History
A short history of Universalist Christianity
A tradition with roots in the early church, a denomination that flourished in nineteenth‑century America, and a hope that has outlived its institutions.
The early church
The hope that God will restore all things is as old as Christian theology. Origen of Alexandria (about 185–253) taught the apokatastasis, the final restoration of every creature, and Gregory of Nyssa held the same in the fourth century. The teaching was contested and later condemned in the form Origen’s followers gave it, but it never disappeared, and it was recovered again and again by Christians reading the same scriptures: “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
England and America
In eighteenth‑century London, James Relly preached that Christ’s union with humanity secured the salvation of all. His convert John Murray carried the message to America, landing in New Jersey in 1770, and gathered the first Universalist congregation at Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1779. Elhanan Winchester, a Baptist preacher in Philadelphia, reached the same conclusion by his own route and published his Dialogues on the Universal Restoration in 1788.
The denomination
- 1793New England Universalists organise a General Convention.
- 1803The convention at Winchester, New Hampshire, adopts the Winchester Profession.
- 1805Hosea Ballou publishes A Treatise on Atonement, the theological foundation of American Universalism for a century.
- 1852Universalists found Tufts College.
- 1863Olympia Brown is ordained by the Universalists, among the first women ordained by any American denomination.
- 1899The Boston convention adopts the Five Principles and restores the liberty clause.
- 1935The Washington Avowal of Faith.
- 1961The Universalist Church of America consolidates with the American Unitarian Association to form the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Through the nineteenth century the Universalists were among the larger denominations in the United States, with hundreds of churches, a lively press, and a reputation for reform: they were early in opposing slavery and capital punishment and in ordaining women. Their books, hymnals, sermons and debates fill the shelves of LibHUT.
The wider hope
The same hope arose independently in the Church of England and the free churches in the later nineteenth century. Andrew Jukes’s The Second Death and the Restitution of All Things (1867), Thomas Allin’s Universalism Asserted (1885) and F. W. Farrar’s Eternal Hope (1878) argued the “wider hope” from scripture and the Fathers without leaving their churches. LibHUT keeps a shelf for these writers.
Today
After 1961 the Universalist name lived on chiefly inside Unitarian Universalism, where some congregations still keep a Christian Universalist identity. Outside it, Christian Universalism has returned in evangelical, Catholic and Orthodox voices, and in bodies such as the Christian Universalist Association, founded in 2007. This site belongs to no denomination. It exists so that the texts of the tradition are easy to find and free to read.