How important are the atonement models? This is a good question. Are the atonement models to Calvinism? Does it fall apart if penal substitution is taken out? I should say, hey, David. Congratulations on your new baby. Really excited for you. So yeah, the Atonement is a great question. And it's something that even today is a major item of contention. So if you look at most of the Calvinist community that is conversant with the nomenclature, they tend to be five-point Calvinists, the vast majority.
I don't know what the exact percentage is, but certainly the vast majority are. However, there has always been, and there continues to be a fairly strong contingent of people that are so-called four-point Calvinists, meaning that they deny limited atonement. So the first example of that was a person named Moses Amyraut, who lived in the late 1500s. And he penned a, I think a very skillful document where he outlined what we would today call something more like unlimited atonement.
And there has always been a basically ever since then. And many people would argue that Calvin himself would have been in that position. So there's, yeah, so there's actually a lot of very interesting David Allen is one person. There are Bruce Ware at SBTS would be another person, very good scholars who would say that at the bare minimum, Calvin did not clearly articulate his views on limited atonement and that certain statements that he made indicate that he was perhaps even in favor of unlimited atonement.
So I think that in and of itself shows you that there's less cohesion with the L than exists between the U and the I and the T. So the unlimited atonement, the irresistible grace, total depravity, and probably even the perseverance of the saints. So that L's always been dangling for centuries, really. And I think really what the what it shows is that because it's biblically so difficult to come to the conclusion of limited atonement and we went through some of those passages in our course.
The system is more philosophically coherent insofar as it's a five-point system. And I think just on pure rational grounds, that makes more sense. But it's more biblically coherent if you take out the L. And so there's always been this delicate tug of war between the two of them. You know, I would say that when the question, as David posed it, was how important are atonement models to Calvinism?
I would say in general, there is a fairly strong emphasis on some of the satisfaction penal models in Calvinism that seem to have greater import there. But that being said, because there are so many people that have held on to the other four points without that fifth point, I think shows that there's at least the ability to be an intellectually satisfied Amyraldian, as they would say, those who follow in the steps of Moses Amyraut from the 1500s there and have a system that's relatively intact. Okay. Very good.
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