The five points of Calvinism (TULIP)

TULIP is a mnemonic of American origin, not older than the early twentieth century, for the canons the Synod of Dort issued in 1619. Dort was convened to answer the five articles the Dutch Remonstrants had published in 1610 after the death of Arminius, and its five heads of doctrine are replies, taken in the Remonstrants' order. Reading them as a summary of Calvin's theology inverts the relationship: Calvin never produced such a list, and the doctrine of election occupies a modest place in the Institutes.

Total depravity does not claim that people are as bad as they could be. It claims that sin has affected every faculty, including the will and the understanding, so that no part of the person remains capable of initiating a turn to God. Moral achievement in ordinary human terms is not denied.

Unconditional election holds that God's choice rests on his own purpose and not on anything foreseen in the elect, faith included.

Limited atonement, better named particular redemption, holds that Christ died with the intention of actually securing the salvation of the elect rather than making salvation possible for everyone. The argument is about the design and efficacy of the atonement, not its sufficiency: the tradition's own formula is that the death of Christ is sufficient for all and efficient for the elect.

Irresistible grace, better named effectual calling, holds that when God calls a person to himself the call achieves what it intends. It does not claim that grace is never resisted, only that the inward effectual call is not finally refused.

Perseverance of the saints holds that those truly regenerate will be preserved to the end, and Dort coupled it with a frank acknowledgement that believers fall into serious sin.

Dort was not a seminar. The Remonstrant controversy divided the Dutch Republic along political as well as theological lines, setting the mercantile regent class and the province of Holland against the House of Orange and the stricter Calvinist clergy. The synod, which included delegates from England, Switzerland and the German Reformed churches, condemned the Remonstrants; their leading political patron, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, was executed in 1619, and Hugo Grotius, imprisoned in the same affair, escaped in a book chest. Remonstrant ministers were deprived and exiled, and the movement was tolerated again only after 1630.

Within the Reformed tradition the fault line has always been the third point. Four-point Calvinism, which affirms the other four and holds that Christ's death was in some sense for all, has been a persistent minority position since the seventeenth century, when the French theologian Moise Amyraut argued for a hypothetical universalism, and it is common in contemporary evangelicalism. Reformed critics answer that a redemption intended for all but effective for some makes the atonement's success depend on the recipient, which the other four points deny.

The disputes about the first and fifth points are practical rather than logical. Total depravity is compatible with a high view of common grace and of unregenerate virtue, and Reformed writers have often been accused by their own side of conceding too much there. Perseverance is not the popular doctrine of eternal security, which detaches assurance from any continuing evidence of faith; the confessional position holds that perseverance is visible in a persevering life, and that a professed conversion followed by nothing is grounds for doubting the profession rather than for confidence.

Methodism, Pentecostalism and much of the holiness tradition descend from the losing side at Dort, so the two positions between them account for most of Protestantism.