This book is a study of eschatological debates at a time when the idea of eternal punishment was under question, and English Christianity was affected by the contrasting Anglican movements of Evangelicalism and Tractarianism and by the controversy over Darwinism. As the nineteenth century began, of all the articles of accepted Christian orthodoxy that troubled the consciences of Victorian churchmen, none caused more anxiety than the everlasting punishment of the wicked. The flames of hell illuminated vividly the tensions of an age in which men felt that old certainties were being eroded by new knowledge and rapid social change. The distant and impersonal God was increasingly repudiated as an immoral tyrant, and hell became a stumbling-block to Christian believers and a weapon of attack for secularists. The need of hell as a moral sanction meant that it could not be simply and quietly discarded. Criticism was coming from outside and inside Christian theology. Later in the nineteenth century, not only the doctrine of hell, but also the very possibility of any future life appeared increasingly implausible. Evolutionary theory appeared to many to deal a death blow to any special claim on behalf of man, and to cast doubt on much traditional language about the soul and its assumed immorality. The nineteenth-century debates about eternal punishment and the future of life are not to be dismissed as peripheral matters. They bring into sharp focus the gradual breakdown of an accepted pattern of human self-understanding, and provide a case study of the ways in which Christian writers and thinkers still committed to that tradition of understanding. This book is about the Victorian crisis of faith. It studies the course of these debates to show in details the issues involved and the arguments employed at various times in the century.

Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford Scholarly Classics)

Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford Scholarly Classics) PDF

The list of books you might like