Benjamin B. Warfield — Predestination in the Reformed Confessions (from The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, xii. 1901, pp. 49-128), from the Monergism text, marked up by Lance George Marshall. Scan: Internet Archive.
Warfield surveys what the Reformed confessions of 1523-1675 say of predestination. The first part follows the documents from Zwingli and the Swiss through Calvin and his pupils to the German, Brandenburg and Thorn confessions, noting how cautiously some of them treat reprobation and election. The second sets out the confessions themselves, in their own words, from the Zwinglian and Bohemian to the Genevan, French, Belgic, Scottish, English and Irish articles, the Westminster standards, the Canons of Dort and the Helvetic Consensus, with the points they hold in common: the sovereignty of election, the reality of reprobation, the unity of the decree and the infralapsarian or supralapsarian view of its object.
Reprinted from The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, xii. 1901, pp. 49-128.
What we call the Reformation was fundamentally, when looked at from a spiritual point of view, a great revival of religion; when looked at from the theological point of view, a great revival of Augustinianism.1 It was the one just because it was the other. Revolting from the domination of ecclesiastical machinery, men found their one haven of rest in the sovereignty of God. The doctrine of Predestination was therefore the central doctrine of the Reformation.2 In the Romish system the idea of predestination has no place, and interest in any opinions that may be held concerning it is in that communion at best but languid. Therefore Perrone, after explaining the difference between the views of the Augustinianizing Thomists and the semi-Pelagianizing Jesuits, can complacently add: “Each school has its own reasons for holding to its opinion: the Church has never wished to compose this controversy: therefore every one may, with safety to the faith, adhere to whichever opinion he is most disposed to and thinks best adapted to solve the difficulties of unbelievers and heretics.”3 The matter was very different with the Reformers. To them the doctrine of predestination was given directly in their consciousness of dependence as sinners on the free mercy of a saving God: it therefore was part of the content of their deepest religious consciousness. Calvin is historically thoroughly justified in his remark that “no one who wishes to be thought pious will dare to deny simpliciter the predestination by which God adopts some into the hope of life and adjudicates others to eternal death.”4 In very fact, all the Reformers were at one in this doctrine, and on it as a hinge their whole religious consciousness as well as doctrinal teaching turned. The fact is so obvious as to compel recognition even in unsympathetic circles. Thus, for instance, the late Dr. Philip Schaff, though adjusting his language with perhaps superfluous care so as to exhibit his doctrinal disharmony with the Reformers, is yet forced to give explicit recognition to the universal enthusiasm with which they advocated the strictest doctrine of predestination. “All the Reformers of the sixteenth century,” he says,5 “including even the gentle Melanchthon and the compromising Bucer, under a controlling sense of human depravity and saving grace, in extreme antagonism to Pelagianism and self-righteousness, and, as they sincerely believed, in full harmony not only with the greatest of the fathers, but also with the inspired St. Paul, came to the same doctrine of a double predestination which decides the eternal destiny of all men. Nor is it possible to evade this conclusion,” he justly adds, “on the two acknowledged premises of Protestant orthodoxy - namely, the wholesale condemnation of men in Adam, and the limitation of saving grace to the present world.”6