James Morris Whiton

James Morris Whiton (1833-1920) was an American Congregational clergyman, teacher, and author, and one of the first three people to receive a Ph.D. from an American university, earning the degree in classics at Yale in 1861. As principal of Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts, from 1876 to 1878, he resigned amid the hostility aroused by his book Is "Eternal" Punishment Endless? (1876), which argued that the scriptural language traditionally rendered "eternal" does not denote endless duration. He continued a career as a minister and prolific writer on progressive theology and the social gospel.

A Congregationalist scholar answers his own question in the negative — by restating the New Testament doctrine of the aiōnes in terms Hanson's Greek studies (also in this collection) had made familiar. Whiton's little book marks the wider hope's penetration of orthodox New England Congregationalism itself, a generation after it had expelled men for less.

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