 The main issue is what the causal connection is between humans’ willing and acting and their salvation or damnation, and predestination or reprobation: do humans participate in or contribute to their own salvation and damnation, or is God’s will the sole cause? Traditionally the answer had been that humans are the cause of their deserved damnation, but that salvation depended solely on God’s will. Although there were various interpretations of this traditional stance, Peter Auriol seems to have been the first important university scholar to provide a real alternative. Auriol had already sought to distance God from the everyday details of the world’s existence, in order to preserve divine necessity and the contingency of things. Auriol now applied his general theory to the specific issue of soteriology and claimed that God sets up general rules by which certain sets of people will be damned and other sets saved, without actively choosing to save or damn specific individuals. This maintained divine immutability but had the added bonus of providing symmetry for reprobation and predestination: the determining factor is the presence or absence of an obstacle to grace (obex gratiae). For Auriol, while someone’s obstacle to grace is indeed a positive cause of reprobation, the absence of such an obstacle, however, is merely a negative or privative cause of predestination. Thus Auriol thought he could avoid charges of Pelagianism by simply denying a positive cause of predestination in the elect. Ockham appears to have adopted the main elements of Auriol’s stance, while Walter Chatton at Oxford and Gerard Odonis and Thomas of Strasbourg at Paris went further and posited a positive cause of predestination in the elect, which would appear to approach the condemned Pelagian doctrine.