Charles Chauncy

Charles Chauncy (1705-1787) was pastor of the First Church in Boston for sixty years, from 1727 until his death, and one of the most influential New England clergymen of the eighteenth century. A leader of the "Old Light" opposition to the revivalism of the Great Awakening, he moved away from strict Calvinism toward a rational, Arminian theology, and by the 1750s had privately concluded that God intends the salvation of all people. He set out the biblical case for this view in The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations (1784), an important early American statement of universal salvation.

Charles Chauncy, minister of Boston's First Church for sixty years and the leading clerical opponent of the Great Awakening, worked on this learned defense of universal salvation for decades before daring to publish it — and even then it appeared without his name. Through close argument from the New Testament, Chauncy contends that the salvation of all is 'the grand thing aimed at in the scheme of God.' Appearing before the Universalist denomination had organized, it showed that universalism had a foothold in the most respectable pulpits of New England Congregationalism.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)