Adeney, Walter Frederic
ADENEY, WALTER FREDERIC: Congregationalist; b. at Ealing (9 m. w.
of London), Middlesex, Eng., Mar. 14, 1849. He received his education at New
College and University College, London. He was minister of the Congregational
Church at Acton, London, from 1872 to 1889, and from 1887 to the same year was
lecturer in Biblical and systematic theology at New College, London. In 1889
he was appointed professor of New Testament exegesis and church history in the
same institution, holding this position until 1903, as well as a lectureship
on church history in Hackney College, London, after 1898. In 1903 he was chosen
principal of Lancastershire College, in the University of Manchester, and two
years later was appointed lecturer on the history of doctrine in the same university.
As a theologian, he accepts the results of Biblical criticism which he feels
to be warranted, and welcomes scientific and philosophic investigation and criticism
of religion, although he seeks to adhere firmly to basal Christian truths and
to harmonize them with what he holds to be other ascertained verities. His works
include, in addition to numerous articles in magazines and Hastings’s Dictionary
of the Bible, as well as in nine volumes of the Pulpit Commentary
(1881-90), The Hebrew Utopia (London, 1877); From Christ to Constantine
(1886); From Constantine to Charles the Great (1888); two volumes in
the Expositor’s Bible (1893-94; the first on Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther;
and the second on Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon); The Theology of
the New Testament (1894); How to Read the Bible (1896); Women
of the New Testament (1899); the section on the New Testament in the
Biblical Introduction written by him in collaboration with W. H. Bennett
(1899); and A Century’s Progress (1901). He is likewise editor of
The Century Bible, to which he himself has contributed the volumes on Luke
(London, 1901) and the Epistles to the Thessalonians (1902).