ABSTRACT
Voltaire’s elegant sarcasm succeeds in conveying the impression that the theologians’ quarrels are unworthy of a wise man’s attention. Calvinism had swept away the intermediaries between God and man. Once upon a time it had looked upon this purge as the very essence of its task. The saints, ritual, and tradition had been dispensed with. The interesting jewish sect of the sadducees also rejected determinism. Christian theorists were obsessed by the problem and could not leave it alone. St. Augustine presented the church with the ingenious verbal solution called “preterition”: some people were elected by God’ sirresistible grace. Outside orthodoxy, of course, the choices are many. There was, for instance, Melanchthon’s synergism, the collaboration of divine grace and human freedom, which still fails to dispose of the matter of foreknowledge.
