Conditional election
Down the centuries, various attempts have been made to avoid viewing divine election as God’s unconditional selection of individuals for eternal life.
In their concern to avoid pagan ideas of fatalism, many early church Fathers taught a synergistic view, in which the human will co-operates with the divine will in achieving salvation. Origen (d. 254) wrote:
‘Foreknowledge precedes foreordination.… God observed beforehand the sequence of future events, and noticed the inclination of some men towards piety which followed on this inclination; and he foreknew them, knowing the present and foreknowing the future.……