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.Perkins explained that he had divided and subdi-vided the decrees solely for the sake of human understanding.102 Yet in giving predestination its most laboriously precise exposition since the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, fi gures such as Perkins left themselves open to the charge, later leveled against the New England Puritans, of intellectual arrogance.Many critics simply did not believe the scholastics’ denial that their systems were intended to penetrate the impenetrable mysteries of God’s essence.The ambitious scope of the scholastic project also created many possibilities for technical disagreements among the theologians themselves.ARMINIANISM VERSUS “FIVE-POINT” CALVINISMThe most spectacular of the Protestant scholastic disputes originated in the work of the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius (1559–1609), whose teachers had included Theodore Beza.While serving for 15 years as a Reformed The Predestinarian Labyrinth37pastor at Amsterdam, he wrestled extensively with the predestinarian intricacies of both Catholic and Protestant scholasticism and wrote a refutation of Perkins’s Manner and Order of Predestination.103 In 1603, after plague broke out in Leiden and killed two of the university’s three theology professors, Arminius was appointed to the faculty.He soon clashed with his colleague Franciscus Gomarus, an ardent supralapsarian, in a protracted controversy that led Arminius to make his famous Declaration of Sentiments (1608) just one year before his death.104As the Declaration made clear, Arminius opposed both the supra- and infralapsarian versions of the decrees, though he reserved particular scorn for supralapsarianism, which he found utterly at odds with scripture and repugnant to God’s wisdom, justice, and goodness.Anticipating later objections to absolute predestination among many American evangelicals, he accused the supralapsarians of extinguishing all zeal for the conversion of sinners.Even prayer in a supralapsarian scheme was rendered futile,he charged, except as a way of worshipping God.105 As an alternative tosupra- and infralapsarian predestination, both of which he felt made God the author of sin, Arminius outlined his own fourfold order of the decrees whereby God (1) appointed Jesus Christ as Savior, (2) determined to save all those who repented of their sins and believed in Christ, (3) provided in a“suffi cient and effi cacious manner” the means necessary for repentance and faith, and (4) elected to salvation those persons he foresaw would believeand persevere.106The third and fourth decrees in Arminius’s fourfold scheme revealed the crux of his disagreement with Calvinism.He believed that through the saving death of Christ, God provided prevenient grace (Latin, gratia praeveniens: grace that “comes before”) to all persons, not just the elect.107This initial infusion of grace preceding conversion enables fallen humans to cooperate with God, if they so choose, by not resisting the Holy Spirit’s workings in their souls.As one contemporary theologian has explained it, prevenient grace created not so much a free will but a will freed to accept or reject Christ.Without this initial gift of grace, humans would remain completely in bondage to sin and unable to turn to God.Indeed, Arminius strenuously denied the accusation that his theology amounted to Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism, which taught that the Fall did not obliterate all freedom in humans to choose the good.To the charge that his system violated the cardinal Protestant principle of grace alone, Arminius pleaded not guilty.108 He also insisted that he still believed in predestination.As thefourth decree in his scheme defi ned it, Arminian predestination was conditional upon humans’ freely willed response to God.38PredestinationConditional predestination, however, raised the same logical diffi culties that had once vexed Augustine.In what sense does an all-knowing, all-determining God leave predestination open to human response? If God knows how each person will respond, does this foreknowledge not amount to foreordination? Arminius insisted that prevenient grace gives humans genuine freedom, but his explanation of the nature of divine foreknowledge of human choices was typically scholastic in its complexity.Occasional references in his writings to “middle knowledge” ( scientia media) have led some interpreters to conclude that he accepted the theory of Luis de Molina (1535–1600), a Spanish Jesuit, that God knows certain things hypothetically.That is, God foreknows how a free creature will respond, given a particular set of circumstances.Though God creates circumstances based on this foreknowledge and in this way predestines for salvation those people he foresees will accept his grace, humans’ future actions remain “free” because they are logically prior to—indeed, they are the ground of—God’s electingchoice.109Regardless of whether Arminius was infl uenced by Molinism, the idea that any future human action could be the cause of God’s decision was anathema to strict Calvinists, who considered it a grave affront to absolute divine sovereignty.110 Arminius’s death in 1609 hardly put an end to the controversy, for the next year in the Arminian Articles, or Remonstrance, his supporters (known as Remonstrants) formally reasserted three anti-Calvinist positions: election is based on divine foresight of faith; the atonement is universal, remitting the sins of all who believe; and grace is resistible.The Remonstrants further provoked their opponents, who tended to be older, more established ministers, by calling for a national synod to reconsider the Calvinism of the Belgic Confession (1561).Soon, a contra-Remonstrant party issued its own statement reasserting a Calvinistic line against the young Turks.The battle lines were drawn, and in an age when preaching still served as a form of popular entertainment, persuasive clergy drew many laypersons into the fray.“People argued about the issues on pas-senger barges and sang partisan songs in front of the houses of prominent members of the opposite faction,” notes social historian Philip Benedict.111Nothing less than the future of the Reformation in Holland seemed to be at stake.A national synod was fi nally convened, but in the end, the contra-Remonstrants outmaneuvered their opponents.Reformed orthodoxy was enshrined in the Canons of Dort (1618–1619), whose predestinarian propositions henceforth were known by an acronym that spelled an appropriately Dutch fl ower, TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.Though the synod The Predestinarian Labyrinth39rejected a minority attempt to endorse supralapsarianism, opting instead for the milder infra- position, TULIP was nevertheless a strict rule of faith.All people sin in Adam, and from this mass of condemned sinners, God elects a certain number according to the “good pleasure of his will,” without regard to their foreseen faith
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