John Coleman Adams

John Coleman Adams (1849-1922) was an American Universalist minister, born in Malden, Massachusetts, the son of the Universalist clergyman and hymn writer John Greenleaf Adams. Educated at Tufts College and Harvard Divinity School, he held pastorates including St. Paul's Universalist Church in Chicago, All Souls' Church in Brooklyn, New York, and the Church of the Redeemer in Hartford, Connecticut, where he served from 1901 until his death. A trustee of Tufts College and of the Universalist General Convention, he wrote expositions of Universalist teaching such as The Fatherhood of God (1888) and Universalism and the Universalist Church (1915), as well as a study of Hosea Ballou.

A set of discourses on the idea that late-nineteenth-century Universalists placed at the very center of their faith: God as father of every human soul. Adams, one of the denomination's ablest younger ministers, draws out what divine fatherhood implies about human worth, sin and its correction, and the final destiny of the race, presenting Universalism as a positive gospel rather than a mere denial of endless punishment.

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A short interpretive study, written for the centennial of the Winchester Profession, arguing that Ballou belongs among the great reformers of Christian thought. Adams presents the Treatise on Atonement as the opening of a 'gospel renaissance' — the recovery of the New Testament's God of love from centuries of punitive theology — and traces how ideas once denounced as heresy had, by 1900, leavened American Protestantism at large. A brisk companion to Safford's full biography.

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A short, modern statement of what Universalists believe and what their church is for, by one of the denomination's leading voices at the turn of the twentieth century. Adams presents Universalism not as a protest against Calvinism — a battle already won — but as a positive gospel of the fatherhood of God, the worth of every person, and the progress of the race. Useful as a snapshot of the denomination's self-understanding late in its independent history.

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Brief chapters on the 'larger faith' — the Universalist gospel stated positively for twentieth-century readers — by the author of Universalism and the Universalist Church. Adams writes for inquirers and church study groups, distilling the denomination's message into short studies suitable for a Sunday evening. This is the 1918 edition of a book first issued in 1907.

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