The battle of the Arminians and Calvinists continues on ad infinitum; indeed, in different expressions and levels of discourse. Nonetheless, the gruel continues unabated. Ironically, and historically, the Arminians, particularly, Arminius himself, weren’t outwith, but within the Reformed halo. As is commonly understood, Arminius was intent on engaging with the theological-anthropological conundrum of human freedom vis-à-vis God’s ostensible sovereignty (as the Calvinists were wont to press in their own stylized way). It wasn’t, of course, that Arminius was attempting to undercut the Calvinist notion that God is sovereign—God forbid it!—but instead, he was challenging the character and way of God’s sovereignty related to human freedom. Jaroslav Pelikan offers nice coverage on this:

The most controversial attempt at such an elucidation within the Reformed communion was the one associated with the names of Jacob Arminius and Simon Episcopius, which eventually challenged openly the central affirmations of the Calvinistic doctrine itself. Arminian acquired its own confessional status in the Remonstrance of 1610 and then, after the Synod of Dort, in the Remonstrant Confession of 1621/22. Reiterating and developing many of the objections to predestinarianism that had already been current during Calvin’s lifetime, the Arminian and Remonstrant protest focused on the problem of will: of the human will as responsible for conduct and therefore in some genuine sense free of “fatalistic necessity”; and of the divine will as addressed to all and therefore in some genuine sense universal, but also as free of sin and evil and free coercion, since such freedom was “the perfection of the [divine] will.” Calvin’s “fictitious fate of predestination” was “hostile to religion” because it managed to undercut both the free will of God and the free will of man. Against “the iron and fatalistic necessity of the Stoics, Manicheans, and Predestinarians,” as well as against the “blind chance” of the Epicureans, stood the biblical doctrine of “the providence of God in the world, which rules everything in a wise, holy and just manner.” The providence of God, which followed immediately upon creation and which extended also to the work of redemption, was universal in scope, pertaining to “this entire universe and especially to man,” as an expression of “the wisdom, justice, and equity of God.” These divine attributes of wisdom, justice, and equity, as disclosed in providence, meant that God was free from “any internal necessity of his own nature or of any external power of some other force”; therefore it was Arminian and Remonstrant doctrine, no less than it was Calvinist doctrine, that God did foreknow future contingents and that he was free “to dispose for his creatures whatever he wills,” death or life, command or prohibition.

It was likewise Remonstrant doctrine, no less than Calvinist, that the grace of God, defined as “undeserved and unmerited favor,” was, as the Remonstrance put it, “the beginning, the progress, and the completion of all good.” But that did not mean that grace was “irresistible.” The analogy, drawn by Augustine and after him by Calvin, between God’s call to faith and the summons to resurrection addressed by Christ, irresistibly, to a dead body, was fallacious. For “those whom God calls to faith, he calls seriously”; if it were impossible to resist the grace of God, his offer of “a reward for Christian virtue” and his threat of punishment for immorality would both be vain. On the other hand, the distinction between what God willed and what God permitted, which Calvin had dismissed as a “falsehood” and an “evasion,” was essential to prevent “the overthrow of all religion”: divine permission did not imply that “it is not possible for anything but disobedience to follow,” but rather that “man can be disobedient, yet only if he so wills.” Therefore God permitted evil not because he will it, but to leave man free. And, contrary to Calvin’s theory, it was similarly “with the permission of God and in accordance with his just judgment,” but by their own action, that the hearts of sinners were “hardened.” Hardening, also in the case of the Jews, was a divine “declaration,” not the initiative of a divine “action.”[1]

A rather succinct presentation of the primary theme[s] present between the Remonstrants and the Calvinists.

I would suggest there is a better way. It is unnecessary to place humanity and God and God and humanity into either the Arminian or Calvinist combine. All that is required to overcome such enmity is to think the relationship between God-humanity through the singular personalis (person) of Jesus Christ. Both God’s downward movement to humanity and humanity’s upward movement to God can be understood from within this miraculous nexus. When election, predestination, human freedom vis-à-vis Divine freedom/sovereignty, so on and so forth becomes the ambit by which such loci is imagined, the Gordian knot of inimical theofare, as that obtains between the “Arminians and Calvinists,” is once and for all cut through.

Pax mundi theologica obtenta est.

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300—1700), Volume 4 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 233–34.