No, not in the way you probably mean. If you’re coming from a Baptist or Reformed background here in Southeast Texas, you’ve likely heard predestination taught as God choosing some people for heaven and others for hell before they were born, independent of anything they do. We don’t believe that.
Orthodox Christians do use the word “predestination,” but we mean something different. God predestines people based on His foreknowledge of how they’ll freely respond to His grace. He knows what you’ll choose, but He doesn’t force the choice.
God Knows, But Doesn’t Compel
Here’s the distinction that matters. God exists outside time. He sees your entire life at once, the way you might see a whole parade route from a helicopter. He knows whether you’ll accept His grace or reject it. And based on that foreknowledge, He predestines you to salvation or condemnation. But the knowledge comes from watching what you freely choose, not from making the choice for you.
Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus put it this way: God “did not irrespectively predestine, but predestined in his foreknowledge.” God sees what’s within your power without compelling it. St. John Chrysostom said something even more direct: “God desires, and if man desires also, then he or she is already predestined.”
This isn’t God playing favorites or flipping coins. It’s God respecting the freedom He gave you.
Why Free Will Matters
You can’t love someone if you’re programmed to love them. St. John of Damascus wrote, “The good that is done by force is not good.” If God overrode your will and made you choose Him, that wouldn’t be love. It’d be coercion.
The whole point of our existence is to freely enter into communion with God. That’s what salvation is, theosis, union with God. And union requires two parties choosing each other. God’s already chosen you. He wants all people to be saved, as St. Peter writes in his second letter. The question is whether you’ll choose Him back.
This is why we talk about synergy, cooperation with grace. God’s grace does the heavy lifting. We can’t save ourselves. But we have to cooperate with what God offers. Think of it like a drowning person and a lifeguard. The lifeguard does the saving, but the drowning person has to stop fighting and let themselves be rescued.
What About Romans 8?
I know what you’re thinking. What about all those verses in Romans about predestination and foreknowledge and being called and justified? We read those verses too. We just don’t read them through Augustine and Calvin.
When Paul writes about God foreknowing and predestining in Romans 8:29-30, the Church Fathers understood this as God seeing ahead of time who would cooperate with grace. God foreknows your free response, then predestines accordingly. The order matters. Foreknowledge comes first.
This isn’t some modern innovation or theological dodge. It’s how the Church has always read these passages. St. Gregory of Nyssa said flat out: “Our salvation does not depend on compulsion, but on our own will.”
The Problem with Calvinist Predestination
The Reformed doctrine of predestination, where God arbitrarily elects some for heaven and passes over others for hell, all before creation and independent of anything humans do, came from Augustine’s later writings and got hardened into dogma by Calvin. It’s a Western development that the Orthodox Church never accepted.
We rejected it formally in the Confession of Dositheus back in 1672, but really we’d been rejecting it all along. It contradicts too much. It makes God the author of evil. It turns humans into puppets. It makes the Incarnation and the Cross into a kind of theater, since the outcome was fixed from eternity anyway.
And honestly, it makes evangelism absurd. Why would Christ tell us to go make disciples if God’s already decided who’s in and who’s out?
What This Means for You
If you’re inquiring about Orthodoxy and you’ve been taught Calvinist predestination, this might feel like a weight lifting. God isn’t playing favorites. He’s not damning babies before they’re born. He genuinely wants you saved, and He’s given you everything you need to cooperate with His grace.
But don’t mistake this for Pelagianism or “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” You can’t earn salvation. You can’t work your way to heaven. What you can do is say yes when God offers you His hand. You can fast when fasting is called for, pray when you’re supposed to pray, confess when you’ve sinned, receive the Eucharist when the Church offers it. These aren’t merit badges. They’re how you cooperate with the grace God’s pouring out.
Fr. Daniel Sysoev, a Russian priest and martyr, said it well: “God saves only those predestined for salvation; however, this predestination does not depend on God but on people.” That sounds paradoxical until you understand that God’s predestination follows His foreknowledge of your free choice.
The Church has always believed this. It’s not complicated once you stop trying to make God into a cosmic dictator. He’s a Father who wants His children home. The door’s open. You just have to walk through it.
