Synod of Dordt

— Contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Jude 1:3

The Synod of Dordt was a national synod of the Dutch Reformed church, enlarged by invited delegates from Reformed churches across Britain and the Continent, that met in Dordrecht from November 1618 to May 1619 to judge the Five Articles of Remonstrance brought by the followers of Jacobus Arminius against the church’s confessional teaching on grace and predestination.¹ The Synod unanimously rejected the Remonstrants’ position and issued its own point-by-point verdict, the Canons of Dordt, received throughout the Reformed churches as an authoritative statement of Calvinistic doctrine.²

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession was not written until 1677, nearly six decades after the Synod concluded, and never mentions it by name. Its own chapters on God’s decree, effectual calling, and the perseverance of the saints nonetheless state the same substantive position the Synod’s own verdict, the Canons of Dordt, set against the Remonstrants article by article. A. A. Hodge lists the Canons among the historic Reformed confessional standards in the same sequence as the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration that followed it, the doctrinal line the 1689 itself continues.¹

Historical Development

Background

Jacobus Arminius taught at the University of Leiden from 1603 until his death in 1609, having moved, in sermons on Romans 7-9 delivered while pastoring in Amsterdam, away from the Reformed churches’ own reading of the human will’s bondage to sin.³ The following year, forty-six of his followers gathered at Gouda and presented the States of Holland with a Remonstrance stating their position in five articles, softening unconditional election, definite atonement, and irresistible, persevering grace into conditional alternatives.⁴ The dispute split the Dutch Reformed churches and drew the Remonstrants into a political conflict with the ruling States General deep enough that ordinary church discipline could not settle it.²

The Synod’s convening and verdict

The States General called a general synod at Dordrecht, seated from November 13, 1618, to May 9, 1619.¹ Its members were drawn from the Dutch Reformed churches themselves, pastors, elders, and theological professors, joined by invited deputies from the Reformed churches of England, Scotland, Hesse, Bremen, the Palatinate, and Switzerland; the French churches were invited but their king’s own interdict kept their delegates from attending.² The Church of England’s own delegation, four episcopalians headed by the bishop of Llandaff, sat alongside nineteen Continental Reformed delegates and one Scottish Presbyterian.²

The Synod unanimously condemned the Remonstrants’ five articles and set out its own confirmation of the Reformed churches’ common Calvinistic teaching against them.² The most prominent Remonstrant theologians answering for Arminius’s position, since Arminius himself had died nine years earlier, were Simon Episcopius, Stephanus Curcellaeus, Philippus van Limborch, Jean Le Clerc, and the jurist Hugo Grotius.² The Synod’s resulting verdict, the Canons of Dordt, was received by the Reformed churches, in A. A. Hodge’s words, as “a true, accurate, and eminently authoritative exhibition of the Calvinistic system of theology.”¹ Arminius’s followers took both of their names from this dispute: having presented a Remonstrance against the Synod’s decisions, Charles Hodge writes, “they were at first called Remonstrants, but in after years their more common designation has been Arminians.”⁵

Opposing Views

The Remonstrants held that election looks to those who will believe, not the other way around. Rather than a decree naming particular persons beforehand, Charles Hodge describes their position as one in which “those who thus believe are predestinated to eternal life, not however as individuals, but as a class. The decree of election does not concern persons, it is simply the purpose of God to save believers.”⁶ On this account grace sufficient for faith is offered to all who hear the gospel, and Episcopius and Limborch extended that sufficiency further still, to all mankind without exception.⁷ The Five Articles of Remonstrance state the fuller position the Synod was convened to examine and reject.

Objections and Responses

If God gives effectual grace only to some, isn’t the gospel’s call to “whoever believes” insincere for everyone else? The Synod’s own Canons deny this directly: “As many as are called by the gospel, are unfeignedly called. For God hath most earnestly and truly shown in his Word, what is pleasing to him, namely, that those who are called should come to him. He, moreover, seriously promises eternal life, and rest, to as many as shall come to him, and believe on him.”⁸ The Canons locate the reason some who are called refuse to come not in any defect in the call itself but in the hearers: “some of whom when called, regardless of their danger, reject the word of life… the fault lies in themselves,” not in the gospel, in Christ offered through it, or in God who calls.⁹

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 112-128, sec. “(4.) The Canons of the Synod of Dort.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 6, “Comparison of Systems,” 94-111. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
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), 68-69. ↩
Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” 72. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter I. The Plan of Salvation.,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 325. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:327. ↩
Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:326-327. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 8. ↩
Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Third and Fourth Heads of Doctrine, art. 9. ↩