Sorry for the admittedly provocative title.

But it may be seen as a stepping stone to accepting the view that history is

two-way.

The tension between the Good Man at Creation and the elect/reprobate at judge-

ment, by which we currently are inclined to view the neutral, "one-ness" of

man as more determinative, and thus hold to Romanism, Arminianism etc. views of

salvation, as a one-being-split-into-two in which the one takes precedence over

the two,

may be thrust in the opposite direction when we think of history backwards,

both in hyper-Calvinism and Pighius' charge, by starting from the

elect/reprobate and working backwards against the one-ness of that first Good

Man, to the point of denying its significance and calling all of history a

"puppet dance."

The solution to this, is not to take the beginning and the end as antagonistic

to each other, but see history as the meaningful bridge that links both ends

AND gives both ends meaning in the first place. Redemptive history would then

presuppose both ends of history, and would not be some sort of accidental

feature, because if it was thought of an accidental feature, then one end must

be original, and the other end accidental or contingent or unnecessary.

Would it be possible to then abandon the categories of supralapsarian and

infralapsarian? Supralapsarian assumes the end of history over against the

beginning, while infralapsarian assumes the beginning of history over against

its end. In the mind of God, there would be a mysterious way in which both are

reconciled, just as this whole redemptive history is mysteriously reconciled

by the wisdom of God which man's wisdom cannot penetrate the depths of.

Of course, there will always be mysteries that we cannot understand or make

basic sense of. The problem is always where do we draw the line? Where shall

we move the cut-off line that declares the horizon of our logic? And even when

we have drawn that line, how significant is the position of that line as to our

salvation or the acceptance of that salvation in faith? The pressure of God's

infinite wisdom crushes us, whether we are a 1 or 100 or 1000 on the IQ scale,

rendering them all infinitesimal and effectively on a wholly different plane.

I am tempted to say imaginary, but (1) even that is assuming too univocal an

analogical structure, and (2) that is just another analogical description of

analogy itself. Even to take the interpreted facts of God is a fundamental act

of faith. The ethical turn of Postmodernism should've happened long ago, but in

the right direction. And it has, and it's name is called the Reformation.

(2021.04.29)