Two Dissertations · §203 · John Davenant

Cap. 1 vocabulary: Praedestinatio — dual use; school sense

I turn next to Predestination. Theologians sometimes — though rarely — use that word for a bad end too: destination to death. So Augustine on John, Tractate 48: How did he say to them, "You are not of my sheep"? Because he saw them predestined to everlasting ruin, not purchased for eternal life by the price of his blood. And in City of God 15.1 he says there are two cities or societies of human beings: one predestined to reign forever with God, the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil. Augustine's disciples Prosper and Fulgentius sometimes speak the same way. The Fathers at the Council of Valence even confess a predestination of the elect to life and a predestination of the ungodly to death. We, following what has nearly become school usage, narrow "predestination" and "the predestined" to that special providence of God by which from eternity he proposed to secure, by efficacious means, the salvation of those he chose in Christ — and, matching that eternal purpose, he works their salvation in time efficaciously and without fail.

Latin

Venio igitur ad vocabulum Praedestinationis, quod aliquando, licet raro, in malam etiam partem usurpatur a Theologis, nimirum pro destinatione ad mortem. Sic Augustinus Tract. 48. in Johan.: Quomodo, inquit, istis dixit, Non estis ex ovibus meis? quia videbat eos ad sempiternum interitum praedestinatos, non ad vitam aeternam sui sanguinis pretio comparatos. Et 15. De civit. cap. 1. Duo dicit esse civitates vel societates hominum; quarum una praedestinata est in aeternum regnare cum Deo, altera aeternum supplicium subire cum diabolo. Sic etiam nonnunquam loquuntur Augustini discipuli, Prosper, & Fulgentius. Quinetiam Patres in Concilio Valentino confitentur praedestinationem electorum ad vitam, & praedestinationem impiorum ad mortem. Sed nos (quod jam fere obtinuit in Schola Theologorum) praedestinationis & praedestinatorum vocabula arctamus ad illam providentiam Dei specialem, qua ab aeterno proposuit illorum salutem efficacibus mediis procurare, quos in Christo elegit: & conformiter huic aeterno proposito, eorundem salutem in tempore efficaciter & infallibiliter operatur.

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John Davenant argues from Scripture that Christ's death is a remedy offered to every person, so that anyone who hears the Gospel may be called to believe, and then opens a second dissertation on predestination.

John Davenant (1572–1641) was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, bishop of Salisbury from 1621, and England's leading delegate to the Synod of Dort. A Reformed theologian of the moderate school, he defended universal atonement language within a Calvinist frame.

The Two Dissertations (1650) press two theses: that Christ died sufficiently for all, and that God sincerely calls all who hear the gospel — against the novel claim that Christ died only for the elect in every sense. They are Davenant's mature statement of the hypothetical-universalist position that divided English Calvinists.

This volume covers the opening of the first dissertation through the close of chapter 3, with the theses on the extent of Christ's death.

Date1572–1641 AD (Bishop of Salisbury; 1650 Cambridge imprint)

The 1683 reprint was not used as base text. No modern English was copied.

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