What did Christians teach about predestination?

Paul grounds election in God's sovereign purpose rather than human merit. Before Jacob and Esau were born or had done anything good or evil, God chose Jacob according to his calling — demonstrating that election stands according to divine initiative alone, not of works but of him that calleth. Paul further affirms that God's gifts and calling are without repentance: the constancy of election rests in God's own character rather than in the fluctuating responses of those called. The apostle also presents the distinction between vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy — God enduring the former with longsuffering while preparing the latter for glory, displaying both wrath and mercy according to his sovereign will. These passages established the framework within which every subsequent Christian theologian would work: election precedes human action, rests on divine constancy, and operates according to God's prerogative over both mercy and judgment.

Augustine of Hippo developed the scriptural foundation into the doctrine that shaped Western Christianity. The elect were chosen before the foundation of the world with a predestination in which God foreknew what he himself would do; they were elected out of the world with a calling whereby God fulfilled what he predestinated. Augustine defined predestination as nothing other than "the foreknowledge and the preparation of God's kindnesses, whereby they are most certainly delivered, whoever they are that are delivered" — certainty grounded in divine preparation, not human cooperation. He insisted that defending free will must not involve striving against the grace that makes the will free: grace does not destroy freedom but liberates it from bondage to sin. Augustine also confronted the mystery directly through the example of Tyre and Sidon — cities that would have repented had the same works been done among them, yet were left in perdition according to God's sovereign purpose. The loftier mystery of predestination, Augustine taught, operates beyond what human observation can fully explain.

Medieval theologians refined Augustine's framework while addressing the tension between divine certainty and human freedom. Thomas Aquinas affirmed that predestination most certainly and infallibly takes effect, yet does not impose any necessity on its effect — the certainty of the outcome does not eliminate the freedom of the means. Aquinas echoed Augustine's definition: predestination is "the foreknowledge and making ready the mercies of God, by which they are most certainly saved, whosoever are saved." The emphasis remained on divine preparation as the source of certainty rather than human merit. This medieval synthesis preserved both poles of the tradition: God's election is infallibly effective, yet human action retains its genuine freedom within the order of divine providence.

The Reformation brought predestination into explicit confessional form. The Formula of Concord distinguished God's universal foreknowledge from his particular election: election is not merely passive foresight but an active cause that procures, works, helps, and promotes salvation — "upon this divine predestination our salvation is so founded that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it." The Formula rejected reducing election to bare foresight or a military muster in which God merely foresaw who would be saved and who damned. Luther challenged the notion that free will can merit justification: when righteousness is given freely by grace, merit has no place. The Synod of Dort defined election as God's unchangeable purpose by which, before the foundation of the world, by sheer grace and according to the free good pleasure of his will, he chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people out of the entire fallen human race. Calvin taught that those whom God passes by he reprobates for no other cause than that he is pleased to exclude them from the inheritance prepared for his children. The Westminster Confession grounded the choice in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of God's free grace and love alone, "without any foresight of faith or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature, as conditions, or causes moving him thereunto."

The confessional tradition treated perseverance as the fruit of election rather than its condition. The Westminster Confession and the Second London Baptist Confession (1689) both affirmed that perseverance depends not upon the believer's own free will but upon the immutability of the decree of election, flowing from the free and unchangeable love of God the Father. Matthew Henry taught that believers are beloved of the Lord because God chose them from the beginning, and that all God designed for glory and happiness as the end he decreed to grace and holiness as the way — election is inseparable from sanctification. On reprobation, Dort taught that God leaves the non-elect in the common misery into which, by their own fault, they have plunged themselves, in order to display his justice; Calvin insisted the doctrine must be received with sobriety, since the covenant of life is not preached equally to all. Thomas Watson qualified the scope of Christ's death as sufficient for all but effectual only for believers. Charles Hodge later noted that the distinction between knowledge of the possible, the actual, and the conditionally future — developed by Jesuit theologians Fonseca and Molina — represented a later attempt to reconcile foreordination with human freedom.