ASSURANCE Arminius felt that supralapsarianism led to either unwarranted security or unwarranted despair. He tried to construct a doctrine of assurance that would avoid these twin errors. One point he wished to establish is that believers may have present assurance of present salvation. "It is possible for him who believes in Jesus Christ to be certain and persuaded, and, if his heart condemn him not, he is now in reality assured that he is a son of God and stands in the grace of Jesus Christ."
The absence of such assurance is, in fact, an impossibility. "Since God promises eternal life to all who believe in Christ, it is impossible for him who believes, and who knows that he believes, to doubt of his own salvation, unless he doubts of this willingness of God."
He supports this in his earlier writings with an enthymeme [a syllogism in which one of the premises is implicit]: "I believe in Christ. Therefore I shall be saved." But in the later Declaration of Sentiments there is an even more personal and evangelical answer. "Such a certainty is wrought in the mind, as well by the action of the Holy Spirit inwardly actuating the believer and by the fruits of faith, as from his own conscience, and the testimony of God's Spirit witnessing together with his conscience."
In pastoral application, such a person should be able "with an assured confidence in the grace of God and His mercy in Christ, to depart out of this life and to appear before the throne of grace without any anxious fear or terrific dread." There is one important limit to this assurance, however. Arminius set up two questions:
1. Is it possible for any believer, without a special revelation, to be certain or assured that he will not decline or fall away from the faith?
2. Are those who have faith bound to believe that they will not decline from the faith? The affirmative, he says, has never been accounted a catholic [universal] doctrine in the church, and the negative has never been adjudged by the church universal a heresy. In other words, there is no present assurance of final salvation. PERSEVERANCE
If there is no present assurance of final salvation, it is because there is the possibility of falling from grace. Arminius' extensive treatment of this in his Examination of Perkins' Pamphlet has been discussed earlier. he does not depart from that position in his later writings, but he refines some of his language about it. In the Declaration of Sentiments he said that he had never affirmed "that a true believer can either totally or finally fall away from the faith and perish." Is this a reversal of his position in Perkins?
He puts the matter cautiously elsewhere: "Believers are sometimes so circumstanced as not to produce, for a season, any effect of true faith, not even the actual apprehension of grace and the promises of God, nor confidence or trust in God and Christ; yet this is the very thing which is necessary to obtain salvation."
This is in line with what he had said in Perkins, but has he departed from it in the Declaration? The answer is that for Arminius a believer who ceases to trust God, he is no longer a believer. When asked if believers can decline from salvation, Arminius replied that the possibility, "when rigidly and accurately examined, can scarcely be admitted; it being impossible for believers, as long as they remain believers to decline from salvation."
But does that mean that the elect become the non-elect? Arminius denies it, for the term "believer" is not exactly equivalent to the term "elect." Since election to salvation comprehends within its limits not only faith but likewise perseverance in faith, . . . believers and the elect are not taken for the same person" [Matthew 13:20-21]. In both these questions, assurance and perseverance, Arminius develops Reformed theology in a manner somewhat apart from the later "mainstream," but it was a development of Reformed theology, not an intrusion of Pelagianism or humanism from the outside. And there were many in the Reformed church of his day who agreed with him.
Carl O. Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1971), 347-49.
