Theological Theses · §2171 · Louis Le Blanc de Beaulieu

Pareus: Bellarmine's question is slippery; which freedom does he mean?

David Pareus sets out the Protestant teaching this way. Taking up the question as Bellarmine frames it, 'whether man after the fall of the first man truly has free choice in the things that pertain to salvation', he calls the question slippery and sophistical.

'For,' he says, 'it is unclear what freedom of choice for divine actions he means: freedom from compulsion, from physical necessity, from brute determination, which we readily grant; or freedom from bondage to sin, that is, from the necessity of sinning that comes from vice, or from dependence on God's motion, which cannot be claimed for man in the state of sin without blasphemy.' On Bellarmine, book 6, On Grace and Free Choice, chapter 8.

Latin

XXIV. Sic Protestantium doctrinam exponit David Paraeus. Nam proposita quaestione quam format Bellarminus, sitne homo post lapsum primi hominis vere liberi arbitrii, in iis rebus, quae pertinent ad salutem, dicit quaestionem illam lubricam & Sophisticam esse, quia, inquit, obscurum est quanam arbitrii libertatem ad divinas actiones velit, an a coactione, a Physica necessitate, a bruta determinatione: qua libertas ultro a nobis datur: an vero a servitute peccati, seu necessitate peccandi ex vitio, vel a dependentia motionis divinae: qua homini in statu peccati absque blasphemia arrogari non potest. In lib. 6. Bellar. de Grat. & lib. arbitr. cap. 8.

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About this text

Louis Le Blanc, a Reformed professor at Sedan, sets out theology in theses argued against Rome: Scripture, faith, grace, free choice, good works and the saints.

This volume holds the Theses on Theology I–XLIII and On Faith I–XXII, in eighteen sections.

Louis Le Blanc de Beaulieu (1614–1675) was minister and professor of theology at the Academy of Sedan, the Reformed school on France's eastern border. His Theses were disputed by students over many years and collected in a London folio (1675).

The Theological Theses range across the whole Reformed system — Scripture, God, predestination, grace, and justifying faith — in the crisp thesis-and-proof form of the seventeenth-century schools.

Date1675 AD (Sedan theses; London collection)

No modern English.

Reference

ESTC R17887; Wing L802. IA bub_gb_eOkHAW4G0-wC (+ EEBO 1675 for gap leaves).

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