The Reformation Divide, and the Eastern Refusal of the Frame

The Reformation hardened the question into confessional walls. The Reformed position of Calvin, codified at the Synod of Dort (1618-19) and the Westminster Confession, teaches unconditional election: God chooses the saved without regard to foreseen merit or faith, and saving grace is effectual. The Arminian position, set out by the Remonstrants in 1610 and later carried by John Wesley, answers that election is conditional upon foreseen faith and that grace, though necessary and prior, can be resisted; it is held today across Methodist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal and much of world evangelicalism. The five points summarised at Dort were framed precisely as replies to the five Remonstrant articles, which is why the two systems mirror each other point for point.

The Eastern churches largely decline the terms of the Western debate. The Greek fathers and modern Orthodox theologians treat salvation as synergy, a real cooperation of divine grace and human freedom, and read the predestination texts as God's foreknowledge of free responses rather than a prior decree that causes them. From that vantage the whole Augustinian-versus-Pelagian axis looks like a peculiarly Western problem generated by a peculiarly Western doctrine of the Fall.