God’s First Decree is Christ as Saviour

Last updated on: February 21, 2014 at 7:47 pm by Michael F. Bird

God’s First Decree is Christ as Saviour 2014-02-21T19:47:26-04:00 Michael F. Bird

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Over at the blog, Evangelical Calvinism, Bobby Grow posts one of the “theses” about Evangelical Calvinism set forth by him and Myk Habets, namely, a supralapsarian christology! Don’t get lost on the word, it means that God’s decree of Christ as Saviour is logically prior to God’s decree to permit the fall. Might sound speculative, but a whole lot rides on it.

According to Grow/Habets:

Evangelical Calvinists embrace the idea that who God is for us in Christ is grounded in the pre-temporal reality of his choice to be for us apart from and prior to the “Fall” or even the creation itself. This, theo-logically coheres with the Evangelical Calvinist conception of God’s life being shaped by who he is as love, and thus both chron-ologically and logically places his love and his self-determining freedom as the primary mode of God’s life; and thus the basis from which he acts, even in wrath … It is through this matrix that Evangelical Calvinists can be said to hold to a “supralapsarian Christology,” that is that we believe in God’s primacy over all of creation; and thus his choice to be for us is in Christ is not contingent upon sin, but instead it is the result of the overflow of who he is as the God for the other—God is Love!

The election of the eternal Son for us that occurs pre-temporally becomes temporally externalized in the Incarnation of Christ, and ultimately finds its resounding crescendo in being actualized through the cross-work of Christ, exemplifying that God’s life of over-flowing love is in fact cruciform in shape as it is revealed within the conditions of a post-lapsarian world.

Okay, that’s heavy, but I actually argue for something similar in an excursus in Evangelical Theology, called “Was the Incarnation Plan B?”

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