Theopedia

Franciscus Gomarus

Franciscus Gomarus (1563-1641) was a Dutch Reformed theologian and professor at Leiden, best known as the chief opponent of Jacobus Arminius1 and a leading advocate of supralapsarianism at the Synod of Dort (1618-19).2 A twentieth-century historian of the Westminster Assembly calls him the “Dutch theologian and leader of the strict Calvinist party at Dort,” whose arguments the Assembly’s own minutes cite and repeat with approval.3

Life and Ministry

Gomarus was born January 30, 1563, in Bruges. His parents, who had embraced the Reformation, emigrated to the Palatinate in 1578 so they could practice their new faith openly, and sent their son to study under Johann Sturm at Strasbourg. He continued his education at Neustadt under Zacharius Ursinus, Hieronymus Zanchius, and Daniel Tossanus after Heidelberg’s professors were driven out for refusing to become Lutheran, then crossed to England in 1582 to study under John Rainolds at Oxford and William Whitaker at Cambridge, graduating from Cambridge in 1584.1 He pastored a Dutch Reformed congregation in Frankfurt from 1587 until persecution dispersed it in 1593, then was appointed professor of theology at the University of Leiden in 1594.1

Gomarus taught at Leiden without controversy until 1603, when Arminius joined the theological faculty and began teaching that election depends on foreseen faith rather than on God’s sovereign decree alone. Gomarus opposed these views from his own lectures and, with colleague Johann Bogermann, became the acknowledged leader of the anti-Arminian party, who came to be called Gomarists.1 He debated Arminius directly before the assembly of the estates of Holland in 1608, and again in a larger five-against-five conference in 1609. When Arminius died later that year and Conrad Vorstius, who shared Arminius’s views, was appointed to succeed him over Gomarus’s objection, Gomarus resigned his Leiden post in 1611 for a pastorate and professorship at Middelburg, then a chair at Saumur from 1614, before accepting a final professorship of theology and Hebrew at Groningen in 1618, where he remained until his death on January 11, 1641.1

Gomarus took a leading part at the Synod of Dort (1618-19), convened to judge Arminius’s teaching, and was among the delegates who signed the Canons of Dort on April 23, 1619.4 He also contributed to a 1633 revision of the Dutch Old Testament translation, and after his death his collected works were published in one folio volume at Amsterdam in 1645.1

Theological Contribution

Gomarus was among the Reformed scholastics who held that God’s decree to elect and reprobate logically precedes, rather than follows, the decree to create and permit the fall. A. A. Hodge’s Outlines of Theology lays out this supralapsarian ordering of the decrees, in which fallen and unfallen humanity alike are simply “creatible” objects of election or reprobation rather than already-fallen ones, and states plainly that “this view was held by Beza, the successor of Calvin in Geneva, and by Gomarus, the great opponent of Arminius.”2 Bavinck’s own list of “the great defenders of supralapsarianism” names Gomarus alongside Beza, Piscator, Polanus, Whitaker, Perkins, Twisse, Alsted, Maccovius, and Voetius.5 At the Synod of Dort itself, Charles Hodge notes, “a large majority of the members were infralapsarians, Gomarus and Voetius being the prominent advocates of the opposite view,” so that the Canons were framed to avoid the extremes of either position while giving symbolic authority to the infralapsarian majority.6

Gomarus also contributed to Reformed covenant theology. Bavinck records that “Gomarus and others already made a distinction between an internal [covenant] and an external covenant,” separating those who merely receive the covenant sign from those who inwardly believe. Bavinck judges the distinction “not entirely helpful,” since on his own reading “the internal and external covenant are two covenants no more than the invisible and visible church are two churches.”7 Gomarus is also named, alongside Arminius, Witsius, Voetius, and others, among the older Reformed theologians who held that the pactum salutis was an agreement between the Father and the Son specifically, rather than among all three persons of the Trinity.8

Historical Significance

Historian Robert Norris judges that Dort “was the most significant of the recent Reformed synods” for the Westminster Assembly a generation later, and that Gomarus’s own arguments, preserved in the Synod’s minutes, were cited by the Westminster divines with approval.3 The infralapsarian position that prevailed at Dort also prevailed among the Westminster divines, but not unanimously: William Twisse, the Assembly’s own Prolocutor, was himself “a zealous supralapsarian,” and the Confession’s language on reprobation was worded carefully enough to avoid giving offense to either school. Charles Hodge notes that the Swiss church’s 1675 Formula Consensus Helvetica later went further and formally repudiated the supralapsarian view outright.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. “Gomarus, Franciscus,” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), a public-domain reference not held in the Theopedia Library, used here for biographical facts (education, ministry posts, dates) not otherwise found in library sources. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 232-33. ↩ ↩2

  3. Robert M. Norris, “The Thirty-Nine Articles at the Westminster Assembly,” in The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, ed. Ligon Duncan (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2009), 3:161, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 55-56. ↩ ↩2

  4. Jared Heath Moore, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine,” in “A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 116. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel,” n.90. ↩

  6. Charles Hodge, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 315. ↩ ↩2

  7. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩

  8. Samuel G. Parkison, “Soteriological Foundations: The Pactum Salutis, the Historia Salutis, and the Ordo Salutis,” in “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), 169, citing J. V. Fesko, The Trinity and the Covenant of Redemption (Fearn: Mentor, 2016), 129. ↩