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Place (Placceus), Josue de La

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Place (Placceus), Josue De La

a celebrated French Protestant divine, was born in Bretagne about the close of the 16th century some put the date at 1596, some as late as 1606. His parents died while he was in his infancy, and he was educated under the guidance of his elder brothers. When yet very young he was made teacher of philosophy at Saumur, where he had been a student. In 1625 he was made pastor of the Protestant Church at Nantes, and there remained until 1632, when he was called, with Amyraldus and Capellus, to a professorship of theology at Saumnur. He died in 1665. An excellent teacher and a pious Christian, he yet offended greatly, and provoked much strife and controversy by his tendency to Arminian theology in his views on the doctrine of Imputation (q.v.). The theory of original sin, as consisting only in native corruption, was condemned by the French synod of 1645, though Placaeus himself was not named. Strictly speaking, his theory was only a modification of Jean Cameron's (q.v.), who had succeeded Gomarus (q.v.) at Saumur in 1618. Cameron himself taught, after Piscator, the imputation of Christ's passive obedience alone; and advocated the theory of the hypothetic universalism of divine grace, which was more fully developed by Amyrant. "The peculiarity of Amyraldism," says Schweizer, ‘ is in the combination of a real particularism with a merely ideal universalism." Placaeus accepted the statement of the synod of 1645, by distinguishing between immediate and mediate imputation, and advocated the mediate, instead of the immediate imputation of Adam's sin to his posterity. He was opposed by Anton Garissol (q.v.), professor in Montauban, and defended by Charles Drelincourt (q.v.), pastor at Charenton. His defence, Disputationes academicae, sub paesidio J. Placaei, de imputatione primi peccati Adami, de argumentis quibus eficitur, Christun priusfuisse, quam in utero B. V. conciperetur, et de testimoniis et argumentis quibus probatur Jesum Christum esse Deum, was published at Salm (1649-51, 3 vols. 4to), and in an enlarged form the year of his death (1665), and since. His works (Opera) were published in collected form at Franeker in 1699, and again in 1702. See Schweizer, Centraldogmen, 2, 234 sq., 319; Haag, Hist. des Dogmes; Ebrard, Dogmatik, vol. 1. § 43; Mü ller, On Sin (see Index); Theological Essays from Princeton Review (N. Y. 1846), p. 195 sq.; Cunningham, Reformers, p. 379 sq.; Dorner, Gesch. der protestant. Theologie, 2, 447; Brit. and For. Ev. Rev. July, 1860, p. 585; New-Englander, July, 1868. (J. H. W.)