Theopedia

Limited Atonement

Definition

Limited atonement (also called definite atonement or particular redemption) is the doctrine that Christ’s death on the cross was intended by God to actually secure salvation for the elect, not merely to make salvation possible for everyone. It is one of the five points of Calvinism, denoted by the “L” in TULIP, and stands opposite Arminianism’s view that Christ died equally for all, with the actual benefit depending on each person’s own choice to believe.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession confesses that Christ “purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom the Father hath given unto Him,” and that “to all those for whom Christ hath obtained eternal redemption, he doth certainly and effectually apply and communicate the same.”1 The Canons of Dort (1619), the confession from which this Reformed consensus descends, states the same doctrine at greater length: Christ’s death is “of infinite worth and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world,” yet it was “the sovereign counsel, and most gracious will and purpose of God the Father, that the quickening and saving efficacy of the most precious death of his Son should extend to all the elect,” to “effectually redeem… those, and those only, who were from eternity chosen to salvation, and given to him by the Father.”2

Biblical Basis

Dort’s own rejection of the opposing view rests directly on two texts. Christ says of himself, “I lay down my life for the sheep… I know them” (John 10:15, 27), naming a specific “sheep” belonging to him rather than the whole of mankind, and Isaiah prophesies that when the Servant’s “soul” is “an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper in his hand” (Isa. 53:10), tying the atonement’s effect to a guaranteed outcome rather than a bare possibility.3

John Gill presses a further argument from the unity of Christ’s saving work: the same persons for whom Christ died are also the persons for whom he rose, for whom he ascended, and for whom he intercedes, “for his advocacy is founded upon his propitiatory sacrifice.” But Christ himself limits his intercession: “I pray for them; I pray not for the world” (John 17:9). If Christ’s death and his intercession are for the same people, and his intercession is not for everyone, his death cannot have been for everyone either.4 Gill adds a second argument from Isaiah 53:11, that the Servant “shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied”: if Christ died for all without exception and yet many are lost, that promised satisfaction fails for everyone whose sins are never actually removed.4

Doctrinal Significance

Boettner argues that the nature of the atonement itself settles its extent: “If it merely made salvation possible, it applied to all men. If it effectively secured salvation, it had reference only [to] the elect,” quoting Warfield’s summary of the choice facing every view of the cross: “The things we have to choose between are an atonement of high value, or an atonement of wide extension. The two cannot go together.”5 On this reasoning, the Arminian view does not so much widen the atonement’s extent as narrow its power: it reaches every person but secures no one’s salvation on its own, while the Reformed view narrows its extent but leaves its power to actually save fully intact.

Historical Development

The Synod of Dort, 1618-19

The Synod of Dort convened in 1618-19 to answer the Arminian Remonstrance of 1610, which had taught that Christ died equally for every person without distinction. Dort’s Second Head of Doctrine answered that Christ’s death is sufficient in value for the whole world, but efficient, by God’s own design, only for the elect, and explicitly rejected teaching that separates the value of Christ’s death from “a certain and definite decree to save any.”3

John Owen’s argument, 1647

A generation later, the Puritan theologian John Owen pressed the same distinction into a single argument in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647). Christ, he reasoned, bore in his sufferings either “all the sins of all men,” “all the sins of some men,” or “some sins of all men.” If the last, “then have all men some sins to answer for, and so shall no man be saved.” If the first, “why are not all men free from the punishment due unto their sins?” To answer “because of their unbelief” only pushes the question back: either Christ suffered the punishment due to that unbelief too, in which case no one could be lost for it, or he did not, in which case he did not die for all their sins after all. Only the second option, Owen concluded, that Christ suffered for all the sins of the elect, avoids both problems.6

Andrew Fuller and the extent of the gospel offer

In the late eighteenth century, the English Particular Baptist Andrew Fuller proposed a distinction meant to secure a universal gospel offer without abandoning definite atonement: considered simply in itself, apart from God’s own design for it, Christ’s death was “for sinners as sinners,” but considered in light of “the purpose of the Father in giving his Son to die,” it “was for the elect only.”7 James Petigru Boyce, reviewing this distinction in 1887, judged that it agreed with the older Reformed position on every substantial point (the necessity of satisfaction, its accomplishment by Christ alone, and its particular design), so that it had “merely at first sight the appearance of being better” than the position it was meant to improve on, without actually differing from it.7 The episode shows the “sufficient for all, efficient for the elect” formula’s own continuing life within Baptist theology specifically, not only in the Continental Reformed tradition that produced Dort.

Opposing Views

Arminianism holds that Christ’s death made salvation equally available to every person, with its actual application depending on each individual’s own free choice to believe, so that the atonement itself secures no one’s salvation in particular.

Hypothetical universalism (associated with the Amyraldian tradition) holds that God decreed Christ’s death for all people conditionally, on the hypothesis that they believe, prior to and distinct from his unconditional decree to grant faith only to the elect. Strong notes that even Calvin’s own later commentary on 1 John 2:2 reads in a more universal direction than later scholastic Calvinism (“Christ suffered for the sins of the whole world… his blood being shed not for a part of the world only, but for the whole human race”), which hypothetical universalists have appealed to as part of their case, though Strong cautions that Calvin’s harsher statements elsewhere in the Institutes complicate any simple reading of his overall position.8

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t Scripture say Christ died for “the whole world” and gave himself “for all” (1 John 2:2; 1 Tim. 2:6)? Boettner surveys how “world” and “all” function elsewhere in Scripture and shows both words regularly carry a restricted sense fixed by context. “World” can mean Jews and Gentiles together rather than every individual (John 12:47), a large but bounded region (Luke 2:1, 3; Acts 2:5; 19:27), or even a comparatively small group, as when Paul says the Roman church’s faith was “proclaimed throughout the whole world” (Rom. 1:8). If 1 John 5:19’s “the whole world lieth in the evil one” meant literally every person, John and his own readers, whom he calls “of God” in the same verse, would be included in that description.9 The same pattern holds for “all”: Paul was sent as a witness “unto all men” (Acts 22:15), meaning Jews and Gentiles as classes, not literally every individual who ever lived.10

Hebrews 2:9 says Christ “should taste death for every man”: doesn’t that settle the question? Gill points out that the underlying Greek has no word for “man” in this verse; it reads only “for every one,” and the immediate context supplies who that “every one” is: “everyone of the sons Christ brings to glory” (Heb. 2:10), “everyone of the brethren whom he sanctifies” (Heb. 2:11), and “everyone of the children given him by his Father” (Heb. 2:13-14), not an unqualified reference to the whole human race.11

2 Peter 2:1 warns of false teachers “denying the Lord that bought them,” implying Christ purchased even those who are finally lost. Gill argues the verse does not concern Christ’s atonement at all. The Greek word for “Lord” here (despotes) is elsewhere used of God the Father, not of Christ, and nothing in the passage mentions a price, blood, or redemption in the sense Scripture ordinarily uses when it does describe Christ’s atoning purchase (citing, by contrast, Acts 20:28; 1 Cor. 6:20; Eph. 1:7; 1 Pet. 1:18-19; Rev. 5:9). The “buying” in view echoes Moses’ language to Israel in Deuteronomy 32:6, “Is not he thy Father that hath bought thee?”, recalling God’s temporal deliverance of Israel from Egypt, not the cross; Peter uses the same image to aggravate the false teachers’ ingratitude toward the God who had once redeemed their nation.11

Doesn’t limiting the atonement to the elect undermine evangelism? The confessions answer this by keeping two things distinct: the extent of Christ’s saving purpose, and the scope of the gospel’s free offer. Dort states that the gospel promise “ought to be declared and published to all nations, and to all persons promiscuously and without distinction, to whom God out of his good pleasure sends the gospel,” and that where people perish in unbelief, “this is not owing to any defect or insufficiency in the sacrifice offered by Christ upon the cross, but is wholly to be imputed to themselves.”12 The call to repent and believe is addressed to everyone who hears it; definite atonement concerns why that call actually succeeds in some and not others, not how widely it may be preached.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 8, “Of Christ the Mediator,” paras. 5, 8. ↩

  2. Canons of Dort (Dordrecht, 1619), Second Head of Doctrine, “Of the Death of Christ, and the Redemption of Men Thereby,” arts. 2, 7. ↩

  3. Dort, Second Head, Rejection of Errors, Error 1. ↩ ↩2

  4. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 6, chap. 3, “Of the Objects of Redemption by Christ.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 114. ↩

  6. John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647), book 1, chap. 3. ↩

  7. James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 312-13, quoting Andrew Fuller, The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller, vol. 2, 690, 692-98. ↩ ↩2

  8. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1909), 777. ↩

  9. Boettner, 213. ↩

  10. Boettner, 212. ↩

  11. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 6, chap. 4, “Of Those Texts of Scripture Which Seem to Favour Universal Redemption.” ↩ ↩2

  12. Dort, Second Head, arts. 4-5. ↩