William Seymour
the famous Afro-American preacher
who brought a new Pentecost to
the West Coast of America
believed in and preached that there
is and will be an ever-burning HELL!
Charles Fox Parham was William
Joseph Seymour's Teacher
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"Stone's Folly" --Parham's Bible school in Topeka, Kansas |
Charles Fox Parham |
Agnes Osman 1st to speak in tongues |
In the inaugural issue of his paper The Apostolic Faith, Charles Fox Parham presented the doctrine of the annihilation of the wicked in an article entitled “Questions on Immortality.” In catechetical style, Parham presented 37 questions on the topic, answered by a simple Bible verse. The audience is left to conclude that the sinner is damned only to death. Interestingly, Parham never uses the word “hell” in the article and does not address the many biblical references to eternal punishment.
William Joseph Seymour, who received training in the rudiments of the Pentecostal baptism under Parham in Houston, Texas, strongly denounced his mentor’s perspective in the January 1907 issue of his own paper published in Los Angeles, also named, The Apostolic Faith.
Seymour appeals to the Lukan parable of Lazarus and the rich man to establish the premise that “ . . . there is no annihilation in God’s Word for the wicked, but there is a blazing and burning hell awaiting them.”
Seymour says that if the destruction of the wicked were true, “then this rich man would have been burned into ashes, and there would be no more of him.”
Seymour worries after those taken in the doctrinal error: “Many who have preached a no-hell Gospel will find out better when they die and come to judgment . . . May God help us to turn from sin and wickedness and not try to wrest the Scriptures, but take them just as they are written.” The entire article is a clear renunciation of the heresy of “no-hellism” and an impassioned plea to those who may have a false security about such a finite afterlife to come to repentance, paying heed to “God’s Holy Ghost preachers that are testifying to the Blood that cleanses from sin and warning of an everlasting hell.”
