What do Calvinists teach about the Election of mankind? Is it before or after the Creation?
Upvote:2
In the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, a historic Calvinistic faith confession that is a revision of the Westminster confession and used as a confession of faith by many reformed calvinist church today, state in Chapter 3 (Of God's Decree), Paragraph 5:
Those of mankind that are predestinated to life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, hath chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love,11 without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving Him thereunto.12
11 Eph. 1:4, 9, 11; Rom. 8:30; 2 Tim. 1:9; I Thess. 5:9
12 Rom. 9:13,16; Eph. 2:5,12
So for your question What do Calvinists teach about the Election of mankind? Is it before or after the Creation? Mankind was elected for salvation before the creation
Upvote:3
Since virtually it's formation as a school of thought, Calvinism has disagreed about the logical order of God's divine decrees. Generally there have been two schools with the minority (5% according to wikipedia) espousing the pre-lapsarian (lit. pre-fall) view that God elects to save and condemn prior to even create or allow sin. The majority view is the post-lapsarian (lit. after-fall) perspective which holds that Gods election to save and condemn follows the creation and sin of humanity.
Note that given the determinism of the Calvinist view of the world, and the a-temporal nature of God, it is, strictly speaking, improper to think of time before creation but these have been the commonly espoused views about the logical order in which God's commands about how the world would be made, occurred. This means in a temporal sense God elected before creating, but disagreement exists about whether he logically decreed election before or after decreeing creation and the fall.
This is why the majority of reformed theologians and statements of faith can simultaneously claim that God elected to salvation and punishment (temporally) before creating even while almost none of them have been pre-lapsarian. Therefore, the majority have held that at the very least election is logically subsequent to human sin, even while God's plan was established before the act of salvation.
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