Louis Le Blanc On Reprobation in the Reformed School (Theses 7-11)
Reprobation among the infralapsarians and at Dordt. Twofold Reprobation: Positive and Negative.
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7. Still, a great part of the doctors of the Reformed church do not think that the decree of creating man and permitting the fall of the first man, and thus, from that, the consequent ruin of all of humankind, makes up a part of reprobation. For they limit the decree of reprobation to that will by which God established to not elect certain people but to leave them in their own sins and finally, on account of those sins, justly damn them.
8. This was the opinion of the Synod of Dordt, whose chapter about divine predestination, Art. 15, lays down the decree of reprobation as, “God, out of his most free, most just, and unchangeable good pleasure, has decreed to leave certain people in the common misery into which they have willfully plunged themselves, and not to bestow upon them saving faith and conversion; but leaving them in his just judgment to follow their own ways, at last for the declaration of his justice, to condemn and punish them forever, not only on account of their unbelief, but also for all their other sins.”
9. To this definition agree many individual Judicia of the theologians who attended that Synod. So, in the Judicium of the Nassau theologians, this is their first thesis about reprobation: The will of God through which he eternally wisely, freely, and immutably established to not choose some certain people from the whole human race in sin and misery, and to justly damn them on account of their sins—this is the whole decree of reprobation. And this was also the same position of the Leiden theologians as can be seen in Rivet’s theses about reprobation, thesis 3.
10. Additionally, these theologians are accustomed to distinguish in reprobation a twofold act. They call one “negative,” by which God eternally decree to not elect a person, but to pass over and to not raise from the fall. But the other called “positive” or “affirmative,” is that by which God decreed those sinners left to themselves and abusing the administration of common providence where they are not abandoned, after a long toleration, to assign them to their merited punishments and to afflict them with those same punishments. These are the words of Rivet in the same disputation, thesis 7.
11. Polyander agrees in his theses on reprobation, edited in the year 1625, thesis 19. There he observes two distinct preordinations in reprobation. He says, “The first is negative, which is designated by the words preterition and non-election; the other is affirmative, which is designated by the term predamnation.”