Tradition · 1610

Remonstrants

Dutch followers of Jacobus Arminius, named after their Remonstrance of 1610. After the Synod of Dort their ministers were expelled, and they organized as the Remonstrant Brotherhood in 1619.

History

Roots

The Remonstrants started as a dispute inside the Dutch Reformed Church about predestination. At Leiden in the 1600s, Jacobus Arminius questioned the strict Calvinism of his colleague Franciscus Gomarus. Gomarus taught that God decreed who would be saved and who would be lost before considering anything about them. Arminius argued that God elects those he foresees will believe, and that grace can be resisted. He set out his case before the States of Holland in his Declaration of Sentiments (1608, in Works of James Arminius, vol. 1, CCEL). He died in 1609 with the question unresolved.

The quarrel was never only theological. The young Dutch Republic was split between the province of Holland, led by its Advocate Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who wanted the civil government to control church disputes and keep the peace, and a stricter Calvinist party that looked to Prince Maurice of Nassau. Doctrine and politics became one fight.

Causes

On 14 January 1610, some forty ministers who sided with Arminius signed a petition, a “remonstrance”, to the States of Holland. The court preacher Jan Uytenbogaert drafted it. Its Five Articles (Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3, CCEL) gave the movement its name and its program. Their opponents answered in 1611 with a Counter-Remonstrance, and the two parties became known as Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants (or Arminians and Gomarists). The States tried to calm things by ordering both sides to tolerate each other, which failed.

By 1618 the political balance had turned. Maurice moved against Oldenbarnevelt, who was arrested in August 1618 along with the jurist Hugo Grotius. The States General then called a national synod at Dordrecht.

The Synod of Dort and exile

The Synod of Dort met from November 1618 to May 1619, with delegates from Reformed churches in Britain, Switzerland and Germany as well as the Dutch provinces. The Remonstrants were summoned as defendants, not members. Their spokesman, Simon Episcopius, a former student of Arminius who had succeeded Gomarus at Leiden, refused the synod’s procedure and the Remonstrant ministers were dismissed. The synod’s Canons (Christian Reformed Church) answered each of the five articles and added a “Rejection of Errors” naming Remonstrant teaching point by point. The order of the Canons later gave English speakers the five points of Calvinism.

The aftermath was harsh. Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded on 13 May 1619, four days after the synod closed. Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment and escaped in 1621 with his wife’s help, smuggled out of Loevestein Castle in a book chest. Some two hundred Remonstrant ministers were deposed (Dutch Wikipedia, secondary), and those who refused to stop preaching were banished. The exiles met in Antwerp in 1619 and organized the Remonstrant Brotherhood. In 1621 a group settled in Friedrichstadt in Schleswig, where a congregation still exists.

Influence

After Maurice died in 1625 the persecution eased. Episcopius returned in 1626, Remonstrant churches opened in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and in 1634 the Brotherhood founded a seminary in Amsterdam with Episcopius as its first professor. Full legal recognition came only in 1795.

The seminary made the small church unusually influential. Philipp van Limborch taught there and corresponded with John Locke, who dedicated his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) to him. Jean Le Clerc edited learned journals read across Europe. Through them, Remonstrant ideas about toleration, the limits of creeds and reasonable religion fed into the early Enlightenment.

The wider legacy ran through Arminianism. Laudian churchmen in the Church of England were called “Arminians”, and the Anglican debates of the 1620s and 1630s borrowed the Dutch labels. A century later John Wesley named his magazine the Arminian Magazine (1778), and Methodist theology carried an evangelical form of the Remonstrant articles to millions. The Remonstrants themselves took another road. In the nineteenth century they became a liberal Protestant church, and in 1986 the Brotherhood became the first church in Europe to allow blessings of same-sex couples on an equal footing with marriage (summary, secondary). Today it has about 5,000 members and friends in some forty congregations (secondary, same source).

Key ideas and contributors

Conditional election. The first article says God decreed in Christ to save “those who, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, shall believe on this his Son Jesus” and persevere (Article I). Election rests on God’s foreknowledge of faith, not on a decree that comes before it (Romans 8:29). This is the point where the Remonstrants touch the debate on Divine Foreknowledge.

Christ died for all. The second article says Christ obtained redemption and forgiveness for all people, though only believers actually receive it (John 3:16, 1 John 2:2).

Human inability. The third article is often forgotten: “man has not saving grace of himself, nor of the energy of his free will.” Without regenerating grace no one can think, will or do anything good. The Remonstrants were not teaching that people save themselves.

Resistible grace. The fourth article makes grace the beginning and end of all good, but says it “is not irresistible, inasmuch as it is written concerning many, that they have resisted the Holy Ghost” (Acts 7:51).

Perseverance left open. The fifth article says believers are given full power to persevere, but whether they can fall away through negligence “must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scripture.” Later Remonstrants decided that true believers can fall away.

A church with a short creed. Episcopius gave the movement its systematic form. His Remonstrant Confession (1621), written in exile, was meant as a guide, not a test, and treated Christianity as a practical faith that changes life more than a system to be signed. English translation: Mark A. Ellis, The Arminian Confession of 1621 (Pickwick, 2005; no link confirmed). Freedom of conscience became the Brotherhood’s defining trait, and its later statements of 1940 and 2006 continue that pattern.

Grotius on the atonement. Grotius defended the Remonstrant cause in law and theology. His Defence of the Catholic Faith concerning the Satisfaction of Christ (1617, against Faustus Socinus; 1889 English translation, Archive.org) presented Christ’s death as God acting as ruler, upholding his law while forgiving. Later writers called this the governmental theory, an alternative to strict Penal Substitution.

Key controversies

Was it Pelagianism? The Counter-Remonstrants and the Synod of Dort charged that the five articles made faith a human contribution and so revived Pelagianism, or at least its milder cousin semi-Pelagianism. The Canons’ Rejection of Errors under the third and fourth heads makes this charge directly (Canons of Dort). The Remonstrants pointed to their third article: grace comes first and is necessary for every good act. The question is whether grace that a person can refuse leaves the final decision with the person, which Calvinists say it does and Arminians deny is a problem (Augustine is claimed by both sides).

Was Dort a fair hearing? Remonstrants, and many historians since, regarded the synod as a trial with the verdict settled in advance, held under a government that had just jailed their political protectors. Reformed defenders answer that the Remonstrants refused to accept the synod’s authority and order and so walked away from their hearing. The execution of Oldenbarnevelt has kept the political side of Dort in view ever since.

Socinianism and drift. Calvinist critics in the seventeenth century accused the Remonstrants of opening the door to Socinianism, the anti-Trinitarian movement Grotius had written against. Later history seemed to some to confirm the warning: the seminary grew more rationalist, and the nineteenth-century church became theologically liberal. Arminian evangelicals reject the inference. Roger Olson’s Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (IVP, 2006; no link confirmed) separates Arminius and the early Remonstrants, whom he counts as evangelical Protestants, from the later liberal turn.

Whose Arminianism? Wesleyan and Free Will Baptist Arminians share the five articles but not the Brotherhood’s current theology. The 2006 Remonstrant statement leaves doctrine open, and the church’s stance on same-sex relationships places it far from most churches that trace their soteriology to Arminius. The name now covers two traditions: a small liberal Dutch church and a large worldwide evangelical theology of Salvation.

What remains unresolved

The core dispute of 1610 is still live between Calvinism and Arminianism: whether God’s choice of the saved rests on anything in them, and whether grace can be refused. What the Remonstrant story adds is a question about method. The Brotherhood bet that a church could hold together on a short creed and freedom of conscience. Its defenders see that as the lesson Dort failed to learn; its critics see the church’s later drift as what happens when it is learned.