The Unaccommodated Arminius: Disputing and Extending Muller’s Account

The prodigious scholarship of Richard Muller has moderated but not dissipated longstanding critiques of Jacobus Arminius’s Christology, soteriology, personal integrity, and identification as a Reformed theologian. Muller also has noted insightfully the integration of doctrines in post-Reformation dogmatics, such that altering one doctrine would affect others. This paper engages with Muller’s scholarship by first assessing Muller’s four criticisms of Arminius and mounting counterarguments, then building on Muller’s insight on doctrinal integration to identify the common themes that integrate Muller’s and Arminius’s contrasting understandings of Christology, soteriology, ethics and epistemology, and the Reformed tradition. This exercise in theological pattern recognition and comparison yields two models of the integration of doctrine, ethics, and ecclesial identity for contemporary theologians to consider in relation to today’s religious landscape, not least the recent history and current state of Methodism.