A meme has been circulating in the usual places. Six panels, two people in a coffee shop, and a conversation that runs as follows.
Is God’s atonement for each and every soul? Yes, for all the whosoever. So you’re a universalist? No, only if you choose to accept Him. So atonement is limited to believers? No, to everyone.
Final panel: three floating question marks over the poor man’s head.
The intended effect is obvious. The universalist’s position is coherent and the particularist’s position is coherent, and anyone standing between them is supposedly reduced to babble. It is a tidy piece of work, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissive one, because the confusion it exploits is real and widespread. What it does not deserve is the assumption that it proves anything. The meme is built on a single equivocation, and once that is named it collapses. Worse for its author, when the same six panels are pointed at the Westminster Confession they produce exactly the same question marks.
The equivocation
The whole thing turns on the preposition. “Is the atonement for each and every soul?” can mean two quite different things:
- For whom was propitiation made? That is, what is the extent of the provision?
- Who actually enjoys its benefits? That is, what is the extent of the application?
Every serious atonement theology in the Christian tradition distinguishes these two questions. It has to. The meme refuses the distinction, insists that a single answer be given to a question containing two, and then performs astonishment when its interlocutor tries to supply the two answers the question actually requires.
This is not a subtle move. It is the same trick as asking whether a hospital was built for everyone in the city, refusing to accept “yes, and it treats those who come through the doors,” and then declaring the administrator confused.
The same six panels, pointed the other way
Take the meme’s form and change only the word “soul” to “elect soul.”
Is the atonement for each and every elect soul? Yes. So all the elect are saved irrespective of faith? No. Not until they believe. So the atonement is limited to believing elect? No, to all the elect.
Question marks.
The particularist is now in the chair, and he is there because his own confession put him there. The Westminster Confession states that Christ, by his obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those justified and made proper satisfaction to the Father’s justice on their behalf, and then adds this:
Nevertheless, because Christ was given by the Father for them, and his obedience and satisfaction accepted in their stead, and both freely, not for anything in them, their justification is only of free grace… God did, from all eternity, decree to justify all the elect, and Christ did, in the fullness of time, die for their sins, and rise again for their justification: nevertheless, they are not justified, until the Holy Spirit doth, in due time, actually apply Christ unto them. (WCF 11.3–4)
There it is, in the confessional documents of the tradition the meme is defending: a satisfaction accomplished at the cross, and a justification that does not obtain until it is applied. The elect man walking around unregenerate at twenty-two has an atonement made for him and is not yet justified by it. Provision and application come apart. If the meme’s logic is valid, then the Confession’s authors were confused; if the Confession is not confused, then the meme’s logic is invalid.
The only way out is eternal justification, the position that the elect are justified from eternity and faith merely recognises an accomplished fact. That is a genuine position, held by some in the hyper-Calvinist tradition. It is also the position Westminster explicitly forecloses in the sentence quoted above. The meme, if it works, is not an argument for Calvinism. It is an argument for a view Calvinism has spent three centuries repudiating.
The Canons of Dort do not help the meme either. Its second head grants that the death of the Son of God is “of infinite worth and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world” (II.3), and then explains that when those called by the gospel refuse to come and perish in unbelief, this happens
not by any defect or insufficiency in the sacrifice offered by Christ upon the cross, but is wholly to be imputed to themselves. (II.6)
That is a sufficiency which is not everywhere applied, together with an explicit denial that the reason for perishing lies in the sacrifice. It is precisely the two-level structure the meme calls incoherent, asserted by the confession the meme exists to defend. Dort goes on in II.8 to locate the particularity in the divine intention rather than the sufficiency, and that is a real and substantive disagreement worth having. But it is a disagreement about the intent of the provision, not about whether provision and application can be distinguished at all. On that question, Dort has already conceded the field.
It is worth noting, too, that Dort’s own British delegation included men who held that Christ died for all conditionally as well as for the elect absolutely. Whatever one makes of that position, it means the meme’s argument would have to excommunicate delegates from the very synod it invokes.
The engine underneath
The meme is a popular-level echo of a serious argument, and it is only fair to state the serious version. In The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647), John Owen presses a trilemma. Christ died either for all the sins of all men, or for all the sins of some men, or for some of the sins of all men. If the first, why is anyone condemned? If unbelief condemns, then either that sin was borne or it was not; if it was borne, the unbeliever cannot be punished for it, and if it was not, then Christ did not die for all sins.
This is a real argument and it has kept people awake. But look at what it assumes. It treats the atonement as a quantified debt, a sum discharged, such that the transfer of payment necessarily and immediately entails the release of the debtor. On that model the argument is airtight.
The trouble is that on that model no condition can be attached to release, and that includes faith. If the cross is a bare commercial transaction, the debtor walks free the moment the money changes hands, whether or not he knows it, wants it, or has been born yet. Any theology that requires faith for justification has already abandoned the strictly pecuniary model. Westminster abandons it in 11.4. What is left is a propitiation genuinely made, which grounds a judicial offer that God dispenses on terms he sets, and one of those terms is that it be received.
So the answer to “was unbelief borne?” is that the question mistakes the category. Nobody perishes because his sin was intrinsically unatonable, as though some residue of guilt had escaped the cross. He perishes because he refuses the propitiation that was made. The blood is real, the covenant is real, and the contempt is culpable precisely because what was despised was sufficient.
The texts
Argument from confessional inconsistency only clears the ground. The positive case is exegetical.
1 Timothy 4:10. God is “the Saviour of all men, especially of those who believe.” The μάλιστα is the whole argument in a single word: one saviourhood, held in two senses, one wider and one narrower. This is the answer to panel four, written by Paul.
The standard particularist response is that μάλιστα here specifies rather than distinguishes, so that the sense is “Saviour of all men, namely believers.” Grant the reading for the sake of argument and see what it costs. The specifying move still requires a wider category, “all men,” of which believers are picked out as the referent in view. You cannot specify within a class without the class. And if “all men” simply means “believers” with no remainder, then Paul has written a tautology and prefaced it with an intensifier for no reason. The natural reading, and the one the syntax invites, is that God stands in a saving relation to humanity generally and in a further relation to those who believe.
1 John 2:2. Christ is the propitiation for our sins, “and not for ours only but also for the whole world.” The particularist reading takes this as elect Jews and elect Gentiles. Two problems. First, the epistle nowhere addresses a Jew–Gentile tension; the distinction has to be imported from Romans and Ephesians to make the reading work. Second, John himself defines ὅλος ὁ κόσμος three chapters later: “we know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). That is not the elect scattered abroad. That is the unbelieving mass, over against the “we.” The same phrase, the same author, the same short letter.
2 Corinthians 5:19–20. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them; and therefore, Paul says, we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. An accomplished reconciliation which must nevertheless be received, stated as apostolic logic and turned immediately into an appeal. If that structure is incoherent, Paul is incoherent.
John 3:18. He who does not believe is condemned already, “because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” The stated ground of condemnation is unbelief, not a deficit in the provision.
Hebrews 2:9. He tasted death “for everyone.” 1 Timothy 2:6: a ransom “for all.” John 1:29: the Lamb who takes away the sin “of the world.” The particularist must read each of these as a restricted “all,” and can do so in isolation; the cumulative weight is another matter.
What the man in the panels should have said
Panel two: “Yes. Propitiation was made for all.”
Panel four: “No. It is applied to those who believe. Your own confession says the elect are not justified until the Spirit applies Christ to them, so you already hold this distinction. You just object when I hold it more widely.”
Panel six: “Provided for everyone, received by faith. Your objection assumes that provision entails reception. Prove that, and you have abolished the necessity of faith in the same stroke, and Westminster with it.”
Three sentences, no question marks.
Two corrections to the meme’s own script
The meme has rhetorical traction for a reason, and part of the reason is that it puts a poorly worded answer in its opponent’s mouth.
First, “only if you choose to accept Him.” This is where the meme gets its purchase, because it makes faith sound like a contribution the sinner brings to the transaction, and once faith is a contribution the particularist can shout “synergism” and go home. The New Testament’s own idiom is receiving, believing, drinking, looking. Faith is the empty hand, not the coin. Say received, say believed, and the objection loses its footing.
Second, the man’s answer in panel two should not have been an unqualified “for all the whosoever” without further specification. “Whosoever” describes the offer; “propitiation” describes the accomplishment. Keep the vocabulary clean and the panels have nothing to work with.
What the meme actually shows
There is a genuine dispute here, and it is not the one the meme thinks. The real question is not whether provision and application can be distinguished, since everyone distinguishes them, but whether the divine intention in the provision was universal or particular. That is a question about texts, about the will of God, and about what it means for the gospel to be preached indiscriminately to people for whom, on the particularist account, no propitiation was made. It is a discussion worth having at length.
What the meme shows is that a distinction which is entirely ordinary in a systematic theology can be made to look absurd if you compress it into six panels and refuse to let your opponent finish a sentence. That is not an argument. It is editing.
Postscript: the false dicothomy of Calvinism vs Arminianism
I mention this so that no one reads what precedes as an Arminian tract. Calvinism and Arminianism share a premise I reject: that the biblical language of election is election to eternal salvation, so that the only remaining question is whether its ground is an unconditional decree or foreseen faith. Grant that premise and you are indeed left with the two options, and you will read anyone who declines both as confused. I take the language of choosing to be vocational throughout, election to a role or a service within God’s purposes rather than to eternal life. Israel is chosen as a nation for a task and told plainly that the choice rested on love and oath rather than on anything in her (Deut 7:6–8). The Servant is God’s chosen (Isa 42:1). Cyrus is named and called before he knows the God who names him (Isa 45:4). Paul is a chosen instrument to carry a name (Acts 9:15). The Twelve are chosen by Christ with a traitor among them (John 6:70) and appointed to bear fruit (John 15:16). None of that is a decree allocating individuals to heaven or hell, and the last of those texts is difficult to square with any account on which election entails salvation. I do not argue the case here, since it deserves its own treatment. But it is worth mentioning I do not hold what Arminians have generally held about perseverance. Assurance rests on the promise of the one who gives life, not on the recipient’s continuance in it.