Bored Protestant

Philip Van Limborch, an important Remonstrant theologian in his Body of Divinity has some interesting things to say about God’s decree. So the goal of this post is to just summarize what Limborch says in his Body of Divinity concerning the decrees of God.   Limborch starts with the divisions of the decree he first starts off with saying that the decrees of God are divided with respect to the objects and he gives some examples of this like the creation of the world,the sending of Christ in the world and things that God commands or forbids. When it comes to things that commands, Limborch says God “promotes by the Assistance of his Grace, whilst he would permit the latter for very wise and just Reasons.” Limborch makes sure to say that “this Assistance of God's Grace does not lay any constraint upon a Man to do what is good, but only bestows upon him a Power of Working, and is the very Principle of all Operation, without destroying Man's Free-will: Much lest does the ...

The reason why I’m writing this blog post is that I was reading through some of Herman Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics, mainly the 2nd volume and he makes some bad critiques when it comes to the Remonstrants and a massive blunder. So I just want to go through the areas where Bavinck talks about the Remonstrants on the attributes of God. The first section will deal with immutability which Bavnick says the Remonstrants attacked then I will look at simplicity since those are the main areas where he talks about the Remonstrants and I’m not gonna talk about middle knowledge since Bavnick doesn’t make a mistake in attributing to them middle knowledge.  Bavinck on page 155 says “On the one hand, Pelagianism, Socinianism, Remonstantism and rationalism, which especially opposes the immutability of God knowing and willing and makes the will of God dependent on and hence change in accordance with the conducts of humans.”  But when we go to the Remostant confession we don’t see an attack on ...