Infralapsarian

Part of speech: adjective, noun

Definitions

1. A Christian theological position holding that God's predestination of the saved and damned occurred after God foresaw humanity's fall into sin
2. The theological doctrine that God's plan for salvation and damnation was made with knowledge of how humans would freely choose to sin
3. A Christian belief that God determined who would be saved or lost only after foreseeing that humans would commit the original sin

Etymology: Infralapsarian is a theological term built from Latin pieces: "infra" meaning "below" or "beneath", "lapsus" meaning "a fall" (from "labi", to slip or fall), and the suffix "-arian", which marks a person who holds a particular belief. Put together, it names someone who holds that God's decree to save some people was made after, and in view of, the Fall of Adam and Eve. The term sits in a pair: supralapsarian, from "supra" meaning "above", describes the rival view that the decree of election came before the Fall in God's ordering of events. The word belongs to the vocabulary of Reformed and Calvinist debates about predestination, which were heated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its sense is therefore narrow and technical, and it is used mostly in theological writing and discussions of doctrine. The two terms were coined to label positions in these arguments, so the words describe the order of God's decrees rather than the fall of any person.

Synonyms: sublapsarian

Antonyms: supralapsarian