Even if scholars of the Synod of Dordt and the debate between Arminians and Calvinists would not say the following, I have often heard my Reformed friends talk about Arminianism as a half-way house to Rome. By rejecting the Calvinist view of the efficacy of grace, they have opened the floodgates for the semi-Pelagian heresies of Roman Catholic soteriology, even if they have not gone all the way down that terrible path… Does this sound familiar?–even if put a bit stridently…

At any rate, the way that Calvinists could draw upon sixteenth-century Thomists like Banez and others regarding predestination and free will showed me that this was not the case. Many leading seventeenth-century Calvinists, instead, saw themselves as part of the great catholic tradition on grace in harmony with St. Paul (of course), St. Augustine, St. Prosper, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and even contemporary post-Tridentine Dominicans. It was the Arminians, in common with the Molinist Jesuits, that had abandoned this broad consensus. I’m sure that not all seventeenth-century Calvinists thought this way, but some certainly did.

Anyway, I am rambling. The thing that I wondered is the following: how would Thomists, then, think of the debates on grace taking place at Dordt and the decades that followed? Among the Spaniards, I haven’t found much commentary. But Thomists elsewhere acted exactly as this framework might “predict” that they would: they believed that the aspects of Calvinists predestinarianism that they *did* disagree with had scandalized some of their co-religionists (the Arminians) into the terrible heresy of denying the efficacy of grace and truly embracing semi-Pelagianism. They did not see the Arminians as taking a step towards Tridentine orthodoxy on salvation. Instead, they thought that the Arminians had jumped from what they believed to be the Manichean-tainted heresy of the Calvinists, over the orthodox Thomist position, and into the very semi-Pelagianism that the Reformers had protested against so stridently.

I am certainly not saying that the Thomist story was true. But it is quite surprising and might suggest certain ways that we could re-draw the lines of soteriological debate today, taking our cue from the theologians living in the century or so following the Reformation.

Sorry for another long comment on an old post! I just couldn’t resist.