- lapsarian

Ok, this is going to be fun... From what I have read, there are 2 different views of Calvinism: "Supralapsarian" and "Infralapsarian or Sublapsarian." Raise your hand if you had ever heard this before...

I am going to be speaking without citing actual sources. I'm going based on my ignorant understanding. That means, I could be wrong :) This is just me keeping up to date in the book I'm reading as the chapter on Unconditional Election is 165 pages long or so - a book in itself. Anyway,

Supralapsarian is the belief that God ordained that He would be merciful to some of the world, those that He elected, by sending Jesus Christ to save them. After He ordained that, He ordained the Fall of Adam in order to bring about the need for the mercy... Essentially, the Decree of the cross made God have to decree the Fall of man. I understand that A.W. Pink called himself Supralapsarian.

(By the way, I mentioned a few posts ago, that if you double-click on any of the words on my blog, you can get a dictionary definition for those words. Perhaps this would come in handy for this post!)

Infralapsarianism or Sublapsarianism is the belief that God, as a result of the Fall, decreed that He would be save some of the world, those whom He elected, by the mercy of the cross.

So, the Supras would say that God determined who was going to go to Heaven and who was going to go to Hell based on His good pleasure - and then caused Adam to eat the fruit in order to show His goodness on some and His severity on others. The Infras would say Adam sinned, and put man into condemnation, God then determined who He was going to save and left the rest to their own sins...

I'm writing this down more for my own sake - it's easier to understand something if you have to explain it to someone else! I may not even post this, but if you're reading it, then I probably did!