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For whom did Christ die?

Wednesday, 14 September, 2005

The centrality of the doctrine of predestination may be appreciated by considering de Bèze's celebrated ordo rerum decratarum, which arranges the form of a chart his understanding of the nature and execution of the divine decrees of election (Figure 10.23). Everything in the history of salvation is shown to be the logical execution in the time of the “eternal and imutable purpose of God” (propositum eius aeternum et immutabile).

One major consequence of this development may be noted. For whom did Christ die? The question had been raised in the great predestinarian controversy of the ninth century, in which the Benedictine monk Godescalc of Orbais developed a doctrine of double predestination similar to that later to be associated with Calvin and his followers. Pursuing with relentless logic the implications of his assertion that God has predestined some to eternal damnation, Godescalc pointed out that it was thus quite improper to speak of Christ dying for such individuals; if he had, he would have died in vain, for their fate would be unaffected. Hesitant over the implications of this assertion, Godescalc proposed that Christ died only for the elect. The scope of his redeeming work was limited to those who were predestined to benefit from his death. Most ninth-century writers reacted with disbelief to this assertion. It was, however, to resurface in later Calvinism.

An examination of de Bèze's “description and distribution of the causes of the salvation of the elect and of the destruction of the reprobate” brings out the point at issue. It is only the elect who benefit from Christ's death. Indeed, Christ is only to be found on the left-hand side of the chart, dealing with the fate of the elect; there is no mention of him on the right-hand side, outlining the progress of the reprobate towards eternal death. Although Vermigli and Zanchi fail to provide their readers with graphic diagrams by which they may trace their route to salvation, their published works bear abundant witness to the same point: only the elect may expect to benefit from the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It may be stressed that at no point does Calvin himself suggest that Christ died only for the elect; the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement appears to result, at least in part, from the influence of these two Italian writers and the growing awareness of the need to tie up theological loose ends. This serves to remind us of the variety of sources upon which Calvinism felt able to draw, and the subtlety of its relationship with Calvin himself.

Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 214-216.

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