Calvin's Hypothetical-Universalism

Consider... Calvin’s language in his Sermons on Deuteronomy. Calvin claimed that God’s love is the reason Christ was sent to be a redeemer. For whom was he sent? Glossing Jn. 3:16 (and consonant with his understanding of the passage in his commentary on John’s Gospel), Calvin said that “Jesus Christ offered himself as a redeemer generally for all without exception.” Although it might by tempting to read Calvin as not including each and every person under “all without exception,” such a reading goes against the context. Calvin goes on to lay out three degrees of God’s love, with the first degree as the motive for this universal intention. The first degree of God’s love is “extended to all, seeing that Jesus Christ outstretches his arms to call and urge[s] both great and small to win them to him,” and respects the “redemption which was acquired in the person of him who gave himself to death for us.” This is distinguished by two “special” degrees of love which are shown to “those to whom the gospel is preached” and, third, those whom “he makes to feel the power” of the preached word. In this section of Calvin, it is clear that on account of a general love for all human beings, God sent Christ to be a redeemer for all. This is Davenant’s ordained sufficiency.

 

Michael Lynch, John Davenant’s Hypothetical Universalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 52