Looking at the Gospel Through TULIP-Colored Glasses

You’re probably familiar with the acronym TULIP. It’s just an easy way to remember some basic tenets of Calvinistic theology. There has been a lot of quibbling over the language of TULIP, so some people have suggested revised phrases. In case you need a review, here’s the acronym along with the updated language:

Total Depravity (Radical Depravity)

Unconditional Election

Limited Atonement (Particular Redemption)

Irresistible Grace (Efficacious Grace)

Perseverance of the Saints (Persevering Grace)

Even for people who use the new terminology, we still tend to talk about the acronym TULIP…because it sounds so much better than RUPEP.

But there’s a very serious problem with the language we use in this discussion. TULIP may not simply be a helpful mnemonic device; it may be a set of colored glasses that keeps us from seeing some very important aspects of the work of redemption.

You know those little decoder glasses you got as a kid? You would have a piece of paper that had a bunch of red dots on it. But when you put on the decoder glasses, the red disappeared, and you could finally read the hidden message, right? Without the glasses you could only see the red dots. But once you put the glasses on, you had a very different perspective.

When we use the language of TULIP we have on our special glasses, and we can only see parts of the picture. Perhaps we need to take off those linguistic filters and see a bigger picture.

Kenneth Burke, famous rhetorician, called this filtering aspect of language, “terministic screens.” In other words, we screen out certain aspects of ideas simply by the terms we use to talk about those ideas. I think we may unwittingly be screening out some very important aspects of the gospel because we fail to think of the gospel outside of the limits of the TULIP acronym.

I want to take a series of posts to accomplish several objectives:

• I want to demonstrate how each of the points of Calvinism are not only right and biblical, but also somewhat misleading.
• I want to show why a Christian who is committed to the doctrines of grace needs to take off the TULIP-colored glasses and look at the gospel from every angle.
• I want to show how we need to use different language when speaking of the gospel in order to accomplish that goal, and perhaps suggest some different language to use.
• And I want to point down some possible paths we may follow when we see that there are other paths of reality in the gospel message than simply TULIP.