CT

A second overlap is on the doctrine of creation. Take Jonathan Edwards, for example. He’s surely a stalwart of evangelical Reformed thought, yet he denied that there was a material world. He thought that the world emanated from God, that God is the only real cause of what happens in the world, and that there is no one single thing called “the world” that persists from one moment to the next: God re-creates the world out of nothing at every moment that it exists. He also thought that the world is contained in God in some strong sense. Now, compare that with Arminius, who thought that God creates and then sustains the world in being, that the world is distinct from God, and that God graciously governs it in all its details yet without doing violence to creaturely freedom. That sounds much more familiar to many of us. It’s fascinating to think that Arminius was closer to the Reformed consensus on the doctrine of creation than Edwards was.