Limited Atonement

Part of a series on the Five Points of Calvinism
[Introduction] [Total Depravity] [Unconditional Election] [Limited Atonement]

The "L", Limited Atonement, is probably the most vilified of the five points of monergism. I have spoken with many people who held a high view of God's sovereignty, and who agreed with points such as Total Depravity and Perseverance of the Saints, but stumbled on Limited Atonement. Limited Atonement can be defined as the understanding that:

Christ's redeeming work was intended to save the elect only, and actually secured salvation for them, and only them.

It is my aim here, as always in this series, to clear up misconceptions about Limited Atonement and make it believable, if not exactly palatable. For I, too, somehow feel the injustice of it. Christ's death - limited only to certain people! It seems so unfair of God. Yet, I have come to believe over my years of growth as a Christian and increasing knowledge of the Bible that it is true.

One thing that Limited Atonement does not mean is that God's saving power is limited somehow, that God is being put in a box, or that God's salvation is any less glorious. What's more, the extent of God's atonement is not limited by any factor except God 's own justice and wisdom. Spurgeon's sermon on this topic is well worth reading.

It also does not mean that God does not love those who are not His elect, nor does it mean (as I have argued before) that believers in Limited Atonement are less evangelistic than those who do not believe in Limited Atonement. It means simply what it says: that the salvific effect Christ's death is only applicable to those who God has elected. In fact, Limited Atonement does not even mean that Christ's death had no effect on those who are not elect. Christ's death had many effects on men, including changing the way God relates to us, handing Satan an intermediate defeat, showing us an example of supreme self-sacrifice, etc. The only effect it does not have for the non-elect (undoubtedly, from our point of view, although perhaps not from God's, the most important) is saving them from their sins.

Now that we've considered what Limited Atonement is and is not, I will try to convince you that it is reasonable. But, before we can consider that question, we need to consider two others first. The first one is: Why do people go to hell? It seems to me that there are only two answers, from a Christian point of view, to that question. First, because they don't believe in Jesus; or, second, because they are sinners who are not covered by Christ's redeeming blood.

Let's consider the first answer. Do people really go to hell because they don't believe in Jesus? I don't see any Scriptural support for that idea. Furthermore, there are real problems with that belief. First, what about the "native in Africa", or the "good Jew" problem? Is it really right that God should punish people forever because they happened to be born in the wrong place, the wrong time, or into the wrong family? What about people before Jesus died? If you go to hell because you don't believe in Jesus, why aren't they all in hell now? (Below I will argue that the second position does not have this problem, although on first blush it seems it does.)

For that matter, what about the good and honest atheist? It seems to me (and it seemed the same to atheists I have actually talked to) that this kind of God would capricious and unworthy of our worship. Now, before you judge me for considering philosophy and man's judgment over revealed truth, I believe in Limited Atonement because I believe it is scriptural, not because I was convinced of it by philosophical considerations such as I am raising now. My discussion here is merely to clear up misconceptions and hopefully to help people better understand the Biblical data, which is always the final court of appeal.

An analogy may help: people who jump out of an airplane without a parachute don't die primarily because they didn't have a parachute, but because they jumped out of the airplane. The parachute could have saved them, but its lack is not the cause of them dying: jumping out of the airplane and hitting the ground is. It's the same with salvation: believing can save us, but lack of believing is not what condemns us.

On the other hand, consider the second answer: that people go to hell because they are sinners. This answer seems to me much better fitting with the Biblical data, as well as other doctrines that I am many non-monergists accept (such as Total Depravity). Further, it does not have the philosophical problems above. It may seem that the native in Africa problem applies, but I believe it does not. The native in Africa (substitute good Jew or atheist if you wish) goes to hell not because they don't believe in Jesus, but because they are sinners. I am a sinner too, of course, which means that I deserve to go to hell just as much as the good native or Jew or Muslim or, for that matter, Adolph Hitler or Josef Stalin. Believing in Jesus saves me from what I otherwise deserve: that's why we call it grace.

In fact, if people went to hell because they did not believe in Jesus, that would make salvation at least in part a work on our parts, and it would not be fully of God's grace. The native in Africa would go to hell because he didn't perform the right work, and I am going to heaven because I did. As Paul would say, "God forbid!"

So, if it is true that men go to hell because they are sinners, let's consider a second question: what is the effect of Christ's death on the cross? Is it that our sin is covered, the guilt of our sins is removed, and we are saved? Or is it simply that we are made savable? It must be the former, because otherwise our sins would still be on our own heads, their effect still upon us. If we are made savable, but God still considers us "dead in our sins and trespasses," and if people go to hell because of their sin, then we would still be going to hell. To avoid going to hell, something needs to remove the guilt of our sins; and that something must be Christ's atoning death. Thus, the effect of Christ's death must be that the guilt of our sins is removed, it is put on His head, and He became sin for us, in our place.

As an aside, I should note that this is the doctrine of substitutionary atonement - Christ took the guilt of our sins on His own head. I have heard people affirm the idea of substitutionary atonement yet deny that the effect of Christ's death was to effectively save people. It seems to me that this is a logical contradiction: the two ideas - substitutionary atonement and Christ's salvific death - are essentially the same thing. In either case, Christ died in our place and took our penalty.

Having considered these two questions, let's finally consider Limited Atonement. If Christ's death takes away the guilt of our sins, for whom did Christ die? It cannot be for the entire world, because then everybody would go to heaven, because the guilt of their sins would be removed. Or, alternatively, it removes the absolute sovereignty of God, because we as men would be able to continually thwart His plans. He planned that Christ would remove the guilt of sin, and thus that we would all go to heaven, but we keep ruining His plans by not believing in Him. That kind of God would be continually frustrated by His creatures.

The only conclusion that makes sense to me is Limited Atonement. Christ's death is perfectly effective for those whom He intends to save, and God's will is never thwarted. Those who He does not save deserve to go to hell (as do we all) because they are sinners, not because they did not believe in Jesus. It's completely by God's grace, not due to anything - not even having faith - that anybody is saved. Praise be to God!

Additional Resources:

monergism.com's Limited Atonement page has lots of them

Unconditional Election

Part of a series on the Five Points of Calvinism
[Introduction] [Total Depravity] [Unconditional Election] [Limited Atonement]

The second part of TULIP is, of course, the U: Unconditional Election. This seems like a doctrine that no believing Christian could argue with, because the Bible so continually talks about election from cover to cover. God elected Noah and his out of all the men on earth at the time; God elected Lot out of Sodom; God elected Joseph our of the sons of Jacob; God elected Moses out of all those babies who died to not only be saved from the Pharaoh's order, but ultimately to save "Israel mine elect" out of all the nations of the earth, such as the Amalekites; God chose Isaac and Jacob but rejected Ishmael and Esau, and not because of what they had done; God elected Saul though he had hid himself among the stuff to escape being chosen; God elected David from among his brothers to be king, and ultimately every king of Israel thereafter; and the list goes on.

Then in the New Testament, the disciples did not choose Jesus, Jesus chose them; God first chose the Jews to receive salvation, then the Gentiles; God chose Peter (unwilling though he was) to start the transition to allowing Gentiles into the church; he even chose Saul to be an apostle period, though he was completely unwilling. Ephesians 1:3-14 best sums it up:

He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:4-6 ESV)

Note that in every case, God did the choosing without regard to whether the person had done anything good or not (i.e. unconditionally); in fact, in many cases (e.g. Lot, Saul the king, Saul/Paul the apostle), the person chosen was quite wicked. So the fact of election should be so clear in the Bible from cover to cover, that there should be no discussion required, at least among Christians. (Unbelievers also disagree with the idea of God's election, of course, but that would be expected.)

Yet, Christians rail at the idea of God choosing unconditionally. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that people have no problem with the idea of God choosing unconditionally in all the above cases, but they rail at the idea of God choosing us unconditionally for salvation. Why is that? It seems to me that if you have a problem with God choosing us unconditionally for salvation, God has a lot more to answer for that just that. What about all the other people on earth in Noah's time? What about those poor babies in Moses's? What about the Gentiles for thousands of years before God sovereignly chose them in the New Testament days? Where does God get the right to make all those choices unconditionally?

He has the right, of course, because He is God, and we are not. And since we trust that God is right in making all those decisions, why not trust that God will rightly make the election decision as well? Yet, we don't. One of the worst examples is Dr. Nelson Price's wretched bus stop analogy. Where do I get off calling it "wretched"? I call it that because, although I highly respect Dr. Price in so many ways, his analogy so completely ignores the facts that it's almost criminal. It would be like me saying that the reason we should not be atheists is because atheists kill babies. In fact, it's worse than that, because a logical result of believing in atheism is that human life is not worth anything, therefore killing babies can be justified by any number of practical reasons.

However, no Calvinist/monergist could believe what the bus stop analogy seems to say that they believe. Nobody believes that a "missionary couple who with zeal have served Christ all their lives" would be rejected by God because they are not among the elect, and that for two reasons. First, we cannot look at that missionary couple and know for sure if they are among the elect. It may be that they were externally serving Christ because they thought they could earn their way to heaven: like the little boy in the joke being told by his mother to stand up against his will, perhaps they are standing up on the outside but sitting down on the inside. Perhaps they are missionaries because an elderly relative promised them a big inheritance if they became missionaries. The truth is, neither I nor you can truly judge somebody else's motives; heck, we have a hard enough time judging our own. But surely God can rightly judge people's motives. And this is one reason why the bus stop analogy is bad: because God would never judge wrongly, as the analogy implies.

The second reason why the analogy is bad, of course, is more basic: that missionary couple would never want to serve Christ with zeal in the first place (assuming that zeal was real and holy) unless God had first elected them and then regenerated their hearts, taken out the heart of stone and put in the heart of flesh.

So what do Christians who wish to deny Unconditional Election do with the many Biblical texts that teach election? They redefine it. In the above article, Dr. Price defines election as being that God "gave man a free will to choose his or her eternal destiny depending of his or her faith in Christ." In other words, in a way that is compatible with the presupposition of libertarian free will. I am not sure what text that comes from; in fact I would say that such a definition of election is completely against all the examples of sovereign election given above. Is it possible that this is what God means by "election" in this one particular instance? Sure, but it militates against every other example of election ever given in the Bible. The evidence for that understanding would have to be very strong to go against the entire tenor of Scripture like that, and I submit that it is not. The references below contain many references that show exactly that.

Another redefinition is by Dr. Ergun Caner. He signs many blog posts with the tag line "Elected because I selected" and this, in fact, seems to be a catchphrase of his. With all due respect to Dr. Caner (who I do in fact respect very much), that makes no sense at all. In what sphere of life is my choice the cause of being "elected" or "chosen"? Am I elected President of the USA because I want to be? Am I chosen captain of the hockey team because I chose to be? Did Israel become God's chosen people because they decided to be? No! In fact, I'd submit that the idea that "elected because I selected" would never be proposed for any use of the word "elected" if not to counteract the obvious meaning of the Biblical doctrine of election.

So, if you chose to disbelieve in Unconditional Election, do it for good and consistent reasons: don't believe that God is sovereign over every sphere of life, especially including man's salvation. But don't pull the word out of the Bible and then redefine it to a completely alien concept based on your presupposition of man's libertarian free will.

Additional Resources:

Spurgeon on Election
A "Southern Baptist" on Election
Boettner on Election

Total Depravity

Part of a series on the Five Points of Calvinism
[Introduction] [Total Depravity] [Unconditional Election] [Limited Atonement]

The first of the five points is, of course, Total Depravity: the idea that sin touches every aspect of our lives and makes us naturally incapable of doing anything at all that is good in God's sight. This does not mean, of course, that we do not do anything good (more below); but, when applied to the soteriological question, we cannot do anything that merits our salvation. The most straightforward Biblical statement of the doctrine, it seems to me, is Romans 8:7-8 (ESV):

For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

As with many doctrines, there have been major misunderstandings of Total Depravity by those who don't hold it. One of the foremost that comes to mind was that of one of the men God has used in my life: C. S. Lewis. Lewis said:

"The doctrine of Total Depravity -- when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing -- may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil worship" (The Problem of Pain, HarperCollins edition 2001, p. 29)... "I disbelieve that doctrine partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature. (ibid, p.61)

I cannot begin to explain the extent of influence Lewis has had in my life for the better - it was his writings that largely led me to intellectually accept the truth of Christianity - but I cannot agree with his statement here. Lewis is begging the question in a subtle, unstated way. The doctrine does indeed mean that sin affects every part of us, including our moral judgments. However, Lewis judges the doctrine based on a synergistic understanding of salvation: the doctrine says that our depravity causes us to be unable to respond to God, which (in his view) makes believers power worshipers or, at best, robots. In other words, Lewis is using an Arminian understanding of salvation (that sinners can freely respond to God) to judge a non-Arminian doctrine. Naturally, if Arminian soteriology is true, then Total Depravity is to be rejected.

However, just you don't judge a football game according to the rules of baseball, you don't take an Arminian assumption and use it to judge Calvinism. The Arminian assumption is that we can choose to follow God, which negates the doctrine. However, the Calvinist understanding is based on the idea that we cannot choose to follow God: that sin has so infected our spirits that none of us wants to follow God. In other words, using Arminianism to argue against Total Depravity is begging the question. Total Depravity must not be determined by Arminian presuppositions - or Calvinistic, for that matter - but rather Biblical support. (There's lots of support, of course: see comments by John Piper, R. C. Sproul, Herman Hanko, and many others. My main purpose here is not to defend the doctrine per se, but to relate my own thoughts on the subject.)

The last part of the quote above, that there is "much goodness in human nature," is also a question-begging assumption. The assumption seems to be that human nature, per se, contains much that is good. But that assumption is simply a negative statement of Total Depravity. In fact, I believe that the Bible does support the idea that in my flesh there is nothing good; all good things come from God Himself. It is not our nature that causes us to do good things, but rather God, who causes rain to fall on the just as well as the unjust. If we are thoughtful and caring towards our fellow-man, there's only one reason: God's grace, poured out on us though we don't deserve it.

Among those who demur from the Arminian position, Total Depravity seems to me to be among the most popular of the five points. People sometimes claim to be one-, two-, three-, or four-point Calvinists (a former pastor of mine called himself a three-and-a-half pointer), but it seems that the one they always include is Total Depravity. This seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding as well. In fact, the five points of Calvinism are not things you can really pick and choose (same for the five points brought forth first by the Remonstrants). The five points of both are the constituent parts of the appropriate Biblical understanding. If you do not have the basic Biblical understanding, you almost certainly do not subscribe to any of the parts.

In fact, in a very real sense, Total Depravity is not just one of the five points: it is THE foundational point. Sin has completely permeated our being: mind, soul, and spirit. It has made us spiritually dead, unable to initiate love towards God (such as the Pelagians would say) or even respond to the love God shows us (such as the Arminians would say). If you really believe in Total Depravity, it seems to me that you cannot believe in any form of synergism. God loves us, but due to our depravity, we cannot respond to His love; we are dead in our sins and trespasses.

The idea that I am able to respond to God's love in such a state seems to negate the idea of Total Depravity, as well as (more importantly) the Biblical analogy of being dead. Lazarus didn't reach out and accept the resurrection Jesus was offering him - he was unable to do anything until Jesus brought him back from the dead. So, it seems that if one wants to reject Total Depravity, one should reject it; but to cling to the idea of Total Depravity and reject the other soteriological tenets of Calvinism makes no sense to me.

The Five Points of Calvinism

Part of a series on the Five Points of Calvinism
[Introduction] [Total Depravity] [Unconditional Election] [Limited Atonement]

It should come as no surprise to anybody who reads this blog (if there were some day to be such people, that is) that I am a five-point Calvinist. Note that this is distinct from what one denizen of Kim Riddlebarger's blog called "fifty-point Calvinism," i.e., following Calvin's every teaching. It is largely for this reason that I like to call myself (and people who believe similarly such as Reformed Baptists, John MacArthur, etc.) "monergists." If I don't accept all Calvin's teachings, perhaps I shouldn't take his name as my description.

There are many descriptions extant of what the five points of monergism really mean and where they came from. There are certainly fine expositions of the five points out there. But I do not wish to write another one. My goal is to write down my thoughts on each, especially from the perspective of somebody who has not embraced monergism until recently. If I succeed in this goal, perhaps I can help somebody else to understand the five points a little better as well.

Speaking of the latter, I have heard a number of times synergists who expect to shock us by telling us that "Calvin didn't even believe in Calvinism," presumably meaning - if it means anything at all - that Calvin did not formulate his famous five points. It's not a great shocker. The five points, as most monergists know, were formulated by the Synod of Dort over fifty years after Calvin died. They were formulated as a response to the five points of the Remonstrants, followers of Jakob Harmenszoon, also known as Arminius. Thus, it was the Arminians who first formulated five points: the Calvinists created theirs as an answer.

The initial observation I wish to make, in fact, builds on this fact. The five points were not formulated - or even unequivocally stated - by Calvin. This fact does not bother me in the least, because, frankly, I don't care what John Calvin said. I don't believe "Calvinism" to be the truth because Calvin said it, but because I believe it is the best systematic presentation I know with of the overall teachings of the Bible in the area of soteriology. And I have seen a few: I first became a Christian primarily by reading C. S. Lewis, who was a pretty thorough-going Arminian. (I think he clearly rejected Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, and Persistence of the Saints; I'm not sure where he'd fall on Limited Atonement and Irresistible Grace.) Thus, I also became an Arminian. As I learned more and more teachings of the Bible, I rejected outright Arminianism and moved along my scale to become what I'd call a "semi-Calvinist." Finally, about eight months ago, I accepted the monergist view of salvation.

At no point in this process did the explicit teachings of Calvin come into play; in fact, on some points taught by Calvin, I was far more in accord with his beliefs at the beginning than at the end of the process. For example, regarding paedobaptism, I was brought up in the Roman Catholic Church and became a Christian in the Episcopal Church under (as I said) heavy influence of C. S. Lewis. If anybody had a basis for believing in paedobaptism, it was me. Yet I gradually came to reject a number of the teachings of Calvin and others, while embracing that which I believe is Biblical.

I think most monergists would have a similar story. However, I have heard the most ludicrous statements by anti-Calvinists along these lines. I heard one Southern Baptist preacher imply that the result of coming to believe reformed doctrine is to become a paedobaptist. Another, a well-known seminary professor who should certainly know better, said that some Calvinists think that JC stands for John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. There are weasel words here, no doubt, so that, if challenged, these men would say "I didn't mean all, I meant only some Calvinists think that way." But, in fact, the bias in the mind of the speaker, and that intended to be created in the mind of the listener, is clear.

After all, since the avowed intention of the speakers is to dissuade people from believing reformed theology, what good would it do to really say that "some Calvinists" believe such-and-such? I could say "some synergists kill babies," which would be true if even one of them did; but it would have no bearing whatsoever on whether one should listen to synergist soteriological doctrines unless I was implying that all or most synergists do so, and that killing babies is a near-inevitable result of following the synergist doctrine.

That is ridiculous, of course: the vast majority of born-again synergist Christians no more support abortion than any monergist, and thus I would never use such comparisons. But synergists don't seem to have a problem using them. I am not, for the same reason, trying to use this as an argument against synergist soteriology: simply imploring synergists not to use them.

Anyway, thus begins my series on the five points. I hope it will be edifying to somebody, and clarifying to myself.