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The ‘Restitution of All Things’ in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Premillennialism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Martin Spence*
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford

Extract

This paper explores the nineteenth-century doctrine of the ‘restitution of all things’, a concept of the afterlife which emphasized material continuity with the present and generated detailed speculation about the activities and events which would take place in the eternal realm. Such beliefs, it will be suggested, resonated with broader developments in nineteenth-century theology which tended to soften the boundary between this life and the life to come, and increasingly suggested that the Christian hope was for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth rather than for the soul to go to heaven after an individual’s death. This belief has been almost completely neglected in previous historiographical discussions of nineteenth-century evangelical eschatology. To recognize its existence challenges many historiographical depictions of the ‘world-denying’ nature of Evangelicalism in general and the pessimistic temperament of pre-millennialism in particular.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2009

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Footnotes

*

The research upon which this article is based was funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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