Against the Calvinist Scheme

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.