Aquinas's Interpretation of Predestination in Scripture – Fr. Piotr Roszak
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Fr. Piotr Roszak shows how Thomas Aquinas interprets predestination through a deeply biblical lens, reading predestination as God’s merciful, Christ-centered plan to lead creation freely to a supernatural end and insisting that scriptural context is essential for avoiding deterministic distortions of the doctrine.
This lecture was given on September 5th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.
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About the Speakers:
Piotr Roszak is an adjunct professor of Fundamental Theology at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland; associated professor of Systematic Theology at University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he obtained his PhD in 2009. Member of Pontifical Academy of St Thomas Aquinas; editor-in-Chief of the journal ‘Scientia et Fides’ dedicated to science-religion debate and director of the series ‘Scholastica Thoruniensia’, where the polish translations of medieval biblical commentaries are published. Together with Mateusz Przanowski OP is leading the project of “Opera Omnia” of St. Thomas Aquinas in Poland. In 2021 he received Medal for Excellence in Christian Philosphy awared by International Étienne Gilson Society. He obtained several grants from the Templeton Foundation, National Science Centre in Poland and in Spain. He is a honorary member of Pontificia Academia Mariana Internationalis and Comite de Expertos del Camino de Santiago in Spain. He published recently (with Jörgen Vijgen): Reading the Church Fathers with St. Thomas Aquinas Historical and Systematical Perspectives (Brepols: Turnhout 2021).
Keywords: Biblical Thomism, Christocentric Predestination, Divine Providence and Human Freedom, Election, Ephesians 1, Pauline Theology of Predestination, Potter Clay Metaphor, Romans 8, Scripture and Systematic Theology in Summa Theologiae, Trinitarian Missions
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | College students are struggling to find Christ in a culture that rejects God. |
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| 0:31.6 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual |
| 0:36.8 | tradition in the university, the |
| 0:38.6 | church and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university |
| 0:43.7 | students at Thomistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, |
| 0:49.5 | visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org. I have to recognize that it's easier to be a second speaker of the conference |
| 0:57.0 | because the most important and difficult issue |
| 1:00.0 | has been already treated in the first speech of this afternoon. |
| 1:04.0 | But nevertheless, I think it's good also to repeat the same ideas |
| 1:09.0 | but from a different perspective. |
| 1:12.7 | And as it was already said, predestination is precisely one of those topics that can be |
| 1:19.8 | approached from many angles. |
| 1:23.1 | We can take the philosophical one, asking how God's will relate to human freedom. |
| 1:29.3 | We can explore the ethical angle, how responsibility fits alongside determinism, |
| 1:35.3 | or we can go existential one, wondering whether life still has meaning, |
| 1:41.3 | or whether is there an impact of predestination on taking, for instance, |
| 1:47.0 | risky decision in our life, if this is somehow related. I remember empirical research on precisely |
| 1:55.0 | the risk decision and how this is related to if someone believes in predestination or not, |
... |
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