Two Dissertations · §70 · John Davenant

Cap. 5 Mem. 2 Scripture elect Resp: Election wills justification in time, not coeternal with election

Response. Electing someone to life before the world’s foundation is one thing; actually justifying and reconciling that same person to himself before the world’s foundation is another. Election names in God an eternal will to justify, reconcile, and save the elect person—but to justify, reconcile, and save him in his own time through faith. So the elect person’s actual justification, reconciliation, and sanctification flow from eternal election; they are not coeternal with it. That is easy to gather from Paul’s whole argument in Ephesians 1. He affirms that we were elect before the world’s foundations were laid (Ephesians 1:4), yet he does not say we were therefore sanctified before those foundations were laid. He says we were elect so that we might be holy and blameless before him in love. Nor does he teach, by the power of eternal election, that we were justified or reconciled from eternity. He teaches that this happened in the dispensation of the fullness of time, after we applied faith to the gospel that had been opened (Ephesians 1:9–10 and following).

Latin

Resp. Aliud est eligere aliquem ad vitam ante constitutionem mundi, aliud actu justificare & reconciliare eundem sibi ante constitutionem mundi. Electio dicit in Deo aeternam voluntatem justificandi, reconciliandi & salvandi personam electam, sed justificandi, reconciliandi & salvandi suo tempore per fidem. Ipsa igitur actualis justificatio, reconciliatio, sanctificatio hominis electi fluit ab aeterna electione, sed non est eidem coaeterna. Facile est hoc colligere ex toto discursu Paulino in illo primo capite ad Ephesios. Affirmat nos electos ante jacta mundi fundamenta, vers. 4. sed non dicit proinde nos sanctificatos ante jacta mundi fundamenta, sed electos ut essemus sancti & inculpati coram eo per charitatem. Neque virtute aeternae electionis docet nos ab aeterno fuisse justificatos aut reconciliatos, sed in pleni temporis dispensatione, postquam patefacto Evangelio fidem adhibuimus, vers. 9, 10, &c.

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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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