Arminianism (free will and universal atonement)

Methodists and Pentecostals characteristically affirm Arminian theology, that God's saving grace is offered to all, that Christ died for everyone (universal atonement), and that human beings, enabled by grace, are genuinely free to accept or reject salvation. Named for the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, the position holds that God's predestination is grounded in his foreknowledge of who will believe, and that grace, though necessary and prior, can be resisted. It thus affirms real human responsibility in salvation while insisting that the initiative and power belong to God.

Jacobus Arminius taught theology at the University of Leiden until his death in 1609, and the year after, his followers formalized his positions in the Remonstrance of 1610, a document setting out five articles, on election, the extent of the atonement, human depravity, the resistibility of grace, and the possibility of falling from grace, that they presented to the Dutch government as a request for toleration within the Reformed church; the Synod of Dort convened in response and, rejecting the Remonstrants' articles point by point, produced the five counter-points later summarized in English by the acronym TULIP, so the two positions have been defined against each other, article by article, since their very first formal confrontation.

Arminianism defines itself over against the Reformed (Calvinist) doctrines of unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace, a controversy formalised at the Synod of Dort in 1618-19. Wesley made an evangelical Arminianism central to Methodism, and it passed into much of the Pentecostal and Holiness world. The affirmation shapes preaching that appeals to all to be saved and an understanding of assurance and of the possibility of falling from grace, marking one of the great enduring divisions of Protestant theology on the questions of election and free will.

John Wesley deliberately reclaimed the Arminian label, which had accumulated negative associations in some Reformed circles by the eighteenth century, founding a periodical in 1778 titled The Arminian Magazine specifically to defend and popularize the position among his own Methodist societies and to counter the Calvinism of contemporaries such as George Whitefield and the Countess of Huntingdon's connexion; the magazine's title was itself a statement, an open, unapologetic identification with a theological label Wesley judged worth rehabilitating rather than avoiding, and it helped fix Arminian as the standard name for the Wesleyan position within English-speaking Protestantism.