Order of God's decrees

The order of God’s decrees concerns the logical, not chronological, relationship among the elements of God’s one eternal purpose: whether the decree to elect some to salvation stands before or after the decrees to create mankind and to permit the Fall. The question is not what sequence of acts occurs in God’s mind, since his purpose is a single eternal act, but what relation the parts of that purpose bear to one another.¹ Reformed, Arminian, Amyraldian, Semi-Pelagian, and Pelagian theology answer this question differently, each ordering election, the Fall, and the provision of redemption in its own way.

Confessional Contrast

The Second London Baptist Confession states, in its third chapter, that God “hath decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass.”² Neither this chapter nor its Westminster counterpart specifies whether that decree considers the elect as already fallen or merely as creatable; both confessions state the decree’s unity and unconditional ground without adjudicating the ordering question this article addresses. Bavinck records the historical judgment: the Synod of Dort’s own “judgments were infralapsarian in character… but it did not condemn supralapsarianism,” and, on his reckoning, “both views have a right to be called Reformed.”³

Pelagian view

Pelagianism has no decree of election in the sense the schemes below debate, since it denies that salvation depends on any discriminating divine choice at all. On the principle that ability limits obligation, each person retains, even after the Fall, the same undiminished capacity Adam had to obey God’s law and earn eternal life; “grace,” on this account, names only the natural endowment of reason and free will God gives to everyone alike, not a supernatural work he grants to some.⁴ Pelagius’s own teaching was condemned at Carthage in 418 and at the Council of Ephesus in 431.⁵

Semi-Pelagian view

Semi-Pelagianism likewise has no decree that discriminates among individuals: its own advocates held that the beginning of salvation lies with man, who takes the first step toward God on his own before grace assists him, so that the soul cooperates with grace rather than being the object of a prior, effectual choice.⁶ This position was condemned at the Council of Orange and the Synod of Valence in 529.⁷

Arminian view

Arminianism orders the decrees so that redemption is provided for everyone before anyone in particular is elected. Since human agents remain morally free even after the Fall, God, foreseeing with certainty that all mankind would fall into sin, is held to have decreed first to create mankind, then to provide salvation through Christ for all people, and only then, foreseeing which individuals would repent and believe on their own, to elect those individuals to eternal life on the condition of their foreseen faith.⁸ Where the Reformed schemes below make God’s own good pleasure the sole ground of election, the Arminian order grounds it in a condition met, or not met, by the creature; the Second London Baptist Confession denies exactly this, stating that God chose the elect “without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving him thereunto.”⁹

Amyraldian view

Amyraldism agrees with the Reformed schemes that election rests on God’s good pleasure alone, not on anything foreseen in the creature, but agrees with Arminianism in placing the decree of redemption before the decree of election. French Protestant theologians at the Academy of Saumur, chiefly John Cameron and Moses Amyraut, taught that God decreed to create mankind, to permit the Fall, to provide in Christ’s mediation a salvation available to all, and only then, foreseeing that none would repent and believe without further help, elected some to receive the grace of repentance and faith.¹⁰ Archibald Alexander Hodge presses two objections against this order: it makes Christ’s coming secure salvation for no one in particular before anyone had been elected to receive it, against Christ’s own statement that he came to give eternal life to those the Father had already given him (John 10:15; 17:2, 9); and, because it grounds election in God’s good pleasure while still making redemption conditional in effect, it amounts, in his words, to an attempt “to weld together Arminianism and Calvinism.”¹¹

Infralapsarian view

Infralapsarianism, also called sublapsarianism, places the decree of election after the decrees to create mankind and to permit the Fall, so that those chosen are considered as already fallen rather than merely creatable.¹² Archibald Alexander Hodge calls this “the common view of the Reformed Churches, confirmed alike by the Synod of Dort and the Westminster Assembly.”¹² Loraine Boettner reads Scripture the same way: the elect are said to have been chosen “out of” the world (John 15:19), and the potter’s right over the clay from “the same lump” (Rom. 9:21) presupposes a single fallen mass from which some are drawn, not an undifferentiated mass of merely possible people.¹³ Sublapsarianism covers this view, and Boyce’s own internal Reformed objection to ordering the decrees at all, in fuller detail.

Supralapsarian view

Supralapsarianism places the decree of election before the decrees to create mankind and to permit the Fall, so that God elects and reprobates a class of merely creatable, not yet fallen, human beings.¹⁴ Charles Hodge summarizes its logic: “Creation is in order to redemption. God creates some to be saved, and others to be lost.”¹⁵ The view was held by Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva, and by Franciscus Gomarus, “the great opponent of Arminius” at the Synod of Dort, where an infralapsarian majority prevailed.¹⁴ The same pattern repeated at the Westminster Assembly: its Prolocutor, William Twisse, was “a zealous supralapsarian,” while the Assembly’s own majority, and the confession it produced, sided with the infralapsarian view.¹⁶ The Swiss churches’ 1675 Formula Consensus Helvetica, principally authored by Johann Heinrich Heidegger and Francis Turretin, went further and formally repudiated the supralapsarian position.¹⁷

Comparing the schemes

Archibald Alexander Hodge sets out the Arminian, Amyraldian, infralapsarian, and supralapsarian orders as four parallel sequences of the same four elements, arranged differently:¹⁸

Order	Arminian	Amyraldian	Infralapsarian	Supralapsarian
1st	Create mankind	Create mankind	Create mankind	Elect some, reprobate the rest
2nd	Permit the Fall	Permit the Fall	Permit the Fall	Create mankind
3rd	Provide salvation for all through Christ	Provide salvation for all through Christ	Elect some out of fallen mankind	Permit the Fall
4th	Elect those whose faith God foresees	Elect some to receive the grace to believe	Provide salvation for the elect	Provide salvation for the elect

Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism have no place in this table, since neither holds a decree that discriminates among individuals at all; both locate the deciding factor in the creature’s own choice rather than in any prior divine election.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t supralapsarianism make God’s reprobation of the non-elect an arbitrary act unrelated to their sin? Archibald Alexander Hodge lists this among the standard objections to the scheme: it “represents God as reprobating the non-elect by a sovereign act, without any respect to their sins, simply for his own glory,” which appears inconsistent with divine righteousness and with Scripture’s own description of reprobation as judicial.¹⁹ Charles Hodge states the underlying principle: “It is a clearly revealed Scriptural principle that where there is no sin there is no condemnation… reprobation is declared to be judicial, founded upon the sinfulness of its object.”¹³ Infralapsarians conclude that Scripture is, in Boettner’s own phrase, “practically infralapsarian”: the elect and non-elect alike are represented as already members of a common, guilty mass before either decree distinguishes between them.¹³

Isn’t infralapsarianism the less consistent scheme, since it doesn’t carry God’s sovereign discrimination all the way through his plan? Supralapsarians press exactly this. Archibald Alexander Hodge concedes their scheme is “unquestionably the most logical of all,” resting on the principle that “what is last in execution is first in intention”: if God’s final purpose is his own glory in the salvation of some and the ruin of others, that purpose, not creation or the Fall, should stand first in the order of his intention.¹⁹ Infralapsarians answer that a scheme’s logical consistency is not the same as its biblical warrant, and that arranging God’s single eternal decree into a certain order of thought is simply how finite minds must reason about an act that has, in itself, no succession at all.²⁰ Warfield gives the infralapsarian rejoinder, in words Boettner quotes: sin must be “the logical prius” of any decree that discriminates between men with respect to salvation or punishment, since “we cannot speak of salvation any more than of reprobation without positing sin.”²¹

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 230. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel,” sec. “Supra- and Infralapsarianism; Remonstrance.” ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), “Chapter VIII. Sin,” 150-151. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” 153. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” 165. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” 166. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 231. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 5. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 231-232. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 234. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 231-232. ↩ ↩²
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 95. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 232. ↩ ↩²
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation,” 313. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation,” 316. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation,” 315. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 231-233. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 233. ↩ ↩²
Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 96. ↩
Benjamin B. Warfield, The Plan of Salvation, 28, quoted in Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 95. ↩