Episcopius, SIMON

Episcopius, SIMON (properly Biscop), the leader of the Arminian party after the death of its founder, was born at Amsterdam in 1583, and studied (from 1600) at Leyden. Arminius and Gomarus were his teachers in theology, and on the death of the former in 1609 Episcopius was obliged, on account of his known attachment to Arminius' views, to leave Leyden for Franeker. In 1610 he became pastor at Bleysswich, a village near Rotterdam, and in the following year he was one of five 'Remonstrants' appointed by the government to meet five 'Contra-Remonstrants' at a conference at the Hague. When Gomarus resigned his chair at Leyden, Episcopius was appointed his successor (1612). Called with twelve other Arminian theologians to the bar of the Synod of Dort (1618), Episcopius (with the rest) was condemned and banished from the country. He removed to the Spanish Netherlands, where he wrote his famous Arminian Confessio (published in 1622). On the renewal of the war between Spain and Holland, he found refuge in France, where he lived mostly at Paris and Rouen, and published a series of able controversial treatises. Permitted in 1626 to return to his native country, he was for several years a preacher at Rotterdam, where he wrote his Apologia pro Confessione in 1629. From 1634 he was professor at the Arminian College at Amsterdam, and here he produced his Institutiones theologicae and Responsio ad Questiones Theologicas, two works which are mutually complementary, and which, though the former was left incomplete at his death in 1643, present an ample apology not only of Arminian theology, but of the Christian revelation itself. Episcopius everywhere lays the utmost stress on the personal responsibility of man in relation to divine grace, denies the doctrine of original sin, and treats Christian faith not as a doctrinal theory, but as the potentiality of right moral conduct. Yet it cannot be denied that, in his view of the Trinity, the Son and the Holy Spirit are partakers of divine power and glory non collateraliter sed subordinate, and that he held it enough to believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, and is the spirit of the Son. This rationalistic development of Arminian doctrine by Episcopius went far beyond the famous Five Articles of 1610, but in the next generation was generally adopted by the Arminian party. His works were collected in 2 vols. (Amst. 1650-65). The best Life is Philip Limborch's Historia vitae Simonis Episcopii (Amst. 1701). See ARMINIUS, CALVINISM; and Sepp, Het godgelcerd ondercruijs in Nederland (1873).