Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (review)

The doctrine of predestination—that God chooses some humans for salvation from all eternity—is one of the classical topics of theological analysis and speculation. As Peter Thuesen demonstrates in this fine intellectual history, it has also generated as much controversy as other doctrines that are, arguably, more central to Christian faith.

Thuesen’s book traces the history of this idea and its often contentious religious effects primarily in its “American career,” i.e., as it has been worked out among theologians and churches on the western side of the Atlantic since its seventeenth-century arrival with the Puritans. A brief and not entirely satisfactory opening chapter does sketch the origins of the “predestinarian labyrinth” in Scripture (especially St. Paul), St. Augustine, medieval Scholasticism, and the Reformation. But the analysis really takes off as Thuesen traces the large role that predestinarian ideas—almost entirely Calvinist in origin—played in classical Reformed theology and piety in New England, and subsequently in the broader streams of mainstream American Protestantism and evangelicalism deeply tinged by them. He effectively and subtly demonstrates how the seemingly abstruse and complex logic of predestination worked to advance what he calls the “ecstatic agony” of Calvinist-Puritan piety and religious life, in which believers sought, through intense spiritual struggle, the assurance that they were among the elect of God.

This inner drama, which Thuesen compares to the athlete’s motto of “no pain—no gain,” was often too overwhelming or disturbing for all but the most dedicated and fervent of the faithful. Furthermore, the forceful formulations of the original predestinarian Calvinist doctrine, enshrined in the classical Confessions of Westminster and Dort, soon provoked challenges from those who sought to modify or soften the seemingly arbitrary and harsh “divine decree” by which God chose only some people for grace and salvation (the “limited atonement” of classical “five-points Calvinism” memorably enshrined in the acronym “TULIP”) and others for damnation.

Throughout Predestination, Thuesen exhibits a rare talent for explicating these most difficult and complex theological debates in lucid prose, and anyone who might wonder about the significance of controversies over “supralapsariansim” (the belief God’s election occurred even before the Fall into sin) or “infralapsarianism” (election after the Fall), and many other matters, will find them clearly unpacked here. Furthermore, Thuesen argues convincingly that the more extreme predestinarian formulations almost inevitably produced what became in America the more widespread, commonsense “compatibilist” version of the doctrine, which attempts to reconcile predestination and free will by holding that God’s election is based on his foreknowledge of the moral choices that humans make. Whether this middle ground is theologically or philosophically coherent is itself highly debatable, Thuesen observes; but that has not stopped it from being the most popular.

Although the classical Reformed formulations and debates form the essential spine of Predestination, Thuesen also traces the long and often fervent history of American resistance to what many termed the “hellish doctrine,” even in its modified forms. Enlightened critics and their numerous intellectual progeny found in the whole idea one of the best reasons to shun any kind of traditional theology, while Charles Wesley devoted fifteen verses of a hymn to condemning the “horrible decree.” Yet Thuesen notes that Methodists, and evangelicals of all stripes, continued to wrestle with the central questions of divine grace and human choice that the doctrine, and its scriptural underpinnings, essentially addressed.

Besides his primary argument that debates over predestination, in various guises, have remained a major presence in American Protestantism (“the elephant in the room of American denominationalism,” p. 6), Thuesen also offers a secondary argument that predestination operates as the major spiritual alternative to the sacramentalist doctrines and piety taught and practiced by Catholicism, Lutheranism, high Anglicanism, and the like. Although he devotes a chapter to American Catholics’ and Lutherans’ views of predestination, this account is less nuanced and persuasive than the rest of the book, and gives perhaps excessive attention to...