Position · 1610

Arminianism

Salvation as God’s gift that a person can accept or resist: God’s prevenient grace frees the will to respond, election rests on God’s foreknowledge of faith, and Christ died for everyone.

History

Roots

Arminianism began as a quarrel inside the Reformed church of the Dutch Republic. Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) trained at Leiden and at Geneva under Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor, and served as a pastor in Amsterdam before becoming professor of theology at Leiden in 1603. A long-told story says he was asked to refute a critic of predestination and was won over instead. His biographer Carl Bangs (Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation, 1971) doubted that story, finding no clear evidence that Arminius had ever accepted Beza’s doctrine of predestination (Evangelical Arminians, secondary).

At Leiden Arminius clashed with his colleague Franciscus Gomarus, who held a strict supralapsarian view: God decreed whom he would save and whom he would pass by before he even decreed the fall. Arminius argued that this made God the author of sin. In his Declaration of Sentiments (1608), given before the States of Holland, he set out his alternative: God’s decree to save rests first on Christ, and God elects those he foreknows will believe (Works of James Arminius, vol. 1, CCEL). He also insisted that fallen people cannot think, will or do any real good without grace, which kept him on the Reformation side of the line drawn against Pelagianism.

Causes

Arminius died in 1609 with the dispute unsettled. The next year forty-odd ministers who agreed with him signed a petition to the States of Holland, the Remonstrance of 1610, and became known as the Remonstrants. Its five articles (text in Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3) taught that God elects those who believe in Christ, that Christ died for all though only believers receive forgiveness, that no one can do good without the regenerating grace of the Spirit, that this grace can be resisted, and that whether believers can fall away “must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scripture.” Their opponents answered with a Counter-Remonstrance (1611).

The quarrel became political. The Remonstrants looked to the States of Holland and its advocate Johan van Oldenbarnevelt; the Counter-Remonstrants found a patron in Prince Maurice of Nassau. After Maurice took control in 1618, the national Synod of Dort (1618–1619) met with delegates from Reformed churches across Europe. It treated the Remonstrants as defendants, not participants, and its Canons answered each of their articles with a positive statement and a “Rejection of the Errors.” Some two hundred Remonstrant ministers lost their posts. Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded in 1619, and the jurist Hugo Grotius was imprisoned until he escaped in a book chest in 1621.

Influence

Under Simon Episcopius the exiles organized the Remonstrant Brotherhood, wrote a confession (1621), and were tolerated in the Netherlands from about 1630. In England “Arminian” became a party label for the high-church circle around Archbishop William Laud, though their quarrel with the Puritans was as much about worship and church order as about grace. The General Baptists, who traced their line to John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, held a general atonement on their own grounds.

The decisive spread came through John Wesley. His sermon “Free Grace” (published 1740) attacked unconditional predestination and declared that God’s grace “is FREE IN ALL, and FREE FOR ALL.” George Whitefield replied in print, and the revival split into Wesleyan and Calvinistic Methodism. Wesley later named his monthly the Arminian Magazine (1778). Through the Methodist churches, the Holiness movement, Pentecostal denominations, and most of the Baptist and Evangelical free churches that do not identify as Reformed, Arminian convictions became the working theology of much of world Protestantism. Formally, the theology of the Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches also rejects unconditional reprobation, but those traditions arrived there by their own routes and do not use the name.

Key ideas and contributors

Prevenient grace. Arminians agree with Calvinists that sin has left humans unable to turn to God by their own power. They add that God gives every person grace that goes before any response and restores the ability to answer. Wesley called conscience itself the sign of it: “It is more properly termed preventing grace,” and “there is no man, unless he has quenched the Spirit, that is wholly void of the grace of God” (“On Working Out Our Own Salvation”, 1785; Titus 2:11; John 1:9).

Conditional election. God elects in Christ, and he elects individuals as believers, on the basis of his foreknowledge of their faith (Romans 8:29; 1 Peter 1:1–2). Foreknowledge here means God’s knowledge of free choices, which is why the position sits close to the debates under Divine Foreknowledge.

Universal atonement. Christ died for every person, so the gospel can be offered sincerely to all (1 John 2:2; 1 Timothy 2:4–6; 2 Peter 3:9). Grotius, defending the Remonstrants, framed the cross as God upholding his moral government rather than paying an exact debt (Defensio fidei catholicae de satisfactione Christi, 1617), a “governmental” view many later Arminians took up. Arminius himself and most classical Arminians kept Penal Substitution.

Resistible grace. Grace really works salvation, but it does not overpower the will; people can refuse it (Acts 7:51; Matthew 23:37).

Conditional perseverance. The Remonstrance left this open, but later Remonstrants and Wesley taught that a true believer can fall away by abandoning faith (Hebrews 6:4–6). Wesley’s 1770 tract The Question, What is an Arminian? Answered reduced the whole dispute with Calvinism to three points (absolute versus conditional predestination, irresistible versus resistible grace, and whether a believer can fall) and then to one: “Is predestination absolute or conditional?” The same tract insisted that no one ever asserted original sin or justification by faith “in more strong, more clear and express terms, than Arminius has done.”

Other contributors: Episcopius and Philipp van Limborch, who led the Remonstrant tradition in directions later critics called rationalist; John Fletcher, whose Checks to Antinomianism (1771–1775) defended Wesley against Calvinist evangelicals; and in the twentieth century I. Howard Marshall (Kept by the Power of God, 1969), Clark Pinnock (ed., The Grace of God and the Will of Man, 1989), and Roger Olson, whose Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (IVP, 2006) argued that classical Arminianism belongs inside Reformation Protestantism. The Society of Evangelical Arminians (founded 2009) now gathers scholars who hold the view.

Key controversies

Semi-Pelagianism. The oldest charge is that Arminianism makes the human decision the final cause of salvation, so that grace helps but the person decides. John Owen’s A Display of Arminianism (1643) laid the Remonstrant claims beside Scripture and found them a revival of Pelagian error. Arminians answer that every good response, including faith, is enabled by grace, and that a gift one could refuse is still a gift (Ephesians 2:8–9). Olson concedes that some later Arminians, especially in nineteenth-century revivalism, did drift toward semi-Pelagianism, and distinguishes them from the classical view.

Freedom of the will. Calvinism holds that the will always follows a person’s strongest motive, so a sinner chooses God only when God changes the heart. Jonathan Edwards made the case at length in Freedom of the Will (1754), arguing that the Arminian idea of a will able to choose otherwise in identical circumstances is incoherent. Arminians reply that without that ability God would be responsible for sin and human guilt would be unjust.

Foreknowledge and election. Calvinists ask how foreknown faith can be the ground of election when Romans says election does not depend “on human will or exertion” (Romans 9:16). Arminians read Romans 9 as God’s choice of peoples and of the terms of salvation, not of individuals to final destinies. A second pressure comes from the other side: Open Theism, which grew out of Arminian circles in the 1990s, argued that if the future is already known it is already fixed, and gave up exhaustive foreknowledge. Most Arminians rejected that move and kept Classical Theism; others adopted Molinism, the view that God knows what free creatures would do in any circumstance.

Assurance and apostasy. If a believer can fall away, can anyone be sure of salvation? Calvinists press John 10:28–29. Arminians point to the warning passages in Hebrews and argue that assurance rests on present faith in Christ, not on a past decision. The question also divides Arminians: Free Will Baptists, for example, teach that apostasy is possible but cannot be reversed, while Wesleyans hold that a fallen believer can be restored.

Dort and its legacy. Remonstrants have always objected that the Synod of Dort was a political trial whose verdict was settled before it met. Reformed churches answer that it was the most international synod of the Reformation and stated what the Reformed churches already believed. The popular acronym TULIP for its five heads of doctrine dates only from the early twentieth century: its earliest documented use is a 1913 Outlook article recalling a lecture by Cleland Boyd McAfee around 1905 (PCA Historical Center, secondary). Some historians argue it misstates both Dort and the Remonstrance. The exchange continues in paired books such as Olson’s Against Calvinism and Michael Horton’s For Calvinism (both Zondervan, 2011).

What remains unresolved

Both sides agree that salvation is by grace, that sinners cannot save themselves, and that God knows the future. They disagree on whether God’s choice explains a person’s faith or a person’s faith explains God’s choice. Each side’s strongest objection names the other’s hardest problem. Calvinism has to explain why a good God would leave most people without the grace they need. Arminianism has to explain why, if grace is given to all, the final difference between the saved and the lost lies anywhere except in the person.