If it was the case, as you assert, that when Paul originally preached to the unbelieving Corinthians he had actually told them that Christ had died for his (Paul's) and the other members of the church's sins, and not necessarily for their (unbelieving Corinthians) sins, then in the letter, Paul is reminding them of this. This would, presumably, apply to the resurrection as well. So the gospel is, essentially, that Christ's death and resurrection are only for believers. It isn't for those that God determined it would not be for.
I'm glad we've finally been able to come to agreement on this point. However, that makes what you're about to say inconsistent.
Your problem is that Paul fails to make this point explicitly. His language in 1 Corinthians 15 is not consistent with such a gospel.
3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
Shouldn't Paul rather have said something like this:
3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for believers sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day for believers only, according to the Scriptures,
Since you have agreed that, if in the original context Paul preached a gospel wherein Christ's death was intrinsically efficacious for those who believe, he is referring to this message in I Cor 15, why would it be necessary for Paul to make that "explicit." It's what Paul preached, it's what the Corinthians remembered Paul preaching, and it's not precluded by pronoun choice.
You have already agreed that it is not a natural or necessary way of speaking to explicitly exclude the irrelevant. When I tell my wife "I have made reservations for us for dinner," I do not need to actually say "I have made reservations for us only for dinner." I and my wife and all parties who might overhear this are fully aware that when a man tells his wife he's taking her to dinner without qualification, that's a date meant just for the two of them. Paul and the Corinthians and everyone familiar with the Biblical doctrine of atonement as it was understood at least past the point Paul was writing all understood that an atoning death is a thing which reconciles God and man and is efficaciously, not potentially, salvific. Had Paul qualified "and this doesn't mean unsaved people are also saved," the reader's response ought to have been the same as what my wife would say if I said "and just so you know, no one else is coming on our date": "well, duh."
So Paul made it clear beyond doubt that under no circumstances is anyone to preach the gospel to unbelievers and give them the impression that Christ died and rose from the dead for them necessarily? He established this did he? So, when he finally did say in his letter, 'this is what we preach', nobody was in any way confused about what 'this' referred to?
We are to preach the Gospel to unbelievers. The gospel is that God, in the fulness of time, fulfilled his messianic prophecies and ransomed Israel through the death of his son on the behalf of his people. But Israel consists not merely of those who are of the blood of Abraham. Israel is a great multitude taken from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. You, o unbeliever, are not excluded from Israel for your lack of circumcision, your lack of bondage under the law, your lack of observance of Hebrew rites. Good news! There is nothing barring you from having been saved efficaciously through the particular redemption Christ has already completed on the cross if you believe. The only thing that can separate you from God is a faithless and unbelieving heart.
And anyone who would make that faithless and unbelieving heart God's problem, instead of man's problem, based on specious extrabiblical philosophy, is speaking absurdities. The wicked are guilty by reason of their wickedness, not by reason of causal theories or by reason of potentiality or by reason of counterfactuals. Guilt is a property of evil, not of the genesis of evil.
So it would signify an additional, non-atoning universality within Christ's death, but it doesn't actually benefit the reprobates one iota?
Why are you bothering to bring it up?
I dislike repeating myself.
1) Redemption is not universal.
2) Atonement is redemption, therefore atonement is not universal.
3) You posit that this verse is universal.
4) You posit that this verse is atonement.
Assuming the first two theses, anything you do which proves your supposition in (3) disproves your supposition in (4).
Now if you want to have a proper dispute about points 1 and 2, nothing's stopping you. But you're honed in exclusively on point 3 in this thread. You believe that if you establish 3 as fact, you'll be disproving the Calvinist doctrine in points 1 and 2. But logically you'd just as easily be disproving point 4.
I don't accept point 4 because I accept points 1 and 2 and not 3, but if you convinced me to accept 3, I wouldn't be compelled to reject 1 or 2, which seems to be the goal of this thread.
You have baffled me again.
I don't like to pull the "I'm an expert" card out, but you have to be not baffled by what I said if you want us to believe you understand language thoroughly enough to be making the argument you're making.
Your argument doesn't follow if Paul's use of quotation and antecedent are even slightly other than what you say they are. You feel very strongly that Paul's language choice indicates General Atonement, to the point that you feel Paul would be misleading his audience if he wrote something that brings up these feelings within you but didn't mean to. But if you can't explain why this is the case from a technical, linguistic standpoint, I can easily write off these feelings as eisegesis. You are Arminian, therfore this is what you expect to find in a text, so when you read a text, you find what you expect, not what's there.
I will try to write the technical argument I'm making in the most introductory of terms. Human language has the capacity to refer to things not by their actual, individual name, but by features they have. We call these pronouns. In Indo-European languages, the features defining pronouns are person, number, and gender. In other language families, a pronoun can indicate the social status of the speaker. But there is a limit to what a pronoun can indicate.
For instance, the human brain probably would be unable to handle a pronoun with an antecedent of one first person, two second persons, one lower class and one upper class third person, and a female hamster. We could say all that in our sentence to be explicitly, but the pronoun-handling part of our brain probably just isn't advanced enough to understand this concept.
How do we know whether or not a proposed class of pronoun is biologically capable of being understood? One good indicator is the presence or absence of that pronoun type in any natural language. If no natural language has ever come up with a word with a specific, precise use, it's probably the case that such a use can't be conceived of pronominally. Humans are really creative when it comes to making up new linguistic forms. If we haven't done it in 6000 attempts, it's highly unlikely it can be done.
Second person clusivity is one of those things that has never been done. Your argument hinges upon second person clusivity. Paul is including himself, "I," and the Corinthians, "you," together in his "we." You're suggesting that that second person "you" consists of "you, the audience I'm writing to, the Corinthian Christians," and "other people who were with you at the time." That's second person clusivity - indication through a pronoun that both the second and third person are being implied. It's doubtful that this can be expressed. So the reason you're hearing "all the world" in "we" in I Cor 15 has to be your prior commitment to general redemption, and your expectation to hear salvific language used of all the world. It can't be due to Paul's word choice.
