Nathan Finn: “The Making of a Baptist Universalist: The Curious Case of Elhanan Winchester”
This week and next, the Credo blog will be highlighting papers by different Credo contributors delivered at ETS this past week. To start us off is Nathan Finn’s paper: THE MAKING OF A BAPTIST UNIVERSALIST- THE CURIOUS CASE OF ELHANAN WINCHESTER. Finn is an outstanding historian and a Baptist historian at that.
Finn begins his paper,
In the waning days of the American Revolution, the Baptist movement in America was just beginning to take off in terms of membership statistics and wider influence. Largely as a result of the revivals of the First Great Awakening, Baptists had transitioned from a peculiar sect on the periphery of American Christianity to arguably the most vibrant denomination in the New World, at least until the Methodists surpassed them in the early nineteenth century. The religious liberty gains made in the two decades after the Revolution only furthered Baptist growth. According to William Brackney, “The impact upon Baptists can be seen in its statistics: in 1700 there were only 14 Baptist congregations in North America with about 1,500 members; in 1800 there were 1,200 congregations and about one hundred thousand church members.”
At the very moment when Baptists were poised to emerge as an influential denominational tradition in the young nation, a theological controversy rocked what was at that time arguably the leading church in the leading association among American Baptists. In October 1780, Elhanan Winchester became the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia. By May 1781, Winchester was no longer occupying the church’s pulpit because of his belief that all people would one day be saved, a position Winchester called “universal restoration”.
This paper recounts the curious case of Elhanan Winchester, a man who has been called “the most significant Universalist of the later eighteenth century” and “the most eminent for general learning and for intellectual grasp, fertility, and power.” Though his entire ministry is fascinating and worthy of study, this paper will focus on the story of how a rising star among North American Baptists became one of the pioneers of modern Universalism.
Read Finn’s entire paper The Making of a Baptist Universalist.
Nathan Finn (Ph.D., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and an ordained Southern Baptist minister. Nathan is married to Leah and they are the parents of three children. The Finns are members of the First Baptist Church of Durham, where Nathan teaches theology classes and serves as a deacon. Nathan loves teaching at Southeastern because he enjoys showing students how church history applies to gospel ministry in the 21st century and why our historic Baptist identity is a heritage worth preserving. Nathan has contributed chapters to Calvinism: A Southern Baptist Dialogue (B&H) and Southern Baptist Identity: An Evangelical Denomination Faces the Future (Crossway). He also blogs at Christian Thought and Tradition.
Advertisment
