Two Dissertations · §224 · John Davenant

Cap. II: Pelagian opening — free will alone; election from foresight holiness

Blinded self-love in human reason claims there is always some prior reason for the decree of election — and Scripture cries against it. That British serpent spat out this poison: that a person can keep God's law and reach eternal life by free choice alone. He joined to it another venom of the same kind: that God, foresighting who would live holy by their own will's choice, elected them all to glory before the world's foundations were laid.

Latin

Dari tale aliquod praecedaneum, cui semper innitatur decretum electionis, humana ratio amore sui occaecata praetendit, Scriptura reclamante. Britannus ille coluber hoc plenum veneni & pestilentiae dogma evomuit, Posse hominem solis viribus liberi sui arbitrii legem Dei servare, ad vitam aeternam pervenire. Huic & illud alterum conjunxit ejusdem virulentiae, Deum scilicet praevidentem quinam essent per voluntatis suae arbitrium sancte victuri, eos omnes ante jacta mundi fundamenta ad gloriam elegisse.

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About this text

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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