Wesley’s New Birth is as supernatural as anything in Dort: almighty Spirit, created anew, raised from the death of sin. Arminians are not preaching self-improvement. They locate the birth with justification in time—God’s work for us and in us together—and they refuse a mode of grace that cannot be resisted.
Preventing (prevenient) grace is the Arminian account of how a dead sinner can believe. God takes the initiative; the Spirit convicts, enlightens, and enables. Nicodemus is told he must be born from above, and the gospel is still a command and an invitation. The will, restored enough to respond, may yield or refuse.
John 3 and Ephesians 2 are therefore not denied as texts of divine action. They are denied as texts of irresistible action. “You he made alive” is God’s mercy; “whoever believes” remains an earnest address. Pastoral Arminian preaching presses urgency: do not resist the Spirit who is already at work.
Dort calls regeneration a raising from the dead that God works “without our aid”—not because the person is a stone afterward, but because the spiritually dead do not cooperate in their first coming to life. Moral suasion (argument, example, appeal) is not enough. The Spirit supernaturally gives a new heart, and that heart believes.
On this reading, new birth precedes faith in the order of nature (if not always in our awareness). “No one can come unless the Father draws” is effectual drawing. The same God who commands also creates the response. Dead in trespasses is more than wounded; it is inability that grace overcomes, not merely assists.
Pastoral Reformed preaching uses this for humility (you did not raise yourself) and hope (God can raise the most unlikely). It should not be heard as making evangelism pointless: the Spirit uses the Word. The fork is whether the decisive moment is a new heart that cannot finally refuse, or an enabled will that still can.
Key contrast Both preach a Spirit-wrought new creation. Arminians typically bind new birth to resistible, enabling grace and to faith as a response; the Reformed typically treat regeneration as an effectual, supernatural raising that produces faith rather than waiting on it.