Remonstrants and Philosophes

When the Arminian pastor at Warmond was dismissed from his post after Dordt, the congregation refused the Gomarist pastor sent to fill the vacancy. Instead, led by Gijsbert van der Kodde, the church organized itself into a “college,” a democratically organized Bible study group, devoted, as they thought, to the Reformation principles of sola scriptura , the right to private interpretation, and the primacy of individual conscience.

According to Andrew Fix, “because of its opposition to the official Reformed church, the Collegiant movement acted as a magnet, drawing to itself the scattered groups of the radical Protestants who had come to settle in the Netherlands since the sixteenth century. Like the Gollegiants, the radical groups had little sympathy for the doctrinaire and intolerant established church. As these older forms of Protestant radicalism mixed with the Remonstrant elements already present in the colleges, a unique brand of religious reformism evolved that incorporated Arminianism, spiritualism, chiliasm, and rationalism.” Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Socinians rubbed shoulders in the colleges and by the middle of the seventeenth century the Collegiant movement had produced thinkers who blended what Frampton calls “inner-spiritualism with Cartesian rationalism.”