Justified True Belief

(●) The Dutch pastor who asked whether God chooses a person before or after that person believes, and gave an answer half of Protestantism has carried ever since. + Ask a churchgoer today what an Arminian is and you will usually get an answer about free will, as though the man had spent his life defending the human ability to choose God. He spent it defending almost the opposite. Jacobus Arminius held that a fallen person, left to himself, has no power at all toward God, and he said so in print, in a public university disputation, in words as strong as anything his opponents wrote. What he would not grant was that the grace which does all the work is a force nobody can turn down. That one refusal split the Dutch Reformed church, and the split outlived him by four centuries. He was a parish minister in Amsterdam for fifteen years and a professor at Leiden for six, and in those six years he was investigated, denounced from pulpits, and accused of three things at once. He was called a Pelagian, which meant a man who thinks a sinner can make the first move toward God under his own power. He was called a Socinian, which meant a man who denies that the Son is God. And he was accused of secretly working for Rome. He answered all of it in the autumn of 1608 before the assembled States of Holland, the body that governed the province, and he was dead within a year, before he was fifty. And here is the odd thing about the man whose name became a party. Arminius put almost nothing of his own into print while he lived. Nearly everything under his name, including the Declaration of Sentiments that states his position most fully, was published after he died. The five articles that made his name a label were written by his friends in 1610, the year after the funeral, when they petitioned the government to be left in peace to hold them. That petition was called a Remonstrance, and its signers have been the Remonstrants ever since. The Dutch Reformed church answered them at a national synod that sat at Dordrecht from 1618 to 1619, the Synod of Dort, and the synod’s point-by-point replies to those five articles are what the English-speaking world has known ever since as the five points of Calvinism. The order surprises people. The Remonstrants asked first, and Dort answered.

(●) c. 1560 AD: Born in a cutler’s house in a small Dutch town, and fatherless before he could remember it. + Oudewater sat on the Hollandse IJssel between Gouda and Utrecht, a town of a few thousand people whose name means, roughly, Old Water. His father, Harmen Jacobszoon, was a cutler there, which is to say he made knives and sold them. His mother was Angelica. There were three children in the house, and Harmen died while the youngest of them was still an infant, which left the widow to raise all three on very little. The boy was christened Jacob Harmenszoon, which is simply Jacob, Harmen’s son, the ordinary Dutch way of naming a child. Later, as scholars of that century liked to do, he traded it for a Latin name that sounded near enough: Jacobus Arminius, after the Germanic chieftain who destroyed three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. Melanchthon had done the same thing with his own surname, and nobody thought it strange. Help came from a priest named Theodorus Aemilius, who had said mass for years and then quietly stopped, having come to believe the Reformed doctrine, and who moved from town to town to stay out of the authorities’ reach before settling at Utrecht. He took the fatherless boy in, put him in school there, and taught him Latin and Greek along with the habit of daily Scripture reading. Arminius lived with him until he was about fifteen, when the old man died. The birth year is a convention rather than a record. The traditional date, 10 October 1560, rests on no document anyone has produced, and his modern biographer Carl Bangs argued for 1559 on the evidence of the university registers. The table of his life is built on estimates from the end backwards, which is why the dates of his childhood carry a "c." and his later years do not.

(●) 1575 AD: Spanish troops destroyed Oudewater, and he walked home to find his mother, brother and sister among the dead. + When Aemilius died, another man from Oudewater stepped in: Rudolph Snellius, a mathematician of real distinction who had left the Netherlands to escape the Spanish and was teaching at Marburg in Hesse. Passing through his home town, he found his young townsman without a guardian and took him back to Marburg to study. Arminius had hardly settled there when the news came, in August of that year, that Oudewater had fallen. The Dutch provinces were nine years into the revolt against Philip II of Spain, and the town had held out under siege; when it was taken, the garrison was put to the sword, the ministers were hanged, the houses were burned, and the inhabitants were killed without much regard to age or sex. His earliest biographers say he wept for a fortnight and then went, on foot, to see for himself. He found rubble, and among the dead his mother, his brother and his sister. Then he walked back to Marburg, the whole way. The detail comes from the funeral oration Petrus Bertius preached over him in 1609, so it reaches us from friends rather than from a register, but nobody who knew him doubted it. Years later he wrote a few lines of Latin elegiac verse for a friend at Delft about the place, and they are the only glimpse anyone has of how he carried it: "In Holland once (ah! once) there stood a town, Now by the Spaniard’s rage in ruins thrown", in John Guthrie’s English rendering. In the same year the Prince of Orange founded a university at Leiden, as the reward for that city’s own heroic siege. Arminius came back to Holland, spent a while in Rotterdam among other refugees, and entered the new university in 1576 as one of its first students. He stayed six years, read Hebrew, mathematics and astronomy alongside theology, and fell in love with the logic of Peter Ramus, the French philosopher whose streamlined method, which cut a subject into branching pairs a student could take in at a glance, was then the fashionable alternative to Aristotle. That preference would cost him later.

(●) 1582 AD: Amsterdam paid for his training abroad, and Theodore Beza wrote back that they hoped the best of him. + In 1581 the senators and the ministers of Amsterdam recommended him to the heads of the city’s merchants’ guild as a young man worth investing in. The guild agreed to pay for the rest of his studies out of its yearly proceeds, and on 13 September he signed a bond in return: once ordained he would serve the church of that city for the remainder of his life, and would take no other post anywhere without the leave of the city senate. It was an ordinary arrangement for a promising student with no money, and it shaped the next twenty years of his life. He went straight to Geneva, drawn by Theodore Beza, who had succeeded Calvin and was then the most respected Reformed theologian in Europe. He also went on teaching Ramist logic to anyone who would listen, which offended the philosophy faculty enough that he moved on to Basel for a year. There he lectured so well that the theology faculty offered him a doctorate on his departure. He turned it down, saying he was too young for it. Then he went back to Geneva, calmer this time, and stayed three more years. In 1583 Martin Lydius, a minister of Amsterdam, wrote on behalf of the leading men of the city and the church to ask what they were getting for their money, and on 3 June Beza answered for the whole theological faculty: "from the time Arminius returned to us from Basle, his life and learning both have so approved themselves to us, that we hope the best of him in every respect." The men who later accused him of never having been sound would have to explain that letter away. In 1586 he took a student’s tour through Italy, mainly to hear Giacomo Zabarella lecture on philosophy at Padua, and he looked in on Rome. Rumor followed him home: that he had kissed the pope’s slipper, that he had been thick with the Jesuits. His patrons were displeased until he explained himself, and the story was still being recycled against him twenty years later.

(●) 1588 AD: Ordained in Amsterdam, he preached his way through Romans and found his own reading of it unsettling him. + He was ordained on 11 August 1588 and became one of the ministers of the Dutch church in Amsterdam, a post he held for fifteen years. Two years later, on 16 September 1590, he married Lijsbet Reael, whose father Laurens Jacobszoon Reael was a magistrate of the city and had risked his property and his life for the Reformation under Spanish rule. They had nine children, seven sons and two daughters. He seems to have been thoroughly happy at home, which is worth saying about a man whose working life was one long quarrel. He preached consecutively, book by book, and in 1591 he reached the seventh chapter of Romans. The wretched man who does what he hates, Arminius argued, is not the apostle describing his own Christian experience but a man under the law and not yet free. In 1593 he came to the ninth chapter, the hardest predestination text in the New Testament, and read it as being about God’s freedom to choose which kind of person he will justify, meaning accept as righteous and receive into his favor, rather than about the eternal fate of named individuals. Both sermons drew fire. His colleague Petrus Plancius accused him of Pelagianism, which meant, and still means, the teaching of the British monk Pelagius that a person can make the first move toward God by his own unaided will. The story his early biographers tell about how his mind changed goes like this. Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, a layman of real courage who had fought the Inquisition and now attacked the Reformed doctrine of an absolute decree, was making trouble the ministers could not answer. The church court of Amsterdam asked Arminius to refute him. At the same time Martin Lydius, by then professor at Franeker, sent him a pamphlet by two ministers of Delft and asked him to defend Beza against it. Arminius set to work, weighed both sides, and found he could not answer the objections, and so ended up holding the position he had been hired to demolish. It is a good story and it may be partly true, but it should be handled as tradition rather than as record. Carl Bangs, going through the sources in the twentieth century, found no evidence that Arminius had ever held the strict view he is supposed to have abandoned, and good reason to think his doubts were older than the commission. What is certain is that from about 1590 he began, cautiously, to say in sermons what he thought, and that he did not say all of it.

(●) 1602 AD: Plague swept Amsterdam, and he went into the houses no one else would enter. + The pestilence that ran through Holland that year spared no rank. Arminius, with a wife and small children and almost nothing to leave them, admitted to his closest friend, the court preacher Johannes Uytenbogaert, that the funeral counts had frightened him, and then wrote again when the fear had passed: "Thus far have I committed myself and my life to the Divine mercy, waiting daily till he require it of me, and repay a better with usury; and this I do (I say it fearlessly, that you may rejoice) with a quiet, tranquil, and unperturbed mind." His biographer Caspar Brandt, writing from the reports of men who had been there, tells one scene from that summer. Walking through a poor quarter, Arminius heard wailing from a small house, and learned that the whole household had the plague and were burning with thirst. He gave money to the neighbors standing outside to fetch a drink. When none of them would carry it in, he went in himself, and stayed to comfort every person in the house. The same plague took Franciscus Junius, the professor of divinity at Leiden, in October of that year, and that death opened the chair which changed the rest of Arminius’s life. The two men had already exchanged a long and courteous set of letters about predestination, in which Junius laid out his position and Arminius pressed him on it. Arminius wrote a reply that Junius kept on his shelf and never answered.

(●) 1603 AD: He took the Leiden chair over loud objection, and spent his six years in it under investigation. + The curators of the university wanted him; Amsterdam, holding his bond, did not want to give him up; and the transfer went through only after Uytenbogaert and Prince Maurice himself intervened. He was made Doctor of Divinity on 11 July 1603 and gave the customary oration, on the priesthood of Christ. Then he began to teach. His colleague Franciscus Gomarus had opposed the appointment and never stopped opposing the man. Their disagreement was a narrow one, much narrower than the noise around it, and almost everyone gets it wrong. Both men held that God elects, which is the theologian’s word for God choosing, from eternity, who will be saved. Neither of them doubted that for a moment. The question between them was what God is looking at when he chooses. Gomarus held that God decreed, before he had even decreed to create, which individuals would be saved and which lost, and that the creation and the fall of mankind were the means by which that earlier decree would be carried out. This is called supralapsarian, from the Latin for "above" or "before the fall," because the decree stands above the fall and is settled without so much as a glance at it. Arminius held that the decree about individuals comes last rather than first, and that when God makes it he is looking at people as fallen, and as believing or refusing to believe. From 1604 the two men were disputing in public, and the students took sides. The charges against Arminius multiplied, and they came from three directions at once. First, he was called a Pelagian for what he said about grace. Second, he was called a Socinian, a follower of the anti-trinitarian Faustus Socinus, the Italian who denied that Christ is God at all. That charge grew out of a quarrel with his colleague Lucas Trelcatius over a single point of trinitarian grammar. Arminius insisted that the Son has his Godhead from the Father, and he would not say that the Son’s deity is from himself. He was not withholding anything from the Son. He held the Son to be fully and truly God, and was saying only that the Son receives that Godhead eternally from the Father, which is precisely what the Nicene fathers meant by eternal generation: the Son begotten of the Father with no beginning, and no moment when he was not. His accusers heard the refusal and not the doctrine underneath it. Third, there was Rome, which the Italian tour of 1586 had made easy to insinuate. At his disputation on the call of man to salvation in July 1609 a stranger whom some in the hall took for a Jesuit argued against him from the floor, and Gomarus stalked out afterwards saying the reins had been remarkably well loosened for the papacy that day. In 1605 the university made him its rector, which suggests the faculty as a whole thought better of him than his loudest opponent did. He laid the office down in February 1606 with an address on reconciling the religious dissensions among Christians, which is the warmest thing he ever wrote and the least heeded.

(●) 1608 – 1609 AD: He laid his whole case before the States of Holland, and died the next autumn with the quarrel unsettled. + By 1608 the rumors had done enough damage that he asked to be heard. On 30 October he stood before the States of Holland at the Hague and read what is now called the Declaration of Sentiments: a survey of the current doctrines of predestination with his objections to each, then his own position in four decrees, then plain statements on providence, free will, grace, perseverance, assurance, the divinity of the Son, justification, and last of all a request that the Dutch Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism be examined in a national synod. Earlier that year, on 5 April, he had written a long letter to Hippolytus a Collibus, the Elector Palatine’s ambassador, answering the same charges, and an apology against thirty-one articles that had been attributed to him by his opponents. In August 1609 the States summoned both professors for a final conference. Arminius and Gomarus took justification first, then predestination, then the grace of God and the free will of man, and last the perseverance of true believers. On grace Arminius said he would admit every operation of grace anyone could show at work in a person’s conversion, provided no grace was maintained that could not be resisted. Gomarus answered that the word resisted was carrying too much weight, and that the old error of the Semi-Pelagians was hiding inside it. The Semi-Pelagians were the fifth-century writers who granted that grace does the saving work and still left the first stirring of consent to the sinner, and in Gomarus’s judgment a grace that has to wait and see whether it will be turned down comes out in the same place. Then the conference stopped, because the States could see that Arminius was too ill to go on. He had been sick since February with a disorder the best physicians in Holland could not arrest: fever, cough, labored breathing, broken sleep, wasting, and a dimness in the left eye. When word got out about the eye, a few of his opponents amused themselves by applying the curse of Zechariah 11:17 to him, the woe pronounced on the worthless shepherd who deserts his flock, whose arm is to wither and whose eye is to be struck blind. On 12 September he wrote to the States apologizing that he could not finish the document they had asked for, and adding that he stood by his confession and was ready to appear with it, that very hour, before the judgment seat of Christ. He set his house in order and dictated a will that begins by committing his soul to God, "in whose presence I testify that in simplicity and sincerity I have walked with a good conscience in my office and calling; very anxiously and scrupulously on my guard not to propound or teach aught which, by diligent application to the study of the Sacred Scriptures, I had not previously found to be in strictest harmony with these writings." His student Simon Episcopius came from Franeker and sat by the bed for days. He prayed constantly out of Hebrews 13:20, calling Christ "the great shepherd of the sheep" and asking him to be present with an infirm and afflicted sheep of his own. On 19 October 1609, about noon, he died, in the forty-ninth year of his age, leaving his widow with nine children, the eldest barely seventeen.

What He Taught

(T1) God’s first decree was to appoint a Savior, and only afterwards to choose who is saved. + A decree, in this kind of theology, is simply something God eternally purposed to do. Nobody in the argument doubted that God has decrees, or that he chooses. What they fought over was the order: when God settled on a plan for saving sinners, what did he settle first? Think of a man founding a hospital. He decides there will be a hospital, and that it will heal the sick, long before there is a list of patients; the list belongs to the plan, but it is not the first thing in it. Arminius read God’s saving purpose that way, and laid it out in four decrees. - First, Christ. God appointed his Son as Mediator, Redeemer, Savior, Priest and King, to destroy sin by his death and win back the salvation that had been lost. - Second, the terms. God decreed to receive into favor those who repent and believe, and to leave in sin and under wrath those who will not. - Third, the means. God decreed to administer, sufficiently and effectively, everything needed to bring people to repentance and faith: the preaching, the calling, the grace. - Fourth, the persons. God decreed to save and to condemn particular people, and this decree rests on his foreknowledge of who would believe under that administration of grace, and who would not. Two things follow from that order, and both of them made his opponents furious. The first is that election becomes election in Christ. God does not draw up a list of names and then cast about for a way to save the people on it; the Savior is settled first, and to be chosen is to be chosen in him. Arminius thought the apostle had said as much: "he chose us in him before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4). The second is that the choosing of particular people rests on foreknowledge, on God seeing in advance who would believe (Romans 8:29). That is the half his critics would not have. Let the decree wait on what the creature does, they said, and God’s eternal purpose has been made to hang on us, and grace is no longer free. Arminius’s reply was short. A gift is not less a gift for being refusable, and his fourth decree still saves nobody who has not been carried the whole way there by the grace of the third.

(Q) "The First absolute decree of God concerning the salvation of sinful man, is that by which he decreed to appoint his Son, Jesus Christ, for a Mediator, Redeemer, Savior, Priest and King, who might destroy sin by his own death, might by his obedience obtain the salvation which had been lost, and might communicate it by his own virtue." + Source: Declaration of Sentiments (1608), "My own Sentiments on Predestination" (Nichols translation). He is standing in front of the assembled States of Holland, having just spent an hour on what he thinks is wrong with the prevailing account, and this is the first positive sentence of his own (T1). Everything else in his system hangs off the order of that sentence.

(T2) Nobody takes a single step toward God unless grace moves him first. + This is the point on which Arminius is most often misrepresented, and the misrepresentation started in his lifetime. Picture a man asleep in a burning house. He is not tied down and nobody is holding him in bed, but he is asleep, and the smoke has already dulled him; he will die there unless somebody comes in and wakes him. He cannot wake himself, because that is what being asleep means. Whatever he does afterwards, on the stairs and out the door, begins with someone else’s hand on his shoulder. That is roughly Arminius’s picture of a person before grace. He taught what the older theologians called total inability: that fallen human beings cannot think, will, or do anything truly good toward God on their own, because the mind is dark, the affections are disordered, and the will is in bondage. He quoted Jesus on it, "apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5), and then quoted Augustine pressing every word of that sentence. The grace that meets this condition he called, borrowing the old word, preventing grace, from the Latin praevenire, to come before; the modern word for the same thing is prevenient. It goes before the will, wakes it, and stays with it. So he was not a Pelagian, whatever was said from Amsterdam pulpits. Pelagius held that a person can take the first step by nature; Arminius held that there is no first step at all without grace, and he said so in the lecture hall where his students could hear it and write it down.

(Q) "In this state, the free will of man towards the true good is not only wounded, maimed, infirm, bent, and weakened; but it is also imprisoned, destroyed, and lost. And its powers are not only debilitated and useless unless they be assisted by grace, but it has no powers whatever except such as are excited by Divine grace." + Source: Public Disputation XI, "On the Free Will of Man and Its Powers," section 7 (Nichols translation). The state he means is the state of a person under the dominion of sin, after the fall and before grace (T2). A public disputation was a formal classroom event at which a professor’s theses were defended in front of the university, so these are not private musings; they are what Leiden heard him say.

(T3) Grace can be resisted, and that single word is the whole quarrel. + Arminius said it himself, and it is the most useful sentence in the whole controversy for a reader trying to find the real fault line. The dispute, he wrote, is not about which actions belong to grace, since he granted as many of those as anyone ever did. It is about the mode of operation, and it reduces to one question: is the grace of God a certain irresistible force? Say it in kitchen terms. A doctor who diagnoses you, prescribes for you, brings the medicine to your house, opens the bottle and puts the spoon in your hand has done everything; you are not going to get well on your own initiative. But you can still spit it out. Arminius thought Scripture describes people doing exactly that, and he pointed to Stephen’s charge against the council: "you always resist the Holy Spirit" (Acts 7:51). His opponents were not fools about this, and their answer deserves to be heard at its strength. Gomarus replied at the Hague that the word irresistible is slippery, and that the Reformed claim is narrower than it sounds: not that grace bulldozes a person, but that in regeneration the Spirit works so effectively that the resistance of the flesh is overcome, so that everyone who receives that grace is in fact converted. Otherwise, he said, the decisive factor in salvation ends up being the sinner’s response, and the old Semi-Pelagian error is back in the room wearing a new coat. Both men were reading the same Bible, and the texts each found easiest are the texts the other found hardest: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44) on one side, the prophets pleading with a people who would not come on the other.

(Q) "I ascribe to grace the commencement, the continuance and the consummation of all good, and to such an extent do I carry its influence, that a man, though already regenerate, can neither conceive, will, nor do any good at all, nor resist any evil temptation, without this preventing and exciting, this following and co-operating grace." + Source: Declaration of Sentiments (1608), "The Grace of God" (Nichols translation). He is answering the report that he gives too much to free will, and the next sentences narrow the disagreement to a single point: the whole controversy, he says, reduces to the question whether the grace of God is a certain irresistible force (T3). Preventing here has its old meaning of coming before, not of hindering.

(T4) Whether a true believer can finally fall away, he would not say. + Most people assume that "Arminian" means believing a Christian can lose his salvation. Arminius did not teach that. He also did not teach the opposite. Standing before the States of Holland, with every reason to give a clean answer that would make his life easier, he told them he had never taught that a believer can totally or finally fall away, that certain passages of Scripture nevertheless looked to him as though they pointed that way, that the answers he had been shown to those passages did not satisfy him, and that weighty passages were produced on the other side too. He proposed, instead, that the question be searched out from the Scriptures in a synod. That was his instinct throughout: when he could not see his way, he asked for the matter to be opened rather than closed. There is a kind of courage in that which is easy to miss. A man under investigation for heresy, who is already suspected on four other counts, says in public that he has an unresolved question and declines to pretend otherwise. It is also, in fairness, a cost. Pastors have to say something to frightened people, and the men who came after him did answer the question, with a confidence he had not reached.

(Q) "Though I here openly and ingenuously affirm, I never taught that a true believer can either totally or finally fall away from the faith, and perish; yet I will not conceal, that there are passages of Scripture which seem to me to wear this aspect." + Source: Declaration of Sentiments (1608), "The Perseverance of the Saints" (Nichols translation). In the same paragraph he grants that passages produced for unconditional perseverance are worthy of much consideration, and asks for a synod to examine the whole question from Scripture (T4).

(T5) Any doctrine that ends with God as the author of sin has gone wrong somewhere. + When a fire investigator traces a house fire back through the wiring and the timeline and arrives at the conclusion that the fire brigade started it, he does not publish; he goes back and finds his mistake. Arminius treated one conclusion the same way. If a chain of reasoning about God’s decrees ends with God being the author of sin, the chain has a bad link, however respectable each step looked. His argument against the supralapsarian account, the one that settles the fate of individuals before it settles the creation, ran in four steps, and its whole force is in the way they stack up. - God absolutely decreed to display his justice and his mercy in the salvation of some and the damnation of others. - That display cannot happen unless there is sin to save from and to punish, so God ordained that man should sin. - God therefore withheld the grace that would have kept him from sinning. - And God then so works upon man that the sin follows necessarily. Put those four together, Arminius said, and you no longer have a God who permits sin. You have a God who sins, and a man who cannot properly be said to sin at all, since he was moved to it by a force he could not resist. He set that conclusion beside what the apostle says plainly: "God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one" (James 1:13). His opponents denied the inference, and they had a distinction to deny it with: God decrees to permit the sin that creatures freely commit, and permitting is not causing, so the guilt stays where it belongs. Arminius knew the distinction and did not think it survived the addition of a decree that makes the sin unavoidable. His own account of providence, incidentally, was not the loose one he is sometimes given: he insisted that nothing in the world happens by chance, and that even the free acts of rational creatures fall under God’s government, with one caution attached, that this must never be made to mean God is the cause of sin.

(Q) "From these premises, we deduce, as a further conclusion, that God really sins. Because, according to this doctrine, he moves to sin by an act that is unavoidable, and according to his own purpose and primary intention, without having received any previous inducement to such an act from any preceding sin or demerit in man." + Source: Declaration of Sentiments (1608), the fourteenth objection to supralapsarian predestination (Nichols translation). This is a reduction to absurdity, not an accusation: he is saying what he thinks the doctrine implies, not what its defenders believe (T5). The same passage draws two more conclusions from the same premises, that God would be the only sinner, and that sin would not be sin.

(Q) "It is my special wish, that there may now be among us a similar cessation from the asperities of religious warfare, and that both parties would abstain from writings full of bitterness, from sermons remarkable only for the invectives which they contain, and from the unchristian practice of mutual anathematizing and execration." + Source: Oration V, On Reconciling Religious Dissensions among Christians, delivered 8 February 1606 when he laid down the rectorship of the University of Leiden (Nichols translation). He had been comparing church quarrels to long wars, which are usually stopped by a truce before anyone can negotiate a peace. What he wanted next was a free and orderly synod at which the disagreeing parties would actually sit together, laymen included, and test each side’s reasons against Scripture. A synod came, nine years after his death, and it was not that kind of synod.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) A year after his funeral his friends put his teaching into five articles, and the Synod of Dort answered them with the five points of Calvinism. + In 1610 more than forty ministers met under Uytenbogaert’s lead and drew up a petition to the States of Holland asking for toleration and setting out what they believed in five articles. The petition was called a Remonstrance, which is why they became the Remonstrants. The five articles are recognizably their dead friend’s: election of believers in Christ, an atonement intended for all though effective only for believers, the total inability of the natural man, grace that can be resisted, and, on perseverance, the same open question Arminius had left open, with a note that it needed more searching of Scripture. The reply came at Dordrecht, the Synod of Dort, which sat from November 1618 to May 1619 with delegates from England, the Palatinate, Switzerland and elsewhere as well as the Dutch churches. The Remonstrants were summoned, then treated as defendants rather than members, and dismissed. The Canons the synod issued answer the five articles in order, under four heads of doctrine, the third and the fourth taken together, and those answers are the famous five points of Calvinism. It is worth pausing on that, because the popular sequence is exactly backwards: the five points were not a summary of Calvin, they were a reply to five specific Dutch objections written by the friends of a man who had died nine years earlier. The aftermath was political as well as ecclesiastical, since the quarrel had become entangled with a struggle at the top of the Dutch state, between Prince Maurice, who commanded its armies, and Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the Land’s Advocate and the senior civil officer of Holland. Oldenbarnevelt, who had protected the Remonstrants, was executed in May 1619. The jurist Hugo Grotius was imprisoned for life and escaped in a book chest. About two hundred Remonstrant ministers were deposed, and the eighty or so who would not promise to stop preaching were banished. They organized in exile under Episcopius, and were tolerated again in the Netherlands from about 1630.

(†) John Wesley put the word on the cover of a magazine, and a whole wing of Protestantism has carried it since. + The name traveled further than the man. English separatists in Amsterdam absorbed the Dutch debate, and Thomas Helwys took its conclusions back to London, where the General Baptists took their name from their belief in a general atonement, meaning that Christ died for everyone, rather than a limited one, meaning that he died for the elect alone. A century and a half later John Wesley, preaching prevenient grace to colliers and weavers, adopted the label deliberately and founded a periodical in 1778 called The Arminian Magazine, having already published an essay in 1770 asking what an Arminian was, mostly to correct people who thought it meant a denial of original sin. Through Methodism the tradition passed into the holiness churches and into most of Pentecostalism, which makes it, counted by heads, one of the larger theological families in the world. Two honest qualifications belong here. First, much of what travels under the name is Wesley’s development rather than Arminius’s own text, and Wesley was more definite on several questions than Arminius ever was. Second, the English use of the word in the seventeenth century, when Archbishop Laud’s party was called Arminian, attached the label to a ceremonial and political program that has little to do with the Leiden professor’s actual arguments. What did travel intact is the pastoral center of it: that the gospel offer is sincere to everyone who hears it, that God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), and that a person who hears and refuses has not been shut out by a decree made before he existed.

(†) The scholars who corrected the caricature of him have mostly been Reformed. + For three centuries Arminius was read through the Canons of Dort, which is like reading a defendant through the verdict. The twentieth century went back to the texts. Carl Bangs, in Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (1971), showed that the dramatic conversion story rests on thin evidence and that Arminius had never been the strict predestinarian he was supposed to have stopped being. Richard Muller, a historian of Reformed orthodoxy writing from inside that tradition, showed in God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius (1991) that he was a trained scholastic, meaning a man schooled in the rigorous method of the universities, with its careful distinctions, its objections stated in full and its formal disputations, and that he used the same technical apparatus his opponents used. He was not a soft-hearted humanist chipping away at a system he did not understand. Muller also traced a debt that matters for present-day philosophy of religion. Arminius had read the Jesuit Luis de Molina, whose Concordia of 1588 proposed that God knows, besides all actual facts and all possibilities, what any free creature would freely do in any circumstance God might create. Molina called this middle knowledge, scientia media, because it sits between God’s knowledge of what must be and his knowledge of what he decides to make happen. Arminius used the idea to hold together two things he refused to give up, a God who governs everything and creatures whose choices are genuinely theirs. The same proposal is argued over today under the name Molinism, by Christian philosophers who have never read a word of Dutch. The result of all this work is a more useful disagreement. Most careful Reformed writers now grant that Arminius held to total depravity and the priority of grace, and most careful Arminian writers grant that Dort was answering a real difficulty and not inventing one. The two sides are still divided, and the division is about something, which is better than being divided about a caricature.

(†) He kept his position half-spoken for fifteen years, left one question unanswered, and drew one boundary he never re-examined. + The ledger has another column, and it is drawn from his own papers rather than from what his enemies said. - The silence. For something like fifteen years, from his Amsterdam pulpit and then from the Leiden lectern, he taught in private and hinted in public. His earliest biographers say plainly that he was guarded at first for the sake of peace. His opponents called that dissimulation and demanded to know what he actually held, and they were not wrong to want an answer. When it finally came, in 1608, the rumors had had fifteen years to harden, and a good part of what the Dutch church tore itself apart over was not his doctrine but a suspicion about his candor. Speaking earlier would have cost him his chair. It might have cost the church less. - The unfinished answer. Leaving the perseverance question open was intellectually honest and pastorally expensive (T4). He knew the texts pulled both ways and said so; he also left the people in his care, and the movement that took his name, to settle for themselves a question about whether a frightened believer can be lost. - The limit of his charity. The same will that commends his soul to God, and the same man who begged both parties to stop anathematizing each other, wrote that peace and unity of faith are to be sought among Christians "excluding the Papacy, with which no unity of faith, no bond of piety or Christian peace, can be maintained." He had watched Spanish troops kill his mother in the name of that church, and in 1609 almost every Dutch Protestant would have written the same clause without blinking. It is still a boundary he asked others to examine and never examined himself. None of that touches the thing he got right, which is that a Christian may say "I do not know yet" about a hard text and keep reading. The maxim he delighted in most was bona conscientia paradisus, a good conscience is a paradise, and the man who wrote it went to his grave with the argument lost, the synod ahead of him, and the conscience intact.