CHOSEN

Loraine Boettner:

The Reformed theologians logically and consistently ap­plied to the spheres of creation and providence those great principles, which were later set forth in the Westminster Standards.  They saw the hand of God in every event in all the history of mankind and in all the workings of phys­ical nature, so that the world was the complete realization in time of the eternal ideal.  The world as a whole and in all its parts and movements and changes was brought into a unity by the governing, all-pervading, all-harmonizing activity of the divine will, and its purpose was to manifest the divine glory.  While their conception was that of a divine ordering of the whole course of history to the veriest detail, they were especially concerned with its relation to man’s salvation.  Calvin, the brilliant and systematic the­ologian of the Reformation, put the matter thus: “Predes­tination we call the eternal decree of God, by which He has determined in Himself, what He would have to become of every individual of mankind.”