Joseph arminius free#
In other words, God knows beforehand who will believe, who will exercise free will and choose to accept. Although salvation involves the human response to God’s election, God foreordained who was to have such faith. Yet now Arminius gives election an intriguing twist. What happens to the central doctrine of election? This becomes conditional, depending upon the human response. This is to be expected, since Arminius set out to undermine precisely that doctrine: through prevenient grace and free will, human beings cooperate with God in the process of salvation. We are now far from Calvin’s doctrine of predestination according to which one is always one of the elect or the damned. One may therefore lose one’s faith and no longer be one of the elect – salvation may well be lost. Even more, the exercise of free will means that one may at some time accept that call of grace and then at another reject it. A similar pattern of moving from the universal to the particular operates in Arminius’s Christology, for although Christ dies for all in an atonement that is made potentially for every human being, his atonement is effective only for who accept the call of God to salvation. God’s grace is no longer irresistible but resistible human beings exercise their free will by either accepting grace or resisting it. It should not be difficult to see what this means for salvation. The outcome is that everyone has free will, a power that God grants to human beings (and thereby limits God’s own power). That is, the Holy Spirit comprehensively covers all bases: its preparatory work affects all people and the entire person.
Joseph arminius for free#
Yet the implications are momentous, for prevenient grace opens up a wide space for free will. Nay, we carry this principle so far as not to dare to attribute the power here described even to the nature of Adam himself, without the help of Divine Grace both infused and assisting. Though we always and on all occasions make this grace to precede, to accompany and follow and without which, we constantly assert, no good action whatever can be produced by man. Even so, Arminius is careful to say that this capability is not inherent to human beings, for it is a gift of God’s grace: This grace renders a person capable of responding to the call of salvation. So also did Calvin, but now Arminius veers away from Calvin, specifically through his theory of “prevenient grace” – the groundwork of the Holy Spirit, which removes the guilt of the first sin. He argued that through the Fall human beings are depraved and corrupted. In doing so, he ensured that the Fall was not such a catastrophe. Arminius, of course, set out to oppose Calvin’s doctrine of election and double predestination. This requires working through some of the key points of the theology of Jacobus Arminius (Harmenzoon), whom Grotius followed closely. The biblical text upon which all these arguments turn is that of the Fall in Genesis 3. The crucial elements turn out to be the assertion of a free-willing individual, who has the power to choose good or evil, and to accept or reject God’s grace. Let me explain, by focusing on the thought of one of the earliest theorists of capitalism, Hugo Grotius (1683-1645). The reason is simply that the key agents in establishing capitalism in the Netherlands – or the United Provinces as it was then called – were Arminians, not Calvinists. Why? It was the Arminian heresy and not Calvinism that provided the cultural framework for capitalism. Weber is of course wrong, but I would like to suggest he is wrong even if we accept his premises. Then, having achieved its task, Calvinism retired or vanished from its preeminent role. Frugal living, hard work, self-discipline, delayed satisfaction and reliance on the inscrutable grace of God – these and more were the factors that enabled the accumulation of primitive capital and then the expansion of the new system. He looked in particular to the Netherlands, where the first commercial empire was established in the sixteenth century, and then to England, where the Puritans enabled a similar feat some time later. It provided the cultural, behavioural and religious framework that enabled capitalism to establish itself and gain ground. As is well known, Weber argued that Calvinism acted as a crucial vanishing mediator for capitalism. For the sake of the following argument, I would like to grant the premises of Max Weber’s idealist argument: religion and culture (superstructure) are causative agents in socio-economic change.