Free Grace people have often struggled to explain how we offer a genuine alternative to both Calvinism and Arminianism.
There is one issue where we are different (though we’d prefer not to be!). Contrary to many Calvinists and Arminians, we are clear and consistent that salvation truly is by grace, through faith, apart from works—without any gimmicks or fine print. Though people in other traditions claim to believe that, too, they unwittingly reveal their conviction that simple faith in Jesus is not enough when they call our position “easy believism” and “cheap grace.”
But how else were we different? More specifically, how are we different given the five points of Calvinism (i.e., TULIP) or Arminianism (i.e., ROSES or DAISY)?
Many Free Grace people, myself included, came out of Calvinism (or four-point Calvinism) and were not looking for alternatives to TULIP. But over the years, that began to change, as we began to suspect that neither Calvinism nor Arminianism lined up with the Bible. That’s certainly how I felt. It was not a question of being different for the sake of being different but of being a Berean, stepping away from inherited patterns of thinking, and reading the Biblical texts afresh.
Back in 2017, I wrote Chosen to Serve, defending the idea that Biblical election is to service, not to eternal life. That meant I had an alternative to the “U” in TULIP, which stands for unconditional election. That breakthrough helped accelerate my rethinking of the other four points. The more I thought about them in light of the Bible, the more questions I had about their assumptions, and the more it dawned on me that the Biblical evidence was something at odds with both traditions.
I’ve meditated on these questions for several years now, and I’m not done yet. I had planned to write big books on each of the five points, and I still might, but I felt it was time to write in a general way about the alternatives I was seeing in Scripture.
I was nearly finished with the first draft of that work when Daniel Weierbach approached me with his idea for a new flower acronym, namely, LOTUS, and invited me to contribute a chapter to a book he was writing on the subject (see here). I was thrilled! Daniel cracked the flower code! With his permission, I wrote The Five Points of Free Grace using the acronym LOTUS. However, I defined the T and the U differently to fit the arguments I had already developed. For my purposes, they stand for:
I’m pleased to say The Five Points of Free Grace is now available as a free download on our website.
Click here: https://freegrace.in/product/the-five-points-of-free-grace/
It will soon appear in print and ebook formats. I hope it inspires a deeper search into God’s Word.
Edit: The very first downloads of the PDF and EPUB did not contain an endnote in the Introduction giving credit to Daniel Weierbach for inventing the LOTUS acronym. The text has been corrected (see his LOTUS book linked above). Please feel free to re-download the latest version.
Send your questions or comments to Shawn.
