Bernard Whitman

Bernard Whitman (1796-1834) was a Unitarian minister, born in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, who served the Second Religious Society in Waltham, Massachusetts, from 1825 until his death. He worked to carry Unitarianism beyond New England's educated classes, traveling widely as a missionary preacher, defending liberal Christianity in controversial writings, and founding the magazine The Unitarian in 1834. A close friend of Adin Ballou, he sought to break down the barriers between Unitarians and Restorationist Universalists before dying of tuberculosis at thirty-eight.

A focused skirmish in Balfour's long campaign over the vocabulary of hell: here the opponent is Bernard Whitman, a liberal Unitarian who still defended gehenna as future punishment. The exchange shows the Universalist argument pressing not only against orthodoxy but against the halfway positions of fellow liberals.

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