The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

IV. Denniston—Jamaican Frontier Conditionalist

About four years before the periodical The Bible Echo was launched in London, the book The Perishing Soul appeared in Jamaica, B.W.I. pressing on the same major points. JAMES M. DENNISTON (d. 1895), Scottish Presbyterian missionary to Jamaica, was a graduate of the University of Glasgow. Throughout his life he maintained the careful study habits acquired, becoming noted for his accurate scholarship. As a result, in 1880 his help was sought in connection with the work of the English Revision Committee of the Bible. He had many friends among the scholars of the day. And his scholarship gives weight to the contentions of his own book. CFF2 443.3

Denniston had a burden for less-favored lands. So he sailed for Jamaica in 1839. His first sermon, significantly enough, was on the “Free and Gracious Offer of Eternal Life”—a forecast, as it proved to be, of his later theological interests. He then went to Montego Bay and founded St. Paul’s Presbyterian church. Denniston had an intense longing to find and follow the full will of God, and ever sought to present Bible themes of transcendent importance. In 1843, with a group of Seceders, he left the Church of Scotland to become one of a band of Evangelical preachers. His goal was twofold—to reach scholars through private gatherings in his home and to reach the untutored in his public meetings. CFF2 444.1

1. APOLOGIST FOR PRIMITIVE GOSPEL IN MATERIALISTIC AGE

Possessed of independent means, he traveled in Europe in 1848, visiting Budapest in the interest of the Jews, and for a time he labored in Constantinople as a missionary to the Jews. He then returned to Plymouth, England. Becoming convinced of the truth of baptism by immersion, he went to the East End of London and built his own church, the Victoria Park Chapel, where he labored for the teeming multitudes of the great metropolis. All this time he was studying and writing on the nature and destiny of man, as well as preaching. He produced The Perishing Soul, together with several other works in related fields. CFF2 444.2

Returning to Jamaica, and using his private income, he devoted the remainder of his long life to promulgating the gospel and fostering education among the poor in the country of his adoption. Being a lover of young men, he sponsored a “temperance house” in Mandeville for their protection, as well as conducting a twice-a-week night school for about forty of them. He also conducted evangelistic meetings in Kingston. Denniston broke away from the staid Presbyterian psalm-hymns and introduced the great moving hymns of the church. His ministry was marked by fidelity to the Word as he understood it, without fear of consequences or concern over losing the approbation of men. CFF2 444.3

Inflexible loyalty to Christ and His Word characterized his opposition to the current wave of religious liberalism, with its denials of the deity of Christ, spiritual regeneration, blood atonement, and the literal resurrection—“without which,” he insisted, “we have no gospel for dying sinners.” He was an apologist for the simple primitive gospel in a materialistic age, and was pre-eminently a Bible preacher. This led him to proclaim the positions of Conditionalism. He was ever a fearless and uncompromising foe of the perversions of Romanism, as well as an eloquent and persistent champion of the fundamentals of Protestantism. CFF2 445.1

2. ENDLESS SUFFERING IS “INTOLERABLE OPPRESSIVE.”

In his thirty-one-chapter, 360-page The Perishing Soul, written in Jamaica, Denniston starts, as many had done before him, with the trilemma of the three schools of thought on the fate of the wicked—Endless Suffering, Universal Restoration, and the Ultimate Destruction of the Wicked, which latter position he championed as the truth. In his preface Denniston quotes approvingly from the British and Foreign Educational Review (October, 1872, page 702), as saying: “The idea of permanent and unrelieved, not to say endless suffering, is intolerably oppressive, and every one longs to see some escape from it.” ⁷⁹ CFF2 445.2

Although the bulk of his book presents the “Scriptural View” on the fate of the wicked, the last seven chapters deal with the “Historical View.” Denniston disposes at the outset of the common contention that most ancients believed in the indestructibility of the soul, by one quote from Plato (Phaedo, secs.6 8-70): “‘Most men assert that the soul, when separated from the body, will be immediately dispersed and destroyed.’” ⁸⁰ CFF2 445.3

That, he says, was the majority view of old. CFF2 446.1

3. MAN LOST IMMORTALITY THROUGH “FALL.”

Starting with the Old Testament and the Creation narrative, Denniston shows that no Innate Immortality is indicated in the Inspired Record. Rather, “from the moment of his eating” Adam became a “mortal, perishing, ruined creature.” ⁸¹ The tree of life “pointed to the grant of immortality, as promised to Adam,” but which he “forfeited.” ⁸² Denniston also quotes from the Memoir of Dr. John Duncan (p. 230), that Adam was “designed for immortality,” but “by the fall, man lost immortality.” And to die means to “cease to be.” ⁸³ But recovered life is provided through grace. CFF2 446.2

4. DESTRUCTION BOTH A “PROCESS” AND A “TERMINATION.”

The New Testament teaches that all life is vested in Christ. Immortality is a “special bestowment of grace,” not a “natural endowment” of man. Thus the apostolic teaching was wholly contrary to the later popular position of “endless life in death, or an endless death in life” concept. ⁸⁴ However, the bulk of Denniston’s volume, appropriate to its title (The Perishing Soul), deals with the Biblical uses of the Greek terms for “destroy,” “perish,” et cetera, first in the Septuagint (Old Testament), and then in the Gospels and Epistles as meaning to “bring to an end,” and “come to an end”—involving both a process and a termination. ⁸⁵ Denniston similarly shows the fallacy of Universalism. Since his testimony parallels the witness of many other able Conditionalists we need not repeat in detail. CFF2 446.3

5. WITNESS OF EARLY CENTURIES TO CONDITIONALISM

In the historical section Denniston deals with the Jewish Apocryphal writings—about equally divided between truth and error on the nature and destiny of man. Then, coming to the Christian Era, and the Apostolic and Ante-Nicene Fathers, he shows wide reading and accurate conclusions. The Apostolic Fathers, he insists, were Conditionalists, with no “trace of universal immortality” ⁸⁶ and so were the later Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others, who taught the destruction of the wicked. Irenaeus said the wicked are “utterly bereft of immortality and continuance.” ⁸⁷ Athenagoras, on the other hand, introduced the Platonic Immortal-Soulism of Greek philosophy with “no appeal to the authority of Scripture.” ⁸⁹ Denniston closes his able discussion with:
“We cannot but thank God for the testimony—furnishing, as it does, another and so valuable a proof of how the men of that early Christians age could speak of the everlasting punishment of those whom they never forgot to represent as not immortal.” CFF2 446.4

The wicked, Denniston concludes, are utterly bereft of immortality, or deathless continuance. Their loss is “eternal and endless.” The sinner’s existence is definitely “terminable,” however indefinite its period. Such was the word from the British West Indies in 1874. CFF2 447.1