Ferdinand Olivier Petitpierre

Ferdinand-Olivier Petitpierre (1722-1790) was a Swiss Reformed pastor, born at Couvet in the principality of Neuchâtel, who trained under Jean-Frédéric Ostervald and was ordained in 1746. While pastor at La Chaux-de-Fonds he taught that the pains of hell, because of God's grace, cannot last forever, a position that set off a famous controversy and led to his removal from office in 1760. He lived in England from 1762 before returning to Neuchâtel in 1777, where he died in 1790. His Thoughts on the Divine Goodness, first published in English at Edinburgh in 1789, presents future punishment as limited and corrective under the government of a benevolent God.

The one Continental classic of the early universalist revival. Petitpierre, a Swiss pastor at Neuchâtel, was removed from his pulpit for denying eternal punishment — the affair that reportedly drew from Frederick the Great the quip that if his Neuchâtel subjects insisted on being eternally damned, he had no objection. His book argues from the goodness of God that all punishment of moral agents is corrective and must end in their amendment. Translated from the French, it circulated widely among English and American Universalists.

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