Calvin’s ideas of depravity, predestination, and the purpose of human existence spread rapidly within the expanding Protestant world, and after his death in 1564 followers like Theodore Beza in Geneva and William Perkins in Cambridge continued to elaborate these doctrines and further their command over churchgoers’ belief. In time, however, questions arose even among the committed faithful. Not surprisingly, the doctrine of predestination—intended by Calvin as a source of comfort but, to many of those faithful, ground for profound anxiety and even despair—was a particular focus of concern.
Almost by accident, a Dutch theologian, Jacob Arminius, became the fulcrum of the dispute. Born in 1560, Arminius had been a student first at Leiden and then at Geneva under Calvin’s successor Beza. He then returned to Holland, where he served as a minister in the Reformed Church in Amsterdam. In 1589 a colleague asked him to refute the ideas put forth by two ministers in Delft who had refused to endorse Beza’s view, following Augustine and Calvin, that the elect who were to be saved were chosen before the Fall of Adam and Eve. At about the same time, the Amsterdam consistory (the governing body of the local Reformed Church) asked Arminius to refute the views of another Dutch theologian who was critical of Calvinist doctrine more broadly. Especially in the latter dispute, two aspects of predestination were particularly at issue: Did those who were among the elect have to do anything, or even merely have to will something, to receive God’s grace once it was given? Or were their actions and their will beside the point for this purpose? And once someone received God’s grace, could he fall away from it? If so, how? On each set of issues, the question in short was whether human agency—choice or action, or both—mattered for an individual’s salvation.
With Arminius’s credentials as a former student of Theodore Beza, the presumption was that he would reaffirm the orthodox Calvinist doctrine. But despite his Calvinist pedigree, after study and reflection his answers to the questions given him took a different direction. Yes, he concluded, an act of human will is involved in receiving God’s grace: God “foreknew” who would accept faith and who wouldn’t, and extended his grace not arbitrarily but to those who he knew in advance would choose in this way. While grace alone was still what mattered for salvation, the giving of grace was not unconditional but rather in foreknowledge of who would choose faith. Grace, therefore, can be resisted.
Further, Arminius concluded, individual humans can fall from grace after receiving it. True, those who have received this “life-giving Spirit” thereby have “sufficient powers to fight against Satan, sin, the world and their own flesh, and to gain the victory over these enemies.” But this strength is not theirs unconditionally. Only if they “stand prepared for the battle, implore his help, and be not wanting to themselves,” will God preserve them from falling. Arminius’s answer to each question put to him, therefore, was—in part—that human choice and agency matter.
Arminius made no attempt to publish his unexpected conclusions, and he was circumspect even in what he wrote but did not publish. After stating his view of the need for the saints to stand ready for battle and implore God’s help, for example, he modestly opined that it would be useful for a church synod (a formal church gathering) “to institute a diligent inquiry from the Scriptures, whether it is not possible for some individuals through negligence…to decline from the sound doctrine which was once delivered to them,” and thereby cause the divine grace they have received to be ineffectual. Even more cautiously, “Though I here openly and ingenuously affirm, that I never taught that a true believer can either totally or finally fall away from the faith, and perish; yet I will not conceal, that there are passages of Scripture which seem to me to wear this aspect.”
These departures from Calvinist orthodoxy had begun to influence Arminius’s sermons, however, and in 1591 one of his senior colleagues in the Amsterdam ministry complained to the local consistory. Arminius managed to satisfy the consistory that he was preaching nothing improper, and the matter remained quiet for more than a decade. But in 1603 he was appointed professor of theology at the university in Leiden and at this point the controversy became acute. Rival theologians, including Arminius’s earlier accuser, publicly objected to university proceedings involving Arminius and others holding like views, and opposed the dissertations of their opponents’ students. The dispute soon came also to involve matters of church authority and governance—in this case, whether only religious bodies or the civil authorities as well could remove an unorthodox minister or professor, or convene a national-level synod.
Arminius died in 1609 but the publication of his writings, beginning soon after his death, kept the controversy alive. Less than a year later, his followers presented an official petition to the States-General of Holland, the highest Dutch civil authority, raising five specific points of disagreement with the prevailing Calvinist orthodoxy. Even though Arminius was no longer there to argue his views, his followers did so in his name and the position they advanced quickly acquired the label “Arminian.” In time, for faithful Calvinists, Arminian became an all-purpose epithet referring not just to dissent concerning these specific aspects of predestination but to any form of disagreement with orthodox Calvinist doctrine. (Arminius was never as important for the Arminians as Calvin was for the Calvinists.)
In response to the Arminians’ petition, those committed to the predestinarian view as laid out by Calvin and Beza responded with a counterpetition of their own, reaffirming the unconditional nature of God’s grace and the impossibility of falling from it. As was typical of such doctrinal disagreements, each side claimed authority in the line of Paul and then Augustine. The dispute simmered for the better part of a decade until, in 1618, the Dutch Reformed Church convened a synod to settle the debate. Held in the southern Dutch city of Dordrecht—commonly, Dort—the gathering included representatives of the Dutch church’s provincial synods and of the Dutch universities. Representatives of the Reformed churches in Switzerland, Britain, and Germany came as well. Throughout, the meeting was instigated, organized, and dominated by the orthodox Calvinist forces.
After six months of debate, the Dort Synod predictably rejected Arminius’s views and reaffirmed the orthodox doctrine. The synod’s official concluding statement, affirmed in April 1619 and issued in May, organized this accepted belief around five “points” that directly responded to the challenges raised by the Arminians, and that then formed the basis of orthodox Calvinism. In time, at least among English-speaking Calvinists, it became popular to order these five points according to the convenient mnemonic TULIP:8 Total Depravity, in the sense of extreme corruption and sinfulness of human nature following the Fall, so that humans cannot, without assistance, choose to have faith. Unconditional Election, so that God’s choice of whom to save is by his will alone, not in respect of any decision or action, or any other merit, of those who are chosen—hence implying also the unlimited sovereignty of God in making this election, and in parallel the absence of any role in it for human choice or action other than that consequent on receiving God’s grace. Limited Atonement, meaning that although Jesus’s suffering and death were sufficient to atone for the sins of all humanity, they are nonetheless efficacious only for the elect. Irresistible Grace, so that—contrary to the Arminians (and perhaps to Arminius himself, depending on which of his statements one chooses)—the elect inevitably turn to faith, and do so only once, and no one who is chosen can resist either God’s grace or the salvation it brings. And Perseverance of the Saints, meaning—again contrary to the Arminians—that the elect cannot fall away from faith (and anyone who appears to do so never really had faith to begin with).
The States-General accepted the Dort Synod’s statement, and to enforce its content within the church sent it on to each of the country’s provincial synods. Ministers who refused to sign it—roughly two hundred of them—were removed from office. Those who continued to speak out against the Dort principles were banished from the country. It was, for the time being, a total victory for the orthodox side.
Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints continued to frame the central doctrine of orthodox Calvinist belief for at least the next three centuries, and in some quarters they still do today. (The phrase “five-point Calvinist”—or sometimes even TULIP Calvinist—still often refers to a believer in Reformed doctrine as laid down at Dort.) But the discomfort that these ideas caused among many of the would-be faithful did not disappear, nor did the debate that Arminius and his followers had initiated. By the time of Adam Smith and his contemporaries, more than a century after the Dort Synod, that debate remained intense within Protestant church circles, especially in Scotland. In the meanwhile, contention over religion, among other issues, had led to a civil war and a revolution.
In 1534, following his excommunication the year before, Henry VIII proclaimed himself head of the newly independent Church of England, and for the remaining thirteen years of his lifetime the English church was anti-Rome politically albeit not yet clearly Protestant in its theology. (Henry himself was firmly anti-Protestant.) But Henry’s death led to a dozen years of turmoil. His nine-year-old son, who assumed the throne as Edward VI, never attained sufficient age or stature to be a governing force in his own right, and so others—often pursuing their own objectives—ruled, and disagreed, in his name. After just six years Edward died, succeeded by his older half-sister, Mary. Mary was Henry’s daughter by his first wife, the Spanish Catherine. Like her mother, she was a staunch Catholic, and within a year of assuming the throne she married the Catholic prince Philip of Spain, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who had spent years fighting the Protestants on the continent. She quickly sought to return England to the Roman Church. But by then (Mary came to the throne twenty years after the initial separation under her father), increasing numbers of Englishmen were becoming accustomed to Protestantism and many had become committed Protestants. Her effort to root them out, involving not just dismissals of clergymen from their posts but outright persecutions including public burnings—more than three hundred were killed—earned her the lasting sobriquet Bloody Mary. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, recording many of these events, became England’s most widely read book after the Bible.
Martyrdom of George Marsh and William Flower, 1555.
The execution of hundreds of committed Protestants, often enacted as a public spectacle, during “Bloody” Mary’s brief reign reinforced popular antipathy toward Catholicism in England.
Mary died in 1558, having reigned for only five years. Her younger half-sister, Elizabeth, was Henry’s daughter by Anne Boleyn, his first wife after the break with Rome enabled him to remarry. Unlike Mary, Elizabeth had been reared as a Protestant. Moreover, the chief foreign threat that England faced during her forty-five-year reign was from Catholic Spain. Once she succeeded to the throne, Elizabeth was determined to maintain her kingdom’s independence and with it that of the English church, beginning the very next year with an Act of Uniformity that reconfirmed her control over all church matters—including requiring all English persons to attend church weekly. The Thirty-Nine Articles, laying out the basic tenets of Anglican belief, were likewise a product of the effort to consolidate England’s Protestant settlement. The queen officially sanctioned the Latin version of the new confession in 1563; the English translation in use today, including some minor changes, appeared eight years later. With the Articles’ publication in English, an oath of conformity was required for all ordained clergy. Increasingly, predestinarian theology prevailed within the Church of England.