Protestants and Catholics share the belief that Jesus Christ died on Calvary for our sins. But we disagree about what that means. Besides the various debates over how Christ’s death saves us, there’s another debate that’s sometimes overlooked: for whom did Christ die on the cross?
Certain Protestants, particularly those in the Reformed or Calvinist tradition believe in the doctrine of limited atonement, claiming that Christ didn’t die for everyone. If you’re familiar with so-called “five-point Calvinism,” this is one of the five distinctly Calvinist points.
The Calvinist Synod of Dort in 1618-19 declared that Christ redeemed “all those and only those who were chosen from eternity to salvation and given to him by the Father.” The 1646 Westminster Confession adds that “neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only.” So why would anyone believe in such a doctrine, and what does Scripture have to say on the matter?
Only for many?
The first reason someone might believe in the limited atonement is that Jesus sometimes speaks of his death being “for many.” At the Last Supper, for instance, Jesus says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). It sounds as if Jesus is saying that his blood isn’t going to be poured out for everyone but only for some. After all, if your boss ended a meeting by saying that “many of you will still have a job on Monday,” you would probably not greet this news with relief, since the obvious implication is that some won’t.
But we’re reading an implication into this passage that doesn’t exist in the Greek. Jesus doesn’t say that he’ll die for “many of us.” He literally says that his blood is poured out “for the many.” A better reading would be something closer to “the masses.”
For instance, if you referred to “the many people on Earth,” you’re not implying that some people are on Earth and others are off in space. You’re simply saying that the group of people to whom you’re referring is large. So, there’s no contradiction between Jesus saying that he gives his life “as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28) and St. Paul saying that he “gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:6).
Only for the Church?
The second reason is that Scripture sometimes describes those Christ died for in narrow terms. For instance, St. Paul says, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). But it would be a disaster to read Paul as saying that Christ died only for those currently in the Church. After all, how many people were in the Church on that first Good Friday? Not many, and certainly not you or I.
In fact, St. Paul elsewhere says that “Christ died for the ungodly,” and that “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:6-10). As Jesus explains, “I came not to call the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2:17).
Just as there is no contradiction between saying that Christ died for “the many” and for all, there’s no contradiction between saying that he died for the Church and for the ungodly. In writing to the Church, it’s not surprising that Paul’s focus should be on the meaning of Christ’s death for the Church.
But the New Testament authors are clear that this death isn’t just for us. St. John is perhaps the most explicit. Writing to the Church, he says that Christ “is the expiation for our sins and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). The epistle to the Hebrews likewise says that Jesus lowered himself “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for every one” (Heb. 2:5).
Only for the saved?
The final major reason offered for limited atonement is that Christ’s death is “for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). But not everyone is saved, so it seems that Christ didn’t die for everyone. The argument here relies on circular theological reasoning, assuming that if Christ died for a person’s salvation, then that person will necessarily be saved.
But that argument works only if you assume a particular view of predestination and don’t acknowledge our ability to freely reject Christ’s ransom for our sins. So, you have to already believe the Reformed system for this to sound like a good argument.
The Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul said, “I don’t think we want to believe in a God who sends Christ to die on the cross and then crosses his fingers, hoping that someone will take advantage of that atoning death” (R.C. Sproul, “TULIP and Reformed Theology: Limited Atonement”). But this is a strawman argument. Dom Boylan famously referred to Christ as “this tremendous lover,” and the Song of Solomon presents the soul’s relationship to God as that of a woman being charmed by a suitor.
We know that God is a persistent, active suitor. We don’t believe that he just sits by the phone, hoping for a call. But the God of the Bible actually cares about our consent, and that means that we do have the power to refuse God’s repeated overtures. Indeed, Sproul’s framing of the issue is telling: his theology isn’t based on what the Bible actually says but upon the kind of God that “we want to believe in.”
At the heart of this theology is the belief, as Sproul explains, that God’s “plan and design was perfectly conceived and perfectly executed so that the will of God to save his people is accomplished by the atoning work of Christ.” Protestants will often refer to this by shorthand as “the completed work of Christ on the cross.” The idea is that when Jesus on the cross says, “It is finished” (John 19:30), he means that everything necessary for salvation is done, and so the salvation of the elect is complete. But Jesus doesn’t say that, and Scripture repeatedly says the opposite.
Paul says that Christ “was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25), so we know that Good Friday without Easter is incomplete. Even after Easter, we find Jesus saying, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16), and we find the angel telling Cornelius that God would send St. Peter, and “he will declare to you a message by which you will be saved, you and all your household” (Acts 11:14).
The tense here is important: through the gospel, he will be saved, because he’s not already. What’s still needed? Belief and baptism. This is also why St. Jude can speak of our continual need to “convince some who doubt” and to “save some by snatching them out of the fire” (Jude 22-23). Only “he who endures to the end will be saved” (Matt. 10:22), so the work of salvation isn’t really “complete” in the fullest sense until we’re saints in heaven.
What’s more, Scripture speaks of our ongoing ability to reject the salvation that Christ won for us. Like the cross, both John the Baptist’s baptism and Christian baptism are described as being “for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4, Acts 2:38), but it doesn’t follow that everyone who receives either baptism is saved. We see the opposite from Scripture: Simon Magus believes and is baptized (Acts 8:12) but sins against God and finds himself mired once more “in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity” with his heart “not right before God” (Acts 8:21-23).
St. Peter warns against false teachers “who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction” (2 Pet. 2:1). He leaves no room for ambiguity: these false teachers have been “bought” (ransomed) by Christ but still turn away from him back to destruction. He cautions:
For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them (2 Pet. 2:20-21).
Such language leaves no doubt that some of those whom Christ ransomed can and will turn away from him, ending up worse off than had they never been saved in the first place. For instance, Demas goes from being one of Paul’s “fellow workers” (Philem. 1:24) to deserting him because he was “in love with this present world” (2 Tim. 4:10), even though St. John warns that “if any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).
This may not sound like good news, but the alternative is worse. Given that some people go to hell, there are only two possibilities: either Christ offered them salvation and they refused it, or he never wanted them to be saved in the first place. The implication of “limited atonement” is that Christ doesn’t love some, perhaps most, of the people he created.
John Piper, a popular Reformed preacher, complains that “it is just not true to give the impression that God doesn’t hate sinners by saying he loves the sinner and hates the sin. He does hate sinners.” Sproul likewise captures the Reformed view well when he says that “whatever kind of love God has for the impenitent, it does not exclude his just hatred and abhorrence of them,” since they are “objects both of his wrath and his abhorrence” (R.C. Sproul, God’s Love: How the Infinite God Cares for His Children).
The issue here isn’t that God hates what sinners do or even that he hates the kinds of people that they’ve chosen to become. No, the Reformed claim is that Jesus didn’t die for them on the cross, that he doesn’t want them to be saved, and that he has in fact made it impossible for them ever to be saved, no matter what they say or do. That’s a vision of God that’s impossible to harmonize with the Jesus Christ we see in Scripture, who calls upon us to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44) and who can refer even to Judas Iscariot as “friend” (Matt. 26:50).
Only for me?
Given how shockingly different the Calvinist and biblical views of God are, it’s remarkable that the error can be traced back to a single word. As is often the case with Protestantism, the seed of the error was adding the word only or alone where neither belongs. This is nothing new. In his translation of the New Testament, Martin Luther famously added the word alone to Romans 3:28, so that instead of saying that “a man is justified by faith apart from works of law” (the Catholic teaching), it now read that a man is justified by “faith alone” (the Protestant teaching).
Luther admitted that the word alone “is not present in either Greek or Latin text” but argued that Paul implied it and that “if your papist wishes to make a great fuss about the word alone [sola], say this to him: ‘Dr. Martin Luther will have it so, and he says that a papist and an ass are the same thing’” (Martin Luther, Open Letter on Translating).
Leaving the biblical text alone, Catholics and Protestants alike could affirm that we are justified by faith. But the Reformers had to add alone so that if we’re justified by faith, then we’re not also justified by works. That’s a shame, since the only time the phrase “faith alone” ever appears anywhere in Scripture is James 2:24, “you see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.”
This becomes something of a disastrous pattern. The Bible speaks of the importance of Scripture. The Reformers then turn this into the doctrine of sola scriptura, belief in Scripture alone to the exclusion of Tradition, a doctrine the Bible doesn’t teach. Indeed, St. Paul reminds his readers to “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15).
So, whether we’re talking about our differing views on justification or on the proper role of Tradition, part of our divergence comes from the fact that Protestants added limitations (alone or only) where God didn’t put them. Heresy almost always works this way: Jesus is only human, or only God; the Father alone is God, etc. The same thing is true here. It’s true that Christ died for the righteous, but it’s false that he died for only the righteous.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that Christ “loved me and gave himself for me” (2:20). It would be absurd to conclude from this that therefore Christ died only for Paul. It’s no less mistaken to take biblical references to the fact that Christ died for the elect as proof that he therefore died only for the elect. In each case, you’re adding an “only” that isn’t there and doesn’t belong.
Christ died for the Church, but he also died for the ungodly. He died for the apostles but also for the false teachers whom Peter says “deny the Master who bought them” (2 Pet. 2:1). He died for the many and for the world. He also died for you and for me. The difference in each case is one of emphasis, just as I might say, “I saw your wife last night at the restaurant,” while clearly not meaning “your wife and I were alone together at the restaurant last night.”
When John tells us that Christ “is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world,” he’s reminding us that the reach of the cross is universal. When Paul tells us that Christ died for him, he’s reminding us that the merits of the cross are personal in their depth. Those two beliefs need to be held side by side, and together they are extremely good news.