Calvinism vs Arminianism: The Differences, Side by Side

Calvinism vs Arminianism is the Protestant debate over how God saves sinners: Calvinism holds that God's eternal choice and effective grace make the decisive difference between the saved and the lost, and Arminianism holds that God's grace enables every hearer of the gospel, so that believing or refusing is the person's own act. The two systems met head to head, in documents that still define Calvinism and Arminianism today, when the Synod of Dort answered the Five Articles of Remonstrance point by point in 1618 and 1619. Both sides built from real Scripture, and both have spent four centuries explaining the other side's texts. The Many Beings Framework argues that the two accounts describe one work of grace, seen from two frames.

Key takeaways

• The difference turns on who makes the difference. Calvinists hold that God's choice and grace decide who believes; Arminians hold that grace enables all who hear and the hearer decides.
• The documents are the Remonstrance (1610) and the Canons of Dort (1619). Dort's five answers to five Arminian articles became the five points of Calvinism.
• The two agree more than their reputations suggest. Both teach that fallen people cannot turn to God unaided, that grace goes first, and that Christ's death is of infinite worth.
• Monergism vs synergism names the question underneath. The live issue is whether God's saving work can be refused.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism keeps both accounts. Set beside Calvinism, Arminianism and Molinism, it holds the Reformed account true of God's frame and the Arminian account true of ours.

What is the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism?

The difference between Calvinism and Arminianism lies in the ground of salvation's final outcome. In Calvinism, God chose His people unconditionally and gives them a grace that brings them to faith without fail; in Arminianism, God chose those He foreknew would believe and gives all who hear a grace that can be refused.

Calvinism is the popular name for Reformed theology, the tradition that runs from Zurich and Geneva through the confessions of Dort and Westminster; our accounts of Calvinism and what Calvinism teaches set out the whole system. Arminianism takes its name from the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, whose followers, the Remonstrants, stated its case in 1610, and whose modern heirs include the Wesleyan tradition of John Wesley.

The fairest way to set out Calvinism vs Arminianism is to let each tradition speak in its own documents. The table below summarizes what the Canons of Dort and the Five Articles of Remonstrance each teach on the five disputed doctrines, in their own terms.

Where did the debate begin? Arminius, the Remonstrance and the Synod of Dort

Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) was trained inside the Reformed tradition he came to question. He studied under Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor, at Geneva, served as a pastor in Amsterdam from 1587, and became a professor of theology at Leiden in 1603. There his teaching on predestination and grace drew sharp opposition from Reformed colleagues, and the dispute outlived him.

A few months after his death, some forty-three ministers met at The Hague on 14 January 1610 and signed a document drawn up by Jan Uytenbogaert. It was a formal protest, a remonstrance, and its signers became known as the Remonstrants. The Five Articles of Remonstrance taught conditional election, an atonement for all, the inability of fallen man without grace, a resistible grace, and a preserving grace whose limits they left undecided. On that last point they wrote that whether true believers could fall away "must be more particularly determined out of the Holy Scriptures before they can teach it with the full persuasion of their minds." By 1618 they had decided it, and taught that a true believer can fall away and perish. Their opponents answered with the Counter-Remonstrance of 1611.

The Synod of Dort settled the matter for the Dutch Reformed churches. It met at Dordrecht from 13 November 1618 to 9 May 1619, in 154 sessions, with delegates from Reformed churches in other countries alongside the Dutch. Simon Episcopius spoke for the Remonstrants who were summoned. The synod's judgment, the Canons of Dort, answered the five articles with five heads of doctrine, and those answers are what later generations called the five points of Calvinism.

The aftermath was political as well as doctrinal. Some 200 Remonstrant pastors lost their posts, and those who would not agree to keep silent were banished. Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the statesman who had protected the Remonstrants, was beheaded on 13 May 1619, four days after the synod closed. After the death of Prince Maurice, the Remonstrants received toleration.

More than a century later, John Wesley carried the Arminian case into the English-speaking revival, and from 1740 he broke openly with the Calvinism of George Whitefield and the Calvinistic Methodists. Today most Methodist, Nazarene, Pentecostal and Free Will Baptist churches stand on the Arminian side, while Presbyterian, Continental Reformed and Reformed Baptist churches stand on the Calvinist side.

Volume One gives Calvin, Arminius and Wesley a chapter each in Resolving the Free Will Dilemma.

TULIP and the five points of Arminianism compared

Because Dort answered the Remonstrance article by article, the two sets of five points line up. The Calvinist set is usually remembered as TULIP, an acronym that appeared nearly three centuries after the synod. Arminians have their own modern acronym: the Society of Evangelical Arminians summarizes the five points of Arminianism as FACTS, for Freed to believe by grace, Atonement for all, Conditional election, Total depravity and Security in Christ, each keyed to an article of the Remonstrance. Read side by side, the two lists show that the debate over Arminianism vs Calvinism is narrower than its reputation: the two agree on the first point, share a great deal on the second and third, and divide most sharply on the fourth and fifth.

Total depravity

Here the two agree, and the common summary that Arminians hold only a partial depravity is mistaken. The Five Articles of Remonstrance say that fallen man "can of and by himself neither think, will, nor do anything that is truly good (such as having faith eminently is)." The Canons of Dort say that fallen people are "neither willing nor able to return to God." The traditions part over what grace does next. Our article on total depravity treats the doctrine in depth.

Election

Dort teaches that God chose "a definite number of particular people," and that He did so "not on the basis of foreseen faith … but rather for the purpose of faith." The Remonstrance teaches that God determined to save "those who, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, shall believe on this his Son Jesus, and shall persevere in this faith." Some Arminians today read election as the choice of a people in Christ, which individuals join by faith. The dispute is whether faith is the fruit of election or its condition; unconditional election has its own article.

Atonement

Both sides confess that Christ's death is sufficient for every sinner. Dort calls it "of infinite value and worth, more than sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world," and the Remonstrance says Christ "died for all men and for every man," though "no one actually enjoys this forgiveness of sins, except the believer." They divide over intent. Dort holds that God willed Christ to "effectively redeem … all those and only those who were chosen." The debate over limited atonement continues on its own page.

Grace

The Remonstrance teaches that "all good deeds or movements, that can be conceived, must be ascribed to the grace of God in Christ," yet adds that "it is not irresistible, in as much as it is written concerning many that they have resisted the Holy Ghost," citing Acts 7. Dort teaches that regeneration is worked "without our help," so that it does not remain "in human power whether or not to be reborn or converted." It also insists that this grace "does not act in people as if they were blocks and stones." The dispute is whether the grace that goes before faith can finally be refused. See irresistible grace and its Wesleyan counterpart, prevenient grace.

Perseverance

Dort grounds the believer's endurance in God: "God's plan cannot be changed; God's promise cannot fail." The Remonstrants first left the question open and then affirmed that a believer can fall away, and the Society of Evangelical Arminians now states that a person's salvation is "secure as long as he is in Christ." The doctrine of perseverance of the saints has its own treatment, and the everyday question of whether you can lose your salvation is answered separately.

Monergism vs synergism: the question under the five points

Beneath the five points lies one question, and the terms monergism vs synergism name it. R. C. Sproul defines them in Everyone's a Theologian: "Monergism means only one person does the work. Synergism has to do with cooperation, with two or more people working together." Monergism in salvation is the teaching that God alone brings a sinner from spiritual death to life. Synergism is the teaching that the new birth comes through God's grace and the human will working together.

Reformed theology is monergist, and Sproul states its reason with a picture from John 11: "Dead people do not cooperate." Lazarus walked out of the tomb, but he contributed nothing to being raised, and so, Sproul concludes, Reformed theology teaches that regeneration precedes faith. God first gives life, and the living person believes. On this view a grace that waits on the sinner's consent would leave the dead to raise themselves, and the Reformed read Ephesians 2, where God made us alive "even when we were dead in transgressions," as settling the order.

The Arminian theologian Roger Olson accepts the other label. He calls classical Arminianism "evangelical synergism," and notes that Calvinists and Lutherans alike "hold to what is known as 'monergism'." That grouping matters, because confessional Lutherans are monergists outside the Reformed tradition, so monergism and Calvinism are separate claims.

Some Arminians decline Olson's word. J. Matthew Pinson reports that Leroy Forlines described his position as "conditional monergism," that Kenneth Keathley and Jeremy Evans, following Richard Cross, defend "monergism with resistibility of grace," and that the Arminius scholar Carl Bangs wrote, "Arminius was a monergist." On their view grace does the whole saving work and the sinner contributes only the absence of refusal. Reformed critics answer that a work which waits on the sinner's not refusing still leaves the outcome finally with him. That leaves the question narrower than the labels suggest: can God's saving work be refused, and what finally distinguishes the one who believes from the one who does not?

Volume One sets out both answers from first principles; download it free.

What do Calvinists and Arminians agree on?

Calvinists and Arminians share far more than their quarrel suggests. Each confesses salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. Fallen people cannot turn to God unaided, and the Remonstrance and Dort describe that inability in nearly the same words. Grace goes first, before the first movement of faith. And the two traditions reject Pelagianism, the teaching that fallen people can turn to God by natural power, and Dort names Pelagius when it refuses to credit conversion to human free choice.

They also share the universal offer. Dort teaches that the gospel promise "ought to be announced and declared without differentiation or discrimination to all nations and people," and that those who perish in unbelief do so "because they themselves are at fault," with no deficiency in Christ's sacrifice. The Arminian says the same about fault and the same about the offer.

This is a family argument inside Protestant orthodoxy, and its history bears that out: William Carey sailed for India holding Reformed convictions, and John Wesley built the Methodist movement holding Arminian ones. Calvinists and Arminians disagree about how grace works, and they confess the same Christ.

Where is each side strongest in Scripture?

Calvinism is strongest in the texts where God's giving comes before our coming. Jesus says:

"All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away." (John 6:37, NIV)

Paul describes a chain in which no link breaks:

"For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified." (Romans 8:29–30, NIV)

And he draws the conclusion about mercy: "It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God's mercy" (Romans 9:16). The Calvinist argument at its best follows. If two people receive the same grace and one believes, then something in the believer distinguished him, and he has something to boast of that the unbeliever lacks. Dort rejects exactly that, and Scripture leaves no room for boasting.

Arminianism is strongest in the texts where God's desire reaches everyone. Peter writes:

"The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9, NIV)

Jesus laments over the city that rejects Him:

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing." (Matthew 23:37, NIV)

The Arminian argument at its best follows. A God able to save all who wills to pass some by seems to contradict His own stated desire, and the Lord's lament seems to have no object if the unwilling could never have been willing.

Each side has a reply. The Reformed distinguish God's revealed desire from His decree and note that Peter writes "patient with you." Arminians read Romans 9 as God's election of a people and a purpose, and read John 6:37 beside verse 40's promise to "everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him." Each side keeps its own texts whole and works hard to explain the other's, and a pattern that persistent suggests something in how the question is being asked.

Volume One reads both sets of texts in full and keeps each one whole; get your free copy.

Is there a middle position between Calvinism and Arminianism?

Two positions are often offered as a middle way. Molinism, from the sixteenth-century Jesuit Luis de Molina and revived by Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, holds that God knows what every free creature would do in any circumstance and chooses which circumstances to create. It keeps libertarian freedom and meticulous providence together, and its critics ask what makes those truths about free choices true before God decrees anything.

Provisionism, associated with Leighton Flowers and some Southern Baptists, holds that the gospel itself carries all the enabling a hearer needs, so no separate grace is required to restore the will. Its critics answer that it gives up the inability both the Remonstrants and Dort confessed, and our article on prevenient grace weighs that charge.

Lutheran theology, sometimes placed between them, is a third tradition with its own answer: monergist on regeneration, universal in its atonement, and unwilling to follow election into a decree of reprobation. Each middle option adds something to hold the two sides together: a kind of divine knowledge, or a gospel that enables by itself. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that Calvinism and Arminianism already stand together, each true of one reality from its own frame.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism read the debate?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error. It is the position of the Many Beings Framework. Calvinism grounds salvation in God's eternal decree and effective grace. Arminianism grounds it in grace that enables a response the person can give or withhold. Molinism grounds it in God's knowledge of what free creatures would do. FICT holds that the Reformed and Arminian accounts are each true of one reality, the first as God knows and wills it and the second as we live it.

The framework holds that there is one reality. God apprehends it in His own frame: atemporal, simple, depending on nothing, knowing and willing the whole of history in one eternal act. We apprehend that same reality in the human frame, which is sequential, composite and contingent, and we meet it one moment at a time. Words whose content involves time, possibility, agency, freedom or value are said of God and of us analogically, truly of both in related senses that differ. The Many Beings Fallacy is treating such a word as though it meant the same thing in both frames.

Three words carry the quarrel between Calvinists and Arminians. The first is "before." To say God chose before we believed places His act on our timeline. In God's frame there is one eternal act, and election is logically prior to faith as its ground; in ours, faith is a real act in time. So Dort's election "for the purpose of faith" and the Remonstrance's election of "those who … shall believe" each report the one reality truly from one frame.

The second is "choose." God's choosing is the eternal ground of the believer's salvation. Our choosing is finite, undetermined by prior finite causes, and our own, and a person who refuses Christ could have believed. The third is "able." Measured against God's absolute standard, no fallen person is able to stand before Him, and total depravity holds without qualification. Within the human frame, the gospel addresses a real respondent who answers for his answer.

Grace follows the same pattern. In the human frame it can be refused, and Stephen told his hearers, "You always resist the Holy Spirit!" (Acts 7:51). In God's frame His saving work is undefeated. These are two descriptions of one work of grace, and monergism vs synergism dissolves along the same line: the saving work is God's alone as He wills it, and the creature's answer is real as we live it. The framework's one reservation concerns a device. A universal restoration of a lost faculty of choice answers a loss the framework locates elsewhere, in the righteousness no finite chooser can produce.

Dort itself pointed toward this reading. Of the believer's perseverance it said: "With respect to themselves this not only easily could happen, but also undoubtedly would happen; but with respect to God it cannot possibly happen." Paul holds both clauses in one sentence:

"Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." (Philippians 2:12–13, NIV)

Critics press from both sides. A Reformed theologian will say that a freedom undetermined in any frame leaves the final difference between two hearers in the creature, which reopens the boast Dort excluded. The framework answers that the difference is grounded in God's frame, and that faith receives a righteousness it did not make, so it gives no ground for boasting.

An Arminian such as Olson will say that if the outcome is fixed in God's frame, "free in ours" sounds like "feels free," and the passing over of the lost is left untouched. The framework answers that the human frame is a real, bounded access to the one reality, and that God's frame knows each refusal as the creature's own. That objection keeps its force, and Volume One makes the full argument.

A philosopher will ask whether this is double truth. The framework holds one reality with God's frame as its ground, and the natures of Creator and creature set the difference between the frames. The statement of Frame-Indexed Classical Theism gathers the position in one place and sets it beside the Reformed, Arminian and Molinist answers.

Volume One carries this reading through the whole debate; read it free.

Frequently asked questions

What are the 5 points of Arminianism?

The five points of Arminianism are the Five Articles of Remonstrance of 1610: conditional election, an atonement for all, human inability without grace, resistible grace, and a perseverance that the Remonstrants first left open and later held could be lost. The Society of Evangelical Arminians restates them as FACTS: Freed to believe by grace, Atonement for all, Conditional election, Total depravity and Security in Christ.

Are Baptists Calvinist or Arminian?

Baptists hold both views. The Particular Baptists and today's Reformed Baptists are Calvinist, while the General Baptists and the Free Will Baptists are Arminian. Southern Baptists are divided: in a 2012 Lifeway Research survey of 1,066 pastors, 30 percent described their church as Calvinist or Reformed, and 30 percent described theirs as Arminian or Wesleyan.

Is Arminianism semi-Pelagian?

Semi-Pelagianism holds that a fallen person can take the first step toward God without grace. Classical Arminianism places grace before the first good movement of the will: the Remonstrance ascribes "all good deeds or movements, that can be conceived" to the grace of God in Christ, and Arminius denied that the will can begin any spiritual good without grace. Reformed critics reply that if the decisive act of faith is the person's own choice, the charge still presses. Our article on prevenient grace weighs both sides.

Can a Calvinist and an Arminian both be saved?

Both traditions confess salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and both stand within historic Protestant orthodoxy. Dort ruled the Remonstrant teachings outside the bounds of the Reformed confessions, and Arminians from Wesley onward have judged the Reformed doctrine of predestination a serious error in turn. Both rest salvation on Christ alone, and a person's view of election is a doctrine held about that salvation.

Which came first, Calvinism or Arminianism?

In the history of Calvinism and Arminianism, Reformed theology came first. Calvin died in 1564, and the Reformed churches had confessions decades before Arminius taught at Leiden. Arminianism arose inside those churches after 1600 as a protest against their doctrine of predestination, and the five points of Calvinism were written in 1619 as the answer to it.

Where to go from here

The Synod of Dort and the Remonstrants each guarded a sentence the other needed. Dort guarded the sentence that salvation depends on God's mercy and His purpose cannot fail. The Remonstrants guarded the sentence that God wants all to come to repentance and that those who refuse Him were unwilling. Four centuries of Calvinism vs Arminianism have treated these as rival sentences, and Dort's own words about perseverance show how both can be said of one reality.

Volume One of the Many Beings Framework makes that argument in full and is free to download. Resolving the Free Will Dilemma is available now in every format. For the five points one at a time, read TULIP Calvinism, and the series carries the same reading into evil, time and God's changelessness.

Related reading

• Double Predestination
• What Is the Unforgivable Sin? Scripture, Views, and Fear