Theopedia

Decrees of God

— My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. Isaiah 46:10

Definition

The decrees of God are his eternal purpose, determined by the counsel of his own will, by which he has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass (Eph. 1:11). Scripture speaks of this purpose in the singular, one comprehensive plan rather than a series of separate acts (Acts 15:18), though creatures experience its unfolding in time as many purposes. The decree is free, grounded in nothing outside God, and unconditional, determining its own means as well as its ends. Providence executes in time what the decree determined from eternity, without making God the author of sin or destroying human responsibility.

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession devotes its third chapter, “Of God’s Decree,” to this doctrine:

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; yet so as thereby is God neither the author of sin nor hath fellowship with any therein; nor is violence offered to the will of the creature, nor yet is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.1

The Westminster Confession’s parallel chapter, “Of God’s Eternal Decree,” states the same doctrine in substantially the same words: “God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.”2 The two confessions track each other paragraph for paragraph through the rest of the chapter: God’s foreknowledge of what “may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions” is not itself the ground of his decree; by that decree, “for the manifestation of his glory,” some men and angels are predestinated to life and others left to just condemnation; the elect are chosen “before the foundation of the world,” out of God’s “mere free grace and love,” without any foreseen faith, works, or other condition in the creature moving him to it; and having appointed the elect to glory, God has likewise foreordained all the means to it.3

Westminster states the point about election’s ground more expansively than the 1689 does, specifying that God chose the elect “without any foresight of faith or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature, as conditions, or causes moving him thereunto”; the 1689 simply says “without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving him thereunto.”4 The difference is one of concision, not substance: both confessions deny that anything foreseen in the creature grounds election. On the doctrine of God’s decree, the 1689 restates the wider Reformed confessional family’s teaching rather than staking out a distinctively Baptist position of its own.

Biblical Basis

Scripture names God’s purpose for all that comes to pass in several ways: his “eternal purpose” (Eph. 3:11), his “determinate counsel and foreknowledge” (Acts 2:23), the “mystery of his will” (Eph. 1:9), and “the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1:11). Believers were chosen in Christ “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), and grace was “given” to them “before the world began” (2 Tim. 1:9).

One eternal purpose

Though Scripture and theologians commonly speak of God’s “decrees” in the plural, the decree is a single, comprehensive plan rather than a series of separate divine acts. Archibald Alexander Hodge defines it: “The decree of God is his eternal, unchangeable, holy, wise, and sovereign purpose, comprehending at once all things that ever were or will be in their causes, conditions, successions, and relations, and determining their certain futurition.”5 Because finite minds cannot take in an infinite plan at once, Scripture itself speaks of God’s “counsels,” “purposes,” and “judgments” in the plural, representing one event as the means or condition of another (Acts 15:18); but these all fall within, not outside, “that one eternal design of God which comprehends equally all causes and all effects, all events and all conditions.”6

Comprehends everything

The decree extends to every event without exception: to the general course of history (Dan. 4:34-35; Acts 17:26; Eph. 1:11), to what appears merely accidental (Prov. 16:33; Matt. 10:29-30), to the free actions of men (Eph. 2:10-11; Phil. 2:13), and even to their sinful actions. Peter told the crowd at Pentecost that Jesus was “delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” to be crucified by “wicked hands” (Acts 2:23), and the church at Jerusalem prayed that Herod, Pilate, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel had gathered against Jesus only “to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:27-28). Joseph told the brothers who had sold him into slavery that what they had intended for evil, “God meant it unto good” (Gen. 50:20).7

Eternal, free, and sovereign

The decree is eternal: God chose his people “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4) and gave them grace “before the world began” (2 Tim. 1:9; see also Acts 15:18; 1 Pet. 1:20; 2 Thess. 2:13; 1 Cor. 2:7). It is free and sovereign, grounded in nothing outside God: “Who hath directed the Spirit of the LORD, or being his counsellor hath taught him?” (Isa. 40:13). It depends on nothing but “the good pleasure of his will” (Eph. 1:5, 11) and is unconditional rather than suspended on some foreseen response: “My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure” (Isa. 46:10).8

Includes the means

God’s decree of an end includes the decree of the means to it. The God who decreed the salvation of his elect also decreed to work faith in them (2 Thess. 2:13; 1 Pet. 1:2), so that the decree “embraced and provided for the free agency of man, as well as the regular procedures of nature, according to established laws.”9

Preserves human responsibility

Scripture holds together, without resolving the tension philosophically, that God has decreed the free and even the sinful acts of men, and that the agents who perform them remain genuinely responsible (Acts 2:23; 3:18; 4:27-28; Gen. 50:20). Hodge states the distinction that lets both stand: “it is evidently only the execution of the decree, and not the decree itself, which can interfere with the free agency of man.” God’s permissive decree renders a sinful act certain because he places the very agent, with full foreknowledge of what that agent will freely do, in the circumstances in which he does it; yet “in executing his purpose” God never “violate[s] or restrict[s] the perfect freedom of the agent.”10

Historical Development

Augustine against Pelagius

Pelagius taught that human nature was not corrupted by the fall, that the will remains free to choose good or evil apart from grace, and that predestination is only a matter of divine foreknowledge.11 Augustine answered that the elect “are not chosen because they believed but in order that they might believe,” grounding predestination in God’s sovereign will rather than foreseen faith.11 He first stated the doctrine in To Simplicianus (AD 397) and developed it further in On Admonition and Grace (AD 427) and On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance (AD 428-429). Pelagianism was condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Synod of Orange (529), though Orange’s own indecision on the full extent of human corruption left the door open to semi-Pelagianism through the Middle Ages.11

Trent, Molina, and the Reformation

The Council of Trent hardened Rome’s position against the Reformation: human free will is not totally lost, prevenient grace is resistible, and good works performed under grace earn eternal life by a “merit of condignity” (Trent, session VI).11 Luis de Molina pressed the same tendency further, proposing that God’s “middle knowledge” foresees how a person would freely respond to grace in any given circumstance and grants grace accordingly, reducing reprobation to a decree to punish foreseen unbelief.11 The Reformation returned to Augustine’s own ground, though not uniformly: Melanchthon’s synergism drew later Lutheran theology away from Luther’s own early position, until by the early eighteenth century a Lutheran historian could describe the Remonstrant articles as containing “the pure Lutheran doctrine.”11 Calvin, by contrast, defended the doctrine at length against Albertus Pighius (1543) and Jerome Bolsec (1552), and it was substantially through his influence that predestination entered the confessions of the Reformed churches, stated with varying degrees of explicitness: restrained in the Heidelberg Catechism and the Second Helvetic Confession, most fully in the Canons of Dort and the Westminster Confession.11

Supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism

Within Reformed theology itself, theologians divided over the logical, not temporal, order of the decrees: whether God’s decree to elect and reprobate stands logically prior to (supralapsarian) or after (infralapsarian) his decree to create and to permit the fall.11 The Synod of Dort’s own judgments were infralapsarian in character but did not condemn the supralapsarian position; both, in Bavinck’s judgment, “have a right to be called Reformed.”11

Opposing Views

Classical Arminian theology agrees that God foreknows the free acts of men with certainty but denies that his decree makes them certain. On this view, God absolutely decreed to create mankind and, foreseeing the fall, absolutely decreed to provide salvation for all; but he decreed to save particular individuals only on the condition, itself foreseen but not foreordained, of their future faith and obedience.12 The Socinians went further still, denying that God even foreknows the free acts of men, since such acts are by nature uncertain until they occur; on this account God decreed only to create the human race and, after Adam’s sin, to save all who repent and believe, without decreeing or foreknowing what any individual would do.12

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t an unconditional, all-determining decree reduce God’s rule to blind fate? Fatalism supposes “a universal law of necessary causation, acting blindly… irrespective of the free wills of the free agents involved,” with no place for ends, motives, or means. The decree of God, by contrast, is the plan of “an infinitely wise, righteous, powerful, and benevolent Father,” executed “through the instrumentality of all classes of second causes, free as well as necessary… each acting without constraint according to its nature.”13

Doesn’t the decree destroy the free agency of the men and women who carry it out? Only the execution of the decree, not the decree itself, touches human freedom, and Scripture nowhere treats a decreed act as an excused one: the same passages that ascribe the crucifixion of Jesus to God’s “determinate counsel” also hold Herod, Pilate, and Israel guilty for it (Acts 2:23; 4:27-28). God’s permissive decree renders a sinful act certain not by forcing the will but by ordaining the very agent and the very circumstances in which that agent freely acts as he does; in executing his purpose, Hodge writes, God never “violate[s] or restrict[s] the perfect freedom of the agent.”10

Doesn’t the decree make God the author of sin? The Reformed answer distinguishes an effective decree, by which God brings good to pass, from a permissive decree, by which he ordains that sin will certainly occur without himself producing it. Mastricht locates the distinction in God’s own will of good pleasure, which is “either his effective decree of good or his permissive decree of evil.”14 In plainer terms: God decrees that sin will happen by ordaining the free agents and circumstances that bring it about, without decreeing to work the sinful choice in the sinner the way he works faith and obedience in the believer. Sin arises, on this account, from the will of the creature rather than from any positive causation in God, whose own nature and revealed law alike forbid it (Ps. 92:15; Eccl. 7:29; Jas. 1:13; 1 John 1:5).15

Related Doctrines

References

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” §1. ↩

  2. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 3, “Of God’s Eternal Decree,” §1. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, chap. 3, §§3, 5-6. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, chap. 3, §5; compare The Westminster Confession of Faith, chap. 3, §5. ↩

  5. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 200. ↩

  6. Hodge, 203-204. ↩

  7. Hodge, 204-205. ↩

  8. Hodge, 207-208. ↩

  9. Hodge, 207. ↩

  10. Hodge, 209-210. ↩ ↩2

  11. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  12. Hodge, 206-207. ↩ ↩2

  13. Hodge, 208-209. ↩

  14. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), 345. ↩

  15. Hodge, 210-211. ↩