Calvinism is often regarded as the most logically rigorous and theologically unsentimental of all Christian theological systems. At the heart of its doctrines lies the twin decree of election and reprobation—most starkly emphasized in supralapsarianism, the view that God's decree to elect some and reprobate others preceded even the decree to permit the Fall. To many, this has made Calvinism seem unflinchingly deterministic and morally austere. Yet, in a surprising theological reversal, covenant universalism takes the very structure of supralapsarian Calvinism and transforms it into a doctrine of hope, turning what has been perceived as Calvinism’s harshest feature into its kindest and most redemptive.
Covenant universalism accepts without compromise the Calvinist insistence on God’s sovereign and eternal decree. In fact, it is within the supralapsarian order of decrees that covenant universalism finds its most powerful foundation: God’s plan of redemption precedes not only the Fall but all human history. However, where classical supralapsarianism sees God actively ordaining some to eternal reprobation, covenant universalism recognizes a critical theological distinction—one that exposes the fatal flaw in traditional supralapsarian logic.
As Herman Hoeksema writes in Reformed Dogmatics, “The thing first in the mind of the builder is last in execution.” This observation is not merely architectural but theological. God's decree begins with the end in mind—final union with His redeemed creation—and executes it through temporal history. What supralapsarian Calvinism fails to grasp is that while election reflects the eternal intention of God to glorify Himself through Christ and the redeemed community, reprobation is not a co-eternal decree of equivalent weight and intention. Rather, reprobation is a temporal judgment, a withholding of the grace that accompanies the regenerating covenant. It is not the mirror image of election but the expression of man’s fallen condition prior to the full accomplishment of redemption.
Covenant universalism therefore maintains that election is logically and ontologically prior in a way that reprobation is not. Election is active, positive, and redemptive. Reprobation, by contrast, is passive and judicial—a consequence of sin, not an eternal design. This theological clarification subverts the deterministic fatalism that has historically haunted Calvinism. The reprobate are not eternally consigned to damnation from before the foundation of the world. They are, rather, those not yet incorporated into the covenant of grace—a covenant which, under the covenant universalist vision, is destined to ultimately encompass all.
David Engelsma, in his criticisms of any mitigation of reprobation’s severity, insists that the decrees of election and reprobation must be "equally ultimate" lest God’s sovereignty be compromised. But this insistence leads him into a theological danger that he himself fails to acknowledge—the danger of a practical Manichaean dualism. For if both election and reprobation are equally eternal, deliberate, and ultimate, then good and evil stand as co-equal and co-eternal poles in God’s will. This not only contradicts the testimony of Scripture that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5), but undermines the monergistic grace Calvinism so passionately defends. Covenant universalism escapes this peril by locating reprobation in the temporal realm—God’s just response to sin—while preserving election as the eternal, positive determination to redeem.
The genius of covenant universalism is that it retains the supralapsarian structure of redemption while freeing it from its moral contradictions. The decree to save is not merely prior in order but primary in intent. The covenant of grace, grounded in the cross of Christ, is the eternal blueprint, and the apparent “reprobation” of many is merely the provisional condition of those not yet brought into the full scope of the covenant. As such, covenant universalism does not minimize the necessity of repentance, faith, or regeneration. Like Jonathan Edwards, it sees the wrath of God against sin as real and terrifying—but also as ultimately purgative and subordinate to divine mercy.
Indeed, covenant universalists affirm with the Reformed tradition that only those united to Christ by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit are saved. There is no salvation apart from Christ or outside of His covenant. But unlike traditional Calvinism, covenant universalism holds that all humanity will eventually be brought into this covenant, each in their order, until “God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). In this way, it remains thoroughly monergistic, completely sovereignist, and yet profoundly hopeful.
In conclusion, covenant universalism turns the apparent cruelty of supralapsarian Calvinism into its deepest kindness. By affirming the primacy of election without making reprobation its dark counterpart, and by understanding reprobation not as a divine initiative but as a temporal reality to be overcome in Christ, it redeems Calvinism from the charge of dualism and determinism. It gives full weight to the wrath of God while insisting that this wrath is not the final word. Rather, the last decree in execution—but the first in God's mind—is the glory of a redeemed creation, bound eternally in covenantal love.
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