Philip Melanchthon on Extent of the atonement

Universal — for all, applied on faith

THE POSITION

The definite-versus-universal question is a post-Dort argument and Melanchthon never answers it in those terms. What he does say points one way: Christ was given to make satisfaction for the sins of the world, and the mature Melanchthon makes the universality of the promise load-bearing — it is the premise from which he argues that the difference between the saved and the lost must lie in the human response.

5 OTHERS HOLD THIS

ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Luther's colleague at Wittenberg and the Reformation's systematizer. He wrote the first Protestant systematic theology (Loci Communes, 1521), drafted the Augsburg Confession (1530) and its Apology (1531), and then revised his own work far enough that the Formula of Concord condemned the later version seventeen years after his death. This entry rests on the Augsburg Confession read in Latin and English — Part I less Articles VI-VIII and XIV-XVI, plus Part II Articles XXII-XXIV and XXVIII — on the opening articles of the Apology in English, and on the successive editions of the Loci through Latin sentences preserved by Schaff and Bente; no edition of the Loci itself was read.