Jacobus Arminius, a professor at Leiden, taught before his death in 1609 that God's election of individuals to salvation rests on his foreknowledge of who would freely believe, that Christ died for all people rather than only for the elect, and that grace could be resisted, positions his followers set out formally in 1610 in a document called the Remonstrance addressed to the political authorities of the Dutch Republic.
The controversy split the Dutch Reformed church badly enough that it became entangled with a political crisis, and the States General eventually convened a national synod at Dordrecht, with delegates from Reformed churches in England, Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere sitting alongside the Dutch, to judge the dispute. The synod sat through the winter of 1618 into 1619, examined Arminian representatives under conditions they themselves protested as prejudicial, and condemned the Remonstrance point by point in canons that affirm unconditional election, that Christ's atonement is intended definitely for the elect, that human nature after the fall cannot turn to God without prior grace, that grace once given effectually accomplishes conversion, and that the elect cannot finally fall away. Politically the synod's verdict was total: Arminian ministers were deposed, and the Remonstrant leader Johan van Oldenbarnevelt's ally Hugo Grotius was imprisoned in the same purge, though Grotius later escaped in a book chest, a detail as well attested as the theology.