea. Since certain people are, in the Presbyterian view, "the elect" (meaning that they are actively predestined from all eternity to come to God and be saved), it seemed to the pastor that it was inconceivable that someone not preaching the gospel to you would affect your salvation. Instead, somebody else would end up preaching the gospel to you so that you’d be saved.
The pastor was quite certain of this conclusion, but the college minister and I both instantly had a negative reaction to it.
On our view, the pastor was taking an unduly simplistic view of how divine predestination operates: Not only does God predestine particular ends (like your salvation) but also with those ends he predestines the means to their accomplishment (like Person X preaching the gospel to you).
Therefore, if God had chosen differently with regard to the means then the end is no longer guaranteed. If he hadn’t chosen to predestine Person X to preach the gospel to you, you can’t assume that he’d predestine somebody else to do so. Maybe he would, but maybe not. Your membership in the elect is not known to be a first-order divine decree around which other, more contingent events in the universe must arrange themselves.
It may be that it’s the other way around–that God has predestined the means that lead to your becoming one of the elect (e.g., someone preaching the gospel to you, you having the efficacious grace required to respond positively to it), and if you change those means then you change your status as a member of the elect.
It strikes me that the same would apply to the question of when one dies. Even on the more active theory of predestination, if God predestines you to die at a certain point then that might be a first-order divine decree that other, more contingent matters must adjust for (so that if the cold pizza doesn’t kill you, the fruit loops or something else will) or it may be that God predestines your-death-at-a-particular-time-and-by-a-particular-means, so that if you throw the means up in the air it takes the time of death with it.
On balance, since on the more passive view of predestination your not eating the pizza leads to you not dying, and since on the more active view of predestination your not eating the pizza may lead to you not dying, I suspect that if you don’t eat the pizza, you don’t die.
A couple of Thomistic notes: God is the first cause of all that is good. We are secondary causes of the good we do (but are real secondary causes)(though regarding the evil we do we are true first causes by privation).
Also to note is that God causes some things in a necessary manner and some things in a contingent manner. Or something like that.
I suppose the problem becomes exponentially more complicated if the pizza eater is a pilot currently transporting 200 passengers at 30,000 feet above sea level.
As an almost convert from Calvinism, I’m attracted to the active predestination view. Does anyone know of any books about Augustinianism that could tell me how much of Calvin’s version of Predestinaion I’m allowed to keep as a Catholic?
I’d recommend my book, The Salvation Controversy. As a former Calvinist myself, there’s a whole chapter in it devoted to exploring the (surprisingly high) degree to which Calvinist thought can be harmonized with Thomistic (and the Catholic) thought.
Doesn’t active predestination align with the once saved, always saved philosophy though?
The REAL lesson here: microwave your pizza, and you may just live forever.
Scooter: I do’t know what you mean by “align,” but if you mean “require” or “tend to requires” then the answer is no. There were all kinds of active predestinarians in history (Augustine, Aquinas), but nobody came up with the idea that you were irrevocably saved until Calvin. They recognized that it was perfectly possible to be predestined to come to God for a time without being predestined to stay with him till the end of life.
JohnH: Oh, yeah, and then you get pizza burns on the roof of your mouth and they get infected and you die from blood-born sepsis.
If our time of death is absolutely predestined, doesn’t that take the sting out of murder? Then if you murder someone, you are not ending their life prematurely or depriving them of anything (except perhaps a more pleasurable death).
Do you believe that ALL these babies that are being aborted were really destined by God to die before being born (and baptized)??
I think I’ll just pass on lunch today altogether…
Oooohh! Pizza Burn! I hate when that happens…
This discussion makes me nostalgic. My mother’s alma mater is Thomas Aquinas in Grand Rapids, MI, which is also the home of Calvin College where family friends attended – so this is predestination was discussed a lot.
I remember asking her about it as a young teen when the subject of South Africa came up in school. She explained that in its extreme form, predestination is a great excuse for abuse because “God destined that I be born into the ruling class and this other man in the oppressed class.” I’m not sure if it was she or a college professor who opined that the most Calvinist country, the Netherlands, is very open to euthanasia and drug use precisely because if one accepts that one’s life and salvation are pre-determined, nothing will affect one’s ultimate outcome.
When I finally read Calvin (after Luther), I was surprised how much it sounded like Jehovah’s Witness reasoning. That is, some people are chosen for heaven and others are junk for the fire – it doesn’t matter what they do or how they believe if they’re not destined to be saved. I was also a little shaken by the thought that if everything was preordained, God was a big ol’ jerk for giving us Commandments if it didn’t matter whether we followed them or not.
Jimmy, I just finished that book. It was excellent, and the TULIP chapter was very helpful, but I am now looking for something about only Augustinianism, which I hear is even closer to Calvinism than Thomism.
Well, on Predestination, there is a difference between ‘Single’ Predestination and ‘Double’ Predestination.
Martin Luther was an advocate of Single Predestination: God gives SOME the grace to have faith (and good works naturally follow). The others, by definition (Though this is not God’s intention) do NOT get that grace, do NOT have faith, and thus NOT good works and go to hell.
Calvin’s Double Predestination states that God actively chooses who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.
So…no. None of Double Predestination makes any sense in a Catholic aspect. I suppose the closest thing would be baptism, an ensuring (and helping) to grow closer to God.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Spain-turned-into-fantasy novel _The Curse of Chalion_ deals with this question. There’s a very striking scene which explains that a certain character had been called to fix a certain situation, and that he wasn’t the only one who’d been called. He was just the only one who kept on going where he was called.
(The other books in this series also deal with religious questions and the extrapolation of their answers — to the extent that some prefer to call them theological science fiction. I’m thinking about them a lot just now, as the third book set in this world is due out in about a week. Holy Roman Empire turned fantasy!
I will note that the Church is replaced in this series by fantasy polytheism, but this was done mostly to avoid the otherwise-inevitable consequences for writers today of casting Ferdinand and Isabella as good guys. Also, Bujold isn’t Catholic, so that probably helped her, too.)
The Hallowed Haunt is almost out!?!?!? Finally!?!?! Yeehaw! Thanks Maureen!
I found the second one kind of weak, but Chalion was fascinating and intelligent.
BTW, Bujold sometimes tells the story about how the first writing group she ever belonged to was this club loosely affiliated with the local Catholic Church that basically consisted of a bunch of sweet little old ladies writing religious poetry, and one teenager/young adult writing very fannish sf (namely Bujold herself). She says they were very accepting of her work, all things considered 🙂
The whole concept of predestination seems to be obviously illogical to me. Take a moment to reflect on a simple question. If creation’s (considering the whole and individual parts) ultimate purpose is to glorify God (arguably man’s purpose is to “Love God with all [our] hearts, minds and strength” which does also glorify him), then why would God predestine anything to occur that does not glorify him? For example, the fall of man does not seem to glorify God; it was an act of disobedience. The devil and/or atheists who curse God do not glorify him. Would God act against his own will by creating things to act in opposition to their purpose? (I understand one can argue that their purpose may be to do the evil which they do but then God would be the cause of evil–also problematic.)
It seems to me that predestination reduces creation to a simple puppet show with God as the puppet master. What would be the point of this? Putting its historical value aside, if one reads the first 3 chapters of Genesis, it seems pretty clear why God created the universe and that man had a choice.
Mark
Mark,
The reason certain events seem to work counter to God’s glory: Imagine you’re telling a joke. You can’t just jump straight to the punchline, or even tell a series of punchlines. Sometimes you have to set the stage for the punchline with some inane or mundane-sounding events. And yet these events are what make the punchline of the joke so funny.
I see the story of the fall and the redemption the same way. God’s salvation of man is amazingly glorious and shows how infinitely loving and good he is. But it wouldn’t have quite the same punch without the story of the fall, would it?
I do agree with you about the puppet show, though. I believe in human free will because I’ve experienced it often enough. God, from an eternal perspective, can look on all our lives and know how we live them. But that doesn’t mean that we have no freedom of action while we are acting. It makes some sense to me, although I can’t entirely wrap my mind around it, or probably even begin to express it adequately.
You never know how things are going to happen in a given day. A few years ago, I was looking for an apartment. At one place I looked at, I met the owner, who was semi-retired, but he and his son were maintaining the apartment. Never missing a chance to talk about God, somehow the conversation as we were looking at the apartment got onto the subject of predestination vs. free will.
We spent the next hour arguing and discussing about the two. The landlord kept trying to understand the idea that we don’t really have a choice in things (which I think he was not too happy about) and I kept trying to explain that we are both predestined, but have free will. In any case, I did not take the apartment.
I went back to my old apartment and began to think about the matter in considerable detail and did a lot of reading, as well, about all of the theories and history. I happen to be doing work on temporal logic at the time and this played into the conclusion I finally reached. It seems to work and it seems to resolve most of the difficulties, but of course, I could be wrong. Still, it is a different way of looking at things.
The principle problem with predestination and free will is that we are dealing with two different time frames (God’s and man’s) and they are only reconcilable, they only exactly intersect, non-negotiably, at exactly one instant – the moment of death.
Here is how it might work:
You are born and God floods you with graces for salvation. Some people get more proximate graces, some, more remote, some more efficacious, some more sufficient, depending on circumstances. Everyone has the same burden of forming a life that is pleasing to God, as best they can understand what pleases him. When you die, at the moment of death, you make a decision for or against God and playing into the decision are all of the habits and graces you have formed or received during life. Then, you present yourself to him in absolute, naked truth.
Now, God, in a sense, loves whatever he can see of himself in you, namely, supernatural charity, since this is the only thing you carry into the next life that has any connection directly to him. If you present yourself to God with supernatural charity in your soul, then it is that charity, which cannot be separated from its source (God), that demands that it be re-united with God in Heaven and it carries you with it. If you have no supernatural charity, God still loves his creation, but you have decided that you will not love him and so, even though you bear God’s image within you, you do not carry the love needed for the image to live in the presence of God and so you have an eternal contradiction in trying to both be and not be, of being loved but not accepting it. You are in Hell.
So, you die and are judged. Now here is the interesting part: when you die, you tell God which state you desire, Heaven or Hell, by your final disposition. God is infinitely loving and as St Paul points out: a) love is not rude and does not demand its own way and b) Jesus is all, yes. This may mean that when God hears your decision, he, in his great love, grants your decision, even if it means an eternity of separation from him.
The thing is, though, those two time frames intersect at this point. You see, if God knows something at one time, he knows it for all time. If he agrees with it at one instant, he agrees with it for all instances. Thus, since you asked for a certain end at the moment of death and God agreed to it, he will act in such a way as to bring that about throughout your entire life, because it is what you asked for. Thus, you are predestined, but you do it to yourself. God is active in bringing it about, because you asked him to. Thus, God predestines your life and so do you. You have free will in your life, but so did God when he accepted your final request.
Predestination and free will are the same thing, simply seen from two different perspectives. Just as Jesus was both predestined and totally free, so must we be. If Jesus unites God and man, then at the moment of death, when we are united to God as he agrees with our request, we also share in a similar relationship of time and eternity that Jesus did. So, our death and judgment is like Jesus’s in terms of how time and eternity unite.
We don’t have a name for the state of being simultaneously free and predestined, but they are not contradictory, by any means, as I have just shown. You are free and you are predestined. You simply do not know which until the moment of death. Then, it will all make sense. God knows how it will all turn out, because he has always known, but he will experience it, again, for the first time, when you die.
Different times can co-exist if one is a point and the other is infinite. The two times exactly cancel each other out, for that instant. That is the moment of death. It is a moment that both exists and does not exist in time. It is the intersection of time and eternity. It both determines and is completely free of all time.
Chew on this, for a while.
The Chicken
That should be:
You are free and you are predestined. You simply do not know which end you will chose, Heaven or Hell, until the moment of death.
The Chicken
Chicken,
If I follow you, you are saying that the choice you make at the moment of death determines (by the power of God) the course of your life prior to that moment of death? Interesting viewpoint.
I don’t think I agree though. It seems to me that we make free choices throughout our lives here on earth, and that the end result of those choices is the love or lack of love we have for God at the moment of death.
Your viewpoint, if I follow it, would be that we have one free choice in our lives, at the moment of death, and the course of our lives prior to that are determined by it rather than the other way around. An odd mix of Molinism and Thomism, I guess, though ultimately leaning towards Molinism in that free will is coming logically prior to predestination.
I myself lean towards a Thomist position of predestination coming logically prior to free will. As I see it, human choices are an inseparable part of God’s unalterable plan for history. I don’t buy the idea that our choices are distinct from that plan but somehow compinsated for. So much of history is directly affected by human choices. In this view our choices are free from an immediate viewpoint, but those free choices from a higher perspective are a part of that divine plan, are predestined. The way it’s different from a heretical kind of double predestination is that God mearly allows evil into his plan permissively to bring about a greater good, rather than ordaining it the way he ordains good things. So God does not predestine people to damnation in the same manner as to salvation, but both are predestined in a sense. This makes more sense than a “God predestines the elect to salvation but passes over the rest” concept and is closer to what seems to have been the belief of the early and medieval Church than Molinism, which is a fairly modern theological phenominon. At the same time I’m aware that it’s quite similar to Calvinism, though not quite so similar to Calvinism as Molinism is to Arminianism I think. And it still retains God’s desire that “all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” better than Calvinism.
No, my idea is not Molinistic or Thomistic, exclusively, but unites them. Neither the will or grace is dominant. It is grace that gets a man to death, but it is the will that allows for the grace that gets him there. Again, there are not two different competing processes, but a single process with two different sides. We don’t have a name for this and perhaps I am explaining this badly, but the action of grace and free will have suffered in their explanations from not considering the one thing that unites them: the co-existence of time and eternity. If time and eternity can be united in both, then the processes become united. One cannot have free will without grace, but one cannot have grace active without free will. They go exactly together. They form one coin. The Thomists are looking at one side; the Molinists at the other.
Personally, I like the Thomistic view better, because it is more closely connected with God’s actions, but salvation is a truly cooperative effort between God and man and so it is impossible to really separate predestination and free will. If people tell me where my explanation is unclear, I can try to refine it until we either find a contradiction or it becomes a plausible explanation.
At the moment, I am saying that it is not predestination or free will; it is not even both, separately. It is both, together and united. How that union takes place, thats the interesting part I’m trying to deal with.
The Chicken
Oh, by the way…you can consider this a form of comic relief from having to keep focusing on the election. After all, anyone who tries to understand the mind of God had better be doing it for comic relief, because such an attempt is truly comic from the start.
The Chicken
Chicken,
Your post made my day. It resonated with me for reasons I’m not quite ready to share yet. (Perhaps you can read about it when I get around to writing my full conversion story on my blog.) I usually enjoy your posts, and I’m beginning to feel that you’re hiding your light under a bushel by not at least keeping a blog. If you do choose to keep one, you could call it The Lampstand. 8]
Or if you’re too modest, perhaps The Coop?
Instead of desiring to be free, we should desire to be as we are. A beetle is more free than fire; a dolphin, more than a beetle; we, more free than dolphins; and God more free than we. We don’t possess freedom in the strictest sense of freedom proper to God and we should be happy in that. What makes man happy is being who he is, not grasping at that which he is not.
Angels are more free than we and we should be humble in that fact rather than “trumping” it with the Eucharist. 2 cents.
Dear Sleeping Beastly,
You wrote:
Your post made my day.
I’m sure it was because of the comic relief. Talking about predestination and free will during an election week is so ironic!
Actually, the title of my blog could be: So, this is why God is laughing.
Seriously, one of the reasons I don’t have cable tv (shock, horror) is because the last thing I need is five-hundred channels. I am, perhaps, one of the most skilled procrastinators on the planet – my skills in this area haven’t yet been officially measured by the people at the Guinness Book of World records, but I’m pretty sure I’m in the top two or three. There may be an old woman in Siberia that people keep telling me about that is better at it and I’ll get around to finding out, someday 🙂
Could you imagine me, blogging all day? I could – and even the little work I get done, now, would never get done.
Maybe I can have my son, Masked Chicken Little, do it (if I had a son, if he were masked, if he were a chicken).
The Chicken