Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy

Baker Book House Company, 1991, 309 pgs.

Summary: A scholarly assessment of the development of Arminius’ theology. Muller’s basic argument is that Arminius is part of the third wave of Protestant theologians who attempted to systematize the earlier exegesis of Scripture by the first wave of the Reformers. In so doing, Arminius attempts to appropriate medieval scholastic and Jesuit tools in vocabulary and theological distinctions to help explain some of the inherent theological tension in theology. His greatest difference with his Reformed counterparts was not biblicism or scholasticism but how he understands God’s being and psychology and God’s relationship to creation.

Arminius adopts and modifies Thomas of Aquinas’ (1225-1274) understanding of the sovereignty of God in his relation to creation using his own modification of the doctrine of middle knowledge, which was developed and embraced by the Jesuits. Arminius’ hybrid theology teaches that God limits himself by his relationship to the order of creation so that God’s actions are contingent on the foreseen decisions of human beings. Thus God and creation are in a mutually reciprocal relationship and to a degree God’s actions are determined by human actions (cf. 135, 165). Arminius also defines the grace of salvation and the grace of creation in such a way as to require that the grace of salvation be universal in nature though limited by human freedom. Because Arminius’ theology allows for God and man to have a reciprocal relationship, Arminianism is more open to the materialistic rationalism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy (cf. 284-285).

Exemplar Quote:

The issue is not that the world has attained an equal ultimacy with God but rather that the conditions established by God in the act of creation become determinative of all subsequent discussion concerning God and world (75).

Thus, the intricacies of Arminius’ God language… are crucial to the whole Arminian system understood as a theological and philosophical construction of reality—a construction notably different from the Reformed thought of the day in its view not only of predestination but also of the entire relation of God to the world and, indeed, of the character of temporal reality (101).

What Arminius has done in this description of the self-communication of the divine goodness is to argue all the divine affections as manifestations of the two primitive or primary affections, goodness and love; benignity, kindness, and mercy as modifications of goodness in relation to its objects. This argument is crucial to his whole theological perspective inasmuch as it has the effect of binding the divine affections to the primary impulse of God ad extra, the self-communicative character of the divine goodness, and thereby relating the divine affections to the teleological presupposition of Arminius’ theology and, more immediately, to the gracious relationship of God to the created order (198).

Benefits/Detriments: The book cannot be read without a background in scholastic theology and half a dozen reference books. Muller persuasively explains how Arminius developed his system and the theological distinctions and the order necessary to maintain it. This book is not a discussion of soteriology, but of Arminius understanding of God, creation, and providence.