Apologetics.com Neiswonger

The Five points of Calvinism. 

You know the whole ‘5 points’ thing is kind of funny. John Calvin never had five points. While I really think he would have agreed with them, his was mainly an exegetical way of looking at what he thought Scripture was saying about some very important things. I think that if he had been asked how many points there should be, he would have been troubled by that kind of thinking. As it is, he was never asked. Are these things really to reducible in that way? To a laundry list of theological slogans? A grab bag of propositions? A neat set of categorical relationships? Or is the depth and breadth of all this such that a few years of thoughtful study is the minimum?

Still, the T.U.L.I.P. is a helpful little acronym for measuring the traditional lines of the in-house debate between Christians of the Arminian and Calvinistic bent, even though the issue has been debated in the Church since before there were either. This is an old argument. I guess, one of the oldest.

And yes, sometimes I feel a bit Arminian. Like when things in the world seem out of hand and you have to wonder if God is really in control of everything in this specific universe, or some other with a little more law and order. But then when you pray with Arminians, they always pray as if they think God is really sovereign over all those things that they say He’s not. Like the course of history, the salvation of their friends and family, and the ultimate destiny of all things. It’s as if they think He has every hair on their heads numbered and that not even a leaf falls to the ground apart from the will of their heavenly Father. But we all have our inconsistencies.

It was the Arminians that formulated the five points (the followers of Jacob Arminius), so we should lay out their 5 points first. It helps us to apprehend the intended scope.

You probably already know this stuff but I’ll write it for the mildly interested.

The five points of Arminianism:
Represented by the acronym P.R.U.N.I.

Partial Sinfulness
Relative Destination
Universal Atonement
Negatable Grace
Insecurity of the Saints

1. Man is not affected by sin in all of his faculties and is still capable of good even while sinful. God gives people enough non-salvific ‘grace’ to make everyone capable of good decisions apart from regeneration or faith.

2. God’s choosing of certain people to receive His grace is based upon conditions that they themselves must fulfill. God might give everybody some graces but ‘predestination’ is by reservation only.

3. The death of Christ did actually atone for the sins of all people, even those without faith or that never repent. But they have to do something themselves prior to salvation for it to count.

4. The work of God’s grace in salvation is able to be resisted and thwarted by the intended recipient. The will of the sinner is inviolable. What merit would there be in salvation if the sinner did not have to do some good work to apprehend it?

5. Those who have received the grace of God and are truly regenerated to new life can and sometimes do, become unregenerate and absent the salvific grace of God given to them.

So, those pesky five points of Calvinism were formulated 80 years or so after Calvin died to respond to these.

That’s how we ended up with… T.U.L.I.P

Total Depravity
Unconditional Predestination
Limited Atonement
Irresistible Grace
Perseverance of the Saints

The Calvinist system goes like this:

1. While not being ‘abjectly’ depraved, every aspect of the human person has been effected by sin. There is no remaining ability to spontaneously choose an ultimate good as an effect of that change in human nature from one that is spiritual, to one that is fleshly in its intent. The human nature apart from God has a ‘direction’, so to speak.

2. God places no conditions on the gift of His grace. It is freely given apart from any good in the recipient. He does not look ahead in time to see what people will do in response to His grace and then give them His grace in response to their response.

3. The benefits of Christ in the atonement for sin apply only to those that have faith, and while there may be benefits of Christ’s work that fall upon the unrepentant, atonement for sin is not one of them. Thus the atonement is Specific and not General.

4. The grace of God being an actual work of the Spirit of God in the soul is always given to those not inclined to receive it, and thus succeeds because it is the power of God, and not because of some inherent good in those receiving grace. There is not a difference in those receiving the grace that causes one to accept and another to reject it. There are not two kinds of sinners: bad and really bad, that is the cause of some believing and some rejecting. Grace is not a thing, it is something God does, and He acts with an intent to save and actually achieves what He intends.

5. Those who have truly believed in Christ unto salvation, and been filled with the Spirit through faith, will be kept by Spirit of God throughout their lives, and so cannot by any means finally fall away. Though many that seem to believe at one time may show themselves to have been false, and many that seem hostile to religion may yet prove the grace of God by repentance.
So it all comes down to whether you think the Bible teaches TULIP, or PRUNI…

The essence of Calvinism is that the effective cause of the salvation of the sinner is the Grace of God, mercifully given in Jesus Christ, and not some pre-existing good found in the sinner apart from God. Does God save sinners? Or do sinners save themselves and God just makes their atonement for sin a hypothetical possibility? Contrary to a common misunderstanding, that if a sinner continues in their rejection of Christ it is their own choice and decision, and so their own moral responsibility, is exactly what Calvinism teaches.

The Calvinist question might be, when someone does turn to God, is it because of their own goodness? Because some people are just better or smarter than others? Or the grace of God alone? The Calvinist says that when someone rejects God it is their own willful decision, but when someone turns to God it is the effectual grace of God that is the cause. If one continues in sin it is the will of the person; if one comes to salvation it is the grace of God.

Some have no attraction to the notion that all sin is of the free will of man apart from grace while all good works are born of the grace of God alone and thus not merely free, but this is closer to what Calvinism teaches than what it is often accused of. There is free and really free, and if a person is not free from sin, how free can they be? But here we’re speaking of the scope of freedom and not metaphysical freedom. The idea that the decisions that men make have no causes either within themselves or from the context of their lives within the environment that God places them, so that they are all ultimately arbitrary, doesn’t do anything to help this kind of problem. That’s kind of the answer that is no answer because, it doesn’t have any explanatory force. If a man can make decisions apart from his own moral nature then we make human nature itself a phantom and destroy the thing we hoped to protect.

So the Calvinist, for better or worse is saying that God is not choosing some of the slightly better or more receptive against the slightly worse and less receptive. He is giving grace to some from a pool of equally unlikely characters of unsavory intent and contrary actions. There is nothing good in any, and He saves some, without being any respecter of men or giving any special favors. All are equally lost and broken, and have nothing in themselves to make one of us more noble or worthy of a special grace. It is a gift.

Christopher Neiswonger