Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Arminian Universal Salvation

Strictly speaking Universal Salvation is considered a separate position from either Calvinism or Arminian, that schism that happened among the Dutch Reformed was predicated on both sides assuming not everyone will be saved.

However among modern proponents of Universal Salvation on the Internet who came out of Protestant Denominations, they mostly come out of fairly mainline ones and thus try to sound more Calvinist then they do Arminian, Peter Hiett is explicit that he is a 4 Point Calvinist removing only Limited Atonement, he came out of Presbyterianism.  He refuses to even mention Arminius when talking about his belief in Unlimited Atonement.

For me though there is only one point of Calvinism I kinda do agree with and that's actually the one Arminianism doesn't actually disagree with, Total Depravity.  Unfortunately that is the most easy to strawman/misunderstand of the points of Calvinism because of modern people reading the modern connotations of "depravity" onto this term coined when King James was still on the Throne.  It simply refers to the fact that All Have Sinned, that Sin is a disease we've all been infected with, that it's only possible to follow God if God is calling us via The Holy Spirit.  The difference between what Calvinism believes and what I and Arminians believe on this is simply whether God is calling everyone or only a chosen few.  The Arminian Agreement with Calvinism here is why they aren't Pelegians, Pelegius did deny Total Depravity and was one of the first to condemn Universal Salvation by associating it with Origen.  It's actually not that different from Secular Determinism, meaning I was mostly wrong in the past when I insinuated Arminains would be in agreement with Existentialists.

The other three Articles of Remonstrance vs Points of Calvinism are bound up in how Protestantism has conflated Salvation with other things.  

Elect is just a fancy way of saying Chosen, not every reference to Election in the New Testament is about the same choosing, however I view not one of them as being a reference to Salvation.  I already have a post proving that "the many" can refer to everyone so "Many are called but few are Chosen" only makes sense if the Chosen are those who Choose to answer the Call rather then Refuse it.  They choose to be part of The Kingdom on Earth, to be those proclaiming The Gospel that Death will be swallowed up in Victory.

Grace is resistible during this mortal life but eventually those who resist it now will be Saved regardless because God never gives up, just like an Anime protagonist.

Jesu said "all who Persevere to the end will be saved" in the Olivet Discourse, that people started thinking it was about Eternal Salvation is frankly embarrassing to all sides of the argument.  Regardless I come at this form the perspective of someone who's prior Soteriology was Free Grace Eternal Security.  Now however I do believe there is something a Believer obtains when they place their Faith in Christ that can be lost if they renounce that Faith (I struggle to define what that is however), and also that their Rewards are contingent upon obedience, but Salvation was never contingent upon either Faith or Obedience.  You can't lose something that wasn't your responsibility to begin with.

So in a sense I can claim to agree with Arminius over Calvin on all Five Articles from a Universal Salvation perspective, and I'm not the first.

First of all there is evidence that Arminius himself was at least an Inclusivist.

The General Baptists of the early 17th Century were named that primarily after their positron on Atonement.  John Smyth and Thomas Helwys were full Arminians who in the statements of faith they made proclaimed even a belief that Salvation could be lost.  But the larger General Baptist movement did include some who taught Universal Salvation.

According to Thomas Edwards there were even Universalists in John Goodwin's congregation, the leading Arminian Congregationalist.

Ariel Hessayon wrote a thesis you can find online as a PDF called Winstanley and Baptist Thought documenting how certain ideas of Gerrard Winstanley he got from the General Baptists since he had been one for a time.  Winstanley stopped being a Baptist because he decided to stop preforming the ordinances at all for the same reason as The Quakers.  In fact a lot of the early converts to Quakerism came out of the General Baptists.  General Baptist Henry Denne also anticipated the Quaker Inner Light Doctrine.  (18th Century Universalist James Relly also went on to reject the Earthly Sacraments but for some reason was buried in a Baptist Cemetery.)

Sarah Apetrei has written about Universal Salvation being popular among specifically Baptist Women during the English Revolution in her book The Reformation of The Heart: Gender and Radical Theology in The English Revolution.

Amusingly the Baptist Perpetuity Doctrine is today usually taught among Calvinistic Baptists but it is in fact only the General Baptists who can claim a lineage through the Anabaptists and Waldenses, indeed the Anabaptists and Waldenses seem to be who Arminius himself got his Soteriological ideas from.

Another informative PDF is The Baptist Universalist: Elhanan Winchester by Robin Parry.  Winchester was first converted to Credo-Baptism by a Free Will Baptist then backslide into the Calvinism he was raised in for awhile before finally being lead to Universal Salvation mainly by the precedent for it that existed among the "German Baptists" the Schwarzenau Brethren another group descended from the Anabaptists.

John Wesley is considered a type of Arminian, and there is debate about whether or not he became a Universalist soon before he died.  Soren Kierkegaard also developed a very Free Will centric theology but expressed in his private journals a preference for Universal Salvation.

I have prior posts on this blog responding to arguments that Universal Salvation conflicts with God respecting Free Will.  Some Free Gifts can't be rejected.

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