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Jacobus Arminius

Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), Dutch Reformed pastor and professor at Leiden. He questioned unconditional predestination, and his followers formed the Remonstrants.

History

Roots

Arminius was born in Oudewater, in the province of Holland; most accounts give 1560, though some scholars argue for 1559. His father died while he was an infant, and patrons paid for his schooling at Utrecht and then at Marburg. In 1575 Spanish troops sacked Oudewater during the Dutch revolt and killed his mother and siblings. He came back to study at the new University of Leiden (1576–1581), founded as a Protestant school for the rebel provinces. The merchants’ guild of Amsterdam then paid for him to study in Geneva under Theodore Beza, John Calvin’s successor. Beza taught a strict supralapsarian doctrine of predestination: God decreed to elect some and reprobate others logically before he decreed to permit the Fall. After a short stay in Basel and a trip to Padua and Rome (later held against him as proof of Catholic sympathies), Arminius returned to Amsterdam and was ordained in 1588.

Causes

His break with Beza’s system grew slowly out of pastoral and exegetical work. The traditional story, told in Petrus Bertius’s funeral oration, is that Arminius was drawn into the controversy the humanist Dirck Coornhert had stirred up over predestination, set out to refute the Delft ministers’ answer to Coornhert, and was won over to the views he had been asked to combat. Carl Bangs, his modern biographer, doubted that account, finding “no clear evidence that Arminius had ever accepted Beza’s doctrine of predestination” (Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation, 1971, Archive.org, secondary; summarized at Holy Joys, secondary).

The firmer evidence is his preaching. A sermon series on Romans in the early 1590s drew complaints, above all his reading of Romans 7:14–25 as describing a person under the law, not a regenerate Christian. His colleague Petrus Plancius accused him of Pelagian leanings. Arminius worked out his position in private: a long correspondence with the Leiden professor Franciscus Junius (1597) and an Examination of the English Puritan William Perkins’s treatise on predestination (written around 1602, published after his death). Both are in volume 3 of the Nichols translation of his Works.

In 1603 Leiden appointed him to the chair of theology left empty by Junius’s death. His colleague Franciscus Gomarus, a supralapsarian, became his chief opponent. Students carried the dispute into the churches, and it became political: the States of Holland, led by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, favored toleration and state oversight of the church, while many ministers wanted a national synod to settle doctrine. On 30 October 1608 Arminius set out his views before the States at The Hague in his Declaration of Sentiments (Works, vol. 1). A further conference with Gomarus followed in 1609, but Arminius was ill with tuberculosis and died in Leiden on 19 October 1609.

Influence

His followers, led by Johannes Uytenbogaert and Simon Episcopius, drew up the Remonstrance of 1610, five articles on conditional election, universal atonement, the need for grace, resistible grace and an open question on perseverance (text in Schaff, Creeds of Christendom). The Synod of Dort (1618–1619) rejected them in the Canons of Dort, deposed Remonstrant ministers and gave Calvinism its classic five-point shape. Oldenbarnevelt was executed in 1619 and Hugo Grotius imprisoned. The Remonstrants survived as a small church, tolerated again from the 1630s.

The name outlived the Dutch party. In England “Arminian” became a label for the anti-Puritan, high-church party around William Laud, often with little connection to Arminius’s actual writings. A century later John Wesley claimed the name for an evangelical theology of universal grace and called his magazine The Arminian Magazine (1778). Through Wesley, Arminianism became the working theology of the Methodist churches and much of later revivalism, holiness and Pentecostal Christianity, and of many General and Free Will Baptist churches.

Key ideas and contributors

Christ comes first in the decrees. In the Declaration of Sentiments Arminius set his own order of God’s decrees against Beza’s (Works, vol. 1). The first decree appoints Christ as Mediator and Redeemer. The second decrees to save “those who repent and believe” and persevere, and to leave unbelievers under wrath. The third provides the means of repentance and faith “in a sufficient and efficacious manner.” Only the fourth concerns particular persons, and it “has its foundation in the foreknowledge of God, by which he knew from all eternity those individuals who would, through his preventing grace, believe.” Election is real and eternal, but it is election of believers in Christ.

Grace does everything, but it can be resisted. Arminius rejected the charge that he gave too much to free will. Fallen man’s will, he wrote, is “not only wounded, maimed, infirm, bent, and weakened; but it is also imprisoned, destroyed, and lost,” with no power for good “except such as are excited by Divine grace” (“On the Free Will of Man and its Powers,” Works, vol. 1). He ascribed to grace “the commencement, the continuance and the consummation of all good.” The whole dispute, he said, came down to one question: “is the grace of God a certain irresistible force?” His answer, citing passages like Acts 7:51, was that “many persons resist the Holy Spirit and reject the grace that is offered” (Declaration, “The Grace of God”).

God is not the author of sin. His main objection to supralapsarianism was moral. If God decreed reprobation before considering sin, Arminius argued, he makes God the author of sin and turns the gospel’s offer into a pretense. This concern for God’s justice and goodness runs through the Perkins Examination and the Junius correspondence.

Perseverance left open. Arminius held that believers have enough strength by the Spirit to overcome temptation and that Christ keeps those who do not fail themselves. He would not affirm that a true believer can never fall away, and asked a future synod to examine the question from Scripture (Declaration, “The Perseverance of the Saints”). The Remonstrance kept the same caution; later Remonstrants decided that apostasy is possible.

Scholastic method. Arminius was a trained Reformed scholastic, drawing on Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suárez and possibly Luis de Molina. Richard Muller argued that his doctrine of God, especially his use of “middle knowledge” (God’s knowledge of what free creatures would do in any circumstance), places him closer to Jesuit theology than his opponents realized (God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius, 1991, Archive.org, secondary). This is the root of later debates about Divine Foreknowledge.

Others shaped what “Arminian” came to mean: Episcopius, who systematized the Remonstrant position; Grotius, whose governmental theory of the atonement grew from the same circle; and Wesley, whose essay The Question, “What is an Arminian?” Answered (1770) insisted Arminians held original sin and justification by faith as firmly as Calvinists did.

Key controversies

Was he still Reformed? Arminius signed the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism and claimed to teach nothing against them, asking only that they be revised in a synod. His opponents said his doctrine of election overturned both. Historians still divide. Bangs presented him as a Reformed theologian within an older, broader Dutch Reformed tradition. Muller stressed his debts to Catholic scholasticism. Keith Stanglin and Thomas McCall’s Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace (2012) argued for a theologian of grace whose main concern was God’s goodness (secondary).

Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism. From Plancius to the Canons of Dort, Arminius’s critics charged that conditional election makes faith a human contribution that decides salvation. The Canons reject the view that election rests on “foreseen faith” (First Head, Rejection of Errors). Arminius and his defenders answer that faith itself is a gift of prevenient grace, and that the ability to refuse a gift does not make receiving it a work. Roger Olson’s Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (2006) restated this defense for modern evangelicals (secondary).

Romans 7 and Romans 9. His exegesis started the trouble and remains contested. On Romans 7 he argued, in a long Dissertation (Works, vol. 2), that Paul speaks in the person of someone not yet regenerate, which critics took as raising human ability too high. On Romans 9 he read Paul’s argument as concerning God’s right to save those who believe and reject those who seek righteousness by works, not an eternal decree about individuals (Analysis of the Ninth Chapter, Works, vol. 3). Reformed readers since Augustine have read the chapter as teaching individual, unconditional election.

Other charges. Opponents accused him of unsound views on the Trinity, on original sin and on justification, and of Catholic sympathies dating from his Roman trip. In the Declaration he answered the first by explaining that the Son is autotheos in the sense of “truly God” but not “God of himself,” since the Son’s essence comes from the Father, and called the reports “notorious calumnies.” On justification he said he was ready to sign what Calvin taught in the third book of the Institutes. The suspicion that his circle sheltered Socinians clung to the Remonstrants for decades.

What remains unresolved

The dispute Arminius opened is still the main fault line in Protestant teaching on Salvation. Both sides affirm grace, election and the need for faith. They disagree over whether God’s choice of the saved rests on his foreknowledge of faith or causes it, and whether grace can be refused. Recent theology has pushed his questions further than he did: Open Theism, associated with Clark Pinnock, drops exhaustive foreknowledge altogether, a step Arminius himself never took.