Podcasts about jacobus arminius

De Pieterskerk gold lange tijd als dé begraafplaats voor knappe koppen van de Universiteit Leiden. Hoog tijd om eens een kijkje te nemen. De Universiteit Leiden bestaat dit jaar 450 jaar. In een nieuwe reeks van de UBLpodcast duikt universiteitshistoricus Pieter Slaman in de geschiedenis van de oudste universiteit van Nederland. Dat doet hij aan de hand van historische documenten uit de Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, én met een gast. Voor deze aflevering spreekt hij met Ward Hoskens, conservator van de Pieterskerk. Die kerk wordt ook wel het Mausoleum Accademicum van de Universiteit Leiden genoemd. Veel beroemde hoogleraren hebben er hun laatste rustplaats. Zo vind je er bijvoorbeeld de graven van Herman Boerhaave en Jacobus Arminius. Samen verkennen Slaman en Hoskens de herinneringscultuur van de Universiteit Leiden. Waarom werden vroegere hoogleraren met zoveel egards begraven in de Pieterskerk? En hoe herdenkt de universiteit de meer recente doden, zoals de slachtoffers van de Tweede Wereldoorlog? In deze podcastserie neemt Pieter Slaman zijn gesprekspartners mee op een tocht door de geschiedenis van de Universiteit Leiden. In iedere aflevering brengt het duo een bezoek aan een locatie die een speciale plek heeft in de historie van de universiteit.

Introduction II Timothy 2:15 John Calvin (1509-1564) Jacobus Arminius and his followers argued against Calvin's teaching. The five points of…

In this episode of The Vortex Apologetic, Beef and the Brain discuss the concern behind the missiles shot into Russia; a doctor speaks the truth regarding flu-shots; cancer in covid-19 vaccinated individuals, and some other news. And lastly, an introduction into the nature of the debate between John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius.  Tune in, listen and be a Berean!     Episode recorded on November 21, 2024

Jacobus Arminius is a character many have heard of because of the calvinist vs. arminian debates. But how well do you know the story of the man himself? We really want to say thank you to David K Martin for the many sermons of ours he has read. You can find more of his content at his website hereJoin Revived Studios on Patreon for more!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/revived-thoughts6762/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this series of lessons, we want to take examine the network of doctrines that has become known as Calvinism. This is one of the most destructive false doctrines that has permeated almost all religions in the world today. In this episode we will consider the following: Who Is John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius and what did they believe? The five major tenets of Calvinism and the T.U.L.I.P. acronym Original Sin and the belief that mankind inherited Adam's original sin Questions that have been submitted on this topic biblequestions.org

On January 16, 1994, sometime after I read the verses we are going to explore this morning, I reflected on the tension I felt over how a loving God could choose and predestine a person before the foundation of the world for salvation. I wasnt angry over what I read in these verses, but I was disturbed; I was disturbed to the point of a near crisis of faith even though I had only been a Christian for just over two years. While I read over Ephesians 1:3-6; I also read similar passages such as Romans 8:28-30; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; John 6:44, and the entire chapter of Romans 9. I read these passages without the aid of books or commentaries, for it was only me and my Bible. I knew nothing of John Calvin or Jacobus Arminius, nor was I aware of their teachings by which we get Calvinism and Arminianism. I share this with you because I want you to know; that if some of you currently struggle with what you see in Ephesians 1:3-6, I also struggled with these same verses, and it took a lot of time for me to work through it, with just me and my Bible. What is clear, however, is that Gods love for you is older than dirt. There are three words that are linked to what it means to be blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ (v. 3) that I want to focus our time on that I believe will help you work through what it is Paul is saying in these verses, and those words are: chose (v. 4), predestined (v. 5), and favored (v. 6). God Chose the Christian to be Holy and Blameless (v. 4) What was so hard about my struggle with verses 3-6 is that this verse could not have been any clearer: God chose us in Jesus before the foundation of the world; the Greek word used for world is kosmos, and it refers to creation. When did God do it? Before He invented dirt. How did God do it? Through His Son, Jesus. Why did He do it? That those who were chosen, would be holy and blameless before Him. Before we can get to why God chose, we need to understand what it means for Him to choose. To choose is to pick or select someone or something. Every November we vote and when we vote, we choose certain candidates that we hope receive enough votes to be elected to whatever office it is that they are running for. In the case of verse 4, to choose is to elect. From verses like the ones before us this morning and others like it, we get the doctrine of elections (aka the doctrine of predestination). No person or theologian who believes the Bible to be the word of God denies what Paul is saying here, but where theologians, pastors, and Christians throughout the ages have disagreed is how it was that God chose the Christian before the foundation of the world. Let me summarize the most popular ways people have explained how it was that God chose. God chose you for salvation because you freely chose Him. You were drawn to him, but it wasnt until you chose Him that He chose you. God chose not only you but the body of Christ that is the Church to be the group of people who receive salvation freely by faith in Jesus. So, God does not choose individuals for salvation, but he has chosen before the foundation of the world that it would be through Christ that people would be saved. God chose you for salvation because he sees all things eternally, and because He can see peoples and events both present and future, He sovereignly chose you because he already knew you would freely choose Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins. Of the three views I mentioned, the third is the one I gravitated towards and believed was the best of the three options; I even stated in my journal on January 20, 1994, Due to the Scriptures and that all scripture is inspired by God, my conclusion on predestination is made: God is all-knowing therefore He predestined us for salvation, but allowed us to choose him for salvation. At the time, my conclusion seemed to reconcile Ephesians 1:3-6 and others like it with passages like 2 Peter 3:9, The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance. There is a fourth view that I have come to appreciate due to two realities I never considered back in 1994, the first concerns the fact that God stands outside of time because time is a part of creation, therefore He is not bound to time and does not make choices based on what He can see down the corridors of time because He stands outside of time. The other reality I did not consider back in 1994 was Ephesians 1:1-4, which states: And you were dead in your offenses and sins, in which you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all previously lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the rest (Eph. 2:1-3). In light of Ephesians 1:3-6, how can a person respond to God in faith when that person is spiritually dead? Can the spiritually dead do anything spiritual? Can the spiritually dead will themselves alive just enough to believe in God? What does Paul mean by dead in Ephesians 2:1? The Greek word could not be any clearer, it is nekros. Do you want to know what nekros means? It means this: no longer having life. So how dead is dead? So, the question I had to answer is a question you must answer as well, and that question is simply this: How can the spiritual dead do anything apart from God doing something? Paul gives us the answer in Ephesians 2:4-5, But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our wrongdoings, made us alive together with Christ (Eph. 2:45). The point of verse 4 is simply this: You, who were once spiritually dead. You who once, lived in the lusts of your flesh, indulged the desires of your flesh, you who followed the prince of this world, and you who were once a child of wrathHe chose you before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in Christ. Whatever you are doing with verse 4, whatever you want to do with verse 4, and whatever you plan to do with verse 4, one thing is very clear: God acted first. When you had no ability or desire to find Him, He found you. John Stott was right when he wrote The doctrine of election is a divine revelation, not a human speculation.[1] God Predestined the Christian for Love (v. 5) What does it mean to be chosen? It means that God predestined you to something. What does predestination mean? It means, to determine something ahead of time before its occurrence.[2] So, according to verse 5, before God invented dirt, He planned for your adoption as a son or daughter through all that Jesus would do on your account for your sin on a cross that we all deserved. We know we deserved the cross because of what Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:3, which is that all of us at one point in our lives were, by nature children of wrath, just as the rest. In Romans 3:10-11, we are told just how bad our spiritual deadness is: as it is written: There is no righteous person, not even one; there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks out God (Rom. 3:1011). Since when have I been spiritually dead? According to Psalm 51:5, Behold, I was brought forth in guilt, and in sin my mother conceived me. Just in case you are not sure what to make of Psalm 51:5, consider Ecclesiastes 9:2, Furthermore, the hearts of the sons of mankind are full of evil, and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. So, with Ephesians 2:1-3 and a whole bunch of other verses about our spiritual problem as our backdrop, lets read again Ephesians 1:5 more closely and thoughtfully: In Love He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will. In other words, among the mass of spiritually dead humanity that has postured themselves against God as, sons of disobedience who walk according to the course of this world, God chose you, Christian, in Jesus, before He created dirt, to be holy and blameless. God chose you because you were dead, dead, dead, and because you were dead, He did the thing that no one else could have done! God raised your spiritually dead and helpless self. Why did He do it? Well, we are told that He did it In love and if that is not enough for you, Paul elaborates and tells us that He did it, according to the good pleasure of His will. And if that is not enough for you, he further elaborates on that point in the next chapter: being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead made us alive together with Christ (2:4-5). It is because of Gods love, His will, and His good pleasure that you who were once dead, now stand before Him as a son or as a daughter solely because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ! Dear Christian, the point of Ephesians 1:3-6 is this: you are only a Christian because of a merciful God who set His affection upon you by sending His son to endure a wrath you deserved for the purpose of adopting you to be His child out of an infinite love no one deserves. God Favored the Christian in Christ (v. 6) So, lets walk through these verses now that we have observed the scenery of Gods word that surrounds Ephesians 1:3-6. If you are a Christian, you were once dead in your sins, you were hostile towards God, and there was no real motive in you to seek the true God, and in spite of all of that, God the Father chose to make you alive in His Son, Jesus, before Genesis 1:1 ever happened, and He did it so that you, would be holy and blameless before Him. The point of verse 4 is that God did something you were powerless to do. Not only did God the Father choose you to be holy and blameless by making you alive in His Son, but He predestined us to be His adopted child with all the rights and privileges that come with being a son or a daughter, and He did it by putting His Son, who kept the Law, on a cross to atone for your guilt from breaking His cosmic Law just as the Bible declares: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for usfor it is written: Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree (Gal. 3:13). If that is not clear enough for you, we also are told in Colossians 2:13-14, And when you were dead in your wrongdoings and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our wrongdoings, having canceled the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross (Col. 2:1314). You were not only dead in your sins before Christ, but the Bible informs us that we are now redeemed by Jesus who were once enemies of God: For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life (Rom. 5:10). What this means dear friends, is this: You were once dead in your sins, are now alive in Christ, and are now reconciled to God. You who are reconciled to God, are now a friend of God (John 15:14-15). If you are still confused as to why He did it, look no further than verse 6. Not only did He save your sorry soul because He simply loved you, and not only did He redeem you as his child out of His good pleasure of His will alone, but He did it, to the praise of the glory of His grace, with which He favored you in His Beloved Son (v. 6). By the way, the word favored literally means, to become the recipient of Gods freely bestowed, beneficent goodwill. What this means is that you were saved from your sins, and it was not due to anything in you, but solely because of the love of the Father who sent His Son who willingly became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). In his book, Friendship with God, Mike McKinley wrote what I think is a good way to end this sermon: Your status before God doesnt depend on your performance, or work, or obedience; it depends on Jesus, and he did everything perfectly to make you Gods friend. Nothing can ever separate you from Gods love in Christ (Rom. 8:38-39). Once He has made you His friend through faith in Jesus, you can never be his enemy again.[3] In closing, permit me to give you some pointers that will help you listen, understand, and submit to the authority of the Bible: Do not try to bend what you read in the Bible to your will. If you want to grow as a Christian, you must submit your will to the authority of the Bible as Gods Word. The Bible is one book, therefore read every verse in the Bible within the context of its surrounding verses, chapters, and books. When you study your Bible, pray to God to help you understand and apply His Word to your life. Read every verse in the Bible with the understanding that God does not need to get better. So, if you read a story, chapter, or verse in the Bible that you do not like, understand you are the one who needs to improve at being good, not God. Just because you do not understand or do not like something you have read in the Bible, does not mean that it is untrue. At the end of the day, what matters is what Gods Word says, not what you think the Bible says, what your pastor says the Bible says, what your family says the Bible says, what your friends say the Bible says, or anyone else says that the Bible says. What matters is what Gods Word says about who He is, who we are, and what we are called to do in this short life we have been gifted. If you have heard anything this morning, I hope you have heard this: Ephesians 1:3-6 teaches us that you are a Christian not because of what you have done, but because of everything God has done, and because of Jesus, you are now a child and a friend of God Almighty! [1] John R. W. Stott, Gods New Society (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), p. 37. [2] From Lexham Research Lexham Research Lexicon of the Greek New Testament. [3] Mike McKinley, Friendship with God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway; 2023), p. 11

On January 16, 1994, sometime after I read the verses we are going to explore this morning, I reflected on the tension I felt over how a loving God could choose and predestine a person before the foundation of the world for salvation. I wasnt angry over what I read in these verses, but I was disturbed; I was disturbed to the point of a near crisis of faith even though I had only been a Christian for just over two years. While I read over Ephesians 1:3-6; I also read similar passages such as Romans 8:28-30; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; John 6:44, and the entire chapter of Romans 9. I read these passages without the aid of books or commentaries, for it was only me and my Bible. I knew nothing of John Calvin or Jacobus Arminius, nor was I aware of their teachings by which we get Calvinism and Arminianism. I share this with you because I want you to know; that if some of you currently struggle with what you see in Ephesians 1:3-6, I also struggled with these same verses, and it took a lot of time for me to work through it, with just me and my Bible. What is clear, however, is that Gods love for you is older than dirt. There are three words that are linked to what it means to be blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ (v. 3) that I want to focus our time on that I believe will help you work through what it is Paul is saying in these verses, and those words are: chose (v. 4), predestined (v. 5), and favored (v. 6). God Chose the Christian to be Holy and Blameless (v. 4) What was so hard about my struggle with verses 3-6 is that this verse could not have been any clearer: God chose us in Jesus before the foundation of the world; the Greek word used for world is kosmos, and it refers to creation. When did God do it? Before He invented dirt. How did God do it? Through His Son, Jesus. Why did He do it? That those who were chosen, would be holy and blameless before Him. Before we can get to why God chose, we need to understand what it means for Him to choose. To choose is to pick or select someone or something. Every November we vote and when we vote, we choose certain candidates that we hope receive enough votes to be elected to whatever office it is that they are running for. In the case of verse 4, to choose is to elect. From verses like the ones before us this morning and others like it, we get the doctrine of elections (aka the doctrine of predestination). No person or theologian who believes the Bible to be the word of God denies what Paul is saying here, but where theologians, pastors, and Christians throughout the ages have disagreed is how it was that God chose the Christian before the foundation of the world. Let me summarize the most popular ways people have explained how it was that God chose. God chose you for salvation because you freely chose Him. You were drawn to him, but it wasnt until you chose Him that He chose you. God chose not only you but the body of Christ that is the Church to be the group of people who receive salvation freely by faith in Jesus. So, God does not choose individuals for salvation, but he has chosen before the foundation of the world that it would be through Christ that people would be saved. God chose you for salvation because he sees all things eternally, and because He can see peoples and events both present and future, He sovereignly chose you because he already knew you would freely choose Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins. Of the three views I mentioned, the third is the one I gravitated towards and believed was the best of the three options; I even stated in my journal on January 20, 1994, Due to the Scriptures and that all scripture is inspired by God, my conclusion on predestination is made: God is all-knowing therefore He predestined us for salvation, but allowed us to choose him for salvation. At the time, my conclusion seemed to reconcile Ephesians 1:3-6 and others like it with passages like 2 Peter 3:9, The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance. There is a fourth view that I have come to appreciate due to two realities I never considered back in 1994, the first concerns the fact that God stands outside of time because time is a part of creation, therefore He is not bound to time and does not make choices based on what He can see down the corridors of time because He stands outside of time. The other reality I did not consider back in 1994 was Ephesians 1:1-4, which states: And you were dead in your offenses and sins, in which you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all previously lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the rest (Eph. 2:1-3). In light of Ephesians 1:3-6, how can a person respond to God in faith when that person is spiritually dead? Can the spiritually dead do anything spiritual? Can the spiritually dead will themselves alive just enough to believe in God? What does Paul mean by dead in Ephesians 2:1? The Greek word could not be any clearer, it is nekros. Do you want to know what nekros means? It means this: no longer having life. So how dead is dead? So, the question I had to answer is a question you must answer as well, and that question is simply this: How can the spiritual dead do anything apart from God doing something? Paul gives us the answer in Ephesians 2:4-5, But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our wrongdoings, made us alive together with Christ (Eph. 2:45). The point of verse 4 is simply this: You, who were once spiritually dead. You who once, lived in the lusts of your flesh, indulged the desires of your flesh, you who followed the prince of this world, and you who were once a child of wrathHe chose you before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in Christ. Whatever you are doing with verse 4, whatever you want to do with verse 4, and whatever you plan to do with verse 4, one thing is very clear: God acted first. When you had no ability or desire to find Him, He found you. John Stott was right when he wrote The doctrine of election is a divine revelation, not a human speculation.[1] God Predestined the Christian for Love (v. 5) What does it mean to be chosen? It means that God predestined you to something. What does predestination mean? It means, to determine something ahead of time before its occurrence.[2] So, according to verse 5, before God invented dirt, He planned for your adoption as a son or daughter through all that Jesus would do on your account for your sin on a cross that we all deserved. We know we deserved the cross because of what Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:3, which is that all of us at one point in our lives were, by nature children of wrath, just as the rest. In Romans 3:10-11, we are told just how bad our spiritual deadness is: as it is written: There is no righteous person, not even one; there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks out God (Rom. 3:1011). Since when have I been spiritually dead? According to Psalm 51:5, Behold, I was brought forth in guilt, and in sin my mother conceived me. Just in case you are not sure what to make of Psalm 51:5, consider Ecclesiastes 9:2, Furthermore, the hearts of the sons of mankind are full of evil, and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. So, with Ephesians 2:1-3 and a whole bunch of other verses about our spiritual problem as our backdrop, lets read again Ephesians 1:5 more closely and thoughtfully: In Love He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will. In other words, among the mass of spiritually dead humanity that has postured themselves against God as, sons of disobedience who walk according to the course of this world, God chose you, Christian, in Jesus, before He created dirt, to be holy and blameless. God chose you because you were dead, dead, dead, and because you were dead, He did the thing that no one else could have done! God raised your spiritually dead and helpless self. Why did He do it? Well, we are told that He did it In love and if that is not enough for you, Paul elaborates and tells us that He did it, according to the good pleasure of His will. And if that is not enough for you, he further elaborates on that point in the next chapter: being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead made us alive together with Christ (2:4-5). It is because of Gods love, His will, and His good pleasure that you who were once dead, now stand before Him as a son or as a daughter solely because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ! Dear Christian, the point of Ephesians 1:3-6 is this: you are only a Christian because of a merciful God who set His affection upon you by sending His son to endure a wrath you deserved for the purpose of adopting you to be His child out of an infinite love no one deserves. God Favored the Christian in Christ (v. 6) So, lets walk through these verses now that we have observed the scenery of Gods word that surrounds Ephesians 1:3-6. If you are a Christian, you were once dead in your sins, you were hostile towards God, and there was no real motive in you to seek the true God, and in spite of all of that, God the Father chose to make you alive in His Son, Jesus, before Genesis 1:1 ever happened, and He did it so that you, would be holy and blameless before Him. The point of verse 4 is that God did something you were powerless to do. Not only did God the Father choose you to be holy and blameless by making you alive in His Son, but He predestined us to be His adopted child with all the rights and privileges that come with being a son or a daughter, and He did it by putting His Son, who kept the Law, on a cross to atone for your guilt from breaking His cosmic Law just as the Bible declares: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for usfor it is written: Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree (Gal. 3:13). If that is not clear enough for you, we also are told in Colossians 2:13-14, And when you were dead in your wrongdoings and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our wrongdoings, having canceled the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross (Col. 2:1314). You were not only dead in your sins before Christ, but the Bible informs us that we are now redeemed by Jesus who were once enemies of God: For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life (Rom. 5:10). What this means dear friends, is this: You were once dead in your sins, are now alive in Christ, and are now reconciled to God. You who are reconciled to God, are now a friend of God (John 15:14-15). If you are still confused as to why He did it, look no further than verse 6. Not only did He save your sorry soul because He simply loved you, and not only did He redeem you as his child out of His good pleasure of His will alone, but He did it, to the praise of the glory of His grace, with which He favored you in His Beloved Son (v. 6). By the way, the word favored literally means, to become the recipient of Gods freely bestowed, beneficent goodwill. What this means is that you were saved from your sins, and it was not due to anything in you, but solely because of the love of the Father who sent His Son who willingly became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). In his book, Friendship with God, Mike McKinley wrote what I think is a good way to end this sermon: Your status before God doesnt depend on your performance, or work, or obedience; it depends on Jesus, and he did everything perfectly to make you Gods friend. Nothing can ever separate you from Gods love in Christ (Rom. 8:38-39). Once He has made you His friend through faith in Jesus, you can never be his enemy again.[3] In closing, permit me to give you some pointers that will help you listen, understand, and submit to the authority of the Bible: Do not try to bend what you read in the Bible to your will. If you want to grow as a Christian, you must submit your will to the authority of the Bible as Gods Word. The Bible is one book, therefore read every verse in the Bible within the context of its surrounding verses, chapters, and books. When you study your Bible, pray to God to help you understand and apply His Word to your life. Read every verse in the Bible with the understanding that God does not need to get better. So, if you read a story, chapter, or verse in the Bible that you do not like, understand you are the one who needs to improve at being good, not God. Just because you do not understand or do not like something you have read in the Bible, does not mean that it is untrue. At the end of the day, what matters is what Gods Word says, not what you think the Bible says, what your pastor says the Bible says, what your family says the Bible says, what your friends say the Bible says, or anyone else says that the Bible says. What matters is what Gods Word says about who He is, who we are, and what we are called to do in this short life we have been gifted. If you have heard anything this morning, I hope you have heard this: Ephesians 1:3-6 teaches us that you are a Christian not because of what you have done, but because of everything God has done, and because of Jesus, you are now a child and a friend of God Almighty! [1] John R. W. Stott, Gods New Society (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979), p. 37. [2] From Lexham Research Lexham Research Lexicon of the Greek New Testament. [3] Mike McKinley, Friendship with God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway; 2023), p. 11

My friends Hank and Tripp come on to talk about Calvinism. We mention John MacArthur, Bill Hybels, John Calvin, Michael Servetus, Jacobus Arminius, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Joe Biden, Henry VIII, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Charles Spurgeon, James White, William Lane Craig, and many more.

“There's too much infighting and too much negativity from a lot of people that really kind of misunderstand each other. I think Reformed Arminianism has the opportunity to bring some people together around the table and discuss this.” Dr. J. Matthew Pinson, president of Welch College, discusses his book, “40 Questions About Arminianism,” which addresses much of the unknown and misunderstood teachings of Jacobus Arminius and encourages a broad understanding of historic and contemporary Arminianism. “40 Questions About Arminianism” is available from Christianbook and Amazon. #NAFWB #BetterTogether #Arminianism

In this series of lessons, we want to take examine the network of doctrines that has become known as Calvinism. This is one of the most destructive false doctrines that has permeated almost all religions in the world today. In this episode we will consider the following: Who Is John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius and what did they believe? The five major tenets of Calvinism and the T.U.L.I.P. acronym Original Sin and the belief that mankind inherited Adam's original sin Questions that have been submitted on this topic

Title: Graced Public Relations Part 2 Text: Titus 3:8-11 FCF: We often struggle insisting on what we ought to hold loosely and holding loosely what we ought to insist on. Prop: Because the gospel preached and lived is profitable for all men, we must teach and live the gospel and excommunicate all who refuse. Scripture Intro: [Slide 1] Turn in your bible to Titus chapter 3. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be back in Titus. However, I must admit that I am a little embarrassed that we are just now coming back to part 2 of this sermon. It has been over a month since you heard the first part of this message. I trust you were able to go back and listen to the previous sermon, but just in case you didn’t, I’ll take a little time to review what we saw from the first 7 verses of this passage. Paul is in the midst of telling Titus what to teach the people there on the island of Crete. In chapter 2, Paul explained how the gospel produces certain lifestyles in those who have truly received it. Lifestyles aimed at those within the church. Older men and women being examples and mentors to those younger men and women. Younger men and women teaching and Discipling their families. Paul hangs all of this on the fact that God’s grace, when it appears, saves His people to the uttermost. It does not provide a potential salvation, but rather a certain salvation. Those who experience His grace are set free from lawlessness and become eager to do good. Therefore Titus should insist on this kind of lifestyle in the church toward one another. In chapter 3 Paul turns that same message toward the unbelieving world. He begins by telling Titus to remind the Cretan Christians to submit to their ruling authorities, to be obedient, and generally to live holy lives of love and honor toward those who are outside the church. Why should Cretan Christians do this? Because they too were once the same way as the unbelieving world. They were foolish, slaves to sin, not desiring to seek God, nor even being capable of seeking God. But God invaded their life with his love and kindness. He saved them not by something they did but by His mercy, sending the spirit to wash and renew them, all made possible by the work of Christ. This declared righteousness comes by the grace of God and produces a confident faith in eternal life. They should live holy lives toward unbelievers because they have no room to boast. They would be exactly the same, if it were not for God doing something. So with that backdrop, let’s start our reading in verse 1 again and we will read through verse 11. I’ll be reading from the ESV today which you can follow in the pew bible on page 1346. Transition: Today, Paul will continue to show the Cretan Christians, how the gospel should be preached in purity and lived out in conduct. When they do this, it benefits all men. But for those who do not, action must be taken. I.) The gospel preached and lived is profitable for all men, so we must teach and live the gospel. (8) a. [Slide 2] 8 – The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, i. So right off the bat we have to wonder which saying this is talking about. ii. First, we must consider is this pointing back at what precedes it, or forward in what follows? iii. To answer that question, we need to go forward in the text a bit and see if there is anything that would be counted as a “faithful saying.” In order to be a faithful saying it needs to be something that is doctrinally full and somewhat memorable. Something that could be repeated like a Catechism or creed. iv. As we do that, we don’t really find anything. In fact, of all the “Faithful sayings” texts in the Pastoral Epistles, this seems to be the clearest when it comes to direction. It seems to very obviously point backward. v. However, that doesn’t fully answer our question. How far back does it go? Well what are our options? 1. [Slide 3] It is possible that it goes all the way back to verse 1. a. Chapter 2 ends with Paul telling Titus to not allow people in the church to dismiss His teaching. b. Then in chapter 3 he continues to instruct him what to teach. c. So, all he has said since verse 1 could be this saying. d. There are some reasons to doubt this though. i. Length is one of them. This is quite a “saying” if it encompasses these 7 verses. It seems a little long. ii. Paul’s words in verse 1 seem to be personal instruction to Titus and not a general saying for the whole of Christendom. Not that there is no application there, but it doesn’t seem to fit the mold of a “faithful saying” 2. [Slide 4] It is possible the saying goes back to verse 3. a. Here Paul turns to speaking truisms or stating theology or doctrine. b. He begins with man and who we are and ends with God’s work toward all who are His people. c. However, there are a couple issues with the saying going back this far. i. Again, length. It seems to be a little long to be a truism or statement of creed or confession. ii. Although Paul includes himself, and all Christians in this statement, it seems to hinge directly on the preceding verses. 3. [Slide 5] It is possible the saying goes back to verse 4. a. This is a much stronger possibility. b. All of what Paul says in these verses are said to “we” or “us” meaning Christians in general. c. It speaks of God and what HE does which makes for much better confessional or creedal material. d. It is a connected sentence with dependent clauses hanging on one another. You cannot really separate anything from 4-7 from each other. e. Really the only reason that this wouldn’t be the faithful saying is that it is lengthy. 4. [Slide 6] Finally, it is possible that the faithful saying is only verse 7 “being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” a. This is far shorter and encompasses great teaching. b. However, there are actually a couple problems here i. It may be too short. Verse 8 says that Titus should insist on these things. And with such a short statement, there isn’t a whole lot there to insist on. ii. This is very much a part of what was said previously to the extent that to divide it off seems to cut off part of what the saying is referring to. vi. [Slide 7] And so, I believe the best option, despite its length, is to go back to verse 3, especially since all that he says about God and His work in salvation is predicated upon man’s utter inability to save himself. vii. In this, Titus is to insist on these truths. He is to make it plain that these things MUST BE accepted as absolute truth of the church. viii. But why? Why are these things necessary to believe? b. [Slide 8] So that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. i. Ok. What is the connection here? ii. The summary of this statement of truth is what? That God does everything for our salvation and that we do nothing, because we can do nothing. His kindness, love, and grace appears and when that happens he saves us based on his mercy alone through Spiritual resurrection by the Spirit whereby he brings what was dead to life, all of which is made possible by the work of Christ. iii. In all of this the only thing we bring to our own salvation is the sin which made it necessary. iv. But how does that correlate with this statement – “so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works.” v. Well let’s break it down. What does it mean to “believe in God” here? vi. It does NOT mean to believe in His existence. It does not mean a simple assent to the truths mentioned in the statement. Instead, it is someone who has not only confessed that these things are true, but is depending on these things being true. vii. Believing in God is hoping exclusively in the fact of His work alone in our salvation – apart from anything we have done, including our own faith and good works! viii. Ok so what does “may be careful to devote themselves” mean? ix. “To be careful” means to put much thought, energy, time, and attention into something. x. “To devote” means to preside over or to appoint. However, this is in the middle voice, which is complicated to understand but it does change the meaning slightly, in that typically in the middle it is an action you are doing to or for yourself. And so, you are appointing yourself over. xi. What that does to the meaning is that it takes on a devotion. So, ways to translate it would be “to undertake resolutely” or “to practice diligently” or “to maintain the practice of” xii. Let’s put it all together. xiii. We must believe all that Paul has taught since verse 3. Why? xiv. So that those who were unable to seek God and are depending on God alone to save them, would put much thought and energy into diligently and resolutely practicing good works. xv. This amounts to the same thing from Galatians 5. Whom the Son has set free, is free indeed, but use your freedom for good works. Or Ephesians 2, where God’s gift of grace leading to faith and salvation, produces a person doing good works that God the Father has laid out for them before the foundation of the world. You see we must understand that before Christ we were wretches unable to do good works to the standard of God (who by the way defines all that is good, since he is the definition of good). Jesus said to the rich young ruler – why do you call me good? There is none good but God. But by God alone we are changed. And that truth we receive in faith, frees us from ever attempting by works what we could never earn. But it also frees us to be godly people and to live righteously. We are now able to devote ourselves to good works, but before God’s grace we were doomed to be judged by our works. xvi. The only path to a life that may be careful to devote itself to good works, is a life where it was once dead and God made it alive in Christ. xvii. So, we have our bookend. Paul began this chapter exhorting Titus to remind the people to live holy lives toward unbelievers, why? Because of doctrine. Because of what we believe about ourselves and our salvation. And what will right doctrine produce? Holy lives toward others. xviii. Paul continues… c. [Slide 9] These things are excellent and profitable for people. i. What things? ii. Good works? Or the truths from the faithful saying? iii. Certainly, the good works of believers are excellent and profitable for people. iv. Certainly, we are a city on a hill, we are salt, our good works will drive people to glorify God. All this is true. v. However, Paul is not focused on the result of our good works, but rather the cause of them. vi. Indeed, the root cause of our good works and all good entirely is God’s lovingkindness which He lavishes on those who are His people. That love is excellent and profitable for people. vii. Even unbelievers benefit from God’s goodness to His elect. Even unbelievers profit from the truths of total depravity and God’s acting alone to save His people. viii. How do we know this? Well, we live in a society that has rejected the concept that man is inherently evil and wicked. We live in a world where man is good from birth. Not simply neutral which would be were Pelagian the heretic would have landed. Not potentially good which is where Jacobus Arminius would have landed. No. We have progressed now to mankind being born good. ix. So, question… has this worldview been profitable and excellent for people? x. Christianity in America has been overtaken with the belief that man can actually do something to get salvation from God. From as much as sacraments, penance, and ritual to as little as belief, most of Christianity in America believes that man must do something in order for God to give him salvation. He must cooperate with God in order for God to forgive him of sin. xi. So, question… has that been profitable for the visible church? Has the visible church been growing with true disciples? Or is it shrinking? xii. Indeed, if the church in America would only grasp and understand these concepts – that man is wicked and that God alone acts to save them from the slavery of their sin… the visible church would be very small – but it would also be quite healthy with far fewer fake Christians. d. [Slide 10] Passage Truth: So Paul tells Titus that faith in these teachings, the teachings of the gospel, produces what we need to devote ourselves to good works. The gospel flows naturally to good works. And the gospel which flows naturally to good works, is excellent and profitable for all people. e. Passage Application: So in application Titus must insist upon these teachings. He must not allow any wiggle room here. The teachings of man’s depravity and God acting alone to save him from it are absolute necessities if the gospel is to remain untainted and effective. f. [Slide 11] Broader Biblical Truth: Zooming out from this text to the whole of scripture we arrive at the exact same conclusion. The gospel of Christ, whispered in the 3rd chapter of Genesis, Loudly proclaimed in the final words of Revelation, and expounded through the pages in between, this gospel, when applied to the heart of a man, does irrevocably change that man to be a doer of good. A keeper of the law. A fruit bearing Christ imitator. And through history in the scriptures and beyond them, we’ve seen the profitability for all mankind when the true gospel is believed and lived by God’s people. g. Broader Biblical Application: Therefore, it is absolutely imperative that we INSIST upon this teaching. Verses 3 through 7 are not questionable teachings. They are not grey areas we must agree to disagree on. No. They are the core of the gospel. That mankind – all mankind – are slaves to sin, unwilling and unable to seek God, and that God alone, apart from any effort or work of man, does save men to the uttermost. If you struggle with either of these teachings… you need to come talk to me. You need to get this right. This is the gospel, and you cannot walk through this life disagreeing with the core of the gospel while thinking you still have it somehow. The true gospel is what brings forth life in us. Make sure you have it! Transition: [Slide 12] So, we have seen that the gospel when preached and lived, has a positive effect on the world. That means it is all the more important that we insist on these teachings and live them out. But what if someone doesn’t? What if someone is less interested in insisting on the gospel and more interested in insisting upon their own opinions or teachings? What do we do with these teachings? What do we do with them? II.) The gospel preached and lived is profitable for all men, so we must excommunicate those who refuse. (9-11) a. [Slide 13] 9 – But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies., dissensions, and quarrels about the law, i. As we’ve seen, this entire section focuses on the gospel being lived out toward different groups of people. ii. First to the church in chapter 2, then to unbelievers in chapter 3. iii. Now it seems that Paul may be moving to a third group. iv. Well, if we are talking about those in the church and those not in the church – who else is there? v. What about those who are false teachers? Those who are causing trouble in the church. The reason these people don’t quite fit into the church or those outside the church is because they seem like they are a part of the church but they are teaching things that are worthless and unprofitable. vi. Paul advises that true gospel believers, people whose lives have been radically changed by the gospel will do what? vii. They will not seek out and engage in foolish controversies. viii. So, what constitutes a foolish controversy? ix. This is fairly difficult to try to define. x. And I think we are tempted in two different directions. 1. We are tempted to under-interpret this. Meaning that there is no such thing as a foolish controversy over anything in the scripture. So, everything in scripture is worthy of controversy and integral to the gospel. Therefore, it must be defended. If we interpret foolish controversies this way – we will always be fighting with one another. Such people bounce from church to church having been “run out” of every one because “the church was not concerned about the scriptures.” 2. On the other hand, we can be tempted to over-interpret this. Meaning that almost everything in scripture is not worth defending. If we interpret foolish controversies this way. key doctrines start falling by the wayside. This results in people rejecting the inspiration of the bible, the 6 day creation, the law of God, original sin, and pretty soon you have a church that stands for very little except a vague notion of Jesus that is not quite found in scripture. xi. So how do we strike that balance? How do we make sure we are not engaging in a foolish controversy, but that we also defend the things that actually matter. I think Paul has given us some clues in this very text. Both from what came before and what comes after. 1. First, he told Titus to insist upon the truths of the faithful saying. That mankind is wicked and depraved, slaves to sin, and unable to seek God – that seems like something that is not a foolish controversy. If that teaching is under attack – defend it. That God the triune does act alone to save a man from this state is also a truth worthy of defense. Even separation. Paul says – insist on these things. 2. Second, earlier in chapter 2 he tells Titus to not allow people to ignore his teaching, about what? The fact that God’s grace radically changes us to be free of lawlessness and to become a people who are eager to do good. So clearly Paul puts this in the “defend this teaching” camp. 3. Finally, in the things that follow we see some common threads. a. Genealogies. What is meant by this? Well in I Timothy we saw how at this time genealogies were used to add legends to or mythicize the scriptures. Turning them into words to build upon. So generally, any teaching that adds to the plain teaching of scripture, and does not attack the truths we just mentioned, should be something we avoid being drawn into fights over. b. Dissensions. Things that cause people to lose their tempers, or become needlessly heated are indications of things that ought to be avoided. If something is the truth no matter who believes it, it is easier to remain calm when defending it. If something is what you believe, it almost becomes a defense of yourself when someone attacks it. Therefore, instead of defending, you attack. That is a clue that it may be something to avoid fighting over. c. Quarrels about the law – This probably refers to the level to which someone should conform to the law of Moses. How Jewish does a Christian need to look? It is important to note that this is not in a pre-conversion context. In that, people need to be Jewish before being a Christian. Such a controversy would be worth defending the truth, as Paul does in Galatians. But, after becoming a Christian and then quarreling over the dietary laws, or meat offered to idols or other such things… this is what Paul is referring to. And so, controversies about things that concern practice and are somewhat grey in scripture – are to be avoided. When they aren’t avoided, they divide people and the diversity of the church diminishes. And by diversity I am not referring to race, but rather to perspective and practice. Christian metal enthusiasts and Hymns only Christians should be able to worship together. Sadly – they do not. And many churches actually separate the services so they don’t have to see each other. What a shame. b. [Slide 14] For they are unprofitable and worthless. i. Such conflicts over things that do not matter are wholly worthless and unprofitable. No one grows by them, no one learns by them, and all leave wounded from them. ii. This stands in direct contrast to the excellent and profitable nature of the truths in the faithful saying from verses 3 through 7. iii. So, Paul has shown what true believers are to do with the teachings of these people. Namely, they must avoid the teachings and the controversies. But what about the people themselves? c. [Slide 15] 10 – As for a person who stirs up division, i. So again, these are folks who appear to be a part of the church, but have come in and starting insisting on these foolish controversies, raising up strife, and ultimately not profiting the church or the watching world around them. ii. It should be noted that a person does not necessarily need to be a false teacher or promote a worthless or unprofitable teaching in order to be one who stirs up division. iii. Certainly, this seems to be where Paul is going – but the principle is sound and should be applied to all who stir up division. iv. So, what should the Cretans do with such a person who is stirring up division? d. [Slide 16] After warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, i. Three strikes and you are out. ii. What is going on here? iii. This gives us a pattern for how to deal with those who wish to insist upon controversial or foolish disputes. iv. First, the church as a whole, probably the leadership themselves will warn the individual that such teaching to which they are so aggressively clinging, is not excellent or profitable. It is not something that conforms to the level of faithful truth that we should insist upon and cling to. v. Therefore, they should stop insisting upon this teaching and stop stirring up division. vi. Applying this to any sort of division making, we can follow similar rules as it conforms to the general pattern for church discipline. Except of course that it is already a public matter. vii. After a second warning, the church is to excommunicate the individual if they persist. viii. This seems harsh right? Why should the church do this? e. [Slide 17] 11 – knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned. i. A person who is unwilling to listen to the warnings of the church leadership and the church body… ii. A person who is so tied to his own opinion that he is willing to stir up division in the church over it… iii. Such a person is both full of sin and twisted. They are self-condemned. What does this last part mean? They are self-condemned? iv. Their desire for division and to be always right is what condemns them to excommunication. Although the church actually puts them in the “nothing to do with” category – ultimately the divisive person has no one to blame but themselves. f. [Slide 18] Passage Truth: Paul continues to put forward the idea that the gospel preached and lived is profitable for all men. But not only must Titus insist upon these teachings… g. Passage Application: Titus must insist on these teachings to the extent that any who continues to oppose and divide the church over other teachings, are excommunicated. h. [Slide 19] Broader Biblical Truth: Again we don’t need to look far to find that the true gospel preached and lived is impacting on the church and the world around us. i. Broader Biblical Application: But the other application in this text from this truth, is that the gospel’s purity and living needs to be kept to the extent that those who would cause division would be excommunicated from the church. This applies to any who would overemphasize teachings that are not the gospel, or underemphasize teachings that are, or teachings that cast aside good works. The overall perspective is a submission to the apostles teachings and the gospel given down through the church age. Any who would divide over the clear gospel, must be warned twice and then excommunicated. Conclusion: [Slide 20]So how can we apply this text to our lives today at CBC? What should we as a church take away from all this? Actually, this message today is extremely applicable to the state of the universal church in America and our church locally. I know – you are so shocked right?

The following is the 2nd episode in a 2 part series where we explore the differences between the theologies of Calvinism & Arminianism.  Calvinism and Arminianism are two systems of theology that attempt to explain the relationship between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility in the matter of salvation. Calvinism is named for John Calvin, a French theologian who lived from 1509-1564. Arminianism is named for Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch theologian who lived from 1560-1609.  For the past 500 years, Christians (mainly protestant evangelicals) have continued to debate these systems of theology related to salvation and how exactly it works. The dispute centers around an understanding of what the Bible means when it talks about concepts such as depravity (or the sinfulness of man), predestination (or the divine foreordaining of all that will happen and all who will be saved), and atonement and who will be included in the atoning work of Christ. So which one is right? Is it that God is absolutely sovereign and ordains some people to be saved and others to be sent to hell? Or is it that God invites all human beings to place faith in Christ and be saved?

In Matthew 11, Jesus invited all who are weary and heavy laden to come to Him, and He would give them rest. But in John 15, Jesus says, “you did not choose me, but I chose and appointed you.” So does Jesus invite us to choose Him in salvation, or does He choose us in salvation? We know that the Bible teaches that God is sovereign over all things, but does that mean we don't have free will? How does the sovereignty of God work with humanity's responsibility to obey God's commands? Calvinism and Arminianism are two systems of theology that attempt to explain the relationship between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility in the matter of salvation. Calvinism is named for John Calvin, a French theologian who lived from 1509-1564. Arminianism is named for Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch theologian who lived from 1560-1609. For the past 500 years, Christians (mainly protestant evangelicals) have continued to debate these systems of theology related to salvation and how exactly it works. The dispute centers around an understanding of what the Bible means when it talks about concepts such as depravity (or the sinfulness of man), predestination (or the divine foreordaining of all that will happen and all who will be saved), and atonement and who will be included in the atoning work of Christ. So which one is right? Is it that God is absolutely sovereign and ordains some people to be saved and others to be sent to hell? Or is it that God invites all human beings to place faith in Christ and be saved?

In the Christian world, there is a long standing debate of who initiates one's salvation – God or man. Since the days of John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius (and even back to the time of St. Augustine), the question of "Does God choose those who follow Him, or does man have the ability to choose to follow God on his or her own accord?" This view is a big difference between not only those in the Protestant Church, but this belief is also a big divide between the Catholic Church and Protestant denominations. In this episode of RTC, Marc and Fuller look at the history of the Calvanist and Arminianist beliefs, what the Bible has to say about this conversation, and why your view on God's salvation can dictate how you view God and the world.  //Other Episodes You May Enjoy// 069, I Know God Loves Me, but Does God Like Me?: http://realtalkchristianpodcast.com/episodes/069-i-know-god-loves-me-but-does-god-like-me/ 063, What is Undeserved Grace?: http://realtalkchristianpodcast.com/episodes/063-what-is-undeserved-grace/ 043, If You Could Ask God One Question: http://realtalkchristianpodcast.com/episodes/043-if-you-could-ask-god-one-question/ 038, Can One Love Without God?: http://realtalkchristianpodcast.com/episodes/038-can-one-love-without-god/ 025, Cultural & Biblical Christianity: http://realtalkchristianpodcast.com/episodes/025-cultural-biblical-christianity/ 021, Should we have Unbelievers in Mind when designing the Sunday Morning Worship Service?: http://realtalkchristianpodcast.com/episodes/021-should-we-have-unbelievers-in-mind-when-designing-the-sunday-morning-worship-service/  //Helpful Links// Got Questions?: https://www.gotquestions.orgDwell Bible App: https://dwellapp.ioCross Formed Kids from Ryan Coatney: https://crossformedkids.comRTC Quick Links: https://linktr.ee/realtalkchristianpodcast  //Music used on RTC// Opening Song: “Joy” by Paul Lindgren https://open.spotify.com/track/3VcYVaixPlAS1KDVgYo1Dy?si=TqSXguuVQNudJrkcRDDjIAClosing Song: “Adjust” by Paul Lindgren https://open.spotify.com/track/16VMY0XxHDo0bLpp6dQpuc?si=a1khJqYTTtWyzeQEbtYGXg

Jacobus Arminius challenged the bedrock doctrines of the Reformation—but the Reformed churches pushed back. On this episode of 5 Minutes in Church History, Dr. Stephen Nichols interviews Dr. W. Robert Godfrey on the Synod of Dort and why we still celebrate its anniversary 400 years later. Read the transcript.

Calvinism arose out of the Protestant Reformation and was largely defined by John Calvin. The doctrine emphasizes God’s sovereignty, man’s depravity and the salvation of God’s elect by grace alone. Well-known Calvinists are George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Spurgeon and more recently, R.C. Sproul, J.I. Packer, Tim Keller and John Piper. Churches that subscribe to Calvinism include the Presbyterian Denominations and the various Reformed Churches around the world. Arminianism is a school of theology based on the teachings of Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius in the late 16th century. It arose as an objection to Calvinism in relation to its doctrines of predestination and election. Arminius and his followers, the Remonstrants taught that God has given humans free will, and humans are able to freely choose or reject salvation. The debate between Calvinists and Arminians has been ongoing among the evangelicals for a long time, drawing from various Scriptures and the early church fathers to support their respective views. However the differences remain – particularly as related to the sovereignty of God in salvation and the ideas of election and predestination, and atonement. The question remains: How big are the differences between the two views? Alexa Ho speaks to Pastor Jeremy Lim who offers a Calvinist standpoint and David Tan who speaks from an Arminian perspective. Will sparks fly? Read full summary here.

This week I have been in the studio working on a new music project, o for this week's podcast, I am dusting off the digital shelf to bring you a special podcast recorded with my wife last year concerning the doctrine of election. This was also recorded during the presidential election cycle of 2016.The popular Protestant doctrine of Election has been much contested down the years. Nevertheless, many aspects of this doctrine are the assumed standard for most mainline Evangelical Protestant denominations. There are some non-Calvinists or "Arminians", but they are not the dominant opinion in the American pulpits. Many people assume that if you are not a Calvinist, you are Arminian. I honestly know nothing of Jacobus Arminius except his name which I just looked up on Wikipedia! (Note to self: add Jacobus Arminius to reading list). Nevertheless, I have always had major concerns and have perceived many inconsistencies within the traditional Calvinistc teachings on election. In this podcast, I take a stab at explaining to my wife how I understand the Biblical doctrine of election. I am sure that this will not be my last attempt!Please, listen, comment, and share with a friend!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/karlgessler)

Building on yesterday’s message, Pastor Ray delves into the lives of John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius and their doctrinal movements with the Synod of Dort and the Remonstrance. Calvin killed and imprisoned those who disagreed with him, while Arminius brought to light the lie of the sinning Christian and the truth that we can live without sin in this life. In the 1700s, the Wesley brothers uncovered the doctrine of entire sanctification, thereby restoring the apostolic doctrine of Christianity. This […]

In this episode we ask the very important question, "What Does It Mean to Be Arminian?" Historically, there have been many different definitions of the term "Arminian" and it becomes very confusing. To add to the confusion the term "Arminian" means something else in different historical eras and even in different countries throughout history! In this episode we make a distinction between "Arminianism of the Heart" and "Arminianism of the Head." Unfortunately, many of the later Remonstrants and the English Arminians in England and New England were liberal "Arminians of the Head." It was really John Wesley who recovered true Arminian theology and restored a theological movement based on "Arminianism of the Heart." Our hope is that through this episode people will begin to see that true Arminianism is "Arminianism of the Heart" taught by Jacob Arminius, John Wesley, and all their Protestant, Orthodox, Evangelical heirs.  Links: "A New Perspective on Arminius" featuring Keith Stanglin (podcast) http://reformedforum.org/ctc446/ "The Loss of Arminius to the Remonstrants" by William Birch  http://evangelicalarminians.org/the-loss-of-arminius-to-the-remonstrants/ "John Wesley, A Faithful Representative of Jacobus Arminius" by W. Stephen Gunter https://oimts.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/2002-2-gunter.pdf  

Dr. Keith Stanglin joins us to speak about the theology of Jacobus Arminius. Dr. Stanglin is associate professor at Austin Graduate School of Theology. Arminius was a Dutch theologian who served as a professor of theology at the University of Leiden. Many

Did Christ die for sins or sinners? If you believe he died for sins, then you have to be a Universalist. If you believe that he died for sinners, then you have to believe in limited atonement. Consider that If Jesus has died for you, you cannot resist the sovereignty of God. Jacobus Arminius held that it is possible to fall in and out of grace. He believed that people are not totally depraved but have free will. The Calvinist Church in Holland became alarmed when Arminius' followers pushed his views forward after his death. The Council of Dort met in 1618 to deal with Arminianism. The Council determined five things that determine the Reformed faith: Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints (TULIP).

Thema: Inleiding op de Dordtse Leerregels, Bijbeltekst Omschrijving: VoorredeOnder de zeer vele vertroostingen, dewelke onze Heere en Zaligmaker Jezus Christus aan zijn strijdende Kerk in deze ellendige pelgrimage gegeven heeft, wordt deze met recht de voornaamste geacht, die Hij haar heeft nagelaten, als Hij tot zijn Vader in het hemelse Heiligdom zoude ingaan, zeggenden: "Ik ben met u al de dagen tot aan de voleinding der wereld". De waarheid van deze vriendelijke belofte is blijkelijk in de Kerk van alle tijden. Want alzo zij niet alleen door openbaar geweld der vijanden en goddeloos geweld der ketteren, maar ook door bedekte listigheid der verleiders van den beginnen is gestreden, voorwaar, indien de Heere haar te eniger tijd van de heilzame hulp van zijn beloofde tegenwoordigheid had ontbloot, zij zoude al over lang òf door geweld der tyrannen zijn verdrukt geweest òf door de arglistigheid der bedriegers ten verderve geleid. Maar de goede Herder, die zijn kudde, voor welke Hij zijn leven heeft gelaten, zeer volstandiglijk bemint, heeft het woeden der vervolgers steeds ter rechter tijd en door zijn uitgestrekte hand, dikwijls wonderlijk, ternedergezet, en de kromme wegen en bedriegelijke raadslagen der verleiders ontdekt en te niet gedaan; in beide bewijzende, dat Hij waarlijk bij zijn Kerk tegenwoordig is. Hiervan hebben wij een zeer klaar bewijs in de Historiën der Godzalige Keizers, Koningen en Prinsen, dewelke de Zone Gods zo menigmaal tot hulp van zijn Kerk heeft verwekt, met een heilige ijver van zijn huis ontstoken, en door hun dienst niet alleen het woeden der tyrannen bedwongen, maar ook zijn Kerk, wanneer zij met valse leraars te strijden had, tegen hen met middelen ter genezing, van heilige Synoden voorzien, in welke de getrouwe dienstknechten van Christus met gezamenlijke gebeden, raad en arbeid kloekmoediglijk zich hebben gesteld voor de Kerk en waarheid Godes tegen de knechten des satans, alhoewel zij zich in engelen des lichts veranderden; en hebben het zaad der dwalingen en der tweedracht weggenomen, de Kerk in eendracht der reine religie behouden en de oprechte godsdienst ongeschonden op de nakomelingen voortgezet.Met een gelijke weldaad heeft onze trouwe Zaligmaker zijn genadige tegenwoordigheid aan de Kerk van Nederland, die enige jaren zeer is verdrukt geweest, in deze tijd bewezen. Want deze Kerk, van de tyrannie van de Roomse Antichrist en de schrikkelijke afgoderij van het Pausdom, door Gods machtige hand verlost, en in de gevaren van zo langdurige oorlog menigmaal wonderbaarlijk bewaard zijnde, en in eendracht der ware leer en tucht tot lof van haar God, tot wonderlijke wasdom van het gemenebest, en vreugde van de gehele Gereformeerde wereld zeer heerlijk bloeiende, is van Jacobus Arminius en zijn navolgers, dragende de naam van Remonstranten, door verscheidene zo oude als nieuwe dwalingen, eerste heimelijk, daarna openlijk aangevochten, en, door ergerlijke twisten en scheuringen hardnekkiglijk verstoord zijnde, in zo groot gevaar gebracht, dat die zeer bloeiende Kerken door een schrikkelijke brand van tweedrachten en verdeeldheden ten laatste zouden zijn verteerd geworden, ten ware de ontferming van onze Zaligmaker ter bekwamer tijd daartussen ware gekomen. Doch geprezen zij in der eeuwigheid de Heere, dewelke, nadat Hij zijn aanschijn een ogenblik tijds van ons , die op menigerlei wijze zijn toorn en gramschap hadden verwekt, verborgen had, voor de ganse wereld heeft bewezen, dat Hij zijn Verbond niet vergeet en het zuchten der zijnen niet veracht. Want als daar nauwelijks enige hope van herstel naar menselijk oordeel scheen voorhanden te zijn, heeft Hij aan de Doorluchtige en Hoog-Mogende Heren, de Generale Staten der Verenigde Nederlanden, in het hart gegeven, dat zij, met advies en directie van den Doorluchtigsten Prince van Oranje, besloten hebbende deze woedende zwarigheden met wettelijke middelen te bejegenen, welke door de voorbeelden der Ap

The title of this episode is Faith in the Age of Reason, Part 2.In our last episode we briefly considered Jakob Hermanzoon, the Dutch theologian who'd sat under the tutelage of Theodore Beza, John Calvin's successor at the Academy in Geneva. We know Hermanzoon better by his Latin name Jacobus Arminius.Arminius took exception to Beza's views on predestination and when he became pastor of a church in Amsterdam, created a stir among his Calvinist colleagues. It was while teaching a series of sermons on the Book of Romans that Arminius became convinced Beza had several things wrong. The implication was that because Beza was Calvin's successor and the standard-bearer for Calvinism, Arminius contradicted Calvin. Things came to a head when Arminius' colleague Peter Planck began to publicly dispute with him.Arminius hated controversy, seeing it as a dangerous distraction to the cause of the Gospel and pressed for a synod to deal with the matter, believing once his views were set alongside Scripture, he'd be vindicated.In 1603, Arminius was called to the University at Leiden to teach when one of the faculty members died. The debate Arminius had been having with Planck was shifted to a new controversy with one of the other professors at Leiden, François Gomaer.This controversy lasted the next six yrs as the supporters of both Calvinism and Arminius grew in number and determination. The synod Arminius had pressed for was eventually held, but not till nine years after his death in 1609.In the meantime, just a year after his death, Arminius' followers gathered his writings and views and issued what they regarded as a formal statement of his ideas. Called the Five Articles of the Remonstrants, or just the Remonstrance, it was a formal proposal to the government of Holland detailing the points of difference that had come to a head over the previous years in the debate between Arminius and Gomaer.Those 5 points were –That the divine decree of predestination is conditioned on Faith, not absolute in Election.That the intent of the Atonement is universal;Man cannot of himself exercise a saving faith;That though the grace of God is a necessary condition of human effort it does not act irresistibly in man; and finally -By the enabling power of the Holy Spirit, believers are able to resist sin but are not beyond the possibility of falling from grace. In 1618, the Dutch Church called the Synod of Dort to answer the Remonstrance. The results of the Synod, called the Canons of Dort, strongly upheld Theodore Beza's formulation of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and developed their own five-point response to the Remonstrance.It comes as a major surprise to most students of Church history to learn that TULIP, or the famous Five Points of Calvinism were a RESPONSE to the challenge of Arminianists; that they'd come up with their 5 points first. Most people who've heard of Calvinism and Arminianism have never even heard of the Remonstrance; yet it's the thing that formalized the debate between the two camps; a debate that's continued to today and has led to some prolific arguments and controversies among Christians.Put a Presbyterian elder and Methodist deacon in a room together and let the fun begin!Now, lest we think the Protestants fell out in the Calvinist-Arminianist brouhaha while the Catholics sat back, ate popcorn and watched the show, realize things were FAR from being all united and just one big happy family over in the Roman sector of the Church. Catholics were no monolithic entity at this time. It was a mixed bag of different groups and viewpoints with their own internal disagreements.In the late 16th and early 17th Cs there was a long dispute between the Jesuits and the Dominicans over how divine grace and human free-will interacted.In the late 17th C, Pope Innocent XI, spent his reign playing a power game with Louis XIV and the Gallic theologians who believed in the authority of the Church, but not the Pope.More serious was the rise of Jansenism. This movement grew out of the work of   Cornelius Jansen, a professor at Louvain University. Jansen published a book in 1640 titled Augustinus, in which he stated what he believed were the doctrines of Augustine. Jansen sounded a lot like Calvin and argued that divine grace can't be resisted, meaning it overrides the human will. He fiercely opposed the doctrine of the Jesuits that salvation depended on cooperation between divine grace and human will. So, the Jansenists believed in predestination, which meant that although they were Catholics they were in some ways more like Calvinists.Jansenism proved a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church, and especially the Jesuits, for quite a while. Its leading exponent after Jansen himself was Antoine Arnauld, an intellectual and cultural giant of the 17th C. Arnauld corresponded with such philosophical luminaries as Descartes and Leibniz. He possessed a penetrating critical faculty; and as a theologian he was no less brilliant.But back to our previous theme, stated at the beginning of the last episode – Protestant Scholasticism, or the Age of Confessionalism, in which the various branches of the Protestant church began to coalesce around distinctive statements of their theology.The Anglican Church of England occupied a curious position in the midst of all this. On the one hand it was a Protestant church, having been created in the 1530s when King Henry VIII took command of the existing Catholic Church in England. The Lutheran sympathies of his advisers, like Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, influenced the new church, but so too did the Catholic tendencies of later monarchs like Charles I and churchmen such as William Laud. Unlike other churches throughout Europe, the Church of England rarely had to struggle for the soul of its nation with another movement. So it had never been forced to define its beliefs and practices in the face of opposition to others. By the turn of the 18th C, the one thing all Anglicans agreed on was a shared distrust of Roman Catholics.The doctrinal openness of the Church of England meant that it was in England that religious free-thinking had the greatest chance of taking root. In the late 16th C it was still possible to be burnt at the stake in England for denying the Trinity, but a C later those who asserted such things had no need to fear anything more damaging than government censure and a deluge of refutations by the clergy. The Church of England prided itself on its doctrinal orthodoxy, understood in terms of common sense, and a middle way between what were regarded as the bizarre excesses of continental Protestants and Catholics. This middle way was based on what its followers felt was a healthy respect, but refusal to fawn, for tradition. This took shape in the principle of the apostolic succession, an ancient Christian notion we've examined in previous episodes. Apostolic succession claims that Christian doctrines can be known to be trustworthy because they are taught in churches which were founded by the apostles or their immediate followers. In other words, great trust was placed in the notion of an unbroken chain of tradition going back to the apostles themselves. It was this ‘apostolic succession', together with the Scriptures, themselves handed down as part of this authoritative tradition, that mainstream Anglicans felt guaranteed the trustworthiness of their church. By contrast, many thought, the Catholics had added to that tradition over the centuries, while the more extreme Protestants had subtracted from it.There was considerable tension between the churches. The worst example was France, where after the Revocation of the Treaty of Nantes in 1685 Protestants were an actively persecuted minority: they felt especially threatened by surrounding Catholics, and all the more determined never to give in to them. Persecution only strengthened their resolve and inspired sympathy from Protestants throughout the Continent, who by the same token became increasingly hostile to Catholicism.In England, Catholicism was the minority faith: officially banned, its priests had to operate in secrecy.There's a story from this time of a Catholic bishop who, functioning as a kind of religious spy, held Mass in an east London pub for a congregation of Irish workers disguised as beer-guzzling patrons.Many people were scared of Catholics, whom they regarded as tools of a foreign power; those sneaky French or the Pope. There was also great suspicion of ‘Dissenters'—members of any churches other than the Church of England. ‘Dissenters' and Catholics alike, it was feared, were eating away at the social fabric of the country, and the policies of tolerance followed by the Whig party were opposed by many. Some Anglican churchmen formed a party with the slogan ‘Church in Danger', which spent its time campaigning against Catholics, Dissenters, deists, the principle of toleration and, essentially, everything that the Enlightenment had produced.In 1778, the English Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act, which decriminalized Catholicism—to the enormous anger of a sizeable minority in the population. Two years later a Scottish aristocrat named Lord George Gordon led a huge mob to London, resulting in a week of riots in which Catholic churches were looted, foreign embassies burnt, and nearly 300 people were killed.But we ought not think it was all petty small-mindedness that ruled the day. There were some who worked tirelessly to effect peace between the warring camps of Christendom. In the 17th C, a number of attempts were made to open a dialogue between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches with the aim of reuniting them.The godfather of this endeavor, sometimes known as ‘syncretism', was a German Lutheran theologian named George Callixtus. He devoted huge effort in the early 17th C to find common ground between the different groups. Like his contemporary Hugo Grotius in the Reformed Church, he believed it should be possible to use the Apostles' Creed, and a belief in the authority of the Bible alone, as a basis for agreement among Christians.Callixtus made progress with Calvinists but the Catholics were less receptive. The Conference of Thorn, called by King Vladislav IV of Poland in 1645, attempted to put these ideas into practice, but after several weeks of discussions the Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist theologians were unable to pull anything substantive together.Sadly, Callixtus's efforts met with the greatest opposition from his fellow Lutherans.Let's turn now from the acrimony and controversy that marked Protestant Scholasticism for a moment to take a look at a guy more like the rest of us; at least we probably hope so.He was an obscure, uneducated Frenchman of the late 17th C.Nicolas Herman, a manservant from Lorraine, tried to live his life around what he called ‘the practice of the presence of God'. He was not a very good manservant, having a pronounced limp from his army days and appallingly clumsy; but he performed his duties diligently until 1651, when, at the age of 40, he went to Paris and became a Carmelite monk. His monk's name was Lawrence of the Resurrection.Brother Lawrence was put to work in the monastery's kitchen—a task he hated, but which he did anyway because it was God's will. To the surprise of the other monks, he not only did his work calmly and methodically, but spoke to God the entire time. Brother Lawrence declared that, to him, there was no difference between the time for work and the time for prayer: wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, he tried to perceive the presence of God. As he wrote to one of his friends:“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God: the only ones who can understand it are those who practice and experience it. But I do not advise you to do it from that motive. It is not pleasure which we ought to seek in this exercise, but let us do it from a principle of love, and because God would have us. If I were a preacher, I would, above all other things, preach the practice of the presence of God. And if I were a spiritual director, I would advise all the world to do it. That is how necessary I think it is—and how easy, too.”Brother Lawrence became a minor celebrity among the hierarchy of the French Catholic Church, and he was visited by more than one archbishop, anxious to see if the reports of his humility and holiness were true. Lawrence's sixteen Letters and Spiritual Maxims testify of his sincere belief in God's presence in all things and his trust in God to see him through all things. They also testify to the way in which holy men and women continued to devote themselves to God's will, both in and out of monasteries, even as the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment were at their height.It's easy when considering the Age of Reason, to suppose theology was increasingly being seduced by philosophy, and that the simple, heartfelt faith of the commoners of the Middle Ages and the Reformation was being replaced by rationalism. That was true in some quarters, but the 17th and 18th centuries had their share of sincere and pious saints, as well as heretics, as much as any age; and there were some important movements that recalled the faithful to a living and wholehearted religion. As the theologians bickered, ordinary Christians were getting on with things, as they always had.As we bring this episode to a close, I want to end with a look at Blaise Pascal. That's a great name, isn't it? Blaise. Sounds like a professional skateboarder.Pascal was a Jansenist, that is, a member of the Roman Catholic reform movement we took a look at a moment ago. While the Jansenists began as a movement that sought to return the Roman Church to the teachings of Augustine, since Augustine's doctrines were considered as being based in Scripture, the Jansenists were a Roman Catholic kind of back to the Bible movement.A few days after Blaise Pascal's death, one of his servants noticed a curious bulge in the great scientist's jacket. Opening the lining, he withdrew a folded parchment written by Pascal with these words . . .The year of grace 1654. Monday, November 23rd.,… from about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. >> Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace. >> God of Jesus Christ, I have separated myself from Him. I have fled from Him, Renounced Him, crucified Him. May I never be separated from Him. Renunciation, total and sweet.For eight years Pascal had hid those words in his coat, withdrawing them now and again to read them and be reminded of the moment when grace seized his soul.Pascal's mother died when he was only three. His father, Stephen Pascal, began the education of his children, Gilbert, Blaise, and Jacqueline. Occasionally he took the young Blaise with him to meetings of the Academy of Science. The youth's scientific curiosity was aroused.Before he reached the age of 27 Pascal had gained the admiration of mathematicians in Paris; had invented the calculating machine for his father who was a busy tax-collector; and had discovered the basic principles of atmospheric and hydraulic pressures. He belonged to the age of the Scientific Greats.Blaise's initial contact with the Jansenists came as the result of an accident his father had. On an icy day in January, 1646, Stephen tried to prevent a duel. He fell on the hard frozen ground and dislocated a hip. The physicians who treated him were devoted Jansenists. They succeeded not only in curing their patient but in winning his son to their doctrines.They told the Pascals physical suffering was an illustration of a basic religious truth: man is helpless; a miserable creature. Blaise had seldom enjoyed a day without pain. He knew how helpless physicians could be, so the argument struck him with unusual force. It deepened his sense of the tragic mystery of life.He also learned from these Jansenist physicians how profoundly the Bible speaks to the human condition. He became an avid student of Scripture, pondering its pages as he had atmospheric pressures. He came to see the Bible as a way to a transformed heart.In 1651, Pascal's personal tragedy deepened with the death of his father. The loss brought him to a crisis. His sister, Jacqueline, renounced the world by entering the Port-Royal convent, and Blaise was left alone in Paris.He now gave himself to worldly interests. He took a richly furnished home, staffed it with servants, and drove about town in a coach drawn by four horses; an extravagance. He pursued the ways of elite but decadent Parisian society. After a year of pleasure he found only a “great disgust with the world,” and he plunged into quiet desperation. He felt abandoned by God.Blaise turned again to the Bible, to the 17th ch of the Gospel of John, where Jesus prepares for His sacrifice on the cross. It was then that Pascal felt a new blaze of the Spirit. As he wrote, “Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace.”Pascal's new faith drew him magnetically into the orbit of the Jansenists. Late in 1654, he joined his sister, Jacqueline, as a member of the Port-Royal community. He was then asked by one of the Jansenist leaders for assistance in his defense against the attack of the Jesuits.Pascal responded brilliantly. He penned eighteen Public Letters exposing Jesuit errors in flashes of eloquence and sarcastic wit. As each letter appeared, the public snatched them up. They were instant best-sellers. Port-Royal was no longer an obscure Jansenist monastery; it was a center of public interest. The Pope condemned the Letters, but all educated French read them, as succeeding generations did for the next two centuries.Upon completing the Letters in March, 1657, Pascal planned a book on the evidences for Christianity. He was never able to complete it. In June, ‘62, he was seized with a violent illness and, after lingering a couple months, died on August 19 at the age of just 39.Friends found portions of his writing on faith and reason, and eight years after his death they published these notes under the title Thoughts (Pensées-Pahn'-sees). In the Pensées, Pascal is a religious genius who cuts across doctrine and pierces to the heart of man's moral problem. He appeals to the intellect by his passion for truth and arouses the emotions by his merciless descriptions of the plight of man without God.Man, Pascal said, is part angel and part beast; a Chimera. In Greek mythology the chimera was a she-goat with a lion's head and a serpent's tail. Pascal wrote, “What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! The glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?”Reason, as great a faculty as it is, is no sure guide, Pascal warns. If we trust reason alone, we will doubt everything except pain and death. But our hearts tell us this cannot be true. That would be the greatest of all blasphemies to think that life and the universe have no meaning. God and the meaning of life must be felt by the heart, rather than by reason. It was Pascal who said, “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”He saw the human condition so deeply yet so clearly that men and women in our own time, after three centuries, still gain perspective from him for their own spiritual pilgrimage.

The title of this episode, is Faith in the Age of Reason.  Part 01After the first flush of Reformation excitement died down, the Protestant churches of Europe went into a long period of retrenchment, of digging in both doctrinally and culturally. This period lasted from the late 16th to the later 17th C and is referred to by church historians as the Age of Confessionalism. But “confession” here isn't the personal practice of piety in which someone admits error. Confessionalism is the term applied to how the various Protestant groups were increasingly concerned with defining their own beliefs, their confessions, in contrast to everyone else. It resulted in what is sometimes referred to as Protestant Scholasticism, called this because the churches developed technical jargon to describe their doctrinal positions ever more accurately—just as medieval Roman Catholic scholastics had done three Cs before.Don't forget; Roman Scholasticism helped spark the Reformation. It was the scholastics devotion to correct theology that highlighted the doctrinal and practical errors many in the Church began to call for reform over. But it was also the tendency of some Scholastics to forsake practical theology in favor of the purely hypothetical that fueled the Reformation's drive to return the practice of faith to everyday life and made religion the sphere, not just of academics and sequestered clerics, but the common people.So, we might conclude Protestant churches were now headed down the same path with their own version of Scholasticism. And in some cases, that's what happened. But instead of turning a theology back to Scripture as the Protestant Reformation had done in reaction to Roman Scholasticism, the reaction to Protestant Scholasticism was a decided turn away from Scripture to a decidedly irreligious philosophy.Many of the discussions of the Protestant Scholastics became dry and technical. Martin Luther sought to overturn centuries of medieval religious jargon and get back to the original message of the NT. John Calvin is often thought of as a more ‘systematic' theologian, but his Institutes of the Christian Religion, though carefully arranged by topics, was intended to be no more than a faithful exposition of Scripture.Luther's and Calvin's heirs, however, went beyond their intended simplicity. They didn't abandon the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura, but they sought answers to questions not found in the Bible. A prime example was the issue of predestination and the relation between grace and free will—which, at the start of the 17th C was THE hot theological topic among Protestants and Catholics. A new kind of scholasticism was produced with some Protestant theologians happy to use the terminology of Aristotle and regarding the premier Roman Catholic Scholastic Thomas Aquinas as an authority.One of the key figures of this era was Theodore Beza, an aristocratic Frenchman who, although only ten yrs younger than Calvin, outlived him by forty and was widely regarded as Calvin's successor. It was Beza, rather than Calvin, who was regarded by most Reformed theologians of the 17th C as the theological authority. He was especially good at recasting the terminology of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics in disputing with his opponents, who were most often Lutherans and Catholics.Beza defined the doctrine of predestination and its role in Reformed theology. In doing so, he developed the doctrine of ‘double predestination', the notion that God deliberately predestines the reprobate to damnation and the elect to salvation. He put forward the ‘prelapsarian' position, which says God planned the Fall and the division of humanity into elect and reprobate before Adam sinned. These ideas were present in germ-form in Calvin, but weren't the touchstones of Reformation orthodoxy they later become.Beza was an eloquent author. That can't be said of all who took up their pens in the service of the Lutheran and Reformed cause. In place of Luther's and Calvin's attempts to simply expound what Scripture said about doctrine and theology, the Protestant Scholastics were all about logical consistency and adherence to a pre-established orthodoxy.The Age of Confessionalism is often thought of as a time when theologians conducted a war of words with sharp pens, rather than sharp swords. What comes as a surprise is how so much of their angry rhetoric was aimed, not at people far across the theological divide from themselves, but at their own, much closer colleagues.With the hardening of orthodoxy, there were inevitable splits within churches as some rebelled against what their colleagues were laying down as required doctrine. The greatest of these fractures occurred in the Reformed Church at the end of the 16th C, after the preaching of Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch minister and professor taught by Beza himself. Arminius was initially a supporter of Beza's views. But he rebelled against Beza's distinctions regarding predestination and prelapsarianism, declaring them unjust. Arminius argued that if God condemns some and saves others, it must be on the basis of who has faith, not on the basis of some eternal decree God's already worked out even before they're born.Arminius died in 1609, but the controversy he started rumbled on thru the centuries and has continued right on down to today.His Dutch name was Jakob Hermanzoon – but as did many scholars of the day, he Latinized that to Jacobus Arminius; and it's from that we get the theology derived from him – Arminianism – which as most listeners know, is usually posited as opposite to Reformed theology, or Calvinism. Now, before I get a pile of angry emails and comments – let me say what's called Arminianism and Calvinism today would likely be disavowed by both John Calvin and Jakob Hermanszoon.  If they attended a seminary class on these topics today they'd likely say, “What'ch you talkin' about Willis?”Both Arminianism and Calvinism have taken on theological accretions and associations their authors likely never intended. And strictly speaking, we can't equate Calvinism with what's known as Reformed Theology.But, back to the story. è Arminius was born in the Netherlands near Utrecht. His father was a blacksmith and armorer who died shortly after Jakob was born. He was educated at the expense of family-friends who recognized his keen intellect. He'd just entered Marburg University in Germany at the age of 16 when news reached him of a tragedy back home in his hometown of Oudewater.The Roman Catholic Spanish had occupied a good part of Holland for some time but were expelled from Oudewater when the city became a Protestant enclave. When the Spanish returned, they over-ran the town and carried out a brutal massacre that killed Arminius' mother and siblings. Jakob spent 2 weeks in inconsolable mourning.When the new University of Leiden opened nearby in 1576, he was the 12th student enrolled. At Leiden he adopted the controversial theology of the French scholar Peter Ramus, a Protestant progressive killed during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Leaving Leiden, Jakob went to Geneva where he enrolled in the Academy, then headed by Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor.Arminius's defense of Ramus angered the faculty of the Academy so he left for a trip to Basel where he declined the offer a doctorate, believing he'd not bring honor to the title.Returning to Geneva, Arminius seems to have been more prudent in his approach. In 1585, Beza wrote to the city magistrates of Amsterdam who'd sponsored Arminius's education, highly commending his ability and diligence and encouraging a continuance of their support in his studies.After a short visit to Italy, Arminius returned home, was ordained, and in 1588 became one of the ministers of Amsterdam. His 1590 marriage to a merchant's daughter gave him influential links.From the outset, Arminius's sermons on Romans 7 drew a strong reaction from staunch  Calvinists who disliked his views on grace and predestination. The Calvinists said that while God's saving grace is unearned, He offers it only to those He predestines to salvation. Arminius disagreed, saying God gives grace to those who believe.In 1592, a colleague accused him of Pelagianism, a 5th C heretical distortion of grace and free-will already condemned by the Church. Arminius was also accused of …1) An overdependence on the early church fathers,2) Deviation from two early Calvinist creeds, the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, and3) An errant views of predestination.When Arminius and his supporters challenged his critics, urging them to point out specifically WHERE he was in error, they were unable to do so. The city authorities ended up on his side. The question of predestination was not raised in any substantive form until Arminius became professor of theology at Leiden, where he served from 1603–9. The last six years of his life were spent in controversy over his views as they stood in opposition to those of his old mentor, Theodore Beza.In a 1606 message titled “On Reconciling Religious Dissensions among Christians,” Arminius argued that dissension damages people both intellectually and emotionally and creates doubt about religion that leads to despair. Left unchecked, it may ultimately lead to atheism. He proposed as a remedy to the controversy his ideas had stirred, the calling of a national synod. Arminius believed the proper arbiter between feuding clergy was a good and godly magistrate. The synod was eventually held at Dort in 1618, but Arminius had already been dead nine years.In assessing Arminius' theological position, we could say that in his attempt to give the human will a more active role in salvation than Beza's brand of Calvinism conceded, Arminius taught a conditional election in which a person's free will might or might not affect the divine offer of salvation.  It's important to distinguish between Arminius's teaching and what later became known as Arminianism, which was more liberal in its view of free will and of related doctrines than was its founder. Arminius's views were never systematically worked out until the year after his death, when his followers issued a declaration called the Remonstrance, which dissented at several points from Beza's description of Calvinism. It held, among other things, that God's predestination was conditioned by human choice, that the Gospel could be freely accepted or rejected, and that a person who'd become a Christian could “fall from grace” or forsake salvation.Though he was mild–tempered, Arminius nevertheless spoke his mind in controversy and characteristically defended his position from Scripture.We'll pick it up at this point in our next episode as we continue our look at Protestant Scholasticism. There's a whole lot more for us to learn about this period, including the Calvinist reaction to the challenge of the Remonstrance, as well as the career of a couple of major lights in Christian history, Brother Lawrence and Blaise Pascal – as well as several others.