In 2024, Michael J. Lynch published a translation of the works of John Davenant (1572-1641) on the atonement. Davenant is important because there is renewed interest in a position known as hypothetical universalism, for which Davenant is a key proponent from the Reformed tradition. I want to focus on a particular premise (or component) of the doctrine and the evidentiary role Davenant gives to John 3:16. Davenant and I disagree about how to understand this verse, and my focus in this post is on that disagreement.
This is not a refutation of hypothetical universalism. I am focused on one of its commitments (entailments) but more specifically the passage in John used as evidence for that commitment. A defender of hypothetical universalism can agree with me about John 3:16 without having to ditch the doctrine given what I say here. I am not making the case below that the doctrine is somehow incoherent.
Points of Agreement
It should not be thought that I believe Davenant has nothing positive to say, even on this topic. That is not my view.
In his Dissertation on the Death of Christ, Davenant opens with the following sentence:
It is truly a matter of sorrow and great sadness that, either from misfortune or the disease of our age, those mysteries of our religion made known to us for the peace and comfort of our souls are consistently made a topic of litigation and argument. (Dissertation, 1)
Indeed, the diseased age continues to this day. In my 2023 article, “The Content of the World in John 3:16”, I take time to show how the verse remains evangelistic even though I oppose the sort of universality Davenant attributes to the verse. Some theologians have thought something important is lost if one takes the “limited atonement” view on this verse. I try to show this should not be so. During my undergraduate education at a Christian university, I was asked to not be part of an evangelism club because I did not agree about their use of this verse. They thought taking a different view about the identity of “the world” somehow undercut the possibility of evangelism. I was asked to not evangelize with them or return to the campus club. So I did not evangelize with them anymore. A diseased age, indeed.
A second point of agreement is that Davenant is concerned with the Pelagian and Semipelagian controversies, which is something I have discussed in another context - i.e. the importance of avoiding their errors. See my essay on Anselm’s theory of freedom and grace. I appreciate that about Davenant.
Finally, Davenant is concerned with methodology in defending his position. He writes,
And here, in the first place, we will show, not from human reason or imagination, but from the Holy Scriptures, that the death of Christ, according to the will of God, is a universal remedy applicable to salvation for each and every human being from the ordination of God and the nature of the thing itself. From many Scripture proofs, I will pick only a few. (Lynch, Dissertation, 38)
What I appreciate about Davenant picking only a few verses is that doing so enables him (or anyone) to make the case more thoroughly. By picking a select few verses, we know that Davenant has made an intentional choice to include those verses because he values them more evidentially or persuasively (these being two distinct properties). Davenant calls John 3:16 the “paragon text”. (38) The resulting arguments can give us greater confidence about the view because of the presentation of more thorough arguments, or it reveals weakness and forces the debate to move to other places.
Thesis of the discussion
The thesis at issue is as follows:
Thesis 1: The death of Christ is represented in Holy Scripture as a universal remedy applicable to each and every human being for salvation, according to God’s ordination and the nature of the thing itself. (Dissertation, 34)
This thesis is the “first and principal one, as the basis for the rest”. It is crucial that Davenant gets this right.
Davenant explains each part of this thesis, e.g., what is the meaning of the “death of Christ”? He clarifies it is the “whole obedience of Christ, active and passive” (ibid). He describes the death of Christ as a universal cause of salvation, and goes on to say this means two things: that it is of such a kind that it is able to cure and save each individual, and it requires a determinate application for the production of this determinate effect in each person (35).
Davenant does not avoid qualifications here. The universality does not include fallen angels or damned human beings. (35-36) It “was not applicable to Peter for salvation, if you were to add this condition, even if Peter had persisted in denying Christ to the end.” (36) Like Davenant, when I described the nature of the debate about the extent of atonement in my John 3:16 paper, I provided qualifications as well. On page 1 footnote 1, I wrote, “The paper assumes this caveat [that Jesus did not need saving], as well as that human persons are the ones for whom Jesus came to save rather than angels, animals (if they are persons), or anything else”.
Davenant explicitly rejects that the death of Christ was applied to each and every person, even though he affirms that it was applicable to each and every person. Noted: not universalism.
My engagement with Davenant in this post is entirely on how he believes John 3:16 is about each and every person. As we saw, Davenant says he will give Scriptural proofs, not arguments from human reason or imagination. John 3:16 appears in the very first two proofs.
Proof 1
Davenant writes, “It is not difficult to deduce from these words every particular of the aforementioned thesis.” (38) I do not know whether to interpret “deduce” as something like logical deduction. I myself doubt that interpretation because it would be wildly implausible. Therefore I interpret “deduce” as meaning “infer with confidence on the basis of this passage.”
So how does the inference work? Answer:
For, in the first place, the fact that Christ was given up to death by the Father is represented here as a universal remedy provided for the whole world.” (38)
Yes, this is the move Davenant should make from John 3:16. I allude in my paper (footnote 3) to the fact that this question about the identity of “the world” is the key to the disagreement about this verse.
How does Davenant argue that the “whole world” is to be interpreted as every individual? Answer:
In the next place, this medicine of Christ’s death is said to be applicable for salvation to any person, and the way or condition of the application is at the same time indicated in those words, “that all who believe in him will not perish.” (38)
But notice that this is a second point. It is not a justification that the “whole world” means “every individual”. For even on the view that the “whole world” means “the elect” (retaining extensionality and intensionality), it would still be true that because of the death of Christ, every believing one does not perish. Therefore, what Davenant must think is that “the whole world” is by itself adequate to justify the inference to “every individual”. On this point, I have an entire paper arguing why this is an unjustified position.
Davenant goes on to discuss how even if one were to regard the world as the elect, he would still be justified in believing from John 3:16 that Christ’s death was a remedy applicable for everyone. He then goes on to illustrate the nature of the remedy and its reception with an analogy. (39)
I have two points to make about why this is not adequate.
First, Davenant is supposed to be giving us Scriptural proofs, not arguments “from human reason or imagination” (37). But what is an analogy in a section on a proof? Imagination. What I expect in a Scriptural proof, ideally, is a careful explanation of the block of text using simple and plain language, written for an intelligent audience but explained in a way any intelligent person could understand. Davenant does offer a useful explanation of his argument by the analogy, but that is not the same as arguing the text itself requires of us to think the world is every individual. That is what a proof should do. Analogies help us understand a proof. They are not the proof.
Second and more crucially, it appears that the entirety of Davenant’s first proof rests on the assumption that the whole world is every person. By assumption, what I mean is that there is nothing in the text itself that provides positive justification other than logical consistency with the text. This will take a moment to make clear what I mean.
In my paper under the section on evidential and semantical issues, I present a scale of worse to better evidence for an interpretation. The weakest goes like this:
The author meant M by E because <projection of interpreter’s only conceived meaning>.
So here, the author of The Gospel of John meant “every individual” because it is the only conceivable meaning from “the world” to the interpreter. The obvious problem with this is that it makes an interpretation’s justification solely a function of the imagination of the interpreter. We should be looking at the text itself for the clues.
To give Davenant his due, it is incorrect to say that Davenant has not thought of other interpretations. He does consider a view that “the world” means “the elect” and goes on to refute it. So really the structure of his first proof has this shape:
John 3 is coherent if one understands “the world” to mean every individual. The alternative view that “the world” means the elect is not coherent. These are the only options. So God’s love for the world is God’s love for every person.
But for someone like myself who rejects Davenant’s view and the view that one can replace “the world” with “the elect”, this argument is not persuasive. What I want to see from Davenant or anyone with his view is that the text demands that interpretation, not that it is an interpretation supported by failure of imagination and failure of other views. (It is true that scientific theories increase in probability by the failure of alternatives, but the van Fraassen type worries about the best of a bad lot apply in the theological domain as well.) I want to see tighter reasoning from the text than Davenant provides. By contrast, I argue for my interpretation through analysis of John 1-4’s structure, symbols, and linguistic patterns… (“The Content of the World in John 3:16”, 12-13)
Proof 2
The second proof depends on joining John 3:17-18 to another passage, John 12:47-48.
Davenant writes,
From these words we learn that the Son of God was sent by the Father that he might bring a universal remedy applicable to the whole world. And these words cannot be restricted to the world of the elect. (41)
Why can’t they be so restricted?
Firstly, because “this world” to which Christ was sent to save is divided into believers and unbelievers. But the world of the elect consists only of believers, or at least, of those who will ultimately believe. (41)
Davenant does not argue that “the world” should be understood in this set-theoretic way comprised of these two sets of people. This is an assumption that the reader does not owe any adherence to on the basis of the text without further argument. It is true that there are two groups in John 3:17-18, namely those who believe and those who do not. But it is a yet further point to think that semantics of “the world” determinatively pick out all individuals rather than higher order classes to which all individuals belong.
Davenant gives a second reason to think that the whole world is every individual. He writes:
Secondly, because these places affirm that out of those to whom Christ was sent to save, some will be condemned. Yet [we know that] none of the elect will be damned. (41)
I address this objection, which is given by Robert Dabney. I take it that Davenant is targeting interlocutors who think that the meaning of “the world” is “the elect”, such that one could swap the terms and retain the same information and referents. I reject this view.
Robert Dabney argues that were the content to be “the elect”, then “we reach the absurdity, that some of the elect may not believe, and perish.” But if the content of “the world” is universal with regard to categories without itself denoting any particular referents, no such absurdity follows. Instead, the meaning would be that anyone of any nation, kindred, or language who does not believe perishes. (“The Content of the World in John 3:16”, 33)
The third argument Davenant gives is similar enough to the second that I need not discuss it. There is a more interesting methodological point that arises in the second proof.
Davenant tells us that Calvin has understood the words in the same way as he. He then cites Calvin:
The word ‘world’ is repeated again and again, lest anyone think that he is altogether excluded, provided that he holds to the way of faith.” (41-42)
And then Davenant cites Calvin on John 12:47.
The methodological point I wish to make is that Davenant is relying on the wrong sort of evidence when appealing to John 12. It is not the wrong evidence because it somehow fails to be evidence. Systematics is not an inherently broken methodology of arriving at true theological views. Rather, it is the wrong sort of evidence because the evidence closer in proximity to the verse in question, i.e. first four chapters, give “the world” its semantic character more reasonably than something many chapters later. When one pays careful attention to the details of the first four chapters, one arrives at a different view than that “the world” means every individual.
Unfortunately, it took many pages to lay out that case. This is not ideal for publishers, because the topic is too niche to spend so many pages. The more time it takes to make a case could be a result of a bad argument. It could also be a result of making an inductive case from a lot of proximate strands that strengthen the probability that “the world” is not every individual. The reader must “deduce” that case for oneself.