25. How we can aid predestination
25. HOW WE CAN AID PREDESTINATION
If those I love are predestined by God to be saved, they will be saved, so why should I pray for them? And if they are not, there is nothing I can do to change God’s will. So why pray for others’ salvation?
(As regards not God’s predestinating act itself but men’s salvation as the effect of predestination,) predestination is said to be helped by the prayers of the saints, and by other good works, because providence, of which predestination is a part, does not do away with secondary causes but so provides effects that the order of secondary causes falls also under providence. So as natural effects are provided by God in such a way that natural causes are directed to bring about those natural effects, without which those effects would not happen, so the salvation of a person is predestined by God in such a way that whatever helps that person towards salvation falls under the order of predestination, whether it be one’s own prayers or those of another, or other good works and suchlike, without which one would not attain to salvation. Whence, the predestined must strive after good works and prayer because through these means predestination is most certainly fulfilled (1,23,8).
As Pascal said, “God established prayer in order to give to creatures the dignity of causality.” Every prayer and every good work makes a difference, possibly an eternal difference, without which those effects would not happen.
It is a fallacy to think that since God has predestined all things, and since “whatever will be, will be”, that therefore our prayers cannot make a real difference to the future. We cannot change God’s predestination but we can change the future because that is one of the things God has predestined: our free choices that cause the future to be one thing rather than another.
God knows whether X will be saved or not, so why should I pray for X? Because perhaps God has predestined that the salvation of X depends partly on your prayers, and if you do not supply them, X will not be saved. Every vote counts.
We do not see these details because God deliberately hides them from us. For if we saw all the effects of our prayers and good works, if we saw the difference we make—like Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life—we would be overwhelmed and paralyzed with responsibility.
Nothing changes God’s will. But “prayer changes things” because God changes things through our prayers. For God has willed that causal order of things; God has willed that His will be fulfilled only through the instrumentality of our prayers. He often refuses to give us the things we need until we pray for them because He sees that we need prayer even more than we need the things we pray for. Prayer is like work: God could have given us everything without our work (food, for instance), but He knew that we need to work even more than we need the things we work for. We co-operate, i.e., we work-with, God—not as equals, not side by side, like two soldiers on a battlefield, but like a general and his infantryman, or like an author and his character. He will not do it without us and we cannot do it without Him.
By the way, St. Thomas, unlike classical Calvinists, does not believe in two equal and parallel predestinations, to Hell as well as to Heaven, to damnation as well as salvation. “Predestination” means predestination to Heaven, for “God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to salvation” (2 Pet 3:9). God knows that not all will come to salvation, and allows this, by allowing our free choice, and in that sense and that sense only He wills (allows) damnation. He writes the whole story, its eternal tragedies as well as its divine comedies, but He acts in the story only in one way, for the comedy, for the salvation. “For God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him” (Jn 3:17).