In the previous article, I argued that ancient Christians rejected astrology partly because they refused to surrender human moral action to necessity. Eusebius, Bardaisan, Origen, and others could allow for providence, circumstance, bodily limitations, and even heavenly signs without allowing those things to become an irresistible cause of virtue or vice. If Mars made the murderer murder and Saturn made the sinner sin, praise and blame had begun to lose their meaning.

But that raises an uncomfortable question for Christians. What happens if we reject the idea that the stars determine every human action, only to teach that God determines them instead? If no person can finally do otherwise than the eternal decree has rendered certain, have we defeated determinism or baptized it?

Romans 9 immediately enters the conversation. Paul says that God loved Jacob and hated Esau before they had done good or evil, that salvation “depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who shows mercy,” that God hardened Pharaoh, and that the potter has authority over the clay. Ephesians 1 seems just as strong: God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” and “predestined us for adoption.”

Those texts cannot simply be softened because they make us uncomfortable. God chooses, predestines, calls, hardens, shows mercy, and accomplishes his purposes. The question is whether those verbs mean what later Augustinian and Calvinist theology has sometimes required them to mean.

I do not think they do.

The Question Is Not Whether God Is Sovereign

A great deal of the free-will debate gets lost immediately because the alternatives are badly defined. Either God is sovereign, we are told, or human beings possess meaningful freedom. If my response can make any genuine difference, then apparently God has surrendered some portion of his sovereignty to the creature.

But that assumes the conclusion. Why must divine sovereignty mean exhaustive causal determination of human choices? God could sovereignly create creatures whose choices are real, govern history without becoming the efficient cause of their sins, know future actions without causing them, judge human beings according to what they actually do, and still remain completely sovereign.

This is roughly where the older Greek Christian tradition placed the question. Irenaeus argued from Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem, “I would … and you would not,” that God created human beings capable of obedience or refusal. His formulation is difficult to reconcile with a theology of irresistible determination: “there is no coercion with God.”

That does not make Irenaeus a Pelagian fifteen generations before Pelagius. The patristic position is not that fallen people save themselves by reaching upward without grace. God acts first, calls, heals, strengthens, illuminates, gives grace, and makes salvation possible. The dispute concerns whether grace creates a genuine response or merely causes the response that God has eternally selected.

John of Damascus eventually states the Eastern distinction with unusual precision. God foreknows everything, he says, but “He does not predetermine all things.” In the very same discussion, John insists that without God’s cooperation and help we cannot will or accomplish anything good, while also insisting that human beings can follow God’s call or turn from it.

That is synergy. It does not mean God contributes fifty percent and we contribute fifty percent. It means salvation is entirely impossible apart from divine grace, while the grace of God does not transform the human person into an instrument without meaningful consent.

Augustine Is More Complicated Than “No Free Will”

Augustine should not be caricatured here. In On Grace and Free Will, he explicitly argues that Scripture reveals free choice and that divine commandments would make little sense without it. He also insists just as forcefully that grace is necessary for doing the good, so simply saying “Augustine denied free will” is historically false.

The disagreement appears more clearly in Augustine’s later theology of predestination. In his anti-Pelagian writings, Augustine increasingly argued that the beginning of saving faith itself is a special gift given to those whom God has predestined, and that final perseverance is likewise a gift God ensures for the predestined. Those who receive this gift finally persevere; others may experience considerable grace and even appear to live Christian lives without receiving the gift that secures perseverance to the end.

So Augustine still speaks about the human will, but the structure has changed. At the decisive point, the difference between the person who finally believes and perseveres and the person who does not is located in a divine gift selectively given according to predestination. Human cooperation remains in Augustine’s vocabulary, but the saving difference is ultimately grounded in what God irresistibly produces in one person and does not produce in another.

Calvin presses the logic further. He defines predestination as God’s eternal decree determining what he wills concerning every person, and he states explicitly that “some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation.” He also rejects the idea that predestination rests upon God merely foreseeing how people will respond.

Calvinism does not normally claim that people are robots dragged toward actions they consciously hate. Classical Reformed theology usually argues instead that people act voluntarily according to their desires, while God sovereignly determines the history in which those desires and actions certainly occur. The real disagreement, therefore, is not whether Calvinists believe people “will” things; it is whether the person could genuinely respond otherwise to divine grace.

That is exactly where Romans 9 must be allowed to speak for itself.

Romans 9 Begins with Israel, Not an Abstract Theory of Determinism

Romans 9 does not begin with the question, “Why does God create some individuals for heaven and others for hell?” It begins with Paul grieving over Israel. His fellow Israelites possess the covenants, the promises, the patriarchs, the worship, and even the Messiah according to the flesh, yet large numbers of them have not embraced Christ.

That creates an enormous theological problem. Has God’s promise to Israel failed?

Paul states the thesis in Romans 9:6: “It is not as though the word of God had failed.” Everything that follows through Romans 11 is an answer to that problem. Paul must explain how Israel can possess the promises, reject the Messiah in large measure, see Gentiles flooding into the people of God, and yet leave God faithful to what he promised.

This context does not make individual salvation irrelevant. Individuals clearly believe, disbelieve, receive mercy, and face judgment throughout these chapters. But it tells us what problem Paul is actually trying to solve, and that problem is the constitution of God’s covenant people.

Jacob and Esau Are Two Men, But They Are Also Two Nations

Paul’s first major example is the election of Jacob over Esau. Before the twins were born or had done anything good or evil, God told Rebekah, “The older will serve the younger.” Paul then reinforces the point with Malachi: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

Read only inside Romans 9, this can sound like two unborn babies have already been assigned opposite eternal destinies. But Paul has quoted texts with histories, and those histories matter.

Genesis 25:23 tells us what Rebekah has in her womb: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples … shall be divided.” The statement that the older will serve the younger concerns the historical relationship between the peoples descending from Esau and Jacob. The oracle certainly begins with two individuals, but Genesis itself immediately interprets them corporately.

The Malachi quotation is even clearer. Malachi is not describing God’s eternal disposition toward two unborn boys. Centuries after Jacob and Esau have died, the prophet contrasts Israel with Edom and describes Edom’s devastated territory. “Jacob” and “Esau” have become covenant names for peoples.

Paul’s argument, then, is not that Esau was created for eternal damnation before he had done evil. His point is that God was free to determine the historical line through which the covenant promise would advance. The promise did not automatically belong to every physical descendant in the same manner merely because of biological descent.

That distinction is crucial. Election in this part of Romans 9 concerns the historical purpose of God in forming the people through whom his promise comes. One cannot simply replace the categories “Jacob and Esau,” “Israel and Edom,” “promise and flesh” with “individual elect person and individually reprobated person” without first demonstrating that Paul has made that move.

John Chrysostom certainly did not read the passage as proof of an irresistible decree. He connects election with divine foreknowledge and says that God adds grace to what he calls “noble-born free-will.”

“It Is Not of Him Who Wills or Runs”

Romans 9:16 is perhaps even more direct: “So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.” If a verse ever appeared to say that the human will has nothing to do with salvation, this would seem to be the one.

Origen knew the argument long before Calvin. In On First Principles, he explicitly addresses people who used this verse to argue that salvation depends solely on God’s determination. His response is not to reduce grace but to deny that Paul has made human willing and striving meaningless.

Origen compares salvation to farming. Paul planted and Apollos watered, yet God gave the increase. The farmer really plants, but the harvest is finally attributed to God because human labor cannot create life or guarantee the result. In the same way, Origen argues, human willing is real but insufficient; salvation requires divine aid immeasurably greater than human effort.

Chrysostom interprets Romans 9:16 almost identically. Paul does not “deprive us of free-will,” he says, because a person must still will and run. Paul’s point is that we cannot attribute salvation to our willing and running as though grace were unnecessary.

That distinction makes good sense in Paul. Grace and human action are not competing causes in which every percentage assigned to one must be subtracted from the other. Paul can say, “I worked harder than any of them,” and immediately correct himself: “though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).

Paul worked. Grace worked. Paul does not appear troubled by the fact that both statements are true.

What About Pharaoh?

Paul’s next example is much more difficult. God tells Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up,” and Paul concludes, “He has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.” Here the divine action is unmistakable.

But hardening must first be interpreted through Exodus itself. God announces beforehand that he will harden Pharaoh, so it would be wrong to pretend divine hardening appears only as an improvised response after Pharaoh sins. Yet when the plagues actually begin, Exodus repeatedly says that Pharaoh’s heart was hard or that Pharaoh hardened his own heart before Exodus 9:12 first explicitly says during the enacted plague sequence that the LORD hardened him.

Pharaoh is also not morally neutral when Moses arrives. He already rules an oppressive system that has enslaved Israel, ordered the killing of Hebrew sons, rejected Yahweh’s command, and increased Israel’s labor. God does not take an innocent man who desperately wishes to obey and mysteriously inject wickedness into him so that he can later punish him for it.

Hardening is better understood as judicial. God confronts an already resistant ruler, gives him signs, warnings, periods of relief, and repeated commands, while Pharaoh repeatedly sets himself against the command. God then confirms and uses that resistance within the judgment falling upon Egypt.

Origen recognized the moral problem with the deterministic reading immediately. If God hardens Pharaoh in such a way that Pharaoh becomes sinful because God caused the sinful disposition, Origen argues, Pharaoh would cease to be the proper cause of his evil. That would make the justice of divine judgment difficult to explain.

And Romans itself gives us another example of divine hardening two chapters later. Paul says a “partial hardening” has happened to Israel “until” the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, yet the same hardened branches can be grafted in again if they do not persist in unbelief. Hardening in Paul therefore does not automatically mean an eternal decree rendering repentance metaphysically impossible.

The Potter and the Clay

Paul anticipates the objection: “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” His answer is severe. The creature is not in a position to summon the Creator into court, and the thing formed cannot demand that the one who formed it justify every decision.

Then comes the potter: “Has the potter no right over the clay?”

That image certainly affirms divine authority. But the image does not automatically define human persons as morally inert clay whose choices God causes in exactly the same manner that a potter physically determines the shape of a cup. Biblical metaphors have a point of comparison, and pressing every feature of an image into a metaphysical system can make the metaphor say more than its author intended.

Chrysostom makes precisely this point in his homily on Romans 9. Paul uses the potter, he argues, “not to do away with free-will” but to rebuke the creature who puts God in the dock. If Paul meant that God actually manufactures one person morally good and another morally evil in the way a potter makes different vessels, Chrysostom argues, God would become the maker of the evil person and human responsibility would collapse.

The Old Testament background strengthens that reading. Isaiah uses potter imagery to rebuke creatures who invert the relationship between themselves and their Maker. Jeremiah 18 develops the potter image corporately, applying it to nations and then explicitly saying that if a nation marked for judgment turns from evil, God may relent, while a nation marked for blessing can turn to evil and lose what had been announced.

So the potter possesses absolute rights over the clay. But in the prophetic use of the metaphor, the sovereignty of the potter does not eliminate morally significant repentance.

The Vessels of Wrath Are Grammatically Interesting

Romans 9:22–23 contains another distinction worth noticing. Paul speaks about “vessels of wrath fitted for destruction” and then about “vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory.”

The Greek is not symmetrical. In verse 22, katērtismena, “fitted” or “prepared,” is a perfect middle/passive participle. The grammatical form itself does not explicitly name God as the agent who prepared those vessels for destruction.

Verse 23 changes the construction. Paul says of the vessels of mercy that God “prepared [them] beforehand,” using proētoimasen, an active verb whose subject is God.

That difference should not bear more weight than it can carry. The middle/passive form in verse 22 does not prove that the vessels prepared themselves, and many interpreters understand it passively. But neither should we rewrite Paul into a perfectly symmetrical double-predestination formula in which God actively prepares one group for damnation in exactly the same sense that he prepares the other for glory.

Paul did not write the sentences symmetrically.

Chrysostom takes the asymmetry seriously within the larger argument. Pharaoh became a vessel of wrath through “his own lawlessness,” he says, while God nevertheless showed long-suffering toward him. Chrysostom then states his conclusion plainly: the different vessels arise through their “own free choice,” even while the saved remain vessels of mercy because salvation still depends fundamentally upon grace.

Paul Eventually Tells Us Why Israel Stumbled

One of the strangest ways to read Romans 9 is to stop at verse 24. Paul does not stop there. The argument continues, and by the end of the chapter he finally asks why Gentiles attained righteousness while Israel did not.

His answer is remarkably ordinary: faith and unbelief.

The Gentiles attained righteousness “that is by faith.” Israel failed to attain it because they pursued righteousness “not by faith” and stumbled over Christ.

That explanation should control how we understand the earlier examples. Paul spends the chapter defending God’s sovereign freedom to carry forward his promise through unexpected people, to show mercy beyond ethnic Israel, and to judge hardened resistance. But when he explains why the present division exists, he does not say, “because God irresistibly caused one group to believe and the other not to believe.”

He says they stumbled because they did not believe.

Romans 10 intensifies the point. People hear the proclaimed word, believe in the heart, confess Christ, call upon the Lord, and are saved. Paul then asks how they can call without believing and believe without hearing, which makes little sense if the proclamation has no genuinely responsive function for those who hear it.

Then Romans 11 makes the structure almost impossible to miss. Jewish branches were broken off “because of unbelief”; Gentile Christians “stand by faith”; those Gentiles are warned that they may be cut off; and the Jewish branches can be grafted in again “if they do not continue in their unbelief.”

Whatever Romans 9 means, Romans 11 does not describe two eternally fixed classes whose membership can never be otherwise. Paul describes people standing, falling, being cut off, and being restored in relation to faith and unbelief.

Romans 9 Is About God’s Freedom, But Not Calvinist Determinism

We can now state Paul’s argument more carefully. God is not indebted to biological Israel merely because of ancestry. God was free to carry the promise through Isaac rather than Ishmael, Jacob rather than Esau, a remnant rather than the whole nation, and finally believing Jews together with believing Gentiles.

No one earns mercy by running hard enough. God originates salvation, defines the covenant, sends Christ, issues the call, and has the right to judge those who resist him. The whole enterprise belongs to grace.

But none of those affirmations requires us to conclude that God causally determines the unbelief for which he condemns one person while irresistibly causing saving faith in another. In fact, Romans 9–11 repeatedly retains the opposite categories: unbelief, faith, repentance, warning, continuance, stumbling, grafting, rejection, restoration, and mercy offered to the disobedient.

The sovereign God Paul describes does not need determinism in order to be sovereign.

Ephesians 1 Predestines Us “In Christ”

Ephesians 1 is the other obvious text. God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” and “predestined us for adoption.” Later Paul says believers have obtained an inheritance according to the purpose of the one who works all things according to the counsel of his will.

Again, those statements are magnificent claims about divine initiative. They should not be reduced to God looking down the corridor of history, discovering what humans happen to do, and then stamping his approval on their independent decisions. Salvation originates in God’s eternal purpose.

But notice the controlling expression throughout the passage: in Christ.

God blessed us in Christ. He chose us in him. Adoption comes through Jesus Christ. Grace is given in the Beloved. Redemption is in him. God’s purpose is to unite everything in Christ. Believers obtain their inheritance in him. Finally Paul turns directly to the Gentile readers: “In him you also,” after hearing the gospel and believing, were sealed with the Holy Spirit.

Predestination in Ephesians 1 is therefore profoundly Christological. Before creation, God determined what the destiny of his people in Christ would be: holiness, adoption, redemption, inheritance, the Spirit, and ultimately the gathering of all things in Christ.

The text explicitly tells us what believers are predestined to. Verse 5 names adoption. Verse 11 names inheritance within God’s purpose. The passage does not explicitly say, “God predestined certain individuals to believe while withholding the possibility of faith from everyone else.”

A Calvinist can certainly argue that this additional proposition is logically included in God’s predestinating purpose. But that is an inference from a theological system, not the sentence Paul actually writes.

Chrysostom again provides an early Christian reading. When he asks what it means that God “chose us in Him,” he connects the choice with faith in Christ and immediately refuses to turn election into moral passivity. God’s saving work is genuinely God’s action, but human faith and life remain real responses to it.

Romans 8 Predestines People to Become Like Christ

Romans 8:29–30 also needs to enter the discussion because the language is explicit: those whom God foreknew he predestined, called, justified, and glorified. This is one of the strongest passages for predestination in the New Testament, and no responsible account of free will can simply skip it.

But once again we should ask what Paul says the predestination is for. Those whom God foreknew were “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”

The context is assurance in suffering. Creation groans, believers groan, the Spirit intercedes, and Paul assures Christians that God’s redemptive purpose is moving toward a predetermined end. God will make his people resemble Christ and bring them into glory.

The difficult word is “foreknew.” Some interpreters understand it as God’s relational knowledge of persons rather than mere foresight of their choices, and that argument deserves to be taken seriously. But even granting that meaning does not by itself establish exhaustive determinism.

Foreknowledge answers the question of divine knowledge and relationship. Causation is another question.

John of Damascus makes precisely that distinction centuries later. God’s knowledge is infallible without every morally significant action therefore being predetermined. Divine certainty and causal necessity are not identical concepts.

Philippians 2 Gives Us the Biblical Pattern

The false choice between grace and freedom becomes especially difficult to maintain in Philippians 2. Paul tells Christians to “work out” their salvation with fear and trembling, then gives the reason: “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work.”

Notice the logic. Paul does not say, “God works, therefore you do nothing.” He says, in effect, God is at work in you, therefore you work.

That is synergy in a single sentence.

Divine action does not compete with human action. God works within the person so that the person genuinely wills and genuinely acts. The action remains grace from beginning to end without becoming unreal human action.

This also explains why the patristic authors could praise free will so strongly without imagining that human beings save themselves. Origen says human willing cannot reach salvation without God. Chrysostom says willing and running remain necessary but are insufficient without grace. John of Damascus says we cannot will or perform the good without divine cooperation, yet God does not compel virtue.

That is neither Pelagianism nor Calvinism.

The Strongest Calvinist Objection Still Has Force

A Calvinist can reasonably object that this reading seems to domesticate Paul’s strongest language. Romans 9 does not merely say that God observes choices. God chooses before works, has mercy on whom he wills, hardens whom he wills, silences the objector, controls the clay, and prepares vessels for glory.

That objection deserves a real answer. Paul absolutely intends to destroy the idea that human beings place God under obligation, that Israel can claim the promise on the basis of ancestry, or that salvation becomes an achievement for which the successful person can congratulate himself.

But divine initiative is not the same proposition as exhaustive determinism. “God’s mercy cannot be earned” does not logically mean “God irresistibly causes only selected persons to receive mercy.” “God may harden a rebel” does not mean “God eternally causes the rebellion for which he hardens him.” “God chooses the line of covenant promise apart from works” does not mean “God chooses some unborn individuals for eternal torment apart from anything they will do.”

Those conclusions require additional arguments.

More importantly, Paul himself refuses to let his powerful language about election erase response. Before Romans 11 is finished, branches have been removed through unbelief, others stand through faith, the standing are warned not to become presumptuous, the fallen can return, and God has “consigned all to disobedience” with the astonishing purpose of showing mercy to all.

The mystery ends not in a diagram of fixed human destinies but in doxology.

The Patristic Reading of Romans 9 Is Not a Modern Escape Hatch

Sometimes libertarian readings of Romans 9 are treated as modern reactions to Reformed theology. That history does not work. Origen was explicitly answering deterministic interpretations of Romans 9 in the third century, more than twelve hundred years before Calvin.

Origen even structures his discussion around the very verses now treated as the strongest objections to free will. He discusses Pharaoh, “not of him who wills,” God giving a new heart, “whom he wills he hardens,” the objector asking why God still finds fault, and the potter with authority over the clay. He does this in a chapter whose title in the ancient collection is explicitly about statements of Scripture that appear to nullify free will.

Chrysostom does the same thing directly in his Romans homilies. His reading of the potter explicitly rejects abolition of free will, his Pharaoh makes himself a vessel of wrath through lawlessness, and his interpretation of “not of him who wills” preserves human willing while subordinating everything to grace.

Irenaeus earlier grounds judgment itself in the capacity for genuine obedience and refusal. John of Damascus later summarizes the developed Eastern position by separating foreknowledge from predetermination and grace from compulsion.

The point is not that every Father says exactly the same thing. They do not. The point is narrower and more important: the reading of Paul that preserves grace, providence, foreknowledge, election, and meaningful freedom is not an invention designed to escape Augustine or Calvin.

It is older than both systems.

Free Will Does Not Mean an Untouched Will

There is one final mistake to avoid. Rejecting Augustinian or Calvinist determinism does not require returning to the fantasy of a completely autonomous person who stands outside grace, history, sin, bodily weakness, social formation, and spiritual powers.

The Bible does not describe us that way. Sin enslaves. Habits harden. Desires become disordered. Human beings can become darkened in their understanding, captive to passions, fearful of death, conformed to an age, and resistant to God.

Grace is therefore not an optional encouragement offered to an otherwise self-sufficient will. God calls, reveals, convicts, heals, strengthens, gives the Spirit, incorporates us into Christ, nourishes us through the church, and empowers obedience that we could never produce as independent creatures.

But healing a will is not the same as replacing it.

Christian freedom is not freedom from God. It is the restoration of the human person so that we can increasingly act in communion with God. The more grace transforms a person, the more truly human and truly free that person becomes.

Predestination Without Fatalism

The biblical doctrine of predestination is therefore much larger and better than the idea that God wrote two secret lists of individuals before creation and then irresistibly moved each person toward the destination assigned to him. God really does predestine. The New Testament will not allow us to abandon the word.

But what has he predestined?

In Romans 8, believers are predestined to conformity to Christ and glory. In Ephesians 1, those in Christ are chosen for holiness, adoption, inheritance, and the summing up of creation in Christ. In Romans 9–11, God sovereignly determines how his covenant promise will advance through Israel, the remnant, the Messiah, and the incorporation of the Gentiles, while Paul continues to explain inclusion and exclusion through faith and unbelief.

God’s purpose is fixed. Christ will triumph. Creation will be restored. God will have a people united to his Son, made holy, adopted, raised, and glorified.

What Scripture does not require us to add is that every human refusal was itself irresistibly caused by God so that the condemnation of the refuser could accomplish a decree settled independently of his response.

That is where I part company with classical Augustinian predestinarianism and Calvinism.

God Is Not Fate with a Christian Name

The sequel to the astrology discussion finally brings us here. The early Christian rejection of fate would be strangely hollow if Christianity merely replaced the irresistible movement of the stars with the irresistible causation of every human choice by God.

The Biblical alternative is neither fate nor autonomy. It is providence, grace, and communion.

God is not struggling helplessly at the edge of history hoping human beings will rescue his plan. Neither is he scripting sin into people and then condemning them for performing the role. He is the sovereign Creator who can govern genuinely free creatures without ceasing to be sovereign, whose foreknowledge does not require coercion, whose grace makes salvation possible, and whose judgment can therefore be genuinely just.

Paul’s language remains as strong as ever. God chooses. God calls. God has mercy. God hardens. God predestines. God prepares his people for glory.

But Paul also says people believe, disbelieve, stumble, turn, continue, fall, stand, obey, refuse, and can be grafted in again.

We should not save one set of Biblical statements by explaining the other set out of existence.

Your birth chart is not your destiny. Neither is damnation a character God assigned you to play before you ever entered the story. The destiny God announces in the gospel is Christ himself: adoption, holiness, resurrection, and glory for those who are united to him.

The stars do not own you.

And God does not need to destroy your freedom in order to save you.