Supralapsarianism

Supralapsarianism is the view that God’s decree to elect some to salvation and reprobate the rest logically precedes his decrees to create mankind and to permit the fall, so that those elected and reprobated are considered merely as creatable, not yet created or fallen, human beings.¹ As a means to that end, God is held to have decreed to create those already elected or reprobated, to permit their fall, and then to provide salvation for the elect.¹ The view stands opposite sublapsarianism, also called infralapsarianism, which places election after the decrees to create and permit the fall.

Confessional Contrast

No confession in the Reformed family teaches the supralapsarian order.² Neither the Second London Baptist Confession nor the Westminster Confession specifies whether God’s decree of election considers the elect as already fallen or merely creatable; both state the decree’s unity and unconditional ground without adjudicating the question this article addresses.³ The Canons of the Synod of Dort were themselves framed on infralapsarian lines, yet the synod stopped short of condemning supralapsarianism as heterodox. Herman Bavinck records that supralapsarian theologians “regard their own view as legitimate but do not for a moment dream of condemning the infralapsarian view or of insisting that their view be marked in the confession as the only valid one,” pleading only “the right of their position to exist alongside, not in the place of, the infralapsarian position.” He concludes that “while the Reformed confessions lean to the infralapsarian position, both views have a right to be called Reformed.”⁴ Augustus Hopkins Strong states the historical verdict more sharply: supralapsarianism, associated with Theodore Beza, “is therefore hyper-Calvinistic, rather than Calvinistic,” while sublapsarianism “was adopted by the Synod of Dort (1618, 1619).”⁵

Historical Development

Theodore Beza (1519-1605), Calvin’s successor at Geneva, was among the first Reformed theologians to hold the supralapsarian order.⁶ Franciscus Gomarus (1563-1641), the leading opponent of Jacobus Arminius in the Dutch church, defended the same view a generation later as one of the “prominent advocates” of supralapsarianism at the Synod of Dort (1618-19), where an infralapsarian majority ultimately prevailed.⁷ Bavinck’s own roll of “the great defenders of supralapsarianism” also names Piscator, Polanus, Whitaker, Perkins, Twisse, Alsted, Maccovius, and Voetius alongside Beza and Gomarus.⁸

The same division reappeared a generation later at the Westminster Assembly: its Prolocutor, William Twisse, was himself “a zealous supralapsarian,” while the Assembly’s own majority, and the Confession it produced, sided with the infralapsarian view.⁷ The Swiss churches’ 1675 Formula Consensus Helvetica, principally authored by Johann Heinrich Heidegger and Francis Turretin, went further still and formally repudiated the supralapsarian position.⁷ Writing in 1932, Loraine Boettner judged the position by then a small minority report within Calvinism: “not more than one Calvinist in a hundred holds the supralapsarian view.”²

Arguments

Herman Bavinck observes that the debate cannot be settled by a simple appeal to Scripture, since each side reads a different cluster of texts as decisive. Supralapsarians emphasize the texts that declare God’s absolute sovereignty, especially over sin: “Ps. 115:3; Prov. 16:4; Isa. 10:15; 45:9; Jer. 18:6; Matt. 20:15; Rom. 9:17, 19-21.”⁹ Infralapsarians read election and reprobation instead through texts that present them as acts of mercy and justice toward an already fallen world: “Deut. 7:6-9; Matt. 12:25-26; John 15:19; Rom. 9:15-16; Eph. 1:4-12; 2 Tim. 1:9.”⁹ Bavinck’s own judgment is that “the simple fact that each of these views rests on a specific group of texts and fails to do full justice to the other group already suggests the one-sidedness of both groups.”⁹

Beyond specific texts, Archibald Alexander Hodge states the scheme’s governing logical principle: it is “postulated upon the principle that what is last in execution is first in intention.” Since the final aim of God’s whole plan is his own glory in the salvation of some and the ruin of others, supralapsarians argue that aim, rather than creation or the fall, should stand first in the order of his intention. On this ground Hodge, though himself infralapsarian, concedes the scheme is “unquestionably the most logical of all.”¹⁰ Bavinck adds that supralapsarianism’s real strength, on his own reckoning, is that “it refrains from all useless attempts to justify God and simply attributes both election and reprobation to God’s sovereign good pleasure,” rather than resting on the language of “permission” and “foreknowledge,” which in his judgment “solve nothing” and leave “all difficulties” over why God permitted the fall unresolved.¹¹

Supralapsarians have also appealed to Ephesians 3:9-10, where Paul writes that God’s purpose in the church displays his manifold wisdom. Hodge argues this exegesis fails: the “so that” clause introducing verse 10 governs Paul’s own commission to preach the gospel, stated in the preceding clause, not a direct claim about the order and purpose of creation itself, so the passage does not establish the supralapsarian order.¹²

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t a merely “creatable” man, not yet actually made, amount to a nonentity incapable of being loved or chosen, and doesn’t Scripture’s own language describe the elect as chosen out of an already sinful mass rather than from a pool of merely creatable men? Archibald Alexander Hodge presses both points against the scheme: “Man creatible is a nonentity. He could not have been loved or chosen unless considered as created,” and the elect are said to have been chosen “out of” the world (John 15:19; Rom. 11:5, 7) and to sanctification and “the sprinkling of the blood of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:2; Eph. 1:4-6), language he takes to mean they were regarded as guilty and defiled when chosen.¹⁰ Bavinck’s own analysis points to the supralapsarian answer: the two schemes “agree on the content of the decrees,” and “the only difference is that infralapsarians adhere to a historical, causal order of the decrees, while supralapsarians prefer the ideal, teleological order.”⁹

Doesn’t ordering election before the fall make God’s reprobation of the non-elect an arbitrary act unrelated to their sin, rather than the judicial act Scripture describes? Hodge lists this as the most serious objection: the scheme “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 the divine righteousness.”¹⁰ Bavinck records how supralapsarians answer the charge: “no Reformed theologian has dared speak of a ‘predestination to sin’”; all insist “that God is not the author of sin, that humans were not created for perdition,” and that reprobation is only the “accidental,” never the “primary,” cause of sin, while sin is reprobation’s “sufficient,” not “efficient,” cause.¹³ Bavinck nonetheless judges that, having denied any decree of sin itself, supralapsarians “too need to introduce notions such as ‘permission,’ ‘foreknowledge,’ ‘dereliction,’ and ‘preterition’ with respect to sin” just as infralapsarians do, so that the scheme’s claimed advantage over infralapsarianism on this point is less than it first appears.¹³

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 232. ↩ ↩²
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 95-96. ↩ ↩²
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.” ↩
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1909), 777. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation,” 315-316. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel,” n.90. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel,” sec. “Predestination and Reprobation.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 233. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 9, sec. “Predestination and Reprobation.” ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 233-234. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 9, sec. “Predestination and Reprobation.” ↩ ↩²