4 5 7R e l i g i o u s R e a s o n i n gadvance of my birth. It doesn’t follow from this that God determined what
my fate will be. But it does seem to follow that my fate is not indeterminate.
Moreover, if God is omnipotent, and can do anything, or anything it is logi-
cally possible to do, then nothing happens except by his will. So if I wind
up in Hell, he will not only have known that from eternity, he will also have
willed it from eternity.
Predestination is not so widely accepted now as it was when my church
was founded in the 16th century. I find many Christians who reject it. And I
sympathize with them. Their hearts are in the right place, certainly. I cannot
believe that a just and loving God would create beings he knew, and had
predetermined, would spend eternity in hell. But Christians can reject pre-
destination only at the cost of ignoring the authority of their scriptures and
the implications of their theology. I would not insist that a good Christian
must be a fundamentalist, who thinks that everything Scripture says is liter-
ally true. But it does seem to me that if someone calls himself a Christian, he
ought at least to believe that the Christian scriptures are not seriously mis-
leading about central matters, such as salvation and damnation.
Let us set predestination to one side. Even if the Christian scriptures did
not contain that commitment, there would still be a problem about Hell,
to which they are committed by an even wider range of texts.* The phil-
osophical support for Hell, though, seems much weaker than the support
for predestination. I see no philosophical reason for believing in an eternal
punishment for sinners. Indeed, philosophy is against it. Philosophy teaches
that the punishment should be proportionate to the crime. Let’s concede, for
the sake of argument, that we are all, in some sense, sinners. Which of us,
looking into his heart, can honestly say that he has never done anything seri-
ously wrong, at least once in his life? But the doctrine of Hell requires that
most of us sinners will suffer eternal torment.**...
In the Christian tradition it is normal to baptize infants at an early age
because it is believed that they come into the world tainted by the sin of
Adam and Eve.† This is the doctrine of original sin. I cannot believe in origi-
nal sin. My granddaughter may be a sinner now, but not when she was in
the intensive care unit [for three months after being born prematurely].* So far as I can see, the strongest scriptural support for predestination comes from the letters of
St. Paul. There seems to be relatively little support for it in the gospels. This might suggest that
it was not part of the original teaching of Jesus. But texts supporting the idea of Hell are easy to
find in the gospels.
** The most explicit passage I know on the question of the proportion of the saved to the damned
is Matthew 22:14, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” But if salvation depends on acceptance
of Jesus as one’s savior, as Christian exclusivists hold, and if the great majority of people have
not accepted Jesus as their savior, the texts supporting exclusivism do imply that comparatively
few are chosen. I say more about exclusivism below.
† This seems to have been the original justification for this practice, though like much else in
early Christianity it subsequently became controversial. Some abandoned the practice. Others
found other justifications for it. For a good brief account see Alister McGrath, Christian Theology,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 514–18.97364_ch21_ptg01_449-464.indd 457 15/11/13 12:22 3M
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