Amyraldism is a word I bumped into for the first time right at the end of October 2017. If I do a poor job of defining it, please forgive me.

Amyraldism is, as I understand it, a form of theology introduced by Moise Amyraut. With Amyraldism, you get the Calvinist doctrines of total depravity, unconditional election, irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints. Which, up to that point, is regular vanilla Calvinism.

With Amyraldism however, only the elect are brought to faith and actually saved but salvation was available to everyone anyway (so going to hell is your fault). As I said, you get the teaching that Christ died to save all which (as I understand it) is at odds with regular Calvinism. [We are all the elect in the end.]

Moise Amyraut was alive between 1596 and 1664 which makes this doctrine less than 400 years old. Or, in other words, the Church taught something else for more than 75% of our history.

As doctrines go, Amyraldism is one which does not fit terribly well with Romans 8:32 as well as pretty much any verses that talk about God saving all men.

Amyraldistic theology might [not] explain Bob’s rather odd flavour of Calvinism. If it does then I disagree strongly with it.

According to one website I read (which gives a better definition), it is also known as “four-point Calvinism”.

How I plan to use the word “Amyraldism”.

I have no plans to use this word. I just thought it was interesting and (once again) avoiding working on my book. I’m not sure I fully understand the term but figured I would define it as best I could because of the topics I have covered previously.

Can you expand this definition?

If you have a better, clearer or deeper explanation of Amyraldism, please speak up. If I was wrong about any point, say something.

Share your thoughts – if only to let me know that someone is reading this.

Update

It looks like I got this one wildly wrong. As Amyraldism, it seems is a doctrine of Universal Salvation. I’ve gone back over the post and struck out the parts that were wrong and added notes [like this] to correct what was clearly incorrect.