The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Brilliant Witnesses on Both Sides of Atlantic

I. Blackburne—Historian of Reformation Conflict Over Soul Question

Up to this time no one had ever attempted to give a systematic record of the contentions and conflicts of the proponents of Conditionalism, covering the two-hundred-year span immediately following the launching of the Reformation, and showing its relation thereto. That was left for the scholarly FRANCIS BLACKBURNE (1704-1787), archdeacon of Cleveland, Conditionalist, controversialist, and historian. Thoroughly trained at Cambridge, he was ordained an Anglican deacon in 1728, and was consecrated as a priest in 1739. Blackburne was ever the advocate of civil and religious liberty, never ceasing to champion thorough investigation of truth and its establishment in the church. CFF2 205.1

He was inducted into the rectory of Richmond in 1739, and resided there for forty-eight years, until his death. Throughout the remainder of his life he gave himself to intensive study and polemic writing. In 1750 Blackburne was made archdeacon of Cleveland, and he held this post until his death thirty-seven years later. He was a decided Arminian, not a Calvinist—which was a definite factor in his concept of the nature and destiny of man. CFF2 205.2

From the time of his first admission to Cambridge, Blackburne was a close friend and literary associate of Edmund Law, likewise an avowed Conditionalist, who was later Master of St. Peter’s College, Cambridge, then archdeacon of Staffordshire, and finally bishop of Carlisle. Blackburne was also a friend of William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester, who was also a Conditionalist. Small wonder that these friendships should stimulate Blackburne’s comprehensive study and personal adoption of Conditional Immortality and his extensive writing “concerning the use of the word soul in Holy Scripture, and the state of death.” CFF2 205.3

Blackburne was bent on dispersing the “clouds of folly and superstition.” But his presentations were quickly denounced by antagonists as “soul sleeping” and persistently castigated by the more hostile as “heresy.” When Dr. Law’s Conditionalism was attacked, Blackburne sprang to his defense, publishing a 140-page No Proof in the Scriptures of an Intermediate State of Happiness or Misery between Death and the Resurrection (1756). ¹ About the same time he felt compelled to take up the cudgels in behalf of his friend Dr. Warburton, under attack from the bishop of London. So Blackburne produced his 77-page Remarks on Dr. Warburton’s Account of the Sentiments of the Early Jews Concerning the Soul (1757) ² Thus the battle of pens and pamphlets surged on, Blackburne being author of six vigorous discussions in this hotly debated field. CFF2 206.1

The year 1765 marked the production of Blackburne’s epochal 183-page A Short Historical View of the Controversy concerning an Intermediate State and the Separate Existence of the Soul, Between Death and the General Resurrection, deduced from the Beginning of the Protestant Reformation, to the Present Time, with a second and enlarged edition in 1772. ³ The continuing witness of a line of noted clerics was presented, constituting the earliest piece of systematic historical research brought forth on this vital issue. Based on the sources, to which he had full access, Blackburne began with the Council of Florence in 1439 and the period just prior to the Reformation, and the vital part it played in producing the Reformation break under Luther. He continued the recital of the swaying battle line on to his own day. CFF2 206.2

Picture 1: Francis Blackburne
Francis Blackburne (d. 1787), Archdeacon of Cleveland Historian of Reformation Conflict Over Soul Question.
Page 207

This unique discussion has fifty-eight pages of Introduction, followed by twenty-one sections comprising 108 pages of text. And it concludes with seventeen pages of Appendix material. Blackburne deals with cases and conditions then currently known but now difficult to compass. He had access to all the issues and the arguments, for he lived close to the times and the tensions. Moreover, he had deep personal convictions as to the principles under fire, and went back of the outer acts and utterances to the underlying principles and causes. His treatise compassed Pomponatius, Luther, Tyndale, Calvin and his Psychopannychia, then the Anabaptist, Helvetic, Edwardian, and Scottish confessions—and on through Stegmann, Overton, Bull, Jurieu, Locke, Coward, Layton, Hallett, Law, and many lesser lights who felt impelled to put aside the “incumbrance of superstition.” CFF2 207.1

Blackburne’s Historical View remains unsurpassed in the area covered, and offers the most comprehensive coverage available of the conflict over the nature of the soul during the two and a half centuries traversed. In masterly grasp of the issues and sweeping treatment it remains the classic. CFF2 208.1

That which lay closest to Blackburne’s heart was “the perfection [or completion] of the Protestant principle, and the reclaiming of the Church of England” from all departures from Scripture, the great rule of faith and standard of doctrine. Blackburne ever stressed the folly of going to churchly dictums instead of Holy Scripture for sanction or authority. In his treatise The Confessional, or a Full and Free Inquiry into the Right, Utility, and Success of Establishing Confessions of Faith and Doctrine in Protestant Churches (1766) he appealed for the progressive acceptance of truth as it should be discerned, and warned of stultifying, rigid creeds and Romeward trends. He fought “established follies and absurdities.” Intense controversy resulted from his searching exposures. CFF2 208.2

It was Blackburne’s call for further reformation of the Anglican Church that aroused the antagonism of Dr. Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, and other powerful church leaders, and forestalled any chance of further ecclesiastical advancement for Blackburne, ⁴ despite his conspicuous and widely recognized abilities. Nevertheless, The Confessional went through three editions and drew answering volumes from various clerics. ⁵ CFF2 208.3

Deep conviction of truth, based upon “the Bible only,” was the motivating force in Blackburne’s life. He held to the inalienable right of private judgment, and was deeply troubled over current encroachments of the Papacy and the devastating perversions she had introduced from paganism into Christendom. And to him the dogma of the Innate Immortality of the soul and its corollaries was perhaps the most serious of all papal departures, for it is foundational to the whole papal structure. And it sprang from Platonism. CFF2 208.4