A Genealogical Sketch of the Arminian Family Tree

[John Bauer]

A Genealogical Sketch of the Arminian Family Tree. Research generated by John Bauer, with help from ChatGPT for dates, some missing data, and mapping the results in a nested hierarchy.

• Classical Arminianism (Jacobus Arminius, 1588–1609). Followers draw up the 1610 Remonstrance.
  
  ​
  • Early Remonstrant Arminianism (Five Articles, 1610–1625). Condemned at Dort (1618–19); Remonstrants survive in the Dutch Republic.
    
    ​
    • High Remonstrant Rationalism (Philipp van Limborch, 1640–1700). Marginalised after the Enlightenment; influence resurfaces via English Latitudinarians.
      
      ​
  • General / Free-Will Baptist Arminianism (Thomas Helwys, 1611–present). Continues today as “Classical Arminianism.”
    
    ​
    • Corporate-Election Arminianism (F. Leroy Forlines, 1960s–present). Common among Free Will Baptists and some evangelicals.
      
      ​
  • Wesleyan Arminianism (John Wesley, 1738–present). Generates the Methodist connection, Holiness churches, and many Pentecostal bodies.
    
    ​
    • Holiness-Pentecostal Arminianism (Phoebe Palmer, A. M. Hills → early Pentecostals, 1867–present). Nazarene, Wesleyan, and Pentecostal denominations.
      
      ​
    • Revivalist / Finneyite Arminianism (Charles Finney, 1821–1875). Shapes New-Measure revivalism and much of 19th-century American evangelicalism.
      
      ​
      • Decisional-Regeneration Fundamentalism (altar-call tradition, 1880s–1950s).
        
        ​
        • Billy Sunday / Billy Graham mass-crusade decisionism (c. 1900–1990s).
          
          ​
        • Campus- and youth-parachurch decisionism (e.g., Campus Crusade for Christ / Cru, “Four Spiritual Laws,” 1951–present).
          
          ​
      • Independent-Baptist / Dallas-dispensational off-shoots
        
        ​
        • Free-Grace / Anti-Lordship Dispensationalism (Zane Hodges et al., 1970s–present).
          
          ​
      • Southern Baptist "Provisionism" (Leighton Flowers, 2012–present).
        
        ​
    • Open-Theist Arminianism (Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd, mid-1990s–present). Intra-Arminian debate; largely academic.
      
      ​
  • Stone-Campbell Restorationism (Barton W. Stone & Alexander Campbell, 1809–present). Emphasises baptism for remission of sins; rejects creeds; views Spirit's work as mediated through word and ordinance. Survives today as Churches of Christ, for example.
    
    ​
  • Molinist–Arminian Convergence (William Lane Craig, 1980s–present). Philosophical hybrid grounding conditional election in middle knowledge.

Reading the tree:

• Each indent marks a daughter stream flowing out of the parent above it.
  
  ​
• Dates give the period when the strand took recognizably distinct shape (not its entire lifespan).

Key movements of its sap:

• Remonstrant stream (continental, 1600s). From Arminius to Episcopius to Limborch. Keeps a nominal doctrine of depravity at first, then rationalizes it away. After 1700, the movement is ecclesiastically alive but culturally peripheral.
  
  ​
• Baptist stream (English, then American, 1611-present). Helwys's General Baptists carry the classical package across the English channel. Free-Will Baptists still taught total depravity plus prevenient grace; the modern "corporate-election" model is their internal tweak rather than a doctrinal surrender.
  
  ​
• Wesleyan-revivalist stream (1738-present). Wesley universalizes prevenient grace and adds perfectionism. Holiness-Pentecostal piety grows from that root. A second branch, Finney's revivalism, collapses moral inability into mere moral indifference and invents the anxious bench, begetting
  
  ​
  • mass-crusade decisionism (Sunday, Graham, Cru);
    
    ​
  • independent-fundamentalist plus Dallas-dispensational "Free-Grace" theology;
    
    ​
  • Southern Baptist "Provisionism."
    
    ​
  Each step trims the bondage of the will a little further; by the time one reaches Provisionism, grace is nothing more than a universally extended mere offer.
  
  ​
• Frontier Restorationist stream (Stone-Campbell, 1809-present). Born out of Cane Ridge camp meeting (pre-Finney). Insists on immersion "for the remission of sins" and treats the Spirit's work as word-and-water mediated, not as an inward enabling.
  
  ​
• Analytic-philosophical off-shoots (late-20th century). Molinism (Jesuit–Arminian hybrid) anchors conditional election in middle knowledge. Open Theism limits divine foreknowledge to what is acutal or settled. Both remain classroom options more than mass-movement forces.

Trajectory: From left to right, the doctrine of innate moral inability steadily erodes; correspondingly, "grace" is redefined from an inward liberating act to a mere external opportunity. Provisionism and Free-Grace dispensationalism stand at the far edge of that drift.

 

[Josheb]

That op is very good. Point of important information I would add is that the Wesleyan influence is not merely about revivalism, but experiential revivalism or, more simply, experientialism. Any preacher might hold a "revival," but that doesn't mean anything. Only God truly revives anyone, and He does not always do that with the now proverbial and cliched "signs and wonders" (modernism abuses the signs and wonders that accompanied the gospel in the first century). The question coming out of the 18th century tent meeting was, "Did you have an experience?" and that experience was thought (imagined) to be evidence (a "sign") of changed (a changed life). One of the unintended consequences was a prevalent reliance on psychosocial perceptions and the belief one's own experience was reliable.....

.....until the next tent meeting,


.....or the next altar call .


Few experientialists knew anything of sound doctrine. Even those God had genuinely changed walked out of the tent lacking knowledge, lacking reason and understanding beyond the anecdotal report, lacking oversight, lacking any shepherds, lacking what Paul described in Ephesians 4:11-16. As a result, within the next century the Church suffered numerous fractures and a huge explosion of sectarianism.

 

[Hazelelponi]

...

 

[Josheb]

Trajectory: From left to right, the doctrine of innate moral inability steadily erodes; correspondingly, "grace" is redefined from an inward liberating act to a mere external opportunity.

Amazingly well said. Innate and inherent inability erodes, innate self-aggrandizing ability increases, and the power of sin diminished.

Provisionism and Free-Grace dispensationalism stand at the far edge of that drift.

Personally, I'd have provided two separate bullet points for Southern Baptists and Provisionists, one bullet for the SBs asserting "Traditionalism" (c. 1925), and a distinct bullet point for Flowers' Provisionism (c. 2012). He's a marked step in the Pelagian direction, and some of the SBs subscribe to Provisionism (rather than vice versa). The proverbial waters get muddied because Traditionalism and Provisionism try to do an end run around Arminius by appealing to (their selective views) on the ECFs.