INFRALAPSARIANISM[1]
In the period following the
death of Calvin, there was much discussion among Reformed theologians
concerning the "order of the decrees of God." The two chief
views of this order were infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism (q.v.).
Both parties agreed that God
brought all things to pass according to his eternal plans, his decrees.
They disagreed, however, as to what precisely went on in the divine mind,
as God formulated these eternal plans. On the supralapsarian view,
God's highest purpose was to glorify himself in the salvation
of certain human beings. In order to accomplish this purpose,
he determined to create these people and also to permit them to
fall into sin. They described this eternal divine thought process
by an ordered list of decrees: 1. election-salvation, 2. creation, 3.
permission of the fall.
The infralapsarians, however,
objected that this order made the fall a kind of upward step to the
fulfilling of God's redemptive purposes; thus it compromised the evil of
sin. They posited a rival order which rejected any attempt so to
explain the fall: 1. creation, 2. permission of the fall,
3. election-salvation. On this scheme, election is more clearly
an election of @UN(fallen) human beings.
Most reformed theologians have
been infralapsarian. The reformed confessions generally express themselves
in infralapsarian ways without condemning the other position.
More recently, some theologians such as Herman Bavinck have refused
to endorse either position. In favor of such neutrality, it may
well be argued that both parties exaggerated their competence to
read the divine mind. In this writer's view, the most that can
be learned from scripture itself is that each of God's thoughts takes
each of the others into account, i.e. that his purposes form a unity.
Granted this premise, many "orders" are possible: God may do A
for the sake of B and also B for the sake of A. Thus there may be truth in
many suggested orders, and these may be mutually exclusive less often than
theologians have thought.
The discussion might seem to
have little bearing on contemporary theological issues, but there are
parallels here with modern theology. An "order of the decrees"
is something like what modern theologians do when they propose one biblical
concept as the "central message" of scripture and then try to
explain everything else in relation to that central concept.
Hence "theologies of" this and that: hope, liberation, word of
God, covenant, personal encounter, crisis, etc. It is as if
God's first decree were to create hope or liberation or whatever
and that God then did everything else he did as means to carrying
out that first decree. In my view, therefore, the lesson sketched
in the previous paragraph applies to many modern theologies as
well as to classical reformed thought.
Bibliography
Frame, John, Doctrine
of the Knowledge of
Muller,
Richard, Christ and the Decree (
Warfield, B.
B., The Plan of