Human beings are under God's providence, just like every other creature, but God provides
for us in a special way, especially in so far as we have intellect and will and so our
free.
Namely God provides us with grace that operates within us so that we would turn from all that
leads us away from God and would freely entrust ourselves and our entire lives to God in faith,
hope, and charity.
The plan for this in God's mind is called predestination.
This word, predestination, frightens some people, and they might think it's a dangerous doctrine,
that it implies some kind of determinism that destroys human freedom.
In fact, the opposite is the case when it comes to Aquinas's theory of this important idea.
Predestination is a scriptural truth and it shows up in a number of important places,
especially in the New Testament.
One of the best examples is in the letter to the Ephesians in chapter one, Saint Paul
writes, “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless
before him.
He predestined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of his
will, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved.”
This text expresses something very mysterious, but also very beautiful about the Christian
faith, and Saint Thomas studied it--and others like it--deeply and with great insight.
The point is not that our free choice is an illusion or that we live in a deterministic
world, but rather that God has a plan for our salvation.
A plan by which he sweetly and strongly provides for us to follow him in freedom.
To understand this, it will help us to begin with two key principles that inform Aquinas's
treatment of predestination: the primacy of Christ, and the primacy of grace in the order
of salvation.
The primacy of Christ means that we're only saved through Christ, through the blood of
his cross.
We find ourselves trapped by our own sin and weakness and often enough, we know what is
good and yet find it difficult to do it.
In fact, this is an inheritance of original sin.
After the fall of our first parents, the human race lost its original friendship with God
and turned away from him.
And as a result, we're born with a nature wounded by sin, prone to disorder desires,
and we have difficulty in doing what is right.
To put it simply, we cannot save ourselves.
We need a savior from this power of sin and death at work in us, and Jesus Christ who
was crucified, died, and rose again as the victor over death is the only savior of the
world.
He is the one who opens for us the way of salvation and draws us upward to dwell with
him.
From Christ then, and by the power of his saving passion, grace flows out to the world.
In order of salvation, the primacy of Christ then leads us to recognize the primacy of
grace.
We're saved by Christ's grace, not by our own power or our own efforts.
Now to be sure it's important for us to cooperate with this grace, but salvation is primarily
and principally God's work in us, the work of grace.
This grace does two things; it heals us and it elevates us.
We should contrast this Catholic teaching with one of the great Christian heresies--Pelagianism,
named after its author, a man named Pelagius.
Pelagius denied that grace heals and elevates us.
Rather, he would say that by your own hard work and good choices, you can save yourself.
In its modern form, we see this view operative in many places.
Everything is going to work out for me.
I'm going to go to heaven if I do what I can to be a good person.
Saint Augustine in the fourth century already recognized that this Pelagian way of thinking
is profoundly contrary to the Gospel and is in fact a dangerous heresy because it doesn't
acknowledge the truth that we are in radical need of help in order to do good, and that
without the special aid of divine grace, we cannot be saved.
So in response to Pelagianism, the church made it clear that we can only be saved by
God's grace for two towering reasons.
The first reason is that even if man had never sinned, it simply is not possible for our
nature to be friends with God, to have eternal life with God or to share in the divine nature.
These things are simply above us.
They are supernatural, and we cannot attain to them by our natural powers.
Only God can give them to us.
The second reason is that after we have sinned, we're in an even worse position than our nature
just considered by itself.
After sin, we experience the wounds of sin and the weakening of our nature so that even
the natural good that we should be able to do on our own becomes difficult for us.
And what is more,
we're alienated from God by our own choices, having refused to live as his friends.
Since this is true, Saint Thomas follows Saint Augustine in holding that there is asymmetry
in the order of salvation.
If we're saved, our salvation comes entirely from God while we freely cooperate.
But if we sin and refuse salvation, this is not caused by God, but is due entirely to
the refusal of the creature.
We'll talk more about this in the video dealing with the problem of evil, but it's important
to flag it here.
God is in no way the cause of sin, even though he permits it.
He doesn't cause our refusal or move us to refuse his grace, but he does let us do it.
In other words, God does not predestined us to evil.
When Aquinas speaks of predestination, therefore, he's referring to God's eternal plan to grant
grace to a rational creature in order to send it to its ultimate end, which is eternal life
with God.
God is the author of our very being and of our human nature, and so as our creator, God
can work within us, interiorly, in a way different from every other creature.
He can enlighten our minds to see what is good and then act within our wills in order
to move them freely to desire this good.
We've now covered in brief what predestination is.
Some important questions remain though.
For example, how can a human person turn away from God and refuse God's grace?
We'll treat that in a future video.
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