Tulip for Beginners

Where have all the flowers gone – or whatever happened to TULIP?

‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ has nothing whatever to do with the song of that name! It simply introduces this short series of articles explaining central teachings of the Reformed Faith. TULIP is an acronym or short way of saying something and stands for the Five Points of Calvinism: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace and the Perseverance of the Saints.

The Synod of Dort, a council of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands, published the Five Points of Calvinism in 1619. These points or ‘canons’ answered the five points of the Arminian Remonstrance (Protest) of 1610. Arminius and his supporters presented a watered-down version of the reformed teachings but the reformed churches saw the danger and published the Five Points. Since then there have been two camps, the Calvinists and the Arminians.

Total Depravity

When somebody says ‘I’m as good as the next person’, without even realising it, they are saying the exact opposite because the next man is not good at all. The Bible teaches that we are sinful from the inside out. In Romans 6:16, Paul talks about us being ‘slaves to sin’. In Romans 7:18 he makes the remarkable assertion that “in [our] flesh nothing good dwells: for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good, I do not find.”

The problem is that our entire constitution is so affected by sin that we cannot please God. Calvin put it like this; “According to the constitution of our nature, oil might be extracted from a stone sooner than we could perform a good work.’ (Institutes III. 14.5) How different from the utopian optimism of evolutionary thought! So deep-seated and so comprehensive is our depravity that Jeremiah said ‘the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?’ (17:9).

Don’t get it wrong, we all have a moral consciousness but that’s not the point. As Paul said, ‘to will is present with me’ but he concludes ‘the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice’ (Romans 7:19). Total Depravity is the inability of the mind, will and affections to please God. Our Confession of Faith says “By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body.” (Westminster Confession of Faith. VI.II).

It’s pretty miserable isn’t it? Total Depravity puts us in our place and the important thing is that it is only when we know that we are real sinners that we will come before God in reverence, godly fear and penitence of heart. It isn’t bad to feel bad. How can we ever appreciate God’s sovereign grace in our Lord, Jesus Christ, if we do not understand our abject poverty and absolute need?

But where has Total Depravity gone? Is it in the preaching, prayers and worship of the church? Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church, San Jose, California the eighth largest congregation in the USA, has a simple answer to the question “What shall I preach this Sunday?” Preachers, he thinks, should be asking, “To whom will I be preaching?” and adds “simply thinking through the needs of the audience will help determine God’s will for the message . . . People’s immediate needs are a key to where God would have you begin speaking on that particular occasion’ (Purpose Driven Church 227).

Total Depravity helps us approach God in the right way; remove it and something else happens. On worship Warren writes “Figure out what mood you want your service to project, and then create it” (264) and again he writes, “start positive and end positive’ (271). Again he writes “we use humour in our services ... it is not a sin to help people feel good” (272) and ‘[we made] a strategic decision to stop singing hymns in [our] seeker services with the result that ‘we have attracted thousands more because of our music … Saddleback now has a complete pop/rock orchestra.’ (285). The aim, as Warren puts it, is to make “members feel special ... they need to feel special” (320,323). Well we all want to feel special, don’t we - but according to Calvin, “man’s nature … is a perpetual factory of idols” (Institutes, 1.11.8). In the words of Ecclesiastes 7:29 “Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” That’s the trouble, when depraved people start inventing worship, anything can happen! Let’s get back to the Bible and the reality of what we know when we are most honest with ourselves. It is not that we all do the same number of bad things but that the same number of bad things is wrong with us. We are totally depraved or “wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body.”