John Forbes of Corse proved to be, as one contemporary colourfully put it, ‘the bone of any that troubled the Covenanters to digest’.Footnote 1 The occasion which generated this comment was Forbes's examination by the 1640 General Assembly of the Kirk in Aberdeen, a gathering consisting entirely of individuals subscribing to the National Covenant of 1638. High on the assembly's agenda was dealing with persons who had fostered opposition to the Covenant by preaching and writing against it during the preceding two years. Principally guilty in this regard, of course, were those six divines collectively known as the ‘Aberdeen Doctors’ – Forbes, Robert Baron, James Sibbald, William Leslie, Alexander Scroggie and Alexander Ross.Footnote 2 The four surviving members of this circle – Forbes, Sibbald, Leslie and Scroggie – were cited to appear and answer for themselves before a special committee of the assembly. Sibbald, Leslie and Scroggie were tried and deposed from their ministerial and academic posts in rather short order, largely unsubstantiated charges of Arminianism, laziness, drunkenness and overlong preaching upon a single text serving to lend some credibility to proceedings.Footnote 3 Baron, who had died the year before, was at least posthumously disgraced when unpublished writings secured from his private study were examined and somewhat vaguely condemned as heterodox.Footnote 4
Yet Forbes, generally acknowledged as ‘the intellectual leader of the Doctors’, was a more difficult case.Footnote 5 On 1 August
he was convened befor ther comittye … and ther interrogated concerning his doctrine and beleefe; to all which he answered so readily, so learnedly, and orthodoxly, and with such candor and modestye, that the moderator of that comittye was forced to tell him that they had nothing to saye to his lyfe, but that they founde him piouse, learnd, and fully orthodoxe, and to disagree with them in nothing but in point of churche governement.Footnote 6
Forbes's own account of this event in his Diary is somewhat less self- congratulatory: ‘notwithstanding of my scruples concerning the covenant, and of my writtings [against the same], yet they were pleased with me … Praised be the Lord’.Footnote 7 He appeared before the entire assembly on two successive days the following week: on the first, in his words, ‘the moderator thereof, Mr Andrew Ramsey, said to me, in [the] name and presence of the whole assemblie, that the general assemblie had found me ingenuous and orthodox, and neither papist nor Arminian’; on the second, ‘that same testimony of ingenuitie and orthodoxie’ being repeated, the assembly entreated Forbes to rethink his position on the Covenant, and allotted him some space of time to do so. ‘I acknowledged this to be a favour done unto me, and promised to obey’, recorded Forbes, ‘and I came from them rejoicing and praising God, who hath had mercy upon me, and hath given me this loving favour of the general assemblie.’Footnote 8
However much Forbes actually reconsidered his stance on the Covenant, he could never subscribe it in good conscience. Hence in April 1641 he was finally deposed from his chair in divinity at King's College. The sole ground of his deprivation, at least to his knowledge, was that he ‘[had] not subscribed and yet [did] refuse to subscribe the late Covenant’. Upon receiving news of his sentence ‘I came to my studie and worshipped God with tears’, Forbes wrote, ‘[and] I prayed also for my brethren who had pronounced this sentence against me, that the Lord would forgive them and not lay this sin to their charge.’Footnote 9 His case was not entirely laid to rest by the 1641 deposition. In light of his evident piety and apparent orthodoxy, his covenanting peers persisted in encouraging him to reconsider his refusal to join their ranks. Forbes, for his part, persisted in appealing his deprivation, consistently observing to his ‘brethren’ that the ‘domestic differences’ between them ‘were not a sufficient cause wherefore to make separation’, and that they knew him to be ‘sound and orthodox in all the controversies against papists, and Socinians, and Arminians, and Anabaptists, and other sectaries’ and to ‘conform to the doctrine contained in [the] national confession and in the harmony of [Reformed] confessions’.Footnote 10 Finally, in 1644, his situation aggravated by opposition to the Solemn League and Covenant of August 1643, Forbes took exile in the Netherlands, where he received a rather warm welcome from, and regularly preached to, English, French and Dutch Reformed congregations.Footnote 11
A superficial reading of these events would suggest that Forbes was largely on the same theological page as his Presbyterian ‘brethren’, their only substantial difference, undergirding disagreement about whether the Covenant was lawful and advisable, pertaining – as Forbes's ecclesiastical judges supposedly put it – to a ‘point of churche governement’. And, of course, the ‘point’ in question, that of whether episcopacy and royal oversight was for the good or ill of the Kirk, was hardly decided by their own ‘national confession’ of 1560 or ‘the harmony of confessions’ governing the practice of Reformed Churches abroad (which practice, it should be noted, differed from place to place). Forbes, at least, was convinced that he was theologically one with his ‘brethren’, as to all appearances were his ‘brethren’, whom Forbes put in the awkward position of having to depose a man on no apparent grounds besides refusal to subscribe to their Covenant. Nevertheless, modern scholars have proven rather apt at discovering other – perhaps more substantive – points of theological difference between Forbes and his Reformed contemporaries.
So for example Donald MacMillan, in his early twentieth-century study The Aberdeen Doctors, names Forbes the champion of a ‘new movement’ which stood against the overriding ‘tendency’ of seventeenth-century Reformed thought towards ‘a more rigorous conception of the Calvinistic theology, … a system which is purely intellectual, without having any very close relationship to man's spiritual or practical life’, a ‘system’ marked particularly by explicit commitment to a doctrine of divine reprobation and an understanding of redemption as ‘particular, limited to the elect alone, who in time are redeemed and restored’.Footnote 12 The chief protagonist of this ‘new movement’ in Europe more broadly was the Dutch theologian James Arminius. Forbes and his Aberdonian colleagues, MacMillan claims, ‘had drunk deeply of the stream which flowed from that source’ and so imbibed ‘the liberalising spirit which emanated from the teaching of Arminius’, and thus constituted something like ‘the advanced guard in the new movement’ in Scotland.Footnote 13 MacMillan hesitates to ascribe all the peculiarities of Arminius' theology to Forbes, ultimately attributing ‘Arminianism … of a very mild type’ to him. He does, however, identify the notion of divine predestination to eternal condemnation, i.e. the doctrine of reprobation, as ‘the one point in the Calvinian theology at which [Forbes] emphatically drew the line … He differed widely from the current theology on the question of reprobation; he thought it horrible blasphemy that God should be held to damn, from all eternity, a certain section of the human race’.Footnote 14
Michiel Kitshoff, in his 1967 study of Arminianism in Scotland, rejects the ascription of ‘mild Arminianism’ to Forbes, preferring to view the divine's doctrine as an instance of ‘milder Calvinism’, but he concurs with MacMillan that Forbes denounced the idea of divine reprobation: ‘Forbes thought it blasphemous that God should be held responsible, whether in a direct or indirect way, for a damnation of a section of the human race … Apart from this, Forbes regarded himself as an Augustinian and a Calvinist.’Footnote 15 In similar fashion T. F. Torrance, in his Scottish theology (1996), identifies Forbes as a ‘mild Calvinist’ who stood against a number of troublesome trends in the orthodox theology of his day. Unlike ‘continental scholastic Calvinists’ as well as ‘high Calvinists’ at home – contemporaries like Samuel Rutherford and David Dickson – Forbes ‘did not offer a doctrine of salvation schematised by double predestination’.Footnote 16 He ‘declined’, in other words, ‘to press [his Augustinianism] to its logical extreme in the idea that God had eternally predestinated some people to damnation’. Moreover, Torrance claims, Forbes taught that ‘redemption applies to the whole of the human race’, even if ‘those who do not believe end up alienated from redemption’.Footnote 17 Hence Forbes stood in partial opposition, at least, to the ‘Synod of Dort [1618–19] with its promulgation of the absolute decrees of predestination and reprobation, and of limited atonement’.Footnote 18
Most recently Douglas Kornahrens has named Forbes as one of several champions of a ‘different theological climate’ in north-eastern Scotland prior to the civil wars, one which was decidedly out of sync with the ‘Bezan-Calvinist orthodoxy’ prevailing ‘south of the Tay’ in Scotland.Footnote 19 Kornahrens, like Torrance, highlights Dort's role in consolidating this ‘Bezan-Calvinist orthodoxy … which would come to dominate theological opinion in Scotland’, but he remains somewhat vague on what, in terms of concrete doctrine, actually constituted the different ‘climate’ in Aberdeen, nevertheless affirming that ‘it would seem a fair observation that theologically Aberdeen’ – and so Forbes – ‘was swimming against the tide of Reformed thought and practice’.Footnote 20
Kornahrens's suggestion that Forbes was to some extent at least, and very much in the company of his immediate colleagues, ‘swimming against the tide’ of orthodox Reformed theology appears to constitute a consensus. MacMillan, Kitshoff and Torrance concur in naming double predestination, or specifically the notion of reprobation proper to the same, as the point of Forbes's departure from his orthodox peers; Torrance, at least, suggests Forbes's further rejection of the doctrine of particular redemption. One could, perhaps, read David George Mullan's recent argument for the existence of a ‘Calvinist consensus’ among Scotland's clergy prior to 1640 as an implicit rebuttal of such claims regarding Forbes's distance from orthodoxy. Forbes's thought, which Mullan describes as ‘thoroughly Augustinian’, does figure prominently in Mullan's argument, and necessarily so since Forbes has been accused of Arminianism more than once over the centuries.Footnote 21 But Mullan, while affirming the priority of divine election over human faith in Forbes's theology, never examines Forbes's convictions regarding reprobation or the scope of Christ's redemptive work; thus his thesis ultimately leaves unchallenged the claims about Forbes noted above (so long, that is, as Forbes's supposed rejection of reprobation and particular redemption is depicted as a ‘mild’ or ‘milder Calvinism’). Mullan, moreover, is keen to distance Forbes and his Episcopalian peers from their Presbyterian Reformed counterparts on his own terms, insisting that the former party ‘in the developing schism’ had a much greater respect for the Church Fathers.Footnote 22 ‘There is no denying that Presbyterian writers knew patristic sources’, he admits, but ‘Presbyterians … used the Fathers for proof texts’, and qualified patristic appeals with ‘frequent reference to the need, despite the virtues of the Fathers, to turn to scripture for infallible authority and guidance’.Footnote 23 Interest in the Fathers from Forbes and fellow Episcopalians ostensibly ran deeper and came with fewer disclaimers.
Whether Forbes's thought is made to differ from that of the orthodox ‘in-crowd’ by virtue of specific doctrines or an approach to antiquity, there is in the scholarship a notable failure to substantiate claims made concerning Forbes by careful consideration of his own writings.Footnote 24 Indeed, specific questions about Forbes's doctrine or his theological method aside, Forbes's works have received scant scholarly attention over the years, a fact rendered somewhat remarkable in light of concurrent claims that Forbes was ‘one of the ablest and most learned theologians whom Scotland produced between the Reformation and the Disruption’, if not ‘Scotland's greatest theologian’ bar none.Footnote 25 A thorough study of Forbes's thought based on his published and unpublished writings as well as close familiarity with his social and intellectual context is needed to redress this deficiency. The present article is decidedly not that study, nor even a significant step towards it. My more modest and admittedly somewhat nitpicking aim here is to review specific chapters from the Liber de haeresi Pelagiana in Forbes's most notable work, the Instructiones historico-theologicae de doctrina Christiana (1645), to the end of discrediting claims made about Forbes's distance from his orthodox peers on the issues identified above. I will specifically examine chapters xii–xvi of the book, in which Forbes deals with two points of controversy between ‘Catholics’ and ‘Semipelagians’, the first pertaining to the matter of ‘God's eternal predestination’, the second to the question ‘for whom did Christ die, or for whom did God give his Son’.Footnote 26 Having, I hope, demonstrated that Forbes's doctrine conforms much more closely to that of his orthodox Reformed contemporaries than has been suggested in previous scholarship, I will consider briefly potential implications which these findings have for our knowledge and appreciation of early modern Scottish theology and the way in which that theology has been narrated in much modern scholarship.
Forbes on double predestination
Forbes's Instructiones historico-theologicae de doctrina Christiana was a by-product of his twenty-odd year stint as professor of divinity in Old Aberdeen. Forbes was appointed to a newly created chair in divinity at King's College in 1620, having recently returned from several years of study under prominent Reformed scholars at Heidelberg and Sedan. He owed his appointment to the influence of his father Patrick Forbes, bishop of Aberdeen. His father also, it is claimed, influenced the peculiar style which came to characterise his son's instruction, which was one of drawing heavily upon the Church Fathers and select medieval theologians with the aim of establishing the catholicity of Reformed doctrine and practice, and – in that process – robbing Rome and her Tridentine dogmas of any claim to the ‘Catholic’ title.Footnote 27 The Instructiones, reflecting this pedagogical approach, is a mixture of heresiology, history of dogma and Reformed apologetic, with a healthy dose of polemic against contemporary antagonists (‘Papists’, Socinians, Anabaptists, Remonstrants, Lutherans and others) included for good measure. The volume's sixteen books, loosely structured by the tenets of the Apostles’ Creed, recount and refute an impressive catalogue of theological errors. The work features dogmatic crimes of greater import (haereses like Adoptionism, Arianism, Pelagianism) as well as some of lesser significance (errores like belief in purgatory, adoration of religious images, the notion of Petrine primacy). No matter the theological topic(s) under review, the punch line comes when the teaching of the ‘Catholic’ Church is shown to concur with confessional Reformed teaching, while one or several opponents of the Reformed Church – most often the contemporary Roman Church – is/are shown to reside on the heretical, or at least heterodox, side of the register.
Book viii of the Instructiones, that dealing with ‘the heresy of Pelagianism and its remnants’ as well as ‘related questions about the grace of God and man's free choice’, is devoted almost entirely to a treatment of Semipelagianism rather than proper Pelagianism.Footnote 28 The term ‘Semipelagiani’ is, for Forbes, first and foremost a term of historical description naming certain persons ‘who damned Pelagius and his dogmas, but nevertheless rejected the opposite doctrine of Augustine, and held on to certain Pelagian tenets’.Footnote 29 Forbes includes the fifth-century churchmen John Cassian and Faustus of Riez as well as Gottschalk of Orbais's ninth-century detractors – John Scotus Erigena, Rabanus Maurus (archbishop of Mainz) and Hincmar (archbishop of Reims) – among the ranks of the Semipelagians.Footnote 30 He identifies five overarching points of ‘dissension’ between ‘Catholics’ and ‘Semipelagians’: the first pertaining to the relationship between ‘the grace of God and human merit’ and encompassing questions about original sin and its consequences for human freedom; the second and third pertaining to the respective issues of divine predestination and the scope of Christ's redemptive work; the fourth pertaining to the nature of divine calling; and the fifth to the perseverance and certain salvation of those who believe. These five points correspond rather obviously to the articles of remonstrance issued by the followers of James Arminius in 1610 and the rebuttal of the same comprised in the five doctrinal heads of the canons of Dort (1619). Indeed, Forbes's ultimate desire to discredit ‘the Remonstrants, who are called Arminians after their founder James Arminius' – which he does fully and explicitly only in the book's final chapters – explains the emphasis upon historical Semipelagianism at the expense of proper Pelagianism throughout. Discussion of Semipelagianism under these five points also provides Forbes with scope to rebuke the ‘papists’ for their teachings on human merit and divine grace, as well as their doctrine of justification on the basis of inherent righteousness.Footnote 31
Forbes breaks down the ‘second point of dissension between Catholics and Semipelagians’, that concerning ‘the eternal predestination of God’, into seven specific questions upon which the parties in question disagree. He initially provides both ‘Catholic’ and ‘Semipelagian’ responses to these questions and then, in a subsequent chapter, offers a catalogue of patristic and medieval quotations and references to substantiate the answers that he has put in the mouths of both respondents.Footnote 32 The first question advanced by Forbes ‘is whether good foreseen by God in those whom are elected – their volition, their faith, their good works, their perseverance, or anything else in them – is a cause or prerequisite condition of their election; or whether, in truth, all these things in the elect are effects of their election or predestination’. According to Forbes, Semipelagians affirm the former proposition, making some good foreseen by God in those whom are elected the basis of their election, while catholics make every good in the elect, including faith, a fruit of their election.Footnote 33 The Semipelagian position is validated partly by hearsay – that is, Prosper of Aquitaine's letter to Augustine concerning the beliefs of certain persons in Marseilles – and partly by words from Faustus, the fifth-century bishop of Riez. Testimony to the catholic position is provided by Fulgentius of Ruspe and Augustine; so, for example, the latter asserted that ‘[God] has chosen us not because we do believe, but in order that we should believe.’Footnote 34
The second question raised by Forbes – to which catholic Christians answer ‘yes’ and Semipelagians ‘no’ – is ‘whether there is from all eternity a certain, definite number of men chosen by God, or men predestined to grace and glory, of which number none will perish, and outside of which none will be saved’.Footnote 35 On this point testimony to the Semipelagian doctrine is entirely hearsay. Augustine and Prosper testify to catholic conviction; the latter, for example, affirming that ‘of the whole number of men born through all the ages, there is in God's view a settled and definite number of people predestined to eternal life’.Footnote 36
The third question – most significant to the argument of this article – ‘is whether God from eternity has predestined certain men to evil [ad malum]’. According to Forbes ‘the Semipelagians utterly deny that anyone is predestined either to sin [ad peccatum] or to destruction [ad interitum]’.Footnote 37 Words from Faustus and Hincmar validate Semipelagian sentiments on this score; Forbes notes that Hincmar's principal problem with Gottschalk in the ninth century was the latter's supposed assertion that ‘just as God predestines some to eternal life, so also he predestines others to eternal death’.Footnote 38 The catholic response to this question is no simple ‘yes’ over against the Semipelagians' ‘no’. Rather, ‘Catholics make a distinction, denying that anyone is predestined to guilt [ad culpam], but affirming that some are predestined to punishment [ad poenam].’Footnote 39 Forbes quotes Augustine to reinforce the truth of reprobation per se: ‘For the accomplishing of his purpose God, the highest good, puts to good use even evil deeds, for the damnation of those whom he has predestined to punishment.’Footnote 40 The distinction between predestination ad culpam and predestination ad poenam is expressed by Augustine, Fulgentius and Gottschalk; the last named, for example, asserting that ‘the reprobate are predestined by divine decision not to any guilt, but to punishment; not to the evil work which they themselves willingly perform, but to the evil which they unwillingly endure in eternal suffering’.Footnote 41
The fourth question upon which Catholics and Semipelagians differ is
whether God has found greater demerit [mala merita] in those whom he has reprobated, and less demerit in those whom he has elected, and on that basis reprobated some or predestined them to destruction, and elected others to eternal life; or whether, in truth, he finds both [elect and reprobate] equal in terms of demerit and worthy of eternal death.Footnote 42
According to Forbes, Semipelagians affirm the first proposition and catholics the second. A rather vague reference to Faustus supports Forbes's claim concerning the Semipelagian position. More substantial is Forbes's observation that ‘the Semipelagian response to this question is easily deduced from their response to the first question’; if divine election is based on foreseen merit, it stands to reason that divine rejection is based on foreseen demerit.Footnote 43 Several quotations from Augustine suffice to demonstrate that catholic Christians deem the whole of humankind equally deserving of divine reprobation.Footnote 44
The fifth question is
whether any reason for this discrimination, according to which some are predestined to eternal life and others to eternal death, besides the most free will of God, who has mercy upon whom he wills and hardens whom he wills, is revealed anywhere in the sacred writings, or whether it belongs to pilgrims [viatores] to investigate God's will. Semipelagians affirm. Catholics deny.Footnote 45
The quotations that Forbes adduces from Faustus as testimony to Semipelagian doctrine hardly demonstrate that Faustus or other heterodox figures were committed in principle to prying into the divine will. But they do arguably catch them in the act. So, for example, Forbes relates Faustus' assertion that Jacob and Esau's ‘future courses of life’, comprehended by ‘divine prescience’, served as ‘evident and most just causes of [God's] love and hatred’ for the respective brothers.Footnote 46 Extensive quotations from Augustine, Prosper and Fulgentius demonstrate the twin catholic convictions that divine election and reprobation are not based on foreseen merit, and that Christians should not seek a reason for God's discrimination between elect and reprobate where none has been revealed.Footnote 47
Forbes's sixth question consists of two parts. The first is ‘whether this Catholic doctrine attributes injustice or cruelty to God’; the second is ‘whether its fruit is to draw men away from prayer and the pursuit of holiness’. Catholics, of course, answer ‘no’ on both scores. Forbes recounts Augustine's logic from the Enchiridion relative to the question of injustice on God's part: ‘the whole human race was condemned by a just divine judgment in its apostate root [i.e. Adam], so that even if none at all were saved, no one could rightly reproach God's justice’.Footnote 48 And rather lengthy passages from Augustine's Liber de bono perseverantiae serve to demonstrate the compatibility of predestinarian doctrine with preaching, prayer and the pursuit of godly living.Footnote 49 Faustus once again serves as the solitary Semipelagian voice accusing the catholic notion of predestination of rendering God cruel and man indifferent in his responsibilities.Footnote 50
The seventh and final question raised by Forbes is ‘whether this Catholic doctrine, even if it is true, should be openly and seriously preached and expounded in the presence of the people’.Footnote 51 Semipelagians, Forbes asserts, answer with an unequivocal ‘no’. Proof is provided only by Prosper's claims to Augustine concerning Semipelagian doctrine and practice in Gaul.Footnote 52 Catholics, according to Forbes, answer this question with a guarded ‘yes’; that is, ‘Catholics affirm that it should indeed be openly and seriously preached, but it should be done so prudently and “in season”, as with all the divine mysteries’.Footnote 53 Evidence is supplied once again by lengthy quotations from Augustine's Liber de bono perseverantiae.Footnote 54 With specific reference to the subject of predestination the bishop of Hippo advised:
Let the truth be spoken especially when some question requires it to be spoken. And let those who are able understand. For if we remain silent on account of those who are not able to understand, those who are able will be cheated of the truth, and will be taken captive by some untruth which they might have avoided.Footnote 55
Having treated thoroughly the differences between catholics and Semipelagians on predestination by means of these seven questions, Forbes concludes his discussion of this doctrinal point by recounting ‘seven rules … concerning God's prescience and predestination’ which were formulated by the ninth-century Church of Lyon, under the leadership of Archbishop Remigius, in defence of the predestinarian doctrine of Gottschalk.Footnote 56 These rules establish as a starting-point that God foreknows and predestines nothing ex tempore, but that his ‘foreknowledge and predestination are eternal and unchangeable’, and that everything that God ‘does, has done, and will do’ in the interest of ‘preserving, ruling, defining the boundaries, and bringing to perfection his creatures’ is rooted ‘in his eternal counsel and judgment, and is truly foreknown and unchangeably predestined’.Footnote 57 They then explore the relationship of divine prescience and predestination to divine and human acts respectively. With respect to God's acts, all of which are ‘good and just’, prescience and predestination exist in perfect harmony: ‘whatever is foreknown … is without any doubt also predestined, and whatever is predestined is certainly foreknown’. This is specifically applied to the divine acts of predestination and reprobation: ‘And so it is in the preordination of the elect to life, and in the preordination of the reprobate to death, because each is a just work of God.’Footnote 58 The relationship of divine prescience and predestination to human acts, however, is slightly more complex, because ‘some of the works of creatures are good, and others are bad’. Inasmuch as the good works of creatures are ‘principally and truly works of the Creator, who works in men to will and do according to his good pleasure’, positively good human deeds ‘should be understood as divinely inspired, and generated, and foreknown, and predestined’. But ‘evil deeds of the creature’, inasmuch as they proceed ‘from the creature's own vice, and not from God's will and operation, can be said to be foreknown, but not to be predestined … for [God] is not the author of evil’.Footnote 59
The rules subsequently note that while divine predestination and reprobation impose a necessary end upon creatures – for ‘as we believe that none of the elect of God can in any way perish, so we think that none of the reprobate can in any way be saved’ – they do not impose any compulsion of sinning upon the reprobate: ‘He who is the Father of all goodness and holiness impels or compels no one whatsoever to perform evil deeds or to persist in them.’Footnote 60 In essence, then, these rules serve to reinforce the distinction which Forbes introduced in relation to the specific subject of reprobation, that between ‘predestinatio ad culpam’ and ‘predestinatio ad poenam’.
From here Forbes moves on to discuss the third point of dissension between catholic Christians and Semipelagians, that concerning the scope of Christ's redemptive work. But these are not his final words on the subject of predestination in the Liber de haeresi Pelagiana. Forbes returns to the topic in the concluding chapters of the book when he addresses the doctrine of the Remonstrants.Footnote 61 He accuses the Remonstrants of ‘scorning the doctrine of the Catholic Fathers, and openly joining themselves to the Semipelagians’ on the issue of predestination (as on all five issues under review), citing the text of the 1611 Hague conference, the records of the Synod of Dort and the Remonstrants' Confession of 1621 as definitive proof of their perfidy.Footnote 62 He also goes to considerable lengths to challenge the portrait of ‘the doctrine of Augustine on predestination and the grace of God’ in the Historia Pelagiana (1618) of the relatively controversial Dutch theologian and historian Gerardus Vossius. Vossius' work was suspected by many of being a rather subtle attempt to enlist Augustine and other orthodox historical figures into the ranks of the Remonstrants. Forbes supplies lengthy quotations from Augustine to vindicate his own reading of the Church Father's predestinarian thought, and so to demonstrate ‘the agreement of Augustine's doctrine … with the doctrine of the perpetual Catholic Church’, and so with the doctrine of the Reformed Churches.Footnote 63
Forbes on particular redemption
The supposition that Forbes was ultimately targeting Remonstrant doctrine in his treatment of Semipelagianism receives substantial support from the fact that he recognised the scope of Christ's redemptive work as a discrete point of dissension between Catholics and Semipelagians; the question ‘for whom did Christ die?’ generated decidedly less controversy, it must be said, in the fifth or ninth centuries than it did in the seventeenth. Nevertheless the question did, admittedly, surface in those earlier centuries, and Forbes manages to gather enough patristic and medieval quotations to define a ‘Catholic’ stance on the matter over against the doctrine of the Semipelagians.
Forbes's treatment of this topic consists of two chapters: the first relates ‘the opinion of the Semipelagians’ and ‘the doctrine of Catholics' on the question at hand; the second provides further material with some annotations pertaining to ‘the doctrine of Archbishop Remigius and the Church of Lyon’ on the issue.Footnote 64 Direct testimony to Semipelagian convictions regarding the scope of Christ's redemptive work is provided by Faustus and Hincmar. According to the former, in his work on divine grace and human freedom, ‘those who teach that the Saviour did not die for all have wandered far from the path of piety’.Footnote 65 And Hincmar, in a letter to Pope Nicholas i denouncing the errors of Gottschalk, lists among their number the notion ‘that Christ did not pour out his precious blood to God the Father for the redemption and salvation of every man, but only for those who are saved, that is for the elect’.Footnote 66
Catholic doctrine on this matter is represented in the first instance by the second-century bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, who affirmed that ‘Christ … suffered for the whole world of those who are being saved.’Footnote 67 Somewhat more substantial quotations from Augustine, John Chrysostom and Jerome follow, the last named, for example, insisting in his exposition of Matthew xx.28 that Christ ‘did not say he gives his soul for the redemption of all, but for the redemption of many, that is, for those who were willing to believe’.Footnote 68 Prosper of Aquitaine, whose writings demonstrate that the question as to for whom Christ died was a genuine point of controversy between the followers of Augustine and Gallic Semipelagians in the fifth century, provides three quotations to the cause. The first is a reply to the primary objection against Augustine's predestinarian doctrine advanced in the Vincentian Articles (commonly attributed to Vincent of Lérins); namely, that it implies that ‘our Lord Jesus Christ did not suffer for the salvation and redemption of all men’. Prosper's response identifies ‘the blood of Christ’ as the source of redemption for sinners, but admits that it ‘was not expended for humankind in such a way as to redeem even those who are not regenerated’.Footnote 69 The remaining quotations from Prosper, both taken from his De vocatione omnium gentium, anticipate objections to this limiting of Christ's redemptive work on the basis of biblical texts which name the ‘world’, or ‘all’, as the object of the same. ‘In the elect, however, and those foreknown who were set apart from the generality of mankind’, Prosper argues, ‘we have a specified totality. Thus the whole world is spoken of as though the whole of it had been liberated, and all mankind as though all men had been chosen.’Footnote 70
Forbes concludes his section detailing ‘the doctrine of Catholics' with a brief paragraph comprising biblical references and theological argument for the doctrine of particular redemption. Citing passages from the Johannine Epistles, Isaiah and the Gospel of John, he notes that ‘Christ prays and intercedes for all those for whose sins he makes propitiation, that is, for those whose sins he carries.’ And ‘thus’, he reasons, ‘Christ did not make propitiation for the sins of those in the world for whom he does not pray’. That Christ does not pray for the reprobate is deduced from the reality that ‘Christ is always heard by the Father [John xi. 42], who grants whatever Christ requests.’ Therefore ‘Christ has neither prayed nor offered himself to the Father’ for those ‘whom have not received grace and salvation from God’. One qualification is offered: ‘It should not be denied that certain effects flowing from Christ's death and intercession reach the elect and reprobate in common.’ Forbes identifies such ‘effects’ as ‘a common, external call [to the gospel], the sacraments, those prerogatives which belonged to the Israelites as enumerated by the Apostle in Romans 9, and those internal motions which are described in Hebrews 6’. Such realities, however, must not be mistaken for proper redemption: ‘Not all who are redeemed from Egypt or Babylon are redeemed from the wrath to come.’Footnote 71 In other words, some belong externally to the people of God and participate in certain benefits as a result, but are not, nevertheless, those for whom Christ has died and/or presently intercedes.
Semipelagian and catholic doctrines having received their respective definitions, Forbes turns to consider the rather detailed treatment of the issue in question – the scope of Christ's redemptive work – by the ninth-century Church of Lyon in relation to the controversy surrounding Gottschalk's doctrine. He relates thirteen propositions advanced by the Lyonese Church, providing commentary only when deemed necessary. The first five propositions require no annotations. These are: (1) that ‘our Lord Jesus Christ … laid down his life for his sheep’; (2) that ‘these sheep’ are elsewhere in Scripture named the ‘many’; (3) that ‘these sheep, the many, are those people whom Christ has saved from their sins'; (4) that ‘these are those who believe’; and (5) that these are ‘that world’ which God is said to love, albeit there exists over against that ‘world’ for which Christ laid down his life ‘a world of those who are unfaithful to, and enemies of, God’.Footnote 72
The sixth and seventh propositions, following from the identification of a ‘whole world in salvation’ and a ‘whole world in unbelief’ above, define with greater nuance distinct ‘orders of men’ in terms of how they participate in Christ's redemption. The ‘first order’ comprises those who are ‘elected and predestined to eternal life, from which none will perish, and all of whom are entirely saved’. These persons benefit from Christ's redemptive work in a fairly straightforward way. The ‘second order’ comprises individuals born into God's covenant community who ‘approach the grace of baptism with a right faith and piety, and through this receive the forgiveness of sins, and so are sharers in redemption, but afterwards fall away from grace … and perish’. The ‘third order’ includes individuals born outside the circle of God's covenant who come to faith and either persevere therein, and so ultimately belong to the circle of God's elect who are redeemed by Christ, or fall away, thereby proving themselves to be, like those of the second order above, ‘sharers in redemption’ only for a season. A fourth and final order comprises unbelievers of a more unambiguous sort – individuals ‘destined to eternal condemnation’, to whom Christ says ‘you have not believed, because you are not of my sheep’.
Forbes clearly feels some need to Protestantise, as it were, this teaching of the Church of Lyon, particularly with regard to those things said about certain persons who believe, share in redemption and the forgiveness of sins, and subsequently fall away. Thus, insisting first of all that ‘we do not disagree’ with the Church of Lyon's doctrine, Forbes argues that the ‘faith’ attributed therein to those who fall away is what Scripture identifies as ‘a temporary faith’, not ‘a justifying and saving faith’, and that whatever benefits persons of temporary faith enjoy are distinct from the saving benefits – the proper forgiveness of sins – enjoyed by God's elect. It is, of course, the Church of Lyon's claim that persons who fall from grace are ‘sharers in redemption’, though only for a season, that requires real finessing in this context. Forbes acknowledges that persons of ‘temporary faith’ are ‘temporary participants, in a certain manner, in redemption’, but defines such temporary participation as reception ‘of those gifts [dona] which flow from the death of Christ’, thus referring to his own previous description of certain non-redemptive ‘effects flowing from Christ's death’ which ‘reach the elect and reprobate in common’. Persons who fall away, and so never knew ‘justifying and saving faith’, are decidedly not sharers in what Forbes, appealing to the author of Hebrews, calls ‘eternal redemption’ (Hebrews ix.12). They do not belong to those ‘for whom [Christ] assumed and destroyed sin’.Footnote 73
The eighth proposition from the Church of Lyon applies the regula fidei to the biblical assertion that Christ, the sole mediator between God and man, ‘gave himself as the Redeemer of all’, with the conclusion that Christ, properly speaking, is neither ‘redeemer’, ‘advocate’, ‘reconciler’, nor ‘Mediator of the unfaithful … but only of the faithful’. Christ is called ‘Redeemer of all’, then, ‘not because all are redeemed by his passion, which is entirely obvious, but because no one can receive redemption unless it is in and through him’.Footnote 74
The ninth and tenth propositions emphasise the intrinsic value and efficacy of Christ's passion respectively; the blood of the Saviour is by no means ‘vain and empty … nor will it in any way be defrauded of its effective gain’. Forbes capitalises upon these points to argue that if Christ's blood is as effective as suggested by the Church of Lyon then it cannot, according to their own understanding, have been expended on any of ‘those persons of temporary faith who perish’. Nor indeed ‘has Christ come to save such persons, for if he had they would not perish’. So again it is evident that ‘Christ died primarily and simply for the elect alone’.Footnote 75
Propositions eleven and twelve refuse again the application of Christ's suffering and death to ‘the unbelieving and ungodly’ both before the Saviour's coming – ‘in the four thousand years from the beginning of the world until the Lord's passion’ – and after it. Forbes interjects with a preview of his later criticisms of ‘those Semipelagians of this age who call themselves Remonstrants’, noting the fallacy of their doctrine that Christ's death procured redemption for all indiscriminately, albeit a redemption which is only applied upon condition of faith. Appealing rather vaguely to ‘the places [of Scripture] cited above throughout this article’ Forbes insists that
Christ … merits and secures [for all God's elect people] not just the possibility of redemption, the possibility of reconciliation, the possibility of forgiveness, or the possibility of salvation, but actual redemption, reconciliation, remission of sins and eternal salvation; and he secures these not just conditionally, nor under some uncertain condition, but with that very condition which he infallibly and certainly applies to, or confers upon, [the elect]. For faith itself, and charity, and hope, and perseverance, are gifts of God promised in the new covenant, of which Christ is the Mediator.Footnote 76
The Church of Lyon's last proposition maintains that ‘wherever in the letters of the Apostles we read that our Lord gave himself for the redemption of all’, ‘all’ is rightly understood as ‘all who will be made alive in Christ’, and should not be read ‘confusedly and absurdly’ as a reference ‘to the ungodly and unfaithful as well’. On the heels of these propositions Forbes notes that the doctrine embodied in them found confirmation in the Council of Valens (855), which comprised the bishoprics of Lyon, Vienne and Arles, and was presided over by Archbishop Remigius.Footnote 77
Forbes concludes his exposition of the Lyonese Church's propositions on the scope of Christ's redemptive work, and thus his treatment of the issue more broadly, by insisting that the said propositions in defence of the notion of particular redemption are ‘most firm’ and ‘should in no way be doubted’. He insists, further, that they ‘confirm the opinion’ of the ‘blessed Fathers’, as he, of course, has attempted to demonstrate. But Forbes's parting words on the subject acknowledge an authority higher than the patristic and medieval voices that he has adduced in support of the doctrine of particular redemption. And the acknowledgement of a higher authority frees him to admit the possibility that ‘some might be found among the Fathers who say that Christ endured crucifixion for the ungodly also’. Such a possibility need not render the doctrine of particular redemption uncertain; ‘the testimonies of Sacred Scripture’ – which constitute ‘an authority of greater weight [potior auctoritas]’ – are sufficient ‘to examine’ any doctrine of universal redemption and render it ‘untrustworthy’. Nevertheless, Forbes urges caution – rooted, presumably, in his awareness of the actual ambiguity in patristic answers to the question at hand (no matter his attempt to represent majority Reformed conviction as ‘Catholic’ doctrine) – about labelling those of a different persuasion on this score ‘heretics’.Footnote 78 This, of course, reflects his approach to Semipelagianism in the Liber de haeresi Pelagiana more broadly; however rigorously he rejects the teaching of historic Semipelagians or ‘the Semipelagians of this age who call themselves Remonstrants’, Forbes recognises their doctrinal errors as just that, errores, in distinction from the proper haereses advanced by Pelagius and his earliest followers.
A superficial reading of the events surrounding Forbes's trial in 1640 suggests that Forbes was, despite his eventual deposition at the hand of the Covenanters, largely in agreement with his Presbyterian peers on the central tenets of the Reformed faith. That superficial reading proves, upon close examination, to be correct, no matter the attempts of modern interpreters to create some theological divide between Forbes and his contemporaries. Far from offering any resistance, however subtle, to the doctrinal decisions reached by the Synod of Dort or the orthodoxy thereby defined for seventeenth-century Reformed divines, Forbes's treatment of Semipelagianism in the Instructiones served to reinforce those doctrinal decisions. The structure of his work – that is, his treatment of Semipelagianism under five heads corresponding to the articles of remonstrance and their rebuttal at Dort – suggests that reinforcing Dort's doctrine was very much his aim.
With respect to the issue of double predestination in particular, Forbes was rather unambiguous in his assertion that ‘some are predestined to punishment’.Footnote 79 Claims that Forbes ‘thought it horrible blasphemy that God should be held to damn, from all eternity, a certain section of the human race’, or that he refused ‘to press [his Augustinianism] to its logical extreme in the idea that God had eternally predestinated some people to damnation’, are unfounded. Forbes's distinction between predestination ad culpam and predestination ad poenam should not be read as an affirmation that God merely predestined a certain penalty to follow generally from certain evil deeds; Forbes directly endorsed the doctrine that God has, from all eternity (albeit with regard, at the very least, to every person's culpability for Adam's first sin), predestined specific persons to eternal death, and that none of those so predestined will fail to obtain that end. Nor should his insistence that sin per se is not the proper object of predestination be read as a claim that sin per se falls outside the scope of the divine decrees and/or providence. His point, rather, is that predestinatio, by definition, properly pertains to man's destinatio. Including the culpable deeds by which human persons ultimately merit the destiny of eternal death within the scope of predestination confuses the meaning of ‘predestination’ as such, and, more critically, runs the risk of making God the author of sin. Similar concerns informed the claim of Dort's divines that ‘the decision of reprobation … does not at all make God the author of sin (a blasphemous thought) but rather its fearful, irreproachable, just judge and avenger’.Footnote 80 In sum, Forbes's doctrine reflects the teaching on double predestination advanced at Dort in Reformed response to the Remonstrant crisis; it reflects even more perfectly, perhaps, the infralapsarian perspective on double predestination held by the great majority of Dort's delegates.
With respect to the issue of particular redemption, Forbes again was rather clear in his insistence that Christ suffered only for the sins of the elect. There is no warrant for claiming that Forbes believed that ‘redemption applies to the whole of the human race’. Redemption, in Forbes's doctrine, is the exclusive privilege of certain persons eternally elected before the foundation of the world. To say that his doctrine reflects Dort's teaching on this score is, however, only a half-truth. Dort's second doctrinal head, dealing with ‘Christ's death and the redemption of men by it’, certainly affirmed that Christ's death was efficacious only for the elect, but – in deference to delegates at Dort who held to a doctrine of hypothetical universalism – it stopped short of insisting that Christ's death had no redemptive application to the reprobate. Forbes actually proves somewhat more restrictive than the canons of Dort on this point. His denial that Christ's death secured ‘the possibility of redemption, the possibility of reconciliation, the possibility of forgiveness, or the possibility of salvation’ for any person strikes at the doctrine of numerous Reformed divines who affirmed a peculiar efficacy of Christ's death for the elect, but maintained that Christ's death secures the genuine possibility of salvation for the reprobate.Footnote 81 But Forbes's doctrine does, again on this score, reflect the position of the majority of delegates at Dort and, at least in his day, the majority of Reformed thinkers more broadly.
In sum, then, Forbes seems to have been swimming with the Reformed tide rather than against it. Upon inspection, the various points at which doctrinal difference between him and orthodox Reformed contemporaries in Scotland – especially, perhaps, of the Presbyterian variety – has been posited prove to be areas of theological common ground. One must, of course, remember that minority reports on various doctrinal questions existed within that orthodoxy marked out by national confessions of faith and the loosely international synodal decisions of Dort. Thus, affirming some kind of universal scope to Christ's redemptive sacrifice did not necessarily constitute heterodoxy by the standards of the day, even – or especially – after Dort. But Forbes to all appearances held to the majority report on both of the doctrines examined above. No wonder, then, that his Instructiones, far from raising questions about his orthodoxy, received ringing endorsements from such notable Reformed divines on the continent as Johannes Polyander, André Rivet, Gisbertus Voetius, Johannes Cocceius, Samuel Maresius and others.Footnote 82 Even the Scottish Presbyterian Robert Baillie, still sore over Forbes's refusal to subscribe the covenants, admitted in 1645 that ‘I like the book very well. And the man much better for the book's cause.’Footnote 83
One could perhaps, regardless of the specifics of Forbes's theology, find support from this cursory examination of book viii of the Instructiones for Mullan's claim that, no matter the existence of a theological ‘Calvinist consensus’ in Scotland, Forbes and his Episcopalian friends were more heavily invested in the catholic intellectual tradition, and especially the Fathers, than their Presbyterian counterparts. There is no question that Forbes's Instructiones is chock-full of quotations from the Fathers and medieval doctors. But this, surely, is first and foremost a symptom of the work's stated aim. When establishing the catholicity of Reformed doctrine is one's explicit intent, quotations from the catholic tradition necessarily follow. In other (non-polemical) works by Forbes – in, say, his Diary from the years 1624–47 – there is a notable scarcity of patristic quotations and profuse referencing of, and reflection upon, Scripture.
More to the point of Mullan's argument: it is noteworthy that Forbes's use of the Fathers very often conforms to that approach to antiquity which Mullan claims characterised Scottish Presbyterians over against Episcopalians. Forbes is not above proof-texting, as evidenced by his ability to make ‘Catholic’ teaching on predestination fit the five-point mould of Dort's doctrinal programme, effectively to Protestantise the Church of Lyon's comments regarding persons of temporary faith, and to force certain figures to defend doctrines by isolated quotations when their broader literary context suggests their authors' disagreement with the doctrine in question. So, for example, Forbes has Prosper of Aquitaine restricting Christ's redemption entirely to the elect, when Prosper's actual response to Semipelagian critics on the question of the scope of Christ's death was to insist that Christ accomplished redemption for humankind as a whole, but that redemption was applied only to those elected unto faith and regenerated by baptism.Footnote 84 Moreover, Forbes very clearly qualifies his appeal to the Fathers by a note on the ‘greater weight’ of Scripture's authority and the need, ultimately, to pattern the Church's doctrine after biblical teaching. It is worth noting, in addition, that recent scholarship has highlighted the significant role which patristic and medieval learning played in seventeenth-century Reformed thought across the board. Orthodox divines of the period, including Scottish Presbyterians
were not … sectarian theologians who blindly grasped onto Scripture as an exclusive basis for all theological insight and then proceeded to trust their own exegetical intuitions … Rather, in the tradition of the Reformers, these successor theologians took the catholicity of Protestantism seriously, claimed for themselves and their churches the best of the Christian tradition, and appropriated it critically, for the clarification and for the defense of the faith.Footnote 85
It would seem, then, that both Forbes's doctrine and his manner of defending it point to agreement or commonality among Scottish divines which ran substantially deeper than the phrase ‘Calvinist consensus’, with its overt doctrinal focus, suggests, encompassing among other things a peculiar approach to the catholic tradition which served the defence of Reformed doctrine. And thus it would be better to speak of a common orthodoxy among the various factions in Scotland's Kirk c.1590–c.1640, with an intentional view towards what recent scholarship has taught us about the content, characteristics and sources of seventeenth-century (Reformed) orthodoxy.
This points to the significance which the preceding study of Forbes's doctrine has beyond a better knowledge of Forbes's theology as such. The demonstrable failure of Forbes's thought to conform to that peculiar party to which he is generally said to have belonged, in whatever basic division a given scholar recognises among Scottish divines of the period, raises questions about the existence of the named parties and divisions as such. It is not merely the case that modern scholars have made Forbes, as it were, play for the wrong team – the ‘mild Calvinists’; the (‘Arminian’) defenders of ‘the spirit of free enquiry’; the Episcopalians with their deeper appreciation for the Fathers. It is, rather, the case that a major representative of those teams – and, more important, major proof for the existence of the team as such – has, upon closer examination, turned out to be a rather ordinary orthodox divine in a decidedly Reformed national Church. Proper appreciation of Forbes's thought points, then, to the artificial nature of the various parties that modern scholars have mapped onto the seventeenth-century Scottish Kirk, usually with the aim of securing a compelling pedigree for some theological or ecclesiastical persuasion or party in the present day. It is doubtful, in other words, that any real division existed, consciously or not, between (‘Arminian’) champions of ‘the spirit of free enquiry’ and stuffy Reformed stalwarts who insisted on strict intellectual conformity, proponents of a ‘mild Calvinism’ or ‘different theological climate’ and divines committed to a ‘Calvinist-Bezan orthodoxy’ à la Dort, or representatives of a proper appreciation for the Fathers and proof-texting Presbyterians who did not lose sleep over their lack of continuity with the catholic tradition. The study of early modern Scottish theology has far too often been subjected to scholarship which serves some modern social, theological or ecclesiastical agenda, and does so principally by projecting ideas and/or characteristics of modern persons or parties onto persons or parties in the period under supposed review. This is not, of course, to deny that doctrinal, liturgical and ecclesiastical differences existed among seventeenth-century Scottish divines (as among Reformed divines elsewhere). They clearly did. Orthodoxy was no monolithic reality. Some of those differences figured significantly in the outbreak and progress of civil war and other momentous events in seventeenth-century Britain. But by and large they were differences which those owning or touched by them knew rather well themselves – so, for example, Forbes and his covenanting antagonists jointly acknowledged their difference on a ‘point of churche governement’, and saw quite clearly the implications of their disagreement. Present-day historians would do well to listen, in the first instance, to the comments of their historical subjects concerning what did and what did not distinguish them from one another.
