Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2006 by Pinson, J Matthew

Olson accurately describes Arminius as a covenant theologian. This should gain the attention of traditional Reformed thinkers, who tend to be friendlier with Calvinist Dispensationalists than with non-Calvinists who share approaches to the covenants and eschatology that are closer to Reformed views.

Moreover, Olson states clearly that classical Arminianism is completely different from open theism, because the former demands absolute divine foreknowledge of future free contingents for its entire system of predestination to cohere. He is also to be commended for discerning that Arminius did not accept middle knowledge. Olson cogently argues that the idea of middle knowledge results in just another kind of divine determinism. Thus, it does not help the Arminien cause but in essence is incompatible with libertarian free will. He correctly says that the classical Arminian contends that middle knowledge is illogical because the concept of counterfactuals of freedom is illogical.

Though this is an excellent book, I do have a few criticisms. These are mostly internecine Arminian issues but are extremely important to the core argument that Olson is making. The first criticism is that Olson is vague on certain details that seem to mitigate the points he is trying to make in getting Calvinists to reconsider Arminianism. Perhaps this is because he is attempting to present a united front for evangelical Arminians.

As one example of this vagueness, Olson seems to minimize the distinctions between Arminius and later types of Arminianism, particularly Wesleyanism, in some places. Wesleyan Arminian theologians tend to take the view that either Christ's atonement or the drawing power of the Holy Spirit (or both-the reader is left confused over which it is) reverses inherited guilt (p. 33) or even releases all people from the condemnation for Adam's sin (p. 34). Olson seems to disagree with this, but he leaves too many loose ends for those Arminians who want to follow Arminius more stringently. Arminius simply believed that original sin, total depravity, and inherited guilt are the lot of all those born into the human race, and the Holy Spirit draws them individually by his grace. Thus, he would have disagreed with what Stephen M. Ashby has called the "scattergun" Wesleyan approach to grace. This view seems to aver that Christ's atonement automatically renders the will free, rather than the Holy Spirit's convicting power applied in his own time to individual sinners' hearts and minds. Olson would no doubt agree, but he would have done well to have made this clearer. Calvinist authors like Robert A. Peterson and Michael D. Williams, whose book Why I Am Not an Arminian Olson cites, are right to think that this view would mean that "in Arminian theology nobody is actually depraved! Depravity and bondage of the will is [sic] only hypothetical and not actual" (p. 154). Furthermore, one might wish that Olson had spent more time talking about how most Arminians after Arminius have differed with him on the imputation of Adam's sin to the race, a Reformed view that Arminius vigorously upheld.