The Reformed Doctrine of the Atonement: What is Hypothetical Universalism? (w/ Dr. Michael Lynch)

Davenant wants to defend what he deems to be the medieval consensus he argues for what's what becomes known to be the lombardian formula and the lombardian formula says as you have it on the screen here Christ died for all sufficiently uh and Christ died for the elect alone efficaciously davant wants to defend both of those D's [Music] welcome back to the channel everybody my name is Javier Perdomo this channel is a place where we like to do theology videos church history videos and Protestant apologetics videos in so far as protestantism is an umbrella and we

say that all the time because protestantism is not in and of itself a church or a tradition it's an umbrella term it's an ism as you can tell by the end of that word the same way that monotheism is an ism and is an umbrella that contains within it several religion right in that same way protestantism is an umbrella that contains within it many different churches right Lutheran Churches Anglican churches Presbyterian churches and so on and so forth and so as you guys know one of the things I like to do on this channel is

explore the Protestant umbrella I like to get people on here uh that know what they're talking about on various doctrines whether it's reformed whether it's Lutheran whether it's what have you uh And just have them explain the doctrine and try to make the case for it and talk about it a little bit especially if it's connected uh in some way to the Protestant Reformation and so with us today we have Dr Michael J Lynch who has his PhD in history of Christianity from Calvin Seminary uh Dr Lynch teaches Classical Languages and Humanities Delaware Valley classical

school in Newcastle he's also a teaching fellow at The davant Institute he's the author of a scholarly book John davin's hypothetical universalism a defense of Catholic and reformed Orthodoxy if you go online you'll probably see the price tag on that one is it might probably be a little bit out of your your your range but the good news is that he has a new book that he translated and that is a fresh translation of John davin's on the death of Christ uh which you can probably afford and so how are you doing Dr Lynch I'm

doing well thank you for having me Javier yeah thank you for coming on I'm excited like I mentioned in the intro I just I like being able to explore uh the different Protestant traditions and seeing what they have to offer especially when it comes to reformed theology because I feel like online reformed theology is just caricatured all the time and it's bottleneck into uh as as I'm sure we'll unpack a little bit later uh very a very particular sort of like like one track sort of perspective and uh by by doing some theological retrieval with

John davan's doctrine of the atonement I think hopefully we can we can break through that a little bit so with that I'm going to go ahead and get out of your way here put up your presentation and uh let you get under way as we talk about uh John davenant You tell us a little bit about him and a little bit about like we said his doctrine of the atonement hypothetical universalism and reformed Orthodoxy so whenever you're ready yeah excellent uh well if you want to go to the first slide uh what I want to

touch on um is just give a basic introduction to uh one who John davant was and then secondly uh I want to talk about his what's called by people his hypothetical universalism because I suspect that most people only have a vague awareness of what that's all about so uh that's what I'm here to do at least at the beginning part of this so uh just some basic facts about him he was born in London in 1572 to a relatively well-to-do uh uh family um they were I think Merchants um he probably actually attended uh Merchant

Taylor School uh the merchant Taylor school there in London although there's some question about him not being on the roles even even though there's other davins uh on the role so anyways who knows where he he went to Grammar School uh but then at 15 uh he attended Queen College Cambridge you might be thinking to yourself that's kind of young but it it wasn't especially young back in the day um those that were particularly uh good in grammar school as soon as they were finished with their Grammar School uh they would go to university and

so he was finished with all of his Latin and presumably some Greek uh in grammar school and so at 15 he goes to Cambridge he earns a Bachelor's of Arts a master's of Arts then he gets his bachelor's of divinity and then finally um as he's Working and as he's teaching he earns his uh doctrate of divinity uh and becomes what people call him after that Dr davant so that's like the term that he's often just called um he is given the lady Margaret professorship of divinity um at Cambridge in 1609 um is a pretty

high-end uh professorship it's the same professorship that arasmus was given in his brief time in England when arasmus crossed the English Channel and went into England um when he taught at Cambridge he was given the same professorship so it's a it's a it's a high-end professorship there um in 1618 this is where uh if you know anything about davant or heard his name you might have heard he was one of the uh uh five or six uh delegates sent to the Senate ad Dort to um help deal with the Dutch uh remonstrant Contra remonstrant which

is basically the remonstrants are the Armenians and the Contra remonstrants are the anti- Armenians hence the name Contra remonstrants um he he he goes there as he's the theological Professor so they have a bishop um that they send they send him and then they send some other more minor figures U but he's kind of the theology guy uh the the theology Professor guy that they chose uh to go Uh King James chose um after that uh he comes back and he spends a short uh few years um continuing to teach at Cambridge and then he's

offered uh uh to be the bishop of Salsbury or appointed rather um and that's what he does for the rest of his life um this is the time period where he starts to actually publish so there's not a lot of publication that he does previous to him leaving his professorship or uh yeah previous to uh um leaving his uh work at Cambridge but once he does leave he starts to publish and most of his Publications are from the work that he did as a professor like the lectures that he gave and these sorts of things

so most of the stuff that we have published of his were simply the work that he did while he was at Cambridge um and then he dies in 1641 and if you go to the next slide we can talk about some of his major works so I picked five of uh his uh major works there are more works and arguably some of the other works that I left off here could be considered to be major but uh these are the five and two of them are actually um uh two books in one and so it's

actually like seven uh books that you have here so uh starting on the left this I I did not put them in any particular order uh partly because when they're when they're printed isn't Necessarily when he actually wrote the material and we can get into some of the questions of why that is later and that's especially relevant to his Treatise on the death of Christ but uh we saw here on the left his um two uh kind of lectures on uh theological controversies or heads of theological controversies one is about the judge of controversy this

is a very anti-roman Catholic political question it's a question of who has the right to determine controversies of Faith the pope cids who who who has this right Bishops whatever anyway so that's what he's dealing with there uh the second work uh so this is this is uh I don't know if you can see my cursor or not uh but it's the one Daya habit at auu um that's about uh uh habitual and actual righteousness so it's A Treatise on justification but a particular question related to how does habitual and actual Rel righteousness relate to

our justification it was also anti-roman Catholic uh largely so is it's a tretis on justification the second volume is translated into English and people can read it from the 19th century you can go find it on Google Books uh It's A Treatise on justification is what it's entitled and you can go read it in English the second work one of the few Major Works of his that he wrote in English is animate versions um and it was written against the book uh by Samuel horde he was a English Armenian basically um who wrote on the

Five Points of Calvinism and davant responds to his book indeed this work animate versions reprints all of hord's book and interleaves uh davenant responses to each chapter or each section um and so that's what that work is it is the only work in English that you can find of davant where he deals with doctrines like predestination and perseverance and some of the other uh Five Points of Calvinism um the stuff that he deals with at door anyways you can read that there and um uh that was published in 1641 as you could see um against

this Armenian uh English Armenian Theologian his third book uh is a exposition of Colossians these are actually his lectures that he taught his University students when he went through the book of Colossians so they're actually they're not sermons they're more like lectures or but it but it reads like a commentary right he takes a verse and then comments and takes the next verse and comments and so on and so forth um this is what um if you're a minister you if you have John davant on your bookshelf you may very well have this his commentary

on Colossians because it's been reprinted by Banner of Truth in their Geneva Commentary series I think it's that if I'm not mistaken so um uh that's his commentary on Colossians it is is um excellent It's scholarly um it's weirdly early modern so it doesn't read like a modern commentary it doesn't do the same sorts of things that modern commentaries do uh but it's very which means it's very theological it's very pical um these sorts of things uh but it was not it was not translated into English until the 19th century and then republished by banner

and you can get it imprint today uh the third or the fourth book on uh uh from the left of the screen is his theological determinations these are various um public disputations that he had to do he was given a thesis where he had to pick a thesis aside of a of a particularly um theologically controversial topic and then he had to defend it um in the preface he notes that um uh he was uh he didn't have a lot of time to often times do these disputations and to work on them um and so

he said ask for forgiveness because you know they were kind of on the Fly sort of thing but nevertheless you will read them uh they're very profitable now you can get these in English they were appended to the 19th century translation of his tretis on justification in the second volume and you will note that I Would say 75% of the DCS if not more are anti- Roman Catholic many of them deal with things like the authority of scripture uh deal with various uh uh the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Pope and these sorts of things there's

a lot of an uh uh prayers to Saints all these sorts of things that it's partic most of them are particularly anti-roman Catholic again final work I did put this at the end for a particular reason uh because this is the work that I want to talk about the most now actually you will note that the title of it this last work is two dissertations the first one is on the death of Christ and mor Christi um and then the second work you'll see Alara day Prest at reprobo uh so you know you don't need

to be a Latin scholar to know that that's on reprobation and predestination that has never been translated into English although the although much of the material or content of it is actually found in animate versions like any of the same teachings but um This Book Is A Treatise that does it in a very uh Scholastic way treats the doctrines of predestination and reprobation I actually have a working translation of it I've um me and a buddy have worked through the whole volume and we have like this working translation hopefully that will be in English at

some point um but it's this first work on the death of Christ Christ that was Translated in the 19th century and that has kind of made him famous for hypothetical universalism because it is a scholarly work intended to argue for a position in the reformed world that is not owan now I don't want to give the impression that he he knew of Owen he did not know of Owen because Owen is of a later generation he wrote this work in the 20s uh in the 1620s Owen doesn't publish his death of death until 1648 and

if you remember I said that he died in 1641 so davant would have read wouldn't have known about that work and indeed uh for Curious reasons about the publishing of deorta Christie it was published posthumously this work this last work you will note uh I think you can barely see it down at the very bottom of the uh screenshot you'll see that it was published in 1650 so Owen did not know of this work when he wrote his death of Christ um and so they kind of missed each other um of course it's also worth

noting that Owen John Owen's work uh on the death of death um or uh the death of death and the death of Christ um it's not intended to be a scholarly Work It Was Written against again an Armenian English Armenian It Was Written in English whereas Davin is written in Latin intended for Scholars Owen's Owen's work is not intended for nearly Scholars but he says he wrote it at the most vulgar level level that he could Write it at right and so even in terms of how they deal with the questions the method is quite

different davant is treating it as a theological dispute among Scholars Owen is dealing with it as a kind of pastoral issue because this English Armenian had written a work uh on the death of Christ that he didn't like and so he's he's he's writing against that so anyways um I think that's about it we can go to the next slide and we can perhaps get into uh what this hypothetical universalism is all about um as I note on the screen uh davet is most welln to have taught what is called nowadays as hypothetical universalism this

is not a term davant used well why didn't he use this term because he would have had no idea what we were talking about because the term hypothetical universalism is tied to two French words and those two French words were slurs the hypothetical ones and the those that taught universalism um they were kind of tied together and they were applied to these theologians these reformed theologians at teaching at the Academy of summer in France um so France is a Roman Catholic country at this point in the 16 uh hundreds and um it's not a university

this it's not the University of suur it's the academy isur because Protestants weren't allowed to have universities because universities had to have magisterial approval and so it's an Academy anyways but there's all these hugenots right there's all these uh French reform guys and they're teaching quote hypothetical universalism according to uh the people they don't uh the other French and swiss reformers reform theologians who don't like what's being taught at the Academy of suur um and in Paris Paris is actually a hotbed of French hypothetical universalism the term hypothetical universalism in this period in the 1640s

remember again this is after davin's death is being used uh interchangeably with amyraldianism which is another term that you might have heard um and it it's also worth noting of and perhaps I I think we might deal with this in some of the questions about what's the difference between this French amyraldianism or hypothetical universalism in davenant kind of position but the French Amir rians um they were teaching all sorts of other doctrines um that were not especially dealt with by davant or davant doesn't address partly because he's dead by the time that they start addressing

some of these questions so anyways what I'm saying is that there's a sort of anacronismo Universalist because he's dead before that happens it would be like calling Calvin a hypothetical Universalist because of course hypothetical universalism just isn't a Turn that people are using at that time no no one would know what you were talking about all right so what's davant hypothetical universalism all about um davant wants to defend what he deems to be the medieval consensus and this is found in Peter Lombard or Peter of Lombard uh he was a he was a I'm gonna

get the century wrong probably I'm going to guess 12th century 1100s uh is probably when he writes his uh sentences but this work called the sentences is basically a theological text with a whole bunch of quotes from the early church fathers and the augustinians dealing with various theological topics and in that work um in the third book he deals with uh he touches on the question of the extent of Christ's work and what he does is he argues that um well this is the summary version of it but he he argues for what's what becomes

known to be the lombardian formula and the lombardian formula says as you have it on the screen here Christ died for all sufficiently uh and Christ died for the elect alone efficaciously davenant wants to defend both of those Theses both of those propositions and he thinks that um this consensus this way of talking was the way that most uh people Throughout church history taught it I have another slide later on where I get into this so I won't get into it in detail about how he's reading the history of this question but those are the

two propositions he wants to defend Christ died for all sufficiently Christ died for the elect alone efficaciously I want to know one other thing about this particular language davenant differentiates these two propositions from closely related propositions Christ's death is sufficient for All In Christ death is for the uh is efficacious for the elect Alone um if you are particularly good with your English grammar you will immediately Ely recognize that the two that the two ways of saying these things aren't actually saying the same thing one is using an adjective modifying a noun Christ death is

sufficient the other one is taught using a verb Christ died um and then using an adverb to modify a verbal action one in other words one uh um implies intentionality um and then the other one does not anyways we could perhaps get into more of that but this is a common misunderstanding people nowadays use these terms interchangeably but people in the early modern period well they just knew their grammar a lot better and So they understood how adjectival modifiers and uh uh adverbial modifiers and adver and verbs and nouns are different and what they might

or might not imply in certain propositions so anyways there's there's more I could say about that but I I'll just forego that for a moment um either way uh by the later part of the 16th century there are some reformed Who start to get nervous about this original lombardian formula and the way that it said so so I I some people start changing it some people say I don't like Christ died for all sufficiently but I'm f was saying something like Christ's death is sufficient for all I don't um um uh and and then some

people just deny the first part of the lombardian formula they say there's no sense in which Christ died for all sufficiently and then some will even say Christ death isn't even sufficient for all so anyways um that's the the world in which davant is taking this uh is is kind of entering in when he writes his de Mor Christi so if we want to go to the next slide all right so what is davin's understanding of the first part of the lombardian formula Christ died for all and then with the adverb sufficiently uh I have

five kind of V's that kind of build on each other that davant uh about how davant understands this proposition and what he wants to Defend first he wants to defend that God ordained the death of Christ to be a universal remedy for sin he thinks that Augustine taught this he thinks that the augustinians prosper fenus and others taught this he thinks that the medieval taught this he thinks that that um uh Calvin and others taught this two he wants to affirm that Christ made his satisfaction for the sins of all people in other words that

um his that that that uh when Christ died it was a propitiation for all men's sins of course he goes to he reads all the texts that are Universal in the new in the New Testament universally any time where it says Christ died for all or he made a propitiation for the whole world he takes those universally okay third because of this Universal satisfaction God is now able according to both his Divine decree uh to make a universal remedy as well as the fact that he made uh satisfaction for all of these sins he is

now in a position to remit the sins of all people right so uh davant would hold this syllogism only those for whom Christ made his satisfaction for sins is God able to remit their sins according to his Divine Justice God has made a um satisfaction for all men sins or propitiation for all men sins therefore God God is able to remit the sins of all People right um so he would also hold the truth that if you believe that the major proposition is Christ made a propitiation for the sins of the elect alone then Christ

is only able to remit the sins of the elect and therefore that would also mean that in the gospel offer you could not say to any man God is able to uh remit your sins you could only say something like um if if you um if you are elect then God is able to remit your sins because he only died for those sins right and these sorts of things um because of this Universal satisfaction fourth all people are able to be redeemed right they're able to be remitted of their sins and be redeemed um here's

where you get your hypothetical universalism right um it's a conditional universalism people are in a state of conditional universalism that is that if they fulfill the conditions of the Evangelical gospel offer uh they can be redeemed they uh the death of Christ put um people in a redeemable State all people in a redeemable state in which had Christ not have died he they would not be in and this is in distinction from the Angels uh the Fallen Angels uh Christ did not die for the Fallen Angels therefore we have no reason to believe that they

are in a Redeemable State why because he did not make satisfaction for the sins of the Fallen Angels and so all humanity is in a uh State different than the Fallen Angels the fallen angels are unredeemable because Christ in no way died for their sins but all human beings are redeemable precisely because Christ died for all people um in these sorts of things and finally the Pastoral payoff of all this is that the gospel offer is justly Proclaim to all people why God is able to forgive your sins and if you believe and repent you

will be saved that's universally true because of what Christ has done and God and davant calls this Universal promise uh often times in his book The Evangelical Covenant he calls it a covenant which is kind of weird because often times people would would not think that that's a covenant but he calls it a universal visible Covenant that is Proclaim to all people um I hope that's helpful we can go to the next slide um so you may be thinking at this point well he's a calvinist so how does that relate to the death of Christ

and if you go read say canons Ador 28 so this is the second main Doctrine and then it's paragraph eight on their affirmations as opposed to their rejections so it's paragraph eight you will note that they talk about Christ dying for the elect alone in a certain way namely this is the latter part of the lombardian Formula they really strongly affirm the latter part of the lombardian formula at door which is Christ died for the elect alone namely efficaciously so for davant he totally affirms this because of his reading of Jeremiah 31 and certain New

Covenant language and of course the the kind of uh Locus Old Testament uh Locust of um New Covenant language that you find in the Old Testament is found in Jeremiah 31 he sees Jeremiah 31 as teaching what is often called in reformed theology today a covenant of redemption or for this Covenant uh this this situation in which the father and the son promise things to each other that if they do certain things that they will receive benefit from doing certain things um so this is an eternity past this is the father and the son promising

to uh work out salvation um or accomplish salvation and because of this accomplishment of Salvation the father gets things and the son gets things okay so how how how does how does this all work for for davant the father and the son covenanted per uh the New Covenant some of the ways that the Bible uses New Covenant language that on the accomplishment of the son's work he would receive as an inheritance a people I.E the elect for himself one thinks of all the way back in the Proto evangelium right this is how he reads the

Proto Evangelium um this is actually different than some of the other hypothetical universalists in the period but he th uh the the the the seed there that um uh crushes the head of the serpent um as being Jesus and then the seed of the seed of the woman will be the elect um so God ordained for Davin God ordained the death of Christ to the be the meritorious ground for all the and I I put this in kind of hyphens because this is the kind of latinized way that would put it uh he merited in

the death of Christ all the to be applied that is future things to be applied saving Graces which the elect alone ought to receive now what are these to be applied saving Graces he merited for the elect alone saving Faith the regenerating Spirit sanctification glorification Etc the sorts of things that you find in 1 Corinthians 1:30 um they're all benefit it's merited by Christ's death for the elect so davant if you're putting all this together sees that God had two different intentions with the death of Christ there's multiple things that are going on here and

these actually aren't even all the intentions but they're the two main ones that he talks about in demort chrisy one is to make a satisfaction for all sins such that all men are uh remble Or redeemable or able to have their sins forgiven and also to Merit or to provide the grounds upon which God as the exalted Lord um a after having done the work of the father thus far um in his humili in his state of humiliation is now in his state of exaltation able to gift the elect these gifts so that those people

actually become his own and this is all has in mind the elect there that this intention is only with regard to the elect the elect alone receive these benefits When Redemption is applied to them in time he absolutely denies Eternal justification or Eternal remission of sins right this this this application of this accomplished work for the elect is only applied in time when people believe and repent and when God gives the spirit to the elect such that they do believe and repent and receive the G Gifts of saving faith and repentance and everything that goes

along with that so I uh yeah I have one last uh slide I believe yeah um and this gets back to just how he reads church history um because this is his first uh main chapter so if you do pick up the book uh de morrisy uh or on the death of Christ you will note that he begins with history he starts without with a what we might say is a history of the controversy right and then he deals with the state of the controvery uh the state of the question and so on and so

forth But first he does a history of the controversy for Davin he claims that his position which again he did not call hypothetical universalism he just laid it out and we call it hypothetical universalism um he believes that his position on the extent of Christ's work was the consistent position of the great majority of theologians in church history he goes through the church fathers he goes through Augustine prosper and fenus who are the be big three names in the uh fourth fifth and sixth centuries um anti the pagans and semi pagans he thinks that all

the anti- pagans and anti-s semi pagans are of his opinion he goes through some of the medieval controversies on this question ear early medieval controversies like in the 600s 700s 800s uh all the way up to about a thousand ad um then he notes that in the era of scholasticism right so this is Medieval scholasticism in the 11 12 13 14 15th century he thinks that everyone basically held to Lombard by that point um he thinks that Lombard became kind of just the basic Plum line for Orthodoxy um and he includes Thomas aquinus indeed you

will find him he regularly appeals to ainus in De morrisy he likes Thomas on this question um by then finally um we find this both in this work and in other works of his he Believes that almost all of the first and second generation reformers are on his side he names people like I'm not being exhaustive here I'm just noting some names that you may have heard of Meenan uh Hinrich Binger Wolf Gang musculus John Calvin uh Jerome zonki and others is all teaching the lombardian formula and things that he thinks are absolutely true um

now he does not say it explicitly although I I I suspect he actually knew this um but it's arguably with Theodore basa uh you will note that basa is kelvin's kind of protege he thinks that it's basa who um well he doesn't say this explicitly but I think that this is accurate given the history that I know about um the 16th century and where reform people start to bristle at the first part of the lombardian formula uh basa is perhaps the First Reform Theologian to explicitly complain about the wording of the lombardian formula and he

doesn't like the first part of the lombardian formula he calls it inan he calls it barbarous and these sorts of things anyways um that's a brief explanation of davin's hypothetical universalism hopefully that's helpful Javier yeah no it it definitely is um and I I'm excited for these questions a few of these you touched on a little bit but maybe we can get into them with a little bit more depth so you mentioned right uh that a Lot of people tend to conflate uh davant like like you said several times right so people at home uh

please get this right like he didn't call it hypothetical universalism that's just what we've called it uh on a side note it's always interesting to me uh how things get named right whether we're talking about like traditions from the Reformation right you hear a lot of uh Roman Catholics for example get upset when we call them Roman Catholics or when they look back in history and they hear terms papist or romanist and people get all up in arms but it's like well but it's it's it's Rome that called like Luther uh and the followers of

Luther Lutheran right they didn't want to be called that they got called that and so things just get called uh whatever they are with with a lot of the time by their enemies but also just what sticks right and so yeah when it comes to John davan's doctrine of the atonement that's hypothetical universalism now a lot of people can flate that like you mention mentioned with amalis and so maybe could you uh Define amalis one more time again for us and then evaluate whether that conflation uh is accurate a little more in depth there yeah

so amyraldianism is titled because it was a the claim a claim about the teaching of Moses amiro amiro was a French Theologian at the Academy of suur and many of his followers liked him um indeed he was indeed a student of John Cameron who was a Scotsman whom people loved and actually much of what Amy Ro Amy R was teaching was just what John Cameron had Been teaching and Cameron is actually a um contemporary with davant anyways Amy R and amyraldianism um taught a slew of things besides the sorts of things I mentioned about John

David's hypothetical universalism some of them seemed to imply in some of their teaching that because of the death of Christ all people have been given what's called uh this is kind of a Roman Catholic distinction but it's aped by many reformed theologians and used quite well and fine as called Uh there's this distinction between sufficient Grace and efficacious Grace and the idea has been that the death of Christ um perhaps has given all men sufficient Grace all human beings actually have been given what's called sufficient Grace such that if they use that sufficient Grace correctly

they could be saved now efficacious Grace is always going to be limited to the elect for someone like amiro but the idea is is that there's another way in which we could say that all people are redeemable in so far as they've been granted this sufficient Grace on the basis of the death of Christ the way that sufficient Grace works is at least with Amy or it seems with amiro that you find this in his brief track on predestination which became uh which actually lit the fire for all the controversies with the amalan it's published

in 1634 if I'm not mistaken and it was published in French not even in Latin or English but um he he uses this thought experiment um and the thought experiment is you have this man in timbuk 2 um and he I he doesn't actually use timbuk 2 just so that you know it's just that's just this is the way it goes the thought experiment he loves his family he because of the law written on his heart he knows um he knows that he's broken God's law he knows there's a God he knows just naturally that

he breaks God's law and by all the common Grace benefits that he gets like um he has a nice family he gets food on his table the rain falls on him as being unjust all these sorts of things that he paits that were he to call out to God in faith to be given mercy God would in no way reject him and he would be given saving Mercy now of course you will immediately there will be a couple of issues that you will immediately find perhaps objectionable but the one that most people would not here

is is that well where's the hearing of the Gospel where's the hearing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ he seems to suggest that you he would not need any particular special Revelation to do this I say all of that not to say that amiro actually is teaching all of this because after all this is a thought experiment he's believes in like what we'd say total depravity so he would believe that no one in Timbuktu would actually ever be led to do this without the spirit and these sorts of things so there's all sorts of other

things going on but this is how they were read and um this is in the this is part of the objection to amyraldianism it's not just that they're saying Christ died for all people's sins or made a propitiation problem in sense it's a slew of other doctrines closely related to the work of Christ and Redemption applied that many Swiss in particular Dutch and some French guys are getting you know they just don't like and that's why if you read something like the helvetic consensus which was written by um the Swiss um in Geneva this is

kind of this document it's kind of Quasi confessional document helvetic consensus I think the date is 85 1685 it is anti- amyraldianism the whole thing is anti- amyraldianism and you will note that there's only one section out of 30 20 30 40 sections I don't Remember how many there are there's only one section on the death of Christ right and the extent of Christ's death there's all sorts of other things and amyraldism really includes all of these including whether the Hebrew Val points are um uh are uh biblical or maseri uh the maserin right so

like it it includes things like the simple matter of it is that Amy Rie ism is seen to be a liberalizing of the Christian faith it's not just an Armenian of the Christian faith but it's a liberalizing these guys are guys that are undermining the Old Testament by saying that the vowel points the Hebrew vowel points aren't original to Ezra's time or some other time in Biblical history Old Testament history but rather they they're they were written by the maserin um in the 10th or 11th century or E I I don't remember exactly ad that

they're like way after you know Jesus's time when the mazeres added the uh uh The Vow points right which everyone agrees now that the maites did that but back then that was still somewhat debated debated anyways all that to say is is that there's lumping going on um and while I think it's correct as far as I can tell that all the Amir rians taught what davant basically is trying to get at in his sort Christi cant does not teach all of the things indeed is completely unaware of many of the other things that these

Amy rans are doing and amyraldianism and hypothetical universalism in the 17th century becomes a catchall world word not just for what Daving teaches but a whole slew of other things that are really davant would have no aware awareness of and either didn't address or just flat out to nine so so it sounds um although not exactly the same it sounds a little bit similar to how people for example will think of uh Calvinism and reformed theology at large as though it's exclusively just tulip and that's it yeah right and there there's that conflation of well

no that's actually not all that reform theology is right there's there ecclesiology that comes with it there's uh um uh often eschatological things that come with it and so on and so forth right it's a it's a bigger system in in that sense right it's this is where catchall terms can often be very quite deceptive if we uh apply them to certain people in history yeah that makes sense and so then another question that I have so like you mentioned right Bishop davet uh was a delegate at the Senate of Dork right and so was

there A diversity of views at the Senate of dord and the Westminster assembly regarding their views of the atonement uh and is there confessional room uh in these reformed confessional documents uh for hypothetical universalism and the reason I asked that is again so and we'll talk about this more in later questions uh but today there's this concept of uh limited atonement that is just you know John owens's View and and that just is seen as completely synonymous with a reformed view on these matters right and with the view the confessional View today a lot of

people just see it as just either you agree with John Owen uh or or bust like that's it but was there A diversity of views at the Senate of Dort and at the westmin assembly and uh is there room hypothetical universalism in these confessions yeah so two there yeah I mean we should probably distinguish between majority POS or um diversity among just theologians that are in reformed churches and then the confessions as you note so um there has always been diversity in reformed churches on this question sometimes more diversity sometimes less diversity like in the

OPC today right you're not going to find probably a whole bunch of self-confessed hypothetical universalists or even in the PCA partly because most people don't think through these things partly because were you to hold to something like davet position you're probably not going to be public with it uh for a variety of reasons because you know people will immediately want to try you for heresy or something like that anyways uh so there's peculiar because of the way that history has unfolded that's just simply the case um add to there was a minority a a a

a very vocal minority of those who did not like what we would now term of course Dort happens well before Owen uh it gets on the scene this is 20 years before Owen even starts publishing right um but um there was there was quite a bit of diversity at the uh Senate of Dort and this is precisely why the second article when you read through it you will never see Them actually deny that or affirm that Christ only died for the elect alone nor do they deny explicitly Christ uh deny that Christ died for all

men why because there were simply people that affirmed the proposition Christ died for all men and then there were some people that denied the proposition that Christ only died for the elect in any sense so um DOR is simply a uh a consensus document um in which that so yeah I mean if Dorian Orthodoxy is what you need to be reformed well you could hold to davin's position just fine he signed the second article he signed off on it and in my book actually I trace the English delegates actually had a very strong hand in

basically every single article on the second uh on the second main Doctrine which is dealing with the extend of the atonement and there was large debate on it and the English basically make it made a stand saying we will not sign off on the Senate unless you make sure that you allow our position in as kind of within the fold they actually tried to get hypothetical universalism confessionalization at Westminster um I've given some lectures on this some people have liked them some people haven't that's fine um they can be wrong I I'm I'm okay with

that um but uh yeah uh there were a lot of English hypothetical universalists at the Westminster assembly um most of the English Presbyterians so you have the Scottish Presbyterian kind of uh quasi delegates that are sent uh to to to help uh the the Westminster assembly then you have some English Presbyterians you have English congregationalists you have English Independents and so on and so forth and then you even have a couple um actually anglicans uh one in particular who's there for a while anyways um but most of the outspoken and most well-known English Presbyterian leaders

all hold to that an anti in hypothetical universalism Lazarus Seaman uh Edmund Camy Steven Marshall uh Marshall's the one that's most well known for his uh sermons and his defense of pedal baptism um at the assembly um and so on and so forth anyways I mean cam is like the uh uh I I like him to the ji Packer of his period he was blurbing every book imaginable he's the one that you wanted your blur book you know back in the day so anyways all that to say is is that there were some pretty Heavy

Hitters uh it's probably the case as well that John Aerosmith uh was a Davin Anan hypothetical Universalist although um that case is a little bit more tricky but at the end of the day um there was quite a bit of diversity and I honestly do not believe that there's anything in The confession related to this question that davant wouldn't have just said yeah I I can agree with that wording I'm I'm fine with this wording uh in the West confession of Faith so but I I I'm not a I'm not a church court so I

don't I don't I don't have to I'm not put in a position to actually do that sort of thing so it's really uh beyond my pay grade to have to uh do that but if I if the question is if the question is would John davant sign off on the kind of soteriological stuff going on in the west confession of faith and in the Divine degree and predestination and the death of Christ and what it does would he affirm all the things it affirms and would he deny all the things it denies I think he

would so as we think about uh uh like you said right this there's wide variety of perspectives especially with there being a lot of English support uh at the Senate of Dort uh for hypothetical universalism besides John davant uh whether English or outside of England are there any other reformed theologians that have done significant work on this doctrine of hypothetical universalism there are some but there less well known uh like uh um well Baxter did a ton of work Baxter was a big English hypothetical Universalist Universalist in fact he wrote a whole Treatise on it

but it was published again postumus and the reason he didn't publish it is because he basically said we we know this for fact um because he Writes it in letters that he wrote to various people he thought that basically amyro in France or the Amy rians in France and John davant tretis do the work for him he's suff he was sufficiently okay with their work so um yeah I mean there's all sorts John how is a hypothetical Universalist but he doesn't write on it but he loves Baxter's stuff on it and he wishes that he's

like encouraging Baxter to actually publish it John how he's a wellknown like Puritan right and so I just note it there um I'm pretty confident I'm almost certain that Matthew h was um uh but again these guys aren't writing treatises on it there's a there's a reason why they're not by the later part of the SE uh of the 17th century so the later part of the 1600s debating Armenians is just not where the debate has turned you're you're you're actually you're actually joining hands with the Armenians to debate the cians or the Unitarian an

or the antitrinitarians or something like that in other words the theological landscape changes to where Calvinism is just not the thing it's not the that's not the Line in the Sand that people are making anymore in England in particular the Line in the Sand has shifted to other things there are bigger fish to fry and so by the time even Owen starts writing that stuff has become secondary tertiary right so DAV or Owen By the time he writes on it this a tail in indeed this is probably right Davin own tretis that never kind of

became a firestorm the reason it didn't become a p Firestorm is that it was published not in 1628 when he was finished with it but it got published in 1650 postumus and by 1650 just arminianism is not the main problem in English society socinians uh unitarians crazy Armenians not just Armenians that deny that he died for the elect alone in any way but like crazy Armenians that are saying that God is passable and doesn't know the future and these sorts of things so it just becomes like this sounds like entering into a debate that no

one's having anymore yeah that makes sense so one of so one of the debates that that that we referenced several times or no well not debate in so far as the people that that that were writing these works like you said uh were debating because like you mentioned in your presentation they they passed each other right but uh they missed each other rather but that is John Davin and John Owen right because like like we've said a couple times John Owen's view of limited atonement is most prevalent today right that that is what people think

of when they think about reformed theologies like a lot of people are not even W of hypothetical universalism right they just think of John Owen's view of limited atonement as as the reformed View and so uh could you please Give us a quick definition of John Owen's view of limited atonement and then I why don't you tell us why you think it is that Owen's view is the one that has gained such prominence uh in reform circles today as opposed to davin's view yeah that's that's a that's a very complicated question not the first one

the second one is very complicated although the first one is it's complicated for theological reasons the second one is complicated because of History reasons right so uh John Owen just simply denies that God had an intention with the death of Christ that was Universal in any way whatsoever indeed he was not Inc incarnated for anyone but the elect he there is nothing in Christ's mediatorial work that is anything but particular now he has reasons for this you can read his Trea is for this um uh you can either find them convincing or unconvincing I find

them quite unconvincing but you know uh to each their own you know like I I go to I go to church and I'm in churches where people love Owen and that's fine I I'm fine with that it doesn't bother me one bit right like I'm I'm fine with this uh you know people disagree all the time on theological topics so and this is this is just not something that I the question of the extent of hel just does not rise to the level of first order business uh in my in my judgment right um so

um his he believes that if you have a universal satisfaction for sins Divine Justice precludes Christ bearing the Divine wrath do our sins on himself and also simultaneously someone being damned for that same wrath having been poured out for those particular sins on the person he he C this is the what what what's nowadays called the double payment argument in other words um a sinner cannot uh Christ cannot be punished for the same sins that a sinner is punished for um and that is seemed to be unjust um and many of the people that argue

for om om indianism even back in the day they use this argument to great effect right um now whether or not it's fallacious or not is a different question um for a variety of reasons def definitely thinks it's fallacious backx thinks it's fallacious but um and it also um I will note that Dabney and hodj also think it's fallacious they both go after this double payment argument although they don't tie it to Owen um although presumably they both knew this um because they they they both knew of Owen's Works um but they they don't ever

they don't ever tie it to Owen but uh actually uh Dabney ties it to Turan because Turan makes this argument as well um and he goes after turrin for it um so anyways the the argument is is that you either have universalism you have Christ dying for some sins but not all sins of all men so he didn't die for Faith because some People don't have faith and if he died for the sin of Faith then uh then all people would have faith and therefore um for ow then you'd get to a universalism anyway so

he so he has the trilemma right either Christ died for the sins of all men Christ died for some sins of all men or Christ died for all the sins of the elect those are the only three logical positions that you can take and he argues that you can only end up taking the last position um I I don't know how much you want from Owen but that's that's his basic argument um with a whole bunch of Bible argument as well right I mean he argues that all the universal texts are to be interpreted particularly

every time it uses world or all men or something like that it only means all the the elect world and these sorts of things all kinds of men Jews spoke Gentiles not something like all human beings or something like that so yeah and so yeah I was ask the followup with that is why do you think um it's gained such prominence because what's interesting to me is that's one of the things that I see you know when we talk about uh uh stra men especially online right that's one of the things that I feel like

gets most easily attacked uh is you know and we're putting to the side the question of how legitimate for example uh uh you know that that not redefinition but I guess uh different understanding of uh the world and and That kind of language is universal language in scripture putting that to the side a little bit that's the one that I feel like is most attacked online right people people will point out like really like John 3:16 is only the elect and you see all sorts of memes and other things about that but yet this view

is like super prominent and so why do you think it is because I would assume from your perspective with the work you've done with davant that obviously like you said you're you're convinced by dant's View and you would say that's far more defensible I'm sure than Owens View and yet Owens is more popular so why do you think that is okay so I think there are a couple reasons um that you could make first off you asked me the question of how many people actually wrote on this topic in the early modern period wrote trees

on the topic of the genten actually not that many there's a lot of people that dabble on it in common places in systematic theologies of the period Turin has a whole question on it but there's very few actual treatises indeed the two main treatises in the early modern period at least in England there's only two big ones uh published in the 17th century if if we put aside 1695 in Baxter's work right um is Owen in English and davant in Latin and those are the only two in England and I'm not aware of any major

works except for from some of the French amans who are writing in Latin some of their stuff on the extent of the atonement um but even then in those Works those works are largely on other topics not just related to the death of Christ but other topics related to Grace more generally like sufficient Grace efficacious Grace some of the things I got into earlier and like you said in those works you have a lot of other weird stances so so you know like uh if you were yeah yeah yeah right so okay so um uh

one's written by an Anglican well where did anglicanism go did it become a calvinistic stalwart stalwart into to the 18th century 19th century of course it didn't we all know where anglicanism went right it it became kind of Anglo Catholic right by and large I I understand GC RS of the world and these sorts of things but but by and large that's what happened there so davant who's the big Anglican who touches on this topic he argues that well whereas Owen who's a big congregationalist but kind of calvinist ped Baptist congregationalist um although congregationalism actually

kind of dies out as a bull workk in England uh because it becomes often Unitarian and these sorts of things as well just like it did in America into the 18th centuries and 19th centuries right um um it um uh that Legacy is perpetuated by Scottish Presbyterians and the Scottish Presbyterians are almost to a man very owan when they come to the Debate they almost always fall on the side of Owen and because American reform theology is so heavily tugged to the Scottish Presbyterian Irish Scotch Irish Presbyterian tradition I just think that historically it makes

sense that re reformed theology in America is going to look particularly Scottish and if there's one if there's one book that represents the Scottish or defends the Scottish position on this question the Scottish Presbyterian position on this topic it is uh Owen's tretis and I so so I think there's something to that in particular um I also think that because Davin andreus stayed in Latin until the 19th century that also has it right it's simply that everyone could always have read every English speaker could always read Owen but there's a ton of people that cannot

read davant and indeed davin's work is if it can be believed remember DAV Owen says he wrote his work at a very vulgar level if it can be believed I think Davin works even harder to kind of theoretically grasp than Owens and so it's hard and if you're not not trained in medieval scholasticism if you think Owen is hard to read davant might be even more difficult To read and so I think there's some of that as well but I I honestly think it's just because of what's available um Owen's been available uh Owens was

published in English Owen's work are uh Works were constantly translated uh kind of not translated but uh continues to be published davant work uh because it's in Latin it does not continue to be published because if you're going to publish it at some point you need to decide to have a translator that is difficult that's expensive that requires a lot of time so it's not until the 19th century that some uh more kind of uh conservative anglicans decide you know davin's amazing we should publish him and so they start translating through all of his stuff

but they don't even get through all of it because the guy that the main translator dies and then I was going to say and it makes sense I mean that's what we see even today right you can have a lot of scholarly work that is just upnot and it's amazing uh but maybe you're you're like man how how has no one like dealt with this and it may just be that that person's work was just tucked away in in journals it was yeah you know and and just no one you know not the vast majority

99% of people do not have a subscription to that particularly particular scholarly Journal I mean right and they haven't read it yeah Pro proverbs deals with this right you know uh you hear one story and while you hear the one story you think it's true until you hear the other side sort of thing right uh this is like a a proverb that everyone realizes right and the simple matter of It is is that when most people deal with this topic there's only one place that they even know to go and that's Owen which I understand

and that's fine I actually think that you should go to Owen and read him talking about this topic because he thinks about it very systematically and logically and these sorts of things uh I'm I see part of my job as being to say well listen just people should know that there was another Treatise written around the same period but it was published in Latin and almost no one's read it and you should read that too and you'll start to realize ironically enough I think Davin anti and hypothetical universalism has been perpetuated in reformed the theology

by certain persons even though they' never read davant I think Dabney when he gets ARL Dabney the southern Presbyterian I think that his view is basically English hypothetical universalism davin's position he goes after Turin he thinks it's uh harsh or kind of extreme and he wants to take this what he calls middleweight position but then it becomes confusing because he then goes after the amans because he's getting all of his views about amalan ISM from the Turran so anyway so his categories are all screwed up but when he's actually talking about theologizing about it it's

davin's position he just argues dav's position so anyways so I I think we've had this we actually have in re American reform theology some of these guys Hajj I think gets really close to I think hodj is closer to D Davant than he is Owen on this topic this is Charles Hodge so that's interesting well and so as we talk about these uh all these different figures uh whether they formally said yes I agree with John davant or whether they like you said maybe they're working out their perspective and without realizing it they end up

uh coming realizing the same thing coming up with the same thing I want to go back to you know the the the sort of a figure head of Reform theology that is John Calvin right and as we know right reform theology doesn't live or die by John Calvin it's not like like it's just whatever Calvin ever said and that's it no uh but he's obviously still incredibly important and he is the Figure Head uh of Reform theology for a reason uh at least today and so would you interpret John Calvin as being more in line

with davin's view of the atonement uh or with John owens's view of the atonement and why yeah now in the n in the 20th century in particular this question became like a perennial or well per an annual um instead of uh uh yeah a perennial question uh in kind of evangelicalism what was Calvin's view of the extent of the atonement such that there was a whole slew of writing on this question unfortunately most of the people writing on the topic actually had very little knowledge of the history of the development of how people dealt with

that question so Roger Nicole for example who believed that Calvin's view Um he would say something like um it uh tends towards the oian position even though he realized that Calvin oftentimes says things that seem awkwardly antio inian in some way um so so so but uh he knew a lot about the French eny rians but he did not know how he got there very well like he did not know the history of it very well he did not know his Bullinger and musculus very well he did not know basa and basa at the colloquy

of mon Bellard or anything like that like he he does not deal with any of that stuff anyways um so so I knowe that this has been an academic question but I think that that Academy has actually been quite ignorant of most of the history of this question and how it developed from the 16th into the 17th century um to call Calvin Davin Anan would be a mistake partly because in kelvin's time the sorts of precise questions that davant is answering are not really on the radar of someone like Calvin but here's what we do

know about Calvin one he reads John 316 universally everyone knew this this is not debatable in the 16th and 17th century Armenians knew this they would say something like we hate Kelvin on predestination but ironically enough he sounds quite like us when he talks about John 3:16 like they would note this right they hate Calvin they hate his writings and yet they'll say something Like but him on John 36 actually that's quite fine we like that um right like his in his commentary on John 36 he basically holds he reads it in a hypothetical Universalist

way right he reads it exactly the way that davant does and davant knows this and he quotes Calvin on John 316 right so anyways um um Calvin held to the original lombardian formula as it was bequeathed to him he uses it four times one time he says that this lombardian formula doesn't apply to this particular text I think it's first John 22 or something like that um but uh there's nowhere in his writings where he says Christ died for the elect alone there's tons of places in his language where he uses Universal Redemption type language

right and um this is precisely why people that want to have Calvin on their side who are oans often basically have to say that Calvin they'll say well Calvin's doctrine of predestination would preclude him from inter from from us interpreting those as universally as they seem but of course davant is the quintessential person that undermines all of that because davant holds both all those Universal taxs universally and talks in these Universal ways but he is as calvinistic we might say as Calvin on predestination and reprobation indeed William Cunningham who's the great Scottish Presbyterian o indianist

he says that davin's Treatise which is still in Latin as I noted earlier on predestination and reprobation is the best defense available in the n in the 19th century to that point in defense of the calvinistic position of predestination reprobation that there is so and so yeah so I I think that was good I think we we've covered quite a bit kind of running the gamut through different uh reformed theologians uh I'm curious though when it comes to again on this channel right exploring the the the Protestant umbrella and seeing how some things maybe are

similar and differ even across Traditions within uh that umbrella uh how would you compare and contrast uh davin's hypothetical universalism with the Lutheran doctrine of universal objective justification because I I can see people that have knowledge that Doctrine seeing uh quite a bit of similarity in some sense and so how would you compare and contrast those well I can only speak to 16th and 17th century Lutheranism so I will only speak to that and actually the history of this question has a lot to do with Lutheranism and this is kind of the hidden story that

no one ever talks about because no one ever really seems to know about this although there have been some recent Scholars who have noted this uh Randy blackader uh notes this in one of his articles in from Heaven he came and saw her so there there are people that have started to recognize this um uh Randy's work in that chapter is pretty good although it's called blaming basa and he seems to not want to blame basa for some of this but I Earlier did blame basa because he is the blame for some of this it

seems to me um anyways and actually everyone knew this I mean everyone in the 16th and or later 16th and early 17th century was blaming basa for this people knew that basa was the one who started rejecting the lombardian formula and then people were following basa like this was well known but anyways uh piscator was an also uh uh person uh yo Yan piscator was another guy anyways um in the late 16th century there are lutherans Who start to have really harsh debates with Calvinists on atonement Theodor basa and Jacob Andrei Jacob Andrei being like

the quintessential uh German uh Lutheran in the late 16 uh uh uh late 16th century and then Theodore basa being the great reform Theologian of the later part of the 16th century they meet at this colloquia of M Bellard um and they're there to actually debate things that lutherans had already always been debated between or the things always debated between lutherans and reform namely like Lord supper stuff but all of a sudden the extend of the atonement comes up and on Andrei seems to be arguing for what you noted is an objective justification the way

that he says it is he seems to be implying that the death of Christ actually puts all human beings in a redeemed State not just redeem Redeemable state but in a Justified State there so that all people born under the New Covenant are born whether you're a pagan or not in a redeemed State why because you've had original sin has been washed away because of the death of Christ which is universal there's this Universal New Covenant that um covers all people and so at the death of Christ once Christ's death has been enacted all human

beings have been washed away of original guilt then then Jacob Andrei says then the reason why some people are damned is not because of that original guilt which is universally washed away uh because of the death of Christ at at the cross but because of actual sin namely your rejection of Christ and so unbelief becomes the reason why people are Damned people are damned not because of not hearing the gospel and therefore um not having once been Justified but rather because they're unbelievers and um there's another guy uh named Samuel Huber um who also is

teaching something similar he's arguing that people are all born Justified pagans or those in Covenant um in like Christian families and he says all people are born in a Justified State and then they lose their justification by unbelief and then if they then if they move from unbelief back to belief they can be saved once again Justified once again but if they continue or persevere in their unbelief then they're damned and so davant would hate all of that all of that he does not like any of that this is one of the reasons he denies

Eternal justification or any sort of justification on the cross he rejects objective justification or this objective state of reconciliation that all men are put under such that we're all born in reconciled to God until we dconc ourselves from God through our unbelief he denies all of that and explicitly goes after that in deor Christi yeah it's interesting because nothing issue that I need to do more reading on from the Lutheran side as well because I know as as things uh from the the little understanding I have the way that the doctrine is uh more defined

as time goes on especially uh by CFW Walther right the first ever president of the lcms yeah if I remember correct like the way that he would go about describing it would be that this idea of God's verdict of not guilty right is actually proclaimed upon the whole world for the sake of Jesus's uh you know life death Resurrection but then sounds to me yeah and and then you have subjective justification uh which is uh when in faith right through the the vehicle of Faith the benefits of God's verdict are Actually received by the individual

and so it's really interesting I need to do more reading on that but yeah that's what I was thinking as you were explaining uh during your presentation that the difference would be uh like you said uh between everyone is redeemable and all of humanity has actually been redeemed in some sense whether or not they've receed the benefits the full benefits of that Redemption yeah there there is there is some some yeah davidan talks about uh when he gets to 1 Corinthians 5 um no second Corinthians 5 and this whole um we are ambassadors of Christ

be reconciled to God but God has been in Christ reconciling the world to himself there is a bit of that behind his exposition of that but it's not in the he denies it in the way at least that it pays out or cashes Out Among some of these later 16th century early 17th century Lutheran although davant actually explicitly says in one of his letters to Samuel Ward that he doesn't actually keep up with the lutherans very much on this topic yeah so he's getting that secondhand he's getting the Lutheran second hand yeah so so then

that covers a little bit on the Lutheran side as I'm looking here at the the final two questions I have for you just because this is a focus on the channel I always want to try to cover something that has to do with uh the ecclesial ists as we've termed them the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics and and the rest of their cohort on that umbrella uh and so hypothetical universalism that Like as we've been talking about is a subset uh understanding of penal substitution area atonement right and when it comes to uh penal substitution

area atonement or PSA right in short uh p say uh one of the classic critiques that are often launched against PSA by Roman Catholics who are bound I believe they feed it to deny PSA and then by some Eastern Orthodox I know that there's there's there's a lot of Eastern Orthodox today that think that PSA is there's a Bominable Western practice there's others that are actually quite favorable to it from that I that I've run into online but in either case the critique is the same from uh the ecclesial is that deny it one of

the big critiques is that they claim it splits the Trinity right by pitting one member of the Trinity the father against another member of the Trinity the son as they as they claim well because you have one member of the Trinity condemning or damning another member of the Trinity that splits the Trinity and so how has the reformed tradition broadly addressed this issue how would you respond to this objection well there's a short answer and the long answer I'm not going to get into the long answer I'm just going to give a short answer if

well short answer includes a things first I would say there are many Protestants who just simply do not know what they're talking about when they defend penal substitutionary atonement and then they use unguarded language which causes people hearing from the outside to object to penal substitution when in reality they're objecting to something they probably should object to because The advocate of penal substitutionary atonement is speaking unguardedly so I I I I will just note that I think the main problem that many modern Advocates of penal substitution make is by acting as if there are three

agents involved in the transaction going on in atonement and in Penal substitution and those three agents are God the Father Christ the son and then finally Sinners but in fact there are only two agents there is the Divine Trinity and there is the uh and then there are sinners and what you have in the work of Christ is a work of God particularly of the hypostasis in which uh uh the three hypostasis in which the spirit the Son and the father father each have a role for the same end in mind and that um it's

just it's not as if the father decides I'm gonna punish my son and the son decides I'm going to be punished by the father or something like that rather it's that the son decides to do the work Work of his father and the father decides that the uh agrees with the son's desire because they don't have different Wills we're not talking about three Wills just because we're talking about hypostasis there's one will God Wills that in the person of Jesus Christ he would redeem Sinners God is redeeming sinners in Christ God decides to to be

treated as a sinner for the sake and it just so happens that the second hypostasis is the one that does this uh and that the first hypostasis doesn't or the third hypostasis doesn't right but it's God entering into all of that and once you start thinking that there are two parties rather than three parties then you don't have this idea of a father chastising his son and these sorts of things in the way that modern people often discuss it so I just think that the way that this is talked about is completely absurd um also

we have a problem in our language about um what's actually involved in Christ bearing the wrath of God because it clearly can't be the same thing precisely when we talk about us bearing the wrath of God uh for a variety of reasons one being the fact that Christ is actually doing the will of Father the will of the father in the act of penal substitution in other words he is not doing something wrong at the whole point we could say God was the father was well well pleased with the son at every moment of him

bearing the wrath of God in our stad that is not something we can say when we bear the wrath of God God is well pleased with us right and so there there are there are there are distinctions that we must start making before we start using these Lang this language that is prone to all sorts of confusion um anyways I could get M much more into that this I have actually gotten more into this when I did my lectures for the David Institute on chology which you can go by blah blah blah somewhere on the

David Institute so anyways yeah hey and you know there we have that plug right there if you guys want to see more at home on that question you can check out those lectures maybe I can even link them down below if I remember in post but well we come here to our final question something that I like to uh to touch on when we talk about you know for some people when they when it comes to doctrines of the Aton when it comes to these things it can seem like this like high futing sort of

thing and people are like man how how will this ever apply to my life you know you get like a a parallel to the student uh who's who's bad at math sitting in class like when am I ever gonna gonna use geometry or whatever in my daily life and so I I like to end a lot of these sorts of Presentations on a personal note on how this applies and so how does believing in the doctrine of hypothetical universalism practically affect your own Theology and then your own walk with the Lord so davant begins his

Trea us this way this is the very first line very first sentence very first paragraph it is truly a matter of sorrow and great sadness that either from The Misfortune or the disease of our age those mysteries of our religion made known to us for the peace and comfort of our souls are consist consistently made a topic of litigation and argument who could ever thought that the death of Christ which was designed to establish peace and Destroy enmity as the Apostle says in Ephesians 21417 and Colossians 1:20-21 could have become such a fertile fertile ground

for begetting such quarrels yet this situation seems to arise from the innate curiosity of human beings who are more anxious to scrutinize the hidden purposes of God than to embrace the benefits openly offered to them and he goes on and kind of uh rhetorically uh unpacks this a little bit first I would say it's more important for you to embrace Christ as Prophet priest and King on your behalf than it is to get down the question of the extent of the atonement so um Because the atonement I think everyone can agree was intended to establish

peace not beget quarrels uh secondly um I would note that while people may have differences on the extent of the atonement most people's preaching does not in fact seem to always follow one's Theory there are few people that I know few ministers in the OPC or the PCA in my world that I live who wouldn't say to any human being God is able to forgive you of your sins now whether or not logically based on what they think the C the death of Christ did not do or did do they can actually say that the

simple matter of it is that they do so in practice it doesn't seem to play out all that much what I like about aidence work is that it simply allows Theory to line up with the practice that people often already do anyways and so the Pastoral payoff is is that I'm not afraid of saying Christ died for your sins I'm not afraid of making what we might say a little bit more of a stronger gospel offer that makes it a little bit more offering um to to use very vulgar language at that point that is

very vulgar um um uh alery I don't think that that's A that's a adverb anyways um what was I gonna say I was gonna say one other thing um I cannot remember what I was going to say anyways uh how does it play out in my own thinking well it's a reminder that um we should think carefully about the death of Christ we should not just simply um think indiscriminately about things uh but that it requires thought but it's more important to apply Christ uh than it is to um master all the fine theological nuances

of its accomplishment because we all know that scripture is perspicuous when it comes to when it comes to the Bas basic gospel message and the basic gospel message need not delve into the precise question of for whom did Christ die so well thank you so much uh Dr Lynch for being uh with me uh on the channel today once again for everybody at home I'll have it in the desri in the description uh John davant on the death of Christ this fresh modern translation by Dr Lynch before we head out is there anything else that

you'd like to say no uh uh but uh if you want to help feed my family and uh and if there's more spiritual benefit that you might get from meditating on the work of Christ on Behalf of Sinners please please please go out and buy my book so anyways uh that will feed my family uh it will serve the davan Institute who published it and um hopefully it will feed your souls all right well thank you so much Dr Lynch for coming on the channel and uh we'll catch you next time thank you [Music] [Music]