Infra or Supralapsarianism

 A friend recently asked me what the right answer is on this. The truth is I haven't really thought about it very much. We need to be clear exactly what the issue is. I think it is open to question whether or not this is a sensible question and how much difference it really makes. 

You can find some discussion of various approaches here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/lapsarian-views/

The debate is about the logical (not temporal) order of the divine decrees for reprobation and salvation. 

On a supralapsarian view, God means to save some and damn others and therefore decrees the fall and so on. 

On an infralapsarian view, God decrees the fall and means to save some out of the damned mass of humanity. (We might still need to ask why he decrees the fall). 

Now, God is timelessly eternal. And his thinking is not like ours. We sometimes think by logical deduction. But God knows all things we might say intuitively. And God's relationship with reality is also rather different from ours. Though God can "imagine" things that do not exist, certain "thoughts" or decrees of God actually constitute reality. 

In so far as there is a Reformed consensus, it is infralapsarian. All the confessions speak in this way and whilst they do not exclude, supralapsarianism, none affirm it. The Supra- view is a minority report in the Reformed tradition. Packer (Anglican Heritage, p96-98) says the Puritans spent a generation from the 1580s and 1620 embracing supralapsarianism, which Beza taught, but then retreated from it. Prominent supralapsarians include Franciscus Gormarus, a key participant at Dort, William Twisse, the 1st prolocutor of the Westminster assembly & Samuel Rutherford. Barth is a kind of supralapsarian.

It would seem to me very odd to imagine a decree of damnation entirely without reference to the fall. The fall must surely be the judicial grounds of damnation. 

Romans 9 is obviously an important text in this debate. 

Letham (Systematic Theology) argues that there is a case for supralapsarianism if we accept that that which is last in execution is first in design. The house is finally constructed according to the initial plan. This is of course especially so in the case of an omnipotent actor. 

Some of the objections sometimes given to supralapsarianism seem weak to me. 

Richard Muller, Dictionary, p292, is a bit surprising on this. He equates supralapsarianism with double predestination for the glory of God, which seems the correct view to me. We may say that God's predestination is not symmetrical, but even if he passes over some that effectively decrees their reprobation. 

Neither should we worry that supralapsarianism makes God the morally responsible author of sin in a way that other views do not. We have this problem either way if God is entirely sovereign. And we have useful things to say about it. It enough that human beings are the proximate and responsible cause of their falling away from the good. 

It is true that the Bible normally speaks redemptive-historically and therefore it might be said infralapsarianly. We should be cautious about speculating about the secret decrees of God, but I think we can appeal to mystery a little too hastily (as in my view Packes does, whilst admitting that there is a certain logic to the supralapsarian view). 

 Robert Raymond's systematic theology makes a modern case for supralapsarianism. 

The most compendious recent book on this is said to be J V Fesko, Diversity within the Reformed Tradition: Supra- and Infralapsarianism in Calvin, Dort and Westminster (Reformed Academic Press, 2003).