[CCWoody]

What is funny to me anyway is that you are plainly laying out from Scripture my own initial understanding of the Foreknowledge of God when I was probably a bit more than a semi-Pelagian. And since I have embraced a better understanding of Foreknowledge and Predestination, I really do understand just how irritating I must have been to ask such simple questions to other Pelagians and expect them to answer from a Biblically correct position. Thing is, they would tend to deny God's foreknowledge altogether and insist that my position was logically inconsistent. So, I found out that I was wrong as well and I changed.

Still, I don't know that I am a double-Predestinarian. It may just be another "terminology" type confusion. I have so many...

[the_doc]

Still, I don't know that I am a double-Predestinarian. It may just be another "terminology" type confusion.

I believe the problem is only a matter of terminology in your case.

When you think about it, a double predestination actually just amounts to absolute predestination--which tells us that real predestination is necessarily "double or nothing, as one theologian has said. To use Spurgeon's language, if there is a single atom out of the control of God--anywhere in the universe--we have chaos!

It is important to notice that the term "double predestination" does not in and of itself discuss how the predestination of the reprobate is arranged. It merely presents the fact of that predestination.

In his post on Matthew 11, OrthodoxPresbyterian has elucidated something of the arrangement of the predestination of the reprobate. God's foreknowledge is a planning faculty. It plans the salvation of the elect, but it also plans the sealing of the reprobate in his doom. God deliberately passes up some folks. The interesting thing about this is that He often makes confrontational presentations of Himself to reprobates even as He allows them to get worse. And they certainly will get worse!

In the case of reprobate churchgoers, this entails what is called "gospel hardening." It is a thing of divine design. And it leaves the sinner responsible. He really does despise the warnings and the free offer which could save him.

In other words, the predestination of the reprobate unfolds in such a way as to make us realize that God's predestination of the reprobate involves a passive decree. But it is nonetheless a decree. This idea of a decree is seen in verses such as "vessels of wrath fitted for destruction" and "before of old ordained to this condemnation."

Another knotty problem in the matter of the arrangement of God's absolute and necessarily double predestination--i.e., real predestination--concerns the order of God's decrees. This centers on the controversy of the supralapsarians versus the infralapsarians (see below).

The supralapsarian position basically involves the notion that God's decree to damn comes before His decree to create. The idea which winds up being emphasized in this proposed theology is that God purposed to damn people who were not sinners--so He ordained that they become sinners to make for a just damnation.

The infralapsarian, on the other hand, insists that we cannot look at the order of things in God's decrees (e.g., creation versus damnation) in that simplistic way--largely because the decrees did not occur in time and therefore do not have have what we would regard as chronology. The infralapsarian regards the whole matter of the decrees of creation and the Fall and reprobation as a matter of logical order rather than temporal order. And the infralapsarian maintains that God never decreed to reprobate sinners until He regarded them in their status of sinners. (Never mind that this regard on the part of God occurred before even creation.)

Romans One seems to support this infralapsarian position, since God's revealed reprobation of the non-elect does not hit the Adamic race until the Fall.

Spurgeon has some unusually good meditations on this stuff, and OrthodoxPresbyterian probably has it bookmarked. (Spurgeon was basically an infralapsarian. So was Jonathan Edwards. So are most of today's mainstream Calvinists. So are OrthodoxPresbyterian and I.)

***

I hope this helps. I just wanted you to realize that double predestinarians are not necessarily supralapsarians. But as Matthew 11 reveals--not to mention several other passages, the reprobate really is predestined to hell--by the very fact that God is aware of options which He chooses not to take on behalf of the reprobate.