Review of Peter Thuesen’s “Predestination”

Predestination is either “the rock of Christian certainty, without which no true hope is possible, or it is the most dangerous of doctrines, one that risks negating the ‘Come unto me’ of Jesus’ gospel promise.”

Peter Thuesen traces how those divergent convictions have shaped church history in Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine. It made the cut for the 2010 Christianity Today Book Awards.

While his focus, as the subtitle shows, is on American religious history, he begins with the early church, through Augustine (and Pelagius), Calvin (and Armenius), Luther (and his gentler colleague Melancthon), and the Puritan convictions that began in England. It was the rejection of predestinarian thinking that was in part behind the formation of new uniquely American movements such as Mormonism, Adventism, and Universalism. Furthermore, Thuesen introduced me debates on this subject among groups less familiar to me (among Catholic Jesuits, for example, and Midwestern Lutherans) as well as giving me a chance to review the role that convictions regarding predestination (pro and con) have played in my Southern Baptist Convention—from the very beginning to the twenty-first century. He reveals that the doctrine shows up even in megachurches today, particularly in Rick Warren’s teaching, where “a vaguer language of foreordination is arguably stronger than ever.”

It is no surprise that differences on predestination have shaped the history of Christian thought (or maybe the history of human thinking entirely). It’s a fundamental issue: if God is sovereign, is there any room for real human freedom? Conversely, if human freedom is real, does that make God dependent on human choices for the operation of history (and thus not absolutely sovereign)?

Predestination, in the end, ought to generate devotion and not just speculation. “We…inquire into the mysteries which ought only to be adored,” wrote Luther. “Let us confess freely and humbly,” says Baptist theologian Timothy George, who is quoted in the book, “that none of us understands completely how divine sovereignty and human responsibility coalesce in the grace-wrought acts of repentance and faith.” Predestination, Thuesen writes, remains the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the mystery before which one both trembles and is fascinated.