Writing against the monk Pelagius, whom he understood as teaching that man's nature was unaffected by the Fall, or at least was only weakened in the Fall, and that he was free to follow after God apart from divine intervention, Augustine developed the doctrine of original sin and, Calvinists contend, the doctrine of total inability.

Traditional Calvinists believe in the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, which says that because God chose some unto salvation and actually paid for their particular sins, he keeps them from apostasy and that those who do apostatize were never truly regenerated ( that is, born again ) or saved.

While also holding to these principles, the Solas, Calvinists emphasize the deterministic interpretation of Election, that salvation is only for a few decreed by God ( limited atonement ) while all others are decreed to be condemned.

Calvinists maintain that God selected certain individuals before the world began and then draws them to faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.

Calvinists have long taught that when the apostle Paul wrote, " God hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world " ( Ephesians 1: 4 ), that it the passage is meant be understood that God actually choses believers in Christ before the world was founded.

According to Calvinists, since God has drawn the elect to faith in Christ by regenerating their hearts and convincing them of their sins, and thus saving their souls by His own work and power, it naturally follows that they will be kept by the same power to the end.

Calvinists believe this is what Peter is teaching in 1st Peter 1, verse 5 when he says, that true believers are " kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ".

Calvinists also believe that all who are born again and justified before God necessarily and inexorably proceed to sanctification.

Calvinists note that the argument assumes that either God's love is necessarily incompatible with corruption or that God is constrained to follow the path that some men see as best, whereas they believe God's plans are not fully known to man and God's reasons are his own and not for man to question ( compare Rom.

Calvinists agree that God is sovereign, and will save all those whom he has purposed to save, and damn those he has purposed to damn.

Regarding the claim by universalists that an omnipotent God would not fail to save everyone, Calvinists would point to the doctrine of irresistible grace, which teaches that if God has elected to save someone, God's omnipotence will mean that this person will eventually repent, no matter how much resistance ( s ) he puts up.

Since Calvinists further hold that salvation is by grace apart from good works ( sola gratia ) and since they view making a choice to trust God as an action or work, they maintain that the act of choosing cannot be the difference between salvation and damnation, as in the Arminian scheme.

Although Calvinists believe God and the truth of God cannot be plural, they also believe that those civil ordinances of man which restrain man from evil and encourage toward good, are ordinances of God ( regardless of the religion, or lack of it, of those who wield that power ).

Justification is granted to all who exercise faith, but even that is viewed as a gift from God ( unmerited favour ) by Lutherans and Calvinists, who use, as well as and to support that belief.

According to Calvinists, synergism is the view that God and man work together, each contributing their part to accomplish regeneration in and for the individual.

Scholastic Calvinists have sometimes debated precisely when, relative to the decree for the Fall of man, God did his electing – see supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism – though such distinctions are not often emphasized in modern Calvinism.

Calvinists generally understand the former passages as giving a window into the divine perspective and the latter passages as speaking from the human perspective in calling people to work out the salvation God has given them.

" Since Calvinists and nearly all Christians believe that not all have eternal life with God, Calvinists conclude that there are only two possibilities: either Jesus was wrong in saying that he would lose none of his sheep ( a conclusion they reject ), or Jesus must not have laid down his life for everyone, as they understand to imply.

Both Calvinists and Arminians generally accept the concept of common grace in that there are undeserved blessings which God extends to all mankind.

Calvinists hold that God's grace to enable salvation is given only to the elect and irresistibly leads to salvation.

Many Protestants, especially Calvinists, consider him to be one of the theological fathers of the Protestant Reformation due to his teaching on salvation and divine grace.

Although Arminius and Wesley both vehemently rejected this view, it has sometimes inaccurately been lumped together with theirs ( particularly by Calvinists ) because of other similarities in their respective systems such as conditional election, unlimited atonement, and prevenient grace.

While Arminians feel that they have been rather successful in disinclining many Calvinists from such views as unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace, they realize that they have not widely succeeded in the area of eternal security.

Unlike Calvinists, Lutherans agree that the means of grace are resistible ; this belief is based on numerous biblical references as discussed in the Book of Concord.

Calvinists emphasize " the utter helplessness of man apart from grace.

At about the same time that Calvinists and Arminians were debating the meaning of grace in Protestantism, in Catholicism a similar debate was taking place between the Jansenists and the Jesuits.

Although it was not a major issue during the controversy, Barber charged the Arlington Baptist College with teaching the doctrines of grace, often called Calvinism, and said that some of its faculty members were " hyper " Calvinists.

" Should it be asked, whether all Calvinists differ from Arminians, only in reference to effectual grace and perseverance, it is frankly acknowledged, that there are some who differ from them in other points.

Calvinists have their own doctrine of prevenient grace, which they identify with the act of regeneration and which is immediately and necessarily followed by faith.

Arminians object that Calvinist common grace leaves people absolutely incapable of coming to God ( a point on which Calvinists agree ) and thus do not believe it leaves them without excuse.

Calvinists further maintain that when the Bible speaks of humanity's condition of total depravity, of spiritual death, it speaks of it as an actuality, not a hypothetical condition that prevenient grace resolves for everyone, as they believe the Wesleyan doctrine teaches.

Calvinists see all people as either dead in their sins or alive in Christ (), and they see the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace as creating a third state, neither dead nor alive.

Calvinists understand " dead in sin " to mean absolutely incapable of all good, whereas Arminians understand it to mean the state of being separated from God by sin, but capable of choosing God when enabled to by grace.

Some Calvinists ( and others ) derisively refer to the Wesleyan concept of prevenient grace as " universal enablement.

Calvinists also argue the doctrine of irresistible grace, which says that if God has elected to save someone, he will overpower all of that person's resistance, resulting in that person's repentance and consequent salvation.

The specifics of the Reformed doctrine of common grace have been somewhat controversial and at times bitterly contested by some Calvinists.

Even today, many Calvinists, when confronted with Taylor's teachings, will conclude that he had departed from the true Christian faith.

William of Ockham, René Descartes and eighteenth-century Calvinists all accepted versions of this moral theory, according to Ralph Cudworth, as they all held that moral obligations arise from God's commands.

Calvinists argue that ( 1 ) the word " draw " should be understood according to its usual semantics in both John 6: 44 and 12: 32 ; ( 2 ) the word " all " ( translated " all people " in v. 12: 32 ) should be taken in the sense of " all kinds of people " rather than " every individual "; and thus ( 3 ) the former verse refers to an irresistible internal call to salvation and the latter to the opening of the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles, not a universal, resistible internal call.

The Arminians were perceived as ready to compromise with the Spanish, whereas the Dutch Calvinists were not, so Arminianism was considered by some to be political treason ; in 1617 – 8 there was a pamphlet war and Francis van Aarssens expressed the view that the Arminians were working for Philip IV of Spain.

Most settlers in the American Mid-Atlantic and New England were Calvinists, including the English Puritans, the French Huguenot and Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam ( New York ), and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Appalachian back country.

Puritans adopted a Reformed theology and in that sense were Calvinists ( as many of their earlier opponents were, too ), but also took note of radical views critical of Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva.

Calvinists generally believed that the worship in the church ought to be strictly regulated by what is commanded in the Bible ( the regulative principle of worship ), and condemned as idolatry many current practices, regardless of antiquity or widespread adoption among Christians, against opponents who defended tradition.

Calvinists, Anabaptists and Mennonites, angry with their being persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church and opposed to the Catholic images of saints ( which in their eyes conflicted with the Second Commandment ), destroyed statues in hundreds of churches and monasteries throughout the Netherlands.

Historians estimate that in the 1560s, more than half of the nobility were Calvinist ( or Huguenot ), and 1, 200 – 1, 250 Calvinist churches had been established, by 1562 with the outbreak of war, there were 2 million Calvinists.

When it became clear that Henri of Navarre would not rennounce his Protestantism the Duke of Guise signed the Treaty of Joinville ( December 31, 1584 ), on behalf of the League, with Philip II of Spain, who supplied a considerable annual grant to the League over the following decade to maintain the civil war in France, with the hope of destroying the French Calvinists.

Furthermore, in the frame of the controversy around Jansenius ' Augustinus, during which the Jesuits attacked the Jansenists claiming they were heretics similar to Calvinists, Arnauld wrote in defense the Théologie morale des Jésuites ( Moral Theology of Jesuits ), which would put the base of most of the arguments later used by Pascal in his Provincial Letters denouncing the " relaxed moral " of Jesuit casuistry.

The third Governor General of Brazil was Mem de Sá ( 1557 – 1573 ), an efficient administrator that managed to defeat the aborigines and, with the help of the Jesuits, expel the French Calvinists that had established a colony in Rio de Janeiro ( the France Antarctique ).

The Monarchomachs included jurists such as the Calvinists François Hotman ( 1524 – 1590 ), Théodore de Bèze ( 1519 – 1605 ), Simon Goulart ( 1543 – 1628 ), Nicolas Barnaud ( 1538 – 1604 ), Hubert Languet ( 1518 – 1581 ), Philippe de Mornay ( 1549 – 1623 ) and George Buchanan ( 1506 – 1582 ).

Under the influence of Johannes Honterus, the great majority of the Transylvanian Saxons embraced the new creed of Martin Luther during the Protestant Reformation ( almost all became Lutheran Protestants, with very few Calvinists ), while other minor parts of the Transylvanian Saxons remained staunchly Catholic ( Latin Rite ) or were converted to Catholicism later on.

Brine maintained that a lack of ability does not release a man from duty ( with which most Calvinists would agree ), but he sees salvation in a different category because, " with respect to special faith in Christ, it seems to me that the powers of man in his perfected state were not fitted and disposed to that act "

In 1685, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV ( 1654 – 1715 ), which had legalized freedom of religion of the Reformed Church, caused the emigration out of France of three hundred thousand Huguenots ( French Calvinists ), to other countries of Europe and to North America.

It is true that Calvinists believe that once a person reaches a state which fulfils the conditions for salvation ( i. e. once someone has experienced true conversion ), they cannot subsequently fall from this state (" once saved, always saved ").

* Rafał Leszczyński ( 1579 – 1636 ), Palatine of Belz leader of Polish Calvinists

Orthodox Calvinists converted a belt of land from the south west ( the province of Zeeland ), via the Veluwe, to the north of the Netherlands ( until the city of Staphorst ) during the 17th and even as late as the 18th centuries.