Calvinism vs. Arminianism: The Debate Over Divine Providence

Introduction

According to J.P. De Caussade, God speaks "today as he spoke in former times to our fathers when there were no directors as at present, nor any regular method of direction." In other words, De Caussade asserts that God maintains — and has always maintained — a personal, providential relationship with mankind. However, the exact way in which God exercises control over the world and the lives of humans has been debated for many centuries. In the realm of divine providence, there are numerous variables and nuanced positions that Christians have argued from the time of the Apostles through the Protestant Reformation and up to the present day. This paper considers the two broader views of recent centuries — the Arminian and the Calvinist — and evaluates whether there might be alternative views that incorporate both perspectives on how providence affects us in our daily lives.

In Calvinist doctrine, providence is closely related to the notion of predestination, the total depravity of man, and man's utter dependence upon God's will. Providence steers all events with a seemingly unyielding force. Calvin restricts the doctrine of providence largely to the question of whether "irresistible grace" is true, and in doing so he effectively denies that the concept of God's providence — as it appears throughout Scripture, from the Old Testament to the New — implies that God hears the prayers of those who call to Him. Moreover, Calvin offers no explanation for why Scripture contains numerous examples of providence acting as a benevolent will that steers all things and asks only that man accept it freely and allow it to guide him.

The Debate Over Providence

The apparent absence of a benevolent Spirit in the Calvinist conception of God has prompted numerous reexaminations of Calvinist doctrine, from Arminius to Herman Melville, whose Moby-Dick has been interpreted as an attack on Calvinism and its seemingly fatalistic sense of providence.

Because Arminius rejected Calvin's sense of providence and the idea of irresistible grace, he drew from Scripture a more benevolent vision of God's providence — one that provides for all creatures of the Earth, helps man persevere, protects and leads him, and orders the events of human life to a good end, even while allowing evil to occur. While the debate about providence is often approached from the perspective of evil's effects — that is, man's sin in the world — it is more fruitful to consider it from the perspective of first principles, i.e., causes rather than effects. This is essentially Arminius' tactic in defining providence, and the essential first principle in the debate may be understood as the Will of God.

The Will of God, according to Scripture, is "that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life" (John 6:40); it consists of God's desire to see men do right (1 Peter 2:15). Furthermore, it appears to desire that all men submit to Him: "So it is the will of my Father who is in heaven that not one of these little ones should perish" (Matthew 18:14). The idea that no man who is saved can resist God's grace is what limits the Calvinist view of providence to a narrow and illogical reading of Scripture as a whole. Arminius at least acknowledges that because providence sets out a path, it does not follow that all men will walk it: "A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps" (Proverbs 16:9).

The Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius wrote on providence in response to the Calvinist doctrine of his teacher Theodore Beza in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By rejecting Calvinist ideas, Arminius moved toward a more traditional understanding of God's providence by asserting the doctrine of Universal Atonement. His followers called themselves Remonstrants. The Calvinist Council of Dort in 1618 published the Five Points of Calvinism as an answer to the five articles of the Remonstrants.

Without dwelling too long on the soteriological issues of the debate, the five articles of the Remonstrance may be summarized as follows: first, election depends upon faith — God saves those who have faith, and those who will have faith are known beforehand to Him, thus accounting for the concept of predestination; second, Christ did in fact die for all sinners, thereby establishing Universal Atonement; third, original sin exists in human nature, rendering human nature totally depraved and dependent upon grace; fourth, man has the free will to reject grace and to persist in a state of depravity; fifth, those who believe in Christ and follow in his way have the power to resist Satan and fight against sin — though whether such believers are capable of turning away from Christ and returning to depravity is a point requiring further consideration.

These articles established the mindset of Arminius' followers and set them against Calvinist doctrine, which replied by asserting its own five points: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints (otherwise known as "once saved, always saved").

The Arminian doctrine professed a worldview that expressed uncertainty about "once saved, always saved" and offered the perspective that God's providence could be seen in the lives of all people. The Calvinist doctrine, by contrast, could easily be construed as leaving man no free will whatsoever — suggesting that providence affects only the elect, that suffering is deserved by those who suffer, and that those who help them are guided by providence while those who pass by are not. In essence, Calvinism removed the human element from the Christian experience by eliminating the dramatic dimension of that experience: free will.

Calvin and Arminius: The Five Points

David Scaer writes of the conflict between Arminian and Calvinist interpretation as a debate over the inscrutable ways of God: "This tension between [Providence] and the reality that there are many who are eternally lost has been called the crux theologorum, a cross which the theologian must carry."

This cross is part of the mystery of God and His works. As Fulton Sheen suggests, any study of the life of Christ must give sufficient emphasis and contemplation to the cross: "If we leave the Cross out of the Life of Christ, we have nothing left, and certainly not Christianity."

Likewise, Richard Weaver has suggested that the desire for immediate understanding is contrary to the ways of God. As St. Paul says, we see as though through a glass darkly. Weaver adds that "it is characteristic of the barbarian…to insist upon seeing a thing 'as it is.' The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it…Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy."

The immediacy with which Calvinism attempts to address the mystery of providence is apparent in the formula of Calvinist doctrine, which limits itself to an inconsistent reading of Scripture in an effort to secure immediate satisfaction. The viewpoint of Arminius, on the other hand, asks for more time — a sufficiently spiritual response to a mysterious dimension of the Christian religion. Calvin attempts to remove the veil and throw off the crux theologorum; Arminius stops short and gives way to contemplation, just as Ignatius and the Society of Jesus did before entering into the service of the Lord.

Aquinas, in line with Anselm of Canterbury, Augustine, and Isaiah, asserts that all things are the will of God and the effects of His providence, and that we ourselves can submit to the will of God — despite our sinfulness — by uniting our sufferings to Christ's and offering up our penance to God in imitation of the sufficient atonement effected by Christ's passion and death.

Thus, without distorting the sense of man's fallen human nature, the Church Doctors, Fathers, and prophets of the Old Testament support Arminius' position and suggest that Calvin's doctrine on providence is ultimately a doctrine of despair, covered over by a legalistic intellectualizing of religion:

"It is undeniable that there are passages in the New Testament which describe the beneficiaries of the atonement in something less than universal terms. Reformed exegetes rely heavily on these passages in order to maintain a particularized view of the intent of the atonement. Boettner, for example, states that 'those for whom [Christ] died are referred to as "His people," "my people," "the sheep," "the church," "many," or other terms which mean less than the entire human race.'"

Still, Boettner is interpreting Scripture according to his own fashion. As the Arminians would point out, there is ample evidence of God's benevolence — that is, His providence — in the New Testament. Calvin rejected the traditional theology in favor of Protestant simplification; Arminius was more cautious, recognizing the need for further study and intimating a return to the doctrine of the Church Fathers.

Conclusion

While Calvin could clearly see and appreciate the idea of providence as depicted in Scripture, he failed to reconcile this evidence with the statements of Our Lord indicating the exclusion of at least some part of the human race from taking part in God's offered plan. By exaggerating the function of grace and the limitations of free will, Calvinist doctrine expresses the idea that God excludes some from His "divine assistance." Arminius, on the other hand, resists the temptation to identify in our daily lives who is embracing the Divine Will and who is resisting it — and being used as a tool despite that resistance. The Arminian view and the Calvinist view may both be reconciled in the traditional, Scripture-based understanding of providence, which asserts that God participates in every life and that it is up to the individual to allow providence to direct him.