40 Questions About Arminianism

J. Matthew Pinson

• Publisher: Kregel Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780825477294
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The actual life and teaching of Jacobus Arminius are often unknown or misunderstood across many Protestant traditions. Answers beyond a basic caricature can be elusive. What are the essential historical backgrounds of Arminianism, and what theological teachings connect to the Arminian point of view? Mixing solid historical research with biblical and doctrinal precision, Baptist scholar J. Matthew Pinson clarifies the foundations of this influential tradition. 40 Questions About Arminianism addresses the following questions and more:
• Who was Jacobus Arminius?
• How has the church interpreted God's desire that everyone be saved?
• How is Arminianism different from Calvinism?
• Can one be both Reformed and Arminian?
• What is "universal enabling grace"?
• What do Arminians mean by "free will"?
• Do Arminians believe that God predestines individuals to salvation?
• Is it possible for a Christian to apostatize?An accessible question-and-answer format helps readers pursue the issues that interest them most and encourages a broad understanding of historic and contemporary Arminianism, with additional resources available at 40questions.net.

PART 1

Introductory and Historical Questions

SECTION A

Introducing Arminianism and Calvinism

QUESTION 1

Who Was Jacobus Arminius, and Who Were the Remonstrants?

Jacobus Arminius was born in 1559 in the city of Oudewater in the Netherlands and was named Jacob Harmenszoon, a Dutch name of which Jacobus Arminius is a latinized version.¹ His father died before he was born, and he and his brothers and sisters were raised by their mother. In 1575, Arminius went to study with Rudolphus Snellius, a professor at the University of Marburg. While Arminius was there, his family was killed in the Spanish massacre of Oudewater. The next year he enrolled in the new university at Leiden. It was there that he began his academic and ministerial career in earnest, as well as his serious interaction with the confessional theology of the Reformed Church in the Netherlands. After graduation from Leiden in 1581, he went to Geneva to study under Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor. He left there to study at Basel for a year but returned and studied at Geneva until 1586.

In 1587 Arminius began a pastorate in Amsterdam and was ordained the next year. Before assuming his pastorate, he traveled with his friend Adrian Junius to Italy and studied philosophy for seven months at the University of Padua. He said that the experience made the Roman Church appear to him “more foul, ugly, and detestable” than he could have imagined.² However, some of his later detractors used the trip to suggest that he had sympathies with Rome, “that he had kissed the pope’s shoe, become acquainted with the Jesuits, and cherished a familiar intimacy with Cardinal Bellarmine.”³

In 1590 Arminius married Lijbset Reael, a daughter of a member of the city council. About this time he became involved in theological controversy. He was asked to refute the teachings of Dirck Coornhert, a humanist who had criticized Calvinism, and two ministers at Delft who had written an anti-Calvinist pamphlet. The traditional view was that Arminius, in his attempt to refute these anti-Calvinist teachings, converted from Calvinism to anti-Calvinism. Yet Carl Bangs has shown that there is no evidence that he ever held strict Calvinist views. At any rate, he became involved in controversy over the doctrines of the strong Calvinists. In 1591 he preached on Romans 7, arguing (against many Calvinists’ view) that the person described in verses 14–24 was regenerate.

A minister named Petrus Plancius led the charge against Arminius. Plancius labeled Arminius a Pelagian, alleging that he had moved away from the Belgic Confession of Faith and the Heidelberg Catechism, advocating anti-Reformed views on predestination and perfectionism. Arminius insisted that his theology was in line with that of the Reformed Church and its confessional standards, the Belgic Confession of Faith and Heidelberg Catechism, and the Amsterdam burgomasters sided with him. About a year later, after Arminius preached a series of sermons on Romans 9, Plancius again leveled accusations against him. The latter insisted that his teachings were in line with Article 16 of the Belgic Confession, and the consistory accepted his explanation, urging peace until the matter could be decided by a general synod.

For the next ten years, Arminius enjoyed a relatively peaceful pastorate and avoided theological controversy. During this decade, he wrote a great deal on theology (many things that were never published in his lifetime), including extensive works on Romans 7 and 9 as well as a long correspondence with the Leiden Calvinist Francis Junius. In 1602, there was an effort to get Arminius named to a post at the University of Leiden, but Leiden professor Franciscus Gomarus led an opposition to Arminius’s appointment. Still, the Leiden burgomasters appointed Arminius as professor of theology in May 1603. Soon he was awarded a doctorate in theology.

Arminius would spend the last six years of his life at Leiden, struggling with tuberculosis but always in a firestorm of theological controversy. The primary source of the controversy was predestination. Another issue of dispute was the convening of a national synod. Arminius’s side wanted a national synod convened with power to make revisions to the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism, while the strict Calvinists relied more on local synods. In 1607 the States General brought together a conference to prepare for a national synod. Arminius recommended the revision of the confessional documents but was voted down. He continued to be accused of false teaching, which resulted in his petitioning the States General to inquire into his case.

Eventually, Arminius and Gomarus appeared before the High Court in 1608 to make their respective cases. This was the occasion for Arminius’s famous Declaration of Sentiments.⁴ In that work, Arminius forthrightly argued against unconditional election. He concluded by asking again for a national synod with hopes for a revision of the Confession. Gomarus appeared before the States General and accused Arminius of errors on not only original sin, divine foreknowledge, predestination, regeneration, good works, and the possibility of apostasy, but also the Trinity and biblical authority. While the States General did not support Gomarus, the controversy became more heated.

In August of 1609, the States General invited Arminius and Gomarus back for a conference. They were each to bring four other colleagues. Yet Arminius’s illness, which had been worsening, made it impossible for him to continue the conference, which was dismissed. The States General asked the two men to submit their views in writing within two weeks. Arminius never completed his, owing to his illness, and he died on October 19, 1609.

Arminius’s Theological Context

To understand Arminius’s life as a theologian, one must understand the historical background of confessional theology in the Reformed Church in the Netherlands during his lifetime. Most of the interpretations of Arminius’s theology have been based on misconceptions about Arminius’s life and context.⁵ Carl Bangs noted that interpreters of Arminius commonly misunderstand basic facts about him and his context.⁶ They mistakenly think that Arminius was reared and educated amidst Calvinism and accepted Genevan Calvinism. They also misunderstand that as a student of Theodore Beza he accepted supralapsarianism and that, while preparing to refute Dirck Coornhert, he changed his mind and went over to Coornhert’s humanism and that thus his theology was a polemic against Reformed theology. None of these things, as Bangs has shown, are true.⁷

Arminius was not predisposed to a supralapsarian view of predestination. He rather shared the views of numerous Reformed theologians and pastors before him. The origins of the Reformed Church in the Netherlands were diverse, both historically and theologically. When Calvin published his views on predestination in the 1540s, many within the Reformed churches reacted negatively. When Sabastien Castellio disagreed with Calvin’s view of predestination, he was banished from Geneva but was given asylum by the Reformed in Basel and soon offered a professorship there. It was said that, in Basel, “if one wishes to scold another, he calls him a Calvinist.”⁸

Another Reformed theologian who reacted negatively to Calvin’s doctrine of predestination was Jerome Bolsec, who settled in Geneva in 1550. When Calvin and Beza sent a list of Bolsec’s errors to the Swiss churches, they were disappointed with the response. The church of Basel urged that Calvin and Bolsec try to emphasize their similarities. The ministers of Bern reminded Calvin of the many biblical texts that refer to God’s universal grace. Even Heinrich Bullinger disagreed with Calvin’s soteriology. Bangs notes that “the most consistent resistance to [Calvin’s] predestination theory came from the German-speaking cantons.” Even in Geneva there was a fair amount of resistance. This is evidenced by the presence of Charles Perrot, whose views diverged from Calvin’s, on the faculty of the University of Geneva even during Beza’s lifetime.⁹

“From the very beginnings of the introduction of Reformed religion in the Low Countries,” says Bangs, “the milder views of the Swiss cantons were in evidence.” Because of Roman Catholic persecution, the first Dutch Reformed synod was held at the Reformed church in Emden. The church’s pastor, Albert Hardenberg, who was closer to Philip Melanchthon than to Calvin on predestination, exerted great influence on the early leaders in the Dutch Reformed churches—most notably Clement Martenson and John Isbrandtson, who openly opposed the spread of Genevan Calvinism in the Low Countries. At the Synod of Emden in 1571, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Belgic Confession of Faith were adopted. Both these documents allowed room for disagreement on the doctrines of grace and predestination, but some Geneva-educated ministers began attempts to enforce a stricter interpretation of them.¹⁰

Thus two parties arose in the Dutch Reformed Church. Those who were less inclined to a Calvinistic view of predestination tended to prefer a form of Erastianism (in which the magistrates controlled discipline in the church) and toleration toward Lutherans and Anabaptists, while the Genevan elements wanted strict adherence to Calvinism and Presbyterian church government. The laity, including the magistrates, tended toward the former, while more clergy tended toward the latter. However, a significant number of clergy clung to non-Calvinistic views of predestination. As Johannes Trapman notes, the States General “never wished to define the Reformed Religion so strictly as to exclude those who accepted only conditional predestination, that is ‘some’ ministers, ‘many’ magistrates, and ‘countless’ church members.”¹¹

As late as 1586, Caspar Coolhaes, a Reformed pastor in Leiden, after being excommunicated by the national synod at the Hague, was supported by the magistrates at Leiden.¹² The provincial synod of Haarlem of 1582 deposed and excommunicated him, an action opposed by the magistrates and some ministers of Leiden, the Hague, Dort, and Gouda. The Synod also attempted to force the Dutch churches to accept a rigid doctrine of predestination but did not succeed. As Bangs says, Coohaes “continued to write, with the support of the States of Holland and the magistrates of Leiden. A compromise reconciliation between the two factions was attempted, but it was not successful. This indicates something of a mixed situation in the Reformed churches of Holland at the time that Arminius was emerging as a theologian.”¹³ Thus there was no clear consensus on the doctrines of grace and predestination in the Dutch Reformed churches of Arminius’s time.¹⁴

The Remonstrants and the Synod of Dort

While Arminius was still living, some of the local synods required their ministers to state their views on the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism.¹⁵ This move concerned the States General, which saw this as a challenge to its power. Thus it ordered that the ministers in question submit their views to the States ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Introductory and Historical Questions
• Part 2: Questions About the Atonement and Justification
• Part 3: Questions About Free Will and Grace
• Part 4: Questions About Election and Regeneration
• Part 5: Questions About Perseverance and Apostasy