John Mark Hicks

Review of Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace, by Keith D. Stanglin and Thomas H. McCall.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.  This review first appeared in Restoration Quarterly 56 (2014): 258-259.

This book is long overdue. While the shelves are filled with scholarly summaries of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, this is the first book-length rigorous exposition of the theology of Arminius. MCall and Stanglin intend their work as a complement to the magisterial 1971 Arminius biography by Carl Bangs. They write within the framework of a renaissance of Arminius scholarship (whaich began in the 1980s) that is more objective (as opposed to polemical) and contextual (recognizing a Reformed scholastic setting) than previous studies that heralded him as either saint or sinner.

The subtitle reflects their specific intent. They explain Arminius’s theology of grace in the light of the topics that most consumed his attention in the first decade of the seventeenth century and what “recent scholarship has found to be central.” Through a “constructive synthesis,” McCall and Stanglin “attempt to show what “makes him tick” (21). Grace is a pevasive theme that drive his pastoral and theological interests. This stands in contrast with some interpreters who think Arminius subverted the Reformed understanding of grace by “elevating autonomous human free will and introducing anthropocentrism into Protestantism” (22). On the contrary, Arminius consistently maintained the necessity and sufficiency of grace.

While developing his perspectives within the heart of the Reformed faith, the authors argue that Arminius had a “different theological starting point” from that of his opponents. Arminius begins with a theology of creation whose central feature is a love for the creation as well as a love for righteousness (God’s faithfulness to God’s own self). Out of this dual commitment, God “free–not of necessity–obliged himself to creation and set limits for his own actions” (93). The drama of redemption, then, is driven by God’s love for creatures coordinated with God’s own sense of justice. Arminius’s understanding of predestination, sin, and salvation arise from this fundamental theological orientation.

McCall and Stanglin place Arminius in the trajectory of Irenaeus, the Eastern Orthodox, Aquinas (Jesuit interpretation), and Molina (whose “middle knowledge” he adopts) in contrast with the line that begins with Augustine, continues through Aquinas (Dominican interpretation), and finds expression in Calvin.

The authors have succeeded. Their work will become a standard resource for the theology of Arminius in the foreseeable future, just as Bang’s biography has been for over forty years. Historical theologians, students of Arminianism and Calvinism, and those engaged in contemporary discussions of neo-puritanism (the young, Reformed, and restless) owe to themselves as well as to fair sense of history to digest this book carefully.

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