PREDESTINATION
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
For whom he did foreknow, he also
did predestine to be
conformed to the image of his son.
-- Romans 8:29.
[239] Two of
the cardinal points in Calvin’s
doctrine of predestination are, first
that God elects individuals to be saved;
second, that He designs complete
redemption for these only; that
every event in their lives was
predestined and could not have been
avoided.
Carefully
bear in mind these definitions of
predestination; that the Calvinistic is
the arbitrary method of God by which some
are ordained to be saved and others to be
eternally lost. The definition of
predestination as given in the Koran is
that every event that has ever occurred
in the history of the world or which ever
will occur was foreordained from the
beginning and could not possibly have
been different.
These are
the doleful interpretations as almost
universally accepted at one time and as
accepted by many today. Predestination
declares that if a man is born to be
hanged he can never be drowned; that each
event in his life, and the [240] manner
of his leaving this sphere of activity
was foreordained before his birth, and
from such teaching was born the doctrine
of fatalism.
There are
many sensible people who are fatalists,
those who believe it is useless to battle
against the predestined conditions in
life. Calvinism teaches that man has
attached to him at birth a personal chart
of life which he must follow to the
letter; that if he has not been elected
by God to be one of the saved, no efforts
on his part can tend to his
salvation.
Some
centuries ago theologians of the
Christian Church began to see an element
of unfairness in this situation, because
their alert mentalities discovered that
the individual, in order to be an
individual at all, has what is called
“free will”; that is, he is a
free moral agent, and because of this it
was possible, very possible, that a man
who was predestined to be something other
than he wished to be, might by the
exercise of free moral agency or free
will break the shackles. Many
controversies took place, among the
active mentalities of the Church and the
sleepy ones, on this question of
predestination, but it was never settled
because even so great a church dignitary
as Robertson (Frederick William,
1816-53), perhaps the greatest preacher
of his time in England, declared that it
was possible for him to see
predestination and a certain amount of
free will without interfering with the
plans of the Infinite. He, however, only
plunged them into a dilemma. He [241]
handed them predestination on the one
hand and free will on the other.
Now, my
friends, what is free moral agency for if
it is not to carve out for the individual
the kind of life that he desires to live?
If it is for no higher or better purpose
than for one merely to follow the lines
of least resistance and accept the
doctrine of predestination as a fixed
chart for one’s personal life, then
I see no real value in free moral
agency.
It seems
ridiculous, and yet this great man of the
Church, Robertson, declares that he can
see vaguely, dimly, the possibility of
predestination according to the
Calvinistic theory, and free moral agency
according to the desires of the inmost
heart. He does not tell us that these
ideas can be brought together and caused
to work in harmony; he could not tell us
that because two thoughts so utterly
opposed to each other never could be
brought to work harmoniously
together.
Predestination has been a mightily
discouraging doctrine which Theology has
never been able to explain. It remains,
therefore, for the thoughtful minds
outside the Church which are not bound by
the traditions of the elders to solve
this doctrinal enigma. If man wishes to
be noble, great and powerful spiritually,
it would surely be a pity if
predestination should prevent his
spiritual growth.
Free moral
agency is God’s greatest gift to
man, not intended, however, to affect the
foreordained [242] plans of the Infinite.
Were these plans that each individual
should follow a certain line of conduct
carefully mapped out before his birth,
[and] follow it through all the events
and experiences, pains, passions, trials
and tribulations of what we call this
earthly life, and finally land in a state
of unending torment as a result of his
life here, then it would be a sad
theology and a sad outlook.
That
predestination is a law goes without
saying; that free moral agency is a
God-bequeathed power also goes without
saying; and to affirm that these two, one
a law and the other a force, can work
together harmoniously it is our purpose
to show. We shall prove the possibility
of predestination and free agency working
in perfect harmony and bringing about
those high conditions which every
aspiring human soul desires. But in order
to do this we must take a new view of
predestination. We must get away from the
idea which says that an invisible tag is
placed around the neck of every child the
moment it is born; a tag signifying the
method and manner of its future life and
inevitable death and of its postmortem
experiences, for this is the idea which
has obtained for so many centuries in the
minds of men concerning
predestination.
Predestination is a law, and perhaps the
most beautiful law in the whole category
of laws. It is diametrically opposed to
the Calvinistic idea that God elects some
to be saved and others to be eternally
lost; it is diametrically opposed to the
[243] teaching of the Koran. How
differently does the Master regard this
law! He seems to feel, when we turn with
anguished hearts, mutilated bodies and
tortured minds, that we are entitled to
something nobler in the way of
interpretation of this great law, and he
tells us in unmistakable words, “It
is not the will of your Father which is
in heaven that one of these little ones
should perish,” but that all of
them should have eternal life. It is not
the will of our Father which is in heaven
that the sinner should die, but rather
that he should be converted and live.
Imagine, my friends, that it were
predestined by God that the child should
die and that without baptism; that the
floor of hell should be paved with the
skulls of unbaptized infants (as a
contemporaneous writer of Calvin declares
to be the case); imagine this vivid
picture of Dante’s Inferno of a
seething mass of lost souls--including
the repentant ones (because of this
terrible law having gone into effect,)
and where men who desired to be saved
could not be saved, and little children
although not responsible for their
personal salvation eternally damned!
Imagine this if you can!
Is it not a
wonderful thing to have the greatest of
all teachers tell us that the
predestination of God concerning man is
that all shall know Him from the
least of them unto the greatest, from the
lowest to the highest, from the most
degraded and debased to the most exalted
and powerful?
[244] I want
you to bear in mind these wonderful words
of our text, because they signify what
Paul the Apostle understood
predestination to mean: “For whom
he did foreknow, he also did predestinate
to be conformed to the image of his
son.”
For God to
know means for God to foreknow; for God
to ordain is for God to foreordain; for
Him to destinate means for Him to
predestinate. So all the great scheme of
the universe is known from the beginning
to the end by that Infinite Wisdom which
men call God, and in that Infinite Wisdom
we see the working out of an oral process
of unfoldment.
God
predestines Man! He foreknows Man! He
foreordains Man and for what purpose?
To be conformed to the Divine
Image. What a wonderful
predestination that is! How it would have
enlightened the medieval theologians if
they had taken these words of St. Paul
and examined them carefully and found
what they really meant. They knew the
meaning of the words predestinate,
foreknow, and foreordain, but they did
not know the beautiful word
conform. To conform--to make one
with--to cause one to be in complete
harmony with; this is what is meant by
man being foreordained to the image of
God. Theologians have seen only half the
picture.
We see man
in the process of going out, but we do
not see him coming back. It is as if we
saw an Australian boomerang-thrower
throwing his boomerang and we wondered
where it was [245] going, trying to see
if it would not disappear in the
distance. Presently we see it returning
to the hand of the thrower. That is the
half of the picture that Calvin did not
see. He saw the other half, God throwing
Man into this great world of experience
and letting him go with a tag on his neck
signifying the career he should follow
notwithstanding he desired to follow a
very different one.
Divine
Wisdom and Divine Spiritual Science see
the end from the beginning. We see the
boomerang which we may figuratively speak
of as Man going out from the great heart
of God, making its circuit and coming
back again, having gained much by the
experience. Just as the boomerang gains
velocity on its homeward journey, just so
man on his homeward journey back to the
great heart of God brings with him the
treasures of this wonderful life.
For
instance, take a sincere teacher in a
school who is not there merely for
financial gain but who desires to see the
unfoldment of his pupil’s mind; he
sees in the child what the parents cannot
persuade themselves to see; he believes
that in that child are great
possibilities and he goes to work upon
the unfinished product of other systems
of education. All the time he sees the
boy as the thing that is coming into its
own. He holds the thought over the child
that he must return to his divine
perfection. Imagine a child in an
atmosphere of this kind. Picture the
unfoldment of the child in whom the
principal [246] of a school has such
tremendous confidence that he know that
one day that child is going to manifest
all the intellectual perfection which God
intends he shall manifest. This child
cannot be a failure.
Compare the
patience of this teacher with the
wonderful patience of Divine Wisdom
which, whether or not it sees us at work
in this great schoolroom of life, has but
one idea concerning us,--our perfection
in the divine scheme of things. It is as
if we were put into a workshop with a
certain pattern to follow and the master
workman knowing beyond the shadow of a
doubt that we were fully capable of
working out this scheme, should leave us
with all the implements and with a
pattern before us, knowing in his own
mind that it is but a question of time
when we shall bring to him the finished
product.
God sees in
you the divine artist and has given to
you the perfect pattern. The thought of
God is, “It is only a question of
time when this son of mine will come back
to me with the finished work, when all
the thought in his mind and all the atoms
of his body are conspiring to bring about
a conformity with the ‘I
AM.’”
In the great
schoolroom of life we make many
mistakes--serious mistakes; we suffer
because of them and devise ways, means
and methods of our own for escaping the
punishment of these mistakes, but it is
this very punishment that is going to
correct them, till we begin to see that
we [247] were destined to be something
infinitely greater than that which we
have produced in our lives.
Shakespeare
says, “There is a destiny which
shapes our ends, rough hew them as we
may.” The fatalist says it makes no
difference how we live, we shall end just
as God planned us to end. The great
universal scheme of things has us at its
mercy, so it makes no difference as
individuals what we do. “Why not
interpret these words of Shakespeare a
little differently? Thinking of man as a
mortal, beginning at birth and ending at
death we know how the ends are shaped; we
know we come into this plane of
consciousness with a cry, and we know
that most of us go out with another cry;
we know this only too well, but this is
not all of man. These are not the ends
that destiny has shaped, for when we
begin to think seriously and think of man
as an immortal instead of a mortal being,
as spiritual instead of material, then we
begin to conceive of man as the son of
God instead of as a mere son of man; we
begin to see that the ends which destiny
has shaped for us unite. Those ends meet
in that eternal life which is God; they
are so skillfully welded together that
the human eye cannot see the point of
separation. These ends have been destined
from eternity to eternity.
The
predestination of man is that he shall
forever repose in the great central heart
of God. From the very beginning it has
been foreordained that man shall conform
to the image of His Son; to the image of
the One Altogether [248] Lovely. It is
the destiny of man to be superior not
only to sin, but to sickness, sorrow,
pain, perplexity and poverty; this is the
destiny of man. While we are working this
out here, either ignorantly or
intelligently, a Divine plan formed
throughout all eternity is at work in
every human consciousness.
It is your
work and mine to understand the purpose
and cause for which we came into this
world; why we are here, what we are going
to do and what is going to become of us.
The simple words of St. Paul interpret
predestination from a glorious point of
view. They tell us that conformity to the
image of His Son is our destiny, is the
glorious end of Man even as it was his
beginning, because both meet in God.
Does ill
health seem to be your destiny? Do you
feel that your destiny is to go through
this earth-life of yours wasting away
till that which is called death takes
place? Do you feel that adversity is your
lot in spite of yourself? Do you feel
that despite all your efforts you are to
remain a limited personality all your
days in this great workshop of life? Are
you the victim of some habit which has
been fastened upon you by inherited
tendencies? If so, disabuse your mind of
any such belief. It is a giant delusion
and has nothing to do with predestination
as understood by Jesus of Nazareth and
Paul of Tarsus. Let Theology rave, rant,
argue and indulge in controversies, but
all the time God’s glorious truth
that Man’s destiny is to conform
[249] to His image is eternal. If
originally you were the son of God,
ultimately you will manifest Him in spite
of all your earth experiences. You will
prove your divine sonship because it
is the law of your being.
The only
inherited tendencies are the God-like
tendencies. Claim them for yourself. Of
course that which is predestined must
come to pass and this is the thing
predestined--the perfectness of Man made
in the image of God. What a horrible
doctrine is predestination when seen on
its negative side! What a glorious
doctrine when seen on its positive
side!
When
predestination is understood as the
ultimate recovery of man’s original
birthright of domination over sin,
sickness and sorrow alike, then we will
be glad for predestination. It is a
hopeful doctrine. It dries the tears and
gives courage to the fearful, strength to
the weak and heart to the disheartened.
It is new birth. This was what it did for
the prodigal son. He arose one morning
and opened his eyes to the real meaning
of predestination. It dawned upon him
that he was the son of his father and
that it was not right for him to be down
there eating husks with swine; that it
was his divine right to be free, healthy
and happy; timorously at first he arose
and said, “I will arise and go in
the direction of my father if this is my
destination; if it is predestined for me
that I shall live in my father’s
home in comfort, happiness, peace and
[250] luxury, then I will turn my face in
the direction of my father.”
This is the
lesson that comes to you and to me, my
friends. We were predestined from the
very beginning to enter into all the joys
of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “It
is your Father’s good pleasure to
give you the Kingdom.” (Luke
12:32.) Calvinistic predestination says,
“It is the Father’s good
pleasure to withhold the Kingdom from
you.”
Shall we
believe in this false doctrine, or in Him
who is “The Lord your God, who is
God in heaven above and in the earth
beneath?”
It is your
destiny to demonstrate health, harmony
and happiness. Look away from the morbid
reflections of the past. Look away from
this false doctrine of the medieval
Church which was mixed in its theology.
Look away from everything which would
indicate that man was destined to be
anything other than the glorious,
dominating Son of the Living God, which
he really is.
Next: The
Practice of Idealism
* * * * *
The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
