Author: jetbrane

Did Jesus Die For Everybody?

Here is an exercise in thinking through the implications of holding to a hypothetical universal view of the Atonement (also sometimes referred to as General Atonement Theory). This view of the Atonement teaches that Christ died for each and every person who lives, has ever lived or will live. Those that hold to such a view are the majority report in American Evangelicalism.

Genera Atonement (GA) Preacher — “God loves you and showed that love by sending His Son to die for your sins.”

Sophisticated Unbeliever(SU) — “You mean to tell me that Jesus died for all my sins?”

GA Preacher — “That is accurate, Jesus died for your sins.”

S. Unbeliever — “Thanks for telling me that. That is a helpful thing to know.”

GA Preacher — “Your welcome. Now you must repent and believe.”

S. Unbeliever — “Why is that necessary?”

GA Preacher — “Because the Scripture says you must.”

S. Unbeliever — “Would it be a sin if I didn’t do that?”

GA Preacher — “Oh yes, a most terrible and grave sin.”

S. Unbeliever — “But the fact that it is a sin doesn’t really matter does it?”

GA Preacher — “Of course it matters! Why would you say that?”

S. Unbeliever — “Well, if Jesus died for all my sins then that would include the sins of my refusing to believe and refusing to repent, and so I am ok. But like I said thanks for the information.”

GA Preacher — “Wait a minute. Thats not the way it works.”

S. Unbeliever –“Oh, so what you are telling me is that Jesus died for all my sins except the sins of unbelief and lack of repentance?”

“But if He didn’t die for the sins of unbelief and lack of repentance then how could anybody be saved, and how could it be that God loves me if God sent Jesus to die for all of my sins except the ones I most desperately need forgiven?”

“It sounds like what you are saying here is that Jesus died for some of the sins of all of the people, but you can’t be saying that cause if that is true then all people will be damned since according to you one sin can separate us from God.”

GA Preacher — “No, no, no. Jesus died for all of the sins of all of the people.”

S. Unbeliever — “Well, that is not what you said earlier but if that is what you believe then I don’t know how it is that not all of the people are saved if Jesus died for all of their sins.”

GA Preacher — “They are not all saved since they don’t all believe.”

S. Unbeliever — Isn’t unbelief a sin for which Jesus died? But let’s leave that alone for now. So what you’re saying is that some people will have had all their sins paid for and still end up damned?”

GA Preacher — “Yes.”

S. Unbeliever — “Just curious. If that is the case then isn’t it at least theoretically possible that Jesus could have died for all the sins of all the people and that without not one person ever being saved”?

GA Preacher — “What do you mean”?

S. Unbeliever — “Well, if Jesus died for all the sins of all the people but His death wasn’t effective to the end it was designed then you have to admit that at least theoretically Jesus could have died for the World without anybody in the World being saved, since obviously His death wasn’t enough to do what needed to be done.”

GA Preacher — “No, that is not what I mean at all.”

S. Unbeliever — “I am sure it isn’t.”

GA Preacher —“Jesus paid for all the sins of all people.”

S. Unbeliever –“What was the sense of paying for their sins if they were going to end up damned anyway”?

GA Preacher — “That’s how much God loves you.”

S. Unbeliever — “God loves me enough to send his Son to die for my sins but doesn’t love me enough to make sure that I don’t end up damned anyway”?

“I’ll wait for a God who makes sense.”

Dr. Ken:

The most fatal flaw in the entire Reformed system is the clear teaching of the NT that a person might not be saved even after having received the Holy Spirit. I say emphatically. No one who gets their theology from the Bible–rather than from their theological worldview–can believe in eternal security or the perseverence of the saints. But with this point gone, the entire deck of cards, built completely on human logic, tumbles to oblivion.

OAW:

LOL… If you say so.

Would you mind going over the clear teaching of Scripture that a person might not be saved even after receiving the Holy Spirit?

Feel free to do so in a post and not in a comment.

I agree with you though … if you can undo perseverance of the saints then the whole thing crumbles.

But I seriously doubt that you are going to elucidate anything that a Reformed person hasn’t seen before and doesn’t have a sound hermeneutical answer for (though I am sure you would contend to the contrary).

Is the reason you loathe Reformed Theology so much due to the fact that some significant authority figure in your life (Little League Baseball Coach? / Jr. High Catechitical instructor?) used to beat you with a copy of Turretins’ Elenctic Theology?

I do get a charge out of you Holiness folk. On one hand you make noise about how the Reformed and Holiness need to realize that they are the left and right side of the same football team (a Druryism from some years ago) while on the other hand, as the left tackle, you labor assiduously to try and beat the stuffing out of the right tackle on your team.

Dr. Ken:

I have always thought that the term “biblical Christian” was a major misnomer. The Martinite/neo-Reformed agenda is a philosophical system that interprets the Bible in the light of its own theological system. Time and time again it trumps the biblical text itself in lieu of its own theology and idea of Scripture. Of course the Wesleyanism you grew up with did exactly the same thing, which is why it is my passion to let the text mean what it meant whether it fits with my theology or not. No one can free themselves of their own biases, but it is my passion to do so even when it hurts.

I completely mean what I said about eternal security having nothing to do with Scripture read in its historical context at all. I know there are Calvinist responses to passages like Hebrews 6, 10, 12; 2 Corinthians 9:27; Philippians 3:11-12; Jude 24; etc… But there are none that in my opinion listen to the biblical text in the slightest. I am willing to hear Romans 9 and 1 Timothy 2–just not willing to shove them down the throat of other passages that are in tension with them.

This is a major difference between me, you, and the Wesleyanism you grew up with. If two passages seem to disagree, I must let them still say what they seem to say. You–and the Wesleyans of your youth–will shove one or the other passage down the other one’s throat. This may pass for a higher idea of Scripture, but it shows no real respect for the Scriptures themselves.

I’m tired of Calvinists acting as if they are smarter, more logical, and superior to all other groups. Which of the two is the tradition most known for calling the other tradition and its theology stupid and heretical? Pot calling kettle, pot calling kettle, come in kettle. The Calvinist God is a God I can understand. He basically amounts to a big human. My God is a God past understanding whose essence we could not possibly fathom.

OAW:

Nathan Hatch’s ‘The Democratization of American Christianity’ is foursquare against your stated thesis in the last paragraph of your latest comment. Hatch shows convincingly that it was the Arminians who were the haters and who misrepresented the Biblical faith in the early colonies, though, as his research speaks through the eyes of the haters all of it was justified. Look at the poetry section in his appendix for immediate confirmation.

And my own personal experience confirms all that hatred that Hatch logs. The only Theology I was taught growing up in the Wesleyan Church was anti-Calvinist. When I got to IWU that was only ingrained even more. To this day I can take you to my files and pull out my blue book essay tests where I ripped and ripped apart Calvinism, and in those ‘A’ tests you will also find the comments of professors complimenting me on my ability to dissect the hated calvinists. I left knowing that I hated calvinists but with little idea why I should oppose JW’s, Mormons, or any number of other anti-Christ’s groups. I don’t suppose that strikes you as disproportionate or odd?

And of course you understand that I wasn’t in these classes by myself, consequently it wasn’t only me that was learning to hate Calvinists (assuming of course that the other students were actually doing their work — given the intelligence of most Wesleyan Pastors I meet this is an assumption that shouldn’t automatically be granted). Also, it wasn’t the professors alone but it was the Theology texts themselves they assigned. All of it was one big exercise on how evil the Reformed were. It wasn’t systematic Theology, or Theology of Holiness, or any number of Bible named classes, it was all a degree program on how to hate the Reformed and what they taught, and looking in retrospect, all of it was taught by some of the most unqualified men that one could imagine.

Is it a severe inferiority complex that drives all this hatred exhibited then and exhibited yet today by some of what you say in your recent comment?

Of course years later, after much labor and struggle and arguing passionately against my Seminary teachers I learned (long after that Seminary program was complete) that all that I had been taught negatively about the Reformed faith was so much caricature and straw men.

And yeah … I still resent the brainwashing that takes 18 year old young adults and fills their minds with such piffle all in the name of ‘higher education.’

I’m not done yet,

As to the substance of your response I continue to be amazed that you keep trying to pin all of this on Glenn Martin. Glenn Martin didn’t teach Systematic Theology, Exegetical Theology, Biblical Theology, Historical Theology, Hermeneutics or any other number of subjects that we traverse in our conversations. I am many, many years and degrees removed from Glenn Martin and yet you keep trying to lay my observations at his feet as if it is all his fault.

That is strange behavior.

Now, let us briefly pursue your seeming problems with thinking in systemic and systematic categories. I could conclude that this is a result of one who is gotten to close to the campfire of post-modernism and who fails to realize it is its own systematic approach, but I will try to put that conclusion into abeyance for now.

You boast of allowing the text to speak apart from your theology without seemingly realizing that it is your Theology that is informing you to allow the text(s) to speak in a bald contradictory fashion.

Your Theology and its hubris is staggering. To listen to you, Augustine, was a poor benighted fool who was wrong about sin nature. To listen to you, the Wesleyanism that you and I grew up in was foolish and unenlightened. To listen to you, Dr. Glenn Martin was an idiot who couldn’t see that he was involved in circular reasoning.

But not to fear… You have arrived and now for the first time ever the text will be allowed to speak the truth that for centuries has been muted by ham-handed theologians who bound the text from speaking its own mind.

So speaks every generation.

If texts speak in a way that is contrary to your theology then you have no theology or more precisely your theology is directing them to speak in contradictory fashion. Nobody interprets texts apart from their theology. Nobody.

Your Theology has given up on the whole notion of the analogia fidei or the idea of reading the less clear scripture in light of the more clear scripture. Your Theology has given up the notion of the Scripture having a meaning for the idea that the Scriptures have meanings.

This statement of yours perhaps imply that we have other problems beyond Calvinism vs. Arminianism,

You walked right up to the microphone and crowed so that everyone could hear,

“My God is a God past understanding whose essence we could not possibly fathom.”

Allow me to ask you, if your God is a God past understanding how is it that you understand Him enough to understand that He is past understanding? Now certainly the finite cannot contain the infinite but to say that he is past understanding is past my ability to understand.

If God is a God past understanding then what in the Hell are you doing trying to help students understand God? If God is a God past understanding then you truly are an idiot beyond understanding for you have given your life to a vocation, that by definition, cannot be successful. If God is a God past understanding then what is Jesus doing saying, “This is eternal life, to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent?”

The God of the Bible is understandable because He has made Himself known. We may see through a glass darkly but we do see. Now certainly the mind of man cannot comprehend God but to say he is past understanding seems to teeter on Neo-Orthodoxy. Karl Barth call your office. If God is past understanding then all of this is a crap shoot and your guess is as good as mine and truth boils down to how many lemmings we can fool with our rhetoric.

You say you’re tired of Calvinists and given the way you Caricature Calvinists I couldn’t stand being in a room 5 minutes with them either, but before you dump us all overboard you should realize that there are some of us out there that are seeking to let the texts speak in ways that nuance and qualify high predestinarianism without giveing up doctrines of Grace. I would finally offer on this point that if one allows texts to blatantly contradict one another then it is that person who has shown no respect for Holy Writ.

Now, to finish, I get to say what I am tired of. I am tired of irrationalists who parade their skepticism of uniform meaning as a badge of honor. I’m tired of academia insisting that certainty is bad all the while being certain about their vaunted uncertainty. I’m tired of leadership blowing a unclear note leaving the rank and file confused.

Finally, when you meet a big Human who would take upon himself the penalty that He rightly required for His honor being tattered and torn let me know… I have a few garlands I’d like to throw at his feet and some votives I’d like to light in his honor.

Restrainedly yours,

OAW

Ken:

You’ll be happy to know that I don’t bash Calvinists in class and when I’m wearing the aegis of the university, I try to facilitate. Certainly I let them know my interpretations, but with at least half the people in my class believing in eternal security, I don’t bash the position. I am better known for the statement, “Feel free to disagree.”

I am less restrained on the blog, which I do not intentionally promote in class and almost never mention. Thank you for making it impossible for any reader of mine to be looking at a “straw man.” Thanks for letting them see a real live Calvinist 😉

But we are in the middle of a resurgence of 5 point Calvinism. I do not ask you for your forgiveness for combating it. To me there is about as much hubris in saying it is not biblical as in arguing that my car is grey.

P.S. My car is grey. No, really, it is 😉

This next section I am keeping in, though readers of IronInk might have a hard time understanding the thrust and parry regarding Dr. Glenn Martin. Dr. Glenn Martin was my mentor in undergraduate school and was the guy God used to make me realize I was sitting in Plato’s cave. Dr. Martin was a presuppositionalist who was no theologian which meant that his work was uneven. In retrospect Martin was intuitively Calvinistic but remained officially Arminian, which many of his statements reflected. Dr. Glenn Martin was a great man and the disrepute that his former colleagues shower on him in this next section is reprehensible.

Craig:

I might add that while I was a student at IWU, I too was warned to avoid reading or buying anything that smacked of Calvinism. I recall Charles Carter advising me not to buy a certain book because of it’s Calvinistic slant. Also, I was advised by Leo Cox to choose a seminary that was non-Calvinistic. I might also add that Calvinists were not the only ones historically put down by the faculty at IWU. Let’s not forget the Charismatics.

I admit I am a Martinite. Dr. Martin was a huge influence in my life. He made my education at IWU a life changing experience.

Ken:

I believe that Dr. Martin was a godly man for as much as I was able to tell. My strong hunch is that God did very great things through him for the kingdom. I will not in any way claim to be anywhere close to him spiritually. I am glad that Dr. Bartley was able to get a book of his basic thought published with Triangle. Of course I vehemently disagree with him.

By the same token, I would not want the name of Charles Carter and mine to be uttered in the same sentence (oh no, I just did it!). To me both the typical Calvinist and the typical Wesleyan of the past had the same faulty hermeneutic. Barth, on the other hand, is a Reformed thinker I deeply respect, even if his writing style drives me nuts.

Dr. Keith Drury:

Martin was reformed through and through–he should have made up for Carter or any other former faculty member who kicked against the goads.

Though he had a high school hermeneutic he did have a neat “spreadsheet theology” that gave clear and simple answers to students, and I applaud his efforts at what he considered “integration.” Even integrating a high school hermeneutic with one’s discipline should be applauded.

He was gone before he allowed his ideas to be “peer reviewed” or even responded to, and his departure is too recent to engage in answering… so I will let the sleeping dog continue to nap another decade… it is not fair to answer his posthumously-published book for there is nobody willing to defend it–including those who published it.

He did good work at prodding students to think like a reformer, and thus broadened IWU’s theological field considerably.

OAW:

The fact that anybody could consider Martin ‘Reformed through and through’ says more about the person making such an asinine assessment then it does about Martin and it just exhibits how little people understand what it means and doesn’t mean to be Reformed. A close analysis of Martin’s posthumously published book will reveal that he did indeed disavow doctrines that were at the hub of what it means to be Reformed.

Now, he may have been inconsistent at this point but that would have to be argued and not just assumed, and it is an argument that I have made but by Martin’s own writing he was not ‘Reformed.’

The contempt for Martin displayed by members of what is styled the ‘Christian Ministries’ department at IWU is most revealing. I wonder what their attitude would be should someone from another department handled them with equal contempt? What I am seeing here is the long simmering feud between these two departments that percolated even when I attended many summers ago. But be of good Cheer gentlemen, your foil is dead and the field is yours.

I find in Dr. Drury’s comments just one more example of the high disdain that is held for anybody who has clear answers that can be clearly communicated. Why surely, anybody who knows what they believe and why they believe it must be employing a high school hermeneutic by Dr. Drury’s lights. The problem with Dr. Martin according to the Christian Ministries department is that he didn’t believe that God was past understanding, and so he wasn’t a member in good standing of the Marion College Academic Irrationalists Club.

All hail obscurity and academic obfuscation for seemingly those are the things that Professorial careers are made of!

Glad to be only, OAW

Ken:

Actually, Drury and I are the only rabid ones here–all the others are entirely sanctified. And neither of us teach theology. Chris is of course fervently Arminian, but is entirely sanctified.

I don’t remember ever speaking disrespectfully about Martin to a student while he was alive or after his death (any comments to Keith would not have been hateful, only Cheshire ;-). If I’ve alluded here to my strong irritation at his method and, in my strong opinion, misnomers, I’ve at least initially done so only in a way that an insider would catch (which you did).

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

OAW:

If you teach, you teach Theology since everything is Theology.

Second, I don’t consider myself an insider and if I picked up on your dissatisfaction for all things Martin I’m quite sure that leaks out in other venues.

Damnant quod non intellegunt.

Ken: In case anyone was wondering, Monday is Latin night on the blog. The Meringue is next.