I began researching and writing roughly 10 years ago. The more I read of the modern literature, the more I realized I needed to go back and read the primary sources on this subject, especially from the Reformation to the present. My chapter on the extent question, “The Extent of the Atonement: Limited or Universal?”, which was published in 2010 in Whosoever Will: a Biblical-Theological Critique of Calvinism, became….
In our Book of the Week, David L. Allen’s The Extent of the Atonement, David L. Allen surveys every period of church history to demonstrate the relative popularity of limited and unlimited atonement among various groups. The first part of his book argues that limited atonement did not arise as a formulated doctrine until Theodore Beza….
In 1647, John Owen published what some consider to be his most influential work, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, which defended the doctrine of limited atonement. Perhaps because of Owen’s work, many have assumed limited atonement to be the default position of most Reformed theologians (that and the well-known recent….