Double Predestination: Calvin, Reprobation and the Critics

Double predestination is the teaching that God's eternal decree concerns both the saved and the lost: He elects some to eternal life, and He ordains the rest to just condemnation for their sin. It comes in two forms. Equal ultimacy makes reprobation a positive work parallel to election, while the Reformed confessions teach that God passes the non-elect by and condemns them for sins that are their own. The critics of double predestination are right that God authors neither unbelief nor damnation, and most of the difficulty comes from reading an eternal decree as though God acted in time before the sinner refused. The Many Beings Framework takes up that reading directly.

Key takeaways

• Double predestination holds that one decree has two outcomes. God elects some to life and ordains the rest to condemnation for their sin.
• The doctrine has two forms. Equal ultimacy sets reprobation beside election as a parallel work; Westminster 3.7 and Dort I.15 teach a passing by, with unbelief caused by the sinner alone.
• Its critics press hard. Lutherans teach single predestination, Catholic councils condemn predestination to evil, and Arminians hold that God sincerely wills all to be saved.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism reads the decree differently from equal ultimacy and single predestination. It holds that God's justice concerns final ends, known whole in His frame, while each refusal in time is the sinner's own.

What is double predestination?

Double predestination is the doctrine that God's eternal decree determines the final state of every person, electing some to salvation and appointing the rest to condemnation. The second half of that decree is called reprobation, from the Latin for rejection. The doctrine of predestination is called "double" because the one decree has two outcomes, and its defenders hold that neither outcome can be affirmed without the other.

John Calvin gave the doctrine its classic Protestant definition in the Institutes of the Christian Religion. In Henry Beveridge's translation, "By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man." He drew the consequence at once: "All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation" (3.21.5).

The phrase double predestination is used in two senses, and much of the confusion around it comes from mixing them. Some popular definitions describe God creating people in order to send them to hell, as though He works damnation in the lost exactly as He works faith in the saved. The Reformed confessions teach double predestination as a decree with two outcomes and an unequal relation to each: God works faith in the elect, and the lost remain in an unbelief that is their own. Why God chooses whom He chooses is the question of unconditional election, and this article takes that choice as given and asks what the decree says about everyone else.

Equal ultimacy or passing by: the two forms

The first form is called equal ultimacy. On this view election and reprobation are parallel positive decrees, and God acts in the reprobate as directly as He acts in the elect. Its strength is consistency: if one decree settles every end, the end of the lost is decreed as fully as the end of the saved, and the confessional "passing by" names the same act in gentler words. R. C. Sproul, in an essay first published in 1976, described it: "God positively and actively intervenes in the lives of the elect to bring them to salvation. In the same way God positively and actively intervenes in the life of the reprobate to bring him to sin."

Sproul rejected it. The Reformed view, he wrote, holds that predestination is double but "not symmetrical with respect to the mode of divine activity. A strict parallelism of operation is denied." Robert Reymond later defended a form of equal ultimacy while denying that the same kind of divine causality stands behind both decrees.

The confessional form divides reprobation into two parts. Preterition is God's passing by of the non-elect, His decision to withhold the saving grace He gives to others. Precondemnation is His decision to judge them for their sins. The Westminster Confession states both parts in one sentence:

"The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of his own will, whereby he extendeth or withholdeth mercy, as he pleaseth, for the glory of his sovereign power over his creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice." (Westminster Confession 3.7)

The Canons of Dort say the same. Some "have been passed by in God's eternal election," and God decided "to leave them in the common misery into which, by their own fault, they have plunged themselves," and "not to grant them saving faith and the grace of conversion" (I.15). The synod's Conclusion rejects the charge "that in the same manner in which election is the source and cause of faith and good works, reprobation is the cause of unbelief and ungodliness." The confessions teach a double decree and a single cause of faith: God causes the believer's faith, and the unbeliever causes his own unbelief.

Where did double predestination come from?

Double predestination grew out of Augustine's late writings against Pelagius. Augustine taught that faith is God's gift and that the rest of fallen humanity is justly left in its sin, and scholars still debate whether he went further and taught a predestination to damnation. The Council of Orange (529) drew a firm line at one point: "We not only do not believe that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema." Orange condemned predestination to sin, and later Reformed confessions reject the same thing.

The first controversy came in the ninth century. Gottschalk of Orbais (c. 808–868), a Saxon monk, taught a twofold predestination, of the elect to life and of the wicked to death. He was condemned at the Council of Mainz on 1 October 848, and at Quierzy the next year he was deposed, flogged, made to burn his writings and confined at Hautvillers, where he probably died in 868 after about twenty years.

Hincmar's synod at Quierzy (853) answered him: God intends to save all, Christ died for all, and the doom of the lost follows God's foreknowledge. Two years later the Council of Valence (855) confessed "the predestination of the elect to life, and the predestination of the impious to death," adding that God foreknew the malice of the wicked "because it is from them" and did not predestine it "because it is not from Him." The Catholic Encyclopedia later judged it "doubtful" that Gottschalk's teaching on predestination was heretical.

Thomas Aquinas kept the same asymmetry. "God does reprobate some," he wrote, and yet "Guilt proceeds from the free-will of the person who is reprobated and deserted by grace" (Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, a. 3).

Calvin pressed double predestination hardest. He held that "there could be no election without its opposite reprobation," and that "Those, therefore, whom God passes by he reprobates" (3.23.1). The lost are excluded "by a just and blameless, but at the same time incomprehensible judgment" (3.21.7). Facing the objection, he wrote, "The decree, I admit, is, dreadful" (3.23.7), the passage traditionally known as the decretum horribile; some readers take "dreadful" in its older sense of awe-inspiring. He refused to let the decree excuse the sinner: "Man therefore falls, divine providence so ordaining, but he falls by his own fault" (3.23.8).

His successor Theodore Beza charted the decrees in his Summa totius Christianismi, and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) and the Westminster Assembly (1646) gave the doctrine its confessional form.

Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, gives a full chapter to Calvin on evil and the decree.

Supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism

Reformed theologians who agree on double predestination still disagree about the logical order of God's decrees. Both sides hold every decree to be eternal, so the question concerns order in God's purpose.

Supralapsarianism holds that the decree to elect and to pass by comes first, logically ahead of the decree to create and to permit the Fall. God first purposes to show mercy in some and justice in others, and creation and the Fall serve that end. Beza held this order, as did William Perkins, Franciscus Gomarus and William Twisse, and later Abraham Kuyper and Herman Hoeksema.

Infralapsarianism reverses the order: God decrees to create and to permit the Fall, and then chooses among a fallen race. The Canons of Dort follow it, speaking of a choice made "out of the entire human race which had fallen by its own fault from its original innocence into sin and ruin." Supralapsarians have remained a minority among Calvinists.

Sproul connected the equal-ultimacy view with "a radical form of supralapsarianism," and the link is real in some writers. The two questions are still separate: most supralapsarians also deny that God causes sin, and both parties describe an order of logical priority within one eternal decree. The dispute turns on what "before" means when it is said of God.

Single predestination: the Lutheran position

Single predestination is the teaching that God's decree of predestination reaches the saved alone, and that the lost fall under His foreknowledge. Its classic statement is Lutheran. The Formula of Concord insists that the distinction between God's foreknowledge and His predestination "ought to be accurately observed." Foreknowledge extends to all things, good and evil. Predestination "extends only over the godly, beloved children of God, being a cause of their salvation." The Formula then rejects the teaching that "some, without regard to their sins, from the mere counsel, purpose, and will of God, are ordained to condemnation so that they cannot be saved."

Lutherans hold two truths side by side, election by grace alone and God's sincere will that all be saved, and they treat the tension as part of what God has revealed. On their reading Scripture speaks of predestination as a cause only where it speaks of salvation and lays unbelief at the unbeliever's own door, so foreknowledge covers the lost.

The label is also used loosely inside the Reformed world, where some call the passing by of Dort "single" because God actively causes only faith. Scholars disagree over whether Heinrich Bullinger held a single predestination; Frank James argues that he did, and Cornelis Venema that he did not.

Reformed theologians answer that single predestination cannot stand. Sproul called particular election without reprobation "manifest nonsense," because a God who chooses some has by that act left the others unchosen. The critics answer from the other side. Emil Brunner wrote in his Dogmatics, "The Bible does not contain the doctrine of double predestination," and Karl Barth rebuilt the doctrine around Christ, who in Barth's account is both the elected and the rejected one.

The case for double predestination

The case begins with Romans 9. Paul has said that before Jacob and Esau were born, God's purpose in election stood: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." He then faces the objection:

"Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: 'Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?' But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? 'Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, "Why did you make me like this?"' Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use? What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory—" (Romans 9:18–23, NIV)

Peter speaks in similar terms of those who reject Christ:

"They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for." (1 Peter 2:8, NIV)

The logical argument carries as much weight. God chooses to save some out of a fallen race, and a God who knows the rest remain unchosen has willed their final state. Denying reprobation while keeping particular election leaves that outcome in place and declines to name it.

The pastoral case follows. If salvation rests on God's purpose, the believer has nothing to boast of and a security that cannot move. Westminster asks that "this high mystery of predestination" be "handled with special prudence and care," so that believers may be "assured of their eternal election" from the certainty of their calling (3.8).

The five points of Calvinism article places double predestination inside the whole Reformed account of grace.

The objections: Catholic, Arminian and moral

The Catholic objection was fixed at the Council of Trent in 1547. Its sixth session condemned the claim that grace reaches only the predestined while all others are "by the divine power, predestined unto evil," and the claim that God works evil deeds "not permissively only, but properly." The Catechism of the Catholic Church states it in one sentence: "God predestines no one to go to hell" (1037). Catholic theology keeps its own doctrine of predestination, as Aquinas shows: God permits the fall, deserts the sinner to a guilt that is his own, and punishes justly. Its question for the confessions is whether a decree that ordains the end leaves that permission real.

The Arminian objection is the closest and most sustained. Jacobus Arminius, in his Declaration of Sentiments delivered at The Hague on 30 October 1608, grounded predestination in God's foreknowledge of who would believe. John Wesley, preaching "Free Grace" at Bristol in 1740, refused the gentler vocabulary: "Call it therefore by whatever name you please, election, preterition, predestination, or reprobation, it comes in the end to the same thing." His point was that withholding the only grace by which anyone believes settles the unbeliever's end as surely as a sentence would, whatever the term. He went further: "It represents the most holy God as worse than the devil, as both more false, more cruel, and more unjust." The Wesleyan account of prevenient grace carries the Arminian answer to how a fallen will can respond.

The moral objection gathers these together against double predestination. If God decrees the final state of the lost, He appears to be the author of their damnation, and Scripture seems to say the opposite:

"For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live!" (Ezekiel 18:32, NIV)

"The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9, NIV)

The Reformed reply is firm. Dort says the decree of reprobation "does not at all make God the author of sin (a blasphemous thought!)," Westminster says the non-elect are ordained to wrath "for their sin," and Calvin insisted that the one who falls falls by his own fault. The objection still stands at full strength: a decree that settles the end before the creature acts seems to leave the divine lament and the sincere offer without an object.

Volume One of the Many Beings Framework works through sovereignty and freedom from the ground up; download it free.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism reads reprobation

Each main position keeps something by giving something up. Equal ultimacy keeps the unity of the decree and pays for it with a parallel divine causality the confessions reject. The infralapsarian passing by keeps the asymmetry and leaves the moral objection pressing on the word "before." Lutheran single predestination keeps God's universal saving will and leaves the lost to foreknowledge alone. Arminian conditional election keeps the sincere offer by grounding the decree in foreseen faith, which the Reformed say makes God wait on the creature. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT), the position of the Many Beings Framework, holds that the decree and the offer can both be kept whole.

The framework holds that there is one reality, known by knowers whose natures differ in kind. God's perceptual frame is atemporal, simple and self-existent: He knows and wills the whole of history in one eternal act. The human frame is sequential, composite and contingent: we meet that same reality one moment at a time. Terms whose content involves time, possibility, agency, freedom or value are said of God and of us analogically, truly of both and in different senses. The Many Beings Fallacy is treating such a term as if it meant the same thing in both frames.

Reprobation language describes a decree about final ends. The moral objection reads that decree as an act God performed before the sinner refused, and so as the refusal's cause. "Before," said of God's decree, is a word from our frame, and His decree has no place on our calendar. From God's frame, justice concerns final outcomes, known whole, and the judgment of the lost is just. From ours, each refusal originates in the person who refuses, and God deals with that person in patience and a genuine desire that he repent. His decree permits the finite order and governs its ends.

Each rival then keeps its truth. The confessions are right against equal ultimacy that God causes faith and the sinner causes his own unbelief. Valence and the infralapsarians are right that condemnation is for sin. The Lutherans are right that the cause of damnation lies in the creature, Wesley that the offer and the lament are sincere, and Calvin that one eternal decree governs the end. Westminster's "pass by" and Ezekiel's "Repent and live!" describe one reality from two frames.

Romans 9 fits the same reading. God can harden a particular heart for His purpose, as He did Pharaoh's (Romans 9:17–18), an extraordinary exercise of His right, and the ordinary course Paul describes is patience: God "bore with great patience the objects of his wrath."

A Calvinist will say a refusal originating in the person makes the decree wait on the creature; the framework answers that waiting is a temporal relation said from our frame, and the decree comprehends the refusal without depending on it. An Arminian will say the lost are still passed by. The framework answers that the passing by is true of final ends, the sincere offer is true of the course of a life, and each stands whole. A philosopher will say this is a relabelling. The position stands or falls on whether the difference between Creator and creature grounds the index. Volume One makes that argument in full, and Frame-Indexed Classical Theism is set out on its own page.

The whole case is in Volume One, and your copy is free.

What if I fear I am reprobate?

The fear of being reprobate is answered by the confession that teaches reprobation: the Synod of Dort tells the person who desires to turn to God not to count himself among the reprobate, and Christ promises to receive whoever comes to Him. The fear has troubled serious believers for centuries, and it deserves an answer from the same sources that raised it.

Those who do not yet feel a lively faith, but who desire to turn to God, "ought not to be alarmed at the mention of reprobation, nor to count themselves among the reprobate," for God "has promised not to snuff out a smoldering wick or break a bruised reed" (Canons of Dort I.16).

Christ's promise speaks to the same fear:

"All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away." (John 6:37, NIV)

"The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law." (Deuteronomy 29:29, NIV)

The decree belongs to God's frame, and it is read whole from there alone. What is given to us in ours is the summons and the promise attached to it. The desire to turn to God is the very thing Dort names in those it tells not to be alarmed, and a fearful reader can do today what Jesus promised He would receive: come to Him.

The views compared

The views differ on what the decree says about the lost and who causes unbelief.

Frequently asked questions

Did Calvin believe in double predestination?

Calvin taught double predestination. He defined predestination as God's eternal decree concerning every person, some preordained to life and others to damnation (Institutes 3.21.5), and he held that God reprobates those He passes by (3.23.1). He also insisted that the fallen fall by their own fault (3.23.8), so he did not teach that God causes sin as He causes faith.

Do Reformed and Presbyterian churches teach double predestination today?

Their confessions teach election and a passing by with just condemnation for sin: Westminster 3.7 for Presbyterians and Dort I.15 for the Dutch Reformed churches. Many Reformed theologians avoid the word "double" because it suggests the parallel causality their confessions reject, and they describe the doctrine as election and reprobation with an unequal relation to each. The substance of the doctrine remains in their standards.

Is double predestination biblical?

Defenders of double predestination cite Romans 9, where God hardens whom He wills and prepares objects of wrath, and 1 Peter 2:8. Its critics cite Ezekiel 18:32 and 2 Peter 3:9, where God wills that none perish, and Emil Brunner concluded that Scripture does not teach it. Calvinist readings subordinate the second set of texts to the first, Arminian readings the reverse, and Frame-Indexed Classical Theism reads each set as true from its own frame.

Does God create people for hell?

The major confessions that teach double predestination deny that God damns anyone apart from their sin. Westminster says the non-elect are ordained to wrath "for their sin," Dort says they plunged themselves into misery "by their own fault," and the Council of Valence held that God did not predestine the malice of the wicked. The Lutheran Formula of Concord and the Catholic Catechism reject any predestination to damnation outright.

What is the difference between reprobation and preterition?

Preterition is God's passing by of those He does not elect: His decision to withhold the saving grace He gives to others. Reprobation, in the broad sense, includes preterition and adds God's decision to condemn the non-elect justly for their sins. Westminster 3.7 contains both parts in one sentence, "to pass by" and "to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin."

Where to go from here

The long dispute over double predestination turns on the word "before." The Reformed are right that one decree governs the end of each life, and their critics are right that God causes faith, that the sinner's unbelief is his own, and that God desires his repentance. Both sides have assumed that God's decree stands earlier on the line of time than the sinner's refusal, and that assumption is what makes the two truths collide.

Volume One of the Many Beings Framework argues the alternative from first principles, including what it means for a decree to govern the end of a free creature, and it is free to download. Volume Two takes up Calvin, the decree and the problem of evil, the Calvinism article sets out the Reformed system and its critics, and the series carries the same reading through time, changelessness and providence.

Related reading

• Irresistible Grace
• Penal Substitution
• Calvinism vs Arminianism