The Myth of Arminius: Anti-Predestinarian

By far, the most controversial topic engaged by Arminius was that of election, or predestination. He did not deny the doctrine, but he did not understand its particularities as did the Calvinists of his time, nor would have the early Church fathers. Just as in his day, when many accused him of corrupting the doctrine, the same charge is leveled against Arminius and Arminians today by modern day Calvinists.

Roger Olson notes that only "the most cynical scholar could claim that Arminius and Arminians deny predestination," stating further: 

Nevertheless, some Calvinists dispute the Arminian interpretation of predestination as unbiblical and illogical; Arminians often return the favor. 

In spite of widespread scholarly acknowledgment that Arminians do believe in predestination, popular Christian opinion has become firmly convinced that the difference between Calvinists and Arminians is that the former believe in predestination and the latter believe in free will. That has been elevated to the status of a truism in American pop theology and folk religion. But it is false.¹

False indeed! But much in the same way as Calvinists contend that Arminians do not believe in God's sovereignty (link), due to their qualifications of the term, Calvinists also insist that Arminians do not believe in election or predestination for the same reason.

Let us begin by examining and distinguishing between the words election and predestination. These two words are typically conflated when this topic is being debated. For over four centuries, the word predestination (as used by both Calvin and Arminius) has indicated those whom God has seen fit to save (i.e., their eternal destiny was determined beforehand). Strictly speaking, this concept belongs to our English word election, not predestination. 

The English translation predestination is rather unfortunate (cf. Eph. 1:5 ESV). The Greek word proorízō is translated as predestined in many if not most English Bibles. This is both unfortunate and unwarranted, for the word has nothing to do with one's destiny, strictly taken (i.e., for either heaven or hell).

This Greek word is a compound word: pró, before, and horízō, to set or determine. The resources Strong's, Thayer's, and Webster's grants the definition thusly: to determine beforehand. What has God determined beforehand? The New Living Translation renders Ephesians 1:5: "God decided in advance [predestined, in most translations] to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ." What God determined beforehand (predestined) is that those who would come to be in union with Jesus Christ would be adopted as God's own children.

The same method of interpretation can be used elsewhere: "In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will" (Eph. 1:11 NRSV). God predetermined for those in Christ to have (or be) an inheritance (cf. Rom. 8:17). 

At Romans 8:29-30, Paul writes: For those whom God knew beforehand, He also determined beforehand to be conformed to the image of His Son . . . and these whom He determined beforehand (to be conformed to the image of His Son), He also called (or, named as His own). Here we find God "knowing" His people beforehand, and determining something about them beforehand (the conforming of them to the image of His Son). Hence, to "predestine" is to determine beforehand.

The Bible indicates that God determined beforehand to adopt as His children those who would trust in Christ Jesus His Son (Ephesians 1:5; cf. 1 Cor. 1:21), making them His inheritance (Ephesians 1:11), conforming them to the image of His Son (Rom. 8:29), and calling or, better, naming them as His own (Rom 8:30). Hence predestination concerns the believer, not the unbeliever (or unregenerate).

So, when reading Arminius (or Calvin for that matter), one must consider that when he is speaking on the nature of predestination, he means election unto salvation or damnation, not of God's predetermination concerning believers, in conforming them to the image of His Son (Rom. 8:29, 30, Ephesians 1:5, 11).

Arminius indicates that he uses the word election in two senses: For the decree by which God is resolved to justify believers but to condemn unbelievers, and which is called by the Apostle Paul, "God's purpose of election" (Rom. 9:11 NRSV); and also, for the decree by which God is resolved to elect these or those nations and individuals "with the design of communicating to them the means of faith, but to pass by other nations of men."² Olson comments: 

Clearly, Arminius did believe in predestination. His definition even contains a hint of foreordination, but further examination of Arminius's writing reveals that the predestination of individuals is conditional while corporate predestination is unconditional. The "believers" that God decrees from all eternity to justify, adopt and endow with everlasting life is simply that group of people who accepts God's offer of the gift of faith; that is, those who do not resist prevenient grace. . . . The main point here, however, is that Arminius did not cast aside predestination. He defined it differently than most Calvinists of his day but in harmony with many medieval theologians.³

There are those persons who do not understand and hence misrepresent the concept of election according to God's foreknowledge. If God foreknows that a person will believe in Christ Jesus, so it is argued, then to what effect is God's election?

What should be noted is that those who advocate the foreknowledge view of election are merely taking certain texts of Scripture at face value. Paul writes: "For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined" (Rom. 8:29 NRSV). Peter confirms such when he writes to "those who are elect exiles in the Dispersion . . . according to the foreknowledge of God the Father" (1 Peter 1:1-2 ESV). No matter what one thinks of this foreknowledge view, what cannot be admitted is that the doctrine of election is to any degree denied by foreknowledge advocates. 

My judgment is that, for Arminius, God has always known people (by a simple, exhaustive knowledge) ultimately in two categories: believers and unbelievers. That is how Arminius can admit that God, by decree, has resolved "to justify believers and to condemn unbelievers." God did not, as the supralapsarian promotes, first decree to elect and to reprobate and then decree to create human beings in order to fulfill that first decree. Nor did God in any fashion, as the infralapsarian promotes, decree the fall and then decree to unconditionally elect whom He would save and whom He would reprobate; both are notions against which Arminius argues.⁴

Calvinist theologian Richard A. Muller further explains Arminius' idea of God's knowledge (foreknowledge) in its relation to His will: "Foreknowledge follows the divine will but is not identical with it -- its certainty rests upon the divine apprehension of the object, not upon the divine will concerning the object." He writes:

Arminius can say, therefore, "that things do not exist because God knows them as existing in the future, but that he knows future things because they are future." Arminius appears to follow the argument, first set forth by Boethius and later adopted by a majority of the medieval scholastics, that God, as eternal, sees things as they are: his knowledge does not precede the objects in time and recognize them as about to come into existence; rather it knows objects as they are in time from beyond time. What is future to me God knows as future to me because he simultaneously knows all things, whether they are past, or present, or future in relation to me.⁵

For Arminius and Arminians, generally speaking, the supra- and infralapsarian models of the Calvinism of their day led one to believe that God is the author of sin, and, as others would have it, makes God the worst kind of sinner.

God, as holy, must not be thought to decree or foreordain, strictly speaking, sin or evil. Also, to suggest that God would unconditionally reprobate the greater majority (cf. Matt. 7:13-14) of helpless sinners is to call into question God's integrity when He, seemingly and genuinely, offers salvation to and desires the salvation of all people (John 3:16; 3:36; 1 Tim. 2:4). Olson concludes this piece:

What Arminius objected to in the Calvinist account of predestination is the exclusion of particular persons from any possibility of salvation and the unconditional bestowal of faith on particular persons. He even argued that it made God a hypocrite "because it imputes hypocrisy to God, as if, in His exhortation to faith addressed to such [i.e., the reprobate], He requires them to believe in Christ, whom, however, He has not set forth as a Savior to them."

In other words, if some particular individuals have already been foreordained unconditionally by God for damnation, then the universal call for them to believe in Christ cannot be sincere.

In spite of what some Calvinists claim, in other words, the universal call to repent and believe the gospel for salvation cannot be a "well meant offer" either by God or by those who believe in that decree of predestination and practice evangelism.⁶

__________

¹ Roger E. Olson, Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 177.

² James Arminius, "Apology Against Thirty-One Theological Articles: Article XXVIII," in The Works of Arminius, the London edition, three volumes, trans. James Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996), 2:53.

³ Olson, 181.

⁴

Concerning God's decrees, Arminius, quoted at length here, writes:

The decrees of God are the . . . extrinsic acts of God, though they are internal, and, therefore, made by the free will of God, without any absolute necessity. Yet one decree seems to require the positing of another, on account of a certain fitness of equity; as the decree concerning the salvation or damnation [of that creature] on the condition of obedience or disobedience.

The act of the creature also, when considered by God from eternity, may sometimes be the occasion, and sometimes the outwardly-moving cause of making some decree; and this may be so far that without such act [of the creature] the decree neither would nor could be made. . . .

One and the same in number is the volition by which God decrees something and determines to do or to permit it, and by which He does or permits the very thing which He decreed. About an object which is one and the same, and uniformly considered, there cannot be two decrees of God, or two volitions, either in reality, or according to any semblance of a contrary volition -- as to will to save man under conditions, and yet to will precisely and absolutely to condemn him [emphasis added]. A decree of itself imposes no necessity on any thing or event. But if any necessity exists through the decree of God, it exists through the intervention of the Divine Power, and indeed when He judges it proper to employ His irresistible power to effect what He has decreed. . . . 

As many distinct decrees are conceived by us, and must necessarily be conceived, as there are objects about which God is occupied in decreeing, or as there are axioms [self-evident truths] by which those decrees are enunciated. Though all the decrees of God have been made from eternity, yet a certain order of priority and posteriority must be laid down, according to their nature, and the mutual relation between them. (2:709-10)

⁵ Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacobus Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991), 152.

⁶ Olson, 181-82.