On 1 Tim 2:4, Matt 23:37, and other texts at the 1586 Colloquy of Montbèliard against Johannes Valentinus Andreae:
Not for the first time, Beza
responded with the argument that Luther had used against Erasmus: God’s secret
will (Luther had called it the “secret will of the divine majesty”) might not
agree with what God has chosen to reveal while incarnate in Jesus [1]. The
earthly Jesus, like any good preacher, wanted all his hearers to be saved [2]. Secundùm
humanitatem (“according to his humanity”) and as one called by God to
minister to the Jews, Jesus would not have known who among his hearers would
believe in him and so would have attempted to save them all [3]. (Baird Tipson,
Inward Baptism: The Theological Origins of Evangelicalism [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2020], 73)
Footnotes for the Above:
[1] de secreta illa voluntate
maiestatis non esse disputandum . . . deus incarnatus. Martin Luther, De
servo arbitrio, WA 18:597-787, pp. 689-90
[2] omnes . . . seruatos
cupiunt, Beza, Ad Acta Coloquii Montisbelgardensis Responsionis, Pars
altera, p. 170
[3] secundùm Humanitatem, &
quatenus erat Minister Patris Circumcisi destinatus, cognitos fuisse singulos
in ipsum non credituros: promiscuè Christus vt Euangelij sui Minister omnes
auditores suos aggregare voluerit, ac etiam studuerit, vt & fidi omnes
Ministri, relicto penes Deum arcano suo consilio, facere consueuerunt.
Ibid., p. 171
From “Appendix A: Decree and Execution in Theodore Beza’s Doctrine of Predestination”:
At Montbèliard, Beza tried once
more to convince skeptics that the fall could be understood as both necessary
and contingent. God had endowed Adam and Eve with a good will, taken care to
explain his command not to eat any fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, and warned them of the consequences of disobedience. Nevertheless,
they had disobeyed. Why not then, simply explain the fall as the result of
their free choice?
Because, Beza argued, such an explanation
would mean that mere human creatures had the power to thwart the will of God.
No, since God’s power was absolute, nothing could happen unless God allowed it,
and so it must have been God’s intent to allow the fall to occur by not
preventing it. Beza was explicit: God could have given Adam and Eve the additional
gracious assistance that he knew they would need to avoid disobeying him. But
he chose not to, because the decree made the fall necessary. This meant that
Adam’s fall “can no more be removed from God’s will than the necessity [of sinning]
that follows from it; which involves Adam and all his posterity.”
Explaining how God could somehow
have allowed Adam and Eve to fall without assuming any of the blame for it had
been a perpetual challenge for Christian theologians in the Augustinian
tradition. By relying on the distinction between decree and execution, Beza
believed he had responded to that challenge. The decree—to manifest mercy in
the saving of some humans and justice in the damnation of others—was executed
through the disobedience of Adam and Eve. Their disobedience related them and
all their posterity to the status of sinners, worthy of God’s punishment. God mercifully
extended grace to some of those sinners, his elect; he justly condemned the
rest, the reprobate. The elect were grateful; the reprobate got their just deserts.
But should God not be faulted for
reprobating people who, he well knew, lacked the capacity to turn to him? Born
into original sin as descendants of Adam, the reprobate, with their sinful
natures, could not but resist any assistance God might extend to them. But was
that not equally the case for those he had elected? If God was willing to
extend grace to a chosen group, why not extend the same grace to the equally
unworthy remainder of mankind, overcoming their resistance in the same way?
Characteristically, Beza responded
to this question on two levels: at the level of execution and at the level of God’s
decree. At the level of execution, he argued that God did offer grace to
many people whom he nevertheless did not plan to save. Just as he did in the
water of baptism, God through the preaching of his ministers and in the bread
and wine of the Eucharist actually offered grace to every hearer and recipient.
If nominal Christians grounded their confidence on simple attendance in
worship, if they failed to understand that God’s promises were intended only for
those who took them to heart; it would be their own lack of faith and not God’s
unwillingness to offer grace that led them to damnation. God offered
assistance, they refused it, they continued in their sin, and God punished them
accordingly. As Beza explained in response to Jacob Andreae:
the condemnation of those who are
left in their corruption according to that eternal decree of God should not be attributed
rightly to that decree. For even if what God decreed cannot but happen, and
accordingly those who perish do not perish apart from that decree of God, the
cause of the execution of that decree (or the damnation of those who perish) is
not that divine decree but their native corruption in which they were born, and
the fruits of that corruption. (Beza, Ad Acta Coloquii Montisbelgardensis
Responsionis, Pars altera, pp. 160-161)
Beza was saying that original sin
propelled people to actual sin, and because they sinned willingly, God was just
in meting out the appropriate punishment. Creation has been carefully arranged
in such a way that something decreed necessarily could occur contingently. In
Beza’s terminology, a “mediating” or secondary cause—the sin of the reprobate—“intervened”
between the decree and its execution, so that the inevitable blame fell
entirely on the sinner and not on the God whose decree was being executed in
this way. As Beza put it succinctly: “IT is not as though they want to be
converted and God resists their desire, but because they do not even want to be
converted. And they cannot want to be, since they are justly left in their own
impenitence” (Beza, ibid., 161).
So was God “surprised” that some
people failed to come to faith? Obviously not. Though they acted spontaneously
and contingently, God had arranged matters such that their contingent decisions
occurred necessarily (ibid., 207). By Beza’s logic, the necessity of their
sinning not only did not remove but actually “demonstrated” the spontaneous motion
of the fallen human will (ibid., 206). Given their original sin, every
descendant of Adam and Eve deserved eternal punishment for the evil inclination
of his or her will. “Marvel that God deigns to save anybody,” Beza concluded
(ibid., 186).
On the level of execution, then,
the responsibility—and the blame—for human evil resisted on the fallen human will,
sinning spontaneously and contingently. But ultimately, at the level of decree,
there was a deeper explanation. Ultimately, the reason for the difference in
God’s treatment of the elect and the reprobate was not human unbelief; it was a
divine decision to intervene or not to intervene in the lives of individual
human beings, imparting the grace that could alone create faith in a human heart.
So Beza could say that God had chosen David for eternal life, but he could add,
in words that must have sent a chill down many spines, that God had ”created
and ordained Saul to damnation” (Dauid aeterno Dei decreto fuit electus:
Saul verò ad aeternam damnationem creatus & ordinatus. In Andreae, Acta,
p. 473). Some will be saved to demonstrate God’s mercy, and others, no less
unworthy, will be damned to demonstrate his justice. Why? For no other reason
than that God wills it. Only after their death might humans possibly learn who
God had chosen some and not others, but in this life, God’s reasons for
electing some people and reprobating others are completely inscrutable.
One must understand, Beza
explained, that God had chosen to reveal only part of his will in scripture.
Behind this “revealed will”—traditionally called his “will of the sign” (voluntas
signi)—lay something deeper, God’s ultimate intentions, the “will of his
good pleasure” (voluntas beneplaciti). Take the case of God commanding
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. God’s revealed intention, that Abraham sacrifice
his son, was not his ultimate intention (Beza, Responsionis Responsionis
pars altera, p. 174). God never intended to break his promise that Abraham,
through Isaac, would be “a father of many nations,” but Abraham had no way of
knowing that until God’s angel appeared to tell him not to offer up his son.
In story after story, the Bible as
the critical component of God’s revealed will, described God’s anger toward
people who ignored his commandments. God’s execution of his justice required
reprobation—eternal suffering in hell—as the appropriate punishment for such
people. The experience of the reprobate, Beza thought, would teach Christians
that their own behavior deserved no better. Without Christ’s intervention on
their behalf, they, too, would have endured eternal punishment.
The ultimate reason for the punishment
of the reprobate, however, was God’s decree: the just punishment of some human
beings and the merciful salvation of others would manifest God’s glory. God’s rationale
for manifesting his glory in this way was simply beyond human knowing. Nor
could Christians expect to understand why an infinite God might not have found
a way to execute his decree that did not require banishing the majority of his
human creatures to everlasting fire. Regardless of its theological viability,
the decrees/execution scheme was unlikely to be a crowd-pleaser, and one can understand
why Andreae made every export to expose it at Montbéliard. (Baird Tipson, Inward
Baptism: The Theological Origins of Evangelicalism [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2020], 181-84)
