A Dutch pastor's quarrel over predestination reshaped Baptists, Methodists and Pentecostals
Jacobus Arminius was trained by Calvin's hand-picked successor, then rejected his teacher's view that God unconditionally picks who will be saved. His followers were purged, jailed and exiled in the Netherlands, yet the idea that grace is offered to everyone and can be refused spread across Protestantism.
Arminius, a Dutch pastor and theologian who lived from 1560 to 1609, studied under Theodore Beza. After working through scripture he concluded that God's election is of believers, making salvation conditional on faith rather than decreed in advance. He set out his position before the magistrates of the States General in The Hague in his Declaration of Sentiments of 1608. After his death his supporters, called the Remonstrants, drafted the Five Articles of Remonstrance in 1610, spelling out where they parted from strict Calvinism.
Two core teachings define the tradition. God gives prevenient grace to all people, preparing them for new life, and the grace that brings regeneration and ongoing holiness can be resisted. The movement has two main branches, the classical form tied to Arminius and a Wesleyan form.
The ideas were not wholly new. The Waldensians had stressed free choice over fixed destiny before the Reformation, and the Anabaptist Balthasar Hubmaier argued something close to Arminius's view nearly a century earlier. In the Netherlands, though, the dispute turned political. Calvinists won over Prince Maurice of Nassau, who removed Arminian magistrates and summoned a national synod at Dordrecht. The Synod of Dort seated 102 Dutch Calvinists and barred 13 Arminians. Remonstrants were then ousted, imprisoned, banished or silenced, and only twelve years later did Holland grant them legal protection.
England had its own parallel strand; the Thirty-nine Articles of 1571 were vague enough to fit either camp. The first Baptists, led by Thomas Helwys, became known as General Baptists for their belief that atonement is offered to all. In the 1770s John Wesley, clashing with George Whitefield and accused of semi-Pelagianism, embraced the Arminian label, even though he knew little of Arminius's own writings. Methodists in the eighteenth century and Pentecostals in the twentieth carried the outlook forward.
Source: Arminianism
