The idea of predestination is sometimes misunderstood as
prohibiting true free will in spiritual advancement.
Predestination is the doctrine that God knows our future actions, yet our own free will determines how we will act. We are free to think, will and act virtuously or sinfully, yet God has knowledge of our future acts, while allowing us free will in our actions.
The theory behind the idea is quite simple. God knows how he will act, how he will set up our world, and he in fact 150 Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly made statements that Heaven is the person of Christ. From his Mass homily at Monte Cassino, May 24, 2009,
“…this word Heaven does not indicate a place above the stars but something far more daring and sublime: it indicates Christ himself…”
Jesus himself says that he is both the eternal life of Heaven and the resurrection, (Jn 11:25).
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maintains everything in existence, even what we call random acts. We do not have knowledge of God’s thoughts in this matter, therefore we do not know the future, even if God does.
It’s a matter of God and his total knowledge, and our own limited human knowledge. They both exist, but are very different.
If God were to think of a volume of random numbers, he
would have pre-knowledge of them. God could point to slot number 10,000 and say what that number will be even before he starts writing the volume of random numbers. But because we just do not know any of this, the table of random numbers is truly random to us.151 At God’s end he knows our future, at
our end we freely choose our future.
The purpose of our lives, as designed by God, was to attain the holiness intended by God. We were free to do just this, but with the onset of sin, each individual got a bit less free, or rather, it was a bit more difficult to be truly free. The inclination toward sin was now in every soul. Our free will remained, but no longer had its original expanse. The purpose of spiritual advancement is to attain again this freedom, and then move past true human freedom into divine participation, and it may be done in this life.