Robert Henry Boll

Robert Henry Boll (June 7, 1875 – April 13, 1956) was a German-born American preacher in the Churches of Christ. Boll is most known for advancing a premillennialist eschatology within the Churches of Christ, in articles written during his editorship of the front page of the Gospel Advocate from 1909 to 1915 and after 1915 in Word and Work, leading to a dispute which was a significant source of division within the Churches of Christ in the 1930s. Boll was one of the most influential advocates for the premillennial point of view, and was most singularly opposed by Foy E. Wallace Jr. By the end of the 20th century, however, the divisions caused by the debate over premillennialism were diminishing, and in the 2000 edition of the directory Churches of Christ in the United States, published by Mac Lynn, congregations holding premillennial views were no longer listed separately.

Boll was born in Badenweiler, Germany, to "ardently" Roman Catholic parents Max Boll and the former Magdalena Ulman. His father moved the family to Basel, Switzerland, when Boll was three years old for a short period before returning to Germany, where they lived in Karlsruhe before hardship reportedly led them to move to Mühlhausen and, later, Freiburg. The younger of Boll's sisters as well as his father died when Boll was 10 years old, and he entered the Lyceum at age 11. His mother remarried when he was 14, prompting Boll to emigrate with a maternal aunt and friends to the United States, settling briefly in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1890. He migrated to Tennessee as a farm laborer; it was there that Boll was immersed by Sam Harris, of the Churches of Christ, near Nashville, on Sunday, April 14, 1895.

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