Arminius's Christology

I finally got my mitts on Richard Muller's article on the Christology of Jacob Arminius (published in the Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiendenis, 1988). Here is a summary of some of the salient points.

In the years leading up to Dordt, Arminius debated the Reformed theologians on both predestination and christology, and in various documents of the period it is apparent that "the christological debate appears as a topic equal in importance to the predestinarian debate, both in Arminius' estimation and in the estimation of his opponents and questioners." Thus, Muller argues that Arminius' christology was not incidental to the more notable issues. Instead "I would suggest . . . not only the equivalent importance of the debates but also their profound interrelation and, in addition, the necessity of the christological issue to the full formulation of Arminius' doctrines of predestination and the order of salvation" (p. 149). Several issues may be noted:

1) The nature of Arminius' christological "problem" (as Muller describes it): For Reformed theologians, the designation of the Son as a participant in the decision that He be mediator; He is not simply appointed by the Father, but is also the appointer. In Barthian terms, for the Reformed orthodox, the Son is both electing and elected. Arminius appears to follow the same pattern, but in fact subtly shifts it. He does not "attempt to relate the anointing or the official subordination of the Mediator to the self-emptying of the divine nature" (p. 151). There is a subordination of the Son to the Father even apart from the mediating subordination of the Son to the Father. Thus, "Not only does Arminius not explain the subordination of the Son in terms of the Son's designation to office, he also implies that the office of the Mediator is constituted by God the Father alone" (p. 151).

This hint of subordinationism in Arminius' understanding of the mediatorial office of the Son is more pronounced in his claim that the Son receives His deity, and not merely His personality as Son, from the Father. For Arminius, the Son is not autotheos, but has both "divine essence" and "divine life" of himself. In part, his argument is that the Reformed view of the "autotheotic" reality of the three persons is inevitably tritheistic: "the Reformed doctrine of the Son's aseity . . . violates the unity of the divine essence by postulating three divine persons each God from himself -- in short, by postulating three separate deities and lapsing into tritheism" (p. 153). From his reading of the fathers, Arminius concluded that "God the Father [is] the principium of the Godhead" (p. 153).

2) Influence on Atonement theology: In contrast to the Reformed theologians of his time, Arminius believed that the atonement was accomplished purely by the passive obedience of Christ. By his life, Jesus was qualified and prepared to exercise his priesthood, but He actually exercised that priesthood only in his death. This struck at an important crux of the Reformed understanding of the Trinity as well as of the atonement, for the kenosis doctrine and the status humiliationis that went with it had been used by the Reformed as a way of maintaining the balance between Christ's absoute divinity (a se) and his subordination as mediator. Thus "rather than use the idea of a voluntary self-emptying to explain the way in which the eternal Son is subordinate to his work, Arminius tends to view the subordination in terms of the order of persons in the Trinity and to view Christ's as conferred by the Father, without reference to the will or act of the Son" (p. 155).

3) Influence on soteriology: Because Christ's active obedience plays no role in Arminius' understanding of the atonement, room is opened up for human obedience as the means for accomplishing salvation: "As in the satisfaction-theory of the medieval doctors, the distinction between a salvific passive obedience of Christ and a non-salvific active obedience points in the theology of Arminius toward a doctrine of human involvement or cooperation in the work of salvation. In other words, Arminius' separation of Christ's active and passive obedience in his christological locus correlates with his soteriological synergism" (p. 157).

4) Influence on doctrine of predestination: Reformed orthodoxy had argued a predestinarian doctrine in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, insisting that election took place "apart from any foreseen merit or faith" but was founded on "a trinitarian construct in which Christ, as God, was acknowledged with the Father and Spirit as the one who predestines." But that needs to be made more precise. Arminius broke up the decree of election into four decrees. According to this scheme, the Father elects the Son as the Mediator at the beginning of the sequence, but Christ does not appear as elector until the end, the fourth decree. This movement corresponds to the distinction between the antecedent and consequent will of God. According to the first decree (antecedent will), God the Father appoints the means by which all who will be saved will be saved; only at the fourth decree (consequent will) does the Son choose those who have believed on him. Two of Muller's statements summarize the issues: "Arminius' grounding of the economic subordination of the Son to the antecedent will of the Father in the concept of a generated deitas or divine essentia is foreign not only to the Reformed and Lutheran views of the Trinity but also to the views of all the great medieval doctors" (p. 160). And, "What Arminius seems to have done is to have taken the side of the patristic argument which argues some subordination in order in the Godhead and to have developed it into the basic principle of his view of the Trinity. This subordination of the Son became, in turn, the lynch-pin of his final statement on the doctrine of predestination. There, the Father, as principium of the Trinity antecedently wills the election of human beings in Christ and consequently gives to Christ the choice of believers as his own" (p. 161).

My interest in this article is twofold: a) The possibility of constructing an argument to the effect that Trinity implies predestination of a high Augustinian sort. Part of the argument would be historical: Augustine was both a high Augustinian and a high Trinitarian. Muller doesn't provide all the ammunition, but the fact that Arminianism brought together subordinationism with synergism is suggestive. b) It occurs to me that the terminology and categories of these debates are pretty clunky. To summarize the whole of Christ's life under the heading of "active obedience" is a very clumsy way of handling the gospels. Once the work of Christ is set up as "active/passive obedience," then all kinds of wierd questions come to the fore, and lots of what the Bible actually tells us about Christ's obedience is simply lost.

This hint of subordinationism in Arminius' understanding of the mediatorial office of the Son is more pronounced in his claim that the Son receives His deity, and not merely His personality as Son, from the Father. For Arminius, the Son is not autotheos, but has both "divine essence" and "divine life" of himself. In part, his argument is that the Reformed view of the "autotheotic" reality of the three persons is inevitably tritheistic: "the Reformed doctrine of the Son's aseity . . . violates the unity of the divine essence by postulating three divine persons each God from himself -- in short, by postulating three separate deities and lapsing into tritheism". From his reading of the fathers, Arminius concluded that "God the Father [is] the principium of the Godhead"....
....In contrast to the Reformed theologians of his time, Arminius believed that the atonement was accomplished purely by the passive obedience of Christ. By his life, Jesus was qualified and prepared to exercise his priesthood, but He actually exercised that priesthood only in his death....Thus "rather than use the idea of a voluntary self-emptying to explain the way in which the eternal Son is subordinate to his work, Arminius tends to view the subordination in terms of the order of persons in the Trinity and to view Christ's as conferred by the Father, without reference to the will or act of the Son"....

....Because Christ's active obedience plays no role in Arminius' understanding of the atonement, room is opened up for human obedience as the means for accomplishing salvation: "As in the satisfaction-theory of the medieval doctors, the distinction between a salvific passive obedience of Christ and a non-salvific active obedience points in the theology of Arminius toward a doctrine of human involvement or cooperation in the work of salvation. In other words, Arminius' separation of Christ's active and passive obedience in his christological locus correlates with his soteriological synergism".

The Doctrine of Arminius is based, at least in part upon that of Pelagius. Who believed that Mankind was not Dead Spiritually, but mearly damaged with the attributes to be sinless still there. Pelagius believed that human beings were born sinless and only learned sin from other human beings.

However, if what God said in Genesis 2:17 "but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." - Adam and Eve Died, not physically, but Spiritually that day. Not only that, but the Apostle Paul says in Romans 5:12 "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned". Paul is saying that Adam as the head brought Death and Sin upon ALL MANKIND.

Thus the problem with Arminius as well as Pelagius is to deny the Extent of the Death of Mankind through Adam. And to Deny the Amazing work of God in Regeneration, The Implantation of God's word and the Gift of Faith - All done by God since "NO ONE SEEKS FOR GOD" (Romans 3, Psalm 14, Psalm 53).

Thus we who believe that the Spiritual Death killed mans wish to seek God, thus anyone who does may be one of God's Elect who we need to run to the side of the chariot - and give an account of the Hope that is within us - that is the Gospel.

Although I disagree with his position of intuit fides (God elects on the basis of our future faith) and his denial of Christ's active obedience, which man must accomplish rather than Christ (I would have to call such a view heretical); the idea that the Son received his deity from the Father is the same position that the Eastern Orthodox hold, not only that, but the Son and the Holy Spirit receive their deity from the Father. This maintains the unity of the Trinity. If all three Persons of the Trinity were autotheos, I can see how this would lead to Tritheism. I am going to have to dig into this one a little more.

“Paul is saying that Adam as the head brought Death and Sin upon ALL MANKIND.” Every human since Adam, as direct descendants of Adam (Jesus was not completely since His Father Is The Holy Spirit) has inherited a human spirit without God’s life in it. Even Jesus verifies this for us in John chapter three, telling us “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” I happen to believe Jesus is referring to the amniotic ‘water’ and the Spiritual birth of God’s Life coming into the human spirit. If a man is a human, he is born of ‘water’ but must be born of the Spirit to be then born into God’s family.

If a man is a human, he is born of ‘water’ but must be born of the Spirit to be then born into God’s family.

Yes, and just as you did not cause your own birth, it is God who causes that Spiritual birth and the result the confession of faith.

Most folks believe that they purchased their Salvation through their confession. We believe the confession is to show the "faith" the "Gift of God" was planted by God. Not the cart before the horse.

If Salvation is purchased by men, then men get the glory. If God regenerates and plants faith - then God gets all the glory. So it is.

I found this on the Internet:
Calvin argued that ‘when we speak simply of the Son without regard to the Father, we well and properly declare him to be of himself; and for this reason we call him the sole beginning. But when we mark the relation that he has with the Father, we rightly make the Father the beginning of the Son’ (Institutes, I.xiii.19).

Not being a Calvinist, I was not familiar with this dispute among Reformed theologians. I know that the Scriptures proclaim that the fullness of the Deity dwells in Christ, and I certainly proclaim that he is True God, fully 100% God, and that there was no time in which the Son did not exist; however, it is difficult to talk about the Son in exclusion of the Father. In fact, without the Father, he would not be Son. That is in itself a relational term.

I may only be mudding the waters here, and not clarifying anything. This is not a debate with which I am familiar, and so I have more questions than I do answers.

Here's an interesting essay which discusses that statement by Calvin...

JOHN CALVIN ON THE TRINITY

"...However, if each person of the Trinity is fully God, then what of their relations as causal activity? Calvin speaks of the Father as the unbegotten one who begets the Son and the Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son. The question then arises whether this is not a violation of Calvin’s strong affirmation of the Son and Spirit’s full divinity. How can Calvin say, for instance, “Therefore, when we speak simply of the Son without regard to the Father, we well and properly declare him to be of himself; and for this reason we call him the sole beginning. But when we mark the relation that he has with the Father, we rightly make the Father the beginning of the Son” (144)? The Son considered in himself as God is said to be unoriginate (indeed, eternal and self-begotten as God has no origin outside himself), but considered in relation to the Father he is begotten. Are we to say then that the Son depends on the Father for his existence? Does the Father cause the Son to be (and so with the Spirit)? Paul Helm, in his book, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford 2006), deals with this issue and finds an answer in remembering that the begetting of the Son is an eternal begetting such that the Son is always begotten of the Father. What this eternal begetting means most importantly is that this ordered relation between the Father and Son is what God is and it could not be otherwise. As Helm states: "…the Father’s act of begetting the Son is necessary, not voluntary. It is an essential feature of the Father’s person. And likewise the begottenness of the Son is essential to his person as Son. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit not only are essentially God, the relations to each other that they in fact have are equally essential. But if the Son of God essentially and necessarily has the person he has, then the begetting of the person of the Son by the Father cannot have any voluntariness about it. In a real sense, it was not up to the Father whether one of the divine persons should be the person of Son, since being the person of the Son is essential to the person who is the Son. (56)..."

Calvin - The Institutes Book 1 Chapter 13 section 19:

Moreover, this distinction is so far from interfering with the most perfect unity of God, that the Son may thereby be proved to be one God with the Father, inasmuch as he constitutes one Spirit with him, and that the Spirit is not different from the Father and the Son, inasmuch as he is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. In each hypostasis the whole nature is understood the only difference being that each has his own peculiar subsistence.

The whole Father is in the Son, and the whole Son in the Father, as the Son himself also declares (John 14:10), “I am in the Father, and the Father in me;” nor do ecclesiastical writers admit that the one is separated from the other by any difference of essence. “By those names which denote distinctions” says Augustine “is meant the relation which they mutually bear to each other, not the very substance by which they are one.” In this way, the sentiments of the Fathers, which might sometimes appear to be at variance with each other, are to be reconciled.

At one time they teach that the Father is the beginning of the Son, at another they assert that the Son has both divinity and essence from himself, and therefore is one beginning with the Father. The cause of this discrepancy is well and clearly explained by Augustine, when he says, “Christ, as to himself, is called God, as to the Father he is called Son.” And again, “The Father, as to himself, is called God, as to the Son he is called Father. He who, as to the Son, is called Father, is not Son; and he who, as to himself, is called Father, and he who, as to himself, is called Son, is the same God.”

Therefore, when we speak of the Son simply, without reference to the Father, we truly and properly affirm that he is of himself, and, accordingly, call him the only beginning; but when we denote the relation which he bears to the Father, we correctly make the Father the beginning of the Son.

Augustine’s fifth book on the Trinity is wholly devoted to the explanation of this subject. But it is far safer to rest contented with the relation as taught by him, than get bewildered in vain speculation by subtle prying into a sublime mystery.

—Institutes of the Christian Religion

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