Chapter 20

Conditional Immortality from Arnobius to Edward White

The third option, almost forgotten, waiting to be found

A. The Hereford Lectures and the Long Shadow Behind Them

In the autumn of 1845, in a Congregational chapel in Hereford, England, a young minister named Edward White stepped up to preach a series of four lectures. He was thirty-six years old, well-read, and possessed of a quiet conviction that the standard evangelical doctrine of hell did not match the Bible he had been studying for years. His thesis was simple. Immortality, he argued, is not a property the soul possesses by birth. It is a gift God gives to those who are united to Christ. Those who finally reject Christ do not live forever in torment. They cease to exist.¹

The lectures became a small book the next year — Life in Christ: Four Discourses upon the Scripture Doctrine That Immortality Is the Peculiar Privilege of the Regenerate. It scandalized many of White's fellow Congregationalists. For a time it looked as if his career in the ministry might be over. He was branded a heretic. He was warned. He kept preaching anyway.²

Thirty years later, in 1875, White brought out a vastly expanded second edition of Life in Christ — a six-hundred-page biblical, historical, and philosophical case for what he called conditional immortality. By the time he died in 1898, he was no longer a scandal but a respected senior figure of English Nonconformity. He had served as chairman of the London Congregational Union. He had outlived most of his critics. And he had launched a stream of theology that would, more than a century later, find its way back into mainstream evangelical conversation through the work of Edward Fudge, John Stott, and the contemporary Rethinking Hell project.³

But here is the strange thing. White was not the first. He was a recoverer. The position he defended — that immortality is conditional on grace, that the wicked finally perish rather than burn forever — had been articulated in the persecuted Christian community of Roman North Africa around the year 303, in a strange and uneven Latin treatise called Adversus Nationes. Its author, a rhetoric teacher named Arnobius of Sicca, would die a few years later in obscurity. His book would be barely read for a thousand years. And yet his idea would refuse to die. It would surface again in seventeenth-century Poland, again in eighteenth-century Cambridge, again in nineteenth-century Hereford. It would arrive in the modern evangelical world as if it were brand new — when in fact it was very, very old.

This is the chapter where I tell that story.

B. A Quick Map of the Conditionalist Arc

Before we look at the figures one by one, let me sketch the arc. The conditionalist tradition is the third position in the historic three-way conversation about the fate of the unsaved. The dominant Western view, from Augustine forward, has been eternal conscious torment (ECT) — the unsaved live forever in suffering. The minority but persistent Eastern alternative, which we have traced through Clement, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, has been universal restoration (UR) — God's purifying love finally restores all. Between these two stands a third option, less famous than either, but biblically and theologically distinct: conditional immortality. On this view, the soul is not naturally immortal. The unsaved do not suffer forever. They do not finally repent and join the saved. They simply cease to exist. They perish, as the New Testament says they will perish.⁴

The arc goes like this. It begins with Arnobius around 303. It goes underground for over a thousand years — though there are traces, hints, isolated voices in the medieval period. It surfaces explicitly in the seventeenth century with the Polish Brethren and the Racovian Catechism, and in the writings of the English layman Henry Layton. It enters respectable Anglican thought in the mid-eighteenth century with Edmund Law. It becomes a sustained scholarly movement in the nineteenth century with Richard Whately, Edward White, Henry Constable, Sir George Gabriel Stokes, and the Swiss biblical scholar Émile Pétavel-Olliff. In parallel, and largely independently, the American Adventist tradition develops conditionalism out of its own biblical reading after the Great Disappointment of 1844. By the late nineteenth century, conditional immortality is a recognized — if minority — Protestant option, engaged by major theologians on both sides of the Atlantic. After about 1900 it falls into a half-century lull. Then, beginning in the 1960s, it is recovered again, and the modern movement, which I treat in Chapter 28, takes shape.

That is the road. Let us walk it.

C. The Figures Themselves

Arnobius of Sicca: The Ancient Patristic Anchor

Arnobius taught rhetoric in Sicca Veneria, a Roman town in the province of Numidia in North Africa, near the end of the third century. He was a pagan most of his life. According to Jerome, he converted to Christianity after a vision or dream during the early years of the Diocletianic persecution. The local bishop, suspicious of a former pagan rhetorician's sincerity, refused to baptize him until he produced a written defense of the faith. Arnobius did so — seven books of apologetic argument, written somewhere around 303 to 305, that have come down to us in a single ninth-century manuscript under the title Adversus Nationes, "Against the Pagans."⁵

The first book defends Christianity against the pagan charge that the Roman gods are angry because of the Christians. The second book turns to the soul. And it is here, in Book 2 — especially in chapters 14 through 62 — that Arnobius takes a position that no major Christian writer before him had taken with quite this clarity. The soul, he argues, is not by nature immortal. The Platonists are wrong. The doctrine of the soul's inherent deathlessness is a "novel" pagan philosophical idea, not a Christian one.⁶

Arnobius's argument moves in two steps. First, only the unbegotten Father is naturally immortal. Everything else — gods, angels, souls — has a beginning, and what has a beginning may also have an end. Second, the destiny of human souls depends entirely on whether God grants them continuance. Those who come to know God receive the gift of ongoing life. Those who refuse God do not. In the fire of judgment they are consumed — not preserved in torment.⁷

I want to be careful here. Arnobius is a strange writer. He knows Scripture poorly — he quotes the Bible only once verbatim, and confuses Pharisees with Sadducees elsewhere.⁸ His theological vocabulary is half-formed. Later patristic readers would treat him as a minor and idiosyncratic figure. He was never a major influence. But there he is. In the early fourth century, on the eve of the Council of Nicaea, an African convert defending Christianity against the pagans articulates a doctrine in which the natural immortality of the soul is rejected as a pagan philosophical error and the destruction of the wicked is taken at face value. The modern conditionalist movement did not invent this. Arnobius did it first, sixteen centuries earlier.

Medieval Silence, Then the Socinians and Layton

For over a thousand years after Arnobius, conditional immortality goes nearly silent. There are hints. Some scholars detect conditionalist tendencies in Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, and even in stray passages of Irenaeus. But these are debated, and in any case the medieval Latin West settles firmly into Augustinian eternal conscious torment. The natural immortality of the soul becomes a settled doctrine, codified at the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513, which condemned "soul mortalism" as erroneous.⁹

The first sustained recovery comes from an unexpected source: the Polish Brethren. The Polish Brethren — known later as the Socinians, after the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus who became their leading thinker — were an anti-Trinitarian Reformed splinter group based in Raków, in southern Poland. They produced a confession of faith called the Racovian Catechism, first published in Polish in 1605, and later translated into Latin, German, and English. The catechism rejected the Trinity. It also rejected the natural immortality of the soul. It taught that the soul dies with the body, and that only the righteous will be raised to ongoing life; the wicked, if raised at all, will be raised only to a final and definitive death.¹⁰

The Socinian position was Christologically heterodox. Mainstream Protestants and Catholics alike condemned it for its anti-Trinitarianism. And because the Socinian conditionalism came packaged with the Socinian Christology, orthodox theologians for a long time treated conditionalism itself as a Socinian heresy. The English Parliament ordered copies of the Racovian Catechism burned in 1652. But the exegetical work the Socinians had done — their close reading of the biblical language of "death," "destruction," and "perishing" — would later be picked up by orthodox conditionalists who had no patience for Socinian Christology but recognized that the biblical exegesis was independent of it.¹¹

Meanwhile, in late seventeenth-century England, a country gentleman named Henry Layton (1622–1705) was conducting his own war against the natural immortality of the soul. Layton was a layman, not a clergyman — son of a master of the royal jewel-house under Charles I and Charles II — and he wrote anonymously. Between 1692 and 1704, he produced a series of pamphlets and treatises rejecting soul-immortality, including the unwieldy but important A Search after Souls and Spiritual Operations in Man, which appeared around 1700 and was expanded into a still larger treatise printed in 1706.¹² Layton's argument was philosophical as much as biblical. He pressed the case that what we call "the soul" cannot be shown, on either Scripture or sound reason, to exist apart from the body in a continuing conscious state. His work was attacked by Boyle Lecturer Richard Bentley and the Presbyterian Timothy Manlove, among others. Layton kept writing.

A generation later, the conditionalist position found a home inside the Anglican establishment. Edmund Law (1703–1787) — eventually Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Bishop of Carlisle — published Considerations on the Theory of Religion in 1745, with later editions adding an extended appendix "concerning the use of the word soul in Holy Scripture, and the state of the dead there described." Law argued, in measured Anglican prose, that the biblical "soul" is not a Greek immaterial substance but the whole living person, and that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection. He stopped short of full annihilationism. But he questioned the natural immortality of the soul more openly than any previous bishop of the Church of England. His student and friend William Paley would later edit his works and continue to circulate them.¹³

Richard Whately: The Archbishop with a Logician's Mind

By the early nineteenth century, the soil was ready for a sustained conditionalist movement. The first major nineteenth-century figure was Richard Whately (1787–1863), Anglican Archbishop of Dublin from 1831 until his death. Whately was a logician above all. He had been Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, principal of St. Alban Hall, and one of the founders of the Oriel Noetics — a group of Oxford theologians who insisted on the application of careful reasoning to biblical interpretation. He wrote textbooks on logic that remained standard for decades.¹⁴

In 1829, while still at Oxford, Whately published — anonymously, "by a Country Pastor" — A View of the Scripture Revelations Concerning a Future State. The book worked through the biblical material on death, the intermediate state, judgment, and final destiny, and concluded that the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul could not be sustained from Scripture alone. The biblical writers, Whately argued, do not assume that the soul is by nature deathless. They assume that life is a gift, that death is the wages of sin, and that any persistence beyond death depends on God's specific action.¹⁵

Now I have to be careful here. Whately is sometimes presented in conditionalist literature as a full-blown annihilationist. He was not. The Dictionary of National Biography summarizes his position with care: he "doubted the natural immortality of the soul and denied the physical resurrection of the body, but made no attempt to attenuate the significance of the doctrine of eternal punishment."¹⁶ Whately's position was, strictly, a kind of Christian mortalism rather than a fully developed annihilationism — he denied that the soul is naturally immortal, but did not work out in detail what happens to the unsaved in their final state. That work would be done by Whately's readers, especially Edward White.

Whately mattered for two reasons. First, an Archbishop of Dublin saying these things openly meant that conditionalism was no longer simply a Socinian or sectarian position — it had entered the Anglican mainstream. Second, his careful, logical, deflationary biblical readings gave later conditionalists a model. The case did not have to be made shrilly, by sectarians. It could be made calmly, by serious scholars in serious chairs.

Edward White: The Foundational Modern Conditionalist

Now we return to Edward White (1819–1898), with whom this chapter began. He deserves the longest treatment, because the modern conditionalist movement is, in a real sense, Whately's logic pressed through White's exegesis and pastoral imagination.

White grew up in English Nonconformity. He trained for the Congregational ministry and took the pulpit at Eignbrook Chapel in Hereford in the early 1840s. By his own later account, he had begun to question the standard doctrine of hell during his theological reading in the late 1830s. The lectures he gave in 1845, published as Life in Christ in 1846, set out his alternative.¹⁷

The first edition was brief — four discourses, about three hundred and thirty pages in its first printing. The second edition of 1875 was a sustained six-hundred-page work, restructured around four major arguments. The third edition of 1878 refined it further, and the title settled into the form by which it is now usually cited: Life in Christ: A Study of the Scripture Doctrine on the Nature of Man, the Object of the Divine Incarnation, and the Conditions of Human Immortality.¹⁸

White's four arguments are worth laying out, because they remain the basic shape of the conditionalist case down to the present.

The first argument is anthropological. Scripture, on White's reading, does not teach that human beings are naturally immortal. It teaches that we are mortal — that life is breath, that we are dust, that "the soul that sins, it shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4). Immortality is something God alone possesses by nature (1 Timothy 6:16). Created beings receive it as a gift, conditional on union with the Author of life. To say that humans are inherently immortal is to confuse the gift with the receiver. It is to import Greek metaphysics into Hebrew Scripture.

The second argument is eschatological. The biblical language used for the fate of the unsaved is the language of death, destruction, perishing, being burned up, being consumed, becoming as though they had never been. The standard ECT reading metaphorizes all this language — "death" means a kind of unending alive-but-dying, "destruction" means continuing in destroyed misery, "perishing" means persistent unperishing torment. White argued that this is exegetically untenable. The simplest and most consistent reading takes the language at face value: the unsaved die, are destroyed, perish, are consumed.¹⁹

The third argument is patristic. White appealed to Arnobius. He read more broadly in the Fathers — finding suggestive material in Justin, Theophilus, and Irenaeus that he interpreted as friendly to a conditionalist reading. He argued, plausibly though not always cautiously, that the strict ECT doctrine became dominant only in the post-Augustinian Latin West, and that the earlier Greek tradition was more open to conditional readings than its later defenders admitted.²⁰

The fourth argument is pastoral and theological. ECT, White argued, distorts the character of God. A God who keeps creatures in agony forever — for finite sins committed in a brief earthly life — is harder to recognize as the Father of Jesus Christ than a God who, in love, finally lets the wicked perish. White did not soften the gospel. He held the seriousness of the warning fully. But he insisted that the warning was the warning of destruction, not the warning of unending torture.

White's reception was contested. Congregational authorities initially considered disciplining him. Major figures like Charles Hodge at Princeton and Henry Alford, the New Testament scholar, engaged White's arguments at length and rejected them. Alford was sympathetic to a softened reading of the duration of punishment but disagreed with full conditionalism. Hodge, in his Systematic Theology, treated White as a serious opponent worth refuting.²¹ But White's careful biblical work and his calm pastoral tone eventually won him a hearing. He served as chairman of the London Congregational Union. He outlived his critics. He died in 1898, having lived long enough to see his book go through multiple editions and to see a generation of younger evangelicals start to take the position seriously.

Constable, Stokes, and Pétavel-Olliff: The Late-Nineteenth-Century Conversation

White was not alone. The mid- and late nineteenth century produced a small but substantial network of conditionalist writers.

Henry Constable (1816–1891) was an Anglican clergyman who in 1868 published The Duration and Nature of Future Punishment, a careful exegetical work that went through multiple editions and became, alongside White's Life in Christ, a standard nineteenth-century conditionalist reference.²² Constable's argument focused on the biblical word-studies that White had only sketched. He worked through the New Testament vocabulary of judgment — apōleia (destruction), olethros (ruin), phtheirō (corrupt, ruin) — and argued that in their normal Greek usage, these words refer to actual destruction, not to preservation in suffering. Constable's prose is leaner than White's, and his arguments are often the ones modern conditionalists cite for the lexical case.

Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819–1903) is the surprise of the list. Stokes was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge — the chair Isaac Newton had once held, and which Stephen Hawking would later hold — and one of the great nineteenth-century mathematical physicists. The Navier–Stokes equations and Stokes's theorem in vector calculus carry his name. He was also a serious evangelical Christian, president of the Victoria Institute (the Christian science-and-faith organization), and a careful Bible-reading Anglican. Late in life he wrote a small book called Conditional Immortality: A Help to Sceptics, published in 1897, in which he laid out his reasons for thinking the doctrine of natural immortality was both unbiblical and philosophically suspect.²³ The fact that one of Britain's most distinguished living scientists held the position publicly mattered. It meant the conditionalist case could not be dismissed as anti-intellectual.

Émile Pétavel-Olliff (1836–1910) was a Swiss pastor and biblical scholar, the son of a Neuchâtel pastor and grandson of one of the founders of Genevan biblical scholarship. He wrote in French. His two-volume La fin du mal ("The End of Evil") appeared in the 1880s, followed by the major work, Le Problème de l'immortalité, in 1891. An English translation as The Problem of Immortality, with a prefatory letter by the Swiss philosopher Charles Secrétan, appeared in London in 1892. Pétavel-Olliff brought the conditionalist case into the French-language Protestant world, drew on continental Reformed exegesis as much as on the English tradition, and connected the movement to the broader nineteenth-century reconsideration of hell on the continent (D. P. Walker traces some of this background in The Decline of Hell).²⁴

The Adventist Independent Stream

While the Whately–White stream was taking shape in England, an entirely independent conditionalist tradition was emerging in the United States. William Miller (1782–1849) was a Baptist farmer in upstate New York who, on the basis of his own intense study of Daniel and Revelation, became convinced that Christ would return in 1843, then in 1844. The Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844 — the date Miller's followers had finally settled on — left the Millerite movement in crisis. Out of that crisis emerged several new religious bodies, including what would become the Seventh-day Adventist Church.²⁵

In the years after 1844, several Millerite preachers — including George Storrs, who wrote the influential Six Sermons on the Inquiry, Is There Immortality in Sin and Suffering? (1842), and James White and Ellen G. White, the founders of Seventh-day Adventism — converged on a doctrine that combined conditional immortality, soul-sleep (the view that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection), and annihilation of the finally unrepentant. They reached the position independently of the English Whately–White stream, mainly through their own biblical reading.²⁶

The Adventist development was a mixed blessing for the broader conditionalist movement. On one hand, it produced an entire denomination committed to the position, with a substantial body of biblical and historical scholarship — eventually crowned in the twentieth century by LeRoy Edwin Froom's two-volume The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers (1965–1966), a sprawling and partisan but historically substantial Adventist history of conditionalism.²⁷ On the other hand, the Adventist tradition came with theological elements — most notably Ellen White's prophetic ministry, the Saturday-Sabbath teaching, and what mainstream evangelicals viewed as a heterodox investigative-judgment doctrine — that made it easy for non-Adventist evangelicals to dismiss Adventist conditionalism as part of a broader sectarian package. For most of the twentieth century, Reformed and Lutheran scholars who rejected ECT had to do so carefully, distancing themselves from the Adventist conditionalism that was, in fact, making many of the same biblical arguments.

D. Reception: From Recognized Option to Mid-Century Lull

By the 1880s and 1890s, the conditionalist option was firmly on the table. Major theologians on both sides of the Atlantic engaged it. Charles Hodge's Systematic Theology (1871–1873) treated it as a serious if mistaken position. Augustus Strong's Systematic Theology (1907) did the same. James Orr engaged it in his Scottish lectures. The Plymouth Brethren produced a mixed body of conditionalist and anti-conditionalist literature. Charles Finney's Oberlin School flirted with some conditionalist-friendly themes without ever fully adopting the position. The Anglican controversy over hell — the so-called "Eschatological Crisis" of the 1860s and 1870s, set off by F. D. Maurice's Theological Essays (1853) and continued by F. W. Farrar's Eternal Hope (1878) — created an atmosphere in which conditional immortality was at least a recognized third party in the conversation, alongside ECT and what was then called "the larger hope" (universal restoration).²⁸

And then, around the turn of the twentieth century, the conversation went quiet.

I want to name some of the figures who kept the position alive through the lull, because they matter for the recovery. Basil Atkinson (1895–1971), the under-librarian at the Cambridge University Library, was a quiet conditionalist whose typewritten manuscript Life and Immortality circulated among British evangelicals for years before being formally published. F. F. Bruce (1910–1990), one of the most respected New Testament scholars of the twentieth century, held conditionalist sympathies privately, mentored Edward Fudge through correspondence, and eventually wrote the foreword to Fudge's The Fire That Consumes. John Wenham (1913–1996), the British evangelical scholar, came to a conditionalist position in his later years and defended it in The Goodness of God (1974) and The Enigma of Evil.²⁹

The lull, in other words, was not total silence. It was the quiet between the nineteenth-century articulation and the late-twentieth-century recovery. The recovery itself, with Fudge, Stackhouse, Pinnock, and Date, belongs to Chapter 28.

E. Assessment

What can we say about this tradition, fairly and accurately?

First, conditional immortality is a real third option. It is not eternal conscious torment, which it explicitly rejects on biblical and moral grounds. It is not universal restoration, which it rejects because it takes the biblical language of "perishing" at face value and does not see Scripture as teaching the final salvation of all. It is its own position, with its own logic, its own primary texts, and its own historical lineage. When contemporary evangelicals are told there are only two views on hell — the traditional view and universalism — they are not being told accurately. There has always been a third option.

Second, the historical lineage is real but thin. Arnobius is genuinely there in the late third century, but he is a minor and idiosyncratic figure. The medieval period offers fragments rather than a sustained tradition. The Socinians articulated the position but did so within a Christology the broader Church could not accept. Henry Layton was a layman writing anonymously. Edmund Law was a respectable Anglican voice but a quiet one. The first sustained, scholarly, mainstream-evangelical articulation of conditionalism really does come in the nineteenth century with Whately, White, Constable, Stokes, and Pétavel-Olliff. The Adventist development is parallel and independent. So when modern critics say conditionalism is "essentially modern," they are wrong — but they are not as wrong as the parallel critics who say postmortem opportunity is essentially modern (since PO has a much deeper patristic lineage). The conditionalist patristic warrant is genuine but slender.

Third, the position is biblically serious. Whately, White, and Constable were not eccentrics. They were careful exegetes engaging the biblical texts on death, destruction, perishing, the second death, and the lake of fire. Their reading of those texts is at minimum a respectable reading, even for those who finally disagree. The standard ECT reading requires consistent metaphorization of the biblical language of destruction. The conditionalist reading takes that language straight. Both readings make moves the other will dispute. Neither is obviously the only possible reading.

Fourth, conditionalism's relationship to the other long-hope positions is closer than its early proponents sometimes acknowledged. White himself, in his later writings, was open to the possibility that the duration of postmortem judgment might be more extended and pedagogical than a simple immediate annihilation — gesturing toward what we might now call CI-with-PO. The Adventist tradition has generally insisted on an immediate-at-judgment annihilation. The modern conditionalist movement (Fudge, Stackhouse, Date) has been mostly silent on whether the opportunity to come to Christ might extend beyond death — though some modern conditionalists, like Clark Pinnock, explicitly held a CI-with-PO position.³⁰ My own position, as I have said elsewhere in this book, is CI-with-PO: I hold the conditionalist anthropology and eschatology of Whately, White, and Fudge, while also holding that God in love continues to pursue the unsaved beyond physical death. The history I have just traced is a tradition I claim — gladly, gratefully, and with some serious disagreements over particular details.

Fifth, where I do disagree with parts of this tradition: I think Whately overstated his case against the conscious intermediate state. I think Edward White's reading of certain patristic passages was too sanguine — he wanted to find conditionalists in the early Church more readily than the evidence allows. I think the Adventist insistence on soul-sleep, while defensible, does not match my reading of the biblical material on Hades and the dying thief and Paul's "to depart and be with Christ." Those are friendly internal disagreements within a tradition I broadly affirm.

F. Why This Matters

Why does this matter? Three reasons.

The first reason is historical-rhetorical. The claim that conditionalism is a recent innovation — a modern flinching from the hard biblical doctrine of hell, invented in the late twentieth century by people whose moral squeamishness has overpowered their fidelity to Scripture — is simply not true. Arnobius wrote in the early fourth century. The Polish Brethren wrote in 1605. Edmund Law was bishop of Carlisle in the 1760s. Whately was archbishop of Dublin in the 1830s. Edward White's book went through multiple major editions before 1900. The position has been continuously articulated in some part of the Christian world for sixteen centuries. It is older than the doctrine of purgatory. It is older than the Filioque controversy. It is older than every single one of the modern evangelical confessions that exclude it.

The second reason is pastoral. For Christians who have grown up with eternal conscious torment as the only thinkable doctrine of hell, and who have struggled to reconcile it with the character of the Father revealed in Christ, the conditionalist option is a real option. It is biblically grounded. It is historically defensible. It is held by sober, serious, creedally orthodox scholars. To know that one is not alone, that one is in fact in continuity with a small but persistent tradition of believers going back to Arnobius, is a real pastoral gift. The choice is not between the strict Augustinian hell and despair-of-the-tradition. There is a third path.

The third reason is ecumenical. Conditional immortality, taken seriously, is unusually flexible. It can pair with postmortem opportunity (as in my own position and Pinnock's). It can pair with what David Bentley Hart calls hopeful universalism (as in some recent figures who hold CI as a fallback, while hoping that all will in fact respond to God's love). It can stand on its own (as in Fudge and the Adventist tradition). Because the conditionalist commitment is primarily anthropological — about what kind of beings we are — rather than maximally eschatological, it leaves room for several different views of the duration and shape of postmortem encounter. That flexibility has made it a stepping-stone for many evangelicals moving from strict ECT toward broader long-hope positions.

Arnobius would not have predicted any of this. He was a North African rhetorician writing under persecution, trying to convince a skeptical bishop that he was a real Christian. He did not know he was launching a tradition. He did not know that, sixteen hundred years later, a Cambridge mathematician and a Hereford preacher and a Swiss biblical scholar would all, independently of each other, work their way back to something close to what he had argued. But the tradition was launched. It was nearly lost. It was found again. It is here now. And as I will show in Chapter 28, it is more alive in the early twenty-first century than it has been since the days of Edward White himself.