Not Simply the P of TULIP

Eternal security is often mistaken for a restatement of Calvinism's five points under a different name, and the mistake obscures something real about how the doctrine actually functions among Baptists. The Reformed acronym TULIP reaches its final point, perseverance of the saints, only after moving through unconditional election, the claim that God chooses who will be saved without regard to anything foreseen in them. A great many Baptist churches affirm the security half of that chain while leaving the election half genuinely open, holding that a believer, once truly regenerate, cannot finally fall away, without committing themselves to a doctrine of unconditional election to explain why that believer was regenerate in the first place. That combination is exactly why the doctrine functions as the sharpest single line separating Baptist churches from Methodist and other Arminian bodies within American Protestantism, rather than separating Baptists from Calvinists. Arminian theology, following Jacob Arminius and later John Wesley, holds that grace working in a believer can finally be resisted and that genuine falling away is possible, so a Methodist and a Baptist who agree on almost every other point of ordinary Protestant doctrine part ways precisely here, over whether the believer's future remains genuinely open or is already secured.