Jacob Arminius – Reformer of the Reformed Theology

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to present Jacob Arminius and his thought. It opens with a brief biography of Arminius to help a reader to place him in the adequate historical and geographical context of Christian Europe at the time. The background that helps to emphasize the uniqueness of Arminian Theology is Calvinism at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. The author presents the conflict found between Arminius and the Calvinists, which was based on different views on the key passages of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Rom.7 and 9), i.e. the concept of God’s sovereignty, anthropology, and soteriology. Afterwards he deals with the Arminian version of the biblical doctrine of God’s election, focused on the person of the Son of God that essentially distinguished it from the Calvinist doctrine on predestination that emphasizes God’s judgment of the individuals. This paper seeks to evaluate the controversy raised by Jacob Arminius, considered to be a new path in the history of Reformed Theology, known to this day as Arminianism.