At any rate, this is my best attempt at explaining it. Hopefully you, gentle reader, are not one of those who has experienced the murderous cruelty that has been known to characterize some of the discussions of Calvinism here at DBU, though probably more have been peaceful than not. Calvinism really is making a comeback on Baptist college campuses these days, and none of us should be ignorant of it. Take a side, for or against it, but you really should have a clue what it is.

Many of the early Baptists were Calvinists; heck, America was culturally a Calvinist nation in many ways (you know, Jonathon Edwards and dudes like that; see Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 76; and Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, chapter three, third paragraph ). So we shouldn’t be ignorant of our history. By the way, the Baptist Faith and Message (Section V, second paragraph) basically affirms one of the five points of Calvinism and ignores the rest; so Baptists are allowed to be 100% Calvinists and still be Baptists, but not allowed to be 100% Arminian. That’s the 1963 and 2000 BF+M's. (The 1925 in Section VI seems to specifically reject one of the points.)

I am unique among Calvinists. Most of the ones to whom I've talked say things like, "I looked at Scripture, and Calvinism was obviously true." I haven’t even really looked at Scripture to see if Calvinism is true. I just looked at it philosophically, and it turned out to be a pretty darn good philosophical system. Really, people, if any of you are thinking about Calvinism (thinking it's true, thinking it's not, thinking you don't know, whatever . . .), you probably shouldn't do what I did: I strongly recommend spending much more time in prayer and Bible study than you spend reading this essay. But this explanation may be of use to you in explaining some of the philosophy of Calvinism so you know what they mean when they say they found some truth in Scripture.

Also, I'm not sure about some of the versions of Calvinism much different from mine. They might be there, they might be good, they might be not, they might splice commas, they might not, you can figure out for yourself if there are other ones. This is the way I understand it.

1. T: Total Depravity. This means that every human being is evil, but it means a bit more than that. Arminianism agrees with that much; Calvinism explains it a little bit further and says that every human being is completely unable to do anything good on their own. EG, a human being on his/her own is completely unable to choose God/follow God/accept Christ on his/her own. Even our good acts are often done for the wrong reasons (all our righteousness is filthy rags, right? [Is that somewhere in Isaiah?]).

(Be aware [not 'beware'] of the Arminian position: prevenient grace is made available to everyone. Arminianism has a pretty strong view of human depravity, but holds that God gives prevenient grace to everyone. Prevenient grace is defined as enough grace to make someone able to choose God. After that, it’s their free choice. Problem with prevenient grace: it’s hard to imagine a person completely neutral towards God, with no influences pushing him/her either way, or with influences perfectly balanced. An Arminian might well reply that, even if we can’t imagine it, God is capable of making it happen as often as He likes.)

2. U: Unconditional Election. This means that God chose one person and not another for no reason that we can see. Especially, unconditional election means that God chose one person and not another for reasons having nothing to do with their righteousness, because all are equally depraved.

3. L: Limited Atonement. This means that. This is also called "Particular redemption" because it means that God’s redemption was made available to particular people (and not made available to others). This is the point of Calvinism that most people find the most unattractive. Limited atonement sort of follows from unconditional election: God knows whom He's going to choose or whatever, so He doesn't bother shedding His perfect blood for them.

4. I: Irresistible Grace. This means that God’s call on a person is never resisted. It’s sort of like saying that that person can’t refuse, but not quite: I, and I am a Calvinist, think that person most certainly can refuse, but grace is irresistible because he/she never does resist. I’ll get into this later, when I talk about "The Philosophy of Calvinism."

5. P: Perseverance of the Saints. This means that the saints will persevere unto the end. (Duh.) I know this includes eternal security, so most Baptist already agree with this one. I don’t remember right now what else it includes.

(The acronym is, of course, T-U-L-I-P. TULIP has helped many people remember the five points, but I think it should end. From now on, we should use TUPAC: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Particular redemption, Always saved if once saved, and Call unresisted. Yeah, the new acronym should be TUPAC. So there.)

So, anyways, like I said, Calvinism is a very sophisticated philosophical system. Please understand: The five points are not Calvinism. Calvinism is the five points plus a sort of theory of free will that ties the five points together.

I think it's best to start with this question (it's where I started, anyways): pretend that someone will always do what’s right and never do what’s wrong. Or the opposite: Satan, for instance. Let's just say that you can always trust Satan to do what's wrong, no matter what. What we have is a zero-percent chance that Satan will do what’s right. Well, then: is he free or not?

If you say that he's free because he has the option of doing what's right, and just never does it, then I tend to agree with you. To the best of my knowledge, Calvinism agrees with you that a creature with a will wholly corrupt or wholly good is "free" in the sense that he or she usually has the option of doing something contrary to their nature. Heck, Jesus did on earth, like when Satan tempted Him. There was never the slightest chance that Jesus, since He is God incarnate, would actually sin. But he had the option. But a zero-percent chance that he’d actually do it.

Calvinism thinks that all human beings are inclined either one way or the other, towards good (towards God) or towards evil (towards self). We are "free" in the sense that we theoretically could choose either way. But, because of our inclination, we only actually make that one choice.

This is where the other sort of freedom comes in. This is the freedom that's not just theoretical, but actual: we can do what we want to do. Maybe that’s a better sort of freedom than being able to do anything you want to do. At any rate, if you want to say that Jesus was totally free that day when Satan tempted him in the Judean desert, you have to think that freedom means something a little bit different from being able to choose either way: good or evil, black or white, to worship God or to sin.

So if you ever hear a Calvinist say that they don't believe in free will, don't believe them. They don’t mean it, or they don't know what they're talking about (either that, or I don’t know what I am talking about; always a possibility). Calvinists believe in free will. They just believe that the only freedom available to all human beings is the freedom to follow our inclinations.

Now to tie it all together. Calvinism has this understanding of free will and the importance of that towards which a person is inclined. It also believes that all humans are born totally depraved, that is: completely inclined to rebel against God. Calvinism believes that God is sovereign, and for some reason chooses a few of those humans. He doesn't force them to worship Him. He alters their will, he makes some change in their inclination, so that they are inclined towards the good, inclined to do what's right, inclined to worship God. Then they do, because they were free to do what they wanted to do.

What about those who whose will was not altered, whose inclinations were not altered? Don't misunderstand. Calvinism and Arminianism, when both are properly understood, both agree with the early chapters of Romans: the default setting is sin. It's not unfair for God to send anyone to Hell, for all human beings are sinners set against him in condemnable rebellion (many Christians prefer to say that humans send themselves to Hell, and I think that's an ok way of looking at it).

Arminianism holds that God brings everyone from that depraved state, once in their lives, to a state in which they are able to freely decide for themselves whether to remain sinners or to repent and worship God, accept Christ’s free gift of having paid the dept, fulfilled for himself the legal penalty for our sin, taken our punishment upon ourselves, died once for all the people on death row, etc., etc.

Calvinism holds that God gives to some humans Grace, which is precisely unfair to those humans (we deserve punishment), nothing we deserved.

(It's still fair to Himself and to the legal penalty that has to be paid [justice demands punishment for sin; there is such a thing as justice, and, since there is, punishment has to be made]. God is under no obligation to let murderers and criminals go free.).

Here's where I have to talk about what I think is the biggest ... uh, difficulty with Calvinism. It sure sounds like, if I'm right (since I am a Calvinist), God sure is mean. It's not very nice of him to predetermine me to Heaven and, for someone just like me in his eyes, no more or less sinful, to not predetermine them to Heaven (or to predetermine them to Hell, whichever the Calvinist prefers).

But here's why I think Calvinism is ok. We really cannot know what is always right for God to do or not to do. This is why Calvin was always saying that the finite can neither grasp nor contain the infinite. One thing we can know is that total depravity would make some sort of "predetermining" necessary; but as for why God would predetermine some and not others . . . that’s something we can't know.

Calvinism tries to have a good feel for what we can know and what we can't. So it ends in profound mystery: Why me? Why not someone else? But it begins with total depravity and the sovereignty of God, things that are not profoundly mysterious and certainly are revealed in Scripture. The point of Calvinism is absolutely not that I’m special because God chose me (that leads to pride). The point of Calvinism is that, since God chose me for reasons of His own having nothing to do with my worth or my personal righteousness, I should be humble because I had nothing to do with it.