James Denney 1856-1917

James Denney is now best known for his The Death of Christ, considered a standard treatment of objective atonement understood in substitutionary terms. However there is a breadth and depth to Denney’s thought, a richness and passion in his theological work, an attractive integrity and spiritual immediacy in his writing that resists any reducing of his legacy to that of being an apologist for one aspect of Christian doctrine. This is the first major study of Denney to use the large corpus of Denney’s unpublished theological papers and sermons held in New College, Edinburgh. These, together with Denney’s published work, and wider biographical research, form the basis for this intellectual and contextual biography of one of Scotland’s most attractive and forceful theological personalities.