This is a follow up to article below:

What Is an Atonement?

An unnamed, friendly objector has offered several arguments against this position. I’ll quote his arguments below:

Just to clarify, by this logic of the atonement, I don’t think you can say Christ died for any of the elect who did not already believe in Him while He was hanging on the cross

Nobody’s sins are forgiven and nobody’s guilt is expiated, even if part of the eternal elect, until the very specific moment in time and space that person comes to faith.
Up until then, God treats each of us as legally reprobate children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3).

First: none of this touches the vacuity problem. Even if you think my view has weird entailments, that’s still secondary. The question is: does your view entail vacuity or not? If it does, then “but your view has other problems” is a red herring. How much worse is a position that makes the atonement empty until later? At minimum, let’s keep these as two interesting questions, not treat one as a shield against the charge of content-bankruptcy. I’m fine with the “entailments” issue being raised—just not as a board to defend a position that’s being charged with vacuity.

Second: Romans 4 says justification works the same way prior to the cross. How does that fit your framework? It sounds like you’re willing to allow trans-temporal application before the cross (OT saints justified on the basis of Christ), but then you won’t allow analogous trans-temporal considerations after the cross. That asymmetry needs an argument. Was David justified—was Christ’s righteousness imputed to him? It sure seems like God can apply the benefits of Christ even though the incarnation hasn’t happened yet.

Third: it’s at least possible that the cross itself is the ground/cause of trans-temporal acts of faith—i.e., part of how someone moves from wrath to grace. I agree the “wrath → grace” transition is difficult for both sides, and I also think it’s underdetermined, which is why I’m not making it the centerpiece. My main point is: don’t tell me “Your view struggles here” as though that answers vacuity. A square circle doesn’t become plausible because it explains one dataset slightly better.

And honestly, the “under wrath” language has been a problem across a lot of theologies. If God is timeless, how can He ever “view” someone under wrath in any change-like sense? That’s why eternal-justification proponents push people to treat some of this as metaphorical in a different way.

What I’m suggesting is that the cross-causing faith across time helps: it keeps the cross as the ground of faith, ex…

I only bring up the fact that unless you affirm eternal justification—which is indefensible in light of Scripture—you end up with vacuity as well. Which means your objection to HU cannot stand.
But yes, I’m totally fine with cross-temporal application of the efficacy of the atonement.

I think the atonement does have universal benefits for all human beings even apart from repentance and justification. In 2 Corinthians 5:18–20, God has already reconciled the whole world to Himself through Christ on the cross, and therefore, God begs the world through the apostles to be reciprocally reconciled to Him.
So the atonement alleviates some sort of divine distance for all people, even if they choose to scorn it.

Additionally, we have texts that explicitly teach people for whom Christ died can perish (Heb 10:22, 26–31; 1 Cor 8:11; Rom 14:15; 2 Pet 2:1).

And lastly, the atonement is more than a juridical exchange.

It’s forgiveness of past sins, cleansing of conscience (Heb 9:14), breaking of the bondage of Sin—“He who has died has been justified from Sin” (Rom 6:7). It’s a “cleaning of house,” allowing the Spirit to come dwell in us (1 Cor 3:16).

Here are some of Jimmy Stephens thoughts about this:

This problem is made more apparent when we consider the sufficiency of the cross to save. On potentialism, atonement can’t be sufficient to produce justification through faith, because if it did, you’d be forced into limited atonement in the strong sense (everyone Christ died to atone for would believe and therewith be justified). Instead, potentialism introduces a third category of people: those Christ died for, yet who are not caused to believe, are never united to Christ, and therefore never receive justification. This illuminates why the vacuity worry arises for your model: the cross is doing work that, at the decisive point, does not actually accomplish what penal substitution is supposed to accomplish.

Many potentialists misunderstand this point. They clarify that the cross is sufficient on the condition of faith, and that the actualists are in danger of trivializing or nullifying the role of faith. On the contrary, the actualist is observing that the cross (via the Spirit’s application) causes faith inasmuch as the justification it occasions. That is why faith is an instrumental means or cause: it is not an independent condition, but a mediary cause-effect between the cross and justification brought about by the cross.

On potentialism, faith must be treated as brought about separately, not from the cross. Justification becomes double-conditioned on faith and the cross independently, whereas for the actualist, justification is contingent on the cross-through-faith as one condition.

You appeal to other “effects of the cross,” but the most basic and controlling effect is: penal substitution—expiation/propitiation for guilt and wrath. Without that, the other effects you want to appeal to are either impossible or unintelligible. For example, “victory over the cosmic powers” presupposes expiation, because Satan’s accusation only loses its footing if guilt is actually dealt with. If sin isn’t truly expiated, then the satanic “accuser” charge remains legally standing.

That the cross’s benefits are all derivative of penal substitution illuminates the problem with your appeal to 2 Cor 5. If you read “God reconciled the world” / “not counting trespasses” as applying to every individual without distinction, you get universalism. Since universalism is false, “world” there can’t be doing the universalist work you’re asking it to do. This is the same reason universalist appeals to Romans 5 fail: that hermeneutic fails to respect the role of faith in the surrounding context, and it outright contradicts other passages/texts. Not all mankind is justified; “all” and “world” language has to be read with contextual constraints and qualifications, not as automatically “every single person without exception.” So too: not “the entire world” receives the actual forgiveness and “righteousness of God” in the saving sense in 2 Cor 5.

As for the texts you cite about people “for whom Christ died” perishing – I affirm perseverance of the saints, so I’m happy to go passage by passage and explain why those texts don’t entail that someone truly atoned-for can finally perish. However, notice that if you do take those texts to mean “Christ atoned for people who nevertheless perish,” then you’ve actually conceded- doubled-down even on the vacuity problem, because now you’ve got a “Christ died for them” that doesn’t actually justify them.

The dilemma remains: either Christ’s atonement is sufficient to save its objects (in which case “died for” can’t include those who finally perish), or “died for” becomes an abstract accomplishment that fails to deliver its purported entailments, what penal substitution claims to do.

TheSire:

The atonement is more than a juridical exchange—but it is juridical at the root. The “other effects” (cleansed conscience, breaking sin’s bondage, the Spirit’s indwelling) don’t float free from the legal dimension; they flow from it. That’s why the cosmic powers are disarmed: once guilt is removed and the law’s condemnation is answered, the Accuser’s case collapses. So I’m not denying the broader scope of the cross—I’m saying you’re understating how central the legal verdict is to everything else you listed.

And notice: you actually shrink the cross’s effects if you leave the legal change as something reversible. Scripture doesn’t just say believers experience renewal; it says a definitive legal transition has occurred—death to the law’s condemning jurisdiction and a new status in Christ. That’s why Paul can speak the way he does in Romans 7:1–6 and Galatians 3:1–25: a change of covenant/legal standing has taken place, not merely a psychological cleansing or moral influence.

So if that legal verdict is real—if justification is an actual pardon and transfer out from under condemnation—then the idea that a justified person can later come back under the curse of the law (and thus under final condemnation) is the contradiction. Romans 8 presses the same point: the law’s condemning claim is dealt with in Christ, and the result is “no condemnation” for those in him. The cross doesn’t merely make salvation possible; it secures a new legal status that excludes returning to the wrath to come.

If you’re going to tu quoque my initial argument by appealing to “people perishing for whom Christ died,” you can’t just assume a scenario where Christ dies for someone and yet they perish because they never believed. A number of the texts often cited here are better read as referring to believers or “weaker” brethren (e.g., Romans 14:15), not as teaching that Christ’s atonement fails to save its objects. But if you press them into that use, you’re effectively committing yourself to the idea that someone can be truly saved and then finally lost—which runs straight into passages like John 6:35–45.

And in any case, the texts you’re leaning on are just as disputed as the ones I’m citing. Even many non-Calvinists argue that those passages don’t overturn perseverance, precisely because they can be read in ways consistent with the doctrine. So at best, this doesn’t refute my argument—it just relocates the debate to another set of contested texts.

Think of Christ’s death like paying in full for a car. (HT Jimmy Stephens)

The purchase is completed at the point of payment. The car is objectively bought, the price is actually paid, and the ownership is secured by the transaction itself. But you might not pick it up until later, and you might not start driving it until later. The later “pickup” doesn’t mean you weren’t really purchased for, and it doesn’t mean the payment was merely hypothetical. It just means the benefit is received in time.

So: Christ’s cross is the full payment that actually purchases the salvation of his people. Faith is not the second payment that makes it real; faith is the moment you take possession of what was already purchased for you. You aren’t buying the car when you show up at the dealership. You’re receiving what was already bought.

So once you grant trans temporal efficacy, meaning the cross can ground and secure benefits applied at different times, you have no grounds to object to the logic that connects limited atonement with a fixed verdict in God’s decree. You have already admitted that the benefits can be applied across time without vacuity. If the cross can save Old Testament saints before it happened, then it is not crazy to say the cross can also be the ground of God’s verdict regarding the elect prior to their temporal coming to faith.

At that point the only way to resist is to deny that the cross actually secures a determinate people. But then you are pushed into the third category problem. Christ dies for people who nevertheless perish. And that is where the vacuity pressure comes back, because “died for” stops doing the work penal substitution claims to do, actually dealing with guilt and wrath for its objects.

The alternative is even worse. You end up acting like Christ is still atoning in an ongoing sense in order to keep atonement from being complete until the moment of faith. But Hebrews cuts that off. Christ offered himself once for all and then sat down because the sacrificial work is finished. Even Catholic talk of “representation” presupposes that the atonement is completed and what happens in time is application, not an ongoing payment.

Another issue is that we’re working with different conceptions of faith as an “instrument.” Not all instrumental causes function the same way.

Take a basketball example. If you pass the ball to someone and they shoot, their action is an instrument of your attempt to score, but it’s an instrument that also contributes something of its own. The outcome depends on their independent act.

But imagine a different case. You shoot the ball off someone’s head and it goes in. The person is still an instrument in the causal chain, but they aren’t actively contributing anything to make the shot succeed. They’re a means, not a co-author of the effect.

The problem with hypothetical universalism is that it effectively forces you into the first model rather than the second. Faith becomes the independent contributor that turns the cross into a saving atonement for you. And that’s the reversal: faith ends up making the atonement what it is, instead of being the vehicle through which what Christ already accomplished is applied.

It smuggles an efficient cause into faith itself, treating faith not merely as the instrument that receives Christ, but as a contributing factor that helps bring salvation about. On my view, the habit and act of faith are necessarily connected: if someone is disposed unto eternal life, they will believe. So faith can’t be a separate, independent “add-on” that completes what the cross only began.

But once you make faith do that kind of causal work, you’ve made it functionally meritorious. Salvation is no longer delivered solely by God’s work in Christ; it’s delivered by Christ plus an additional human act that makes the atonement effective for you.