The Book of Mormon Site

Infinite atonement

See Ngram of the exact phrase infinite atonement and observe that the usage of this term peaked around 1823.

Performing these Googles Book Searches: exact and not, one will quickly find the names Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, and Jonathan Edwards, summarizing their work (by Wikipedia) as:

Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Bellamy together created, perhaps unintentionally, the theological scheme that sometimes bears Hopkins name, i.e. Hopkinsian, but is also known as the New Divinity, New School Theology, New England Theology or Edwardseanism, originiating in the year 1732. This religious system is a form of Calvinism, which later adherents called “consistent Calvinism.” Their view was developed as a distinct theology that dominated religious thought in New England, which was predominately Calvinist. This theological movement was important in the Second Great Awakening. It was opposed generally by the theologians of Princeton, including Charles Hodge. Hopkins is credited with originating the phrase “disinterested benevolence”, though the concept is much older. It was expressed by Jonathan Edwards in his ethical writings as well.

See Anti-universalism for more on Dan Vogel’s work on this; his video explains the satisfaction theory of atonement used by anti-Universalists. Later Unitarians and Universalists emphasized that the Bible never uses the phrase “infinite atonement.”

Infinite and Atonement

Job 22:5:

Is not thy wickedness great? and thine iniquities infinite?

Psalms 147:5:

Great is our Lord, and the of great power: his understanding is infinite.

Nahum 3:9:

Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was infinite

The word atonement is used

The verb atone is never used in the King James Bible. Atonement is used 28 times in the Book of Mormon, atone eight times.

2 Ne. 9:7 uses infinite atonement twice:

Wherefore, it must needs be an infinite atonement—save it should be an infinite atonement this corruption could not put on incorruption. Wherefore, the first judgment which came upon man must needs have remained to an endless duration. And if so, this flesh must have laid down to rot and to crumble to its mother earth, to rise no more.

Alma 34:12:

But the law requireth the life of him who hath murdered; therefore there can be nothing which is short of an infinite atonement which will suffice for the sins of the world.

A representative example

Boston, 1815 (4th ed.), ed. Thomas Belsham, American Unitarianism: or a Brief History or The Progress and Present State of the Unitarian Churches in America:

Another method of awakening publick feeling against the Unitarians, is to represent them as obliged by their sentiments to give up the doctrine of the atonement. It is indeed very true, that Unitarians say nothing about infinite atonement, and they shudder when they hear, what Dr. Worcester seems to assert, that the ever blessed God suffered and died on the cross. They reject these representations, because they find not one passage in scripture which directly asserts them, or gives them support. Not one word do we hear from Christ or his Apostles of an infinite atonement. In not one solitary text, is the efficacy of Christ’s death in obtaining forgiveness, ascribed to his being the Supreme God. All this is theology of man’s making, and strongly marked with the hand of its author. But the doctrine of the atonement, taken in the broad sense which I have before stated, is not rejected by Unitarians.

… as I well recollect, appeared to me, when I read it, to be decidely the production of an Unitarian. It contains not one word about an infinite atonement made by the Supreme God.

… by speculating on the infinite evil of sin, and on the necessity of an infinite atonement, in order to illustrate the fitness of such a mediator.

Quoting a rebuttal to universalism:

You seem to have a very particular antipathy to “an infinite atonement.” This phrase again is not mine; …

Etc.

The book also mentions Samuel Clarke, a non-conformist(?), and Joseph Priestley, a founder of Unitarianism in England, the discoverer of oxygen and theological influence on Thomas Jefferson.

Why ancient New World prophets should be weighing in on these 18th- and 19th-century Unitarian / Universalist / anti-Universalist debates (not just using the exact words, but rehashing the exact concepts) remains to be explained.

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