The five points of Calvinism were written as a reply to one Dutchman
Jacobus Arminius trained under Calvin's own successor in Geneva, then spent his career quietly questioning the harshest reading of predestination. He died in 1609, but his ideas so alarmed the Dutch Reformed establishment that the Synod of Dort drew up the famous five points of Calvinism specifically to answer him.
He was born Jakob Hermanszoon in Oudewater, in the province of Utrecht, in 1559 or 1560. His father, a weapons maker, died before the boy could know him, and his mother was killed when Spanish troops massacred the town in 1575. A priest with Protestant leanings, Theodorus Aemilius, took him in; after Aemilius died, the Oudewater-born mathematician Rudolph Snellius helped him reach Marburg and then the new university at Leiden, where he studied from 1576 to 1582.
Leiden was Reformed but surprisingly porous. One of his teachers, Johann Kolmann, warned that stressing divine sovereignty too hard turned God into a tyrant, and a local pastor argued that heretics should not be executed. In 1582 Arminius moved to Geneva to study under Theodore Beza, got into trouble for using Ramist logic, and decamped to Basel. There, at about 24, he turned down an honorary doctorate as too young and went back to finish under Beza, who later sent Amsterdam a glowing reference praising his sharp mind.
Amsterdam called him as a pastor in 1587, and he was ordained the following year. In 1590 he married Lijsbet Reael, daughter of a leading merchant-poet of the city's Reformation. Preaching through Paul's letter to the Romans, he argued in 1591 that believers renewed by grace need not stay enslaved to sin, and his sermons on Romans 9 leaned on justification by faith rather than on God's decree to save some and damn others. Early on, the church court had asked him to rebut Dirck Coornhert, a critic of Beza's hard line.
Plague deaths at Leiden in 1602 opened a theology chair, and from 1603 he taught there. His colleague Franciscus Gomarus, a Fleming and fierce Calvinist, turned rival; the quarrel went public on 7 February 1604 when a student defended Arminius's theses on predestination and Gomarus arranged a counter-disputation. After Arminius died in October 1609, his challenge to the Belgic Confession fed both the Remonstrant movement and the Synod of Dort.
Source: Jacobus Arminius
