Election & Free Will
Scripture alternates between God determining salvation and people freely choosing it without resolving the tension.
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The Bible says in some places that people choose whether to follow God, and in other places that God decides in advance who will be saved. Christians have disagreed about how these fit together since at least the fifth century, when Augustine and Pelagius argued over it.
This page sets out the passages on each side, the main positions Christians hold, and the answers given when the two sets of passages are put side by side.
Passages about human choice
| Citation | Verse |
|---|---|
| Deuteronomy 30:19 | "I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life." |
| Deuteronomy 11:26-28 | Blessing and curse, depending on whether Israel obeys |
| Joshua 24:15 | "Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve." |
| John 3:16 | Eternal life for "whoever believes" |
| Mark 8:34 | "Whoever wishes to come after me" |
| Revelation 22:17 | "Let the one who is thirsty come" |
| 2 Peter 3:9 | God is "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" |
Passages about God choosing
| Citation | Verse |
|---|---|
| Romans 8:29-30 | Those God "foreknew he also predestined," then called, justified, and glorified |
| Ephesians 1:4-5 | God chose them "before the foundation of the world" |
| John 6:44 | "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." |
| John 15:16 | "You did not choose me, but I chose you." |
| Romans 9:15-16 | Salvation "depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy" |
| Romans 9:18-21 | God hardens whom he wills; Paul answers the obvious objection with "who are you, O man, to answer back to God?" |
| Acts 13:48 | "As many as were appointed to eternal life believed." |
| Acts 4:27-28 | Herod and Pilate did "whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place." |
| Isaiah 46:9-10 | "I declare the end from the beginning... My counsel shall stand." |
Where the difficulty sits
There are two separate problems, and they are often run together.
The first is about knowing. If God knew a thousand years ago what someone would do today, then it was already true a thousand years ago that they would do it. Doing otherwise would mean making God's earlier belief false. This does not require God to cause the action — only to know it — but it does appear to rule out the person doing anything else.
The second is about choosing. Knowing in advance is one thing; deciding in advance is another. The passages above do not only say God knows who will believe. They say God chooses, appoints, draws, and hardens. That raises a question about fairness rather than logic: if God decides who believes, it is not clear why unbelief is punished.
Positions Christians hold
| Position | Does God know the whole future? | Are people free to do otherwise? | How it fits together |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calvinism | Yes | No, not in that sense | God chooses who is saved; people still act on their own desires |
| Arminianism | Yes | Yes | God predestines based on seeing in advance who will believe |
| Molinism | Yes, plus what anyone would do in any situation | Yes | God creates the world whose free choices match his plan |
| Open theism | No — future free choices are not yet facts | Yes | The future is genuinely open |
| Lutheran | Yes | The will is bound, but people are still responsible | Held together without claiming to explain it |
Common objections
"God is outside time, so he doesn't foresee anything — he just sees"
This goes back to Boethius, writing around 524, who compared God to someone on a hilltop seeing a whole road at once rather than following a traveler along it. Aquinas took it up, and it is the standard answer in Catholic theology.
It works against one version of the problem. Watching something happen does not make it happen, and that holds whether the watching is inside time or outside it.
It works less well against the other version. Wherever God's knowledge is located, it cannot be wrong. So at the moment of choosing, the person still cannot do anything other than what God knows. The answer moves the problem rather than removing it.
It also creates a second difficulty, since a God entirely outside time is hard to square with the many passages where God responds, changes course, or acts at a particular moment.
"God knows what you would freely choose in any situation"
This is Molinism, proposed by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in 1588. God knows not just what will happen but what anyone would do in any circumstance, and creates the world whose circumstances produce the outcome he wants. God stays in control because he picks the world; people stay free because nothing forces their choices.
It is the most carefully worked out of the answers. Two problems are usually raised.
The first: what makes those facts true before anyone exists? If a free choice is not settled by the person's nature or their circumstances, there does not seem to be anything for "what they would have done" to be true about.
The second: if God selects a world knowing exactly who will refuse to believe in it, the difference between this and simply deciding who is saved becomes hard to locate.
"Free will just means acting on your own desires without being forced"
On this view, someone is free when they do what they actually want to do, whatever produced the wanting. Jonathan Edwards argued this in Freedom of the Will (1754), and it is a serious position — much of modern philosophy holds some version of it for reasons having nothing to do with religion. Harry Frankfurt's 1969 paper supported it by describing cases where someone seems clearly responsible even though they could not have done otherwise.
It does real work on the first problem. It does much less on the second. It explains why people are responsible for what they do, but not why one person's desires run toward belief and another's do not. On a Calvinist account, that difference traces back to God's decision, which is where the fairness question started.
"God limits his own knowledge to leave room for freedom"
This is open theism, argued by Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, and Gregory Boyd in The Openness of God (1994). God knows everything that can be known, but a free choice that has not been made yet is not a fact, so not knowing it is no limit on omniscience.
The biblical case is real. Genesis 22:12 has God saying "now I know that you fear God" after Abraham's test. Jonah 3:10 has God changing course. Genesis 6:6 has God regretting having made humanity.
The cost is that it drops a claim most of the tradition treats as basic. Catholic, Reformed, and Orthodox theologians have largely rejected it for that reason. It settles the tension by giving up one of the two things that created it.
"It's a mystery beyond human understanding"
Lutheran theology, and some Reformed thinking, holds both claims without trying to reconcile them.
This is not the same as admitting a contradiction, and there is nothing unreasonable about thinking some questions exceed human reasoning.
It does leave the question unanswered rather than answering it. It also offers no way to tell a genuine mystery apart from a mistake nobody has spotted yet.
What the passages show
Each answer above succeeds at something. Boethius handles the objection that foreknowledge causes events. Edwards gives a workable account of responsibility. Molina shows that detailed divine planning and uncaused choice are not obviously contradictory. Open theism fits the narrative passages best.
Each also gives something up, and they differ mainly in what:
- Calvinism and compatibilism keep God's full control and redefine freedom as acting on your own desires.
- Arminianism and Molinism keep freedom in the stronger sense and make God's plan depend on what people would do.
- Open theism keeps freedom and limits what God knows.
- The appeal to mystery keeps both and declines to explain.
None of them leaves both claims standing in their strongest form.
The texts themselves were not written as a puzzle with a solution. Deuteronomy does not qualify its call to choose, and Romans 9 does not soften its account of mercy and hardening — when Paul reaches the obvious objection, he sets it aside rather than answering it. The positions above are later attempts to unify material that was not composed as a system.