1)

Thus much touching the first distribution of God’s decree.

Secondly the decree of God, is either of action or of permission.

The decree of action is that, by which God from eternity purposed to do good, either by himself or by others, Ephes. 1:11. Philip. 2:13.

The decree of permission is that by which God has from eternity purposed and appointed to permit sins to be done, Act. 2:23, and 4:27, 28. Amandus Polanus, The Substance of Christian Religion, (London: Arn. Hatfield for Felix Norton, dwelling in Paules Chuchyard, at the sign of the Parrot, 1600), 52.

2)

Thus far concerning the action of God: now concerning his permission.

God’s permission, is the work of God’s permission, whereby God, according to his eternal decree permits the evil of the offence, or sin to be done, whilst he does not vouchsafe the grace not to sin, or gives it not to sinners, and does not incline or bend their will, no let or hinder sin. Isai. 2.6; Acts 14. 16; Rom. 1.24, 28; Psal. 81:13.

Permission is a suffering of the evils of the offence, that is to say, of sins which are not done by God himself, but he does suffer them according to his decree. Esai. 2.6; Acts 14:16; Roms. 1.24.

But God suffers the evil of the offense so that it cannot be done except he be wiling to it, & it can no otherwise be done then he suffers, nor no further then he permits, that he also may direct it to a good end.

He suffered the first man to fall, for two cause. The first is, that man might know his infirmity and weakness to stand in goodness, if he were left to himself, and had not every moment God’s grace vouchsafe unto him, and faith given, and continued unto him. The second, that by this means God might declare, both his mercy and power, in restoring and saving the elect, and also his justice and power, in punishing and destroying the reprobate.

He suffers even yet the Saints to fall into sin, that they being chastened for their sin, he might bring them to the true knowledge of themselves, and to humility, Psalm. 119:

“It is good for me O Lord, that thou hast humbled me, that I might learn thy statutes.”

He suffered also the reprobate to fall into sin, that he might show the glory of his justice in punishing them for their sin, Roms. 9:17; Exod. 9:16.

For God would not being good, suffer anything to be done evilly, except also being omnipotent, could evil to God.

He has not therefore by his eternal, immutable, most wise and most just purpose at any time wrought or approved evil, but permitted only, that the chief creatures should fall into sin.

Howbeit the devil and the wicked, yea all creatures are so in God’s power, that without his will, they cannot only not do anything, but they cannot so much as once move themselves, Gen. 20.6. So the false Prophet Balaam could not curse the people of Israel, Numb. 22; Job. 1:12; Proverb. 21.1; Acts 17, 25.28.

Hereupon we gather two doctrines or consequences.

The first pertains to our comfort, namely, that no evil can befall us from the devil or from wicked men, without the will & permission of God.

The other pertains to our instruction, namely, that whatsoever adversity comes to us, our mind must be turned away from our enemies, and the evil things with which we are afflicted, and be lifted up to God, and we must bear all things patiently, Job. 1. we must acknowledge the judgments of God to be just, and reverence them. Psal. 119. It is good for me O Lord, that thou hast humbled me and so forth. And we must commit our injury to God, and so forth. Amandus Polanus, The Substance of Christian Religion, (London: Arn. Hatfield for Felix Norton, dwelling in Paules Chuchyard, at the sign of the Parrot, 1600), 95-98.

Goodness of God–Idea of this Perfection: display of Goodness in the Creation of the Universe: and in his dispensation to Mankind–Existence of Physical Evil consistent with the Divine Goodness–Origin of Moral Evil–Display of Divine Goodness in Redemption.

By the goodness of God, we do not understand the general excellence of his nature, but that particular property or principle, which disposes him to communicate happiness to his creatures. It is in this sense that we pronounce it to be one of his essential attributes. It is necessary in conjunction with other attributes, to complete the idea of an all-perfect Being, and is the foundation of the trust, and love, and hope, with which he is regarded by men. We could think of him only with distant reverence, if we conceived that he took no interest in the well-being of his creatures; and the supposition that he was actuated by a principle of malevolence, would create dread of one infinitely superior to us, from whose pursuit it was impossible to escape. We should tremble at his power, which could torment and destroy us; at his wisdom, the contrivances of which for our injury we possessed no means of evading; at his immensity, which forced upon us the alarming thought, that to what. ever place we might flee for refuge, we should be always in the presence of an enemy. Goodness throws a mild and tranquillizing luster over the majestic attributes of his nature. It presents them to us under a friendly aspect; associated with it, they appear as so many powers, by which its benignant designs will be carried into full effect. We look up to him not only as a Sovereign, but as a Father; we feel emotions of gratitude rising in harmony with sentiments of veneration; we are emboldened to supplicate his favour, and to resign ourselves to his disposal. Goodness has been considered as one of his attributes by men of every nation, conducted no doubt to this conclusion by the proofs of his beneficence in the natural course of events. The ancient heathens called him the Best, as well as the Greatest of Beings. If some believed in the existence of a malevolent Being, because they observed much evil in the world, and knew not how otherwise to account for it, they also acknowledged another Being of an opposite character, the author of order and beauty, by whose bounty the wants of living creatures were supplied.

Goodness being a disposition to communicate happiness, regulated, however, in an intelligent Agent by wisdom, and in a moral Agent by a regard to purity and justice, we learn that, it belongs to God from a survey of hie works and dispensations.

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The following is a review by Richard Muller on Jonathan Moore’s book English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology. Moore is fairly good in his examination of Preston, Ussher and Davenant, but he dreadfully mischaracterises Kimedoncius, Vermigli, and others.

Muller:

This volume offers a detailed and finely argued exposition of the view of redemption expressed by John Preston both in his various writings and in his testimony at the York Conference in 1626. Where Moore clearly advances the discussion of both the York Conference itself and of early seventeenth-century British theology is in his clear identification of Preston’s teaching, together with that of several major contemporaries (notably John Davenant and James Ussher), as a form of hypothetical universalism, namely, the doctrine that Christ so died for the sins of the human race that, if all would believe, all would be saved. What Moore nicely shows is that the Reformed side of the debate was somewhat variegated, including hypothetical universalists as well as those who denied universal redemption and that previous analysis of the theological debates in early seventeenth-century England too simplistically identified the parties in debate as either Arminian or Calvinist. In effect, Moore resuscitates an issue recognized in the seventeenth century by Davenant, Baxter, and others, and noted with reference to the Westminster Assembly by Alexander Mitchell that there was an indigenous hypothetical universalism in British Reformed theology. Moore’s study, however, for all its excellent work on Preston and the York Conference, embodies two significant problems concerning perspective on and context of the materials examined. First, there is an underlying systematizing thread in the argument of the book that leads to claims that do not ultimately bear scrutiny concerning the interconnection of specific doctrinal formulations. Particularly in his review of William Perkins’ doctrine, Moore contends that Perkins’ supralapsarian predestinarianism together with his federalism “drives” him toward the conclusion of particular redemption, namely that the all-sufficiency of Christ’s satisfaction yields no hypothetical offer of salvation to all people. However, particularism was hardly the exclusive characteristic of supralapsarian federalists. There is also a clearly particularist formulation concerning Christ’s satisfaction in the work of Perkins’ contemporary, Gulielmus Bucanus, who tended toward an infralapsarian doctrine of predestination and was no federalist. Similarly, a later Reformed orthodox thinker such as Turretin, a convinced infralapsarian and, although party to the two-covenant schema but not a federal theologian in the strict sense of the term, taught a clearly prticularistic doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction.

Moore also underestimates the presence of non-Amyraldian or non-speculative forms of hypothetical universalism in the Reformed tradition as a whole and thereby, in the opinion of this reviewer, misconstrues Preston’s position as a “softening” of Reformed theology rather than as a continuation of one trajectory of Reformed thought that had been present from the early sixteenth century onward. Clear statements of nonspeculative hypothetical universalism can be found (as Davenant recognized) in Heinrich Bullinger’s Decades and commentary on the Apocalypse, in Wolfgang Musculus’ Loci communes, in Ursinus’ catechetical lectures, and in Zanchi’s Tractatus de praedestinatione sanctorum, among other places. In addition, the Canons of Dort, in affirming the standard distinction of a sufficiency of Christ’s death for all and its efficiency for the elect, actually refrain from canonizing either the early form of hypothetical universalism or the assumption that Christ’s sufficiency serves only to leave the nonelect without excuse. Although Moore can cite statements from the York conference that Dort “either apertly or covertly denied the universality of man’s redemption” (156), it remains that various of the signatories of the Canons were hypothetical universalists–not only the English delegation (Carleton, Davenant, Ward, Goad, and Hall) but also the [sic] some of the delegates from Bremen and Nassau (Martinius, Crocius, and Alsted)–that Carleton and the other delegates continued to affirm the doctrinal points of Dort while distancing themselves from the church discipline of the Belgic Confession, and that in the course of seventeenth-century debate even the Amyraldians were able to argue that their teaching did not run contrary to the Canons. In other words, the nonspeculative, non-Amyraldian form of hypothetical universalism was new in neither the decades after Dort nor a “softening” of the tradition: The views of Davenant, Ussher, and Preston followed out a resident trajectory long recognized as orthodox among the Reformed.

In sum, this is a significant study of the theology of John Preston and of the importance of a form of hypothetical universalism in the Puritan and English Reformed theology of the early seventeenth century, but its conclusions need to be set into and somewhat tempered by a sense of the broader context and multiple streams of theology in the Reformed tradition.

“English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology,” by Jonathan D. Moore. Reviewed by Richard A Muller, Calvin Theological Journal, 43 (2008), 149-150.

Credit to Steven Wedgeworth for the find.

[If it helps, read the underlined portion in the second paragraph as if it was a complete single sentence, and the point will become clear.]

Conclusion:

The famous, but not so well known, Eodem Modo (in the same manner) clause of Dort:

And this is the perspicuous, simple, and ingenuous declaration of the orthodox doctrine respecting the five articles which have been controverted in the Belgic Churches; and the rejection of the errors, with which they have for some time been troubled. This doctrine the Synod judges to be drawn from the Word of God, and to be agreeable to the confession of the Reformed Churches. Whence it clearly appears that some, whom such conduct by no means became, have violated all truth, equity, and charity, in wishing to persuade the public:

That the doctrine of the Reformed Churches concerning predestination, and the points annexed to it, by its own genius and necessary tendency, leads off the minds of men from all piety and religion; that it is an opiate administered by the flesh and the devil; and the stronghold of Satan, where he lies in wait for all, and from which he wounds multitudes, and mortally strikes through many with the darts both of despair and security; that it makes God the author of sin, unjust, tyrannical, hypocritical; that it is nothing more than an interpolated Stoicism, Manicheism, Libertinism, Turcism; that it renders men carnally secure, since they are persuaded by it that nothing can hinder the salvation of the elect, let them live as they please; and, therefore, that they may safely perpetrate every species of the most atrocious crimes; and that, if the reprobate should even perform truly all the works of the saints, their obedience would not in the least contribute to their salvation; that the same doctrine teaches that God, by a mere arbitrary act of his will, without the least respect or view to any sin, has predestinated the greatest part of the world to eternal damnation, and has created them for this very purpose; that in the same manner in which the election is the fountain and cause of faith and good works, reprobation is the cause of unbelief and impiety; that many children of the faithful are torn, guiltless, from their mothers’ breasts, and tyrannically plunged into hell: so that neither baptism nor the prayers of the Church at their baptism can at all profit them; and many other things of the same kind which the Reformed Churches not only do not acknowledge, but even detest with their whole soul.

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