Jacobus Arminius Research Articles

Eloquent Silence: The Doctrine of God in the Synopsis of Purer Theology

This article sketches the theological profile of the Synopsis Purioris Theologiae (1625) by focusing on its exposition of the doctrine of God. Earlier disputations by Leiden theologians Franciscus Junius (1545–1602) and Franciscus Gomarus (1563–1641) are discussed as a background for the theology of Antonius Thysius (1565–1640), the author of the disputation in the Synopsis on God’s nature and attributes. For a further specification of the doctrinal position presented in the Synopsis, it is contrasted with the more innovative accounts proposed by Jacob Arminius (1559–1609) in his disputation “De natura Dei” (1603) and by Conrad Vorstius (1569–1622) in his Tractatus theologicus de Deo (1606). This analysis yields the conclusion that both Arminius and Vorstius advocated a structural differentiation between God’s inner essence and his outward operations, which leaves room for human freedom and independence. While the Synopsis does not explicitly discuss their views, in its own formulations itmaintains the common Reformed orthodox notion of divine simplicity, and keeps the balance between—on the one hand—the (hypothetical) necessity of God’s foreknowledge and decree, and—on the other hand—the contingency and freedom in the created world.

Was Fichte a Remonstrant?

On reading Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (1806–7), one is struck by the numerous references to religion it contains. The religious aspect of Fichte's writing is interesting in itself as it touches upon wider issues of theology and political thought, but it is also surprising given that Fichte had been labeled an atheist. The purpose of this article is to explore the ‘religious’ aspect of the Addresses looking specifically at the relationship between Fichte's work and the idea of ‘a chosen people.’ I argue that though not restricted to Reformed theology or even to the Christian faith, the idea of a chosen people can be found in Fichte's work but that it cannot be understood in a Lutheran nor Calvinistic manner but rather through the teachings of Jacob Arminius and the Remonstrants.

“Cum delectu”: Jacob Arminius’s (1559–1609) Praise for and Critique of Calvin and His Theology

The Reformed pastor and professor Jacobus Arminius (1559–1609) is remembered as an anti-Calvinistic theologian whose views were in conflict with the very essence of the Reformation. The question concerning Arminius’s relation to the Reformation and to Calvin has occupied many already, and remains complex. This article illustrates that Arminius had great respect particularly for Calvin’s exegetical prowess, and was in agreement with the most important parts of his theology. However, Arminius shows significant divergence from Calvin’s view on God’s relationship to evil and sin because of its consequences; as far as Arminius is concerned, God is—unintentionally—made the author of sin. According to Arminius this undermines the most important pillar of the Christian religion, namely, God’s love for justice.

“Cum delectu”: Jacob Arminius’s (1559–1609) Praise for and Critique of Calvin and His Theology

The Reformed pastor and professor Jacobus Arminius (1559–1609) is remembered as an anti-Calvinistic theologian whose views were in conflict with the very essence of the Reformation. The question concerning Arminius’s relation to the Reformation and to Calvin has occupied many already, and remains complex. This article illustrates that Arminius had great respect particularly for Calvin’s exegetical prowess, and was in agreement with the most important parts of his theology. However, Arminius shows significant divergence from Calvin’s view on God’s relationship to evil and sin because of its consequences; as far as Arminius is concerned, God is—unintentionally—made the author of sin. According to Arminius this undermines the most important pillar of the Christian religion, namely, God’s love for justice.

Peter J. Thuesen . Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine . New York : Oxford University Press . 2009 . Pp. xiv, 309. $29.95.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the doctrine of predestination provoked flights of speculation and barbed polemics across Europe. Both Catholic and Protestant scholars, including the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina as well as the reformed Protestants John Calvin and Jacob Arminius, argued variations on the idea that God had foreordained each person's eternal destiny. In more thoroughgoing versions of predestination, God had elected some for eternal salvation as a sheer act of grace, unconditionally and apart from any merit on their part. More moderate concepts often depended on the idea that God foreknew human conduct in electing some to salvation and thereby made space for human cooperation in divine purposes. In short, the way a person or church understood predestination had a direct bearing on how and to what extent the conduct of one's life could offer assurance of salvation. From the Council of Trent in the 1540s to the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s, European churches laid down specific teachings on predestination in confessions, catechisms, and theological systems. In the book under review, Peter J. Thuesen summarizes the longer history of predestination, beginning with Saints Paul and Augustine, and focuses the book's central chapters on the transit of the doctrine to North America. He argues that in the American context contending theories of predestination have been among “the most important but unacknowledged sources of discord in churches across the denominational spectrum” (p. 4).

Melville and Religious Experience: A Response

s ALA 2010—San Francisco Melville and Religious Experience CHAIR: BRIAN YOTHERS, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO Participants in “Melville and Religious Experience” panel at ALA 2010, from left to right: William E. Engel, Jonathan A. Cook, Richard Hardack, Peter Norberg, Brian Yothers. F ew writers have engaged more subtly or more broadly with the subject of religious experience than Melville. On both a cognitive and an affective level, Melville’s work is in dialogue with a staggering range of religious traditions. Panelists were invited to consider the following C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 131 E X T R A C T S questions: How does Melville represent belief, unbelief, and tensions and accommodations between the two? Within the context of American Protestant religious culture, what roles do Calvinism, Arminianism, Unitarianism, or Methodism play in Melville’s art? How does Melville negotiate the relationship between the universal and the particular in his treatment of religious experience ? To what degree is Melville’s representation of religious experience fluid over the course of his career? To what degree does his religious thought remain consistent? The panel illuminated one of the most vexed areas of Melville scholarship: the nature of Melville’s responses to ideas, texts, and individuals associated with multiple religious traditions across his career. Melville’s Miltonic Notion of Providence: A Case Study of Moby-Dick, Chapters 82-83 William E. Engel University of the South M ilton’s Calvinist notion of prevenient grace, fundamental to his epic’s recessed theological armature, became a topic for the most serious kind of jesting in Moby-Dick. I seek to clarify Milton’s ideas about providence (especially that mode of grace that anticipates repentance), and then to indicate the extent to which this theme is appropriated and inscribed in Moby-Dick. Focusing on Melville’s use of the Old Testament, Jonah in particular, I assess Melville’s own brand of serio-comic biblical exegesis, which is indebted to Milton’s idiosyncratic shuffling of doctrines and is consonant with his confident yoking of classical and scriptural allusions. Not only is this seen in Melville’s linking of Perseus and Jonah in the role-call of the first whalers (NN Moby-Dick 361-62), but also in his reference, from the very outset, to the “police officer of the Fates” (NN Moby-Dick 7). Three main passages in Paradise Lost, when seen together, triangulate Milton’s complicated theology, especially where salvation is concerned. The first indicates that some God has created the Elect and will protect them from all inclination to sin owing to “special grace” (PL 2.1030-33). A pronouncement from God the Father describes a “peculiar grace” for those “Elect above the rest” (PL 3.183-84). The last concerns “prevenient Grace” finding its way to Adam and Eve, which “descending had removed / The stony from their hearts” (PL 11.3-5). Milton’s theology is an amalgam of traditional Old Faith Catholicism in the style of Augustine, austere Calvinist doctrine that differentiates between the Elect and the non-Elect (thus abrogating the need for free will), and Arminianism, based on the ideas of the Dutch reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), who broke with the Calvinist mainstream. Melville was 132 L E V I A T H A N A B S T R A C T S reared in the Dutch Reformed church and would have been thoroughly familiar with the main tenets of both Calvin and Arminius. Like his namesake in the Old Testament, Ahab rejects reconciliation, let alone salvation; he is hell-bent on wreaking vengeance and willing to die exercising his will. Whatever else we may think of the albino whale, “cetology is code for theology”; like the Arminian view of God, the whale tests, though does not control, the resolve, will, and faith of its mortal pursuers. Comparative Religion and Competing Orthodoxies in Melville’s Clarel Peter Norberg Saint Joseph’s...

Melville and Religious Experience

s ALA 2010—San Francisco Melville and Religious Experience CHAIR: BRIAN YOTHERS, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO Participants in “Melville and Religious Experience” panel at ALA 2010, from left to right: William E. Engel, Jonathan A. Cook, Richard Hardack, Peter Norberg, Brian Yothers. F ew writers have engaged more subtly or more broadly with the subject of religious experience than Melville. On both a cognitive and an affective level, Melville’s work is in dialogue with a staggering range of religious traditions. Panelists were invited to consider the following C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 131 E X T R A C T S questions: How does Melville represent belief, unbelief, and tensions and accommodations between the two? Within the context of American Protestant religious culture, what roles do Calvinism, Arminianism, Unitarianism, or Methodism play in Melville’s art? How does Melville negotiate the relationship between the universal and the particular in his treatment of religious experience ? To what degree is Melville’s representation of religious experience fluid over the course of his career? To what degree does his religious thought remain consistent? The panel illuminated one of the most vexed areas of Melville scholarship: the nature of Melville’s responses to ideas, texts, and individuals associated with multiple religious traditions across his career. Melville’s Miltonic Notion of Providence: A Case Study of Moby-Dick, Chapters 82-83 William E. Engel University of the South M ilton’s Calvinist notion of prevenient grace, fundamental to his epic’s recessed theological armature, became a topic for the most serious kind of jesting in Moby-Dick. I seek to clarify Milton’s ideas about providence (especially that mode of grace that anticipates repentance), and then to indicate the extent to which this theme is appropriated and inscribed in Moby-Dick. Focusing on Melville’s use of the Old Testament, Jonah in particular, I assess Melville’s own brand of serio-comic biblical exegesis, which is indebted to Milton’s idiosyncratic shuffling of doctrines and is consonant with his confident yoking of classical and scriptural allusions. Not only is this seen in Melville’s linking of Perseus and Jonah in the role-call of the first whalers (NN Moby-Dick 361-62), but also in his reference, from the very outset, to the “police officer of the Fates” (NN Moby-Dick 7). Three main passages in Paradise Lost, when seen together, triangulate Milton’s complicated theology, especially where salvation is concerned. The first indicates that some God has created the Elect and will protect them from all inclination to sin owing to “special grace” (PL 2.1030-33). A pronouncement from God the Father describes a “peculiar grace” for those “Elect above the rest” (PL 3.183-84). The last concerns “prevenient Grace” finding its way to Adam and Eve, which “descending had removed / The stony from their hearts” (PL 11.3-5). Milton’s theology is an amalgam of traditional Old Faith Catholicism in the style of Augustine, austere Calvinist doctrine that differentiates between the Elect and the non-Elect (thus abrogating the need for free will), and Arminianism, based on the ideas of the Dutch reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), who broke with the Calvinist mainstream. Melville was 132 L E V I A T H A N A B S T R A C T S reared in the Dutch Reformed church and would have been thoroughly familiar with the main tenets of both Calvin and Arminius. Like his namesake in the Old Testament, Ahab rejects reconciliation, let alone salvation; he is hell-bent on wreaking vengeance and willing to die exercising his will. Whatever else we may think of the albino whale, “cetology is code for theology”; like the Arminian view of God, the whale tests, though does not control, the resolve, will, and faith of its mortal pursuers. Comparative Religion and Competing Orthodoxies in Melville’s Clarel Peter Norberg Saint Joseph’s...

The New Perspective on Arminius: Notes on a Historiographical Shift

Over the last three decades, a new perspective has been emerging in the study of the Dutch theologian, Jacob Arminius. This article describes various older narratives of Arminius the theologian that are driven by dogmatic concerns and decontextualized depictions. These older perspectives are then contrasted with the new perspective, and the superiority of the latter is demonstrated.

English Molinism in the Late 1590S: Richard Hooker on Free Will, Predestination, and Divine Foreknowledge

Set in the context of the Cambridge debates on grace and predestination in the 1590s, and of the wider controversy in the Reformed and Roman Catholic churches from 1580 to 1620, this article examines how Richard Hooker endeavoured to show the compatibility of his radical views on the freedom of the will and the resistibility of grace with his Augustinian doctrine of predestination. Particular attention is paid to Hooker's late manuscript defence, written shortly before his death in 1600, in which he responded to the charge that his views were heterodox and reminiscent of the dangerous opinions recently spread abroad in England by men like Samuel Harsnet and Peter Baro. The precise extent to which Hooker's views on predestination fell within or outside the Reformed tradition is carefully evaluated, especially as regards the order of the divine decrees and the crucial distinction he makes between God's antecedent and consequent will. Key to understanding this question is Hooker's doctrine of divine foreknowledge, a subject which has received no significant scholarly treatment to date; it is argued that (at about the same time as Jacob Arminius) he incorporated the highly controversial Molinist concept of divine 'middle' knowledge (scientia media) into his work.

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

PERHAPS unsurprisingly, as someone who has always been interested in the history of thought, Perez Zagorin holds strongly to the view that ‘in a certain sense ideas rule the world, and the attitudes and actions of human beings are greatly affected by reasons and justifications’. Such is the premiss of the present book on the emergence of the ‘idea of religious toleration’ in ‘the west’, and its ultimate adoption as part of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although Zagorin ranges chronologically from the days of the Emperor Constantine to those of the Second Vatican Council, his centre of gravity is the early modern period. Moreover, in stressing the role of ideas, he takes issue explicitly with those historians who have emphasised the part played by circumstances arising from the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, pointing instead to the failure of the Peace of Augsburg and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. As a result, however, enormous weight falls on the shoulders of those thinkers whom Zagorin chooses to single out: Sebastian Castellio, Dirck Coornhert, Jacobus Arminius, Hugo Grotius, Simon Episcopius, Benedict Spinoza, Roger Williams, John Goodwin, John Milton, William Walwyn, John Locke and Pierre Bayle. Castellio, for example, was galvanised into taking up the cause of toleration due to the burning of Servetus as a heretic in 1553 at the hands of the Genevan authorities. But it is also apparent that the religious disagreement of Castellio with John Calvin was more long-standing, leading to the departure of the former from Geneva in 1545. As well as coming to share some of Servetus’ doubts about the doctrine of the Trinity, Castellio disagreed with Calvin concerning predestination. Thus the argument was as much about the freedom of Castellio, albeit in Basle, to dissent from Calvin as a case of deduction from first principles, and it is no mere coincidence that Castellio became a spokesman for persecuted minorities. Moreover, at the time of his death Castellio was contemplating flight to the then safer haven of Poland.

Johannes Kuchlinus, the 'Faithful Teacher': His Role in the Arminian Controversy and His Impact as a Theological Interpreter and Educator

AbstractJohannes Kuchlinus (1546-1606) was a Reformed pastor in Amsterdam and the founding regent of the theological college at Leiden University. Modern scholarship has overlooked the impact he had during his tenure at the university. Part of his impact has to do with his ability to keep relative peace in the midst of a boiling faculty controversy between Jacobus Arminius and Franciscus Gomarus. His greatest influence, though, is seen in his work as an interpreter and teacher of the Heidelberg Catechism. His first-hand knowledge of the Catechism and one of its authors, Zacharias Ursinus, combined with his prominent position of training pastors, uniquely qualified him as a proponent of the Catechism in the low countries. The disputations on the catechetical topics that he composed for student defenses, a list of which appears at the conclusion of this article, not only comprise a vast wealth of material for further study of this figure who influenced a generation, but also represent another source for the "Leiden theology" during this controversial period.

"To be thy Praise, / And be my salvation": The Double Function of Praise in The Temple

“To be thy praise, / And be my salvation”:The Double Function of Praise in The Temple Margaret J. Oakes In her comprehensive study of Protestant poetics, Barbara Lewalski notes the forms and variety of George Herbert's poems of praise: Hymns were by definition joyful praises of God or thanksgivings to him: in Herbert this category covers the broad range from the elegant simplicity of the hymn portion of "Easter" to the lofty eloquence of "Providence." (300) Herbert's overall corpus of poetry reflects his obsession with praise: approximately forty-eight poems in the Bodleian MS. of The Temple, two additional from the Williams MS., and his two early sonnets to his mother either directly praise God or talk about the act or writing of praise. When Herbert engages in this type of poetic expression, however, these acts have a double function. Of course, Herbert makes use of praise as a way of honoring or thanking God. But he also intends it to be a means of creating a participatory role in his own salvation: his poems are responses from an individual sparked by the gift of grace. For Herbert, the recognition of one's own salvation establishes a duty to glorify God in return in whatever form, literary or otherwise, the Christian is able. Louis Martz comments that Herbert uses his art as "a means of partaking in the salvation offered by a transcendent power" ("Voices," 103). But Herbert is not only convinced that he must praise, he is obsessed with the proper method of doing so, taking up the subject time and time again in his poetry: Joseph Summers has noted that "One of the chief sources of the Christian's and the poet's 'miserie' was that he could not properly praise God" (106). Thus, it is also important to examine Herbert's concerns about the methods of praising that he attempts and the impediments he overcomes in order to worship the Lord in ways that he considers correct. The physical illness and pain that plagued Herbert throughout hislife distract him from his task, but these problems are exacerbated by [End Page 120] emotional issues such as a lack of confidence and motivation, and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, a concern over exhibiting too much pride in his poetic ability. These complications are what make Herbert's poetry more than just flaccid applause or naïve Sunday School rhymes: Herbert is fully and equally aware of the pitfalls of Christianity and the need to write good poetry. On this last point I depart from Summers, who claims that "the beauty of language, like the soul's, can live only if it is 'lost' to the proper object" (119). In The Temple, Herbert is very careful not to lose his mastery over beautiful language; rather, he knows that a confident use of one's abilities can assist the soul in finding its final place with God. Of course, a major sticking point for a post-Calvinist Protestant in contemplating salvation was the complex and evolving doctrine of predestination. Jean Calvin's notions of unconditional predestination had been interpreted narrowly by later Continental and English thinkers. Calvin's disciple Theodore Beza maintained that God "hathe determined from before all beginning with hym selfe, to create all thyngs in their tyme, for his glory, and namely men: whom he hath made after two sorts, cleane contrarie one to the other" (2.A.iii). English theologian William Perkins declared in 1590 that God "hath ordained all men to a certain and everlasting estate, that is either to salvation or condemnation, for his own glory" (186). But countering these views were theologians such as Jacobus Arminius: his growing rejection of hard-line doctrine in the Netherlands had been crystallized by 1610 into a set of articles which, while not retreating to the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian position that the human will rather than divine grace initiated the steps toward eternal salvation, stood firmly for the propositions that predestination was conditioned by God's foreknowledge of the individual's response to the offer of grace, and that a believer could both resist and fall from grace. Many of the theological and...

Cocceius and the Jewish Commentators

The case of Johannes Cocceius defies the commonplace that Leiden University (and perhaps post-Reformation, confessionalized Europe in general) turned away from humanist scholarship in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1650 Cocceius (1603-69), a Bremen-born Oriental philology professor at Franeker, joined the Leiden theological faculty and wrote a treatise, Protheoria de ratione interpretandi sive introductio in philologiam sacram (De ratione). He praised such rabbinic exegetes as Rashi (1040-1105) and David Kimchi (ca. 1160-ca. 1235) in humanist terms for their erudition. At the same time the new Cartesian philosophy was taking hold in the arts faculty, and mathematics instruction was encroaching on scholastic formal logic.1 Leiden would become famous for Cartesianism, mathematics, and Copernicanism in the second half of the seventeenth century, but Cocceius still worked in the tradition of advanced humanist scholarship that had made the institution famous in the sixteenth century.2Leiden's earlier reputation was due in large part to the biblical humanist work of such Renaissance polymaths as Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), but by Cocceius's time Leiden theologians were subject to greater Church and State control. As Jonathan Israel and Edwin Rabbie have shown, in response to the controversy that surrounded Jacobus Arminius and his stand on predestination, the Synod of Dordrecht (Dort) drafted an anti-Arminian statement in 1619; any professor who did not sign was subject to exile from the republic in addition to dismissal from his post.3 Innovative theology, exegesis, and philology suffered as professors, fearing State and Church reprisals, turned to humanism. As Henk Jan de Jonge has explained, this meant that almost all the theologians of seventeenth-century Leiden who concerned themselves with the explanation of the New Testament placed exegesis at the service of dogmatic objectives.4 Unlike his fellow Leiden theologians, Cocceius pursued biblical humanism and Christian Hebraism through the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic-and he did so in a unique way. He was not the first to use Jewish commentaries and even Jewish post-biblical literature for the purpose of reconstructing the original Hebrew Bible, but he was innovative in praising rabbinic scholars as fellow humanists and in incorporating their scholarship into his Christological exegesis and philosophy. He did so, furthermore, not as an independent scholar or pastor or even as a professor of Hebrew; but as the holder of a university chair in theology at a confessionalized university in a century hostile to his brand of late humanism.Although he came to Leiden as a theologian, Cocceius had impressive training as an Orientalist. He had studied with the famous scholar Sixtinus Amama (1593-1629) and polished his Hebrew and Aramaic by working with a Jewish tutor from Hamburg.5 While still a student at Franeker, Cocceius wrote a translation and commentary of the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin. A few years later he began composing commentaries on the Pentateuch, and, by the time he arrived at Leiden, he had completed one lecture, series of lectures, or piece of writing on every book of the Old Testament. These commentaries were based not only on Cocceius's extensive knowledge of Oriental languages but also on his readings of medieval Jewish commentators. These were the same commentators that Cocceius would later praise in chapter eight of the De ratione.These humanist achievements were much at variance with Cocceius's public persona as perhaps the most prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian of the seventeenth century. For approximately 100 years after his death in 1669 a faction of Leiden theologians calling themselves Cocceians battled the Voetians, followers of Gisbertus Voetius, for the soul of the Dutch Church.6 At Leiden he lectured on the Pauline Epistles, a typical subject for a seventeenth-century Calvinist theologian, and he worked on his famous theological tract, the salvation-historical Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei (1648). …

God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy. By Richard A. Muller. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1991. x + 309 pp.

God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy. By Richard A. Muller. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1991. x + 309 pp. - Volume 66 Issue 1

JACOBUS ARMINIUS AND HIS LOGIC: ANALYSIS OF A LETTER

Journal Article JACOBUS ARMINIUS AND HIS LOGIC: ANALYSIS OF A LETTER Get access J. ARMINIUS, J. ARMINIUS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar EEF DEKKER EEF DEKKER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, April 1993, Pages 118–142, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/44.1.118 Published: 01 April 1993

De Irenische Perkins-Vertaling Van De Arminiaan Everard Booth (1577-1610) 1

AbstractBooth's Translation of an Irenical Perkins-Book In 1604 the Utrecht minister Everard Booth (1577-1610) published a translation of William Perkins' 'A Reformed Catholike'. Because of this translation, biographical dictionaries and other literature say that he must have agreed more or less with the predestinarian views of Franciscus Gomarus. In the conflict between Franciscus Gomarus and Jacobus Arminius, Perkins played an important part. He owes this to Arminius, who wrote a book against him and utterly disliked his ideas on predestination, the certainty of faith and final perseverance. The problem is that Booth attended the Conventus Praeparatorius (1607), a meeting meant for the preparation of a national synod. Here he agreed with Arminius on the question of whether the Belgic confession ought to be revised or not. In 1610, the year of his death, Booth's position raises even less doubt. He proved himself to be an Arminian. So his translation of Perkins might point to a change in his outlook or to a moderate stand. However, there is a better solution to the riddle of how a potential Arminian could like Perkins. Perkins' 'A Reformed Catholike' (1597) is an item in the syllabus of irenical writings, released by the French diplomat Jean Hotman in 1607 and extended later on. Utrecht was a former cathedral city which still had a high percentage of Roman Catholic inhabitants. Presumably Booth's attention was drawn to 'A Reformed Catholike' because of its irenical character. He may have considered the book as a means to bring his Catholic fellow citizens to other thoughts. In the same year, 1604, a second Dutchman, Vincent Meusevoet, translated 'A Reformed Catholike' too. He published it together with a translation of a highly polemical book written by Perkins, 'A Warning against the Idolatrie of the Last Times'. Booth did not do things in this way. Incidentally, he took a Latin edition of Perkins' book as his source, not the original English work, as Meusevoet did. 'A Reformed Catholike' is, indeed an irenical treatise. Perkins started his chapters with a discourse on the issues agreed on among Catholics and Protestants. Especially illustrative is the sixteenth chapter dealing with the faith. In the first part of this chapter, devoted to the common elements, he discussed his favourite theme for bruised consciences, namely that a small portion of faith, a faith as a grain of mustard seed, is sufficient in the eyes of God for salvation. So Roman Catholics who desired to believe could assume that they would be children of God, according to Perkins. As a matter of course, nobody was entitled to be satisfied with a small sparkle of faith: man had to aim at an increasing faith. Yet the 'infolded faith' really had a great importance according to Perkins. He showed himself open to the Roman Catholics on a central point in his theological thinking. Booth must have felt attracted to thoughts like those mentioned in 'A Reformed Catholike'. He was an irenical theologian. In the Dutch predestinarian conflict, the irenicists often turned out to be Arminians later on. Notwithstanding his English example Booth's irenical feelings placed him alongside the Arminians with their less unquestioning ideas. One indication of Booth's gifts as an irenicist is what became of the Utrecht Reformed community after his arrival (1602). For many years it had been in a state of turmoil. There were many people who steadfastly refused to go to church in Utrecht. They blamed the Consistory because it danced to the piping of the magistrate. After his arrival the situation improved. During his ministry (1602-1610) the Utrecht church enjoyed a period of peace. This may be mainly due to his influence. Booth was a pupil of the Leiden professor Franciscus Junius, the author of the 'Eirenicum de Pace Ecclesiae Catholicae'. Junius tried to mediate between the religious parties in Utrecht from 1593 onwards. Everard Booth followed in his footsteps.

John Goodwin and the Origins of the New Arminianism

Charles II in 1660 Calvinism lost its hold over English religious life. The effect of Arminianism on this decline has yet to be fully understood. The impact of the early English Arminians, the circle of Archbishop Laud, is, to be sure, well known.' Less appreciated is the emergence of an critique of Calvinism from within the culture of nonconformity. This radical or, preferably, Arminianism was a phenomenon of the Cromwellian era, the 1640s and 1650s. By reconstructing the origins of the new Arminianism of its chief exponent, John Goodwin (1595-1666), this essay will try to demonstrate its pivotal place as a link between the Puritanism of the pre-civil war decades and the rational theology of the early English Enlightenment.2 The term Arminian refers to the doctrines of the Dutch theologian, Jacobus Arminius (d. 1609), whose modifications of Calvinism provoked a profound crisis of reformed doctrine in the Dutch and English church of the early seventeenth century. Arminius's doctrines can be summarized as follows: that Christ died for all men (universal atonement); that all men have the power to believe in the atonement; and that God pledged salvation to all who so believe (later termed general redemption). In short, his views rejected the high Calvinist doctrine that God predestined all mankind to salvation or election before the Fall (supralapsarianism)

Arminianism and the English Parliament, 1624–1629

“Oh, Mr. Pym, this breaks the heart,” lamented Sir Richard Grosvenor in the House of Commons in 1629; “if God be God, let us follow him, and if Baal be God, let us follow him, and no longer halt between two opinions.” The Baalites, it was clear to the Commons, were the Arminians, who threatened “the very ruin and desolation if not dissolution of Religion in this land.” Such was the threat of Arminianism that when the Commons presented its Protestations on March 2, the first article read,Whosoever shall bring in innovation in Religion, or by favour or countenance, seek to extend or introduce Popery or Arminianism or other opinions disagreeing from the true and orthodox Church, shall be reputed a capital enemy to this Kingdom and Commonwealth.This was no ordinary condemnation of schism or theological haggling. The members of the Commons shared a strong suspicion of Arminianism as a political as well as religious heresy. They had a clear idea of what English Arminianism was and who was an Arminian. Before 1624, no Englishman had even been accused of Arminianism, either in Parliament or in contemporary literature devoted to religious controversies. How did the definition of English Arminianism develop between 1624 and 1629? How did Arminianism, originally a moderate Dutch Calvinism, come to be considered along with Popery as a treasonable theology?At the turn of the seventeeth century, Jacobus Arminius, Divinity Reader at the University of Leyden, had proposed a theological compromise between Supralapsarian and Infralapsarian Protestantism.