NON-CAUSATIVE PREDESTINATION??

By: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

According to a book from 2020, “non-causative predestination” is basically a modern guardrail phrase: it tries to protect two claims the author insists Scripture teaches plainly—God’s sovereignty over all events and God’s holiness as “not the moral author of sin”—without letting human “logic” bully the Bible into choosing only one of them.

The Foreword’s core complaint is that many controversies come from confusing mystery with contradiction. A contradiction would be God being holy and unholy “in the same sense.” Mystery is God being “sovereign over all events” while not being the moral producer of evil—truths the author says must be held together even if the “plumbing” is hidden.

The document then pivots to a concrete flashpoint: an exchange tied to C. C. Morris and The Remnant, where the phrase “the Lord’s ‘causative’ absolute predestination” gets pressed. Morris rejects the category and insists his doctrine must be dictated by Scripture, not by “feelings,” and he treats the “author of sin” accusation as a serious charge that Absoluters “everywhere deny.”

Historically, it frames the Fort Worth Council (Oct. 21–23, 1902) as a “stop-the-bleeding” meeting over fellowship fracture. The key line the author highlights is the Council’s denial that predestination is “the cause which moves men to action either in righteousness or unrighteousness,” along with its denial that God is “the author or approver of sin.” It also summarizes the “objections” as coming from factions more than a neat roster: (1) “advocates of limited predestination” redefining predestination into “authorize/cause” and then accusing Absoluters, and (2) a minority inside the predestinarian orbit treating “absolute” as if it meant “causative.”

Finally, the book claims many “non-causative” approaches end up with a split where foreknowledge covers everything (including sins) while predestination is narrowed to certain “good” outcomes; from an Absoluter standpoint, that can feel like foreknowledge does the real work while predestination gets “sanitized.”