Jacobus Arminius

⭐ First, the point most easily misread: he did not oppose predestination. Olson is very clear: Arminius did not object to speaking of God's decrees; he only objected to the particular order of the decrees laid out by the two main branches of Calvinism. His alternative order (in his Declaration of Sentiments, the section My Sentiments on Predestination) is: (1) God decreed to appoint his Son Jesus Christ as Mediator, Redeemer, Saviour, Priest and King; (2) God decreed to receive those who repent and believe, and to leave the impenitent and unbelieving in sin and under wrath; (3) God decreed to make the means needed for repentance and faith both sufficient and effective; (4) God decreed to save and to punish certain particular persons — and this decree rests on God's foreknowledge. ⚠ That is: what comes first in predestination is Jesus Christ, not individuals apart from Christ.

⭐⭐ His really new contribution on this thread is prevenient grace — the first time in fourteen hundred years that the synergist side directly answered the Calvinist side's question: if a person is free to accept or reject, how can salvation still be entirely grace? He wrote (in the Letter to Hippolytus a Collibus; we give the sense, not his exact words) that without grace free will cannot begin any truly spiritual good, nor bring it to perfection; that this grace goes before our will, accompanies it and follows after it, stirring it up, helping it, governing it and cooperating with it, so that our will does not act in vain; and he confessed that the mind of the natural and carnal man is obscure and dark, his affections corrupt and unruly, his will stubborn and disobedient, and that the man is dead in sins. ⚠ Read the structure of this passage closely: he grants that man is dead in sin, and grants that without grace man can do nothing; what he claims is that grace comes to a person first and enables a response — and that this grace can be resisted. In Olson's summary: even the ability to be willing and to receive grace is produced by grace, and the change a person makes — conversion — is not a good work but simply receiving.

Two further points. First, he read Romans 9 as corporate predestination — God's election or reprobation is of groups, not individuals (the group of believers and the group of unbelievers), and each individual can join one of them by free will; the predestination of the group is unconditional, that of the individual conditional, based on God's foreknowledge. Second, he held that God's permitting Adam's fall belongs to God's providence, not to predestination, and the two must be distinguished — as Olson gives his words, Adam did not fall because of God's decree, but only because of God's permission.

⭐⭐Justification — his own testimony on this thread. On whether he denied justification by faith alone, the strongest first-hand material is his own statement: his opinion, he said, was not so far from Calvin's that he could not sign with his own hand what Calvin wrote on this subject in Book Three of the Institutes — something he was ready to do at any time, for he fully approved of it. ⚠ Book Three of the Institutes is precisely the book in which Calvin treats faith and justification — the source of the language, as Olson sums it up, of Christ's righteousness being like a robe the sinner puts on by faith. He said he would sign it at any time.

⚠ Olson records that in many other places, and in many ways, Arminius solemnly declared his belief that salvation is justification by faith through God's grace alone; and that the slander that he denied this belief — commonplace in his own day and not rare since — is one of the greatest scandals in the history of Christian theology. ⚠ This is Olson's judgment, and he is an Arminian; we have noted his position elsewhere. But the mechanism he gives can be checked: in Calvinist thinking, grace alone and irresistible grace are tied together as one thing — as Olson puts it, only when the sinner receives salvation not by free and active choice but as an unconditional and irresistible bestowal is it truly salvation by grace. ⭐ So to oppose the second sounds to them like opposing the first. A good part of the charges on this thread arose in this way.