Dave Burke offered the following rather
cogent argument about some of the problems of Unconditional Election (the
"U" of TULIP):
U:
'UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION'
This doctrine
asserts that God has already chosen those whom He intends to save. This choice
is not made on the basis of individual merit or even faith, but is instead an
arbitrary decision by God to extend mercy to some and withhold it from others.
Such a belief
raises the question: how can individual Christians know that they are the ones
whom God has chosen to save? The official answer from Calvinism boils down to
'Strictlyspeaking, they can't: but if you want to be on the safe side,
exercising the fruits of the Spirit is probably a good idea.'
Lacking any
objective means of confirming their assurance of salvation in this present
life, Calvinists tend to identify the unsaved retrospectively, citing I John
2:19 whenever a former Christian turns from his faith:
--They went out
from us, but they did not really belong to us, because if they had belonged to
us, they would have remained with us. But they went out from us to demonstrate
that all of them do not belong to us.
For obvious
reasons, this argument is vulnerable to the accusation that it relies on the
'No true Scotsman' fallacy