Moise Amyraut (1598-1664)
Calvin employed the distinction between the
secret will of God and his revealed will, developed in the medieval church, in articulating election and predestination,
and assurance, for example. God’s eternal decree is his secret will. But Calvin did
not engage in the business of ordering the decrees. For example, in
distinguishing the end or purpose of a decree, Calvin does not set out in the logical order of practical reasoning, the means and
the end. Such ordering became a practice when the Remonstrants arose, and when
supra- and infra-lapsarianism were developed as alternate ordering of the
divine decree respecting the election and predestination in relation to the
divine permission of the fall.
When Arminius began to make a stir, towards
the end of the 16th century, considerable attention was then given by
Reformed divines to the divine decrees (or decree), both in identifying the
changes that Arminius proposed, and in articulating the main Reformed,
non-Arminian view or views. These discussions had one thing in common; the divines took it for granted that the decree is eternal and unfailing and that such distinctions as they discussed were
within the one eternal decree. The plural ‘decrees’ was used not to denote a
plurality of different decrees, but to make possible the making of distinctions within the one eternal decree. Those on the Reformed side (excepting Arminius, and then, perhaps, Amyraut) who took up distinct positions, were unanimously agreed that God’s
decree was infallible, absolute, that the decree was the secret will of God’s good
pleasure, not the revealed will of his precepts.
By the time of the Synod of Dordt, what came to be known as Amyraldianism was beginning to take shape in the work of John
Cameron, a Scotsman who taught for a time at the Academy of Sedan during
1606-8, and then at Saumur until 1621. He was made Professor of Divinity in Glasgow, but unhappy in Scotland, he returned
to France. He died in 1625. He seems to have left an intellectual legacy which the
French theologian Moise Amyraut, his former student, and successor, following
his appointment at Saumur in 1633, cherished and embellished into
Amyraldianism, or post-redemptionism as it came to be called. (Amyraut died in
1664).
It posited the that, 'following' the decree to permit the fall, there was a decree of the work of Christ the redeemer with a universal offer to everyone. God 'then' foreknew the failure of this, due to the universality of human sin. 'Following' this foreknowledge, God willed the salvation of an election of the human race, working in them an effectual grace through the Spirit, in the standard Reformed terms. According to Amyraldianism, then, the divine decree of election in the divine mind followed (in order) the permission of the Fall, and the ordaining of the work of Christ with a universal invitation. And one assumes that the two decrees were thereafter in simultaneous operation.
It posited the that, 'following' the decree to permit the fall, there was a decree of the work of Christ the redeemer with a universal offer to everyone. God 'then' foreknew the failure of this, due to the universality of human sin. 'Following' this foreknowledge, God willed the salvation of an election of the human race, working in them an effectual grace through the Spirit, in the standard Reformed terms. According to Amyraldianism, then, the divine decree of election in the divine mind followed (in order) the permission of the Fall, and the ordaining of the work of Christ with a universal invitation. And one assumes that the two decrees were thereafter in simultaneous operation.
It is not clear (to me) that common grace, encompassing
the various blessings enjoyed in varying degrees by entire humanity, was according
to Amyraut the fruit of Christ’s death, as it was for Davenant, writing about
the same time, as was noted in an earlier post. This is in any case a moot point in Reformed theology. After all, for Calvin such gifts are the common work of the
Spirit in a role other than that of the Spirit of regeneration, whose work had
no obviously Christological connection in his thought. In any case this does affect the present
purpose, which is to consider the salvific side of Amyraldianism and
‘hypothetical universalism’.
Given the above Amyraldian scheme, instead of a divine decree as being unconditional
or absolute, (perhaps, in our ideas thought of as a set of such unconditional decrees) Amyraut seems to have preferred to think in terms of an antecedent
will of God which could be frustrated by the will of men and women, and a consequent divine will which could not
be frustrated. These differently-understood divine ’wills’ took the place of a
set of absolute decrees. (So the idea of one all-encompassing decree seems to have played little or no part in his thought). The difference between 'antecedent' and 'consequent' was not merely
terminological, but had the consequence of confusing the secret will of God, which can never be frustrated,
(the ‘consequent will’) and the revealed will of God (the 'antecedent will') which of
course could and was (or is being) spurned by a fallen race, according to Amyraldianism. This was, as far as I can see, a purely
speculative construction, whose only biblical warrant is that it endeavours to do
justice to Scriptural expressions of Christ’s
death being for ‘the world’.
To make this a bit clearer, God’s antecedent will was to the effect that
whoever responded to the Gospel would be delivered, but (foreseeing that none
will respond positively), God by his consequent will decreed the
salvation of an elect group. But given that the failure was a foreseen failure, and its universalism thus hypothetical
or counterfactual, due the foreseen plight of the post-lapsarian human race, God’s
particularistic decree followed, the effective salvific will of God which keeps
Amyraldianism within the bounds of orthodoxy in that this is a fully
monergistic, Augustinian, soteriology.
Amyraut's compatriot Pierre Du Moulin (and others, no doubt) objected to
Amyraldianism on the grounds that this scheme endorses features of
Arminianism, namely that when God's antecedent will failed, it was a foreseen failure, construed as the failure of a
decree. (I am indebted for the account of Amyraldianism to the second half of Chapter 5
of Muller's Calvin and the Reformed Tradition.)
Details of Amyraldianism can vary from
person to person. For example, in his The Plan of Salvation, B.B. Warfield
worded post-Redemptionism as being the postulating the ‘Gift of Christ to
render salvation possible to all’, followed by the ‘Election of some for [the] gift
of moral ability’. Yet the first, the gift of ‘Christ…..’ is clearly not intended as a decree in its antecedent only,
but it assumed that (by divine foreknowledge) none would avail
themselves of that possibility, which is not a further decree but simply the
foreknown failure of anyone to respond to Christ. The second decree was the further decree of election. And that is followed (as Warfield put it) in turn by the decree of the ‘Gift of the Holy Spirit to work moral ability in
the elect’. (p.31) The failure of the antecedent will is in fact the failure of a preferred outcome of the antecedent will. For if the decree is that on the basis of which the work of Christ for the
world makes possible that all will be saved, then the fact that none are saved is not
a failure or frustration of that decree. If a man decides to buy a bag
of sweets and invites his friends to take as many as they wish, he has not
failed to offer the sweets if in fact none take any, particularly so if all his
friends have an allergy to sweets.
Du
Moulin maintained that Amyraut held that
the universal decree was in fact enacted, whereas for others God, foreseeing what would occur were he to
issue such a decree, does not will it, but wills instead the particularistic,
monergistic decree familiar in Reformed theology. The words of Amyraut quoted
by Muller at this point seem ambiguous, or too understated to be clear. The
words are ‘the nature of humanity was such that, if God had not set forth
another counsel in ordaining to send the Son to the world than that proposed
him as the Redeemer equally and universally to all…the sufferings of his Son
would have been utterly in vain’. (154) It is one thing to think better of a
possible decree, it is another thing to issue the decree and, because of its
failure and then to countermand it. But it seems that Amyraut thought of it as an abandoned decree, bjut actual decree.
Support for this view of the Amyraldian position is that it was described by orthodox
Reformed theologians of that time in clearly decretalist terms. Thus Turretin
describes the universal or general
aspect of Amyraldianism as being in the form of a ‘general decree’ which
‘concerns Christ being given as Mediator to the human race to remove, by his
satisfaction, the obstacle of divine justice and to open the way of salvation
to each and every one…However because he foresaw that no one would believe on
account of the innate depravity of man and that the gospel of Christ would be
rejected by all, they [the Amyraldians] maintain that God then by a special
decree elected some to whom he would give Christ and would furnish with
faith….’ (Institutes I.423)
So one question is, why need Amyraut think of
this first decree as having been implemented? Why would not God, foreseeing its failure if it were implemented, not implement it? And if implemented, why is it accurate to say that God's antecedent will failed? It was in Du Moulin's words 'in vain'. But the decree succeeded on that the offer was, or is, made. Whatever the answer to these questions, it seems that Amyraut sees these two decrees at
work in Christian history, one universal and one particular or special decree. But is
there evidence that since its first preaching the gospel was general in the
sense assumed by Amyraut, that all people were and are presently familiar with it? Did this seem historically plausible even in the seventeenth century?
We shall consider these questions regarding Amyraut's version of hypothetical universalism, and other questions, in our next post.
