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Cap. X Arg. VII: fulfillment of the promise not from uncertain free will but from the firmest decree and matching operation
What God promised the Son must be fetched not from the uncertain working of human free will, but from the firmest decree of the divine will and from an operation that answers to that decree.
Latin Quod autem Deus promisit Filio, ejus impletio non ex incerta operatione humani arbitrii, sed ex firmissimo divinae voluntatis decreto, et operatione eidem decreto respondente arcessenda est.
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About this text Davenant wrote in the early seventeenth century as Lady Margaret Professor at Cambridge and Bishop of Salisbury; he was a British delegate at Dort. This is not a patristic work.
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.
Date 1572–1641 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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