Muller, Richard.
God, Creation, And Providence In The Thought Of
Jacob Arminius: Sources And Directions Of Scholastic Protestantism In
The Era Of Early Orthodoxy. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1991.
In this volume Richard Muller attempts to fill in a lacuna in the
histories of Arminius and early Arminianism. Rather than focus on the
debates of predestination, Muller notes that “[I]t must still be
explained why Arminius’ doctrine developed along certain technical lines
and with attention to such questions as the internal logic of the
divine will, the character of human beings in their original created
state, the relationship of the divine will, in its providential
concurrence, to the acts of human beings, and the nature of the divine
foreknowledge of future contingents (Muller, 10). Similar to Muller’s
larger project (Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics), he attempts to set
Arminius in a larger historical context, one that explores the
connections between late medieval scholasticism and a burgeoning
Reformed orthodoxy (or lack thereof).
Despite what many saw as his later theological errors, Arminius
correctly placed his theological roots “in the presuppositional
structure and foundational principles of [the Protestant scholastic]
system, which is to say, in the definition of theology and in the
doctrine of God, the so-called principium essendi of theological system”
(Muller, 25).
The Method of Arminius’ Theology
Arminius follows the general outline of both Catholic and Protestant
scholastics. He is perhaps a bit more metaphysical in his doctrine of
God. Muller notes, “Arminius appears far more willing than Protestants
of previous generations to draw ratinal metaphysics into the service of
theology: (59). One should be careful, however, in inferring that this
is or is not the cause of his theological downfall, so to speak.
Arminius’s use of the scholastic method, particularly his emphasis on
God as the principium essendi, stands in line with Reformed
scholasticism. However, Arminius did phrase his method in such a way to
deemphasize final causality, and hence to lessen a decretal theology
(68).
After identifying the being of God as the ground of theology, Arminius
makes the relationship between God and the world the “fundamental
datum…rather than, as in the case of his Reformed contemporaries, a
secondary issue predicated on the doctrine of God” (75). Perhaps this
does condition Arminius’ later theology; Muller notes, “the conditions
established by God in the act of creation become determinative of all
subsequent discussions concerning God and the world.” Arminius has made
the world a “subordinate principium essendi.” (Cf. pp. 100-101; 171
ff.). As Muller notes elsewhere,
“Whereas the theology of Arminius’ Reformed contemporaries tended to
place the work of grace prior to the work of creation and, therefore, to
understand creation increasingly as a means to God’s higher salvific
end, , Arminius’s theology tends to conjoin nature and grace, to
understand creation as manifesting the ultimate goodness of God, and
therefore, to conceive of the divine act of creation as standing prior
to all other divine acts ad extra and as establishing both the context
and limitations within which those acts must occur” (233).
The Existence and Nature of God
On the surface level Arminius begins with the standard scholastic
prolegomena, archetypal and ectypal theology, but as he expands it when
begin to see his departure from Reformed theology. Arminus notes that
existence (esse) and life (vita) must be the two fundamental categories
for the essence of God (114). Arminius’s key point is in identifying
these two terms as the “two moments” of God. His language is a bit
confusing, for he isn’t using the word “moments” in the conventional use
of the term. What does he mean by this? A sympathetic reading could
simply gloss these terms as the traditional terms actus purus and actus
secondus. It appears for Arminius that “there is no first moment of
being in God without the second moment, life” (116).
As it stands this is not all that striking. He is not saying anything
different from other scholastic theologians, whether Protestant or
Romanist. The problem arises when Arminius applies this distinction to
God’s will. As Muller notes, “If God is utterly simple, then the fact of
God having a will and the divine willing must be identical” (117).
Arminius’s distinction of “two moments” will posit a gap between what
God intends to will and what he actually wills.
The Divine Knowledge and Will
Arminius does make a unique move concerning God’s knowledge: he refers
knowing entirely to the intellect and misses an established Reformed
point on the knowledge of God: God’s sapientia (144). Given that
sapientia is a knowledge of purposes and goals, and that Arminus omits
it, one must wonder if this will play out in his understanding of divine
foreknowledge. Arminius further departs from Aquinas by taking the
Boethian model that God knows future things because they are future
(Muller1991, 152-153; contrast with Aquinas, Summa, Ia, q. 14, art. 8,
ad obj. 1). As Muller notes, “[T]his provides a less than total
conjunction between the divine will and the divine intellect” (153).
This novelty leads directly into Arminius’s use of the scientia media.
After a lengthy discussion of how Aquinas and those following him dealt
with “middle knowledge” (e.g., the idea that this knowledge of
contingencies stands prior to any free act of God’s will), this means
that for Arminius “God will, therefore, be able to ordain the means of
salvation on the basis of a hypothetical or consequent knowledge of the
creature’s free choice in a context of grace” (161).
The Object of God’s will
Arminius posited the divine goodness as the object of the divine will;
this means that God could not have permitted evil, only permitting the
free function of the created human will to evil. This raises one problem
that Arminius easily solved: if the divine will is the simple essence,
how can we speak of a multitude of objects? Arminius does so by noting
that God wills the plenitude of his divine goodness. This raises another
problem which he doesn’t solve as well, notes Muller: how do we then
speak of “experience[s] of freedom, contingency, and, indeed, of evil
running counter to the will of God, in the finite order” (175)?
Arminius makes another subtle move. Muller gives a brief but succinct
summary of the ways in which Arminius discussed God’s will. At first
glance it is no different from the typical Reformed and medieval
scholastic discussions, except for one point. Muller notes, “Arminius
emphasizes the way in which the divine opus alienum is a response to the
willing of contingent beings—over against the opus proprium as an
absolute will of God” (185). In short, and in contradistinction to his
Reformed contemporaries, Arminius places God’s will (both antecedent and
consequent) as standing in relation to and as a response to the
creature’s willing (187). Interestingly, Arminius switches terms.
Scholastics had tradtionally spoken of God’s will as voluntas, the
facutly that exercises volition, which for God is always perfect and
complete. Arminius changed it to velleitas, an inchoate and imperfect
will, because incomplete (188).
Creation
This section is admittedly difficult. Muller gives a fine overview of
the scholastic glosses on creatio ex nihilo, noting that the phrase ex
nihilo does not mean “deriving its origin from the principle of
nothing-ness,” but rather “an indication of the ontological and temporal
limit and order of the creative process: first there was nothing and,
then, after the creative act, there was something (216). The following,
however, is not clear as to what Arminius and his contemporaries were
aiming at, but given Arminius’s earlier contention of a connection
between God and the world, seeing both in a reacting towards the other
(75, 100-101; 171), it appears that one can reconstruct Arminius’s view.
It seems that the concept of the nihil, rather than functioning as a
“limit,” now functions as a material substratum, a realm of possible
being existing independently of the realm of actual being (219).
Conclusion:
Muller effectively rebuts the common charge that Arminius rejected the
scholastic method of his Reformed colleagues and chose rather a purer
biblicism that rejected supralapsarian predestination. Arminius followed
the method of numerous divines and gave careful attention to complex
theological problems (26). In light of current intra-Reformed
controversies today over the nature of election and the covenant—and
this is my point, not necessarily Muller’s—we can see those who argue
for a fresher, more biblical theology in contrast to stodgy Protestant
Scholasticism, not only come to the same conclusions as later
Arminianism, but they lack all of Arminius’ own theological strengths;
they get all of his errors and none of this benefits, such as they may
or may not be.
Arminius can be seen as a theologian who took some elements of Thomism
and modifed them for his own use. As it stands that is not too
remarkable. Most every early Reformed orthodox thinker did that. It is
the specific modifications Arminius made that set him apart: the use of
scientia media and creation as a temporal limit upon God’s power. For
example, Arminius, like Thomas, placed God's intellect logically prior
to his will. Thomas, though unlike Arminius, saw God's intellect as
causal of future events.
