Five Problems with Limited Atonement

these are five problems with the Calvinist teaching of limited atonement [Music] one of the five points of Calvinism so-called is the L in the tulip formula which says that the atonement of Christ was limited also sometimes called particular Redemption and this idea teaches that Jesus died not for all people but specifically for the elect it's often said that though Jesus's death is sufficient for all in other words it's great enough that it could have saved all Jesus actually died only for the elect only for a particular group of people and that the universal nature of Christ's atonement does not that it applies to all people but instead that Jesus died for people of all nations I do not agree with that teaching and I think there are some biblical problems with the teaching of limited atonement I've done a number of different podcasts on topic if you want to check those out go to Justin's intercom and you can see a lot more detailed exposition of each of these texts but here I'm just going to give an overview of five of the problems with the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement the first is that there are several texts in the New Testament which speak about people falling away who had indeed been bought by the blood of Christ now there are several tax that teach that a true believer can fall away as well but that's a separate issue that we can discuss in another video but for the sake of this particular video I want to discuss the reality that some people have fallen away according to Scripture who had indeed been bought by the atonement of Christ meaning that these are people who are lost they are not saved however Jesus still died for them thus negating the central premise of the idea of a particular Redemption or a limited atonement there's text that I want to look at that are very clear I think on this point and we could look at others as well but the first of these is from the book of Hebrews chapter 10 verse 29 how much worse punishment do you suppose will he be thought worthy was trampled the Son of God underfoot counted the blood of the Covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing and insulted the spirit of grace this is saying that that there are those who will reject the New Covenant they spurn the Son of God and specifically they count the blood of the Covenant by which he was sanctified this person was sanctified made holy by the blood of the Covenant now there are some commentators that try to say well this is talking about the blood of the Old Covenant that clearly makes no sense contextually here because what's going on is he's speaking about the superiority of the New Covenant as opposed to the old and the entire context of this warning is there were great punishments for those who rejected the grace that God gave in the Old Covenant and even more will there be great consequences for those who reject the even better New Covenant so very clearly the blood that's being talked about is the blood of the New Covenant and what is the blood of the New Covenant but the very blood of Christ as Jesus himself states during the institution of the Lord's Supper the second text that I want to bring up is from Peters second letter this is in chapter 2 verse 1 of 2nd Peter but there were also false prophets among the people even as there will be false teachers among you who will secretly bring in destructive heresies even denying the Lord who bought them and bring on themselves Swift destruction clearly this is speaking about those who have been bought in the New Covenant and what is it that buys us in the New Covenant it is the blood of Christ we are blocked by the blood of Christ now some people will try to say that this verse actually is talking about those who were bought in Egypt who are brought out of the land of Egypt or just some kind of general idea that God the Father is owner or Lord of these people that doesn't really make any sense in the context they're not denying here these heretics they're denying things about Christ himself and there's a parallel passage in Jude's letter which clearly identifies this with with Jesus Christ himself but they're not denying something about the father they are denying Jesus and there's a very clear reference some others will say well being bought is not a reference to the blood of Christ because every other reference to being bought when it references the blood of Christ mentions the price bought with the price something like that the fact is that all the other texts don't necessarily say that there are a couple that do but there actually are a number of texts that mention being bought with the blood of Christ the majority from the book of Revelation that don't specifically mention a price so there's no reason to negate what is the clear and obvious meaning here especially as you move on to the text that it continues to talk about those who have escaped the world to come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ that these are people who Christ has died for he has bought them they have been part of the New Covenant and they have rejected the faith the second major problem with limited atonement is the various texts that speak about the universal nature of God's love not just of God's love but his saving love and of the universal nature of salvation this idea that God wants all people to be saved in that Jesus was sent into the world for all people and some of the most popular texts that speak about this are first John 2:2 and then second Timothy chapter 2 verse 4 as well as chapter 4 verse 10 and the text from the book of 1st John Stape this and he himself Christ of course is the repay Shi ation for our sins and not for ours only but also for the whole world now some people again will argue that what he's saying here is that not just he's saying that salvation is not just for the Jews but also the Gentiles in other words he's saying that he's the profession for our sins meaning the sins of the Jews but not all not just ours but also for the sins of the Gentiles and this interpretation might make sense if we had in any indication whatsoever that John was writing specifically to Jews there's no indication of that whatsoever in the text and so you kind of have to force that into the text to really get that out of there and I think what he's saying is Jesus didn't just die for the sins of those who are saved but also for the sins of all people the world throughout this this letter your and John does use the term cosmos in a number of different ways but the the way that it's used throughout this particular context is there's a contrast between those who are in Christ and then the world the light in the darkness therefore it's logical that what he means by the world is those who are unbelievers so Jesus died not just for us and we're now say but also for the unbelievers and in a second set of tacks that speak about a universal gentleman these aren't all of them by the way I'm just addressing a couple of them are from second or first Timothy chapter 2 verse 4 and then chapter 4 verse 10 so second seventy to force first Timothy 2:4 says who desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth for there is one God and one mediator between God and man the man Christ Jesus that God desires all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth and he's paralleling this with those whom we should pray for and he's arguing that our prayer should be indiscriminate and just as our prayer should be indiscriminate for all people so should Christ so is Christ's death indiscriminate because he died for all people we now have the freedom to pray for every single person this is understood especially as we move on and read later in the letter as this kind of theme shows up again in 410 where Paul says this for to this end we both labor and stuff a reproach because we trust in a living God who is the savior of all men especially those who believe and so we have this broader context of God being the savior of all people and then we have this narrower group that is those who believe and so God is in some sense a savior even for those who do not believe and to read we should read these texts together because it's in the same letter and uses a lot of the same terms and when we do that the clear way to understand this is that he is one who desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth as he goes on to say in verse 6 it gave himself as a ransom for all that's the most logical way in the most straightforward to understand exactly what is going on in this text the third point is that there's a difficulty in reconciling this idea that Jesus only died for certain people with the other idea that the gospel is universally offered to all people now in traditional Calvinism it's said that the the gospel offer is universal meaning that God offers the gospel to all people and we have the freedom to go proclaim the gospel to all people and offer them Christ however the actual atonement was not for all people but it was for the elect in particular and there's a further distinction between the special call or the effectual call and then the general call that just kind of goes out to all people some people start saying that there are two wheels and god that are really in contradiction to one another you have one will where God wills all people to be saved and then he has another will where he wills only some people to be saved now that gets into some issues in terms of our doctrine of God but there is an incompatibility between this idea of a free offer free offer of the gospel and this idea that Christ didn't die for all now here's the problem is that for God to offer something that he doesn't have for certain people is dishonest we would call this lying we would call this dishonesty which is just not in of course the character of God God is not a liar God is not dishonest and if I were going to offer you something that I didn't have if I were to say you know hey I got this do you want this TV and I don't have it and you know you say no I don't need a TV it would still be wrong with me to offer you something that I didn't have for you because it would be lying what if I had you know a TV that I bought for someone else and I'm telling you that I'm offering you the TV even if I know you're not going to accept it it's still dishonest so we have this problem of a dishonest call it's not an honest and earnest call if you are going to say I offer you this thing but I don't actually have it for you and so that's why really it's the hyper Calvinists who are more consistent here because they see that issue and so that's why they say well you can't really have both because that's dishonest and there and God doesn't even want them to believe in the first place they start saying things like there there is no actual duty of the unbeliever to believe because God does not even want them to believe and I think they're just being consistent with this now I'm glad that Calvinists don't go that far of course but I think that is a genuine problem and I think that there's two ideas that are essentially incompatible with one another that are really hard to kind of squeeze together the fourth major problem with limited atonement is the book of Hebrews and by that I don't just mean one particular verse we already looked at one and there are other verses that we can look at but what I mean is the entire context of the book of Hebrews and the whole broader arguments of the book of Hebrews now if you really bruise the argument in that text is essentially that these are Jews who have converted to Christianity they are rejected by the family they're rejected by the people that they love there are all these horrible consequences for confessing Christ and because of that some of them are thinking you know is it really worth it is this whole Christianity thing worth it or should we go back to the Judaism that we profess before there we had freedom there you know we weren't persecuted we're able to do what we wanted to do and so the author whoever that is as he writes this book the entire purpose of the book is to try to stop them from going back to Judaism and he does that by demonstrating the superiority of the New Covenant to the Old Covenant and so throughout the book he's essentially arguing this is what you had in the Old Covenant this is what we have now in the New Covenant and what we have in the New Covenant is so much greater than what we had in the Old Covenant so don't try to go back to that you can't go back to that and he's pleading with them don't go back to that if you do go back to that there is no longer a sacrifice for sins for you notice that language of no longer a sacrifice for sins because there was and they rejected it now the entire argument of the book only makes sense if Christ is indeed the priest the mediator the sacrifice and the tabernacle for the people he's writing to because the entire argument of the book is you have that which is better in Christ don't go back to the stuff that is not as valuable now if Jesus only died for the elect if Jesus only died for those who persevere to the end and not for all people then the argument wouldn't really work because he couldn't really say well you have Christ who this better mediator he is this better priest he's this better offering he's the better Tabernacle when in fact Christ was actually none of those things for the people he's writing to so there's a difficulty here in reconciling these two ideas the whole argument falls apart because if they're elect Christ is the mediator for those people he is the priest he is a sacrifice and he is always going to be and they can't reject him or if they're not elect he never was in the first place so therefore they also can't really reject that because he never was that for those people in the first place and so you have a difficulty they're not just of individual texts but with the overall argument and if you read through the book there's a continual there's continual references to things like he is our mediator there's the us us us and he doesn't just mean the elect because that's that same group of people that he's also warning not to fall away seemingly with the possibility that they actually could indeed fall away and not just hypothetical statements so that's that's a major problem for this teaching the fifth problem is the way that Jesus speaks about Judas and the way that Jesus speaks about to all of those who are were guilty of killing him Jesus does serve as a kind of mediator because we have particularly da ting words that Jesus others on the cross and those words our Father forgive them for they know not what they do meaning he is praying he is interceding for the people who have killed him now we have no indication that every person that he is praying for then actually eventually was saved and it's probably the case that they weren't and so we have an instance of Jesus doing something priestly he is doing some kind of mediation some kind of prayer for these people even though they actually were not necessarily saved now this is a textual variant so some people have argued to that we just kind of throw it out now I can't get into the two issues here but I'm going to be posting something on the blog that a friend of mine wrote on the validity of this particular text as part of the original gospel and the other problem is the way that Judas is treated now there's some debate over the question of whether Judas was present at the Lord's Supper because Luke seems to say that he was but there's indications in John that might seem like he wasn't the way that some people have reconciled this is to say that Judas departed at one time during the supper but he came back for the actual institution of the Lord's Supper certainly in Luke's words it makes it sound like Judas is sitting their way when Jesus says this now if that's the case he speaks to Judas along with the rest of the disciples and says that this is his body given for you he's speaking to all of them in the room and that would include even the one that has betrayed him that he knows as an unbeliever meaning that his body and blood are given for all even the evil Judas which is a really hard kind of concept to grasp the the other way of the other text the talks about about Judas is in John 17 now john 17 is the high priestly prayer and in that high priestly prayer Jesus prays he speaks about those who the father had given him now Calvinists often take this as a specifically a statement about the elect but he says this he says that none of them that you have given me have fallen away except for the son of perdition meaning that Judas was actually part of that group okay you don't make and accept unless there's no such thing as an exception whew this was never part of that group so if those who you have given me did not include Judas Jesus wouldn't have said except the son of perdition except Judas he wouldn't have said it would make any sense so he's part of that group who he had been given by the father and so there's some sense in which Jesus even is the savior of Judas not in the sense that Judas has finally saved of course but Jesus in fact died for all people including the worst of the first and those who will never believe well this is a really brief treatment of this issue I know people have written large texts on at large books on the issue I have spent a lot of time dealing with this in more depth but here at least is a short video that just gives you some of the the reasons some of the problems with the reformed teaching on limited atonement thanks so much for watching if you like this video subscribe share it with your friends and we'll see you next time god bless

Channel: Dr. Jordan B Cooper

Views: 23,544

Rating: 4.4423409 out of 5

Keywords: Limited Atonement, Calvinism, Arminianism, Lutheranism, Universal Atonement, John Calvin, Predestination, Christian theology, Lutheran Theology, Lutheran Doctrine, Atonement, Death of Christ, Just and Sinner, Martin Luther, limited atonement refuted, unlimited atonement, limited atonement debate, definite atonement, doctrines of grace, limited atonement debunked, unlimited atonement vs limited atonement, tulip, problems with limited atonement, problems with calvinism

Id: RSAfmvRKIVU

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

It was very informative. I could be wrong but I believe Jordan Cooper used to be reformed before he "switched" sides. So he has a very indepth connection/history with the theology and you can really tell with videos like this.