Predestination and Justification in the Thinking of Karl Barth: Critical Orthodox Considerations

Predestination and Justification in the Thinking of Karl Barth: Critical Orthodox Considerations

19 September 2017

We often ask ourselves which is the place of predestination in theological thinking. Which is the difference between predestination and election of human being by God? Can we really speak about humans’ justification in the front of Creator? How can these theological themes approach to patristic thought of the Early Church? If Protestantism speaks about predestination, what role place than the faith in the human person’s life? If God disposed the election of human being from eternity, what place gives the Protestant theologians to the father of the demonized child in the Gospel? These are only a few of the issues which the present text proposed itself to treat, in its attempt to analyse the doctrine of predestination and justification in the thought of Protestant theologian Karl Barth, bringing a critical evaluation of the analysed ideas, as much as possible. “We are predisposed to stumble, but not to fall down”, asserted Father Nicolae Steinhardt from the Rohia Monastery. This is one of the clues brought to this dilemma by the Orthodox thought and experience.