If Jesus died for all and loves all, would anyone go to hell?

What is settled, and what is not

The left column holds in every Reformed account of this question and in most non-Reformed ones too. The right column is where believers who share this site’s view of Scripture genuinely differ, and where we hold a position without pretending the matter is closed.

What the text says

• The one who teaches hell most plainly is the one who died to save people from it Not a prophet of doom and not Paul. Jesus. These will go away into eternal punishment (Matthew 25:46), the rich man in anguish in this flame (Luke 16:24), the warning to fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28), and the sentence that ends the Sermon on the Mount’s road metaphor: the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many (Matthew 7:13). A reading of the Bible that empties hell has to quiet the gentlest voice in it.
• One verse teaches the whole method, and Paul wrote it without blinking For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22). The first all is every human being, because every human being dies. The second cannot be, or everyone is raised to life in Christ and there is no judgment left to hold. One word, one sentence, two extents, each set by the head it belongs to. Everything else on this page is that observation applied.
• The all of 1 Timothy 2 is a list of kinds, and Paul says so two verses earlier First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions (2:1-2). A church that might have thought the gospel was for people like them is told to pray for emperors. Then God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved (2:3-4) and a ransom for all (2:6) land in that argument, answering for whom may we pray and hope, which is the question actually on the table.
• Titus does the same thing in the open For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people (Titus 2:11), and the preceding ten verses are nothing but kinds of people: older men, older women, younger women, young men, slaves. Paul has just told a slave that his ordinary work can adorn the doctrine of God our Savior (2:10). That is what all people is doing there. It is the dignity of the list.
• Every text about the purpose of the death names a particular people The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep (John 10:11). Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). He will save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21). Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession (Titus 2:14). The church of God, which he obtained with his own blood (Acts 20:28). Look for one verse that states the design of the cross in universal terms and you will find the universal language is always about the offer or the sufficiency, never about the intent.
• In his last prayer he drew a line, out loud, in front of them I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours (John 17:9). This is the night before the cross, hours from the thing itself, and he distinguishes those he is about to die for from the world at large. It is the most uncomfortable verse in the discussion for everybody, and it is also the plainest statement of intent in Scripture.
• The free offer is not a trick, and the two fit in one verse All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out (John 6:37). Both halves, one breath. The giving is particular, the welcome has no condition attached, and the sinner is never asked to work out which list he is on before he is allowed to come. Spurgeon preached particular redemption for forty years and begged sinners to come for all of them, and never thought he was doing two inconsistent things.
• Owen reduced the whole question to three options, and two of them collapse In The Death of Death in the Death of Christ he puts it as a trilemma: Christ suffered for either all the sins of all men, or all the sins of some men, or some sins of all men. If some sins of all men, then all men have sins left to answer for and nobody is saved. If all the sins of all men, then why is anyone condemned? The answer because of unbelief does not escape, since unbelief is a sin, and either it was paid for or the first option was false. So Owen lands on the second: Christ in their stead and room suffered for all the sins of all the elect of the world. Whatever one makes of the argument, it is the cleanest statement of why this question will not simply go away.
• God’s compassion toward the lost is in the text, not a concession we make Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live (Ezekiel 33:11). And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it (Luke 19:41), and then described its destruction in detail. And Jesus, looking at him, loved him (Mark 10:21), of a man who then walked away and is never heard of again. A doctrine of election that makes these verses awkward is being held too tightly.
• And the stated ground of condemnation is never a defect in the cross Search for it. Whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God (John 3:18). People loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil (3:19). The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Not once does Scripture say that anyone perished because there was no atonement available to them. The arithmetic the question starts from is not the arithmetic the Bible uses.

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

• The Canons of Dort (Second Head of Doctrine, 1619) Written by an international synod in the middle of this exact argument, and still the most careful thing anyone has said about it. Article 3: Christ’s death is the only and most perfect sacrifice and satisfaction for sins, of infinite value and worth, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world. Article 8: it was the Father’s purpose that the saving efficacy of that death should extend to all the elect. Sufficiency without limit, efficacy by design. Note what Dort refused to do: it did not say the death was insufficient for anyone, and it did not say the offer should be narrowed.
• Jacobus Arminius and the Remonstrants, in their own words They deserve to be answered rather than caricatured, and this site has said so elsewhere. Their position was that Christ died for every person and obtained forgiveness for all, but that no one actually enjoys it except the believer. They were not teaching that a man saves himself: the Remonstrance affirmed that man cannot of himself will anything truly good unless born again by the Spirit. The whole weight of the disagreement falls on whether that grace can be finally resisted, and on whether the cross secured a people or made salvation available to all. Those are real differences and they are not differences about grace alone.
• John Owen (The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, 1647) The most relentless treatment in English, and the source of the trilemma above. Owen frames it around the wrath borne: either all the sins of all men, or all the sins of some men, or some sins of all men, and argues that only the second leaves the cross actually effective and the gospel actually good news. His conclusion is that Christ in their stead and room suffered for all the sins of all the elect of the world. It is a hard book, and a reader should know that the argument has been answered at length by men who were not fools, including Richard Baxter, who was fighting Owen on precisely this ground.
• The Westminster Confession (8.5, 8.8) The Confession’s contribution is to tie purchase to application so tightly that nothing can fall out between them: To all those for whom Christ hath purchased redemption, he doth certainly and effectually apply and communicate the same; making intercession for them (8.8). That sentence is why the Reformed cannot hold a redemption that was purchased for people who are then lost. It would mean something Christ bought was never delivered.
• Charles Spurgeon (Particular Redemption, New Park Street Pulpit no. 181, 28 February 1858) He chose his text deliberately, Matthew 20:28, to give his life a ransom for many, and preached the point that the many is the glory of it: Christ so died that He infallibly secured the salvation of a multitude that no man can number. His image for the alternative is the one people remember: General atonement is like a great wide bridge with only half an arch; it does not go across the stream. And this is the same preacher who pleaded with sinners in nearly every sermon he ever gave. If you want a model for holding this doctrine without using it as a muzzle, he is it.
• John Wesley, and the fact that godly men have split here Wesley fought this doctrine hard and in print, and thought it made God’s love hollow. He was wrong, in our judgment, and he was not an enemy. He preached the funeral sermon of George Whitefield, who held the position this page holds, and he did it generously. That is the temperature this question should be argued at, and two of the best men of their century managed it while disagreeing completely.
• Our own view, labelled as ours We hold Dort’s formula: a death of infinite sufficiency, designed and applied to save a definite people, offered without restriction to every creature. We think the purposive texts settle the design and that the universal texts are about the offer, the sufficiency, and the kinds of people the gospel reaches. We do not think 1 John 2:2 or 1 Timothy 4:10 fall out neatly on our side, and we have said so above. And we hold all of it as something to preach rather than something to litigate.

Where it lands

Start with what the question gets wrong about the cross. It treats the atonement as a quantity, a sum that might be spread thin if too many names are written against it. But the worth of the death comes from the worth of the person who died, and he is, in Dort’s words, the only-begotten Son of God, of the same eternal and infinite essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit. There is no edge to that. No one has ever come to Christ and been told the supply ran out, and no one ever will.

Then notice that the particularity, which sounds cold in the abstract, is the warm part when you meet it in the text. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me (John 10:14). He did not die for a category. He died for his own, by name, knowing exactly what each of them would cost him and exactly what each of them would do to him first. An atonement aimed at humanity in general, and at no one in particular, cannot say I know my own. A shepherd who dies for sheep he could not name has died for an idea.

And the thing you actually have to act on is not any of this. It is one sentence, and it has no conditions in it: whoever comes to me I will never cast out (John 6:37). You will notice that it does not say whoever comes to me and is one of the elect, nor whoever has first determined that he was included. Election is not a door you have to get through before you reach Christ. It is the reason the invitation found you at all, and it is only ever read backwards, from the fact that you came.

So here is the honest shape of it. The cross is enough for anyone. The offer is open to everyone. Hell is real, and the people in it are there for their sin and their refusal of the Son, never for a shortfall in his blood. And the Savior who drew the line in John 17 is the same one who stood over Jerusalem and wept (Luke 19:41), which is the only posture this doctrine permits anyone who holds it.

Which means the last word belongs to the person the question arrived with. If it was a father, or a friend, or someone at a graveside, this page cannot tell you where they are, and anyone who offers to is selling you something. What it can tell you is that God was not short of mercy, that he is not slow in the way we count slowness (2 Peter 3:9), and that the Judge of all the earth will do what is just (Genesis 18:25). And then it can tell you what to do next, which is the only part that was ever yours: come, and tell the living.

Questions to sit with

For reading this with someone else, a family, a study, or a friend who asked in the first place.

1. Read 1 Corinthians 15:22 aloud and give each all its own scope. Then say in your own words why that one sentence makes the whole question manageable.
2. John 17:9 has Jesus saying he is not praying for the world. Sit with how that sounds before you explain it, and then say what it tells you about what he was about to do the next day.
3. Which of the four questions, sufficiency, design, offer, love, were you actually asking when you came to this page? Has separating them changed the answer you wanted?
4. Jesus wept over a city he had just finished sentencing. What would it look like to hold this doctrine with that face?
5. Name the person this question arrived carrying. Then name one living person you could tell about Christ this month, and notice which of the two you can actually do something about.