by Charles Hodge
in ePub, .mobi, .pdf formats
The Scriptures speak of an Economy of Redemption; the plan or purpose of God in relation to the salvation of men. They call it in reference to its full revelation at the time of the advent, the οἰκονομία τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν, "The economy of the fulness of times." It is declared to be the plan of God in relation to his gathering into one harmonious body, all the objects of redemption, whether in heaven or earth, in Christ. Eph. 1:10. It is also called the οἰκονομία τοῦ μυστηρίου, the mysterious purpose or plan which had been hidden for ages in God, which it was the great design of the gospel to reveal, and which was intended to make known to principalities and powers, by the Church, the manifold wisdom of God. Eph. 3:9. A plan supposes: (1.) The selection of some definite end or object to be accomplished. (2.) The choice of appropriate means. (3.) At least in the case of God, the effectual application and control of those means to the accomplishment of the contemplated end. As God works on a definite plan in the external world, it is fair to infer that the same is true in reference to the moral and spiritual world. To the eye of an uneducated man the heavens are a chaos of stars. The astronomer sees order and system in this confusion; all those bright and distant luminaries have their appointed places and fixed orbits; all are so arranged that no one interferes with any other, but each is directed according to one comprehensive and magnificent conception. The innumerable forms of vegetable life, are not a confused mass, but to the eye of science arrange themselves into regular classes, orders, genera, and species, exhibiting a unity of design pervading the whole. The zoölogist sees in the hundreds of thousands of animals which inhabit our globe, four, and only four original typical forms, of which all the others are the development in an ascending order, no one ever passing into the other, but all presenting one great comprehensive system carried out in all its details. At the head of these innumerable lower forms of animal life, stands man, endowed with powers which elevate him above the class of mere animals and bring him into fellowship with angels and with God himself. As in all these lower departments of his works, God acts according to a preconceived plan, it is not to be supposed that in the higher sphere of his operations, which concerns the destiny of men, everything is left to chance and allowed to take its undirected course to an undetermined end. We accordingly find that the Scriptures distinctly assert in reference to the dispensations of grace not only that God sees the end from the beginning, but that He works all things according to the counsel of his own will, or, according to his eternal purpose.
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Table of Contents
1. God Has Such a Plan
2. Supralapsarianism
3. Infralapsarianism
4. "Hypothetical Redemption."
5. The Lutheran Doctrine as to the Plan of Salvation
6. The Remonstrant Doctrine
7. Wesleyan Arminianism
8. The Augustinian Scheme
9. Objections to the Augustinian Scheme
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