This past winter, during my Christmas break from college, I worked at an outdoor booth selling sheepskin products for a local farmer. On one less than busy day, I was taking advantage of a customerless break to say part of the Liturgy of the Hours for the day.
Before too long a man walked in and, seeing my breviary, asked me if I was Catholic. He turned out to be a strong Fundamentalist, and we discussed the differences between our respective beliefs for some time. I managed to remain calm, despite the fact that he told me that I would burn forever in the pool of everlasting fire if I remained a Catholic.
Afterwards I realized that one of the central topics in our conversation, as in every doctrinal conversation I have ever had with a non-Catholic Christian, was that of grace and predestination. I also realized, much to my chagrin, that although I knew the Church’s basic doctrine on grace, I could not explain how grace interacts with human free will and what the Church’s doctrine on predestination is. These two closely related points constitute the focal point of our disagreement with Protestants, and the latter, especially, is a must-know for anyone likely to be arguing with a Reformed Presbyterian (Calvinist). It was time to do some research.
If I had had to rely solely on printed material, I could have spent a considerable amount of time just looking around for the right books and articles. But I am a member of the Catholic Resource Network, where information is only a keystroke away to anyone with a computer, a modem, and a phone line.
The Catholic Resource Network (CRNET) is an online information service operated by Trinity Communications, which provides orthodox Catholic resources on just about every Catholic topic imaginable. Not only that, its various forums, or subject areas, are run by experts in those subjects from all over the country. I can send questions to leading authorities on catechetics, Sacred Scripture, apologetics (guess who), cults, and more.
So I used my computer to dial into CRNET, and on this particular question I was especially lucky. For over a week, there had been a message-based discussion on predestination going on in the Divine Revelation Forum, which is advised by Fr. William Most, an orthodox Scripture scholar who teaches at the Notre Dame Catechetical Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
After reading the messages between Fr. Most and various CRNET members, I found out that Father had several articles on the subject online. In just a few minutes, I had gone into the Divine Revelation file library and downloaded to my own computer three text files called ITHOMIST, 2THOMIST, and PREDSTI.
I read these through and found out something I wasn’t expecting. In the spring of 1605, Pope Clement VIII, after a careful study of the opposing positions on the question of grace and free will, was about to render an official decision approving the so-called “Thomist” position and condemning that of LuIs de Molina, S.J. But before he could promulgate the already drafted condemnation, he died! Coincidence? Fr. Most doesn’t think so. It seems that God called Clement to himself to keep the Pope from ruling in favor of an erroneous doctrine. Molina’s teaching, though, was not endorsed, and the question has remained open to this day.
After reading Fr. Most’s own opinion on the question, I still had a few questions. So I sent him an electronic mail message asking for further clarification. He replied the next day, and further conversation yielded a better understanding on my part of what he was saying.
At the same time as I sent my question to Fr. Most, I began working through other channels. I wanted a book or pamphlet explaining the Catholic doctrine on predestination, preferably something intended to be used for apologetics, instead of being a theological treatise. Who better to ask than Karl Keating? So I moved over to the Catholic Answers Forum, and two minutes later the following message (reproduced above, as it appeared on my screen) was waiting for him the next time he came on-line:
“Karl-I have just sent a message to ALL (in the Divine Revelation Forum, since there has been some discussion of the topic there lately) asking for suggestions of apologetical books or other resources on the Catholic and Protestant (esp. Calvinist) positions on grace and predestination. I would appreciate in particular any suggestions you might have in this area. Thanks.-In Christ, Chris.”
Two days later I got a reply, which is reproduced on the next page: “Chris: Let me give the book about predestination some thought. I’ll get back to you about it. Karl.”
I hadn’t received any answers to my message to ALL yet, but that was okay, since I was busy doing research in CRNET’S file libraries, looking for files on grace and predestination. I had several options as to how to proceed, so naturally, I took them one at a time.
Every library on the Network contains a master list of all the files (books, papers, articles, etc.) contained in that library. Since it looked as if the Divine Revelation and Catholic Answers forums would be the best places to check, I began reading the file descriptions, first in the Scripture and Tradition Library of the Divine Revelation Forum. Once again CRNET’s time-saving features came to my aid. I chose the “Find and download a file” command to get the list all the files in the library, with descriptions. I hit S for “stop” to get an options menu and then typed L GRACE to begin a “List” search for the word “grace.” (A representation of the use of the List command is shown on the page after next.)
The “List” feature compiles a list of all the files in a library that contain the specified word or words in their title, description, or key word list. In less than a minute, I had the name of every file in which grace played an important enough role to appear in the description. I did the same with the word “predestination.” When I was done, I had a total of six files.
Instead of moving to the Catholic Answers Forum, I decided to try a “List” in the Universal File Library, where I could search the file descriptions for the entire Network at once, instead of one library at a time. Among other things, I came up with two decrees from the Council of Trent and a book by a theologian named Charles Journet, The Meaning of Grace. The description told me that this book covered, to name a few, “habitual grace, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, actual grace, predestination, justification, and merit.”
I was pretty sure I had the most important files dealing with grace and predestination. But I decided to try a more exhaustive search, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. This time, I started in the Catholic Answers Forum. I went to the main menu of that forum and selected S for text search.
I selected the Apologetics Library, and initiated a search, once again for the word “grace.” The text search feature differs from “List” in that it searches not the file descriptions, but the actual text of the files themselves. Before long, I had a list of every occurrence of the word “grace” in every document in the Apologetics Library.
There were 121 matches. That’s a lot to deal with, but once again CRNET came to my rescue. As soon as the search was complete, I was given the option to view each match in context, to determine which ones would be useful for my particular needs. Every time I came across a promising passage, I saved the file reference, deleting all the rest. When I was done, I had three files left. Two were question-and-answer files compiled from the “Ask Father” feature of the secular computer service America Online; the other was the Catholic Answers booklet Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth. Since my interest was mainly in apologetics, I immediately downloaded all three files to my own computer.
Next, I tried text searches for the words “predestination” and “Calvin.” The files this turned up didn’t seem as useful, so I returned to the Divine Revelation Forum and tried a text search for “grace” there. As I suspected, the matches were far too numerous to deal with. When the count reached 250, I ended the search.
A search for “predestination” was much more helpful, and after sorting through the matches, I came up with five more files. To make sure I didn’t take anything that I didn’t need I went back and looked at the descriptions of these files in the general listing. I was able to narrow down my list to three documents. Two contained lecture material taken from courses at the Notre Dame Catechetical Institute; the third was a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. My final search located 9 occurrences of “Calvin,” but most of them were only passing references.
My document hunting done, I now awaited a response from Karl Keating. I didn’t wait long. A day after his previous message, Karl sent a reply to my original question. He recommended Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s book Predestination, as well as the summary of the question by Ludwig Ott in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma.
Garrigou-Lagrange’s position on predestination, I knew, was firmly in the “Thomistic” tradition, which as mentioned above and explained below, has some major problems. Ott’s compendium of dogmatic theology proved to be a gem. Ott didn’t espouse either the Thomistic or Molinist views, but summarized and critiqued them in light of the Church’s teaching, which he had already set forth clearly and succinctly using a plethora of Scripture references and magisterial texts.
It was at this point that I realized that, despite the fascination which the question held for me, an ability to explain and critique the various Catholic theories on predestination was not in most cases going to be an effective tool for apologetics. Even if I found a theory without major problems, the theological subtleties on this question, it seems, are bound to end without a completely understandable explanation of the problem of grace and free will.
But although we haven’t figured out exactly how the different aspects of this question fit together, we can know what these.aspects are, simply by looking at the teaching of the Church. In other words, we know all the points that we must believe, even if we can’t completely understand how they all fit together.
Ott lists the following doctrines as de fide (Latin for “of faith” and meaning the doctrines are absolutely certain and must be believed) or, in the case of the second point, at least strongly implied in Church teaching.
1. Men cannot perform any supernatural act without the help of actual grace.
2. Despite their sins God truly and earnestly desires the salvation of all men. (It is formally defined that God desires the salvation at least of all the faithful. It is a certain conclusion from Scripture, Tradition, and Church teaching that God gives all innocent unbelievers sufficient grace to achieve eternal salvation.)
3. God, by his eternal resolve of will, has predestined certain men to eternal blessedness.
4. God, by an eternal resolve of his will, has predestined certain men, on account of their foreseen sins, to eternal rejection.
5. The human will remains free under the influence of efficacious grace, which is not irresistible.
With a clear g.asp of the pertinent Church doctrines, I was ready to go back and critique the various theological speculations on grace and free will. Although my main apologetics weapon would be the ability to support from Scripture and Tradition the doctrines listed above, I still wanted to get a feel for the theological problems that flow from them.
In the process, I found that often, when I thought I was about to find the solution to one theological problem, that problem turned out to depend on another which I hadn’t even looked at yet.
I ended up with a good feel for the Thomist and Molinist theories, as well as for the solution proposed by Fr. Most, whose landmark work on grace in the 1950’s won praise in the highest ecclesiastical circles. I saw that both of the former two basically rejected at least one of the dogmas listed above, while claiming to retain them. And I realized that I had a lot more questions to tackle Fr. Most with about his theory.
When I was done, I envisioned what would happen if I tried to explain the Catholic theology of actual grace and predestination to a Protestant. If he were polite, he would hear me out. In either case, he would probably reply, “At least my belief makes sense!” and walk off. And, in a way, he would be right.
Protestants have rejected the clear meaning of Scripture on many of these issues so that their doctrines could make human “sense.” Sometimes they have succeeded, sometimes they haven’t, but either way they have ended up with a distortion of the truth. That’s why Catholicism is such a humble religion. We don’t profess to understand everything that we believe: If it’s found in revelation, we hold to it even if it doesn’t seem amenable to human understanding. Catholics are willing to bow before the mystery.
This, I had discovered, is what we must demonstrate when doing apologetics, that Catholics first strongly affirm every truth contained in Scripture and Tradition and only then try to understand them. Unlike Protestants, we don’t overlook certain portions of the Bible because they seem to contradict other parts which we find more to our liking. We simply admit the limitations of our understanding and have faith.
Of course, my research doesn’t stop here. CRNET has put me in contact with a list of sources that should keep me going for some time, and I intend to keep looking for the complete answer. But whether or not I find it, the apologetics problem is solved, and I won’t be lost for words next time I discuss predestination with a Protestant.