Theological Theses · §1727 · Louis Le Blanc de Beaulieu

Common Reformed view: God's goodness forbids creating man without original righteousness, prone to evil

However that may be, and on whatever ground original righteousness is said to have been natural to the first man, the common Reformed view seems to be that it is wholly at odds with God's goodness and wisdom for him to make man without original righteousness: a man who does not know and love God as he should, who leans and inclines toward evil, and in whom sense and appetite resist reason and rebel against God's law.

They do not believe that in a rational creature such a lack of love for God, such a headlong bent to evil and vice, and such a rebellion of sense and appetite against the mind and God's law, can be free of sin and guilt.

So they think it absurd, and an insult to the Creator, to say that this rebellion of the soul's lower faculties, with the proneness of the whole man to evil and his resistance to good that follow from it, is a consequence of man's being made of a rational soul and an organic body, something that results from that make-up necessarily and by the very nature of things unless God adds something above nature to subject reason to God and the lower part of the soul to reason.

Latin

XXXIV. Utcunque tamen de eo sit, & quacunque tandem ratione dicatur Originalis justitia primo homini fuisse naturalis, communis videtur esse Reformatorum sententia, omnino bonitati & sapientiae divinae repugnare, ut Deus hominem condat absque justitia Originali, & talem qui Deum, ut par est, non agnoscat & amet, & ad malum sit pronus atque proclivis, & in quo sensus atque appetitus rationi repugnant, & sint legi divinae rebelles. Nec enim existimant ejusmodi erga Deum amoris privationem, & praecipitem ad malum & vitia inclinationem, ac rebellionem sensus & appetitus adversus mentem, & legem divinam in creatura rationali posse peccato & culpa carere. Adeoque absurdum & creatori injurium ducunt, si dicatur ejusmodi inferiorum animae facultatum rebellionem, & quae inde sequitur totius hominis ad malum pronitatem, & repugnantiam ad bonum aliquid esse consequens hominis compositionem ex anima rationali & corpore organico, quodque necessario, & secundum ipsam rerum naturam inde resultat, nisi Deus aliquid supra naturam addat, quod subjiciat rationem Deo, & partem inferiorem animae rationi subdat.

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About this text

Louis Le Blanc, a Reformed professor at Sedan, sets out theology in theses argued against Rome: Scripture, faith, grace, free choice, good works and the saints.

This volume holds the Theses on Theology I–XLIII and On Faith I–XXII, in eighteen sections.

Louis Le Blanc de Beaulieu (1614–1675) was minister and professor of theology at the Academy of Sedan, the Reformed school on France's eastern border. His Theses were disputed by students over many years and collected in a London folio (1675).

The Theological Theses range across the whole Reformed system — Scripture, God, predestination, grace, and justifying faith — in the crisp thesis-and-proof form of the seventeenth-century schools.

Date1675 AD (Sedan theses; London collection)

No modern English.

Reference

ESTC R17887; Wing L802. IA bub_gb_eOkHAW4G0-wC (+ EEBO 1675 for gap leaves).

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