A Larger Hope? Volume 2: Universal Salvation from the Reformation to the Nineteenth Century

This book aims to uncover and explore the ideas of notable people in the story of Christian universalism from the time of the Reformation until the end of the nineteenth century. It is a story that is largely unknown in both the church and the academy and the characters that populate it have for the most part passed into obscurity. With carefully located bore holes drilled to release the long-hidden theologies of key people and texts the volume seeks to display and historically situate the roots shapes and diversity of Christian universalism. Here we discover a diverse and motley crew of mystics and scholars social prophets and end-time sectarians evangelicals and liberals orthodox and heretics Calvinists and Arminians Puritans Pietists and a host of others. The story crisscrosses Continental Europe Britain and America and its reverberations remain with us to this day. Parry (and Ramelli) are to be commended--or really praised--for having brought this project to completion with such scrupulous care and comprehensiveness. Taken in its totality it is a work that reminds us how large and venerable the Christian universalist tradition is how intellectually and spiritually rich and how deeply biblically informed. This is an indispensable text. --David Bentley Hart Affiliate of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study Robin Parrys work on universalism is well known and widely admired. In this volume he tracks the doctrine in the work of a number of key thinkers from the Reformation to the nineteenth century. For those concerned to think carefully and thoroughly about this vital issue his series of theological explorations will provide guidance on how the doctrine has developed and changed in modern thought as well as theological grist for the conceptual mill. Along the way he corrects various misrepresentations that have grown up in the recent debates about universalism and provides fascinating insight into some important but largely forgotten thinkers. Written in Parrys engaging style this is a work that scholars and students of Christian eschatology will want to consult. --Oliver Crisp Professor of Analytic Theology University of St. Andrews This theological history of universalism from the early modern to the modern period is scholarly nuanced careful and encyclopedic in scope. Uncovering the quiet stream of universalism throughout the period A Larger Hope? reminds the theological community of the varieties and forms of universalism that have always been present in theological reasoning. --Tom Greggs Marischal (1616) Chair and Head of Divinity University of Aberdeen Robin A. Parry is a curate at the Church of St. Martin with St. Peter in Worcester UK and an editor for Wipf & Stock Publishers. Ilaria Ramelli is Professor of Theology and K.Britt Chair Graduate School of Theology SHMS Angelicum University) and Senior Fellow Oxford; Durham; Catholic University; Erfurt University Max Weber Center.