destructionist

English

Etymology

From destruction +‎ -ist. UK, 1800s. Political sense 1840s.

Noun

destructionist (plural destructionists)

  1. (politics, chiefly derogatory) One who delights in destroying that which is valuable, or whose principles and influence tend to destroy existing social, economic or political institutions.
    • September 1841, “Sir Robert Peel’s position on next resuming power”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume 50, number 311, page 407:
      The foreign and literal warfare, meantime, is a thousand times more desirable than the intestine warfare between the Destructionist and the Conservative.
  2. (theology) One who believes in the final destruction or complete annihilation of the wicked; an annihilationist, a conditionalist (i.e., a believer in conditional immortality).
    • 1807, Charles Buck, A Theological Dictionary, page 229:
      The great Dr. Watts may be considered, in some measure, a destructionist; since it was his opinion that the children of ungodly parents who die in infancy are annihilated.
    • 1850, Reasoner:
      The Destructionist and Annihilationist heretics have drawn their doctrines very fairly from the language of the Gospels and Epistles

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “destructionist”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

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