In passing, Crisp vindicates the tireless research on Christ's atonement by Dr. David Allen at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Allen's resourceful work has effectively challenged Southern Baptist Calvinists who insist on embracing Limited Atonement arguing in many respects Limited Atonement is detrimental to Calvinism per se, consequently insisting on Limited Atonement being detrimental to the biblical gospel recovered by the Reformers. Crisp has this to say in his Introduction:
Another important example of this sort of mistaken view of Reformed theology can be found in popular accounts of the scope of atonement. Often, central tenets of Reformed theology are summed up in the acrostic tulip.[3] However, the L here, which stands for “limited atonement,” is not the only view permissible within Reformed confessionalism. There is a strand of Reformed thinking, which goes all the way back to the early Reformers of the sixteenth century, that denies the doctrine of limited or, more accurately, definite or particular atonement. (Kindle, location 123)
Until fairly recently, this alternative to the definite-atonement view was regarded as the preserve of a vociferous minority in early-modern Reformed theology that has persisted in periodic pockets of discontent ever since. It is usually called Amyraldianism, after Moïse Amyraut, the seventeenth-century French theologian with whom this doctrine has come to be associated. However, there were many who espoused this view besides and before Amyraut, and Amyraut himself learned it from his Scottish teacher John Cameron. (Kindle, location 130-132)
And, finally in a footnote, Crisp expresses the irony that in a time when more credible research has questioned the validity of arguing for a monolithic understanding of the nature of a "limited" atonement in Reformed circles that a renewed interest has arisen in defending it. Crisp writes:
It is not a little ironic that a greater historical understanding of this point has arisen at a time in which there are the beginnings of a renewed interest in articulating and defending the doctrine of particular atonement among certain Reformed and evangelical theologians. For historical work on this, see the literature cited in chapter 7. A significant recent attempt to restate particular atonement can be found in David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson, eds., From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013) (kindle, location 210).
Crisp's Deviant Calvinism: Broadening Reformed Theology
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