The Negative Inference Argument

“The mission and death of Christ is restricted to a limited number—to His people, His sheep, His friends, His church, His body—and nowhere extended to all men severally and collectively. Thus Christ is called “Jesus” because He shall save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). He is called the Saviour of His body (Eph. 5:23). The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep (John 10:15) and for His friends (John 15:13). He is said to die “that He might gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad” (John 11:52). It is said that Christ “hath purchased the church with His own blood” (Acts 20:28). If Christ died for every one of Adam’s posterity, why should the Scriptures so often restrict the objects of His death to a few? How could it, with propriety, be said absolutely that Christ is the Saviour of His people and of His body, if He is the Saviour of others also?”

 Francis Turretin

In other words, since Christ dies for His sheep, it cannot be true that He dies for both the sheep and the goats. This argument is more elegantly seen in the text of John 10 itself, so we’ll use that to construct our syllogism:

P1: Jesus laid down His life for His sheep (John 10:15).
P2: The Pharisees are not His sheep (John 10:26).
C: Therefore, Jesus did not lay down His life for the Pharisees.

Answer

This is a Negative Inference Fallacy. The presence of a positive statement doesn’t allow the logical deduction of a categorical negative. Here’s a clearer example of the error:

P1:  John loves his wife.
P2: John’s daughter is not his wife.
C: Therefore, John does not love his daughter.

In this case the error is obvious: John’s love for his wife doesn’t mean he doesn’t love anyone else, it just means he loves his wife. But although it’s obvious how the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises in this example, when reading Scripture it’s much easier to make the mistake.

That’s what happened to the Pharisees in Jesus day. After reading Leviticus 19:18 they made an erroneous logical deduction that if there was a category of neighbor whom they were to love, then there was also a category of not neighbor whom they could safely ignore. This meant they could move the goal posts of righteousness closer to themselves by figuring out where the line was between neighbor and not neighbor, and then being kind to some rather than all. That’s why, seeking to justify himself, one of the lawyers stood up and asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). And in response He told them the parable of the Good Samaritan, which exposed their flaw and indicated a Biblical interpretation which limits the goodness of God is not valid.

Another example found in Scripture is 1 Cor 7:1, 8, 26. Careful to ensure the Corinthians wouldn’t fall into the negative inference fallacy, Paul points out in the following verses (2, 9, 27) that just because it’s good to remain unmarried doesn’t mean it’s bad to be married. He didn’t want them to deduce the negative statement “marriage is bad” from his positive statement “not being married is good.” But instead Paul wanted the Corinthians to see one state as good and the other as better.

In the same way, the assertion that Christ laid down His life for His sheep cannot be used to prove He didn’t die for the whole world. To make that work John 10:15 must be read with the smuggled assumption that Jesus lays down His life only for the sheep, which would go beyond what is written (contrary to the direct admonition of 1 Corinthians 4:6). That Jesus says He loves His elect with a special love proves only that He loves His elect with a special love; it does not prove that He hates the non-elect, or has declined to provide for them a way of salvation. As Dabney says,

“In proof of the general correctness of this theory of the extent of the Atonement, we should attach but partial force to some of the arguments advanced by Symington and others, or even by Turrettin--e. g., That Christ says, He died "for His sheep," for "His Church," for "His friends," is not of itself conclusive. The proof of a proposition does not disprove its converse. All the force which we could properly attach to this class of passages is the probability arising from the frequent and emphatic repetition of this affirmative statement as to a definite object.”

When Scripture emphasizes how much Jesus loves His people it’s really just emphasizing how much He loves His people. 

Further, not only is there a logical fallacy associated with this argument for the exclusivity of Christ’s atonement, there’s a hermeneutical one as well. To arrive at the conclusion that Christ only dies for the elect when other verses say He dies for the world (John 1:29, John 4:42, etc) requires the reader to adopt a the principle that only the most restrictive sense of Christs death is accepted. That is, every time we see Scripture narrowing the object of God’s love we don’t treat the new category as a subset of God’s existing love, but as the complete expression of it. When we see He dies for the elect we disregard His death for the world.
That gets us over the first hurdle, but once the principle is granted there’s no reason why we should stop there—everywhere we see a subset is we must restrict God’s love further. When we see He lays down His life for current believers (1 John 3:16) we must also throw out those verses which speak to His death for the church. When we see Jesus gave Himself for Paul (Gal 2:20) we conclude the love of Christ was exclusive to him alone. Once we accept the principle that specificity indicates not a special love, but an expression exclusiveness (or more accurately, of lovelessness), then it’s not long until we’ve made Christ’s death meaningless.  
The rejoinder is that the actual hermeneutic principle is to read "world" as "elect." But there's a problem with this too, which we'll look at in the next post.