Simon Episcopius

Simon Episcopius (1583-1643) was a Dutch Remonstrant theologian, educated at Leiden under Jacobus Arminius, who helped draft the 1610 Remonstrance against the Dutch Reformed church’s Calvinism and led the Remonstrant delegation condemned at the Synod of Dort (1618-19).¹²

Life and Ministry

Episcopius was born January 1, 1583, in Amsterdam. He entered Leiden University in 1600 and studied theology under Arminius, was ordained, and took a pastorate at Bleiswijk, near Rotterdam, in 1610.¹ That same year he joined Johannes Uitenbogaert and forty-four other Arminian ministers at Gouda to draft a Remonstrance against the Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed church, arguing that God’s election is conditioned on foreseen faith, that Christ’s atonement is universal in scope, and that grace can be resisted.² He represented the Remonstrant position at a 1611 conference at the Hague called to reconcile the two parties, without success, and in 1612 was appointed to the Leiden theology chair that Franciscus Gomarus’s resignation the year before had vacated.¹ Matthew Barrett describes Episcopius, together with Conrad Vorstius, as one of “the most important successors” carrying Arminius’s own theological cause forward at Leiden.²

When the Synod of Dort convened in 1618 to judge Remonstrant teaching, Episcopius was chosen as spokesman for the thirteen Remonstrant delegates summoned to defend themselves, but the Synod refused them a hearing and condemned Remonstrant doctrine without allowing a formal rebuttal.¹ Before that refusal, the Remonstrants under Episcopius’s leadership submitted their own confession of faith, the Sententiae Remonstrantium, which affirmed man’s total inability to do saving good apart from grace; the Synod condemned it regardless, and Episcopius restated the same articles in his own confession three years later.³ Dort’s condemnation cost him his office: he was deprived of his professorship and expelled from the Netherlands in 1619, and spent the following years in exile in Antwerp, Paris, and Rouen, writing in defense of the Remonstrant cause. He was permitted to return in 1626, after the death of Prince Maurice of Orange, and served first as preacher to the Remonstrant congregation at Rotterdam and then as rector of the Remonstrant seminary at Amsterdam, a post he held until his death in 1643.¹

Theological Contribution

Grace and human inability

Episcopius’s own confessional writing after Dort continued to affirm, in terms close to Arminius’s own, that fallen human beings cannot come to saving faith by the power of their own will. His 1621 confession states:

Man therefore does not have saving faith from himself, nor is he regenerated or converted by the powers of his own free will, seeing that in the state of sin he cannot of himself or by himself either think or will or do anything that is good enough to be saved (of which first of all is conversion and saving faith), but it is necessary that he be regenerated and totally renewed by God, in Christ, through the word of the gospel joined with the power of the Holy Spirit.⁴

Barrett observes that statements like this “clearly affirm man’s inability apart from grace,” distinguishing Episcopius’s own position from the later “optimistic anthropology” of Philip Limborch, who denied inherited depravity outright.³ For Episcopius, as for the Remonstrants generally, this grace remains resistible rather than effectual: prevenient grace enables a response it does not guarantee.²

The work of Christ

Charles Hodge groups Episcopius with fellow Remonstrant theologians Curcellaeus and Limborch as holding a view of the atonement distinct from Hugo Grotius’s governmental theory. Rather than treating Christ’s suffering chiefly as a deterrent example, Hodge writes, “they adhere to the Scriptural mode of regarding Him as a ransom and sacrifice”; but a ransom in their usage “is not an equivalent” payment, and a sacrifice “is said not to be a satisfaction to justice, but simply the condition on which pardon is granted.”⁵ Hodge judges the difference from Grotius “more in form than in reality,”⁵ since both accounts deny that Christ’s death was a strict satisfaction of divine justice in the sense the Reformed confessions teach.

Historical Significance

A. A. Hodge names Episcopius as “the most distinguished” of the Remonstrant theologians who succeeded Arminius, ahead of Curcellaeus, Limborch, Le Clerc, Wetstein, and Grotius himself.⁶ His own Institutiones theologicae, published after his death, became a standard reference for Remonstrant doctrine on the Trinity and other loci, cited alongside Arminius’s own writings as an authoritative statement of the Remonstrant position.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

“Episcopius, Simon,” 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 (dates, education, ministry posts) not otherwise found in library sources. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
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), 71-72. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 259-60. ↩ ↩²
Simon Episcopius, The Arminian Confession of 1621, chap. 7, art. 10, 68-69, quoted in Barrett, “Arminian Synergism in Theological Perspective,” 260. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter XVII. Justification,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 188-89. ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems,” 105-06. ↩
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.15, citing Simon Episcopius, Institutiones theologicae, IV, sect. 2, chap. 32, in vol. 1 of Opera theologica, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Johan Blaeu, 1650-65). ↩