A Tulip in the Roman Curia: Proposing Novel Acronyms for Arminian and Lutheran Theology

The paradoxical relationships between free will, salvific grace, and human depravity have a perplexed man for thousands of years. In the early days of the Christian Church, Catholics affirmed the free will of man while emphasizing that God was not bound by time. This meant that, although the man was a free moral agent, God’s foreknowledge of past, present, and future allowed Him to know the “elect” before the foundation of the world. During the Protestant Reformation, new systems of theology were posited to explain the relationship between these concepts. The three most important of these theological systems are Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Arminianism. In the English-speaking world, Calvinism has become the best-known and most easily-grasped Protestant theological system due to the ingenious mnemonic TULIP, i.e., total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints, to describe the five points of Calvinism. The purpose of this paper is to propose two new mnemonics to describe the theological systems of Lutheranism and Arminianism. These mnemonics are couched in the language of Calvinism for simplicity. For Lutheran theology, the acronym TAURUS is proposed. For Arminian theology, the acronym CURIA is proposed.