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"What the Arminian
wants to do is to arouse man's activity:
what we want to do is to kill it once for
all---to show him that he is lost and
ruined, and that his activities are not now
at all equal to the work of conversion; that
he must look upward. They seek to make the
man stand up: we seek to bring him down, and
make him feel that there he lies in the hand
of God, and that his business is to submit
himself to God, and cry aloud, 'Lord, save,
or we perish.' We hold that man is never so
near grace as when he begins to feel he can
do nothing at all. When he says, 'I can
pray, I can believe, I can do this, and I
can do the other,' marks of self-sufficiency
and arrogance are on his brow."
C. H. Spurgeon
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Arminianism
derives its name from Jacobus Arminius, Professor of Divinity at
Leyden University in Holland at the turn of the seventeenth
century. Arminius studied theology under Theodore Beza, Calvin's
successor. Beza was one of the stronger proponents of the
Reformed doctrine of predestination. But Arminius's theology
represented a retreat from this position. In some ways,
Arminius's theology was actually a return to the position of
Pelagianism taken by Roman Catholicism at the Council of Trent.
Arminius died
in 1609, almost a decade before the controversy over his
teachings peaked. That occurred in 1618, when a group of the
late professor's followers, known as the Remonstrants, issued a
protest in the form of Five Articles to the Reformed Church of
Holland. Those articles were condemned by the Synod of Dordt in
1619. The synod's five-point reply was an article-by-article
refutation of the Remonstrants. (The position defined by the
Synod has come to be known popularly as "the five points of
Calvinism," though the five points were actually a response the
Arminian Articles. Calvin himself never systematized his
doctrine into five points).
The Canons of the Synod of Dordt
thus constituted the Reformation's official reply to the
Remonstrants. The Remonstrants were expelled from the Reformed
Church, and Arminianism was tagged as a deviant doctrine. Far
from dealing a crushing blow to the movement, however, the Synod
of Dordt merely became the starting point for the underground
spread of the doctrine. Today Arminianism is surely the majority
view in Protestant churches.
There are many strains of Arminianism. The classic Arminianism
of the Remonstrants had much in common with semi-pelagianism
(a compromise position between the radical free-will doctrine of
Pelagius and the strong predestinarian views of Augustine).
In the eighteenth century, John Wesley adopted Arminian doctrine
and refined it with a strong evangelical emphasis on the
Reformed doctrine of justification by faith.
From Hall
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