Part II: The Attainment System Described

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

Fairness requires stating the system accurately before critiquing it, and one caveat honestly: what follows is a composite profile. A number of movements around the world, restorationist, holiness, and pentecostal bodies among them, hold most or all of these marks; many other conditionalist churches hold only some, and even within movements that hold them, practice and emphasis vary by congregation and by period. The argument addresses the full profile; a reader whose tradition holds a subset may apply the relevant sections and set aside the rest. The marks:

1. A tiered eternity. Eternal reward is stratified into ranked abodes, in the fullest versions, Zion as the highest glory, then New Jerusalem, then the New Heaven, then the New Earth, with ordinary saved believers of other churches occupying, at best, the lower tiers.

2. An elite consecrated ministry identified with the 144,000. The highest abode is reserved for the movement's own ministers, typically unmarried, communally living, having forsaken property and secular employment, who are identified with the 144,000 of Revelation 7 and 14. The summit of eternity thus becomes an attainment conditioned on celibate consecration within one organization.

3. Exclusivism. Members are discouraged or forbidden from fellowshipping with other churches; the movement's ministers are regarded as end-time apostles upon whom the true church is being built; the movement's own communion is the bridal church that will be caught up at the rapture.

4. Perfectionism and conditional security. Entire sanctification and an "overcoming life" are presented as attainable and necessary. Salvation and reward are held conditionally; the believer who fails to press on may forfeit position or salvation itself.

5. Sign-manifestations as mandatory evidence. Baptism of the Holy Spirit must be evidenced by speaking in tongues; the absence of the sign is the absence of the blessing.

6. Divine healing as a test of faith. Consecrated believers are taught to trust God alone for healing and to refuse medicine, making the renunciation of medical care a mark of faith.

7. Latter-day revelatory authority. The founders and senior ministers are treated as recipients of restored end-time truth, "deeper truths" hidden from the wider church and revealed to the movement's clergy in the last days.

Taken together, the system is a ladder: repentance, faith, baptism, tongues, separation, sanctification, perfection, consecration; each rung climbed by human diligence, with the summit accessible only through the organization itself.