Theopedia

Sublapsarianism

Sublapsarianism, also called infralapsarianism, is the view that God’s decree to elect some to salvation logically follows his decree to permit the fall, so that those chosen are considered as already fallen rather than merely creatable. James Petigru Boyce states the order plainly: “A decree to create. To permit to fall. To elect some to everlasting life. To send Christ for their redemption and salvation.”1 This is the majority position within Reformed theology, standing opposite supralapsarianism, which places the decree of election before the decree to permit the fall.

Confessional Contrast

Neither the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession nor the Westminster Confession formally rules between sublapsarianism and supralapsarianism; both simply state that God elected and reprobated according to his own will, without specifying where that decree falls relative to the decree permitting sin. Archibald Alexander Hodge nonetheless calls the sublapsarian order “the common view of the Reformed Churches, confirmed alike by the Synod of Dort and the Westminster Assembly.”2 Herman Bavinck states the historical judgment more cautiously: the Synod of Dort’s “judgments were infralapsarian in character… but it did not condemn supralapsarianism,” leaving supralapsarians “the right of their position to exist alongside, not in the place of, the infralapsarian position.”3 The Decrees of God article covers this confessional history in fuller detail; both schemes, on Bavinck’s own reckoning, remain within the bounds of Reformed orthodoxy.

The Order of Decrees

Boyce sets the sublapsarian and supralapsarian orders side by side to isolate what actually divides them. The supralapsarian order runs: God decreed to glorify himself in the church he would raise up, then to create the men he had already selected and rejected for it, then to permit their fall, then to send Christ to redeem the elect.1 The sublapsarian order instead places creation and the fall before election: “A decree to create. To permit to fall. To elect some to everlasting life. To send Christ for their redemption and salvation.”1

The difference is narrower than it first appears. On the sublapsarian view, God decrees man as fallen before decreeing him elect or rejected, but sublapsarians still deny that anyone is rejected because of that sin, since the non-elect are no more sinful than the elect.1 On the supralapsarian view, election and rejection are decreed for a class of merely creatable, not yet fallen, human beings. Boyce concludes that under either scheme, the doctrine of reprobation itself is unaffected: the last two elements of the decree “have only what has been called an accidental connection with it.”1 Strong adds a further historical judgment, that supralapsarianism, associated with Theodore Beza, “is therefore hyper-Calvinistic, rather than Calvinistic,” while sublapsarianism “was adopted by the Synod of Dort (1618, 1619).”4

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t ordering God’s decrees this way make God deliberate the way a human mind does, one decision building on an earlier one? Boyce presses exactly this objection against both schemes: arranging the decrees in a sequence, whether sublapsarian or supralapsarian, is “the same kind of misstatement” as distinguishing an antecedent will in God from a consequent one, since it “admits succession in the decrees of God, and makes them many, when they are but one,” and “makes them temporal, when they are eternal.”5 He cites Turretin’s further objections: such a scheme would leave God “at one and the same time willing, and not willing, the same event,” reduce his prior will to a mere wishing rather than a true act of will, and make God’s own independence depend on waiting to see what his creatures would do.5 On this reasoning, sublapsarianism and supralapsarianism are best read not as claims about a real order in God’s mind, which has no succession at all, but as ways finite minds must arrange, one step at a time, what God wills as a single eternal act.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XXX. Reprobation,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing, 1st published ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 357-358. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 231-232. ↩

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Divine Decrees.” ↩

  4. 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. ↩

  5. James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XII. The Will of God,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing, 1st published ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 113-114. ↩ ↩2