Arminius and the Arminians

The story of Arminius and the Arminians, who so agitated both the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the kingdom of England, can only be understood against the wider canvas of the sixteenth-century Reformation. When Arminius was born in the little Netherlands town of Oudewater in 1560, John Calvin was still at the height of his power in Switzerland. Calvin had successfully outridden all opposition to turn his adopted city of Geneva into the nearest thing that human frailty could create to a Protestant heaven on earth, structured on the principles which Calvin himself had set out in a great work of theological reflection and analysis, the Christianae Religionis Institutio (generally known more conveniently in the British Isles as the Institutes). Here was a book with which to confront Christians still loyal to the pope in Rome, who taunted the Protestants as ridden with factions and unsystematic in their theology: all the more formidable a weapon because it was so clearly under an intellectual debt to the greatest name of early Christian thought in the West: Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.