This is for those of you who consider yourselves Arminians or who just want to understand classical Arminianism better.
There are all too few good books about Arminius. This one is expensive, but well worth the $125 (or so) for anyone avidly interested in understanding Arminius’ theology. If you teach at a college, university or seminary, you ought to have the library order if even if you can’t afford one for yourself.
The book is God’s Twofold Love: The Theology of Jacob Arminius (1559-1609) published by European publisher (of mostly Reformed books) Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (2010). The author is William den Boer, a lecturer in Dutch Church History at the Theological University of Apeldoorn (The Netherlands).
I assume the book either is his dissertation or grew out of his dissertation. It reads like a dissertation, but is nevertheless very readable for persons with some training in theology.
The book’s thesis is that Arminius’ driving concern and motive was God’s justice–to protect and preserve it from any and every theology that would undermine it or call it into question. He believed that the high Calvinism of his day, represented especially by Beza and Gomarus, did just that.
God’s “two loves” are his love for his own justice and his love for his human creatures. But his love for his justice, Arminius believed (according to den Boer), is greater than his love for people. God will not and cannot violate his justice and his justice cannot be so mysterious that we can make no sense of it (as Calvin sometimes claimed).
Of course, John Wesley later used the same argument against Calvinism only his primary attribute of God was love, with he correlated with God’s justice to argue that God cannot violate his love or his justice.
den Boer surveys all of Arminius’ relevant works, some never translated into English (but the entire book is in English except for excerpts from Arminius’ and others’ works in Dutch and Latin).
Here is a sentence that well expresses the book’s thesis: “[i]t is not the freedom of the will, but rather God’s justice, that forms the source for Arminius’s theology.”
Near the end of the book den Boer provides an excellent survey of the Hague Conference held between Arminius’s followers, the Remonstrants, and their opponents after Arminius’ death. He demonstrates convincingly that the Remonstrants very early departed from Arminius’s methodology by stressing more free will than God’s justice. (However, I would argue they never elevated free will to the status of a first principle.)
The author also provides near the book’s end a wonderful survey of the discussion about whether God is the author of sin among Reformed scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries (including Arminius). One thing that comes out is that Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor at Zurich, worried that Calvin’s theology tended to make God the author of sin. There were other Reformed theologians who worried about this as well. Not all of the first and second generation Reformed theologians were divine determinists.
den Boer’s discussion of Arminius’ beliefs about God’s sovereignty show just how close they were to moderate Calvinists’. Arminius believed strongly in divine “concurrence” which means even the sinner cannot act without God’s permission and aid. According to Arminius (contrary to the caricatures often presented by his critics then and now), the creature has no absolute autonomy of action, only a relative automony of decision. But even the decision not to resist the prevening grace of God is only possible because of that grace.
I found my own account of Arminius’ theology in Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities confirmed by den Boer’s research. And he mentions Arminian Theology positively.
God’s Twofold Love is an indispensable read for anyone who wishes to know about Arminius’s theology in depth. It is scholarly and readable with numerous quotes from Arminius’s own writings to support the author’s argument.
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