Thomas Baldwin Thayer

Thomas Baldwin Thayer (1812-1886) was an American Universalist minister and theologian, born in Boston, Massachusetts. He held long pastorates with the First Universalist Society in Lowell, Massachusetts, and later served churches in Brooklyn, New York, and Boston. From 1862 he edited the Universalist Quarterly, and his books, including Theology of Universalism (1862), The Origin and History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment, and the consolatory volume Over the River (1864), made him one of the denomination's leading theological writers of the era. Tufts College awarded him a Doctor of Divinity degree in 1865.

Thayer's scriptural guide for Universalist Sunday schools: proof-texts and questions arranged for class use. With Balch's manual and the catechisms, also in this collection, it documents how the denomination taught its Bible.

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Thayer's defense of the truth of the gospel history against the popular infidelity of the age — evidence that the Universalists fought skepticism as earnestly as they fought Calvinism. First published 1833; this is the enlarged edition. His Theology of Universalism and Origin and History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment are also in this collection.

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For a generation this was the closest thing the Universalist denomination had to an official systematic theology. Thayer methodically expounds Universalist teaching on God, Christ, the atonement, punishment, and the future life, treating each doctrine in its 'logical and moral relations' and answering the standard orthodox proof-texts along the way. It served as a textbook for ministerial students and a reference for pastors well into the twentieth century.

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'Pleasant walks into the valley of shadows, and beyond' — Thayer's book of consolation, published in the midst of the Civil War when nearly every household had its dead. The scholarly author of the Theology of Universalism here writes for mourners, assembling the grounds of hope for reunion and the universal homecoming beyond the river. With Quinby's Heaven Our Home and Chapin's Crown of Thorns it forms this collection's shelf of Universalist consolation literature.

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Thayer's historical argument that the doctrine of endless torment is not native to the Bible. He surveys the Hebrew scriptures — which he finds silent on endless punishment — and traces the doctrine's actual origins to Egyptian and Greek pagan mythology, from which it seeped into Jewish thought between the testaments and then into the Christian church. A compact and much-reprinted piece of popular scholarship that armed generations of Universalist debaters.

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