Elhanan Winchester (1751–1797) could recognize the suffering and religious conflict that gave attacks on Christianity their force. He believed, however, that divine intervention supplied the hope such criticism could not offer. In his 1795 answer to Thomas Paine (1737–1809), he defended prophecy, revelation, and the testimony to Christ’s resurrection. The question concerned what God had done for humanity and what those events promised for its future.
Winchester’s Universalism, the belief in the eventual restoration of all, gave that future a particular character. Judgment and suffering could be real without making estrangement from God permanent. Human history would end in reconciliation. His preaching made this prospect a reason to reconsider teachings that consigned part of humanity to endless punishment.
He carried the argument between Britain and America, drawing listeners into congregations where restoration became a shared religious expectation. Books mattered, but so did preaching, conversation, and the work of sustaining a community. People who agreed about the final recovery of humanity could still differ over the account of Christ, the soul, or revelation that made it possible. Religious reform did not remove disagreement by declaring its desired end.
Winchester’s response to Paine therefore occupies a particular place among the defences of Christianity. He was protecting the authority of revelation while contesting a doctrine many Christians believed it taught. His congregations also brought him into contact with other reformers searching for the earliest faith. The Philadelphia congregation would offer one such meeting place, receiving a visiting scholar whose account of early Christianity differed from its founder’s.