THE INCARNATION AND “LIMITED ATONEMENT”

 

The Revd Professor James B. Torrance, Aberdeen

 

Many years ago I was invited to take part in a conference at Tyndale House in Cambridge on the “five points of Calvinism” – total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, the perseverance of the saints – the well known TULIP – in terms of which Calvinists, in the tradition of the Synod of Dort, rejected Arminianism.  I read a paper on the subject of election, and sought to show, as Dr Kendall has argued recently¹, that Calvin, although he taught, in a carefully formulated way, a doctrine of “double decree”, did not allow this to lead him to reach a doctrine of “limited atonement” in the manner of the later Calvinists.  In the very lively discussions which followed, the question was put to me “Did Christ die to make our Salvation actual or possible?” – a good seventeenth century scholastic Calvinist question!  How does one answer this question?  If I had replied that Christ died for all to make the salvation of all men “possible”, but it only becomes “actual” IF we repent and believe, I would have been accused of being an “Arminian”!  The weakness of this position is that it can run into a doctrine of conditional grace, and ground election on the divine foreknowledge of our human decision, a view rightly rejected by John Calvin and the Calvinist tradition.  My questioner knew I would avoid that answer!  If I said, “No, Christ died to make our salvation actual, not just possible,” that he actually bore our sins in his own body on the Cross long ago, as I would say, the next question would have been, “Did he make the salvation of all men actual or only of some!”  In other words, this question implies, that there are only three possible positions – Arminianism, universalism or limited atonement.

 

How then should we answer such a question?  I think I would say a number of things.  (1)  The confession of faith of the believer is to say that our salvation is made actual by the work of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  It is from the beginning to end entirely the work of God’s grace, but within that one work there are three great ‘moments’ – the moment of eternity, the eternal love of the Father; the moment of history, when Christ died and rose again nineteen hundred years ago to fulfill for us in time God’s eternal purpose, so that (in Calvin’s phrase) “all parts of our salvation are complete in Him”; the moment of experience when the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ and brings us to personal faith and repentance.  This is the basic Trinitarian structure of the first three books of Calvin’s Institutio [Institutes].  As in the doctrine of the Trinity there are three persons, but one God, so there are three “moments” in the one work of grace and forgiveness.

 

(2)  Within this, certainly there is a mystery, but if we are true to the New Testament we must assert that the Father loves all his creatures, Christ died for all, but none can come to the Father except the Spirit draw him.  But to say it is a “mystery” does not mean we abandon any attempt to probe this mystery, and see what light the Bible and the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ throw on the mystery.  Theology is faith seeking understanding.  What kind of ‘logic’ controls any answers we seek to give?  It is a mistake, I believe, to interpret the relation between the headship of Christ over all as Mediator, and the effectual calling of the Spirit in terms of an Aristotelian dichotomy between “actuality” and “possibility”.

 

(3)  It is important to recognize in theology, as in any science or a court of law, that the nature of the questions we ask determines the kind of answers we give.  In response to the above question, to echo an American

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right in law, I would appeal to the “fifth amendment of the constitution” the right to refuse to answer a question which can incriminate. (“Have you or have you not left off beating your wife, yes or no?!”)

 

(4)  It is precisely this kind of Aristotelian logic which led the later Calvinists like John Owen to formulate the doctrine of a “limited atonement”.  The argument is that if Christ died for all men, and all are not saved, then Christ died in vain – and a priori, because God always infallibly achieves his purposes, this is unthinkable.  Where does this same argument lead us when we apply it to the doctrine of God, as John Owen and Jonathan Edwards did?  On these grounds they argued that justice is the essential attribute of God, but his love is arbitrary.  In his classical defense of the doctrine of a limited atonement, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ² in Book IV John Owen examines the many texts in which the word “all” appears, saying that Christ died “for all”, and argues that “all” means “all the elect”.  For example, when he turns to John 3:16, he says “By the ‘world’, we understand the elect of God only….” (p. 209).  What then about “God so loved….”?  Owen argues that if God loves all, and all are not saved, then he loves them in vain.  Therefore he does not love all!  If he did, this would imply imperfection in God.  “Nothing that includes any imperfection is to be assigned to Almighty God”.  In terms of this “logic” he argues love is not God’s nature.  There is no “natural affection and propensity in God to the good of his creatures”.  “By love is meant an act of his will (where we conceive his love to be seated…)”  God’s love is thus assigned to his will to save the elect only.  It seems to me that this is a flagrant case where a kind of logic leads us to run in the face of the plain teaching of the Bible that God is Agape (pure love) in his innermost Being, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and what he is in his innermost being, he is in all his works and ways.  [...]  Owen's argument illustrates the point, so often made by theologians (like Pascal, Barth, Moltmann, Rahner and many others) of the problems involved in fusing an Aristotelian doctrine of God with the teaching of the Bible about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The doctrine of the Incarnation is not that an impassible God came in Jesus Christ.  It is that God came as man in Christ and “suffered under Pontius Pilate”.  As God and as man he experiences the rejection of those who hate him (not of those whom he hates!) but loves them to the end in spite of their hatred.  He takes vicariously to himself for mankind both his own divine judgments and the rejection of men, when he dies for us that we might be forgiven, and receive his forgiveness by the gift of the Spirit.  This is not “universalism” but it is universal love.  There is a sin of “denying the Lord who bought us” and a “sin against the Holy Ghost” – a sin against the Incarnate love of God.  If we apply the same kind of “logic” to the doctrine of Creation which Owen applies to the death of Christ, we cannot say that God in covenant love created all men in Adam for covenant love and communion, because if he did, he did so in vain.  The Calvinist conclusion from this doctrine of God is that he creates all men under natural law for obedience but only the elect for love.  The end result of this kind of argument is the desperate attempt to argue against the plain literal meaning of such great passages as John 3:16; 1 John 2:1-2; 2 Cor 5:19; 1 Tim 2:4-6; Heb 2:9.  A clear illustration of this is John Owen’s determined attempt to explain away the words in 2 Peter 2:1 about those who are delivered to destruction “for denying the Lord who bought them” (p. 250ff).³

 

This raises for us in the acutest way the question of how we formulate our doctrine of God.  Twice in recent months I have had students who have said

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to me, “Doesn’t the Bible say in Romans 9:13 ‘Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated?’  Is that not proof that God loves the elect and hates the reprobate?” – as some of the Puritans and Calvinists like William Perkins taught.  My immediate reply was to ask, “Do you hate your father and mother?  You should if you interpret Scripture (Luke 14:26) in that way!”  Surely such passages must be carefully interpreted in their context.  But more important, it is a mistake to construct a doctrine of God out of isolated texts, even if they appear to fit a “logical system”, rather than in the light of the Incarnation.  The question I put to these two students was, “How do you interpret the second table of the law, ‘thou shalt love they neighbor’?  Does this not include our enemies?”  The good news of the Gospel is that God sent his son, born of a woman under the law, to redeem us who are under the law, fulfilling the law for us.  Who then is Christ?  The doctrine of the Incarnation is that he is at once the God who gives us the two tables of the law, who commands us to love our enemies, and he is the one who as man for us fulfilled the law – loving his enemies, praying for those who spitefully used him and rejected him.  Does God tell us to love all men, including our enemies, but he himself does not?  The logic of the Incarnation is not the logic of Aristotle.  It seems to me a danger in the “Systematic Theology”, the subject I teach, to have a neatly structured “system” (no doubt based on biblical texts) into which we fit God and Christ and atonement “logically”, as into pigeon holes, and fail to see that every doctrine must be seen in the light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The doctrine of a limited atonement emerges where we draw inferences from certain “logical premisses” or isolated texts or an Aristotelian idea of God.  Rather we must see atonement as the work of the One who loves all his creatures, the one by whom and for whom all things were created – the one who so loved Jerusalem that he wept over it, who is our “suffering God”.  The logic of the incarnation may at times conflict with the logic of Aristotle.

 

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As I see it, the mistake of his [Calvin’s] successors was twofold.  The scholastic

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Calvinists made election prior to grace, beginning with the doctrine of a double decree as a major premiss, and then moving on to formulate the doctrines of grace, incarnation and atonement, as God’s way of executing the eternal decrees – thereby “logically” teaching that Christ died only for the elect, to secure infallibly the salvation of the elect.  [...]  To speak about election – the eternal Will of God and the decrees – apart from Christ, or about election as prior to grace in the order of decrees, is to go behind the back of Christ to some inscrutable impassible God.  It is to fail to see the significance of the Trinity, that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one in Being (homoousios), and that this Triune God has made known his Nature and his Will to us in Jesus Christ.  We know of no Nature of God nor Will of God other than that of the Father, made known to us in Christ by the Spirit.  When St Thomas Aquinas in his “mediaeval synthesis” sought to wed the God of Aristotle to the God of the Bible, was his Aristotelian idea of God as Necessary Being, the Unmoved Mover, Pure Actuality, not also wedded to an Islamic notion of the Will of god, as in the Arab Aristotelians like Averroes and Avicenna, who preserved Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the earlier Middle Ages when they were unknown in Europe?⁴  This concept of an omnipotent impassible God, who knows all and wills all was certainly injected deeply into Western theology and emerges in certain forms of scholastic Calvinism.

 

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