§ 114. CALVINISM EXAMINED, 573
foreordained what he foreknew ; his foreknowledge and foreordination, his intelligence and will are coeternal, and must harmonize. Tliere is no succession of time, no before nor after in the eternal God. The fall of the first man, with its effects ^ipon all future generations, cannot have been an accident which God, as a passive or neutral spectator, simply permitted to take place when he might so easily have prevented it. He must in some way have foreordained it, as 9, means for a higher end, as a negative condition for the greatest good. So far the force of reasoning, on the basis of belief in a personal God, goes to the full length of Calvinistic supralapsarianism, and even beyond it, to the very verge of universalism. If we give up the idea of a self-conscious, personal God, reason would force us into fatalism or pantheism. But there is a logic of ethics as well as of metaphysics. God is holy as well as almighty and omniscient, and therefore cannot be the author of sin. Man is a moral as well as an intellectual being, and the claims of his moral constitution are equal to the claims of his intellectual constitution. Conscience is as powerful a factor as reason. The most rigid believer in divine sovereignty, if he be a Christian, cannot get rid of the sense of personal accountability, though he may be unable to reconcile the two. The harmony lies in God and in the moral constitution of man. They are the two complementary sides of one truth. Paul unites them in one sentence : " Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling ; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13). The problem, however, comes within the reach of possible solution, if we distinguish between sovereignt}'- as an inherent power, and the exercise of sovereignty. God may limit the exercise of his sovereignty to make room for the free action of his creatures. It is by his sovereign decree that man is free. Without such self-limitation he could not admonish men "to repent and believe. Here, again, the Calvinistic logic
574 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
must either bend or break. Strictly carried out, it would turn the exhortations of God to the sinner into a solemn mockery and cruel irony.
The Scripture Argument. .
Calvin, though one of the ablest logicians, cared less for logic than for the Bible, and it is his obedience to the Word of God that induced him to accept the decretum horrihile against his wish and will. His judgment is of the greatest weight, for he had no superior, and scarcely an equal, in thorough and systematic Bible knowledge and exegetical insight.
And here we must freely admit that not a few passages, especially in the Old Testament, favor a double decree to the extent of supreme supralapsarianism ; yea, they go beyond the Calvinistic system, and seem to make God himself the author of sin and evil. See Ex. 4 : 21 ; 7 : 13 (repeatedly said of God's hardening Pharaoh's heart) ; Isa. 6:9, 10 ; 44:18; Jer. 6:21; Amos 3:6 ("Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?") ; Prov. 16 : 4 ; Matt. 11 : 25 ; 13 : 14, 15 ; John 12 : 40 ; Rom. 9 : 10-23 ; 11 : 7, 8 ; 1 Cor. 14 : 3 ; 2 Thess. 2 : 11 ; 1 Pet. 2:8; Jude 4 (" who were of old set forth unto this condemnation ").i
The rock of reprobation is the ninth chapter of Romans. It is not accidental that Calvin elaborated and published the second edition of his Institutes simultaneously with his Commentary on the Romans, at Strassburg, in 1539.
There are especially three passages in the ninth chapter, which in their strict literal sense favor extreme Calvinism,
1 The last passage is often quoted for a decree of reprobation ; but the verb Trpoyeypa/jLfxevoi is wrongly translated " ordained " in the E. V. npoypd.(p(a means to write before, and refers to previous writings, namely, the Scriptures of the 0. T. Calvin correctly translates "pmscripti in hoc judicium," but refers it, metaphorically, to the book of the divine counsel: "sternum Dei consilium liber vacatur."