The Death of Christ Denney was born in Paisley, Scotland, 5 February 1856, to Cameronian (Reformed Presbyterian) parents.
Lindsay (Church History), Dr. James Candlish (Systematic Theology) and Dr Alexander Balmain Bruce (New Testament).
In 1886, he was called to be pastor of the East Free Church, Broughty Ferry, where he succeeded his friend and mentor Professor Bruce.
According to William Robertson Nicoll, Denney, previously tempted away from the Evangelical and Reformed faith of his parents, was influenced to return in that direction by his wife's encouraging him to read sermons by C.H.
Denney was appointed Professor of Systematic Theology at his old alma mater, Free Church College Glasgow, in 1897, and spent the rest of his life teaching there.
Denney became a close friend of the one-time Free Church minister and journalist Sir William Robertson Nicoll, to whose publications he contributed liberally dozens of articles.
His wife died in 1907 and Denney felt the loss deeply, from which he never recovered, writing only two major works before his death in the summer of 1917 at the comparatively early age of 61.
Denney's greatest contribution to theological literature is in his unfailing confidence in the power of the gospel best articulated in the words, "Christ died for the ungodly."
Denney proceeds to elaborate on the relations between God and man as personal (not legal) and must be "determined in way which has universal and moral validity."
Denney argues that Paul did not preach the gospel "by extending to all mankind a Pharisaic, legal, forensic relation to God; he did it by rising above such conceptions...to the conception of a relation of all of men to God expressing itself in a moral constitution--or, as he would have said it, but in an entirely unforensic sense, in a law--of divine and unchanging validity.
The maintenance of this law, or of this moral constitution, in its inviolable integrity was the signature of the forgiveness Paul preached" (The Death of Christ, 274-275).