In this essay, written at the request of a colleague and former classmate, we shall be considering the subjects of election and predestination. This is the first of three planned essays on these subjects. This one will look at the difference between how the two main continental Protestant traditions have handled a theological dilemma that is at the heart of the predestination/free will debate and will conclude by briefly looking at how our Anglican tradition has handled the same dilemma in its Articles. A second essay will consider divine foreknowledge and human responsibility from a broader perspective than how these apply in salvation and will look more at pre-Reformation thinking on the subject. The third essay will be an exegetical consideration of certain relevant chapters of the New Testament.
The Scriptures speak of God’s people, under
both Covenants, as having been chosen by Him which is the concept the word
“election” denotes. The verb προορίζω
appears in various forms, six times in the New Testament. This verb is a compound of a Greek
preposition meaning “before” and a verb meaning “determine” or “ordain” and is
translated by “predestinate” in the Authorized Bible in four out of the six
occurrences. (1) Election and
predestination, therefore, are Scriptural concepts and so within the context of
orthodox Christian theology, discussion and debate has not been over whether
God’s people have been elected and predestined, (2) but over what the
implications of these words are especially with regards to how they relate to
the matters of divine Sovereignty and human moral responsibility or free will.
“The theologians’ cross” is a translation of the Latin expression
crux theologorum. This expression is used, primarily by
Lutheran theologians, to designate a problem that has plagued theologians of
all Churches, denominations, and stripes.
The problem is cur alii, alii non,
or “why some, not others?” that is, “why are some saved, not others?” Within the Reformed tradition, that is, the
branch of Protestantism that began in Zurich, Switzerland with Ulrich Zwingli
at about the same time that the Lutheran tradition began in Wittenberg, Germany
with Dr. Martin Luther, two opposite answers to this question have been
given. Calvinism, which takes its name
from John Calvin whose became the leader of the Reformation at Geneva about half
a decade after Zwingli’s death, says that the answer is the eternal decree of
God. God, before the creation of the
world, decided that He would save such-and-such individuals and that He would
leave others to suffer damnation, and in both cases His decision was based
solely on its pleasing His will so to do and not on anything in either the
elect or the reprobate themselves that distinguished the one group from the
other. Arminianism, on the other hand,
which began in the generation after Calvin with Jacob Arminius, a student of
Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, says that the answer is to be found in the
free will of man, that God did indeed elect and predestine some to salvation,
but that this was based on His foreknowledge of who would out of their own free
will believe the Gospel and who would not.
Today, an increasing number of theologians can be found willing to
answer the question by denying the distinction, despite the sacrifice of
orthodoxy involved in doing so. (3)
By contrast with both the Calvinist and Arminian sides of
the Reformed tradition and the non-orthodox contemporary universalists, the
Lutherans who named the problem have also taken the position that it has no
answer, or at least no answer that can be known to us in this life. The Lutherans insist that there are two
truths that must be affirmed simultaneously, the universality of God’s saving
grace and that salvation is by grace alone.
The crux theologorum arises
because by natural human reasoning, these truths taken together ought to add up
to universalism and yet they do not. The
Calvinist answer to the dilemma amounts to a denial of universal grace, the
Arminian to a denial of grace alone. (4)
The Lutherans maintain, against both sides of the Reformed tradition,
that universal grace and grace alone can be affirmed together, because God
gives His grace through means, specifically the means of the Gospel in its
three modes of Word, baptism, and Communion, and that when God works through
means His will is resistible. Therefore,
salvation is entirely the work of God which He completed for the whole world in
Jesus Christ and the grace (state of being in favour) thereby purchased He
gives to all as a free gift along with the faith which is the appointed means
whereby we receive it in the Gospel, but because of the intermediate nature of
the communication of grace, we are capable of resisting it and it is our
natural inclination in our fallen condition to do so. God, in the grace He gives through the
Gospel, is the sole cause of salvation in those who receive it by faith, man,
resisting that grace out of the perverse inclination of his fallen will, is
solely responsible for his own damnation in the case of those who are finally
and incurably impenitent. The saved, are
not saved because of anything in themselves (even a lesser resistance) that
makes them differ from the lost, nor are the damned, damned because God loves
them less or has made lesser provision for their salvation, than the saved. There is, therefore, no answer to the
question of what makes the one differ from the other, and this should be
treated as a mystery.
The Lutheran position on this has much to commend it. Some questions don’t need answering and given
the problems with any answer that has been put forward to this one, leaving it
as a mystery is the best option. A sedes doctrinae can be found for this
position in Deuteronomy 29:29 which reads “The secret things belong unto
the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us
and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.” The precise doctrine that sparked the
Calvinist-Arminian controversy within the Reformed tradition is the classic
example of what can happen if theologians ignore this verse and pry into the
secret things that God reserves for Himself.
John Calvin’s career as a Reformer spanned about three
decades from the first edition of his Institutes
of the Christian Religion in 1536 until his death in 1564. While predestination was not as important in
his own theology as it would become in the theology of those who call their
view by his name, he did teach a strong double predestination, in which the
reprobation of the lost is as much a positive decree based entirely on the
pleasure of God’s will as the election of the saved. (5) Jacob Arminius, who
was born in 1560 a few years before Calvin’s death, was a protégé of Theodore
Beza, Calvin’s successor as chief pastor of Geneva. Beza’s principal theological contribution to
the development of Calvinist theology was the doctrine of supralapsarianism.
Supralapsarianism is a doctrine about the order of God’s decrees. It asserts that God’s decree to save some and
damn others, logically but not temporally (because these decrees are from
eternity which is outside of time) precedes His decree to create mankind and
allow him to fall into sin. If anything
warrants being described as a secret thing belonging unto the Lord our God and
hence not to us, it is the order of God’s eternal decrees. The effect, however, of the doctrine of
supralapsarianism is to say that God created people and allowed them to fall
into sin in order that He might damn them and have grounds on which so to do.
Arminius, shortly after being made pastor in Amsterdam in
1587, was tasked by that city’s Ecclesiastical Court with rebutting the
anti-Calvinist arguments of one Dirck Coornhert. Later, after he had become a professor at his
alma mater Leiden University in 1603, he became embroiled in a controversy with
a senior member of the faculty of theology Franciscus Gomarus that would last
the rest of his life. In both cases,
supralapsarianism was at the heart of the controversy. Arminius had been asked to defend this
doctrine against both Coornhert’s attacks and the proposed alternative of infralapsarianism (in which the decree
to save and damn, presupposes the fall of man).
Arminius had concluded, however, that the doctrine he was asked to
defend was indefensible, and by the time of his falling out with Gomarus at
Leiden, he had come to see infralapsarianism as afflicted with many of the same
problems as supralapsarianism. As a consequence,
he adopted a modified doctrine of predestination in which election is based on
foresight of a positive response to the Gospel.
In 1610, the year after Arminius’ death, his students
submitted a protest against the strict predestinarianism of the Dutch Reformed
Church. The protest was entitled the Remonstrance, and consisted of five
articles which have since been collectively called Arminianism although not all
of them were spelled out in Arminius’ own teachings. These are conditional election, unlimited
atonement, total depravity (that fallen man is lost and sin from which he
cannot extract himself but is utterly dependent on the grace of God – Arminians
are no Pelagians), prevenient grace (like the Lutheran view of grace but unlike
Calvin’s, Arminian prevenient grace is resistible, but unlike the Lutheran view
it works by restoring the will’s ability to choose God so that the believer
cooperates, although only after grace, in his own conversion), and a
questioning of the guarantee of perseverance that soon hardened into the
positive affirmation of the possibility of the believer’s apostasy that in
wider evangelical circles today is the first if not the only thing the word
“Arminian” summons to mind. The Dutch
government sat on the Remonstrance for a surprisingly long time, and in 1618
summoned representatives of the Reformed Churches to meet at Dordrecht to
address the matter in what was intended to be the Reformed equivalent of a
General Council. The Synod of Dort met
from late 1618 until spring of 1619 and published five canons in response to
the Remonstrance. These are what have
ever since been known as the Five Points of Calvinism, for which the acronym
TULIP was early coined – Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited
Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints. (6)
This intra-Reformed schism, therefore, and its polarized
theological positions, are a direct result of the Reformed tradition’s
unwillingness to leave the crux
theologorum unanswered and to leave to God the “secret things” that are
His. This is a specific example of a general reluctance in practice to
acknowledge mysteries that are beyond the explanatory capacity of human
reasoning that also manifests itself with regards to other facets of the
predestination-free will debate. This
reluctance helps explain the rise of Modern rationalism but is itself somewhat
of a mystery in that one would expect a tradition that places such an emphasis
on the gap between Sovereign Creator and fallen creature to be more willing
than others to acknowledge mysteries beyond its understanding rather than
less. A partial explanation is the
influence of Renaissance humanism on the Reformed tradition. While Renaissance humanism in general, and
that of Erasmus in particular, influenced both Dr. Luther and the Reformed
tradition, the influence was greater in the Reformed tradition. Note, however, that this does not mean that
the strong predestinarianism of the Reformed tradition came from Erasmus. Dr. Luther and Erasmus had a famous falling
out in 1524-1525 precisely over this matter.
In 1524, Erasmus had published his treatise On the Freedom of the Will which argued for the capacity of the
human will to respond positively to grace, and in the following year Dr. Luther
had responded with his On the Bondage of
the Will which, as the title would suggest, argued that the human will
since the Fall has been bound in chains by sin and cannot respond positively to
grace until freed to do so by grace itself.
It was more humanism’s general influence that led to the
proto-rationalism of the Reformed tradition.
This should not be taken as entirely a negative thing. In the Institutes
of the Christian Religion, John Calvin wrote the single most important contribution
to systematic theology since St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and this too can be largely attributed to the same
influence.
Where the humanist influence on the Reformed tradition can
be most seen to impact its approach to the crux
theologorum has to do with the means of grace, especially the Sacraments. In the broader Christian tradition, the
expression “means of grace” refers to channels through which God distributes
grace to people. Protestantism takes a
narrower view of this concept than other Christian traditions, limiting the
grace distributed through the means to saving grace. This is part of the reason why Protestants
generally limit the Sacraments to two (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) or three
(if absolution is included), although, as I recently discussed at length, (7)
our Anglican Church has the best position on the matter by affirming baptism
and the Lord’s Supper as Gospel Sacraments through which saving grace is
distributed, without dogmatically rejecting the others affirmed by the broader
Christian tradition as being Sacraments in a more general sense. The
Lutherans, helpfully distinguish between two kinds of means of grace, the organa dotika (means of giving, Word and
Sacraments) and the organon leptikon
(means of receiving, faith). While the
Reformed tradition uses the expression “means of grace” for Word and Sacrament
(the Westminster Confession of Faith also names prayer), in their theology only
the Word is a means of grace in the sense of an instrument God uses to give saving
grace and faith.
In the Heidelberg Catechism, Question 65 is “It is through
faith alone that we share in Christ and all his benefits: where then does that
faith come from?” The answer is “The
Holy Spirit produces it in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel, and
confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments.” (8) Note the distinction. “Confirm” here is used in its original sense
of “strengthen” rather than “verify” but since faith’s reception of grace is in
no way dependent on its strength this position nullifies the concept of the
Sacraments as an effectual means of grace in Reformed theology. Orthodox Lutherans argue that Reformed
theology by its doctrine of immediate grace nullifies even the Word as an
effectual means of grace. (9) This is
because in Reformed theology, conversion is produced by irresistible grace or
the effectual call, which is distinguished from the outward call of the Gospel,
and which is regarded as a work of the Holy Spirit that is entirely internal to
the person on whom it has the effect. It
is the Holy Spirit in the elect, in other words, rather than the Holy Spirit in
the Word, who makes the elect believe the Word by the direct exercise of His
power within the elect, rather than through the instrument of the Word.
The idea in Reformed theology, that the Holy Spirit operates
directly on the human spirit, and that the external means of grace are inappropriate
tools for Him to use to accomplish His work but are at most external signs
testifying to it points to something in Reformed theology that manifests itself
elsewhere in Reformed theology, and that is a tendency towards a moderate
neo-Gnosticism. The original heresies to
which the term Gnosticism is applied, saw the physical world and the matter of which
it is composed, as irredeemably corrupt and the spirit as incorruptible and
pristine. Their idea of salvation was
the liberation of the human spirit from what they regarded as its material prison. The Gnostics derived their ideas from secular
philosophy, and in particular from Plato who saw everything in the physical
world as an imperfect reflection of a perfect original in the unseen
world. While Plato also clearly
influenced the thinking of St. Paul, the Apostle like the orthodox Church
Fathers who contended against the Gnostics, recognized both the material and
the spiritual as the creation of the One God, the same God of both Covenants,
Who was manifest in the flesh in the “mystery of godliness” (1 Tim. 3:16). While the Reformed tradition’s affirmation of
the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon prevents it from being
outright Gnostic, its rejection of Nicaea II, the theological argument of
which, whatever one might think of the practices that the Roman and Eastern
Church justify with it, are the reasonable consequences of the orthodox doctrine
of the Incarnation as articulated and defended in the earlier ecumenical councils,
demonstrates an uncomfortableness with regarding the material as the vehicle of
the spiritual that approaches Gnosticism without quite crossing the boundary
between it and Christianity. This
entered the Reformed tradition through the influence of humanistic philosophy
on, especially, Zwingli, and is the reason that tradition, while retaining the
language of means of grace with reference to Word and Sacrament, falls short of
seeing them as the actual instruments God uses to give His grace. This in turn is the reason why the Reformed
tradition is unwilling to leave the crux
theologorum as an unsolvable mystery.
Predestination and Election are addressed in Article XVII of
our Anglican Articles of Religion.
Although it is a fairly long Article I will quote it in its entirety:
Predestination to Life
is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world
were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver
from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind,
and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to
honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be
called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they
through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of
God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus
Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy,
they attain to everlasting felicity.
As the godly consideration
of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and
unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the
working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their
earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well
because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation
to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love
towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ,
to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination, is
a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into
desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous
than desperation.
Furthermore, we must
receive God’ s promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in
holy Scripture: and, in our doings, that Will of God is to be followed, which
we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God.
Just as Article XXV on the Sacraments affirms the Protestant
view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as being unique as Sacraments of the
Gospel without dogmatically rejecting the other five others affirmed by all the
ancient Churches (with a partial exception of the Assyrian Church) as being Sacraments,
so this Article affirms only the bare basics that all Christians should be able
to affirm about predestination. There is
no mention of reprobation or even of preterition or any other predestination
other than predestination to life. It
speaks of those so predestined as “chosen in Christ out of mankind” without commenting
on whether that election is based on foresight or unconditional. Although this Article was written before
Jacob Arminius was born – it is a slightly shorter, but substantially the same
version of what Archbishop Cranmer had written in the Forty-Two Articles of
1553 – there is nothing in this that Arminians cannot affirm. (10) Nor is there anything in it that Calvinists
cannot affirm, although their attempt in the late Elizabethan period to have
the more explicitly Calvinist Lambeth Articles passed demonstrates that this
Article did not impose their interpretation to the extent they would have liked
(11). It is more Lutheran than either
Calvinist or Arminian, however, belonging to the section of the Articles
immediately following the first section (Articles I-VIII) which affirms the
most important Christian truths, the Catholic truths. This section (Articles IX to XVIII) could be
described as the “Augustinian” section of the Articles, and in it Archbishop
Cranmer clearly drew his inspiration from the Lutherans as can be seen by
comparing Articles IX, X, XI and XII/XIII to Articles II, XVII, IV and XX of
the Augsburg Confession (and its Apology) respectively. (12)
In the later section on Sacraments, Archbishop Cranmer was more
influenced by the Reformed tradition than the Lutheran when it comes to the
presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper (his Article XXIX was much toned down in
this regards in its revision into the current Article XXVIII in the reign of
Elizabeth I) but his language in the last paragraph of his Article XXVI, which
became the first paragraph of the current Article XXV, would seem to rule out
the idea that Sacraments are merely external witnesses rather than actual
instruments of communicating grace.
Therefore, while the Articles do not require that Churchmen
take the Lutheran position on the crux
theologorum, it is the position they most direct us towards. Many serious historical and present-day
theological conflicts could have been avoided in our Church, if Churchmen had
agreed to that position.
(2) The question of whether God’s people are elected as individuals, i.e., Joe was elected qua Joe to be part of God’s covenant people or as a collective, i.e., the entire Church is collectively chosen to be in covenant relationship with God, is a question that arises within the boundaries of orthodoxy because it is a question about the nature of election rather than the fact of election. Similarly, the difference between the Arminian (conditional election) and Calvinist (unconditional election) views is a difference about the grounds of election among those who hold to individual election. The recent calling into question to varying degrees of God’s foreknowledge of the outcome of the Final Judgement by “open theists” (Richard Rice, John E. Sanders, Greg Boyd, Clark Pinnock, et al.) does not fall within the bounds of orthodoxy because it rejects the fact of election as well as classical theism and Augustinianism in the general sense in which it was accepted as orthodox against the Pelagian heresy in the early Church.
(3) In 1987, Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, best known for his work on theological aesthetics, raised a few eyebrows with his book Dare We Hope? “That All Men Be Saved”? although the book merely raised the hypothetical possibility that all would be saved ultimately without affirming that this must be so. More recently, David Bentley Hart, a lay Eastern Orthodox theologian who is the brother of two Anglican priests (one of whom crossed the Tiber in both directions) and a doppelganger of the late David Ogden Stiers (if you only know the actor from M*A*S*H or the revived Perry Mason movies you won’t see it, look up an image of him from Doc Hollywood or later in the period when he wore a beard), published That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Note the similarity between Hart’s title and von Balthasar’s and the big difference – Hart’s is an assertion, Balthasar’s was a question. In his book, Hart declares that everyone will ultimately be saved and that to say otherwise is to make the eternal suffering of the damned the price paid for the everlasting bliss of the saved and to teach a God Who is unworthy of our faith and love. It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to rebut his thesis which I have brought up only as an illustration of answering the crux theologorum by denying the dilemma. For a book length rebuttal of universalism (and annihilationism) see The Other Side of the Good News: Confronting the Contemporary Challenge’s to Jesus’ Teaching on Hell (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1992) by Dr. Larry E. Dixon, who was my Greek and theology professor and faculty advisor in the 1990s. Or, if you are looking for something more recent, try Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
(4) Neither Calvinists nor Arminians necessarily accept this assessment of their views. The Lutheran assessment of the Arminian position is based on the Arminian view of prevenient grace as enabling the will to choose to respond positively to the Gospel. The Lutherans argue, correctly, that a positive effect on the will is the result of grace being received through faith produced by grace rather than an intervening secondary cause in producing faith. They point out, again correctly, that faith, even in other contexts, is not a product of the will. We say “I trust so-and-so” and “I believe such-and-such” but this is not because we choose to do so, but because so-and-so has persuaded us of his trustworthiness and such-and-such has impressed us with its truth. With regards to the Gospel, of course, ordinary persuasion is insufficient because man in his fallen condition is disinclined to believe God, but the Holy Spirit is always present in the Gospel working to overcome this. Much of the second volume of Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology is devoted to arguing that Calvinism does not deny the universal aspect of God’s grace. To give but one example of how his arguments fail to persuade, however, Hodge, in his defence of the Calvinist view of the design of the Atonement – he conspicuously avoids the expression “Limited Atonement” – directs his argument against the claim that the Atonement must apply equally to everyone and in no way have a special reference to the elect. In reality, of course, what everyone other than Calvinists find objectionable in the Calvinist doctrine, is the denial that there is provision for the salvation of those who will ultimately reject it in the Atonement.
(5) See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.
(6) The order of the canons required adjustment to produce the acronym. In the order published, it would be ULTIP.
(7) https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2025/10/sacraments-and-gospel-sacraments.html
(8) Richard Hooker in the fifth volume of his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie had to contend with the absurd contention on the part of Elizabethan era Puritans that the Word was powerless to convert unless “preached” in the sense of exposited in a pulpit address. Some of these objected to the reading of the Lessons (actual passages from the Scriptures) in the Church on this basis. Ursinus and the other framers of the Heidelberg Catechism did not intend “by the preaching of the holy gospel” to be understood in this grossly ignorant manner.
(9) “Because saving grace is particular, according to the teaching of the Calvinists, there are no means of grace for that part of mankind to which the grace of God and the merit of Christ do not extend…But neither do the Calvinists have means of grace for the elect. Believers are expressly directed by Calvin not to ascertain their predestination from the external Word, that is, from the universal call (universalis vocation) which occurs through the outward Word (per externam praedicationem), but from the special call (specialis vocation), which consists in an inner illumination by the Holy Spirit…But according to the teaching of Calvinism this “inner illumination” is not brought about through the means of grace; it is worked immediately by the Holy Ghost.” Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume III (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 118-122. Pieper is, of course, a hostile witness to Calvinism, but when he goes on to quote Charles Hodge to prove this point he does not misrepresent him. Indeed, if anything he understates his case because he elides from his quotation the following “When Christ said to the leper, ‘I will: be thou clean’, nothing intervened between his volition and the effect. And when he put clay on the eyes of the blind man, and bade him wash in the pool of Siloam, there was nothing in the properties of the clay or of the water that cooperated in the restoration of his sight.” (This is on page 684 of the 1872 edition published by Thomas Nelson in London and Edinburgh, and in New York by Charles Scribner. Pieper cites it as 634f. Either he was looking at a different edition or, more likely, he or his English translator wrote a 3 for an 8). This is sloppy thinking, and worse exegesis on Hodge’s part. Obviously, Christ’s words expressing His will for the cleansing of the leper, intervened between His volition and the effect to bring about the latter. In the case of the blind man, while it is true that nothing in the properties of the clay or water contributed to the restoration of his sight, this is entirely beside the point. While Christ could have just spoken and healed the blind man like He did the leper, in this case He chose the means of mud and the pool of Siloam, and the mud and water were effective means not because of their intrinsic properties, but because He so chose to use them.
(10) Despite this, John Wesley removed it from his Twenty-Five Articles for Methodism. In the century before Wesley, Bishop Andrewes, Archbishop Laud, and other Orthodox Churchman of the Jacobean and Caroline reigns were accused of “Arminianism” by the Hyper-Calvinist Puritans. A case can be made that this accusation was no more substantial than the ridiculous accusation of popery made by the same people because the Laudians insisted that the Church follow the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer to the letter (if you don’t see why that accusation is ridiculous you are hopeless and I will not waste my time explaining it). See, however, Samuel D. Fornecker, Bisschop’s Bench, Contours of Arminian Conformity in the Church of England, c. 1674-1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) for an account of Arminian Churchmanship of a slightly later period (Bisschop is the Dutch name of the man more commonly known as Simon Episcopius, who was the leader of the Remonstrants, Arminius’ first generation followers). Whether their Arminianism was real or merely in the minds of their opponents, these Churchmen subscribed to the Articles of Religion.
(11) See my discussion of this here: https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/ 2023/08/1595-anglicanism-at-crossroads.html
(12) Note also the wording of Article XVI. It suggests the Lutheran rather than the Calvinist view of perseverance, although not strongly enough so that a Calvinist could not affirm the Article.
