How to Use predestination in a Sentence

predestination

noun

• By Adam Smith’s time, however, Protestant thought had turned away from the idea of predestination.
  — Benjamin M. Friedman, WSJ, 14 Jan. 2021
• The questions raised by the doctrine of predestination are real and profound.
  — Marilynne Robinson, New Republic, 12 Dec. 2017
• But the facts of her culinary upbringing do have that glitter of predestination.
  — Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, 15 Oct. 2019
• With this as the prewritten outcome, Jack dramatizes the heartbreak of predestination while suggesting that the details and contours of a life—or a love—matter even if, in the end, that life or love will seem to come to nothing.
  — Jordan Kisner, The Atlantic, 11 Sep. 2020
• Her surname—like several others in this story—seems to bear the mark of predestination; in this case, the ashes-to-ashes sense of circularity.
  — Lisa Wells, Harper's Magazine, 28 Sep. 2021
• The Puritan belief in predestination dictates that salvation is predetermined and that no amount of good works (or bad) will change one’s fate in the afterlife.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 6 May 2021
• The doctrine of social class as predestination has rarely been presented so succinctly.
  — Washington Post, 22 Sep. 2021
• About that wheel: The fictional world of this series is one dominated by a religion that believes fiercely in reincarnation and in something that edges up to predestination.
  — Daniel D'addario, Variety, 16 Nov. 2021
• And the day after his address, the president had an appointment with predestination, as the Senate was scheduled for a Wednesday vote that would, barring shocking news or mass hypnosis, acquit him on impeachment charges.
  — James Poniewozik, New York Times, 5 Feb. 2020
• There's still room out there for a time-travel/alternate-reality story that really grapples with the issues of predestination.
  — Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 29 Dec. 2010
• John Calvin put major emphasis on the doctrine of predestination, which holds that an individual’s salvation (or damnation, as the case might be) is determined by God before that person is even born.
  — Win McCormack, The New Republic, 23 Dec. 2020
• Many white evangelicals had already begun to shun vaccines altogether, and part of their rationale is this sense of predestination.
  — Monica Potts, The Atlantic, 21 July 2021
• Those surreal face-to-face confrontations allow the filmmakers to pose a few playful questions about fate, predestination and human decency: What binds us to our alternate-universe counterparts, and what sets us apart from them?
  — Justin Changfilm Critic, Los Angeles Times, 3 May 2022
• Up next was Anderson, a Holocaust denier who gave a rambling sermon against Calvinist theology, which includes predestination, the belief that God has chosen certain people to go to heaven before they’re born.
  — Los Angeles Times, 2 Aug. 2019
• In the original Terminator, Cameron taps into what’s called a predestination paradox, or causality loop: An event causes another event that necessitates the first event.
  — Darren Orf, Popular Mechanics, 2 Nov. 2019
• His thoughts, however, were exalted: predestination, God’s all-commanding word, Jesus’ living and suffering among us, Christmas with its angels, magi and shepherds.
  — Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 23 Dec. 2020
• Which of these two pandemics any given American will experience will be determined by a morbid mix of a sort of demographic predestination—shaped strongly by inequality—and purely random chance.
  — Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic, 10 Apr. 2020
• As often with retrospective understanding, several moments in young Henry’s early life seem to point, as if by predestination, to the novelist’s honed sensibility.
  — WSJ, 11 Aug. 2017
• Bradford and other Pilgrims believed in predestination.
  — Peter C. Mancall, CNN, 25 Nov. 2019
• Belief in predestination actually hindered the emergence of modern capitalism’s key idea—that human beings can rationally advance their own and others’ economic condition.
  — Benjamin M. Friedman, WSJ, 14 Jan. 2021

Last Updated: 5 Oct 2024