1560–1685

Reformed Orthodoxy and Predestination: from Beza and Zanchi to Turretin, Ursinus and Amyraut

McGrath distinguishes Calvin from Calvinism: Calvin's successors, systematizing his teaching by the Aristotelian method, gave predestination a central place, and from about 1570 the theme of election became dominant in Reformed theology. According to González, Beza and Zanchi derived predestination from the doctrine of God – His omniscience and omnipotence – rather than from the experience of grace, and insisted on limited atonement, a conclusion Calvin himself did not draw. A different approach is found in the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), where predestination is placed after the doctrine of the church as an expression of the experience of salvation, and in Moses Amyraut, who, according to González, understood Calvin more clearly than the "strict" Calvinists. In the seventeenth century Francis Turretin gave the classic infralapsarian scheme of the order of the divine decrees.