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.Yet in the scholasticism that New England ministers inherited from theologians like William Perkins, the supra-infra debate arose precisely from an impulse to defend predestination’s unconditional nature.The Arminian alternative of conditional predestination, the Puritans alleged, compromised the free grace of the gospel and went against the weight of church tradition.Perkins had taken pains to point out that even the medieval schoolmen “in the midst of Papacie” had taught the unconditionality of predestination.He appealed especially to Aquinas, who in the Summa insisted that why God chose some and rejected others had no reason but the divine will.Perkins seemed to take Aquinas’s comments as an implicit endorsement of supralapsarianism, even though the Angelic Doctor wrote the Summa long before the Reformed debate about the order of the decrees.To Perkins, the supra sequence of election / reprobation, creation, and Fall ensured that even reprobation (considered from the eternal perspective of God’s logic, as we saw earlier) could not have been for sin.Sin was the result, not the cause, of God’s “permission and desertion” in the Fall, which he allowed only after he had already decreed election andreprobation.18Perkins’s ruminations helped to elevate the order of the decrees as a favorite occult question for later Puritans, including those who convened in the Westminster Assembly.The gathering’s prolocutor, or presiding offi cer, William Twisse (1578–1646), was on record as a defender of Perkins’s supralapsarianism.Legendary for his encyclopedic scholastic knowledge, Twisse was old and in poor health by the time of the assembly, during which he sometimes exasperated delegates by allowing speakers to “haranguelong and very learnedlie” over abstruse doctrinal matters.19 Ultimately theassembly’s divines, like their counterparts at Dort, opted for infralapsarian The Agony and the Ecstasy49language in the Westminster Confession, declaring that after the decree of election, God was “pleased” in his unsearchable wisdom to “pass by” the rest of humans (implying that he left them in an already fallen state).Yet the confession retained enough ambiguity on the decrees—asserting, for example, in double predestinarian fashion that “some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlastingdeath”—to preclude any merciful foreclosure of the supra-infra debate.20Indeed, Twisse’s last book, not published until just before his death in 1646, was an extended refutation of an early predestinarian treatise by the American Puritan John Cotton (1585–1652), a supralapsarian and by all accounts a natural ally.21 Cotton had circulated his piece in manuscript inthe mid-1620s, prior to his emigration to New England, and after reading William Twisse by Thomas Trotter (1783), after unknownartist.National Portrait Gallery, London.50Predestinationit, Twisse became convinced that Cotton was soft on reprobation and dangerously close to the Arminian heresy of conditional predestination.Like Perkins, Cotton subdivided the decree of reprobation into a fi rst “negative”act of non-election or desertion and a second “positive” act of damnation for sin.But on the positive side, Cotton inserted a further subdivision prior to damnation—judgment according to works.Cotton was, as historian David Como has explained, “trying to insinuate the Covenant of Works into his schema of predestination.” 22 The covenant of works was the Puritans’ term for the fi rst bargain that God made with humanity—the promise of salvation in exchange for perfect obedience, which Adam violated in the Garden of Eden.To Twisse, Cotton seemed to be inserting an element of conditionality into supralapsarianism, which destroyed the supra part (that God’s electing and reprobating were radically prior to all else).Cotton’s scheme struck Twisse as a Jesuitical shell game—as insidious as the Molinist account of “middle knowledge,” which Twisse had attacked in another treatise.In Twisse’s view, Cotton had betrayed himself as one of those weak-kneed Calvinists who could not endure the full arbitrariness of absolute predestination.Similar discomfort had driven some, such as French theologian Moïse Amyraut, to deny the L of the TULIP, replacing limited atonement with a “hypothetical universalism” by which God conditionally willed to save all who believed and unconditionally willed to save particular persons.Amyraut insisted that human logic could not fully reconcile thecontradiction.23Twisse’s attack on the early Cotton’s apparent fl irtation with conditional predestination was particularly ironic given Cotton’s later theological evolution and his association with the condemned “antinomian” Anne Hutchinson, who so exalted the free grace of unconditional election that she accused ministers such as Thomas Shepard of preaching a covenant of works.Twisse’s reproof of Cotton’s casuistry also was more than a little hypocritical, given the Westminster prolocutor’s own reputation for doctrinal hairsplitting.In the end, however, Twisse conceded that all the “perturbation” about the order of the decrees was in vain because God’s decisions were inseparable and simultaneous in his own eternal mind.Twisse admitted that for many years, he had been “carried away with the common error” of ordering the decrees and thus had found himself in an endless “labyrinth.” 24The international Reformed fraternity did not heed Twisse’s warning about the labyrinthine nature of “decretal” theology.Seven years after his death, Twisse’s Riches of Gods Love unto the Vessells of Mercy, Consistent with His Absolute Hatred or Reprobation of the Vessells of Wrath (1653) appeared in print together with a “vindication of Dr.Twisse” from the criticisms of the English Arminian John Goodwin.A massive folio volume The Agony and the Ecstasy51replete with citations of Catholic and Protestant scholastics, Twisse’s Riches overfl owed with enough supra-infra complexities to leave even the most determined student begging for mercy.While supralapsarians in particular continued to read (or at least invoke) Twisse appreciatively, infralapsarians gained an infl uential ally in the Geneva theologian Francis Turretin.In his systematic theology (1679–1685), he derided Twisse for “mak[ing] himself hoarse” repeating the supralapsarian argument that God’s last act in order of execution (the salvation of the elect and the damnation of the reprobate) ought to be his fi rst in order of intention.25 To Turretin, supralapsarianism, though containing “nothing absolutely repugnant to the foundation of salvation,” was nonsensical because it made a “non-entity” (the not-yet-created person) the object of predestination.Infralapsarianism—the “common [view] among the Reformed”—not only prevented this problem but also avoided the appearance of making God’s fi rst decree (in reprobation) an arbitrary act of hatred
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