ABSTRACT
Claims to grace, like those to honour or intelligence, depend on the existence of an out-group. There must be some people not qualified even to advance a claim in the first place. In respect of grace it is the reprobate who fill this role, and we examine now the historical transition from concepts of reprobation to modern ones of intellectual disability. Perhaps the strong concept only applied to defective members of his own social class; he was also the author of works on honour and genealogy, and may well have taken lack of a natural intellectual faculty in labourers for granted. It was as fierce a science of damnation as modern psychology’s doctrine of intellectual disability. “Natural intellectual disability” came from the middle-way theologians’ attempt to refute the orthodox doctrine of limited atonement while making tactical concessions to it.
