Jacobus Arminius
Pastor at Amsterdam and then professor at Leiden, who rejected the doctrine of predestination taught in the Dutch Reformed churches and held that God elects those he foreknows will believe. His followers, the Remonstrants, were judged at the Synod of Dort.
His children, dedicating his disputations to the magistrates of Leiden after his death, call him a native of Oudewater and say that he had served the church of Amsterdam as pastor for fifteen years before he was called to the university (Arminius, Public Disputations, dedication).
In his declaration to the States of Holland he said that he disapproved of the teaching on predestination current in the churches and in the university, and gave his own: God decreed to save those who repent and believe, and chose particular persons on the ground of his foreknowledge of who would believe and persevere through grace (Arminius, Declaration of Sentiments, On Predestination, 5). The nineteenth-century editor of his works, quoting the funeral oration of Petrus Bertius, puts his death on 19 October 1609 (Arminius, Declaration of Sentiments, editor’s life of Arminius (1853 edition, p. 15)). The Synod of Dort named him and his followers as the source of the troubles in the Dutch churches (Canons of Dort preface). See the Synod of Dort.
In the timeline
- 1618 to 1619, firm dateThe Synod of Dort
A national synod of the Dutch Reformed churches, with delegates from Britain, Germany and Switzerland, judges the five articles of the Remonstrants, the followers of Arminius. Its Canons set out the Reformed teaching on predestination and grace in five heads.