"Baby you are so fine; it is women like you that make
particular redemption a necessity."
The
particular redemption medium used is of subordinate importance.
We are back to what Barth called the "grim doctrine" (Williams, 265) of "
particular redemption." In following this reading, however, it is good to recall that Barth's objection to the tradition was not grounded in a "principle" of love or in a general understanding of what love is, what it can and cannot do, but in scriptural interpretation, an interpretation that is naturally debatable--and debated, as the volume shows.
Moore further maintains that Preston's hypothetical universalism was unrelated to the apparently similar theological moves of the Huguenot theologian Moise Amyraux and his mentor John Cameron, which Moore sees as a more radical revision of
particular redemption than Preston's insofar as it depended on reordering the eternal decree of redemption to make election follow the decree of the atonement.
(4) Wright also wrote that Thomas Crosby was not in error, as some have suggested, in attributing A Treatise of
Particular Redemption to this same Thomas Lambe, soap boiler and General Baptist, who wrote of "those that are predestined, and therefore effectually called, justified and glorified, but others to walk in their own ways, as the vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction." (5) Wright argued that debates about the issue of grace did not define the theological outlook of Lambe's Bell Alley Church at this early date, but rather those disputes took place within that congregation that seems to have combined both free-willers and high-Calvinist antinomians.
Many Baptists, Presbyterians, Independents, and Episcopalians adhered to such Calvinist doctrines as eternal, personal election, effectual calling, and
particular redemption. Methodists and many other dissenters adhered to the Arminian alternatives.