Atonement Part 2 - GBC Bulletin Column #39

The occasional clumsiness of the English language is not our friend here, nor indeed is the subjective broadness with which it can be interpreted. I believe in what some might call ‘limited atonement’, but nowadays the word “limited” can carry with it the idea of cheap and powerless inferiority, unless of course we’re talking about a limited edition Jaguar C-X75.

In a fallen world, prototype super-cars and might I add, limited-time-only vast reductions on tickets to your favourite sporting event are trivialities far outweighed by more painful, personal limitations. Some suffer from limited thought patterns, limited speech, limited hearing, limited sight, or limited mobility, and we all face a limited life span. You would rather think about the car and those tickets than the handicapped, disabled and comatose? It was silly to get too excited: only the richest of the rich can afford the car, so only enough cars are made for the richest of the rich; as for the tickets, the offer ends before you get your pay-cheque and even if you did scrape up enough money to buy them, you find that you have only a limited view of the pitch, track, or ring. To sum up, limited can be a bit lame.

God is not limited by anyone or anything but himself, and since he is eternally infinite, limited is still not a great word to use about God or anything he has done. And he most definitely isn’t lame – to suggest such would be blasphemy. As God is, so are his mighty deeds.

When we think then about atonement, the awesome work our Triune God has done through the crucified and resurrected Christ: satisfying holy wrath, washing away filthy sin, reconciling rebellious sinners to himself and to each other, providing a perfect example of Spirit-empowered selfless suffering and so on, we would do well to come up with more appropriate, God-glorifying, Christ-exalting terminology than “limited.” Or, if we really want to get radical and take a thoroughly biblical approach we could just speak of “redemption” or “atonement” without the preceding caveat and work any additionally required information into our exposition of the term. It is this latter course that I will now take.

To be continued. This is from the unedited version of an article published in the January edition of Grace Magazine.This was printed in the worship bulletin of Grace Baptist Church (Wood Green) on 19 January 2014.