Hermeneutics of the Doctrine of Election in Aquinas

The doctrine of divine election evokes the image of an unjust God, who chooses and rejects people randomly. The theories of universal salvation and of conditional election counter this image but offer a way out that is too easy. Moreover Thomas Aquinas rejects both theories. The common picture of divine election, as illustrated by various sixteenth and seventeenth theologians like Báñez, Molina, Bellarmine and the Calvinists is to view God as first knowing all possible individuals and then selecting some of them while bypassing others. This picture is indebted to a Scotist metaphysics of the priority of possibles and of haecceities. In this paper it is argued that Aquinas has a different perspective. Instead of the top-down view, presented in the common picture, he has a bottom-up approach in which talking about the eternal election of concrete persons presupposes that these persons are considered in their present and future determinacy.