Dr. Tony Badger, author of Confronting Calvinism, will be teaching a thirteen-week elective course on Calvinism starting January 25. Here is what he says about Limited Atonement:
Not a single passage of Scripture in either the Old or New Testament expresses or teaches the notion that Christ’s redemptive death on the cross, normally referred to as His Atonement, was limited or confined, either in God’s intent or in the extent to which the benefits might accrue.i Contrarily, the Scripture deliberately and unequivocally teaches that Jesus the Messiah is the Lamb of God whose death took away the sins of the whole world, satisfying God’s wrath toward all men, and came to seek and to save those who were lost, not just some of them! (p. 213).
In my book, Is Calvinism Biblical? I consider two verses that disprove Limited Atonement: John 1:29 and 2 Peter 2:1.
Of the six points of Calvinism, Limited Atonement is the most rejected. Many people who call themselves Calvinists reject the L in TULIP. So-called four-point Calvinists are called Amyraldian Calvinists after Moses Amyraut (1596-1664). My alma mater, Dallas Theological Seminary, is historically Amyraldian. In the mid-seventies Dr. S. Lewis Johnson resigned from DTS because he had come to believe in Limited Atonement.
Five-point Calvinists rarely consider Amyraldians to be Calvinists. They classify them as Arminian, even though they believe in all the points except L.
John 1:29. When John the Baptist saw Jesus approaching, he said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” The word world (Greek kosmos) here means mankind, humanity, everyone.
“The word kosmos is used more in John (78 times) than any other book in the New Testament. It is used in the following ways…” (Is Calvinism Biblical? p. 59). The range of meaning of kosmos in John includes “Planet earth” (p. 59), “The unbelieving system of thought” (p. 60), “The present age” (p. 60), and “All humans of all time” (p. 60). I went on to write,
The last use is the most prevalent. In John’s Gospel, most of the time kosmos refers to all humans of all time.
When John the Baptist said that Jesus is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” he was not talking about the sins of the planet, or of a system of thought, or of the present age. He was saying that Jesus fulfills the Old Testament sacrificial system and takes away the sins of all humans of all time (pp. 60-61).
When we compare John 1:29 with 1 John 2:2 (“And He Himself is the propitiation [satisfaction] for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world”), the conclusion is unmistakable: The Lord Jesus Christ died for Adam and Eve and all their offspring.
2 Peter 2:1. “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.”
We know from 2 Pet 2:17 that the false teachers about whom Peter prophesies would be unregenerate and bound for “the blackness of darkness forever.” He was not saying that all false teachers are unregenerate. But he was saying that those coming false teachers would be. Yet notice that Peter says, “the Lord…bought them.”
One of the subheadings in my chapter on 2 Peter 2:1 is: “If Christ Bought People Who Will End Up in the Lake of Fire, Then the Atonement Is Unlimited” (p. 70). You don’t need to get a graduate degree in theology to see that. In fact, getting a graduate degree in theology from a Calvinist school is one of the easiest ways to miss that.
With the exception of Preservation of the Saints, the remaining four of Calvinism’s five points are all clearly unbiblical. Of those four, TULIP’s L is the easiest to disprove. Only by intense indoctrination can anyone be misled into believing that Christ died for only a small percentage of humanity. Anyone who prayerfully searches the Scriptures (Acts 17:11) will see that Unlimited Atonement is true.
i Dr. Badger is not saying that all the benefits of Christ’s blood are applied to everyone. He is saying that the specific benefit of removing the sin barrier, of making everyone savable, is not in any way restricted. Fellowship with God and the forgiveness of sins are conditional (cf. Acts 10:43; 1 John 1:7, 9). See my article, “The Benefits of Christ’s Blood, Restricted and Unrestricted?” here.
