No greater confusion exists in Christianity than that concerning Calvinism. There are many people who call themselves Calvinists who have little idea of what Calvinism teaches, or of its history. (See Quotes By John Calvin below) Many who claim to be Calvinists are not. To rightly understand Calvinism we must start at the beginning. The purpose of this article is to do so by looking at the lives of three men, John Calvin, Aurelius Augustine and James Arminius. We will look first at the life of: JOHN CALVIN John Calvin was a Frenchman. He was born on July 10, 1509, in Picardy at Noyon, France. His family was Roman Catholic and his father worked for the local Roman Catholic bishops managing the business affairs of the cathedral. When 14 years old, Calvin went to Paris where he began to prepare for the priesthood by studying logic, philosophy and Latin. After completing his course of study he transferred to the College of Montaigu, a Seminary for the training of priests. Although he was not yet admitted into priest's orders, he became a member of the clergy. Robert Olivetan, a cousin of Calvin, and a Waldensian pastor, witnessed to Calvin, but Calvin, an indoctrinated Roman Catholic strenuously resisted the gospel. His cousin gave Calvin a Bible and urged him to study it. After three years of conviction Calvin testified, "When I was the obstinate slave of the superstition of popery and it seemed impossible to drag me out of the deep mire, God by a sudden conversion subdued me, and made my heart more obedient to His Word." He then began to study civil law where he was taught, "it is the magistrate's duty to punish offenses against religion as well as crimes against the state. What! Shall we hang a thief who robs us of heaven?" He abandoned the study of law and began studying God's Word. He began preaching in secret meetings at Bourges, Paris. In 1536, he was appointed pastor and professor at Geneva. The most celebrated of all Calvin's writings is the Institution of .the Christian Religion. It is said to be "the first theological and literary monument of the French Reformation." The issue of the day was popery and works, as opposed to salvation through faith in the finished work of Christ. As a result the Institution gave accurate information about the Trinity and the Deity of Christ, but is totally devoid of correct teaching on baptism, distinction between Israel and the Church, the millennium and the second coming of Christ. In 1538, Calvin fled Geneva. Lorraine Boettner gives the reason (Predestination, pg.408): "Due to an attempt of Calvin and Farel to enforce a too severe system of discipline in Geneva, it became necessary for them to leave the city temporarily." Calvin went to Strassburg, Germany, where he ministered to French refugees until his return to Geneva in 1541. Calvin, influenced by his Roman Catholic education, preached a church-state set up. He, like the other Reformers, sought to reform the Roman Catholic position of State controlled Church, baptism and eschatology. Under the influence of John Knox, who studied under Calvin, the Presbyterian Church became the State Church of Scotland in 1592. Laurence Vance in his book The Other Side of Calvinism (page 37) quotes Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church to illustrate the extent Calvin went to in using the state to fulfil his wishes. "Calvin was a firm believer in a united Church and State. From 1541 to 1546, fifty- eight people were executed and seventy-six exiled from Geneva. Calvin was consulted in all important affairs of the State, and his advice was usually followed. Press censorship continued in Geneva until the eighteenth century. Attendance at public worship was commanded and watchmen were directed to see that people went to church. Three men who laughed during the sermon were imprisoned for three days. Death sentences were routinely imposed: a girl was beheaded for striking her parents and some were burned for witchcraft. Calvin's theory of a theocracy is professed to be based on the Holy Scriptures, but as Schaff astutely observes: "It is impossible to deny that this kind of legislation savors more of the austerity of old heathen Rome and the Levitical code than of the gospel of Christ, and that the actual exercise of discipline was often petty, pedantic, and unnecessarily severe. The problem with all Calvin's scriptural arguments is that they are exclusively taken from the Old Testament. Which means that if a man is not a Dispensationalist -- he is a heretic."
A specific illustration of Calvin's treatment of those of unorthodox religious views is found in the death of Michael Servetus. Servetus did have unorthodox views of the Trinity. He was not Unitarian. His problem seemed to be in distinguishing between the eternal Son of God and the Son of the eternal God. (Incidentally, the Calvinist writer, A.W. Pink, denied the eternal Sonship of Christ on page 50 of his Exposition of Hebrews.) Servetus held other beliefs Calvin considered unorthodox. He was premillennial. He rejected Calvin's doctrine of predestination. His big "heresy" however was his rejection of infant baptism. In fact, during his trial the marginal notes he had made in Calvin's Institutes against infant baptism, were used against him. He admitted infant baptism was a "diabolical invention and infernal falsehood destructive to Christianity." Servetus had been imprisoned in Vienna for his blasphemy. According to Miller's Church History, page 1035, Calvin is represented as saying, "If Servetus came to Geneva, and my influence could prevent it, he would not go away alive." Servetus did come. Through Calvin's information to The Magistracy Servetus was put in prison. Calvin submitted 39 accusations against him at the trial. Servetus was sentenced to be burned at the stake. Calvin then entered a "plea for mercy" asking that Servetus have his head chopped off with the sword rather than be burned alive. The real issue was, death by the sword was State execution while burning at the stake was for religious offenders. Calvin wanted a state execution. The sentence stood and Servetus burned. In 1561, Calvin wrote the Marquis Paet, high chamberlain to King of Navarre, "Honour, glory, and riches shall be the reward of your pains; but above all do not fail to rid the country of those scoundrels, who stir up the .people to revolt against us. Such monsters should be exterminated, as I have exterminated Michael Servetus, the Spaniard." Most of us reading this article would have suffered the same punishment Servetus did had we been living under Calvin's influence. As a result of poor health and preaching five or six times a week, Calvin died in May, 1564 at the age of fifty-four. In commenting on Calvin's life Laurence Vance writes (The Other Side of Calvinism, page 43)... "Calvin is, of course, best remembered for his doctrine of predestination .... The doctrine is not mentioned in the first edition of the Institutes nor is it prominent until after the 1539 edition. It is avoided in his catechism for children. Calvin was attacked for making God an 'arbitrary tyrant.' He even admitted that it was causing 'vast disturbances in the church.' Bullinger wrote to Calvin: 'Believe me, many are displeased with what you say in your Institutes about predestination.' Jewett maintains that Beza had to spend more time defending Calvin's doctrine of predestination than anything else.' The ministers of neighbouring Bern finally sent to Geneva on December 7, 1551, for a 'cessation of discussion' of the predestination issue for 'sake of the tranquility and peace of the church.'"
Calvinism, strangely enough, did not originate with John Calvin. Spurgeon said, "Calvin got his Calvinism from Augustine." Boettner wrote, "Augustine had taught the essentials of the system a thousand years before Calvin was born" (Predestination, page 4). We now turn our attention to the second of our "three men" -- AURELIUS AUGUSTINE Aurelius Augustine was born November 13, 354 at Tagaste in Roman North Africa. His father was a pagan but his mother was a Christian. When 19 years old, he joined the religion of Manichaen which taught there were two original and opposite principles, light and darkness. The real man belonged to the light and it was the dark nature which caused him to sin. "Salvation" was by liberating the light of the soul from its bondage of the body. When 30 years old, he moved to Milan where under the influence of Neo-Platonic philosophy he rejected Manichaeanism. Augustine was converted to Christianity at the age of 32 and after six months of instruction was baptized by immersion, which had continued to be the usual form of baptism. He returned to Africa where he was baptized again by Valerius, the. bishop of Hippo. Laurence Vance points out that Augustine's rebaptism is interesting because it was through the influence of Augustine that later "an edict was issued that declared the person rebaptizing, and the person rebaptized, should be punished by death." At the age of 42, Augustine became a bishop, in which office he remained until his death in 430 at the age of 75. The Calvinist Warfield, in his book Calvin & Augustine makes the statement on page 313 that Augustine was "in a true sense the founder of Roman Catholicism." The historian Schaff (History, Vol. 3, page 1018) calls Augustine the "principal theological creator of the Latin-Catholic System as distinct from the Greek Catholicism on the one hand, and from evangelical Protestantism on the other." Augustine became the "servant and representative theologian of the Catholic Church in North Africa." Warfield, in his book quoted above, writes concerning Augustine -- "In him are found at once the seed out of which the tree that we know as the Roman Catholic Church has grown ." Augustine was a great admirer of Plato. Vance, in his book The Other Side of Calvinism (page 20), has this to say about Plato: "Plato (427-347), along with Socrates and Aristotle, is one of the three most influential philosophers in history. As a young man, Plato became a disciple of Socrates, who never worked a day in his life and neglected his wife to have sex with young men. In 387 B.C., Plato founded the Academy in Athens, where Aristotle studied before he committed suicide like Socrates. Plato, like Calvin and Augustine, wrote extensively, which explains his notoriety. His most famous work is the Republic, a political treatise. Of the true value of his works, it has been said: 'A confused mass of social and political theories that have never worked for one government on the. face of this earth that ever tried them.' Plato was a polytheist and evolutionist who subscribed to transmigration and reincarnation of souls. What should be the Christian's attitude toward Plato and his philosophy? 'Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy' (Col. 2:8). The followers of Plato, seeking to develop his ideas adopted the name Neo-Platonism. The doctrine was carried to Rome where it reached Augustine in Milan. It is said of Augustine that he made every attempt to reconcile philosophy with Christianity. Again we quote the Calvinist Warfield who said that Augustine's Christian philosophy was "built largely out of Platonic materials." (See Sins of Augustine) Let's look now at Augustine's doctrine. 1. Baptism -- Augustine was the first theologian who maintained a place for infant baptism in Christian theology. He was the first to make believer's baptism punishable with civil law. Vance writes concerning Augustine: "Any man who opposed infant baptism was accursed, especially anyone who denied that little children by baptism are freed from perdition and eternally saved. Now it logically follows, that if infants are saved by baptism, then they are damned without it. And this is precisely what Augustine taught. Infants dying without baptism are consigned to limbus infantum. Here on the outskirts of hell, Augustine believed they received light punishment. Augustine thought the dead must be saved either by water in this world or by fire in the next. The case of the thief on the cross perplexed him, but since there was no record of the thief's baptism, Augustine found some relief in the thought that no one knew that he had not been baptized beforehand. For sin committed after baptism, he developed the doctrine of purgatory. Boettner admits that Augustine was the one who gave the doctrine of purgatory its first definite form." (See Infant Baptism) 2. The Church -- Augustine advocated force against so-called heretics. His text was "Compel them to come in" (Luke 14:23). Augustine was influential in calling the Council of Carthage. The historian Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2:233) has this to say about the result of the Council's action: "300 bishops, with many thousands of the inferior clergy, were torn from their churches, stripped of their ecclesiastical possessions, banished to the islands, and proscribed by the laws, if they presumed to conceal themselves in any of the provinces in Africa. Their numerous congregations were deprived of the rights of citizens and of the exercise of religious worship. By these severities, which obtained the warmest approbation of Saint Augustine, great numbers of Donatists were reconciled to the Catholic Church."
3. Scripture Interpretation -- Following the teachings of Origen and the Alexandrian School, Augustine held to the allegorical method of Scripture interpretation. This allows the interpreter to make whatever application he wants to the Scriptures. Examples of Augustine's allegorical applications are: The binding of Satan took place during the ministry of the Lord and the first resurrection is the new birth of the believer. Lord's Supper -- the memorial of the Lord's Supper is a spiritual presence of Christ's body and blood. It was Augustine who first defined the so-called sacraments as a means of grace. Mary -- Augustine promoted the worship of Mary. Original Sin -- Adam and Eve's sin was sexual intercourse. Marriage relationship -- Sex was shameful and sinful except for producing children. Millennium -- Augustine did not accept a literal reign of Christ for one thousand years. He allegorized the millennium to be the period between the first and second coming of Christ. Predestination -- He first held to free will but later changed depravity of man as a result of sin, to inability of man. John Calvin, along with the other Reformers, adopted Augustine's position on this point.
Until Augustine's time the church fathers understood predestination as being based on God's foreknowledge. Augustine changed this. He taught that God purposely created some people to go to heaven and others to go to hell. He further taught that those who went to hell would do so because God had so willed. Following this line of thought he concluded that Christ only died for those God had pre-chosen to go to heaven. Concerning salvation, Augustine taught that a person must be converted before they could repent and believe. Although inconsistent with his teaching on election, he believed that a saved person could lose his salvation, but if he was really among the elect he would get saved again before he died. Considering Augustine taught that baptism brought salvation to babies and comparing that with his teaching on election and some losing salvation, the only conclusion that can be reached is "What a mess!" The Calvinist author Cunstance, writing of Augustine declares: "Augustine stands as a major link between Paul and Calvin," and again: "The Reformation was essentially a revival of Augustinianism, or Augustinianism was a recovery of Pauline Theology" (Sovereignty of Grace, pages 20 & 27). Augustine can certainly be ranked with Calvin, but to rank him with Paul borders on blasphemy. Not one of Augustine's teachings discussed above are a result of Paul's teaching or any other Scriptures. Augustine was wrong on baptism. He was wrong in trying to mix philosophy with Christianity. He was wrong on the church. He persecuted "heretics." He was wrong on the Lord's Supper. He was wrong on the millennium. He was wrong on his method of Bible interpretation. He was wrong on eternal security. I wholeheartedly agree with Vance who concluded: "Why would anyone think he would be right on election and predestination?" (See Sins of Augustine) There is another man's life we will now briefly look at. That man is James Arminius. JAMES ARMINIUS James Arminius was born at Oudewater, Holland in 1560, just before the death of John Calvin. His father died when he was an infant. A legal guardian, a cousin of his mother, was appointed who saw that he was trained in Latin, Greek and Theology. This cousin died when Arminius was fourteen, after which he lived with another of his mother's cousins who enrolled him in the University of Marburg. A year later, Spanish troops sacked Oudewater killing his mother, sister and brother along with many others. Arminius then moved to Rotterdam where the pastor of the Reformed Church received him into his house. Arminius, along with the pastor's son, studied six years at the University of Leiden. He then moved to Geneva to further his studies in the academy founded by John Calvin. Following Calvin's death, Theodore Beza took over as lecturer. Arminius seemingly accepted Beza's belief that God's plan of salvation included His damning the nonelect and causing the Fall to insure it. Problems developed, however, when Arminius saw that Calvinism was based on logic. Arminius did not consider himself bound to what he called "the private interpretation of the Reformed." He believed he was at liberty to expound the Word of God according to the dictates of his conscience. In other words, his authority was God's Word, not the teachings of the Reformers. It is interesting to note that modern Calvinists still appeal to various creeds and confessions. Arminius was noted as always carrying his New Testament with him. Concerning commentaries, Arminius stated: "But after the Holy Scriptures, I exhort them to read the commentaries of Calvin, on whom I bestow higher praise than Helmichius ever did as he confessed to me himself. For I tell them, that his commentaries ought to be held in greater estimation, than all that is delivered to us in the writings of the ancient Church Fathers: So that, in a certain eminent Spirit of Prophecy, give the preeminence to him beyond most others, indeed beyond them all."
Arminius completed his studies under Beza and returned to Amsterdam where he became the first native Hollander to exercise ministry in the Reformed Church in Amsterdam. Soon Arminius was called upon to answer the argument as to whether God had damned the non-elect and caused the Fall to insure it, or had God caused the Fall and damned the non-elect because of it? In preparing his answer Arminius saw that both positions were wrong. Neither position is taught in the Bible. Arminius, unlike Calvin, practised religious tolerance. (Remember, Calvin had those who disagreed with his beliefs put to death.) Arminius was also strongly anti-Roman Catholic. Vance records, "Arminius held a public disputation of the Roman Pontiff, defending the position that 'he was an adulterer and panderer of the church, a false prophet and the tail of the dragon, the adversary of God and of Christ, the antichrist, the evil servant who beats his fellow servants -- one who is unworthy of the title of Bishop, and the destroyer and spoiler of the church.' Arminius also declared that 'a reform must not be expected from any one who is elevated to the Roman Pontificates'" (page 50). The work of the Reformers would certainly have been more effective had they made it their object to reject, rather than reform the Roman Catholic Church. Arminius was appointed Professor of Theology at the University of Leider, where he had earlier studied in preparation for a ministry in the Reformed faith. His theses on the nature of God enabled him to receive a doctor's degree. Arminius became increasingly ill and died at the age of forty-nine. The following extract from his will expresses his faith in God, his confidence in and faithfulness to the Scriptures, and his total rejection of Roman Catholicism. "Above all, I commend my soul, on its departure out of the body, into the hands of God, who is its Creator and faithful Saviour; before whom also I testify, that I have walked with simplicity and sincerity, and in all good conscience, in my office and vocation; and that I have guarded with the greatest solicitude and care, against advancing or teaching any thing, which, after a diligent search into the Scriptures, I had not found exactly to agree with those sacred records; and that all the doctrines advanced by me, have been such as might conduce to the propagation and increase of the truth of the Christian Religion, of the true worship of God, of general piety, and of a holy conversation among men, and such as might contribute, according to the Word of God, to a state of tranquility and peace well befitting the Christian name; and that from these benefits I have excluded the Papacy, with which no unity of faith, no bond of piety or of Christian peace can be preserved ."
Modern Calvinists continually give the impression that Arminius was a rank heretic. Calvinism knows only two schools of theology, followers of John Calvin or followers of James Arminius. Considering the condemnation heaped on him by Calvinists, let's look at what he believed. Arminius believed in infant baptism, as did Calvin. (See Infant Baptism) Arminius held to the complete ruin of man in the fall. Arminius said, "The righteousness of Christ is the only meritorious course on account of which God pardons the sins of believers and reckons them righteous." Arminius believed God's grace could be resisted by the free will of men. He rightly esteemed the doctrine of Irresistible Grace to be "repugnant to the Sacred Scriptures." Arminius said, concerning eternal Security, "at no period have I asserted that believers do finally decline or fall away from faith or salvation ." (See Eternal Security) Arminius stated his position on predestination as "an eternal and gracious decree of God in Christ, by which He determines to justify and adopt believers, and to endow them with life eternal, but to condemn unbelievers, and impenitent persons." In other words, until a person is saved he is on his way to hell, after he is saved he is predestined to heaven. Calvinists condemn him on this point because he did not make predestination the cause of salvation.
Charles Hodge, the respected Calvinist, had this to say about Arminius: "It is a well-known fact that Arminius himself did not depart as far from the Scripture truth and from the teachings of the Reformers as did his followers at the time of the Synod of Dort. Moses Stuart even thought it possible to prove that Arminius was not an Arminian." The followers of Arminius have departed so far from his teachings they should totally disconnect his name from their system. Calvinists should drop their bigoted prejudice against Arminius. Most of them won't however because it would jeopardize their theological system known generally by the letters TULIP. Much of my research for this article has been from the book The Other Side of Calvinism by Laurence Vance. Much of the material is his. This book is available from E.L.E. | 
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