Event · 1618

Synod of Dort

A synod of the Dutch Reformed Church at Dordrecht (1618–19), with delegates from Reformed churches abroad. It rejected the Remonstrants’ articles and issued the Canons of Dort.

History

Causes

The quarrel began at Leiden University. Jacobus Arminius, professor of theology from 1603, came to doubt the Reformed teaching that God elects some people to salvation without regard to anything in them. His colleague Franciscus Gomarus (Wikipedia, secondary) defended the strict view, including the supralapsarian order in which God’s decree to save and to pass by comes logically before the decree to permit the fall. Arminius set out his own position in his Declaration of Sentiments (1608) and died in 1609 with the matter unsettled.

His followers did not let it drop. In 1610 forty-odd ministers, led by Johannes Uytenbogaert, signed a petition to the States of Holland known as the Remonstrance. Its five articles (text in Schaff) taught that God elects those he foresees will believe; that Christ died for all, though only believers receive forgiveness; that no one can do good without grace; that grace can be resisted; and that whether believers can fall away needed further study. The other side answered with the Counter-Remonstrance of 1611, whose seven points anticipate what Dort would later say (Five Points of Calvinism, secondary).

The dispute was political from the start. The Remonstrants appealed to the provincial States rather than a church synod, and the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (Wikipedia, secondary) protected them, partly because he held that the civil government of each province should rule its church. Prince Maurice of Nassau, the military leader of the Republic, sided with the Counter-Remonstrants in 1617. When Holland passed the Sharp Resolution that August, authorising towns to raise their own troops, the conflict became a contest over who governed the Republic. Maurice won it: Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius were arrested on 29 August 1618, and the States-General called a national synod.

Proceedings

The synod met at Dordrecht from 13 November 1618 to 9 May 1619, in 154 sessions (Wikipedia, secondary). Johannes Bogerman, a Frisian minister, presided. Alongside the Dutch delegates sat voting theologians from abroad: a British delegation sent by James I (George Carleton, John Davenant, Joseph Hall, Samuel Ward, and later the Scot Walter Balcanqual), and delegates from the Palatinate, Hesse, Nassau, Bremen, Emden, Geneva and the Swiss cities. The French Reformed delegates were named but forbidden to travel by Louis XIII. That international membership is why the Canons claim to speak for “the Reformed churches”, not only the Dutch ones.

The Remonstrants came as defendants, not members. Their spokesman, Simon Episcopius (Wikipedia, secondary), asked to open with an attack on the doctrine of reprobation, which the Remonstrants thought was the weakest point of their opponents’ system. The synod insisted that the accused first state and defend their own views, article by article. After a month of procedural deadlock the Remonstrants were dismissed at the 57th session on 14 January 1619, and the synod judged their written opinions in their absence. A translation of those opinions survives as The Opinions of the Remonstrants (1618; PDF, from Peter De Jong’s 1968 Crisis in the Reformed Churches).

The Canons were adopted in April and published on 6 May 1619 (Latin and English in Schaff; modern English at the Christian Reformed Church). The synod also confirmed the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, drew up a church order, and commissioned a new Dutch Bible, the Statenvertaling (secondary), completed in 1637.

Aftermath

The settlement was enforced at once. Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded on 13 May 1619, four days after the synod closed. Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment in Loevestein Castle and escaped in 1621 hidden in a chest of books (Wikipedia, secondary). Remonstrant ministers were deposed across the provinces, and around 70 were banished (List of participants in the Synod of Dort, secondary). The exiles organised the Remonstrant Brotherhood at Antwerp in 1619. After Maurice died in 1625 the pressure eased, and from 1630 Remonstrants could live openly in the Republic, though they could not build public churches until 1795 (Remonstrants, secondary).

Influence

The Canons became, with the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, one of the Three Forms of Unity (secondary) still confessed by Dutch Reformed churches and their descendants in North America, South Africa and elsewhere. Dort fixed the shape of Calvinism in Protestant memory: the “five points” of Calvinism are its answers to the five Remonstrant articles, later boiled down to the TULIP mnemonic, which dates only from around 1905 and first appears in print in Loraine Boettner’s The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (1932).

It also gave Arminianism its name and its identity as a rival tradition. In England the reaction against Dort fed the anti-Calvinist party of Archbishop William Laud (Wikipedia, secondary), and a century later John Wesley revived the label for the evangelical revival, naming his magazine The Arminian Magazine. The Methodist tradition carries the Remonstrant position into the present.

Key ideas and contributors

The Canons answer the Remonstrance point by point, in four chapters (the third and fourth are combined). Each chapter states the positive teaching and then lists the errors rejected.

Unconditional election. God chose “a definite number of particular people out of the entire human race, which had fallen by its own fault,” and the chosen “were neither better nor more deserving than the others” (I.7). Faith is the fruit of election, not its ground. The phrase “had fallen by its own fault” is infralapsarian: God elects from a fallen mass, which is the order Augustine assumed. Bogerman, himself a supralapsarian, accepted this wording, and Gomarus’s stricter view was not made binding. Reprobation is described as God passing some by, leaving them in a misery they brought on themselves (I.15). The pastoral concern behind this, and behind Divine Foreknowledge debates generally, was that salvation should rest wholly on grace.

Particular redemption. Christ’s death “is of infinite value and worth, more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world” (II.3). But God’s intention was that it should “effectively redeem … all those and only those who were chosen from eternity” (II.8). When people perish, it is not because the sacrifice was insufficient, “but because they themselves are at fault” (II.6). The chapter holds together a universal sufficiency and a particular design, a balance that shaped Reformed thinking on the Atonement for the next century.

Total inability and effective grace. Fallen people cannot turn to God by their own powers (III/IV.3), yet the gospel call is sincere: “all who are called through the gospel are called earnestly” (III/IV.8). Regenerating grace does not treat people “as if they were blocks and stones”; it does not “coerce a reluctant will by force, but spiritually revives, heals, reforms, and … bends it back” (III/IV.16). The synod meant this against the charge that its view made grace mechanical.

Perseverance. Believers could lose their faith if left to themselves, and “undoubtedly would” do so, “but with respect to God it cannot possibly happen” (V.8). Assurance comes from God’s promise, the Spirit’s witness, and the fruit of a holy life.

The Remonstrant case. Episcopius was the main theologian on the other side; the Opinions of the Remonstrants argued that God’s will to save is genuinely universal, that a decree of reprobation makes God the author of sin, and that grace which cannot be resisted removes human responsibility. The Remonstrants affirmed the need for grace at every step, which is why they rejected the charge of Pelagianism.

Key controversies

A fair trial? The Remonstrants and their later historians argued that the result was fixed before the synod met: the Dutch delegates had been chosen after Maurice purged Remonstrant town councils, and the accused were given no vote. Frederick Calder’s Memoirs of Simon Episcopius (1835) put it plainly: “condemnation was determined before the national synod met.” Defenders reply that the Remonstrants refused the synod’s procedure and that the Canons moderated the Counter-Remonstrant position rather than adopting it whole. Anthony Milton’s The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (2005), an edition of the British delegates’ papers, shows real debate within the synod, especially among the foreign theologians.

The extent of the atonement. This was the hardest article to agree on. The British delegation, led on this point by Davenant and Ward, and the Bremen delegate Matthias Martinius held that Christ died for all in some real sense while dying effectually for the elect, a view later called hypothetical universalism (Wikipedia, secondary). The compromise language of II.3 and II.8 let them sign. Whether the Canons teach strict “limited atonement” or leave room for the British view is still argued among Reformed historians, and the debate reopened within a generation in the controversy over Moïse Amyraut at Saumur.

Does God sincerely offer salvation to the reprobate? The Remonstrants said a call to people God has decided not to save cannot be honest. The Canons affirm both the decree and the earnest call (III/IV.8) without explaining how they fit. Later Reformed churches split over this “well-meant offer” of the gospel; the Protestant Reformed Churches in America began after the Christian Reformed Church’s 1924 synod adopted the “Three Points of Common Grace,” and Herman Hoeksema denied that the gospel is a “well-meant offer” (Common grace, secondary).

Do the Canons make God the author of sin? The synod’s closing “Rejection of False Accusations” lists the charges its opponents made: that its teaching “makes God the author of sin, unjust, a tyrant, and a hypocrite,” and that it makes people “carnally self-assured” (Conclusion). The synod denied every charge and asked readers to judge its teaching from its own documents, not from caricature. Arminians from Wesley to the present have kept pressing the same objection.

Church and state. Dort settled a doctrinal dispute with the help of a coup, an execution and mass deposition. Remonstrants made religious toleration a principle partly because of this, and Grotius’s later writings on church and state grew from it. Reformed defenders note that the Remonstrants themselves had sought the civil power’s protection and that every side in the period assumed a public church.

What remains unresolved

The theological question Dort answered is still open between Calvinism and Arminianism: whether God’s choice explains a person’s faith, or a person’s faith explains God’s choice. Inside the Reformed world, two narrower questions remain live: how particular the atonement is, and how the decree fits a sincere offer to everyone. Historians also still argue how much of the synod’s outcome was theology and how much was Maurice’s victory over Oldenbarnevelt.