Calvinism and the atonement

One of the things which most surprised me about the character of "exclusive" theology is its adherence to some of those doctrines elsewhere regarded as "Calvinist." R. A. Huebner's book on God's sovereignty is available for free download here, and it includes a great many choice quotes from older writers on these themes.

The nineteenth-century writers I've been reading over the last few months have been very dismissive both of Arminianism and of high Calvinism. J. N. Darby has some fairly robust things to say about both groups, not least in his discussion of "Propitiation and Substitution,"  which nevertheless argues that while propitiation was universal, Christ was only a substitute for the elect.

And this is a theme we pick up in other writers of this school. C. H. Mackintosh also argued that "Christ is a propitiation for the whole world. He was the substitute for His people." And on the question of the "five points of Calvinism," in the same pamphlet, Mackintosh was emphatic:

"We believe these five points, so far as they go; but they are very far indeed from containing the faith of God's elect. There are wide fields of divine revelation which this stunted and one-sided system does not touch upon, or even hint at, in the most remote manner. Where do we find the heavenly calling? Where, the glorious truth of the Church as the body and bride of Christ? Where, the precious sanctifying hope of the coming of Christ to receive His people to Himself?"

And I think that's pretty much where we are up to now too: quite happy with the soteriological perspectives of what is elsewhere described as "evangelical Calvinism," and yet wanting to see the broader importance of the character of the church, its universality and hope.

[NB The distinction between universal propitiation and particular substitution seems similar to that of Shedd: see Oliver Crisp, An American Augustinian : Sin and Salvation in the Dogmatic Theology of William G. T. Shedd (2007)].

[NB2 Tim Grass, who has written a definitive history of "Open" brethren, describes their earliest theological position as "high Calvinism," which revivalism would moderate post-1860; Grass, "How fundamentalist were British brethren during the 1920s?" in Bebbington and Jones (eds), Evangelicalism and fundamentalism in the United Kingdom during the Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, 2013), p. 119 fn. I'll come back to this thought another time, d.v.]