Article 5: The Effects of Such Serious Sins

By such monstrous sins, however, they greatly offend God, deserve the sentence of death, grieve the Holy Spirit, suspend the exercise of faith, severely wound the conscience, and sometimes lose the awareness of grace for a time—until, after they have returned to the way by genuine repentance, God’s fatherly face again shines upon them.

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At the time of the writing of the Canons (1618-1619), the Dutch Arminians held that since believers could sever themselves from Christ through gross and serious sins and fall way–and since the Reformed held to the perseverance of the saints–the Reformed were guilty of creating a sense of indifference toward sin which allowed professing Christians to sin with impunity. Of course, it is easy to find cases of professing believers doing exactly that–who, while claiming to be Christians, still live like pagans. The Arminian accusation was that the Reformed understanding of perseverance creates just that sort of problem–it allows and tolerates indifference to sin in the life of professing believers. If believers remain convinced that they are of the elect, and cannot be cast into Hell, then they can sin with complete indifference.

Lest we forget, at the time of the Reformed-Arminian debates in the Netherlands, the Roman church had long held to a distinction between moral and venial sins. Often described as the seven deadly sins (including murder, adultery, and theft), once committed, mortal sins were understood to remove one from the sphere of God’s grace and could and often do lead to eternal damnation. But a venial (or lesser) sin merely requires repentance and possible confession to a priest–depending upon the sin. The Roman church saw itself (and still does) as the judge of which sins are which (as spelled out in its various catechisms) and assigned a remedy to the sinner to remove themselves from their corresponding predicament.

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