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Without Doubt Or Debate, Arminius Is One of the Most Unfairly

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Without Doubt Or Debate, Arminius Is One of the Most Unfairly CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION “Without doubt or debate, Arminius is one of the most unfairly neglected and grossly misunderstood theologians in the story of Christian theology.”1 Indeed, the legacy of Jacobus Arminius (ca. 1559–1609), who is famous (or infamous) exclusively for his “anti-Calvinist” doc- trine of conditional predestination, has suffered a double blow. First, the neglect by the scholarly community is evident. Despite the accessibility of Arminius’s works and his undeniable status as a learned and thought- ful theologian—not to mention all the controversy that Arminius’s the- ology and its opponents have generated—Arminius has not been given due scholarly attention. For example, although he has been a gure of intense controversy in Protestant circles for 400 years, no one has yet written a technical monograph completely devoted to his doctrine of salvation. Second, when his doctrine is discussed, it is too frequently done from an overtly biased theological perspective, resulting in con- fusion over what Arminius actually taught. Such misunderstanding, passed on by the internet and popular publications ad nauseam, perpetu- ates the Arminius of mythical lore—on the one hand, the free think- ing, enlightened hero who put his Calvinist oppressors in their place with his irrefutable biblical theology, or, on the other hand, the decep- tive heretic who resurrected Pelagianism and made anthropocentric religion, Enlightenment rationalism, and anti-Trinitarianism accept- able. The scholarly ignorance and popular misunderstanding can only be remedied by peeling away the layers and examining the “historical Arminius.” To make progress toward this end, it is time for his doctrines of salvation and assurance to be analyzed in their historical context, not for the purpose of jumping to conclusions about his orthodoxy, but in order to show where and how Arminius’s theology ts (or does not t) 1 Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform (Downers Grove, 1999), p. 455. See similar statements in Richard A. Muller, God, Cre- ation and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protes- tantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, 1991), p. 3. Stanglin_f2_1-15.indd 1 11/14/2006 10:55:25 AM 2 chapter one with the theology of his contemporaries, on what sources his theology rests, precisely what generated the controversies with his own colleagues in the university, and, if possible, what was the foundation or starting point of his protest. I. The State of Arminius Scholarship and the Current Proposal In light of the tremendous impact of Arminius’s theology on the sub- sequent history of doctrine along with the availability of his works in English, the scarce quantity and often decient quality of scholarship dealing with Arminius are surprising.2 Although there are many factors that contribute to this deciency, I shall classify the scholarship under two particular weaknesses. The rst limitation plaguing much of the scholarship on Arminius is a myopic use of sources. Included here are secondary works that fail to engage contemporary scholarship on devel- opments in late sixteenth-century Protestant thought.3 More prevalent and seriously awed are the studies that neglect important primary documents of Arminius himself, and the texts they do cite are usually from translations.4 Many of these surveys devote their sole attention to Arminius’s Declaratio sententiae and ignore his other works of the aca- demic genre. Unfortunately for them, it is impossible to fully compre- hend some nuances of the Declaratio without a working knowledge of his broader theology revealed in his disputations and treatises. These studies 2 For a more chronological survey of the scholarship on Arminius, see Muller, GCP, pp. 3–14. See also the survey in William Gene Witt, ‘Creation, Redemption and Grace in the Theology of Jacob Arminius’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1993), pp. 187–210. 3 E.g., see F. Stuart Clarke, ‘Arminius’s Understanding of Calvin,’ Evangelical Quarterly 54 ( January–March 1982), 25–35. 4 Most studies fail to ever consult Arminius in the original Latin, as Donald M. Lake confesses about his own work, ‘He Died for All: the Universal Dimensions of the Atone- ment; Jacob Arminius’ Contribution to a Theology of Grace,’ in Grace Unlimited, ed. C. H. Pinnock (Minneapolis, 1975), pp. 223–42, there p. 236; see also, e.g., R. T. Kend- all, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, 2nd ed. (Carlisle, UK, 1997); Howard A. Slaatte, The Arminian Arm of Theology: The Theologies of John Fletcher, First Methodist Theologian, and His Precursor, James Arminius (Washington, D.C., 1977). A host of other studies could be cited here, for those that refer to Arminius’s Latin are far outnumbered by those that only use the translations. A few “scholarly” articles on Arminius fail to use Arminius’s works at all, e.g., Charles M. Cameron, ‘Arminius—Hero or Heretic?’ Evangelical Quar- terly 64 (1992), 213–27, who cites Arminius exclusively via C. Bangs’s biography. Stanglin_f2_1-15.indd 2 11/14/2006 10:55:25 AM.
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