metamorphist

1. (Christianity, theology) One who believes that the body of Christ was merged into God when he ascended.Examples: "I would you did but see what I have seene in these Conntries, as concerning the deadly hatreds, contentions & differensions of Luther has of-fspring: as of the Muntzerans, Anabaptists, Adamists, […] Metamorphists, Iudaists, Neutersacramentaries, Image-breakers, […], & of such like: al which have sucked their errours out of the dregges of Luthers doctrine, and yet forsooth will be found Protestants all."

2. (Islam, theology) One who believes that some species were not part of the original creation but arose as the transformed souls of sinners.Examples: "Concerning the progeny of the transfigured sinners, Muslim scholars split into two groups, which Cook figuratively designated as "creationists" and "metamorphists.” The former held that swine and monkeys were created in the form they exist today, whereas the latter believed that their contemporary apes and swine were the progeny of the transfigured sinners."; "On the other hand, there was the metamorphist position that some species were not created at all; instead they were brought into existence through metamorphosis in later epochs, after which they enjoyed a biological fitness no less than that of created species."

3. (historical, geology) A proponent of one side of an early geological controversy in the late 19th and early 20th century who held that differences between various nonsedimentary rocks and minerals could be explained by metamorphic processes rather than the opposing viewpoint that these differences resulted from cooling of different types of magma.Examples: "I am inclined to hold that there is a wide segment of truth embodied in the views of the metamorphists; but there seems to be also a segment of truth on the other side ; and so I must likewise hold with their antagonists, that there existed long periods in the history of the earth in which there obtained conditions of things entirely different from any which obtain now, —periods during which life, either animal or vegetable, could not have existed on our planet; and further, that the sedimentary rocks of this early age may have dreived, even in the forming, a constitution and texture which, in present circumstances, sedimentary rocks cannot receive."; "A general laissez-faire sort of acceptance of the views of the more advanced metamorphists consoled some of us perhaps with the notion that it did not matter much whether tides had been greater agents of degradation of denudation and of transport in the remote ages of the Palaeozoic Period than in more recent times, since it was assumed that the oldest rocks we know were derived from other still older rocks."; "It has very properly been objected to the extreme views held by metamorphists that no kind of fusion or rearrangement of any kind is competent to metamorphose an ordinary greywacke into a granite, for the simple reason that the most important constituent of one of the essential minerals of the granite, to wit, the patash of the felspars, did not orignally occur in the material acted upon."historical