Arminius, Jacobus

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Jacobus Arminius

1560–1609

Theologian

Youth in a Tempestuous Time.

Jacob Harmenszoon, who later became known as the theologian Jacobus Arminius, was born in the town of Oudewater, near Leiden in the Netherlands. His father worked in the metal trades, either as a blacksmith or a forger of armor, but he died when Jacob was still a child. Throughout the child's youth the Netherlands were plagued with civil and religious wars, a result of the Dutch movement for independence from Spain. Following Jacob's father's death, a family friend, Jacob Aemilius, took the young boy under his wing and paid for his primary and secondary education. When Aemilius died around the time Jacob Harmenszoon was fifteen, a Dutch-born professor at the University of Marburg in Germany, Rudolf Snellius, assumed the responsibility for Harmenszoon's education. Snellius paid Jacob Harmenszoon's fees at the University of Leiden, and in 1576, when the young student entered, he began to use the name "Arminius." After completing his studies there, Arminius won the support of the city of Amsterdam to study in Geneva, then the center of Calvinist theological education in Europe. Although usually temperate and mild-mannered, Arminius attracted controversy shortly after he arrived in Geneva when he defended the French mathematician, rhetorician, and Calvinist convert Peter Ramus, a figure he had admired since his school days in Leiden. During the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres of 1572, Ramus was martyred, and in the decades that followed his works were widely reprinted and his fame spread throughout Europe. Ramus's Calvinist ideas were feared by some because he argued for a complete reorganization of universities and the elimination of Aristotelianism from the curriculum. At Geneva, Arminius's defense of Ramus seems to have ruffled some feathers, and in 1583, the young theologian left town to study in Basel. After some success there, he returned to Geneva where he seems to have ingratiated himself with Theodore Beza, then the leading theologian and successor of John Calvin in the city. In 1586, Arminius completed his studies in Geneva. He made a short trip to Italy and then returned to his native Netherlands, where he took a position as a minister in one of the churches of Amsterdam. He married and served for a time on the town council before being called in 1603 to a professorship at his alma mater, the University of Leiden.

Controversy.

For most of his life Arminius seems to have lived the life of a quiet parson. But in his final years as a professor, the scholar became a lightning rod for controversy. Although he had originally believed in the Calvinist concept of predestination, he came to have doubts, and when he expressed them he became embroiled in a theological dispute that eventually erupted into a major controversy throughout the Dutch Calvinist church. Arminius rejected the teaching of "double predestination" that Calvin and other Genevan theologians had propounded. In this view, God not only had fore-knowledge of who would and would not accept or reject his offer of salvation, he actively elected or chose those to receive his grace. Arminius rejected such a view and taught instead that God may have had foreknowledge of whether one was to be saved, but this knowledge did not determine a human being's choice. One was free to accept God's offer of salvation or to reject it. In this way, Arminius's theology championed free will, a concept roundly rejected by Calvinist theologians of the day. At Leiden, Arminius's colleague Franciscus Gomarus led the charge against his views, developing a counter-party to the Arminians that became known as the Gomarists. Although he died only six years after accepting the post as professor of theology at Leiden, he attracted a significant following, and in the years following Arminius's death his concept of free will was taken up by a significant portion of the university's faculty and students, and was even embraced by Hugo Grotius, the greatest legal mind of the early seventeenth century. One year following his death, they issued the Remonstrances, a work that systematically defended his teachings and argued that they should be accepted by the Calvinist church in the Netherlands. From this time, the Arminian party in the Netherlands became known as Remonstrants. During the 1610s, the controversy continued to brew over Arminius's free-will theology, but in 1618, the Synod of Dordt, a meeting of the Dutch church's ministers and theologians roundly condemned his views as heretical. While a splinter group survived that adhered to his teachings, Dutch Calvinist orthodoxy continued to follow the vein of thinking on predestination that had first been set down by John Calvin in the sixteenth century. Arminius's views survived, however, and became even more significant in the eighteenth century, when they were adopted by John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church.