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This chapter scrutinizes nine objections leveled against Pascal's Wager. Two of these objections are charges that Pascalian reasoning is immoral. Three might be called ‘methodological objections’, as they purport to show that the Wager argument is unsound because of this or that logical flaw. Four of the objections flow out of theological considerations. None of the nine, however, survives close scrutiny. The Jamesian Wager, in particular, escapes the nine unscathed.

The chapter discusses the doctrine of election in the context of the Glaubenslehre. The concept of a single divine decree structures the argument throughout the book, and the content of the decree is a universal predestination to salvation in Christ. Christ's redemptive work is realized gradually and without miraculous leaps. The historical existence of believers and unbelievers does not result from a foreordained division of human beings. Divine mercy and righteousness pertain to every person; the idea of double predestination is rejected. Since the Christian church is the complete revelation of Christ's dignity, it is possible that every person will be included in the fellowship with him. Schleiermacher's position remains theocentric; predestination is defined in terms of divine omniscience and omnipotence, not in terms of redemption. Christ is the universal mediator of salvation, but his appearance in history does not contribute significantly to the determination of the divine decree.

The chapter argues that Karl Barth's Commentary on Romans questions the individualistic assumptions of traditional views. For Barth, as for Schleiermacher, predestination is a divine act that constitutes the unity of all human beings and not an absolute distinction between two kinds of persons. Every person is the object of God's universal judgment and grace, at once separated from and bound to God. The divine decision to elect or reprobate is not predetermined but occurs time and again in the historical event in which God's address leads to faith or to unbelief. Is Barth's thinking already ‘open toward the later characteristic christological centring of election’? He argues that humankind's reprobation is overcome in Christ because of Christ's resurrection from the dead, but he does not yet say that Christ's reconciling death is the result of God's self‐determination to be God in a covenant with humankind.

The chapter argues that the main theme of the doctrine of election in Karl Barth's Göttingen Dogmatics is the twofold possibility of faith and unbelief, which is an integral part of God's address to humanity. God's ‘unveiling’ is the purpose of His ‘veiling’, but the decision when and how the ‘unveiling’ occurs is made by God alone. Reprobation is the event in which God withholds the gift of faith, but it is not an end in itself and is always oriented toward election and salvation as the steadfast goal. Barth changes the concept of an eternal double predestination from a concept that refers to a pre‐temporal divine foreordination into an actualistic concept that refers to the freedom and contingency of God's acting in history. The modification underscores the theocentric and teleological character of his view.

The chapter shows how Barth's second revision of the doctrine, culminating in Church Dogmatics II/2, puts the doctrine on a new foundation. Predestination now is identical with the election of Jesus Christ. It is a primal decision, by which God determines not only humankind but also Himself, and a gracious choice, by which God chooses reprobation for Himself and election for human beings. The idea of Jesus Christ as the subject and object of election overcomes the traditional distinction between God's will in Jesus Christ and God's eternal will. Barth's second revision of the doctrine succeeds in defining election more concretely. The teleological view of reprobation and election is preserved, but with a new focus on Jesus Christ, the ‘atoning substitute’ (Schleiermacher). The christological revision leads to a consideration of the election of the congregation and of the individual, two topics neglected in the Göttingen Dogmatics.

This chapter sets out the structure and method of this book. Will, evil, and predestination are all problems which have a history, and whose history is relevant to Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will. This book adopts a rather parsimonious approach to these contexts by focusing upon On Free Choice itself. Rather than attempting to map Augustine’s text onto a contemporary account of these concepts or locating it in an overarching narrative of their development, this book is an enquiry into the way Augustine uses such terms and ideas in the context of this particular text. A related methodological minimalism consists in the leaving out of detailed references to Augustine’s relationship to other historical figures and movements (Manichaeanism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism).

Mark Twain grappled seriously with theologians from the Calvinist tradition. While many of his comments seem dismissive (and funny), it is clear that Calvinism charged his writing with what one might call an insistent humorousness of purpose. Reflecting on free will, election, and predestination, Twain read especially Jonathan Edwards; not just as one of whom to make fun but as one with whom he had much in common. Edwards provided more than just a whipping boy for Twain’s philosophical comedy—they shared a theological vocabulary, metaphysical assumptions, and a view of God as sovereign. Their disagreements were substantial, but Mark Twain and the Calvinists were partners in the same enterprise. Thus, one can argue that Twain’s growth as a writer came, not, as some have argued, only insofar as he could distance himself from his Calvinist upbringing and influences, but rather as he fully engaged and wrestled with that tradition.

One of the most difficult elements of Wyclif’s thought is resolution of the tension between his deterministic understanding of the nature of the church and his call for ecclesiastical reform. Augustine theology has long been defined by the problem of predestination, and Bradwardine had famously attacked the “Pelagianism” of the Ockhamists in his strongly deterministic De Causa Dei. Wyclif’s thought is an attempt at balancing Bradwardine’s determinism by a carefully articulated modal account of necessity, allowing for a stronger degree of reciprocity between God’s necessary understanding of creation and human free will than Bradwardine had allowed. This opened Wyclif’s conception of the church as the unknowable body of the Elect to the possibility of reform. While his writings are filled with references to Antichrist, Wyclif followed Augustine in rejecting millennialism, arguing that Antichrist’s threat in the form of papalism and friars was ongoing, but ultimately able to be resolved.

Leo preached to a city in which the process of Christianization was effectively complete; he therefore had to describe Christianity in terms that made it accessible to the ordinary citizen. The style and content of his sermons were intended to show that Christianity did not subvert civic values but rather made the Christian a better citizen and Rome a greater city. This was influenced by Augustine's account of Christ the Mediator mediating justice to the body of the elect, and through them, to the world but Leo offered a different account of predestination.

The pastoral problems of predestination arise because Augustine uses the concept of divine election to answer the question: why are some saved rather than others? For Protestants, this becomes a question about why some are converted rather than others, but as his treatment of the conversion of Paul shows, Augustine does not conceive of conversion as a once‐in‐a‐lifetime event. Nor does he think it assures us of eternal salvation, for we do not know in advance whether we will also receive the gift of perseverance in faith. The anxieties evoked by predestination stem ultimately from supercessionism, the doctrine that Christians replace the Jews as God's chosen people, which assumes, contrary to the biblical concept of election (as Karl Barth shows), that God's choices are bad news for those not chosen.

This chapter traces Wycliffite beliefs about salvation, starting with an analysis of Wyclif's doctrines of grace and predestination. Rather than espousing the view that God has arbitrarily elected those who will be saved and condemned those who will be punished, as medieval polemicists and later scholars alike have argued, Wyclif and many Wycliffite writers instead ascribed to good deeds an essential role in the process of salvation. A majority of lay heresy suspects agreed, and only a few defendants endorsed predestinarian views after the turn of the sixteenth century. This trend suggests that many dissenters were hesitant to abandon the dominant religious world view of the Middle Ages. Ecclesiastically sponsored sermons, poems, plays, and other texts often privileged the need to perform good works over and above the operation of grace, and whilst lollard dissenters were not enthusiastic about such practices as indulgences and bequests for soul‐masses, the underlying logic of their soteriologies was strikingly similar.

Political stories are all about heroes. It is because Barack Obama could not be a hero in south Chicago's black community that he lost that long-ago congressional race. Only by losing could Obama become a hero on the larger historical stage. There is a purpose to a hero's life. It is this goal that defines an arc stretching from the past to the future via the present, moving the heroes and the greater causes for which they fight from earlier despair to contemporary redemption and on to future glory. Persons who become heroes are predestined to traverse this rainbow arch. This is what the plot to their story is all about. This chapter discusses the hero's predestination and redemption, crisis and salvation, and the suffering and redemption of John McCain. In the campaign for the presidency, McCain played Achilles to Obama's Hector, even if the outcome of their epic confrontation inverted the tragic ending Homer earlier prescribed.

While the earlier chapters have established al-Ghazali’s teachings on certain elements of his cosmology, all these alements are brought together here and analyzed from how they appear in al-Ghazali’s later works, i.e. those works written after the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din). Most important are al-Ghazali’s comparison of the created world with a water-clock. This comparison appears in two of his later works and offers a detailed understanding of how God creates a fully determined universe of secondary causes and effects. The so-called veil-section in his Niche of Lights (Mishkat al-anwar) has always posed the greatest difficulties for a comprehensive understanding of al-Ghazali’s cosmology. This chapter offers a coherent explanation of who the different groups in that section represent and what they believe in. Avicenna appears in the veil-section as someone who has an almost correct understand of God and His relation to the world, yet he did not grasp that the true God is one step beyond the creature that he assumes to be God. Those who truly arrive at an understanding of God, realize that the God of the philosophers is only a creature. He is the “one who is obeyed” (al-muta’) in al-Ghazali’s cosmology, the first intellect or God’s first creature. Finally the chapter analyzes al-Ghazali’s very last work, finished only days before his death and shows that even here at the end of his life, al-Ghazali maintains that the conflict between the proponents of occasionalism and that of secondary causality must remain undecided.