The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Robin Parry annotates Allin's CHRIST TRIUMPHANT

smile.amazon.com/Christ-Triumpha … 1498229123

Various editions of Thomas Allin’s Christ Triumphant, aka Universalism Asserted as the Hope of the Gospel [etc.], can be found perfectly free on the internet, of course. But Robin Parry (whose work The Evangelical Universalist under the pen name “Gregory MacDonald” inspired our forum name) has been working for a while on a new edition of the final (9th) version, mostly adding a ton of annotations in source notes and contextual commentary (while also tightening up the presentation a bit for modern readers). He also adds a biographical report on Allin, and Thomas Talbott contributes a little essay, and… maybe there’s an index now? Can’t recall. (I’m too lazy to walk out to the car and look at the moment. :wink: )

Not gonna lie, the paperback version is steep for a book freely available on the internet, listing at a price of $49 – usually discounted by retailers, of course, but currently Amazon isn’t discounting much. But the Kindle version is (currently) $10, and looks good, even though (as always for a Kindle format) the chapter footnotes have to be endnoted with hyperlinks. Which means that the main reason for the new edition, the great annotations, require a lot of fiddling about to access. At least their ‘physical’ location in the Kindle fire is helpfully assigned to the end of each relevant chapter, so if you miss a few you can quickly scan them to see if you’ve missed anything interesting before moving on to the next chapter.

For those who don’t know (though any regular forum members probably will), Allin was an orthodox trinitarian Anglican minister (eventually picking up a PhD and Doctor of Divinity – also a botanist who made a national contribution to studying Irish flora, by the way), who wrote arguably the last great 19th (and early 20th) century argument for (trinitarian) Christian universalism, spreading his argument out through philosophy, patristics (his forte), and scriptural testimony, in that order – not trying to privilege any of them but working on the Anglican Reformed principle of the Three Legs of the Chair: scripture, reason, and tradition.

Two of our best-regarded forum regulars, Father Aiden Kimel (akimel) and Reverend Doctor Andrew Davison (revdrew), are cited among the blurbs, SO YOU KNOW THIS BOOK IS PRETTY AWESOME! :sunglasses: Well, you probably knew that already, but now it is awesomer.