Is Fate Real?
The issue of fate is as old as time. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is a poem from the Renaissance, God and the Angels have a long conversation about choice. They discuss why God would place a tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden that will cause Adam and Eve to sin. Surely God knows that Adam and Eve will be tempted and eat the fruit? Yet, God places the tree in the garden anyway. Adam and Eve fall and humankind is cursed because of their choice to eat the fruit.
Even in today’s society, movies, video games, and many other parts of pop culture explore the issue of fate. In The Matrix, Neo has to make a choice that changes his destiny: drink the red pill and continue living in ignorance, or drink the blue pill and learn the truth about humans and the machines. In Terminator: Judgment Day, Sarah Connor receives a vision of the end of the world and assumes that judgment day is inevitable. That is, until she decides to make her own fate and intervene. Because of her intervention, humankind avoids a nuclear apocalypse.
Clearly, even in the advanced twenty-first century, human beings still grapple with the issue of fate. We wonder, is my destiny predetermined? What are the limits of God’s intervention? Where does my responsibility as a human being end and where does God’s begin? In this post we will look at some of the origins of fate and how we got to where we are now.
Where it started
Let’s travel 400 years into the past. Human beings just got out of the Black Death and the Medieval times. Science has made important discoveries, like the heliocentric theory. It is no longer taboo to dissect cadavers and researchers now use the scientific method. In the realm of art, Michelangelo and Da Vinci are creating some of the greatest masterpieces like David and the Mona Lisa. Da Vinci is inventing flying machines and other feats of engineering. In essence, human beings are discovering for the first time in 1000 years that it’s great to be human.
Of course, in religion, there are also revolutions taking place. Geoffrey Chaucer already started criticizing the corruption of the Church in his Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century. But by the Renaissance, this corruption reached its peak. Through the selling of indulgences, people no longer needed sincere contrition but could simply buy their time off purgatory. In other words, by giving money to the Church, you could secure your place in heaven.
Because of this system, and the overall humanism of the Renaissance, people no longer focused on God. Instead, society started to believe in making their own destiny, which caused them to drift away from faith. We could even say that this human determinism carried over from the Renaissance and is still around today. Even now, many of us believe that if we work hard, we can be successful, whether God helps or not.
The great pivot
Because of the Renaissance society’s focus on humanism, a great pivot took place. Martin Luther, in the sixteenth century, saw the corruption of the Church and posted his 95 Thesis. In this document, Luther points out all the contradictions of the church and starts the Protestant Reformation. Luther also translated the Bible from Latin into the vulgate, German. Because of the invention of the Gutenberg Press around the same time, he was able to print and distribute the Bible to the masses. This translation is known as the Gutenberg Bible, which you might be familiar with.
Luther also started a doctrine that John Calvin took further after Luther’s death: absolute predestination. In contrast to the Renaissance belief that humans can achieve anything by their own power and the Catholic practice of buying a spot in Heaven, Calvin said that God has predestined everything. In other words, despite humans thinking that we can determine our fate, God is in control of everything. According to this doctrine, God has predetermined our fate for our lives and our eternal destiny as well. No matter what I do on earth, it will not change where I go after I die.
Where does this leave us?
Like the Renaissance idea of human exceptionalism, the notion of absolute predestination has also carried over into modern society. So as twenty-first century humans, we are torn between the two and don’t know where one ends and the other begins. This is even more difficult for us as believers, because the Bible talks about both God’s responsibility and our responsibility.