Dabney thinks that Calvinists have offered “unsatisfactory” answers to objections to its doctrine of definite atonement. Two sorts of objections in particular: “From the universal offer of atonement through Christ, and from Scripture.” He answers these objections, and then goes on into a detailed discussion of the “relation of limited atonement to the Universal call.” His ultimate answer is that Christ’s atonement has multiple ends, the primary end of reconciling the elect and various subordinate ends.
He takes it as a Reformed “truism” that “Christ’s design in His vicarious work was to effectuate exactly what does effectuate, and all that it effectuates, in its subsequent proclamation.” We can reason backward, then, from the effects of atonement to the purpose, and when we do that, we find that the atonement not only purchases “the full and assured redemption of all the elect, or of all believers,” but also “a reprieve of doom for every sinner of Adam’s race who does not die at his birth . . . A manifestation of God’s mercy to many of the non-elect . . . A disclosure of the infinite tenderness and glory of God’s compassion, with purity, truth, and justice.”
Though some Calvinists “scorn” the “distinction of a special, and general design in Christ’s atonement,” Dabney insists that “along with the actual redemption of the elect” the atonement “works out several other subordinate ends.”
He reasons by analogy with human willing. Human volitions are complex, at least in that they involve “some active appentency of the will and some prevalent judgment of the intelligence,” and every act of will arises from deliberation “in which one motive is weighed in relation to another, and the elements which appear superior in the judgment of the intelligence, preponderate and regulate the volition.” A wise man’s will is “far from being the expression of every conception and affection present in his consciousness at the time; but it is often reached by holding one of these elements of possible motive in check, at the dictate of a more controlling one.” A man who sees a beggar feels sympathy, but then remembers that he owes the money he has to a creditor. He decides to “be just before he is generous,” but the decision to withhold charity and pay his bills doesn’t cancel the reality of the sympathy.
Making allowances for God’s omniscience and unchangeableness, Dabney says, we can say that “God’s volitions, seeing they are supremely wise, and profound, and right, do have that relation to all His subjective motives, digested by wisdom and holiness into the consistent combination, the finite counterpart of which constitutes the rightness and wisdom of human volitions.” This God might feel some “active principle” yet decide in His infinite wisdom to act otherwise thatn this active principle would lead Him.
The “great advantage” of Dabney’s view, he says, is that “it enables us to receive, in their obvious sense, those precious declarations of Scripture, which declare the pity of God towards even lost sinners.” He considers Calvin’s and Turretin’s treatment of Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem “perilous” since to preserve the “symmetry of their logic, they say that it was not Messiah the God-man and Mediator, who wept over reprobate Jerusalem; but only the humanity of Jesus, our pattern.”
He discovers a hidden agreement between Arminians and such Calvinist interpretations, since both assume that if God “has a propension, He indulges it, of course, in volition and action.” Dabney challenges this common assumption, saying that “It is not true that if God has an active principle looking towards a given object, He will always express it in volition and action.” Thus, though God “did not purposely design Christ’s sacrifice to effect the redemption of any others than the elect,” yet it is “perfectly consistent with this truth, that the expiation of Christ for sin - expiation of infinite value and universal fitness - should be held forth to the whole world, elect and non-elect, as a manifestation of God’s nature.”