He Shines in All That's Fair: Culture and Common Grace by Richard J. Mouw

Author:Richard J. Mouw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-04-22T09:23:00+00:00

Chapter Four

"INFRA-" VERSUS "SUPRA-"

n 1973, Theodore Kreps returned to Calvin College to receive a Distinguished Alumnus Award. Kreps had finished his studies at Calvin in 1917, earned a Harvard doctorate in economics, and gone on to gain an international reputation as a business economist, spending the last three decades of his academic career at Stanford University. At a reception held in his honor, Professor Kreps told me how he had made his way to Grand Rapids, Michigan, a half century earlier, to begin his undergraduate education. Raised in the small Dutch Calvinist farming community of Prinsburg, Minnesota, he had little hope of getting a college education until he heard that the Christian Reformed congregations of Pella, Iowa, were sponsoring an essay contest, the first prize being a tuition scholarship to Calvin College. He hopped a freight train to Iowa, and when he arrived he discovered that he had twenty-four hours to produce an essay on the assigned topic, "The Debate between the Infra- and the Supralapsarians." He composed the prize-winning entry while sitting on a park bench. When he finished telling me the story, I asked him which side of the debate he defended in his essay. "Oh," he replied without a moment's pause, "I've always been an `infra,' of course!"

I was intrigued by the "of course" part of his unhesitating answer. Not that I would have expected him to endorse supralapsarianism. The infralapsarian view has always been the majority opin ion in the Calvinist tradition, with supralapsarianism tolerated at best. What impressed me about Professor Kreps's response was that he had a position at all on the subject. The tendency these days, at least among mainline Reformed thinkers, is to see the infralapsarian versus supralapsarian debate as a pseudo-puzzle. But Kreps was obviously a thoughtful person, and I sensed a seriousness in his report concerning his infralapsarian sympathies. His comments inspired me to make a note to myself to do some exploring someday in this theological neighborhood. This essay is a modest step in that direction.

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