Mystery unveiled: the crisis of the Trinity in early modern England 9780199979097, 9780195339468

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page viii)
Foreword (page ix)
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Abbreviations (page xv)
Introduction (page 1)
1. Rescuing Scripture from Popery, Reclaiming Mystery from Presbytery: Antitrinitarian Theology and Trajectory of Paul Best and John Biddle (page 16)
2. Antinomian and Antitrinitarian? The Fate of the Trinity between 1640 and 1660 (page 69)
3. Many Weapons, One Aim: Trinitarian Reactions to John Biddle in Context (page 124)
4. Polemical and Practical? The Trinitarian Spirituality of Francis Cheynell and John Owen in Context (page 172)
5. Bishops Behaving Badly? Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell on the Problem of Conciliar History and the Nature of Heresy (page 217)
6. Platonic Captivity or Sublime Mystery? The Trinity and the Gospel of John in Early Modern England (page 271)
Conclusion (page 320)
Notes (page 329)
Bibliography (page 429)
Index (page 475)

Citation preview

Mystery Unveiled

OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY

SERIES EDITOR David C. Steinmetz, Duke University

EDITORIAL BOARD Irena Backus, Université de Geneve Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms- Universitat Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia

EMPIRE OF SOULS THE BIBLICAL Robert Bellarmine and the Christian INTERPRETATION OF WILLIAM

Commonwealth OF ALTON

Stefania Tutino Timothy Bellamah, OP MARTIN BUCER’S DOCTRINE OF wIRACLES AND THE

JUSTIFICATION PROTESTANT IMAGINATION Reformation Theology and Early The Evangelical Wonder Book in

Modern Irenicism Reformation Germany

Brian Lugioyo Philip M. Soergel

ae SUFFERING

CHRISTIAN GRACE AND PAGAN wasp peRORMATION OF

tine Thcologi ay HOunaaaonoy Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in

Ambrose’s Ethics I Nae ] aie ] a es

i Warten Smith 2 edieval ermany and Early Modern KARLSTADT AND THE Ronald K. Rittgers ORIGINS OF THE EUCHARISTIC

CONTROVERSY CHRIST MEETS ME A Study in the Circulation of Ideas EVER WHERE 7 . . Amy Nelson Burnett Augustine s Early Figurative Exegesis READING AUGUSTINEINTHE — Michae! Cameron

REFORMATION GOING DUTCH IN THE MODERN The Flexibility of Intellectual AGE Authority in Europe, 1500-1620 Abraham Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free

Arnoud S. Q. Visser Church in the Netherlands SHAPERS OF ENGLISH jonneemece CALVINISM, 1660-1714 Variety, Persistence, and Transformation Dewey D. Wallace, Jr.

Mystery Unveiled The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England

PAUL C. H. LIM

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UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxtord University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam HongKong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in

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© Oxford University Press 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lim, Paul Chang-Ha. Mystery unveiled : the crisis of the 'l'rinity in early modern England / Paul C.H. Lim. p.cm. — (Oxford studies in historical theology)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-19-533946-8 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. ‘Trinity—History of doctrines—17th century. 2. England—Church history—17th century. IL. Title. BT109.L56 2012 231'.044094209032—dc23 2011051535

ISBN 978-0 -19-533946-8

O35 7:6' 5 4-3. 2-1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Coco Mikalo Krank Verius enim cogitatur Deus quam dicitur, et verius est quam cogitatur. AUGUSTINE, De Trinitate, VII.4.7 [PL 42.939]

Mystery is a Supplement ready at hand, when we fall short of Reason. In a word, Mystery is a Salve for all Diseases. STEPHEN NYE, An Impartial Account of the Word Mystery (1691), 19

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations viii Foreword ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1 1. Rescuing Scripture from Popery, Reclaiming Mystery from Presbytery: Antitrinitarian Theology and Trajectory of Paul Best and John Biddle 16

2. Antinomian and Antitrinitarian? The Fate of the Trinity between 1640 and 1660 69 3. Many Weapons, One Aim: Trinitarian Reactions to John Biddle in Context 124 4. Polemical and Practical? The Trinitarian Spirituality of Francis Cheynell and John Owen in Context 172 5. Bishops Behaving Badly? Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell on the Problem of Conciliar History and the Nature of Heresy 217

6. Platonic Captivity or Sublime Mystery? The Trinity and the Gospel of John in Early Modern England 271

Conclusion 320 Notes 329 Bibliography 429 Index 475

ILEUS TRATIONS

1.1 Votes of Parliament Touching the Book commonly called the Racovian Catechism. Reproduced courtesy of The Huntington

Library, San Marino, California. 45

1.2 ‘The title page of John Biddle, A Twofold Catechism (1654).

© The British Library Board, London. 47

2.1 A Catalogue of the severall Sects and Opinions in England

(1647). © The British Library Board, London. 70 2.2 A Discovery of the Most Dangerovs and Damnable Tenets

(1647). © The British Library Board, London. 71 4.1 ‘The title page of John Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Sonne, and the Holy Ghost (1657). Reproduced courtesy of the Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New York. 188 5.1 ‘The title page of The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford Past in their Convocation July 21. 1683, Against certain Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines (1683). Reproduced courtesy of the Burke Library, Union Theological

Seminary, New York. 218

6.1 Jacques Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d: Or, an Essay Concerning the Notions and Opinions of Plato (1700). Reproduced courtesy of the Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New York. — 312

FOREWORD

Socinianism, or rather debates about the nature of Christ and the Trinity were at the very centre of religious, intellectual and even in the widest sense of the term political change in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Despite the importance of the topic, a general sense of which has grown over the last couple of decades, the subject has lacked genuinely

informed theological commentary. Of central interest and importance to a wide range of intellectual and cultural, ecclesiastical and political historians, the subject requires treatment by someone drenched in both the reformed and

patristic materials out of which early modern debates about the trinity and Christology emerged and in terms of which they were largely framed and conducted. But given its wider resonances, the topic cannot, or rather should not, be treated as an episode in the history of Christian doctrine, with discussion couched in the argot of that sub discipline, and conducted in the transhistorical meta-sphere in which abstractions called Augustine or Calvin or Aquinas or Socinus or indeed Hobbes and Spinoza conduct a conversation cross the centuries about timeless concerns at the centre of Christian Thought. Nor can the essentially theological issues at the heart of these debates be elided, edited out as so much white noise, so that we are left with a sediment of of assertion and argument rather more immediately congenial and indeed intelligible not

to mention significant to secular minded historians of Political Thought or Philosophy Rather, the debates of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries need to be analysed in terms of the concerns and conventions of the period in which they happened if they are to be properly understood and the resulting analysis is to be of any interest or use to political, cultural or intellectual historians in their continuing attempts to integrate and fully understand the

contours of religious, intellectual and political change in the decades after the English revolution. Paul Lim brings to the task in hand the necessary range of skills and interests. Deeply versed in the patristic materials and in

x Foreword the reformed tradition, he is also an historian of the long seventeenth century in England, with a command of the intricate theological and ecclesiological debates sparked by the English revolution. He is perfectly qualified to re-map the contours of the problem — integrating materials from the 1650s which have been almost exclusively studied under the rubric of religious radicalism into

the wider debates of the period and tracing intellectual commitments and changes through generations of English reformed divines and both puritan and Anglican ministers. The result is a nuanced account grounded in a close, intense and sympathetic reading of the sources; an account that is attentive to both the details of each polemical engagement but also conducted with a view to a variety of big picture questions that only an accomplished historian of Christian thought could bring to the topic. The result is not an easy read, but rather a serious work of scholarship that will be abiding importance to a range of scholars interested in the dynamic of intellectual, religious, cultural and indeed political changes of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is perhaps most ground breaking in the ways in which it links the impact of the English revolution to the origins and course of the early Enlightenment. Socianism is perhaps the ideal prism through which to view that subject and Lim’s book promises to frame the emerging debates about it for years, if not for decades, to come. Peter Lake

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Similar to most scholarly endeavors, the research for and writing of this book is indebted to numerous institutions and individuals. The Folger Shakespeare Library offered me a fellowship for spring 2008, which provided the most congenial environment and support in the early stages of the project. Vanderbilt University’s generosity to support its scholars fell on my lap as well, as I was awarded the Vanderbilt Research Scholars Grant (2007-2008) and summer stipends for three successive summers (2009-2011), which provided the req-

uisite funding for me to conduct archival research in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Earlier versions of the chapters were presented in seminars and colloquia at the following institutions: University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Historical Research (London), and Vanderbilt University. The intellectual genesis of this project dates back to the last year of my graduate school in 2001. Eamon Duffy, understandably chagrined by my irrepressible interest in Trinitarian contro-

versies in early modern England, persuaded me that while that was a great project, it had little use for the thesis I was writing under his supervision on Richard Baxter's ecclesiology. He nevertheless encouraged me to tackle that as my next major project; so here it is, after a decade!

Vanderbilt has proven to be a wonderful place for convivial and serious scholarly conversations and exchanges. Isaac Stephens has provided invaluable bibliographical help, especially in pointing me to the manuscripts at UCLA's Clark Library on the Roger Ley—Paul Best disputations. Furthermore, he has offered innumerable pieces of advice and plain good sense in interpreting some of the political issues in early modern England. I have also benefited from conversations with Bill Bulman (now at Lehigh) on the various issues surrounding

the intellectual history of late-seventeenth-century England. J. Patout Burns has been unfailingly kind in helping me navigate the oft-confusing world of ante- and post-Nicene patristics, particularly regarding Augustine, of which

Xii Acknowledgments he remains one of the leading scholars. Leah Marcus suffered through listening to my talks on Jacques Souverain, Platonism, and allegory and on Milton’s antitrinitarian strands in De Doctrina Christianae. A cadre of students in the History of Trinitarian Thought seminar in the fall semester of 2009 offered a number of helpful critiques for the chapters of this book that they had the

dubious pleasure or pain to read. Of particular note among my graduate students are Tamara Lewis, Amy Gant, Alex Jacobs, and Jonathan Warren. Jonathan deserves a special mention here; he served as my research assistant for this project in 2010-2011, pointing me to sources I hadn't heard of, leading me away from conclusions I hadn't thought through, and providing a regular conversation partner for this. My only hope is that I as his doctoral advisor could reciprocate the type of scholarly assistance he has given me. ‘The last person at Vanderbilt who deserves mention is Peter Lake. While he was still at Princeton, he invited me for a talk at his British History Seminar in 2008 and has shown interest in and support for this project. Ever since he came to Vanderbilt in the fall of 2008, he has been a regular—almost weekly—conver-

sation partner in pubs and seminar rooms. He has read the manuscript in its entirety, pointed out some areas for improvement, and throughout remained a wonderfully encouraging presence in my further growth as a historian. Colleagues in other institutions helped in various stages of research and writing. I thank Kenneth Fincham, John Morrill, David Como, Judith Maltby, Jonathan Sheehan, Stephen Snobelen Jean-Louis Quantin, Ryan Woods, Young Kim, Lori Anne Ferrell, Irena Backus, Jeffrey K. Jue, Dewey Wallace Jr., Sarah Mortimer, Margo Todd, Hannibal Hamlin, Tim Cooper, David Eastman, Kelly Kapic, N. H. Keeble, Cesara Cuttica, Ted Vallance, Torrance Kirby, George

Wright, and Elliot Vernon. I extend special thanks to my former GordonConwell colleague Sean McDonough, who possesses one of the most agile theological minds among New Testament scholars; his influence on this book, especially in my interpretation of the Johannine corpus and themes related to Irenaeus and the doctrine of creation, will be evident in appropriate places. Ann Hughes has provided me with her notes on John Harper's notes on Benjamin Needler’s sermons (UCLA Clark Library MS B8535 M3) and offered generous and incisive comments on chapter 3; I am reasonably hopeful that the chapter has been made stronger with Ann’s help. Last, I would like to acknowledge the unfailing friendship of John Coffey; he has read most of the chapters in various guises, gave me copious comments, and saved me from a number of errors, both bibliographical and interpretive. While all the foregoing colleagues—and those I have neglected to mention, from whom I ask pardon—have sought to deliver me from errors and infelicities of all sorts, all the remaining imperfections are my responsibility, fruit of my own undoing and stubbornness.

Acknowledgments xiii Various libraries have provided materials, answered queries, and allowed me places to sit and indulge in the delights of historical research. Of particular note are the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the University Library at Cambridge, the British Library, Dr. Williams’s Library in London, St. John’s College Library at Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Library at Oxford, UCLA’s Clark Memorial Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Library of Congress. Most important, it has been my home institution’s library staff and holdings

that have provided constant support for research for this book. Vanderbilt’s Central and Divinity libraries and their staff have purchased books for me, answered seemingly incessant queries about interlibrary loans, and provided an ideal environment for scholarly reflection. Eileen Crawford, Sarah Dryden, Bill Hook, and Chris Benda have exemplified the professional courtesy and expertise without which this book would have been much weaker. It has been a pleasure—indeed, privilege—to work with Cynthia Read and Charlotte Steinhardt, my editors at Oxford University Press. Cynthia and Charlotte have provided astute, expeditious, and timely advice at every stage of the publication of this book. I would like to thank the two readers for Oxford University Press for their judicious comments on an earlier version of this book. Last, I would like to thank Mikyung Kim and Christian Lim, the two other members of this three-person family through whom I am able to catch fleeting glimpses of the beauty and glory of the Trinity. Christian, our son, has often prayed for daddy’s tenure—which coincided with the finishing of this manuscript—and has often asked how my “chapter book on God” was going. Mikyung, my much better half, has been a constant source of charity, hope, faith, and plain good common sense. It is to them, who have taught me the joy of knowing “Coco Mikalo Krank,” this book is dedicated. Advent 2011

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ABBREVIATIONS

Adv. Haer. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses

AHR American Historical Review Alum. Cantab. Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Ed. John Venn and J. A. Venn. 2 parts in 10 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922-54.

ARG Archiv fiir Reformationsgeschichte Ath. Oxon. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses: an Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their education in the University of Oxford. Ed. Philip Bliss, 4 vols. London: J. Rivington, 1813-20.

BL British Library, London BL Add. British Library Additional Manuscript

Bod. Bodleian Library, Oxford

CH Church History CI Commons Journal

CSPD Calendar of the State Papers, Domestic Series

DWL Doctor Williams's Library, London

EAR English Historical Review

HJ Historical Journal

HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HTR Harvard Theological Review

JBS Journal of British Studies JE Journal of Ecclesiastical History JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JRH Journal of Religious History JIS Journal of Theological Studies

xvi Abbreviations McLachlan, Socinianism H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in SeventeenthCentury England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951.

n.d. No Date of publication NEQ New England Quarterly n.p. No Place of publication ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

OS Joannis Calvini Opera Selecta. Ed. Petrus Barth and Guilelmus Niesel. 5 vols. Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1926-67.

PG Patrologia Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, Paris, 1857-1866.

PL Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, Paris, 1844-1864.

PRO Public Record Office, London PRRD Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725. 4 volumes. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003.

PEP Past and Present

Rel. Bax. Reliquiae Baxterianae: Or, Mr. Richard Baxters Narrative of the most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times. Ed. Matthew Sylvester. London, 1696.

SC] Sixteenth Century Journal S/T Scottish Journal of Theology

Thomason, Catalogue Catalogue of the pamphlets, books, newspapers, and manuscripts relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and Restoration, collected by George

Thomason, 1640-1661, 2 vols. London: British Museum, 1908.

WMQ William and Mary Quarterly

Mystery Unveiled

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Introduction

I

A Tale of Two Cities: Basel, 1524 In his De Libero Arbitrio AIATPIBH, published in Basel in September 1524, Desiderius Erasmus offered a countervailing perspective to Luther’s insistence on the perspicuity—or internal interpretive clarity—of Scripture. And

it is arguably the case that this Reformation debate cast a long shadow, under which the topic examined in this book falls: the relationship between Scripture’s internal witness and the doctrine of the Trinity, and the way this debate has shaped the culture of English Christianity in the seventeenth century.’ In other words, how clear was the Bible about the idea of God’s existence as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”? For Erasmus, it was imperative to remember that not all scriptural teachings were of equal interpretive clarity; some were more obscure than others, and failing to recognize that would inexorably usher in a hermeneutical morass, as he feared Luther’s perspective would. Erasmus’s view on the “obscurity of scripture” was as pungent as it was poignant:

There are certain things of which God intended us to be entirely ignorant, such as the day of our death and the time of the Last Judgment. Acts 1: “It is not given to you to know the times or the moments which God the Father has placed in his own power.”...Certain things he intended us to examine so that we might venerate him in mystical silence; accordingly there are numerous places in the Holy Scriptures whose meaning many have guessed at but whose ambiguity no one has clearly resolved—such as the distinction of persons, the coinherence of divine and human nature in Christ, or the sin that will not be forgiven. Certain other things he intended to be absolutely clear to us: such are the precepts for a good life.’

Of the foregoing three things designed to prompt the Christian to worship God in “mystical silence,” two dealt with the person and nature of Christ. In other words, both these things that God intended for adoration, not for agitation, for communal worship, not for controversial divinity, were key elements

2 MYSTERY UNVEILED in the doctrine of the Trinity: the personal nature of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the putative conjoining of the divine and human natures of Christ, “which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation,” as this language received conciliar sanction at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 cg. Erasmus’s call for a moratorium on dogmatic wrangling notwithstanding, one of the discernible leitmotivs throughout the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century divisions and ecclesiological reconfigurations of the Reformation was the struggle to articulate, codify, and confessionalize the doctrine of the Trinity. The cause célébre of Michael Servetus in Geneva in 1553, which eventuated in his burning, and the same fate that awaited Edward Wightman in 1612 had to do with their repudiation of the traditional expressions of the Trinity.’ The notion of mystery, particularly pertaining to the identity of the Christian God, was vigilantly guarded. Yet such endeavors often proved elusive, especially so within the Protestant theological framework. If, pace Erasmus, the clarity of Scripture was maintained, and its concomitant sola scriptura doctrine, is there

any epistemic room for entertaining mystery? However, such exaggerated polemical distance between Erasmus and Luther needs to be moderated. As Christine Helmer has argued, Luther had sufficient room for divine mystery and incorporated it not only within his theology but also in his hymnody, as the dialectical tension between deus absconditus (“the hidden God”) and deus revelatus (“the revealed God”) finds its Christological resolution, thus offering an inevitable trinitarian trajectory.’ As we will see, far from being castigated as vestigial elements of patristic divinity or medieval Scholasticism, the notion of mystery was utilized to good effect by writers such as Godfrey Goodman, Edmund Porter from the Laudian side and Francis Cheynell and John Owen

from the Puritan side, alike.° Nonetheless, part of the antitrinitarian mantra was to regard the trinitarians’ appropriation of the category of “mystery” as a shibboleth of popery, especially as it was used to justify transubstantiation, tradition, and predestination, as well as the Trinity. Especially with the optimism of progress and discovery, the zeitgeist of the Reformation and an assiduous adherence to tradition and mystery may not appear as natural ideological couplets. However, it is equally true that “magic,” alchemy, kabbalah, and apophatic theology continued to exist side by side with the emergence of grammatical-historical exegesis and the triumph of the literal sense.’

This particular Erasmian sensibility was exploited considerably in early modern England, particularly in the defense of the Trinity.* Matthieu Virel’s Learned and Excellent Treatise...set down by Conference (1594) was an immensely popular text of early Reformed orthodox theology, set in a catechetical format, between “Matthieu” and “Theophilus.” After seeking to explicate the mystery of the Trinity (pp. 6-8), they come an epistemological cul-de-sac and confessional quandary, which is resolved by hearkening to the

Introduction 3 ineffable mystery of God’s triune identity and the radically curtailed nature of human language to adequately capture it: THEOPH. Verily this doctrine is beyond all the reach and vnderstanding of man. Mar. It is indeed: and yet to be beleeued, as that which God in his word hath reueaeld for our saluation, which cannot stand without it.... THEOP. Hitherto enough of the Trinitie: for the more deepely the sharpenesse of mans wit striueth to looke into it, the more it is blunted with the greatnesse of that mysterie. Nowe therefore, declare the other head of the knowledge of God.... MAT. It is therefore our dutie, rather holily to beleeue these three fundamental points, or principles of Christian Religion, then curiously to examine them by the rule of our reason.’

Judging from the fact that this catechetical manual was reprinted eleven times throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart period (last reprint run in 1636), it is hard to miss the emphasis on faith—further formed by Scripture—rather

than unformed reason, as the tool to appropriate the divine mystery of the Trinity. However, this notion of privileging mystery as shielded from and beyond the critique of reason will change, as the following chapters show." One of the key locales for this metacritique—and equally robust defense—of the mystery of the Trinity was seventeenth-century London, in particular, and England in general, to which we turn. I]

A Tale of Two Cities: London, 1646 Thomas Edwards was known as the heresiographer in Civil War England. Much of what he said contained kernels of truth, often blown into a far more sinister, bizarre, and heretical reality. Yet as Ann Hughes has shown convincingly, Edwards's Gangraena (1646) is an indispensable source in mapping the shifting bounds of orthodoxy, fear of the godly, and the intensely contested nature of the politics of religion in England in mid-seventeenth century." In the eyes of many Presbyterians, the gathered churches of the Baptists or the

Independents were a halfway house, inexorably on the road to antitrinitarian perdition.”’ The strange case of Thomas Hawes’s “Socinianism” illustrates the quicksand of making heretics in the parish politics of Civil War London. Hawes, a Puritan layman with sufficient sympathies for Independency, was ferreted out for his alleged denial of the Trinity by two of his neighbors. Two published accounts, both from Hawes’s vantage point, survive: A Christian Relation of a Christians Affliction—published on March 31, 1646—and The

4 MYSTERY UNVEILED Afflicted Christian Justifyed, published by the Leveller Richard Overton on May 18, 1646.'° We have a contemporary account given by Thomas Edwards's Gangraena, and recent accounts by Ann Hughes and Keith Lindley, helping us to fill out the historical contexts. What we do not have is a substantive analysis of what Hawes allegedly denied; in a paragraph or two later, a theological analysis of Hawes’s self-confession is given."

In September 1645, the Civil War was raging, the Assembly of Divines

was meeting in the Jerusalem Chamber in Westminster Abbey, and an unimagined proliferation of sects and heretical ideas were wreaking havoc in pulpit and Parliament, parish and pubs. According to his self-defense, A Christian Relation, Hawes came upon a certain “Mr. Beers house in Olives street, likely a hat maker in Southwark. Joining him and Beers were John Farthing, a weaver, and Eleazar Hugman.” Keith Lindley labels Hawes a Socinian, especially so since he was friends with the arch-Socinian of the 1640s, Paul Best, whose writing Mysteries Discovered and his incarceration became a case of infamy in the late 1640s. Edwards, based on the report of Farthing, declared him to be a Socinian in his Gangraena."° But was he? In essence, the modern historian is faced with two competing, contradictory accounts: according to Farthing, the official arrest warrant, and the reportage of Gangraena, Hawes was unequivocally heretical; however, his own defense showed a remarkable depth of exegetical insights, none of which can be deemed heretical. As I hope to demonstrate throughout the book, the controversy over the Trinity often occupied this polemical, political gray area, the nexus where the line of demarcation between theological lying and accusatory truth can get blurry, as we see with Hawes. Yet with antitrinitarians such as Paul Best and John Biddle, they were—even under the duress of incarceration—unflinchingly committed to their belief that the doctrine of Trinity itself was heresy.'” They began discussing the theological issues surrounding 1 John 5:7, the

locus classicus for antitrinitarian and protrinitarian exegetical disputes. The vast majority of trinitarians took this verse to be canonical, thus a legit-

imate text to buttress the triune nature of the Christian deity. However, taking cues from Erasmus’s repudiation of its authenticity, all antitrinitarian writers took this as a sign of a malicious interpolation of the trinitarians to support a reading that did not exist in the “original” text.’* Hawes sought to prove the Trinity from 1 John 5:7, linking it with Hebrews 1:1-3, using also 1 Timothy 3:16 for “distinction of persons,” and proceeding further to John 1:1 (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”), to conclusively demonstrate the deity of Christ and thus the Trinity.'’ So far, Hawes’s exegetical evidence is impeccably orthodox trinitarian. But when Hawes sought to explain the nature of

Introduction 5 the Incarnation, his exegetical wheels came off the cart, or so his accusers alleged. What did Hawes say? Apparently, Hawes’s “heresy” was this: he argued that there was a “time when the Word was not Flesh,” based on his exegesis of John 1:14 (“And the Word

was made flesh, and dwelt among us”) which was misconstrued by Farthing as though he afhrmed that “there was a time when Christ was not the Sonne of God.”*° This issue of pre-temporal existence of the Word of God—soon to be the incarnate Christ—was a historical litmus test of one’s trinitarian orthodoxy. Arius, the fourth-century antitrinitarian from Alexandria, had afhrmed that “there was when the Son of God was not,” thereby concluding that Christ was the first of all creatures.*! Although Arius did affirm that God used Christ/ Word as the agent of creation, he was nonetheless a creature, with a clearly demarcated ontic identity from God the Father. It seems that this was what took place; perhaps Farthing threw the theological bait to catch Hawes at his own putatively Socinian verbiage. Yet when Hawes made an orthodox statement that the Word was not always enfleshed, it was taken by Farthing—with or without malicious intentions—as a sign that he denied the eternal generation, thus the deity of Christ. To illustrate this, Hawes resorted to an analogy: “the Deity, though in holy Scripture differently distinguished, by the terms of Father, Son and Spirit, yet essentially it was but one in essence or being.” Then Hawes appropriated an old patristic analogy of being to make sense of the Trinity: “the man, the mind of the ma, & the revelati6 of his mind.” After this, Hawes reports, they left the hat maker’s and went home.** Nearly six months later, on March 17, 1646, there was a meeting at Guildhall with parliamentarians from both Houses discussing the prospect of ecclesiastical settlement along the Presbyterian line. Upon seeing Hawes, Farthing exclaimed, “Hee is a dangerous fellow, and is not fit for society, a blasphemer! he denies the Son and the holy Ghost.”*? His warrant, issued the day after Farthing’s hysterical outburst at Guildhall, was by Justices of the Peace Houghton and Cooke and read that he was being summoned for the conversation about the Trinity at Matthew Bear, the hat maker’s shop. The JPs accused—so averred Hawes—that he was an Anabaptist.** On March 19, 1646, Hawes had been summoned to Justice Cooke's house. There, Farthing’s

accusation was that Hawes denied the personhood of the Holy Spirit and that “Jesus Christ was not the son of God before he was incarnate,” implicating him as an adoptionist, heresy going back to the second-century Theodotus of Byzantium.” John Farthing was an informant for Thomas Edwards and a “determined harrier of sectaries’—who also indicted Clement Wrighter for his denial of immortality of the soul—and the two JPs for the case, Cornelius Cooke and Robert Houghton, were zealous Presbyterians.*° Farthing was adept in shorthand writing and was enlisted by the ardent Presbyterian Christopher

6 MYSTERY UNVEILED Love to take the notes of the trial in 1651.*’ Thus, it further complexifies the heresy case of Thomas Hawes. Was he a Socinian in the classic sense of denying the eternal deity of Christ, the tripersonal nature of the Trinity, and the satisfaction of Christ? ‘The Presbyterians certainly thought so. The key question in the intense of politics of heresy-making in early modern England can be phrased: “To what extent can we trust the accusers’ and the defendants’ account of their putative heresies and orthodoxies?”** In front of the Justices and fourteen other witnesses, Hawes abjured the witnesses’ accusations and confessed his faith, based on the same texts as before: 1 John 5:7 and Hebrews 1:1-3.”? Then the Justices called in Francis Woodcock, whom Hawes refers to as “a priest of the high places,” namely, Presbyterian, thereby signaling the ecclesiological tension between the accusers and their witnesses over against Hawes.”’ All this took place in Justice Cooke's house, as Hawes lamentably calls “in a high Commission manner” by mixing “spirituall and civill persons together.”*! Woodcock charged Hawes’s exegesis of John 1:1 and 14 as heretical: “There was a time when the Word was not flesh, but in the fulness of time became flesh.” This language of “becoming” was probably what was unacceptable to Woodcock, and to all of Hawes’s hereticators, for it would give the impression that the Word became the Son of God in a certain point in time, thereby repudiating the eternal pre-existence of the Son.” Also heretical in the eyes of Francis Woodcock was Hawes’s exegesis of Proverbs 8:22-23.*° Hawes’s conclusion from these verses was that

GOD and his SONNE, and SPIRIT is One, and He did possesse his Sonne in the beginning of his way, before his workes of old, and he was with him from everlasting, from the beginning, and before the earth; when there was no depth, was I begotten.*'

At least based on his exegesis of this infamous text of Proverbs with a long trail of heretics’ names strewn along the way—including Arius—it is difficult to prove Hawes an antitrinitarian heretic.” First of all, he affirms the Trinity (“GOD and his SONNE, and SPIRIT is One”), and he clearly differentiates between the Son and God. The crux of the debate, secondly, at least for this text, was the temporal or non-temporal begetting of the Son. Hawes clears that theological hurdle by affirming the Son's presence “from everlasting” and that he was begotten “when there was no depth.” The nagging question is whether Hawes would have gotten incarcerated for heresy had he been a Presbyterian. Woodcock declared Hawes to be an Arian based on that exegesis. Commenting on the nature of religious conflicts in early modern England, Michael Questier and Peter Lake maintained that “orthodoxy and conformity” are seen “not as stable quantities but rather as sites of conflict and contest,”

Introduction 7 thereby necessitating a “move away from somewhat hypostatised labels and categories to a more self-consciously fluid and processual notion of identity formation.” Thus, the notions of conformity and orthodoxy were not “set in stone in the minds of the contemporaries.”*° Is that necessarily so? On the one hand, it seems not. Didn't they all believe that their version of ecclesiology was the true church, their version of predestination the most proximate interpretation of Scripture, and their version of the Trinity the best articulation of divine identity? Yet on the other hand, it seems more persuasive. While each polemical pugilist, whether antitrinitarian or trinitarian, had a clear notion of orthodoxy, engraved upon the pages of Scripture, yet precisely because their convictions were in situ, in conflict with other competing claims for “truer” orthodoxy, there were—seen as a whole—intensely negotiated bounds of orthodoxy. Moreover, it seems that the proverbial slippery slope argument was in significant operation: as improbable as it might be to contemporary historians, it seems Edwards and his Presbyterian colleagues were convinced that ecclesiological divergence (that is, leave Presbyterianism) was equivalent to a heretical imperative. This tale of two cities—one dealing with the exegetical and theological issue of the mystery of the Trinity and the other pertaining to the historical context of a strange heresy trial of a person whose self-testimony is unambiguously trinitarian—highlights the twin aspects to be explored in this book. Now let

us situate the hoped-for contribution of this book vis-a-vis contemporary historiography.

Il Where Have We Been... ? The historiography of the antitrinitarian and protrinitarian conflicts in seventeenth-century England has to begin with H. J. McLachlan’s Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England. McLachlan’s main focus was bibliographical, so he hardly left any folio page unturned when it came to Socinian literature, both Continental and British. Moreover, his penultimate aim was to demonstrate the Erasmian spirit of the English Socinians, presenting them as the embodiment of the “spirit of enquiry rather than a dogmatic position.”” Consequently, McLachlan superbly shows both the Continental Socinian connection and the relatively independent English antitrinitarian traditions. Yet, what is often lacking is a more substantial theological analysis of both the anti-

trinitarian and protrinitarian proponents. A strange lacuna regarding either the doctrine of the Trinity or the place of Socinianism within the larger intellectual history of early modern England has

8 MYSTERY UNVEILED existed since McLachlan published his magnum opus fifty years ago. Recently, however, two major contributions have come, one focusing on the theological issues surrounding the doctrine of the Trinity, the other on the hitherto unexplored Socinian contribution to the natural law tradition. Philip Dixon’s Nice and Hot Disputes offers a crisp analysis and compelling narrative of how what was once a “mystery of faith” became a “problem in theology,” thereby precipitating the “demise of the doctrine of the Trinity.”°* Peppered throughout are

memorable maxims and phrases, and Dixon presents the lexical and philosophical issues surrounding persons—both divine and human—spirituality, and liturgy as key lenses to see the trinitarian controversy. Yet since Dixon’s narrative follows the typical trajectory of the decline of the credibility of the doctrine of the Trinity as an integral piece of the advent of the Enlightenment zeitgeist, it offers a plot with its outcome already part of a deterministic paradigm. In the following chapters, I hope to build on Dixon’s significant contribution yet recalibrate the historiographical lens a good deal to offer a more contested and conflicted, polemicized and politicized narrative.

Hoping to present the Socinians as a far more ingrained part of the undergirding political ideologies of Europe and England, particularly with regard to the natural law tradition, Sarah Mortimer’s Reason and Religion in the English Revolution offers a compelling account of the broader intellectual context and contribution of the Socinians. Thus Mortimer assur-

edly advances the historiographical narrative from that of McLachlan. Furthermore, she offers a fresh reading of the Great Tew Circle, argues that the Royalist defense of the monarchy was owing more to the Socinian influence than previously noted, and raises the profile of the theological issues dividing Biddle and Owen within a broader European context. In the following narrative, I draw on the research of McLachlan, Dixon, and Mortimer, while extending the analysis of the trinitarian theology and its polemical contours to include sources and individuals underdiscussed or undiscussed by the three compelling accounts. This study raises the question that, in the last decade or so, has become au courant: that of the controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity in seventeenthcentury England.” Broadly construed, three key tendencies have contributed to the renaissance of historical and theological inquiries related to the Trinity

in early modern England. In terms of the patterns and trends in the historiography of early modern and early Enlightenment England, the role played by religion in the shaping and reconfiguring of the philosophical, cultural, political, and religious imagination and expressions has been duly recognized as an indispensable explanatory matrix, and that with three distinct yet inseparable vectors. First, as Arthur Marotti has noted recently, the “turn to religion” in early modern English studies has meant that religion qua religion—and not as

Introduction 9 a mere subservient vehicle to explain political processes or economic shifts— has become a legitimate area of inquiry.*® Second, the emphasis of revisionism has been, especially vis-a-vis the two major “revolutions” in the seventeenth century, to acknowledge the crucial religious motivations and consequences

that governed the agents participating in the Civil War, the regicide, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. The English Civil War was, as John Morrill has memorably quipped, the “last of the Wars of Religion,” thus offering a trenchant critique of the Whig and Marxist historiographical “certainties” of the 1960s through the early 1980s.*' Even among the postrevisionists, the nature of the acts and agitations of the various agents of this period is still seen through the lens of religion while accentuating the radical and less-thaninevitabilistic trajectory of such convulsions, thereby distancing both from the Whiggish inevitabilism and the revisionism’s muting of political and religious radicalism.** Third, in a significant essay, albeit dealing with the latter part of the seventeenth century and canvassed in a broader European context, Jonathan Sheehan pummeled the effigy of the grand secularization thesis and argued that the Enlightenment is, pace the regnant historiographical orthodoxies of seeing it as an escape from religion, best seen as an intense conversation about the best theological and philosophical explanatory matrix to speak meaningfully of the God/Spirit-world problematic; in that regard, Sheehan's perspective overlaps a good deal with J. G. A. Pocock, Jane Shaw, and David Sorkin.”

IV

Whither Are We Headed? In describing the cultural nexus between early modern and early Enlightenment, with particular attention to England, J. G. A. Pocock observed that the intellectual purchase and polemical exchanges that eventually made possible the

“rise of secularism” need to be substantially qualified. From the contemporary perspective of the middle to late seventeenth century, rise of unbelief in England was no more self-evident than the persistence of belief is incredible to the secular intellectual of the twenty-first century. From that vantage point, perhaps better adapted to allow for the persistence of orthodoxy than merely chronicle the inevitabilistic triumph of Socinianism-cum-atheism, Pocock establishes the point that from the legions of frontiers—science, biblical exegesis, philosophy—the constant negotiation between the old, established orthodoxies of early modern Europe and the new, brave heresies or heterodoxies needs a better contextual analysis. In that light, Pocock warns against

10 MYSTERY UNVEILED regarding the hegemonic rise of heterodoxy as truth, a new form of orthodoxy. So he argues: We have a string of key words—“traditional” is one, “bourgeois” is another, and “orthodoxy” itself may be a third—which is hard to exclude from our discourse or admit to it without finding that they have imported the whole of this paradigm with them, and of course the paradigm of heterodoxy can,

like any other paradigm, be an orthodoxy in its own right....I want...to advance the thesis that this assumption makes for an impoverished view of history; that it is not enough to view history as an unending series of butterflies bursting out of chrysalises; that we understand history better, and are more enriched by understanding it, when we understand that orthodoxy has its own history, is in history and has history in it....'To anyone who suspects that I am trying to conserve some such positions, apologizing for the mind-set that conserves them, my reply is that Iam trying to show that we understand history better when we understand the activity of orthodoxy within it."

Taking the cues from Pocock, then, what follows in chapters 1 through 6 is a thick description of both the challenge of Socinianism, via the usual cast of Paul Best and John Biddle, and the defense of the Trinity by John Owen, Francis Cheynell, and Matthew Poole. However, this narrative throws a twist and argues that it was not just Best and Biddle who opposed the Trinity and that on exegetical grounds; in the defense of the Trinity, we will see the Laudians

assiduously carping at the Socinians and the Puritans as basic coreligionists whose common aversion to the Prayer Book would make antitrinitarianism a shared fate only as a matter of time. History was seen as a “handmaiden of religion” in manifold controversies of early modern England; it was also true in the way the doctrine of the Trinity was defended and destabilized. Not only were Biddle and Best involved in carping at the historical decline of and departure from primitive purity of the early church but also, we shall see, Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell were relentless critics of the cruelty of prelacy in Restoration England, which, then, provided the lens for their telescoping of the Nicene conciliar legacy precisely in light of the post-Restoration political turmoil and religious instabilities. This underexplored aspect of the trinitarian controversy, as shown later, was equally crucial in presaging the metacritique of the Deists and other freethinkers. One of the key defenses of the Trinity was based on the use of not merely Scripture but also patristic writings. As Jean-Louis Quantin has convincingly shown in his recent monograph, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, patristic scholarship and polemical exchanges over which Church Father or what doctrine was credible was

Introduction I a key historical phenomenon that has been thus far underexplored.*? Woven throughout the book is the significance of the divergent ways patristic writers and their “authority” was appropriated. Moreover, it was not only the expected trinitarians who utilized patristic writings for their polemical purposes; antitrinitarians such as Paul Best and John Biddle, as well as Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell, also exploited historical writings of the patristic period to strengthen their own positions. ‘The foregoing themes are further developed in the following chapters. The primary goal of the first chapter is analyze in detail the antitrinitarian theology of Paul Best and John Biddle. Both Nigel Smith and Sarah Mortimer have provided contextually rich accounts of Best and Biddle recently. I hope to corroborate and correct the claims made by Mortimer and Smith. Their discussion of Best’s and Biddle’s antitrinitarian perspectives is illuminating, although their discussion could have been enhanced by a wider contextualization. By utilizing previously unused manuscript notes on the disputations between Paul Best and his former chamber mate, probably some time between 1606 and 1610, from Jesus College, Cambridge, Roger Ley, who had been curate at St. Leonard, Shoreditch, Middlesex, I highlight the culture of biblical exegesis and reception history of patristic writings. This manuscript from UCLA’s Clark Library offers a rare insight into the actual content, albeit from an ex post facto (and partisan) standpoint, of two erstwhile friends who differed on the fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith: their divergent exegesis of Old Testament, Messianic texts; their use of Church Fathers, par-

ticularly Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine; and intriguing overlap on identifying the Pope as antichrist, inter alia.“° Moreover, Biddle’s patristic theology manual, The Testimonies of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatianus, Theophilus, Origen (c. 1652) has not received the interpretive treatment it deserves. First, it is noteworthy that an unabashed antitrinitarian would devote an entire treatise to argue that these writers—he adds Arnobius, Lactantius, and Eusebius—who lived “in the two first Centuries after Christ was born,’ that is, ante-Nicene, were also anti-Nicene. Second, it is noteworthy that his antitrinitarian patristic perspectives predate the well-known accounts of both the Continental Socinian Daniel Zwicker’s Irenicum Irenicorum (1658) and Jacques Souverain’s Le Platonisme dévoilé (1700), who argued that the pre-

Nicene Fathers were so mired in Platonism that one can speak of a “Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity.”

The antitrinitarian critique of the unbiblical nature of the Trinity was couched in its desires to complete the Reformation. The antitrinitarians of Poland, the followers of Socinus, were convinced that their indefatigable endeavors would soon bring about the complete downfall of Babylon. The glorious yet incomplete beginnings of Luther’s “destroying the [popish] roof” and

12 MYSTERY UNVEILED Calvin's “breaking down the wall” were harbingers to the foundation-shattering work of Socinus, as the raison d’étre of Socinianism was encapsulated in this double hexameter: Tota ruet Babylon; destruxit tecta Lutherus, Calvinus muros, sed fundamenta Socinus.”

Thus a crucial component of completing the work of the Reformation was to completely dismantle the Babylonian ziggurat. Their battle cry can be summarized as three Ts: Tradition, Transubstantiation, and Trinity. Catholics obviously affirmed all three as constitutive elements of true Christianity. In fact, with the symphonic polemical witness of Petavius, Baronius, and Bellarmine, the early modern Catholic perspective on authority depended, ever more than before, on the church to authenticate and sanction true belief, even about the Trinity. Put differently, Catholics were not rattled by the Socinians’ carping at the unbiblical nature of the trinitarian language and doctrine; they would anchor their trinitarian theology along the ship of the idea of the development of doctrine. Even if the first-century apostles and the second-century apologists did not explicitly teach and endorse the language and logic of the Trinity, as in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, eternally coexisting, coinhering, it hardly mattered. So long as the Council at Nicaea faithfully hammered out the homoousion doctrine of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father, reflecting the progressive revelation of God the Spirit as the Spirit faithfully led the church to a greater discovery of identity of God as triune, thus the place for tradition, then all was well with Rome.

The antitrinitarians, equally obviously, rejected all three, whereas the Protestant trinitarians assiduously denied the biblical validity of tradition and transubstantiation, while equally ardently defending the veracity of the Trinity. For example, in The Greater Catechisme (1645), written for his congregation in Fordham, Essex, John Owen added these marginal notes in the article on the Trinity. First, he called the Trinity “that mysterious Ark that must not bee pryed into... wherein plain Scripture goeth not before,” affirming simultaneously that the doctrine is itself a mystery and yet Scripture has revealed the mystery of the Triune God. Second, Owen had these stinging words toward Rome: “This onely Doctrine remained undefiled in the Papacy,” indicating implicitly that tradition was an illegitimate source of religious authority, and as he would cry down the “Popish horrid monster of transubstantiation” in a subsequent section on Eucharistic theology.** Thus, the trinitarian controversy was inescapably a triangulating affair, as is discussed throughout. ‘This confirms Norman Sykes’s judicious point regarding the sola scriptura. Contrary to its original intent of providing the defense against Rome and the Council

Introduction 13 of Trent, which anathematized those who would deviate from the teaching magisterium or the consensus of the Church Fathers in scriptural interpretation (“contra unanimum consensum Patrum Scripturam Sacram interpretati audeat”),’” and the exclusive use of the Vulgate, sola scriptura turned out to be “the harbinger not of peace but of a sword; and a sword of such sharpness as to

pierce to the dividing asunder of the joints and marrow of Protestantism.” After taking a fresh look at the contribution of Best and Biddle to English Socinianism, chapter 2 discusses how multifaceted the problem of the Trinity became in the 1640s and 1650s. Due to the proliferation of “radical” religion, or the proponents of what Nigel Smith calls “perfection proclaimed,” an inexorable upshot was the collapse of ontological distinction between God and human.”' In what I would call nontrinitarian modes of discourse, popular among some Ranters and the Familists, the formal afhrmation of the Trinity ended up being an actual denial of Nicene orthodoxy, since the one Person of the Trinity might very well be the woman or man who believed oneself to have been “godded with God.” Thus, the problem of the Trinity was exacerbated. Not only were there the rational rejections of Biddle and Best but also there was radical reinvention of the ontological makeup of the Trinity. This chapter also challenges the notion that the trinitarian controversy occurred in the 1690s, thereby giving us a radically curtailed picture of the polemical exchange in the pre-Restoration context. Various reactions to Biddle’s antitrinitarian perspectives are the focus of chapter 3. In addition to the typical Puritan attacks from Matthew Poole, Nicholas Estwick, and Benjamin Needler, there were Catholics, Laudians, and Arminians who joined the fray, for while they might be confessionally or ecclesiologically divided, on the Trinity their common foe Biddle brought them together. Another key underexplored source is manuscript notes detailing the disputation between Peter Gunning and Biddle in 1654. This Bodleian MS Rawlinson C 166 is a crucial source in providing insights into the politics of heresy and the specifics of theological and exegetical debates focused on the

Trinity. The third underutilized manuscript is another Clark Library manuscript, B8535 M3, which contains sermon notes taken by a London fishmonger, John Harper, mostly of his Presbyterian minister, Benjamin Needler, lecturer of St. Margaret Moses, London, from 1655 till 1662.°* From his sermons of the 1650s, one gets a clear sense of the Biddlean threat acutely felt by the London

Presbyterians, thus prompting them to hold a month-long morning exercise throughout the city in May 1659, preached by twenty-eight pastors, covering the entire gamut of systematic divinity. Convinced as they were that the true theological proof of the Trinity was found in the liturgical pudding, Puritans such as John Owen and Francis Cheynell assiduously defended the salutarity of a trinitarian spirituality vis-

14 MYSTERY UNVEILED a-vis Socinianism, which they were convinced would create a less passionate piety, indeed commit idolatry, due to the Socinians’ denial of Christ's satisfaction and deity. The mystical, trinitarian, and Calvinistic spirituality of Owen, for instance, was excoriated for verging on Enthusiasm by William Sherlock and William Clagett during the Restoration period. In this brief foray, one sees the political context of Restoration England influencing the polemical trajectory of two trinitarians, Sherlock and Owen. This is the focal point of chapter 4.

If anticlericalism, already endemic throughout Europe before the Reformation, is an unintended by-product of the Protestant Reformation, it reaches a new level in the interconfessional polemic between Catholics and Protestants and amasses a greater centrifugal force during the English Revolution and beyond in the seventeenth century.** Thomas Hobbes, Richard Baxter, and Andrew Marvell are not usually put in the same literary, religious,

or political categories. Yet with regard to their critique of Restoration episcopacy—or priestcraft—and their shared historiographical method of ransacking the church's conciliar history, particularly the first four councils, they come together as incidental ideological allies. This book contends that this his-

toriographical and religious habitus formed an integral part of what became conventional wisdom among Joseph Priestley and other critics of established religion in the eighteenth century.

Deeply embedded into the culture of the antitrinitarian and trinitarian polemic was the “right” interpretation of Scripture. Among the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon of Scripture, no book was more intensely scrutinized or defended and its “true” literary provenance hotly debated than the Gospel of John in the Trinitarian debates. In fact, this became the major arsenal for both

sides of the trinitarian divide. Even though historians agree that Socinians were biblicists and that they utilized little else than catenae of biblical texts to substantiate their antitrinitarian perspectives, little work has been done to situate their scriptural exegesis. ‘This is certainly true in early modern English

historiography in general and in English Socinianism in particular as well. By analyzing the Johannine exegesis of figures such as Hugo Grotius, Fastus Socinus, Bartholomew Traheron, Edmund Porter, Johann Crell, and William Lucy, we are able to see the various polemical angles from which the Johannine

text was appropriated, thereby allowing us better insights into the history of biblical exegesis in the era of the Geneva and King James Bibles in England.

In closing, let us listen to a perspective of a seventeenth-century French mystic, in addition to the sixteenth-century Dutch Catholic Erasmus, and a Londoner in the 1640s, for an interesting contemporary interpretation of the problem of the Trinity during the seventeenth century. In Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable, one finds an interesting reference to Jean de Labadie (16101674), the founder of the Labadists, whose comment encapsulates the pan-

Introduction 15 European concern for the real presence of the Socinian threat: “The Calvinists have answered the Socinians better than the Catholics have. The Dutch were wrong to allow the books of the Socinians to be translated into the common tongue. Almost all of the bishops of England are Socinian.”” Five groups are mentioned—Calvinists, Socinians, Catholics, the Dutch, and English bishops—and these all figured prominently in this intense intellectual, political,

and theological battle, lasting over a century, involving both the laity and clergy, both fellows at Oxbridge and iconoclastic Quakers, a female philosopher such as Anne Conway, and a male weaver, John Farthing. To this intense battle and polemical identity formation, we shall turn now.

it

Rescuing Scripture from Popery,

Reclaiming Mystery from Presbytery:

Antitrinitarian Theology and Trajectory of Paul Best and John Biddle

They...did in outward profession so put-on Christ, as that in heart they did not put-off Plato. ' that God is not divided but distinguished into three equal persons, is... a Hocus Pocus and a Babylonian mouth.’ J

Introduction What do Mahomet, Servetus, and John Biddle (1616—1662) have in common? Were we to ask a mid-seventeenth-century Puritan minister, John Deacon, he would unhesitatingly declare that they all converged on the “heresy” of antitrinitarianism. In his Nayler’s Blasphemies Discovered (1657), he excoriated the Quaker James Nayler for imitating their denial of the deity of Christ, thus the Trinity as well.’ What was particularly noteworthy here was that Biddle was a contemporary of Deacon and Nayler. Biddle did not establish a religion (as

did Mahomet), nor was he burned to death as a heretic (as was Servetus, on October 27, 1553, in Geneva), though he certainly spent the better part of the 1650s incarcerated. Achieving this status of the unholy trinity of “blasphemous apostates,’ to be in the company of Mahomet and Servetus was a significant notoriety. So who was he? How did he articulate his “heretical” notions about the Trinity? Moreover, when Thomas Firmin—the Unitarian philanthropist who owed his conversion to Biddle in the 1650s while both were in London—financed

Rescuing Scripture 17 and published the first collection of the so-called Unitarian Tracts in 1691, The Faith of One God, Who is only the Father, Biddle was, along with the Unitarian apologist par excellence Stephen Nye, one of the two main authors whose per-

spectives comprised the major tenets of English antitrinitarianism. Indeed, Biddle received a posthumous encomium in The Faith of One God in that the very first entry in that collection of eleven works was a “Short Account of the Life of John Biddle.™ Yet not all were encomia and affectionate remembrances

for his subsequent reputation. William Berriman preached eight sermons for the Lady Moyer memorial lectures at St. Paul's Cathedral between 1723 and 1724; his topic was the historical account of the Trinitarian controversies which rocked the Church. In the Eighth Sermon, as he was expounding on the historical situation of England in the previous century, the one person whose contribution to the spread of antitrinitarianism was uniquely significant, according to Berriman, was Biddle.” This chapter introduces the context and offers textual analysis of the two leading antitrinitarian writers in mid-seventeenth-century England: Paul Best and John Biddle. It advances a thesis that trinitarian theology in seventeenthcentury England simply cannot be understood without the foil of Biddle and Best, around and against which numerous trinitarians defended the sacred mystery and key fundamentum of Christianity: the doctrine of the Trinity. Both Best (1590—1657) and Biddle (1616—1662) lived through—indeed, were active participants in—the tumultuous decades of the 1640s and 1650s, when various experiments in ecclesiological reconfiguration, doctrinal reformulation, and political reorganizing were taking place, all with the hoped-for telos of completing the Reformation in view. Just as Michael Servetus’s work needs to be seen vis-a-vis Calvin—Servetus's Christianismi Restitutio was a conscious reaction against Calvin’s Institutio Christianae—so the dialectical tension between Best, Biddle, and their trinitarian interlocutors forms an inseparable core of the following four chapters. Due to the complexity and the sheer volume of materials of the narrative, we will hear the story of Paul Best and John Biddle first, while postponing the equally exciting and no less intriguing account of those key polemicists against antitrinitarian heresies until Chapter Three. Among other lenses through which this controversial terrain can be seen, we focus on their exegetical commitments, their historical sensibilities with regard to the authority of ecclesiastical councils and tradition, and their political contexts and personal connections that might have tilted their fortunes one way or another. Before we launch into an analysis of Best and Biddle, a few more words on the intellectual and historical context of their times are in order. Scholars have sought to assess the significance of Socinianism in early modern English history, ranging from Christopher Hill, who had relatively little to say about this

18 MYSTERY UNVEILED significant religious subterranean reality, to H. John McLachlan, for whom this was not only a key rivulet of Protestantism as instantiated in England in the seventeenth century but also his denominational narrative. McLachlan’s Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England provided an extensive hagiographical portraiture of men and women whose sedulous defense of Christian monotheism shorn of the “impossible trinitarian arithmetic” was often met with incarceration and persecution in a bellicose and hereticating era. His narrative arc focused on John Biddle and those who followed the Biddlean

trajectory. Even within McLachlan’s otherwise brilliant bibliographical details and analysis, there is a tendency to see the significance of Socinianism as an ideological precursor, standing at the dawn of the Enlightenment. ‘This tendency was made more evident in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s tour de force article, “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment.” Trevor-Roper correctly identi-

fies Arminianism and Socinianism as kindred spirits yet displays a flawed tendency to see the heuristic value of these theologies primarily as reactions to draconian Calvinism of the day, thus as harbingers of the secularizing Enlightenment discourse. By depicting the “Socinianism of John Biddle” as an inevitable “application of secular, critical, human reason to religious texts and religious problems,” Trevor-Roper falls prey to the historiographical tendency of excavating the past figures with whom the present secular modes of thought have substantial correspondence and etiological connections.° In a recent article on the intellectual origins of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s historiographical perspectives, John Robertson identified McLachlan’s Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England as the key factor in Trevor-Roper’s confirmed view that the Erasmian spirit of exegesis rather than dogmatics was directly

carried by the Socinians in their dual repudiation: the doctrine of Christ's satisfaction in the atonement and the Trinity.’ McLachlan’s main point was that “Anglican Socinianism” was not a chimera and that the re-emergence of this Erasmian strand within Anglican divinity of the late seventeenth century marks the key strand within the narrative of English Socinianism of the period. Seen in that regard, the story of Paul Best and John Biddle was “offshoots” and not a “separate or novel development.” However, this hagiographical tendency of McLachlan has been recently

challenged by Nigel Smith. His plea for recontextualizing and avoiding the blunder of historiographical narcissism is entirely apropos: “Especially in the case of Socinianism, the two centuries (if not also later) have to be

rethought for all the astonishing intellectual violence that the Socinian writings contain (a counterpoint to the physical violence practiced against Socinians), alongside the Socinian veneration of piety, charity, and non-

resistance.... We have to draw this map anew, and if Socinianism was responsible for the ills of modernity, let us carefully understand of what

Rescuing Scripture 19 it consisted.” This can be illustrated, albeit from a different geographical context: the Dutch Republic. When looked at from afar, the Dutch context might seem the perfect place for religious toleration. Assuredly, the grand narrative will render that conclusion, yet the particularities of history are often more divergent. Hence, even in the Dutch Republic, the putative haven for all ideas heterodox and the hotbed of religious toleration, an antitrinitarian legislation was passed in 1653, further illustrating the state of alert and anxiety." If McLachlan could be guilty of overattribution of Biddle’s significance, an opposite tendency has emerged as well. In a solid monograph on the fate of trinitarian theology in early modern England, Jason E. Vickers relegates John Biddle to a single footnote, while disregarding Paul Best entirely. Such an omission seems most curious, precisely because Biddle’s significance as

an influence on the way trinitarian theology was challenged in late-seventeenth-century England is indisputably clear.'' Perhaps even more surprising is the glaring absence of any discussion of the English Socinians in William Placher’s celebrated Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong. Placher’s analysis correctly identifies the big picture, that the emergence of modernity and its Enlightenment rationality had eclipsed the presence of God a la classic Christian theism, but this at the ironic expense of getting the component parts wrong. In his pivotal discussion of “The Marginalization of the Trinity,’ Placher asserts that the ideological fissure shows up in the privileging of Scripture as it had replaced the triune God as the first article of faith. The major culprit was Protestant Scholasticism, or the Calvinists (in the Calvin versus Calvinists typology). According to Placher, the English Puritans committed the same egregious theological blunder, from William Perkins to the Westminster Confession of Faith, the first chapter of which dealt with Scripture, and only after that God the Trinity. Yet he seems to miss the key aspect of his unsullied hero, Calvin, who, in his Confession de la Foy (1536), began with a prolegomenon on the Word of God as Scripture (“La parolle de Dieu”).'* Not only that, tantalizingly missing also are the Socinians, continental—Laelius and Faustus Socinus, Blandrata, Francis David, or the Racovian Catechism—or English, Biddle or Paul Best. This omission is significant in that both for Socinus and the Racovian Catechism, as well for Biddle and Best, the principium of theology was Scripture. It surely seems a hard sell for historians to accept Placher’s analysis that it was the unplanned consequence of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Calvinists’ privileging of Scripture, and not the indefatigable endeavors of Paul Best and especially John Biddle, that led modern theism down the “wrong” trajectory, as envisaged by Placher.””

20 MYSTERY UNVEILED Similarly, Paul Best’s significance in the history of English Protestantism lies in the fact that he was the first avowed defender and published author of antitrinitarian ideas. Yet aside from the denominational hagiographical portraitures by H. J. McLachlan and E. M. Wilbur, he has not received much

attention from historians. Given that Best is the first English antitrinitarian who went to print bearing his own name, articulating his reasons for opposing the doctrine of the Trinity—indeed, exposing that doctrine to be an invention of popery, a scholastic hocus-pocus designed to keep the laity in darkness and under the thumb of priestcraft—such a historiographical lacuna is strange indeed. ‘That is, until recently. Ann Hughes offered brief yet helpful analysis of how Best’s antitrinitarian threat galvanized the London Presbyterians, prompting the heresiographer nonpareil, Thomas Edwards, to produce the ephemeral yet phenomenally popular Gangraena (1646).” Taking the radical religious imagination of Best and Biddle seriously, Nigel Smith produced an amiable analysis of the political and religious controversies surrounding the Trinity in the middle decades of the seventeenth century."° The

most significant study, to date, on Best has been the recent study by Sarah Mortimer. While her primary interlocutor among the English Socinians is John Biddle, Mortimer does situate Best in the Continental context and illustrates inimitably the currents and crosscurrents between the Polish, Dutch, and other Continental Socinians and their English counterparts, who were by no means mere epigones of the former.'’ While Best and Biddle’s local intellectual context and network is indispensable, this chapter also places their antitrinitarian challenge vis-a-vis the struggle for settlement in the long Reformation era: over the final adjudicating authority in religion. Briefly put, it became a triangulating affair between the church, the individual believer, and Scripture/Spirit.

The Reformation was putatively a direct consequence of Renaissance humanism. No longer content to accept the authority of Jerome’s Vulgate, and following the lead of Lorenzo Valla (whose discovery of the forgery of the donation of Constantine was a milestone in Renaissance critical-textual scholarship) and Desiderius Erasmus (whose peerless achievements in biblical scholarship were amply demonstrated in his Greek New Testament), a number of Reformation exegetes, steeped in Renaissance humanism, began to assemble a formidable array of philological, exegetical, and theological oeuvres, which tended to be more grammatical-historical than allegorical in their methodological orientation. The Protestant Reformation, in particular, championed the notion of sola scriptura, that scripture alone was the normative authority for the religion of Protestants. Nevertheless, the Reformation slogan of sola scriptura was as straightforward as it was often misunderstood and maligned. Designed, initially, to signal the advent of a new Renaissance

Rescuing Scripture 21 mode of learning from and interpretation of ancient texts, particularly Christian Scriptures, the telos of going back to the fountains of “original texts” (ad fontes) was that the texts themselves, rather than the millenniumlong accretion of “mishandling” of texts by the Church, codified as part of ecclesiastical tradition, would serve as the infallible guide of all Protestants. Hans Hillerbrand offered an incisive analysis of the ideological proximity between antitrinitarian and trinitarian Protestants in that they were deeply affected by the Reformation’s willingness to question the numerous doctrinal accoutrements of late medieval Catholicism by recourse to sola scriptura. Continuing persuasively, Hillerbrand notes:

Another group of reformers found that the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity, as promulgated by the ecumenical councils of Nicaea

and Chalcedon, was a major perversion of biblical religion....Once many traditional theological points had become exposed to criticism, it was not surprising that the Trinitarian dogma should be similarly questioned." This intense preoccupation with Scripture naturally led to a flowering of biblical scholarship among Protestants. The Christian Hebraism of Immanuel Tremellius and Johann Buxtorf, and the Greek scholarship of Isaac Casaubon and Hugo Grotius were indubitable attestations of the advances made in postReformation Protestant biblical scholarship.” Contemporary scholarship has rightly noted the singular significance of the Bible in shaping and sustaining the religious culture of Reformation and post-Reformation Continental Europe, led by David Steinmetz, Susan Schreiner, John Thompson, G. Sujin Pak, Richard A. Muller, and Philip Wengert.” The privileging of the scriptural texts and the relatively unencumbered individual authority to interpret them became the ideological centerpiece of writers as diverse as Faustus Socinus and John Calvin, as well as John Biddle and Richard Baxter. Exactly how this material principle of sola scriptura worked itself out in the way these disparate thinkers wrote, in particular, about the Trinity, is the focus of this chapter. To be more specific, this chapter concerns itself with the way Paul Best and John Biddle articulated their vision/version of a non-trinitarian and radically biblicistic Christianity: analyzing both the

context and content of their literary output, situating their antitrinitarian polemic vis-a-vis the trinitarian responses and ripostes, and assessing, albeit provisionally, the significance of this not-so-insignificant religious and intellectual movement in the history of seventeenth-century England. To Best and his many travels and troubles we turn now.

22 MYSTERY UNVEILED I Paul Best and the Beginning of Direct Socinian Confrontation Paul Best (1590-1657) was Yorkshire gentry; eldest son of James Best—a Puritan-leaning layperson—he was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1606.”! Best graduated BA in 1610, proceeded MA in 1613, and took up fellowship at St. Catharine’s on September 8, 1617. After his father’s death—and after settling

the inheritance-related issues with his brother Henry on February 13, 1618— Best took up traveling, pursued his twin passions of philosophy and peregrination. Although this period of Best's life is murky, we know that he fought in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, the terminus ad quem being November 1632 (the date of Adolphus’s death in Ltitzen).”* A. B. Grosart speculated that Best spent nearly a decade or so in reflective retirement in Germany, delving into unitarian divinity.~° If the account of Roger Ley, a friend of Best’s while they were at Jesus College together, is to be trusted, then it seems Best’s source of antitrinitarianism was—pace Biddle, whose view was allegedly a homegrown product of scriptural reasoning—directly influenced by his foreign travels, perhaps even more specifically to his interactions with a few Socinians at the University of Griefswald in northern Germany.** Upon arrival from his Continental travels, Paul Best was a changed man. He had left England as a trinitarian, yet returned as an avowed defender of antitrinitarianism. In February 1645, he circulated his unpublished manuscript containing his Socinian sympathies, likely to his friend Roger Ley, with whom he was accustomed to exchange diverging theological viewpoints.” Rather than keeping it as a private theological disputation and seeking to contain and control the potentially deleterious effect it would have on religion in public, Ley betrayed the confidence of Best and reported this “egregious” heresy to Parliament, and Best was imprisoned around February 1645.*° McLachlan’s supposition that Best’s manuscript

caused much consternation in London has been further confirmed by the hours and sessions devoted to the issue of the “Beast” (an alternative spelling of Best, but with pun obviously intended) at the Westminster Assembly and the Commons from 1645 to 1646, even before Mysteries Discovered was published in July 1647.°’ Thomas Edwards probably provided free prepublication advertising for Best’s Mysteries Discovered (1647), which was based mostly on the manuscript in question, as he blasted Best’s critique of the Trinity as “a mystery of iniquity...a fiction, a Tradition of Rome.”** On January 28, 1646, Commons regarded the case of “one Legatt, who was burned in Smythfield” as the closest historical analogue to Best's case, since

Rescuing Scripture 23 the obduracy of both Bartholomew Legate and Paul Best was similar, thereby heightening the sense of foreboding for Best’s fate.’ Consequently, on March 10, 1646, it recommended that Best be executed by hanging.*° Between February and June 1646, there was a flurry of activities in Parliament as it sought ways to most expeditiously put to rest the Best case.*' On March 9, 1646, lawyers were

asked to join the Committee of Plundered Ministers “for the perfecting of the Ordinance for punishing the blasphemies of Paul Best.”*’ James Cranford (1602-1657) mounted the pulpit at St. Paul’s Cathedral on February 1, 1646, to exhort his auditors to be utterly vigilant against the spread of heresies. In

an unmistakable patristic self-fashioning, Cranford saw the seamless connection between the task of ‘Theodoret, Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius, and Augustine in dismantling the formidable Trojan horse of heresy, particularly that of the antitrinitarian error, for it got to the very jugular of Christianity itself.’ Venting in the same vein, Obadiah Sedgwick preached on the “nature and danger of heresies,” all too acutely aware of the cause célébre of Paul Best.**

Intentionally blurring the distinction between religious heresies and political sedition, Sedgwick compared heresy to a “plain Gunpowder-plot, an error which blows up a fundamentall truth,” and defined heresies as an incorrigible denial of the “Godhead of Christ, redemption by Christ.” Yet there was considerable stalling between April and June 1646, which indicates the level of intra-parliamentary support for Best and the degree of divisiveness and debate over the question of heresy, toleration, and the prickly issue of defining orthodoxy. Simultaneously, over a hundred petitions were presented to the Commons on his behalf.°° This polarization in the public sphere further illustrates the crucial place the controversy over the Trinity had in the minds of the Erastian-leaning Presbyterians, both MPs and ministers. Flustered by the delay and fearful that the harsh conditions of the Gatehouse would “soone and certainly destroy” him, Best wrote a petition to Parliament on August 13, 1646.’ Perhaps the publication of Mysteries Discovered (1647) was Best's desperate attempt to get hearing from Parliament. In July 1647, Mystery Discovered was published. On July 24, Commons learned of its publication, and on July 26, it was burnt by the hangman.**

Judged by the devastating effect, Best’s mere sixteen-page pamphlet Mysteries Discovered (1647) was a bombshell thrown into the playground of the trinitarian theologians. The thorny issue of determining the contours of orthodoxy, exacerbated by the call for liberty of conscience—particularly as an indispensable part of Civil War radicalism—descended on the MPs seeking to extirpate heresy and execute Best. The first point to note about Mysteries Discovered was Best’s inveterate antipopery. He saw the doctrine of the Trinity as a doleful upshot of the Church

24 MYSTERY UNVEILED being “misled with Romes hobgoblins.”*’ Similarly, Best pulled no punches as he indefatigably linked the idea of consubstantiality of the Son, vis-a-vis the Father, to be but the “Chappell of Rome,” designed to keep the world in

the thrall of the pope. In one of his prison epistles, written to Lenthall on September 5, 1646, Best determinedly spoke of his plan to expunge “the heav-

enly trinitie of all Romishe and popishe mists and maculations.”° At this juncture, Best cites from Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his pilgrimage (1613) and Robert Coverte’s A true and almost incredible report of an Englishman that travelled by land throw many kingdoms (1612), two phenomenally popular travelogues. Although no specific pages are cited, Best’s authorial intention in invoking these two famed English travelers is inescapably clear: due to the insistence of Rome that the Trinity be embraced as a fundamental dogma of

the Christian faith, it was proving to be an insurmountable hurdle for the “Jews...the Turk, and the Great Mogoll, ec.” from accepting Christianity, without at the same time believing in “Polytheosie, or Apotheosie, i.e. many

gods or a man-god.”' Therefore, Best was absolutely convinced, not only stemming from his own accumulated wisdom but also from the travelogues of Samuel Purchas and Robert Coverte, that to deny the consubstantiality of the Son, instead of destroying the Christian faith, would remove the false foundation of the Trinity. What was it that Best found so intriguing in Purchas’s travelogue to India and in Coverte’s peregrinations throughout the New World? Perhaps there is a bit of Best’s own self-fashioning here, as his own view about the Trinity was irrevocably changed while he traveled on the Continent, particularly among the Polish Socinians. Without any clear page reference, it is hard to establish the connection that Best drew with perfect lucidity in Mysteries Discovered. However, Purchas does mention the Trinity as he encountered it in the cul-

tic ritual of the “Indian Bramenes.” Purchas was perhaps one of the first cultural anthropologists of the Tudor-Stuart period, if only an untrained one; he uses the available grid of religion—Trinitarian Christianity—to sift and assess, to compare and identify the Indian religions. So Purchas asserts: “The Bramenes have Images of the Trinity, and haue in religious estimation the number of Three. They acknowledge and pray to the Trinity in Unity; but afhrme many Demi-gods, which are his Deputies in gouerning the world.” However, there are passages where Purchas laments the less-than-felicitous handling of the Trinity and other “Christian mysteries,” which were mangled, if not lost, in translation, and that’s likely what Best is referring to: “the

words of trinity and other Christian mysteries were not well vnderstood, and therefore ill deliuered by the Interpreter: that language still wanting proper tearmes for them, and being forced to Indianize Spanish words for that purpose.”

Rescuing Scripture 25 Deconstructing the word mystery was another key polemical strategy of Best's. Acutely aware of the predilection among the trinitarians to rely on “mystery” as a theological category to defend the Trinity, Best reduced the semantic range of the word mystery to that of “lawless mystery,” and the mystery of “Babylon the great,” spoken of in 2 Thessalonians 2:7 and Revelation 17:5. By glossing together Revelation 10:7 and 14:7, Best arrived at the second

use of the concept mystery in that the mystery of God centered around the plan of God “the Father and Creator.” Therefore, the “invisible and indivisible King” (1 Timothy 1:17 and 6:15-16; John 1:18; 5:37; 1 John 4:13) was God,

the Father, and Best explicitly stated that the “inauguration” of “our blessed Saviour” was his baptism. Reflecting the Continental Socinian influence in this exegesis, Best maintained that the Johannine Prologue of “in the beginning’ referred to the beginning of Jesus’ messianic ministry, not the beginning of time; Faustus Socinus had called such trinitarian gloss of John 1:1 “in the beginning was the Word’ as referring to the eternal existence of the Word as a gross error.** Nonetheless, while Best avowed that the Son was ontologically distinct from and inferior to the Father, he also maintained the unique role of Christ as mediator, so that “Christ is to us both God and his Word,” as Moses was to Aaron, and vice versa. It would, thus, seem that Best acknowledges the messianic office of Christ

the mediator and would even allow for the nominal, nonessential title of Christ as God, but the tripersonal theologic was where he drew the line. In fact, in his exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15:28, where the Son shall “himself be subject” so that God may be all in all, he leans heavily on Johann Alsted, a leading Calvinist exegete whose eschatological perspectives—including that of this dense eschatological text of 1 Corinthians 15:24-28—were revered by a number of seventeenth-century divines, including some English writers.” This shows the subtlety and the fine shadow of divergence between the antitrinitarianism of Paul Best and his trinitarian pugilists. Rather than seeing it, as we are wont to do, as a cataclysmic differential, one can see how Best's exegesis was possible precisely within the context of Puritan piety and the emphasis on sola scriptura, as he evinced little interest in—indeed, great impatience toward—nonbiblical language to sketch the contours of divine mystery. Clearly rejecting the language of divine personhood as a horrid vestigial element of popery, Best yet put forward his own understanding of the divine triad. Best chose to speak “definitively of the heavenly Trinity,” and thus the Father alone was God, variously called “the God of heaven” or “the living God and Father,” whereas the Son was the “Messiah... whom God made Lord and Christ,” and the Holy Spirit was a nonpersonal “very power of God.” Put more memorably, for Best, the Father was God “essentially,” and the “Son vicentially,

the holy Spirit potentially,” or the “Father God above all, Ephes. 4.6, the Son

26 MYSTERY UNVEILED God with us, Matth. 1.23, the holy Spirit God within us, 1 Cor. 2.16.” He would tirelessly asseverate that all of his trinitarian formulations were derived from Scripture, thus not from Scholastic jargon or human modal logic."® If Christ was only “vicentially” God, what did it exactly entail? How did he handle his non-trinitarian Christological exegesis? First of all, the Son was “not coequal” with the Father, for he was “dignified by the greater,” as our “Lord and Christ”

through the resurrection.” Then he cites the authority of Erasmus to argue that “where God is put absolutely...as John 8.54,” the Father is the referent. Christ's Messianic declaration was at this baptism, which Best calls his “inauguration, and the confirmation of that Messianic ofice—indeed, adoption as the Son of God—was through his resurrection.” In addition to redefining the Trinity, Best also offered a considerably different interpretive spin to the typical loci classici used to support trinitarian conclusions. The creational text of Genesis 1:26-27 had been a popular patristic text (“And God said, Let us make man in our image...”) as an indication of plurality within the Godhead and as an adumbration of the doctrine of the Trinity, more fully to be revealed with the advent of Christ. Best excoriated this type of exegesis as in desperate need of being “wrested” from “that third semipagan Century’; he saw texts such as Genesis 1:26-27 and 11:7-8 (“... let us go down, and there confound their language...”; the account of the Tower of Babel) and a trinitarian-leaning reading of such texts as grossly missing the mark. Best simply called such exegesis “solecisme and not an Hebraisme.”” For Best, such readings could easily be handled, without any reference to the Trinity whatsoever, by rendering them as an act of divine consultation with angels or a use of royal plural, as an “enallarge [sic] of the plurall number for the singular.” The two leading Hebraists with impeccably orthodox credentials— Johannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564-1629) and Johannes Drusius (1550-1616)— were mentioned on the marginalia to buttress his antitrinitarian reading of the typically adduced trinitarian texts.” Isaiah 9:6, often regarded as a prophecy concerning the Messiah, a view commonly acknowledged by both Jewish and Christian exegetes, was scrutinized by Best, again to show the hermeneutical inadequacy of too quickly arriving at a trinitarian conclusion. Nonetheless, Best was convinced through his exegesis of this Isaianic text to say that because of the expressions “very great and excellent,’ such as that Christ is “a mighty God (not almighty God) above all appellative gods,” this exaltation of Christ’s identity was “not a small thing,” though justifiably deserved. Yet even in this, Best offers his caveat: “unless he be deified and equalized with the Father.” Acts 20:28 is another key text often enlisted to establish the deity of Christ. In terms of textual criticism, the more unlikely reading was likely to be the preferred reading, in that the temptation to smooth out the problematic texts

Rescuing Scripture 27 would render the less troublesome reading to be later emendations, and this point was not lost among Renaissance biblical scholars. However, Best had no truck with such text-critical distinctions. Best opted for his dogmatic theology to govern his exegesis. He wrote: “That Acts 20.28. in some Translations is with that peculiar blood, and not Gods own blood, which is absurd.” Then he offered his contravening, antitrinitarian interpretations of hotly disputed texts that were often used to further clinch the divinity of Jesus: Romans 9:5, Philippians 2:6, John 20:28. It is interesting to note how Best interprets John 20:28, the key text, perhaps the first Christological confession, establishing the deity of Jesus, uttered by Thomas the Apostle; Best avers that it is best to render “My Lord and my God” as “Lord and Master, like Elohim and Adonim,” since what Thomas doubted was Christ’s resurrection, thus the question of Christ’s deity was never in doubt, for he had never even entertained such an ontological possibility. This was an argument entirely apropos for a Socinian of Best’s sort in that while Best unequivocally affirmed the bodily, literal resurrection of Christ, the emphasis was on the power of God to raise a human Jesus and thus this did not constitute a proof-text for the deity of Christ. John 8:58 (“Before Abraham was, Iam...”) was another text in need of interpretive modification; rather than reading that verse as a possible proof for Christ’s eternal existence, or his identification as God in the Old Testament, Best simply asserts that Christ was “before” Abraham in “place and dignity,” not time.” Another fascinating aspect of Best’s biblical interpretation was his appropriation of apocalyptic exegesis for his own antitrinitarian purposes. Indeed, the subtitle of Mysteries Discovered is rather explicit regarding its eschatological orientation: A Mercurial picture pointing out the way from Babylon to the holy City, for the good of all... have been so long misled with Romes hobgoblins. For Best’s antitrinitarian and eschatological purposes, it was crucial to identify the pope as Antichrist. Moreover, by linking the doctrine of the Trinity as a product of popish tradition, then as part of the eschatological fervor of true Christians (namely, antitrinitarian Protestants), the doctrine of the Trinity had to be radically jettisoned from all theology and liturgy among those living the “ancient and apocalyptic lives.” In chapters 6 and 7 of Mysteries Discovered, Best offers a rather ingenious exegesis of Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly—and in this regard, rather typical—Best identifies the Roman Church as the referent of the “G. Whore,” “Babylon the great” (Revelation 17:1, 5), and as previously discussed, Best sees the trinitarian shibboleth of the “mystery of the Trinity” as the “very frontispiece of all the Catholics Confessions concerning”

the identity of God after Nicaea. Best followed the exegesis of John Napier (A plaine discovery of the whole Reuelation of Saint John, 1593) and Pierre du Moulin the Elder (The accomplishment of the prophecies, 1613) on Revelation

28 MYSTERY UNVEILED 18:2 and 13:18 (“This calls for wisdom: let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.”). Both Napier and du Moulin utilized gematria of assigned the numerological value of 666 to the word “Lateinos,” which meant the Latin Church or the Roman Catholic Church. Last, Best ascertained that the problem of tritheism and idolatry—which he calls “Polytheosie of many Gods” and “Apotheosie of a man-God”—started with Rome, and Protestants had no better business than to remove it from liturgy and theology entirely.” In other words, Best’s ingenious interpretation of Apocalypse was a synthesis that came from New Testament scholars of impeccable Protestant credentials, such as John Napier, Pierre du Moulin, and Joseph Mede, as he applied it to his

own antitrinitarian purposes.” This identification of the pope as Antichrist was also closely related with Best's interpretation of ecclesiastical history. A key element of Best’s polemical strategy was to squarely locate the error of the Trinity as a by-product of Catholicism as an ecclesiological expression of primitive Christianity gone horridly astray. First of all, this rise of the Roman bishopric coincided with the treading underfoot of the “real truth” of God, substituting it with shabby, “verbal kind of Divinity,” concocted by the “Semipagan Christians of the third

century in the Western Church.” Second, the “Semipagan Christians” in Best’s polemical imagination were those who had been steeped more in the writings of Plato than of Paul; this was another commonly shared intellectual stance of the antitrinitarians: an antithetical stance toward Platonism. Thus two related themes emerge: the irrefragable commitment to anti-popery on the part of Best and other antitrinitarians, which further complicates the picture of irenicism often associated with the Socinians, and Best's conviction that extirpating the three Catholic Ts—Tradition, Transubstantiation, and the Trinity—was the direct pathway to completing the work of the Reformation. For Best, the powerful dynamic of the Reformation was unleashed heroically, but only provisionally, by Luther and Calvin and now with the mantle was passed on to Socinus and his coreligionists. It was, to be more precise, the sort of Catholicism whose primitive purity was mortally compromised at the “first Nicene Council about 328” and sanctioned as orthodox by the “Imperial decree” at Constantinople in 381.°° For Best, since “human Councils,” including Nicaea, were but “external and accidental” means of truth and, in fact, had been egregiously wrong on a number of counts, it was best not to trust conciliar authority tout court.’ Moreover, as the ideas of Christ's “hypostatical union and communion of properties” were formulated in subsequent councils (notably at Chalcedon in 451), they were insane contradictions, “croaking of the Dragon,” and “Hocus Pocus.”* This is where Best’s radical Puritan sensibilities exceeded that of the more conservative Presbyterian Puritans. As shown

Rescuing Scripture 29 in detail in chapter 5, the degree to which one is willing to criticize the legacy of the Nicene and post-Nicene history was a key barometer of one’s sympathy toward the doctrine of the Trinity. Best’s rejection of the Trinity was coupled with a corresponding rejection of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, as was the case—albeit more moderately so—with Thomas Hobbes, Richard Baxter, and Andrew Marvell.

Il Judas Redivivus? Former Friends in Disputation: Best-Ley MS Analysis The foregoing themes of anti-popery, rejection of typological/messianic exegesis, and a metacritique of Nicene and subsequent councils are also found in a hitherto unexamined source. Roger Ley (1594-1668), who had been curate at St. Leonard, Shoreditch, Middlesex, had a disputation with Best while the latter was incarcerated. Unsurprisingly, it seems Ley had been commissioned to wean Best of his heretical notions, and the manuscript notes at UCLA’s Clark Library sheds unique light on the type of polemical exchange between erstwhile college roommates who, over the issue of the worship of the true God, ended up on the opposite ends of the trinitarian divide. Although the surviving notes are written from Ley’s vantage point, when juxtaposed to Best’s own perspective in Mysteries Discovered, they tell rather accurately the theological and exegetical issues deemed incommensurable between Best and Ley. They had been “chamber fellows” at Jesus College, Cambridge, for a while and were “very inwardly acquainted” with each other.* Ley lavished praise on Best’s Renaissance academic abilities, as he had apparently excelled in “philosophie,” “mathematics,” and “poetrie.””’ The MS notes illustrate three key aspects of the religious culture and theological habitus of the trinitarian controversy in seventeenth-century England. They are, first, the role of Scripture and the emerging divergence of exegesis and hermeneutic between antitrinitarians and trinitarians. Second, and closely related to first, is the inadequacy of interpretive perspectives au courant today that see Socinianism primarily as a precursor of Enlightenment rationalism or emerging secularism. Third, the intriguing presence, indeed, persistence, of patristic voices in these debates and what it tells of how theological authority was constructed, contested, and reconfigured. Ley told us that these disputations consisted of four sessions, each two hours long, and that they took place in 1647. In the MS, Ley left clues as to when one session ended and the next began, thereby allowing the reader a relatively clear sense as to what each session entailed.

30 MYSTERY UNVEILED Woven throughout the four-rounds of disputations is a litany of biblical texts, used by both sides to show how the divine identity derived from these texts supports the Socinian or Nicene perspectives. Ley called foul on Best's putative “violent straining” of texts, deviating from the literal, “ordinary sense” of the text, for instance, of Philippians 2:6, which, for Ley, clearly clinched the deity of Christ. For Best, it did no such thing. Similar divergence occurred with their respective exegesis of John 8:58 (“Before Abraham was I am’): for Ley, this chronological priority of Christ vis-a-vis Abraham proved the “eternitie of Christ, his equalitie with the father,” and “his omnipotency over the creature,” whereas for Best, it meant that Christ was “before Abraham in place and dignity.” ‘The first session was an exegetical battle, as three key texts were given interpretation, counter-interpretation, and rejoinders: John

1:1; Colossians 1:16; and Hebrews 1:1-10. The hermeneutical dissonance between Ley and Best was nowhere more acute than in the way their respective exegesis diverged over the so-called messianic prophecies and Psalms in the Hebrew Bible.

The following example helps us situate the Best-Ley exegetical clash in context. Thomas Wilson (1562-1622), the celebrated author of the first dictionary

of the Bible in England and rector of St. George the Martyr in Canterbury, Kent, encapsulated the trinitarian interpretive schema in his Theological Rules (1615). After asserting that the doctrine of the Trinity was embryonically and “obscurely” taught in the Old Testament, yet with Christ’s incarnation, the New Testament manifested it more “plentifully and manifestly,’ Wilson went on to offer an intriguing way of interpreting the theophanies (the appearances of God to humans) in Rule 156.

Where the old Testament bringeth in, God appearing in humane shape, or speaking to the Patriarkes and Prophets; there vnderstand it alwaies of the second person, for hee it was by whom the father in all ages declared himself to his Church, John 12.37. 38.39. 40. 41 and compare that place with Esay 53.1 and the chapter 6.9. also compare Rom. 14.10. 11 with Esay 45.23 and see 1. Cor. 10.9. This would haue kept Serveltus |sic] and others from denying the aeternall godhead of Christ.”

Wilson found that John read the Isaiah 6 and 53 texts as referring to and fulfilled in the ministry of Jesus; Paul cited the Isaiah 45:23 text, a reference to the judgment of the Lorp, as a proleptic announcement of the eschatological judgment of Christ, thereby finding the apostolic warrant for interpreting various Hebrew Bible passages in light of the person and work of Christ. His rueful conclusion was that such an exegetical commitment would have spared Servetus’s life, as the trial and burning of Michael Servetus in Calvin's Geneva

Rescuing Scripture 31 became a cause célebre in the politics of religion in sixteenth-century Europe. This is precisely the divergence of exegetical habitus (a deeply engrained and formed tendency or habit) we find in Best and Ley. Ley took issue with Best for taking Psalm 23:1 as a “mere similitude,” that God is like a shepherd, and no more. Taking cues from John 10:18 and appropriating the analogia fidei (analogy of faith), Ley collated this verse with John 10:18, which spoke of Christ’s role as the good shepherd who was to lay down his life for the sheep. Furthering his Johannine exegesis, Ley juxtaposed John 10:29 and 10:30, in which both the economic superiority of the Father—as the one who sent the Son (“My Father... is greater than all”)—and the ontological equality between the Son and the Father (“I and my Father are one’) are clearly laid out. Ley’s exegesis of John 10:30 was intriguing; most of the trinitarian exegetes rendered this verse as denoting the ontological equality primarily: that the oneness spoken of by Christ was one of substantial identity. In con-

tradistinction to the majority opinion, Ley asserted, similar to Calvin, that the oneness was one of “pastoral jurisdiction,” although this overlapping and identical purpose in the history of salvation was seen by Ley as an indisputable indicator of Jesus’ deity.°’ His conclusion was pithy and pungent: due to the “abundance of ancient prophecies in the old, and plaine speeches in the new testament, doe really conferre a royall dignitie on Christe; and made it divine, we cannot perceive him a viceroy onelie, or a representative but a reall king, and Lord.”**

Interpreting the Old Testament Christologically often encountered the problem of forced fulfillment and allegorical interpretation run amok, whereas favoring historical-grammatical exegesis often meant that the prophetic discourses in the Hebrew Bible were seen as being fulfilled in the historical horizon of the players of the period; that is, the fulfillment of the prophecies given

to or uttered by Isaiah was given a historicist interpretation. For instance, when Ley averred that “the Spirit of God findeth Christe in the old testament, and allegeth places where we finde him not in exprest words,” thus supporting a messianic exegesis of the Hebrew Bible,” Best’s riposte was that it was absolutely unconscionable to follow the Papists in making the Bible “a nose of wax. °° Ley's rejoinder was: You answered that diverse high speeches belong to Christe in a restrained sense, with subordination to God, and that of the that of the marriage with his church, you compared with the similitude of a shepherd, as Christ is called sometime. ... Thus you did observe the angel of the Lord sometime to be called the Lord, as Exod. 3.2. The angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in the bush, which angel is God of thy fathers the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which place I turned against you.”

32 MYSTERY UNVEILED One of the perplexing texts that resulted in divergent interpretations was Exodus 3:2-6. The question surrounding this burning bush was the mysterious identity of the “angel of the Lord,” who spoke of himself, without any hint of referring to someone else, in verse 6 as the “God of thy fathers the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”* Ley clearly sided with the “exposition of the ancient fathers, who expounded the apparition,’ namely, the angel of the Lord, as a pre-Incarnate manifestation of Christ, called also as “Christophany.” On the contrary, Best found this exercise of fitting Christ into every Old Testament theophany as a futile attempt at theologically squaring the circle. Nevertheless, Best acknowledged that Christ had a “metaphoricall, and representative” office of being the unique messenger from God but not as a consubstantial coparticipant in the eternal glory of the Triune God.” The Best-Ley disputation, especially this exegetical discord over interpreting the Old Testament, had a long pedigree, as ancient as Justin Martyr’s debate with Trypho the Jew, running

all the way through the Arian controversy in the third and fourth centuries CE, the medieval Christian-Islamic and Christian-Jewish exegetical disputes, and more recently the view of Michael Servetus that all the supposed adumbrations of the Christ the Messiah as seen in the Old Testament sorely lacked exegetical grounding.” The hermeneutical divergence between Best and Ley was not a methodological one. The formal commitment to sola scriptura and perspicuity of Scripture was equally shared. It was more of a functional fissure. For instance, utilizing the same trope of reading biblical texts literally, Ley would arrive at an interpretation of Acts 7:59 in which Stephen, seeing Christ on the throne, cried out, “Lord Jesus receive my spirit” as verifying the deity of Christ by virtue of the fact that Stephen’s supplication was an act of worship, since worship can only be directed to God. Thus Christ had to be God. To further buttress his conclusion, Ley interpreted Psalms 45:11 and 72:11 Christologically. In other words, Ley, committed as he was to the deity of Christ, drew from the rich tradition of messianic exegesis, the habit of reading of the aforementioned psalms as referring to and anticipating the advent of the divine mediator.” Best, on the other hand, neither read Psalms 45:11 and 72:11 messianically nor saw Stephen's invocation of Christ as proof positive of Christ's deity. Here we are beginning to see the place of pre-eminence that the Gospel of John had for both antitrinitarians and their interlocutors for bolstering their own theological perspectives. Using the evident bifocal perspectives—stressing both the palpably subordinationist language of the Son vis-a-vis the Father and the expressions bolstering the equality of the Son and the Father, which were less frequent yet present nonetheless—Ley articulated the communicatio idiomatum (communication of the properties, e.g., the human and divine in Jesus). So he continued:

Rescuing Scripture 33 I remember in general I delivered my mind, first that Christ as mediator did receive from the father, as from a superior, what did belong to perfect our redemption and reconciliation wherein we must distinguish his divine nature from his office. Secondly by receiving from the father in his divinity,

he is not made unequall, seeing in a perfect generation there is equalitie. A man begets a man of the same nature, equall, as good, as reall, as sure a man, as himself. One tree may produce another by succours, or seeds, a tree like, equall, and of the same nature. Therefore what the sonne of God receives by eternal generation, in a high and unspeakable way above the creature, yet by the creatures law, inferreth no inequality. Nay rather, this infinite perfect generation can produce nothing but like it selfe, a person that is God, infinite and equally perfect, for simile generate simile.” Four observations, by way of Best’s riposte, are in order. First, for Best, the very notion of two natures coinhering in one person of Christ was unacceptable, for

it was unbiblical, and the only crutch against which it could lean for support was Tradition. Second, both for humans and trees, the human and arboreal qualities are shared, but chronological priority is given to the parent. In other words, for Best, chronological precedence of the Father meant that just as there is one true God, this supreme deity was the Father, and to the extent that the Son had any divine quality at all, it was conferred on him as “privileges by gift.” Moreover, for Best, when Ley acknowledged that Christ qua mediator did “receive from the father, as from a superior,” it was a sign of theological surrender.’”* Third, the idea of communication of properties was utterly superfluous once the two-nature doctrine was dispensed with. Fourth, the other idea of eternal generation or pretemporal begetting of the Son, a patristic notion that Ley deemed theologically defensible, was a chimerical notion deriving from pagan mysteries.” The dubious legacy and authority of the church fathers was another point of contention, especially regarding that of Nicaea. Ley responded to Best’s challenge that the Athanasian notion that there is “one almightie God, yet three almightie persons” was an insult to reason. “Religion is above reason” was Ley’s response, yet it was “not against true, but onelie against carnall reason.” A clear instantiation of such theological quandary and its potential resolution, according to Ley, was to be found, even in the realm of created order. Citing from Jerome Zanchi’s De Opera Dei, Ley asseverated that just as water in its three states of existence—liquid, vapor, and ice—could coexist, and so can the human soul, as the coming together of the soul and body did not create confusion but formed a harmonious and indissoluble bond in the human person. Zanchi’s mode of argument proceeded as follows: in the created order, there seemed to be elements of mystery or some semblance of vestigia trinitatis, and

34 MYSTERY UNVEILED just as these occurrences were never regarded as violations of the law of noncontradiction, so much more should such allowances be made for the realm of the Creator.”

After this quick foray into Reformed Scholasticism, Ley returned to the topic at hand: patristic trinitarian exegesis. The use of similitude was prevalent in the Nicene trinitarian theology, thus Zanchi and, in turn, Ley were in fact directly influenced by Athanasius and the Nicene Creed. “The Nicen Creede showeth it by light of God the sonne”; Ley confirms the use of similitude in that just as it renders divine identity as “God of God, light of light: there is but one light in all the hemisphere, yet that light in the sunne begets the inferiour light that is here below in the aire. So did the father beget the sonne, before all worlds, and yet but one God.” This theological tightrope walk was not atypical among the trinitarians, of both patristic and medieval eras; the acutely felt tension was couched in the language of “inferiour” and “yet but one.” How can a begotten being inferior to God be one with God? To buttress his view, Ley quotes extensively from Augustine's De Fide et Symbolo, chapter 9, section 17, where Augustine offers an analogia fidei and analogia entis by looking at the created order, in this instance, two examples: water, river, and fountain and the “root,” the “trunk,” and the “branch.”” According to Augustine, they all comprise inseparable and indispensable elements of the tree, thus he concludes by asserting that “in reference to the oneness which subsists even in things visible, so that it may be understood to be quite a possibility for three objects of some sort, not only severally, but also all together, to obtain one

single name; and that in this way no one may wonder and think it absurd that we should call the Father God, the Son God, the Holy Spirit God, and that nevertheless we should say that there are not three Gods in that Trinity, but one God and one substance.”” Building on that foundation of analogical reasoning, with avowed Augustinian apophatic sensibilities, Ley proceeded to argue that God was the “fountaine of reason,’ thus the ultimate tribunal of all human rational activities. Just as it was absurd for humans to complain that we do not have more than two eyes in the human body, much more intolerable was raising questions about three persons in the divine being.”* Then Ley followed up with a key quote from Augustine’s De Trinitate (lib. 9, cap. 12)

in which he posited that “the minde it selfe is a certaine representation of the trinitie, and the knowledge thereof which is the offspring or birth, and the word which issueth from thence,” and completed the triad by speaking of the love within the mind.” The trinitarian theological disputes and inexorable divergence was not only based on the specifics of the trinitarian theology: the consubstantial nature of Christ, the two-nature doctrine of Christ, or the question of messianic exegesis. As the Best-Ley disputation clearly highlights, the debate also entailed

Rescuing Scripture 35 secondary and peripheral issues: human free will, divine providence, “foreknowledge of future contingencies,” and predestination, all of which loomed

large as key points of polemic between the Calvinists and Arminians.*° Spiritual natures were “verie darke” and often they were “undiscernable” to the clouded fancies of redeemed yet residually corrupt humanity; thus what appeared to Best as mere fanciful yet unwarranted exegetical leaps often made in patristic trinitarian exegesis were—in foro Dei—clear and fitting of the mystery of the Trinity.” Another key area where patristic authority came in handy was in construct-

ing the apostolic historicity of the Church of England, bypassing the See of Rome. Ley argued that John Jewel’s defense of the antiquity of the Church of England vis-a-vis the Roman Catholic view was a major polemical victory in that Jewel marshaled the evidence in support of the Anglican cause by incorporating the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Cyprian “for the divinity of Christe.”** Best's ideological commitment to these pre-Nicene writers was that they were the formulators of the “appointed tradition and antiquity.” On the one hand, vis-a-vis the Catholic polemic, Anglican writers were careful to obviate any criticism of their inordinate dependence on tradition.** Full of sardonic flair, Ley moved on to construct a historical “pettigree” for Best's ilk: Cerinthus was the progenitor of the antitrinitarians. Making a slightly tendentious move, Ley adduced Augustine’s De Haeresibus (cap. 8) as a proof of Cerinthus’s heretical status. It must be said, in Best’s defense, that Augustine was already operating within a received traditional mode of polemic: that Cerinthus was a heretic; citing a source of that biased sort would only cause Best to scoff at the specious scholarly method, which is precisely what Best does.** Cerinthus had espoused, accord-

ing to Augustine, that angels were the agents of creation, that circumcision

was to be observed, and that Christ's resurrection had not yet occurred, and when it does, he will rule with the saints for a thousand years, and this millennial reign of Christ would “overflowe with carnall pleasure.”* Then came the Ebionites, and Ley accepted the Ebionite and Cerinthian heresies to be the immediately precipitating cause for the writing of the Gospel of John. To further buttress his historical and polemical credibility, Ley cited from Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, in which the Ebionites had allegedly affirmed that Jesus was literally “Josephs sonne by his wife Mary,” and while there were some who held to a more Catholic Christology, due to their insistence on adhering to the “ceremonies of the law, and the Jewish Sabbath,” they were put out of the ranks of Catholic Christians.*° Along with Cerinthus and the Ebionites, there was Artemon in Best’s genealogy of the antitrinitarians who fell as victims to power-mongering among the bishops in the first few centuries of church history, as well as Eusebius of Nicomedia and Bishop

36 MYSTERY UNVEILED Theognis of Nicaea, whose unceremonious excommunication after the first Nicene Council had nothing to do with right theology and everything to do with their being on the wrong side of the political sycophancy. However, for Ley, the champion of this antitrinitarian heresy revived in mid-seventeenthcentury England was Paul of Samosata, who was Bishop of Antioch from 260 to 268 cE, thus the title Ley presumably gave to signal that his former friend was a Samosatenian redivivus. Ley was convinced that the fundamental truth of Christianity—namely, the doctrine of the ‘Trinity—had continued uninterruptedly, pace the discontinuity thesis offered by Paul Best, so he averred that the Council of Nicaea was a continuation of the “renowned martyrs of the primitive church.” Best’s perspective on ecclesiastical history verged close to that of the Anabaptists in that he believed that the primitive truth concerning Jesus, the appointed Son of God who was not of the same substance with the Father, had been hijacked by the steady and stealthy encroachment of Platonism into apostolic Christianity and the church.** Consequently, Best bluntly argued that the orthodox bishops at the Council of Nicaea were “Semipagan Christians,’ whereas Ley’s riposte was that the “doctrine of the trinitie of all other [doctrines] complie least with Paganisme.”*’ Here was an interesting quandary for trinitarians of early modern Europe. If one affirmed any sense of continuity—whether via Plato or Hermes Trismegistus or the Sibylline Oracles—as did the Cambridge Platonists and numerous other trinitarians, then one can easily back into a polemical cul-de-sac. For the antitrinitarians, this commonality was a sign either of the corruption of primitive Christianity, which knew nothing of the Platonistic logos that became the bedrock foundation for the deity of Christ (especially through the Gospel of John), or of the falsity of the Christian view of the Trinity entirely. Thus, it seems Ley adopted yet another trinitarian polemical option, which was to emphasize the radical discontinuity between pagan teachings about gods and Christian theism. The other intriguing aspect of Ley’s selective appropriation of patristic authority was the self-imposed terminus ad quem of his affection for the trinitarian bishops. He certainly had abiding admiration for Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and the four ecumenical councils, but when Boniface III “exalted himself above all bishops,” the purity of the church was incorrigibly corrupted. Thus, whereas for Paul Best, and for Biddle, the corruption of Christianity occurred almost immediately at the closing of the “apostolic era,” around 100 cE, for Ley, owing

in great measures to his anti-popery, the tragic decline had begun with the papal pretensions entertained by Boniface III, starting around 607 cE. In sum-

mary, anti-popery was an undergirding ideological commitment shared by Best and Ley. The determinative factor for their divergence had to do with the acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Rescuing Scripture 37 Best was released from prison in late 1647. It seems that he was still in prison on September 8, 1647; then, if we were to take February 1645 as the approxi-

mate time of Best’s incarceration, then he had spent at least two and a half years in jail.” Then his life was one of retirement in his home county, and Best died on September 17, 1657, in Great Drifheld. Best was endowed with “more courage than prudence” and thus more “pugnacious” and unafraid of theological novelty than Biddle.*' According to Robert Wallace's Antitrinitarian Biography, Best was known to have hurled the “most profane epiphets to the doctrine of the Trinity.”’* His profane epithets surely achieved one authorial aim: get the religious and political authorities to notice the threat and galvanize their forces. If Best's intention was to have his view accepted as orthodoxy, then he failed spectacularly, at least in the 1640s. Yet his ideas outlived him, manifesting themselves in different contexts.

Finally, what does the Best-Ley disputation tell us? It seems, inter alia, three major issues emerge from these four rounds of disputations. First, it demonstrates the absolutely indispensable role Scripture and biblical exegesis

played in their polemical exchange. This debate shows that both Best and Ley had been imbibing from the same intellectual fountain of Renaissance humanism of ad fontes, as they both privileged Scripture and scriptural

perspectives to trump all other accretions of human wisdom and tradition. It also raises the question of authority in settling religious disputes.” Furthermore, it shows the divergence in hermeneutics, especially in the way the Hebrew Bible was read, with particular interpretive issues regarding the so-called messianic texts becoming the watershed in the trinitarian disputes. For instance, due to his refusal to acknowledge the deity of Christ, Best was obviously unconvinced by the way the Old Testament had served as a proleptic discourse, progressively unfolding the plan of God to provide the climax of revelation in the coming of the messianic mediator, Christ, who had been

eternally begotten and had been “in the beginning.” Therefore, for Best, a literalist hermeneutic preserved the possibility for a nontrinitarian reading of the Hebrew Bible and prevented the papist encroachment with allegorical readings of Scripture.” Anyone who would use a nonliteral hermeneutic to “prove” the deity of Christ, from either the Old or the New Testament, was guilty of capitulating to the papist snares. This intriguing triad of transubstantiation, tradition, and Trinity was frequently bracketed together in the Socinian efforts to ridicule the fundamentally flawed theological method and trajectory of Catholicism. For Best and his Socinian coreligionists, these three always went together, and the Socinian vision of completing the third and final phase of the Reformation was to pulverize the foundation. Even though Luther had taken off the roof of Babylon and Calvin had thrown down the walls, they were the indispensable yet insufficient first two movements

38 MYSTERY UNVEILED of the symphony called the Reformation, which was reaching its historical fulfillment with the Socinians.” Second, this disputation, as do numerous other Socinian writings of the period, tells us that Socinianism cannot, in good conscience, be seen as a mere precursor to Enlightenment rationalism or the emerging secularism. The aforementioned article by Hugh Trevor-Roper saw the primary significance of Socinianism as a harbinger of the presaging transitional entity, already manifesting signs of “secular critical human reason.” Similarly, J. C. D. Clark’s iden-

tification of Socinianism and the trinitarian controversy as a unique sign of the late-seventeenth-century English zeitgeist is shown to be inadequate.”° In the same way, Charles Taylor's major work, Secular Age, sees the crucial intellectual bridge-building role played by the Socinians. Third, the Best-Ley disputation offers a key insight into the polemical habitus of the trinitarian controversies of the seventeenth century: the significant role accorded to patristic writings.” We shall see a good deal of these issues

emerge in Biddle, with whom Best occupied the Westminster Gatehouse. While it is not clear that these two leading antitrinitarians in seventeenthcentury England shared their ideas in prison, there is considerable overlap of ideas, as well as intra-Socinian divergence. To Biddle’s times and troubles, we shall turn our attention now. IV

Biddle’s Times and Troubles: Beginnings of Antitrinitarianism Born in 1615 as the first son of Edward, a middling sort of yeoman tailor, and Jane (née Hopkins) Biddle, John was baptized on January 14, 1616, at St. Mary’s

church in Wotton under Edge, Gloucestershire.”* At age eighteen, Biddle entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, matriculating on June 27, 1634, and was tutored briefly by the peripatetic scholar and entrepreneur, John Oxenbridge.”

Demonstrating his scholarly promise by the time he was nineteen, Biddle translated Virgil’s Bucolics and the first two satires of Juvenal, publishing them together in 1634.'”° Biddle obtained his BA on June 10, 1637, became a tutor at Magdalen immediately thereafter, proceeded MA in May 1641, then took the

post as schoolmaster at the Crypt School in Gloucester. While remaining in that position for three years, Biddle’s indefatigable search into Scripture led him to espouse a non-trinitarian or antitrinitarian position, as he came to see after “fervently imploring Divine Illumination” that the doctrine of the Trinity was clearly illogical and a nonbiblical interpolation.” In May 1644, Biddle’s freshly arrived conclusion was reported to the civil magistrates in Gloucester by Presbyterian clergy, precipitating Biddle’s first

Rescuing Scripture 39 incarceration. On May 24, 1644, Biddle was brought before the Parliamentary Committee to be examined and forced to confess belief in the three persons of the Trinity. Biddle acknowledged that there are “three in that divine essence commonly called Persons,” perhaps an act of equivocation, if not dissimulation, which allowed his return to the Crypt School.'”’ This turned out to be but the beginning of Biddle’s several imprisonments. In December 1644, after he wrote some “pithy Arguments against the supposed Deity of the Holy Spirit,” he was interrogated by the Presbyterian parliamentary committee and, after a brief incarceration, on December 2, 1645, was released.’ In June 1646, James Ussher sought to disabuse Biddle of the heretical notion of attributing a nondivine status to the Holy Spirit."°* On September 6, 1647, shortly after the publication of Twelve Questions or Arguments drawn out of Scripture, wherein... the Deity of the Holy Spirit is clearly and fully refuted, Parliament ordered that it be burned and Biddle examined by the Committee of Plundered Ministers.'”

According to Anthony Wood, this book sold extremely well, necessitating a new print edition by October 1647. The Westminster Assembly, deeply alarmed and incensed by Biddle’s impudence, sought to have him executed, and Parliament passed the “Draconick Ordinance” on May 2, 1648, making antitrinitarian heresy a capital offense.'*° For the trinitarian Parliamentarians, the march toward Zion came to a screeching halt, owing greatly to Paul Best's and John Biddle’s antitrinitarian agitations. Ironically, antitrinitarian heresy was deemed far more sinister than the radical religious groups marked by certain putatively deviate sexual or social mores. How was that possible? Whereas the fringe groups—their ideologies and actions—were easily identifiable as blasphemous and heretical, the antitrinitarians of Best and Biddle’s type were upstanding, rational, pious, and Bible-quoting Puritans with equal aversion to popery and Laudianism. In other words, Best and Biddle could be seen as one further instantiation of Puritan biblicism; this critique formed an integral core of the Catholic attack on Protestantism in general.'°’ Leave the mother church, put the Bible into everyone's hands, and then a hermeneutical pandemonium was sure to break out. As David Como and Geoffrey F. Nuttall have argued persuasively, the porous membrane of Puritan radical religion and theologia pectoris was a difference of degrees, not of kind.'*

On December 14, 1647, fifty-eight ministers of the London Provincial Assembly became signatories to a document that was published immediately thereafter as A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, and to our Solemn League and Covenant (1648). Under the aegis of “New lights and New Truths,” lamented the Presbyterian ministers, doctrines and practices that were clearly

antithetical to the “very fundamental! Truths of Christianity” were propagated.'"? What A Testimony listed as pernicious heresies that ought not to be tolerated were mostly anti-Calvinist views, be they Arminian or Socinian, and

40 MYSTERY UNVEILED it showed the narrowly defined scope of tolerable doctrines. Therefore, it came as no surprise that Paul Best and John Biddle’s refutation would be included as damnable heresies, in addition to John Goodwin's Hagiomastix and Laurence Clarkson’s overrealized Christology of identifying himself as God Incarnate. In “Errors against the Nature and Essence of God,” Biddle’s twin insistences that God “is the name of a person,” thus to have more than one person within

God was tantamount to tritheism, and that “to distinguish betwixt Essence and person” was an unwarranted, indeed, “wretched distinction” were explicitly listed.""° In “Errors against the Trinity of persons in Unity of Essence,” Paul Best’s modalistic error of asserting that “The Father” is God “essentially,” the Son “vicessentially,’ and the Spirit as the power of God “potentially” was listed as a representative view of English antitrinitarianism. Continuing on in the same vein, the Presbyterian authors pointed out Best's sardonic barb that it was either the “Polytheosis, or Apotheosis,’ worship of either many gods

or a man-god, brought about by the insouciance of the trinitarians regarding the fate of the “Jews and Turks” for whom the doctrine of the Trinity was

proving to be an insurmountable hurdle." Indeed, the entirety of the rest of the London Provincial Assembly’s attack on the antitrinitarian teaching proliferating in England by December 1647—“Errors against the Deity of the Son of God” and “Errors against the Deity, and divine worship, of the Holy Ghost”—was focused on Paul Best’s Mysteries Discovered and John Biddle’s Twelve Arguments.''* Seen in that light, it was likely the Presbyterian goading that led to Parliament’s Ordinance of the Lords & Commons... for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies on May 2, 1648. This “Draconick Ordinance” spelled out in no uncertain terms the heretical notions Best and Biddle were propounding. Notions regarded heretical vis-a-vis God were: that God is not present in all places, doth not know or foreknow all things...or that the Father is not God, the Son is not God, or that the Holy Ghost is not God, or that they Three are not one Eternal God: Or that shall in like manner maintain and publish, that Christ is not God equal with the Father, or shall deny the Manhood of Christ, or that the Godhead and Manhood of Christ are several Natures, or that the Humanity of Christ is pure and unspotted of all sin...or that shall deny his Death is meritorious in the behalf of Believers."

Among the foregoing heretical views, Best and Biddle had explicitly owned all but three: the deity of the Father, affirmation of the humanity of Christ, and the “pure and unspotted” nature of Christ's humanity. Then out of the eleven representative heresies, antitrinitarianism would be liable for punishment for eight counts. If so, then, it is hardly surprising that Parliament and the Westminster Assembly would expend so much energy to refute this heresy. Equally unsurprising, then, was the level of enthusiastic support that Best and

Rescuing Scripture 4] Biddle garnered from the radical tolerationists such as Richard Overton and the 1649 Leveller pamphlet Englands New Chaines Discovered.'" The London bookseller George Thomason got his copy of Twelve Arguments

on September 6, 1647. In other words, the publication of Best’s Mysteries Discovered and Biddle’s Twelve Arguments took place less than a two-month span: late July to early September. These two texts shared the common fate of being burned and also being hounded by the Presbyterian heresy hunters." In all of Biddle’s publishing career, he wrote five treatises/catechisms, translated four works, and copyedited the Septuagint.'’® Among other things, the significance of Twelve Arguments lies in the fact that Biddle’s particular exegetical penchant for interpreting certain disputed biblical texts is clearly evinced here. Strands of primitivism were inescapably present in his letter to the “impartiall Reader” as he narrated the hegemonic struggle for truth vis-a-vis the pretenders thereof, and he decried the formalistic religion of the English Trinitarians, which was a tragic departure from the primitive simplicity of radical monotheism without any trinitarian encumbrances.'” The Twelve Arguments divulged the exegetical fallacies and theological follies of adhering to the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. His arguments were to show that since the Holy Spirit was distinguished from God; “speaketh not of himselfe”; hears from, receives of, and is sent by another; is the gift of God; “changeth place’; “prayeth unto

Christ”; and has an understanding distinct from God, the deity of the Holy Spirit could no longer be maintained." Undeterred by the fear of execution, Biddle went on to publish A Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity, according to the Scripture while awaiting trial in November 1648. Two versions were published, both had six articles, and yet one was twenty pages and the other sixty pages long.' Both Paul Best and John Biddle were contributors to the genre of prison writings in the 1640s

and 1650s, defending the very cause of their incarceration while their cases were hotly debated within Parliament and in print.'’® Regardless of the length difference, in A Confession of Faith, Biddle began to express more forcibly his doubts regarding the eternal deity of Christ. Perhaps this was the logical progression in Biddle’s theological development along the antitrinitarian route. Having repudiated the deity of the Holy Spirit in Twelve Arguments (1647), it was a matter of time for Biddle to dismantle the other “Person” of the Trinity. After radically redefining what he means by the Trinity, Biddle offered in articles 2 through 5 a subordinationist reading of the person of Christ. For Biddle, Christ was the “chief Son of the most High God,” the Lord over the Church, “second cause of all things” pertaining to salvation. Furthermore, Christ was worthy of worship as “the intermediate object of our Faith.”'”' For Biddle, then, the early church’s confession of the divine triad was: “God the Father, of the Man Jesus Christ our Lord, and of the Holy Spirit the Gift of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”!””

42 MYSTERY UNVEILED The church’s dogged insistence on the doctrine of the Trinity, Biddle maintained, was not a mere theological mistake; it “corrupteth almost our whole Religion,” for it introduced tritheism, inexorably subverting the unity of God. The Athanasian Creed’s confession that “though the Father be God, the Son God, the holy Spirit God; yet there are not three Gods, but one God” was a clear instance of muddled theologic gone incorrigibly wrong and a complete lapse of “Reason in Religion.”'* Biddle offered a trenchant critique of the two-nature doctrine of Christ, an indispensable part of trinitarian orthodoxy. In response to the Socinian argument that the Son cannot be the most high God since “he can do nothing of himself, because all authority in heaven and earth hath been given to him, because the Father is greater than he,’ the trinitarians argued that all the foregoing statements referred to Jesus’ humanity. For such “cavalier” response, Biddle insisted that the trinitarians were engaged in question begging, for it simply assumed the very issue that needed proof: that Christ had another nature beside his human nature, that is, the divine nature.'** Another reason for Biddle’s unflinching refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity was liturgically grounded. In contradistinction to the notion that the Socinians were less than exuberant in praising God for God's love, Biddle asserted that the trinitarian perspective prohibited the Christian from loving and honoring God as God deserved, since the summum bonum was, by definition, one, and true worship could not be directed to three persons.'”’ The fifth reason adduced by Biddle in his denial of the Trinity was that this was an insurmountable hurdle, the “main stumbling block,” that kept the ancient people of God, the Jews, from becoming Christians, for they were convinced that this heretical notion of the Trinity was a “genuine doctrine of the Christian religion.”'*° The efforts of the trinitarians, which Biddle saw as “erecting a new Babel,” ended up obfuscating the otherwise “pure and plain language of the holy Spirit,” as they introduced a plethora of nonbiblical terms such as “Triunities, Coessentialities, Modalities, eternal Generations, eternal Processions, Incarnations, Hypostatical Unions.” Full of caustic humor, Biddle called the language of trinitarian theology as befitting alchemists and “Conjurers” rather than Christians, especially those who adhere to the notion of sola scriptura (“keep themselves wholly to the word of God”)!'*’ Then he excoriated the Presbyterians and other Puritans who had signed the Solemn League and Covenant for dissimulation, since in the “close of the second Article of the Covenant,” the signatories swore to uphold pure religion by adhering only to the One God, and the confession of the Trinity was a clear contradiction of this serious covenant, entered into by the House of Commons on September 25, 1643."

Biddle acknowledged the role played by the Spirit in creation, calling it “the instrument of God,” although he vociferously denied that this unique role of the Spirit in creation could in any way be equated with the Spirit’s deity.'*? However, what is quite intriguing was the contextual nature of this

Rescuing Scripture 43 1648 Confession of Faith. Biddle, perhaps goaded by the draconian trinitarian enforcers, adopted a triadic form to describe the persons of God. In articles 1, 2, 3, and 6, Biddle articulated his quasi-trinitarianism this way: Article I. I Believe, That there is one most high God, Creator of heaven and earth, and first cause of all things pertaining to our salvation, and consequently the ultimate object of our Faith and Worship; and that this God is none but the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the first Person of the holy TRINITY. Article II. I believe, That there is one chief Son of the most High God, or spiritual, heavenly, and perpetual Lord and King, set over the Church by God, and second cause of all things pertaining to our salvation, and consequently, the intermediate object of our Faith and Worship: and that this Son of the most High God is none but Jesus Christ, the second Person of the HOLY TRINITY. Article UI. I believe, That Jesus Christ, to the intent he might be our Brother, and have a fellow feeling of our infirmities, and so become the more ready

to help us... hath no other then a humane nature, and therefore in this very nature is not onely a Person, (since none but a humane persons can be our Brother) but also our Lord, yea our God.... Article VI. I believe that there is one principal Minister of God and Christ, peculiarly sent from Heaven to sanctifie the Church, who, by reason of his eminency and intimacy with God, is singled out of the number of the other heavenly Ministers or Angels, and comprised in the Holy TRINITY, being the third person thereof; and that this Minister of God and Christ is the holy Spirit.’°°

Despite the trinitarian appearance and triadic formulation of his Confession, Biddle qualified his “trinitarianism” by speaking of the fact that Jesus had no other than a “humane nature,” thereby denying the Chalcedonian orthodoxy of the two-nature doctrine. Moreover, in his theological exegesis of Matthew 1:20, the annunciation narrative of Jesus, Biddle asserted that since the birth of Jesus needed the “assistance of the Holy Spirit to furnish him with a Humane Nature,’ this proved that he could in no way be the eternal Son of God, “coessential with the Father.”!’!

Consequently, declared Biddle, although Jesus was worthy of worship as the intermediate object, one had always to remember that he was subordinate to the Father in both the economy of salvation and ontology, as he adduced exegetical proofs from Isaiah 9:5-6 (not 9:6-7, as Biddle mistakenly notes), Romans 9:5, John 20:28, and John 1:1, among numerous others. The Isaianic text was a locus classicus for establishing the divine nature and office of the Messiah,

who was identified by Christians—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—as referring to Christ's messianic person and work. Biddle’s theological exegesis of this text defied easy caricature: he did affirm the messianic nature of this text, that it made “full and perfect sense” in Christ. Yet by translating the

44 MYSTERY UNVEILED Hebrew “el gibbor” as “a mighty God,’ and not “the most High God,” Biddle sought to demonstrate that Christ was a subordinate deity vis-a-vis the Father,

thereby avoiding the typical trinitarian conclusion.'’” In a similar fashion, Biddle translated theos in Romans 9:5, due to its anarthrous use—without the definite article—as “a God,” rather than “God” simpliciter, thus rendered the traditionally Christological phrase as “over all a God,” instead of “God over all,” as had been the orthodox translation. Biddle’s theologic proceeded in this way: if Christ were truly “God over all,” wouldn't it have to necessarily include the Father, and wouldnt that be a preposterous inference to be drawn to say

that Christ was the Father? Thus, that translation could not obtain. In that regard, we can see that Biddle’s exegesis was guided by his antitrinitarian theo-

logical perspectives and presuppositions, just as the trinitarian exegesis was also guided by a theological and exegetical trajectory. Biddle quickly enjoined that Jesus is “a God over all save the Father,” and this dignity was not civil or humanly originating, “but Divine.”! John 20:28 was regarded in seventeenth-century culture of biblical exegesis as the first Christological confession in the New Testament, and it seems Biddle was cognizant of the force of this confession, uttered by the erstwhile “doubting Thomas.” In fact, Biddle maintained that “the words of Christ plainly shew that Thomas believed him to be his Lord, and his God” because of the fact of the resurrection. Yet, Biddle answers in the negative the follow-up query: “Doth this now argue Christ to be the most High God?” His rationale was that 1 Timothy 1:17 described the most high God as “invisible” and in the same epistle further described this God as one “none of men... hath seen, nor can see.” And yet Jesus was described as “the Image of the Invisible God” in Colossians 1:15 and appeared in human flesh. ‘Thus, unless a tautological case can be maintained, Biddle contended, Jesus could not simultaneously be the invisible God and the image of the invisible God. The Christological confession of Thomas, therefore, received a fuller canonical modification and was interpreted as a God, not as God with a fully vested ontological status of the Supreme Deity.'** Clearly antitrinitarian notions such as Biddle’s were entering the mainstream of English religious literature, and it was not too long before they were refuted by the alarmed trinitarians. He was also involved in the translation work of the Racovian Catechism (figure 1.1), which created a furor among the godly as well. John Owen, accompanied by fourteen other concerned ministers, presented a petition on February 10, 1652, designed as an interventionist move prompted

by the publication of Biddle’s translation of the Racovian Catechism.'” After submitting their formal Humble Proposals to the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel on February 18, the printed version was published on March 31.'*° About eight months later, in December 1652, Owen and others presented another set of Proposals for the furtherance and propagation of the Gospell in this Nation. They offered sixteen commentaries designed to

Rescuing Scripture 45

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further illuminate the fundamentals of faith. They clearly presented the sole sufficiency of Scripture for salvation (article 1) and explicitly afhrmed the radical Creator-creature distinction (article 3), perhaps to obviate the heresies of Laurence Clarkson and other Ranter radicals whose inordinate identification with Christ led them to blur the distinction between Christ-in-them. The framers of the Proposals further articulated the triune nature of God (article 4) and the simultaneous divinity and humanity of Jesus the mediator between God and humanity (articles 5 through 8). In article 9, a clear anti-Socinian

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46 MYSTERY UNVEILED language of afhrming Christ as Redeemer emerged: “who by paying a Ransom, and bearing our sins, hath made satisfaction for them.”'*’ Moreover, supple-

mentary to article 3, in the article 11, the unique mediatorial role and the ontological status of Jesus, “the only God and Man in one Person,” is reaffirmed, thereby occluding the ontological confusion some Ranters, Seekers, and Quakers had with regard to the extent of the communion with Christ.'** As shown later in our analysis of Biddle’s text of Twofold Catechism, it is rather

striking that Biddle presented a nearly point-by-point refutation of the articles of faith laid out in Owen's Proposals for the furtherance...of the Gospell. Three points of comparison shall suffice, aside from the aforementioned stark contrasts (the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the two-nature doctrine of Christ): in article 12, the total human depravity, thus the utter impossibility of humanity to awaken itself to come to a saving knowledge of God, is clearly taught. In Twofold

Catechism, Biddle assiduously argued against that, pointing out that original human will was not completely lost, thus with relatively unimpaired volitionalpower, humanity could respond to the divine grace shown in Christ the exemplar savior. Similarly, in article 13, Owen and his colleagues presented sola fide as their understanding of the pathway of justification, without works, and made a clear distinction between justification and sanctification (article 14). On the contrary, Biddle averred that such a distinction between justification and sanctification led only to antinomianism and would inexorably vitiate, if not destroy,

the fabric of Christian living. Last, in article 16, the framers of the Proposals clearly presented their belief in the eschatological judgment, from which some will enter “everlasting life,” and others into “everlasting condemnation,” a clearly antiannihilationist position designed to obviate the Socinian view. Yet such was precisely what Biddle repudiates in his emphasis on mortalism. V

Twofold Catechism and the Maturing of Biddle’s Antitrinitarianism Biddle’s Twofold Catechism (1654)—burned by the hangman and causing the vice chancellor of Oxford University to write a major refutation—shows his mature antitrinitarian perspectives. Biddle’s exegetical method was lexical literalism and hermeneutical biblicism in excess. Rejecting all possible figural reading, especially repudiating the received tradition of messianic exegesis of the Hebrew Bible, Biddle continued on in this novel course in Reformation biblical exegesis, preceded by Servetus, Sebastian Castellio, Blandrata, and even Hugo Grotius. Peppered throughout his publications were mordant barbs ridiculing the “brainsick” notions of the trinitarians, whose only exegetical recourse was “mystical readings” of biblical texts or simply attributing that which was beyond human ken as “ineffable mystery.” However, in all of his

Rescuing Scripture 47 writings, Biddle never specifically named an author or particular text to instantiate his attack on trinitarian exegetical tradition and trajectory—that is, until Twofold Catechism (figure 1.2). In the preface, Biddle writes of an “otherwise a very learned and intelligent man” who had written Conjectura Cabbalistica.

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Figure 1.2 The title page of John Biddle, A Twofold Catechism (1654). © The British Library Board, London.

48 MYSTERY UNVEILED Who was this author? How repugnant did Biddle find this Conjectura that he singles out this man and his book? Conjectura Cabbalistica was written by Henry More (1614-89), a Cambridge Platonist who, along with Ralph Cudworth and Benjamin Whichcote, led a movement designed to simultaneously offer a putative via media over against the particularistic and predestinarian dogmatism of the Puritan Calvinists, on the one hand, and over against the materialistic tendencies within Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes, on the other.'*”” Biddle was convinced that by espousing

the Christianity as envisaged in The Twofold Catechism—that is, by adopting the hermeneutic of literalism—the threefold dangers, “the abominable Idolatries of the Papists, all the superstitious fopperies of the Turks, all the licentious Opinions and Practices of the Ranters,” could be obviated. Were the English Christians to continue to “impose our Figures & Allegories on the plain words of God,” two immediate dangers present themselves: Scripture can mean whatever one wishes it to be mean, and the “heretical” notion of the Trinity could be defended only by utilizing this type of figural exegesis." Biddle called such a practice of fitting pure and simple Scripture and its own language and logic to the Procrustean bed of Greek philosophy “a Nose of wax” in three different places of the preface to Twofold Catechism."

Henry More had two methodological commitments in his hermeneutics: the first was the idea of divine accommodation in Scripture. Put differently, God had accommodated God’s wisdom and power in a radically curtailed fashion to create the possibility for meaningful communication and communion between God and humanity. The other methodological commitment was that there were “more noble truths” waiting to be deciphered by those who possessed gnosis esoterica in their immersion into the world of the kabbalah. After defining the “Jewish Cabbala” as a “Traditional Doctrine or Exposition of the Pentateuch” that Moses received directly via divine revelation (“from the mouth of God”) and handed down to Joshua and the seventy elders, More argued that it was “profitable for the explaining of the literal sense as well as that more mysterious meaning of the text where it was intended.”’” As A. P. Coudert has noted, More, ironically, wrote his Conjectura Cabbalistica without having any substantial knowledge of the Jewish kabbalistic tradition; he was heavily dependent, instead, on Philo and Maimonides." In his Epistle Dedicatory, written to his fellow Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth, More identified the literary provenance and polemical context of the Conjectura. Irrespective of how his efforts were interpreted, More was

sufficiently confident to assert that he “so plainly therein vindicated the holy Mystery of the Trinity from being (as a very bold Sect would have it) a meer Pagan invention.” This “very bold Sect” was none other than Socinians, for from Servetus onward to Biddle, an undergirding common thread that

Rescuing Scripture 49 created the antitrinitarian tapestry was this conviction that the doctrine of the Trinity owed far more to Plato than to primitive Christianity. Consequently, More’s polemical strategy was to establish the following: (1) Plato was not so novel or ingenious after all, for the gist of Platonic theology that allegedly provided all the ideological fodder for the doctrine of the Trinity had already been adumbrated in Moses. (2) In fact, Plato had borrowed the material from Moses. (3) Since Plato borrowed from Moses, and since “Christ is nothing but Moses unveiled,” the idea of the Trinity, already shown in embryonic phases in the Mosaic period, receives its full revelation with the Incarnation of the

Word." It was in the course of offering a lacerating critique of the traditional Christian doctrines of divine incorporeality, immutability, omnipresence, and omniscience that we see Biddle explicitly blaming Henry More and his fellow Cambridge Platonists for adopting the supposedly sublime notions of Plato while eschewing the uncouth expressions of Scripture. Biddle was convinced that the right exegesis of Psalms 44:23, 121:4 and Isaiah 1:14, 40:28 would lead any sincere Christian to adopt the view that God has feelings, that God changes God’s mind. Biddle argued that More, in his Conjectura Cabbalistica,

sought to present Christianity as a sophisticated religion, and in doing so, More and “other learned men...entertain such conceits of God and Christ, as are repugnant to the current of the Scripture, whilst they set so high a rate on the sublime indeed, but uncertain notions of the Platonists, and in the mean time slight the plain, but certain letter of the sacred Writers.” For More and the Cambridge Platonists, the seemingly rustic expressions, utterly offensive to the enlightened sensibilities of the cultured pagan despisers of the faith, were regarded “far below the Divine Majesty, and written only to comply with the rude apprehensions of the vulgar,” thereby necessitating the rise of “mystical Interpretation” of Platonism.’” For Biddle, all trinitarians were guilty as More was charged. It was a matter of degrees of allegorical exegesis and typological excesses, not of kind.

The main concern for Biddle was that this treatise thrust forward to the religious imagination of the English Protestants that one can “invent a new mystical meaning of the Scripture,” and by doing so, Biddle was exceedingly worried, one ends up having “no certain rule to judge of such meanings, as there is of the literal ones.” Mystical reading of the biblical text, according to Biddle, was the only way one could read the Trinity out of the Scripture, and it gave warrant to any hermeneutical trajectory as the interpreter saw fit for one’s own polemical purposes.'* So Biddle inveighed against Conjectura: But it is no marvel that this Author, & other learned men with him, entertain such conceits of God and Christ, as are repugnant to the current of the

50 MYSTERY UNVEILED Scripture, whilst they set so high a rate on the sublime indeed, but uncertain notions of the Platonists, and in the mean time slight the plain, but certain letter of the sacred Writers, as being far below the Divine Majesty, and written only to comply with the rude apprehensions of the vulgar, unless by a mystical Interpretation they be scrued [sic] up to Platonism. This is the stone at which the Pride of learned men hath caused them continually to stumble, namely, to think that they can speak more wisely and worthily of God, then he hath spoken of himself in his Word.'”

The tragic consequence of this mystical reading was that a “Babylonish confusion of language” crept into the simplicity of primitive Christianity. The undergirding historical perspective of Biddle is entirely typical among the radical Restorationists, among whom were the Socinians: the true gospel lost its purity due to the Platonist hijacking in the postapostolic period. While

the hegemonic struggle continued on between the Nazarenes (those who espoused simple biblical religion, shorn of the Platonist straitjacket) and the self-styled Catholics, it was not until the officializing of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine, and the subsequent triumph of the imperial-sanctioned Catholicism at the Council of Nicaea, that the sad fate of the losers was determined. In that light, then, it is hardly a surprise that Biddle would take up two and a half pages of his preface simply to list the “horrid expressions” that clouded the judgment of the simple Christian. Words and phrases such as “Divine Circumincession, of an Eternal Generation... of an Hypostatical Union, of a Communication of Properties... of Original sin...of Christs making satisfaction to God for our sins... or his meritorious obedience both active and passive...of irresistible workings of the Spirit in bringing men to believe” were all inventions of priestcraft conspiring with the emperor, whether Constantine or Cromwell, to hereticate and extirpate the true “meer Christians.”"* That there were two competing, if not contradictory, versions of Christian orthodoxy, “that which Christ and his Apostles taught,” that stood in stark contrast to the scholastic divinity concocted from the Christian Platonists, was the trenchant critique of what passed for trinitarian orthodoxy.

At first blush, especially compared to the Quakers, who held to a more dynamic view of Scripture—who, pace the “dead letter” of written Scripture, adhered to the “living Christ” in the hearts of the believers—Biddle’s Twofold Catechism was, in many ways, straightforward Puritan divinity, at least with regard to its doctrine of Scripture.’ ‘Then immediately thereafter, Biddle’s theological wheels came falling off, at least in the eyes of his trinitarian critics, when he argued that the one God is none other than “the Father.”'*? Biddle’s radical hermeneutical literalism led him to espouse that God did “repent” of the fact that “he had made man, and it grieved him at his heart.” Moreover,

Rescuing Scripture 31 Biddle took seriously the idea that God “did tempt Abraham.” His dogged biblicism was simply ill-equipped to square the issues of divine omniscience and

immutability of divine will and the anthropomorphic uses of God's acts in time. Thus it led Biddle to radically curtail God’s omniscience and omnipotence, as did other Socinians."*'

The most heretical notion, however, had to do with Biddle’s Christology. Whereas his Puritan opponents saw the miracles of Christ as a vindication of his deity, Biddle saw them as a sign of divine investiture, or the role given to Christ by the Father, but not as a signifier of his deity.!* By creating a catena of Johannine texts in which Jesus acknowledges that he was sent by the Father, he can do nothing by himself, he does everything that pleases the Father, and the Father was greater than he, Biddle demonstrated the subordinate, indeed

creaturely, nature of Christ.’ Then he quoted from the Pauline text often known as the Socinians’ proof-text of Christ’s being eternally subordinate to the Father, 1 Corinthians 15:24, 28: “when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God even the Father,’ then “the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” As we have seen in Best’s

exegesis earlier, he appropriated this to prove his antitrinitarianism; such is Biddle’s exegetical strategy as well.'”'

One major difference between Best’s and Biddle’s antitrinitarianism was the stress placed on Christ being a rightful object of worship in Biddle’s theology. To be sure, Best did not deny it, but it was not an integral part of his Christology. For Biddle, on the contrary, it was a key component of his anthropology, Christology, and eschatology, and as we shall see in chapter 3, this formed a key arsenal in Peter Gunning’s attack on Biddle as an idolator. Gunning contended that to worship a glorified creature, even Jesus, was tantamount to breaking the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). Gunning also equated this liturgical praxis of Biddle with that of the papists, an ultimate insult for Biddle indeed. ‘Thus, Biddle had no qualms in affirming that both before and after the resurrection, people did worship Christ (Matthew 14.33; John 9:35-38), yet on the other hand, he reso-

lutely stated that the reason of this cultic worship ascribed to Jesus was not “because they conceive him to be very God of very God” or because he was “eternally begotten out of the Divine essence.” Eschewing such metaphysical or Platonic verbiage and ideology, Biddle consistently referred to the resurrection as the precipitating cause.'” Intimately connected to his belief in the partial depravity of humanity and the role of Christ primarily as a moral exemplar was Biddle’s resolute refusal to embrace the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in the believer, which was a Calvinistic shibboleth in seventeenth-century England. He cited from Romans 4:5 to argue that it was the believer’s faith that is “counted for righteousness.”'”°

52 MYSTERY UNVEILED In his chapter “Keeping the Commandment,” Biddle emphasized that just as faith without works is dead, so a true justifying faith had to accompany works. This was a clear Arminian emphasis, which Biddle appropriates in his anti-Calvinist divinity. Yet at the same time, it was not as if Calvinistic practical divinity was devoid of emphasis on works. As Ian Green has shown in his Christian's ABC, the tripartite division of many catechisms, the Apostles’ Creed (what to believe), the Lord’s Prayer (how to pray), and the Decalogue (how to live), especially the last part, allowed ample opportunity to speak of

Christian ethics and the pathway of working out one’s own salvation.'’ It seems that if the Calvinist Puritans were afraid of the Antinomian bugbear, so were the Arminians even more convinced that once one adopts Calvinism, one inexorably ended up an Antinomian, tout court. Thus one can situate Biddle’s emphasis on the perfectibility of the saint and the absolute necessity of works as vindicatory evidence of true faith.'”* Regarding his eschatology, after affirming that the final judge will be Christ himself, Biddle goes on to offer a view that had been deemed heterodox in the eyes of his Puritan pugilists: Christian mortalism. While the saved will enjoy eternal mirth with Christ, insisted Biddle, those who elect themselves out of the possibility of salvation will embrace “second death,” and they will “utterly perish,” both of which Biddle took to mean total annihilation, extinguishing of the very existence itself.’ For the trinitarian Calvinists, Biddle’s mortalism bore striking resemblance to the Leveller Richard Overton’s Mans Mortalitie (1644), a key text for annihilationism in the 1640s and 1650s and an undeniable influence for Milton’s emerging mortalism.'® As we take leave of Biddle’s Twofold Catechism, it must be mentioned that there is a great deal of theological overlap between the Twofold Catechism (1654) and the Racovian Catechism (1652), which went through his translational hands, as well as through Milton’s hands in approving it for publication.'*' All the aforementioned theological

issues were handled in a nearly identical fashion, thereby confirming the emergence of international Socinianism, just as there had been “international Calvinism” and the Respublica literarum, or at least a commonly shared theological outlook.'*”

Biddle’s concern to inculcate a Socinian view of self, society, and savior extended to catechizing the young as well. In A Brief Scripture-Catechism for Children, which was appended to the Twofold Catechism, Biddle explicitly articulated what, if any, role the term Trinity had in his theology. For him, the triadic formula was, in fact, in existence in the earliest forms of Christianity, as seen in the first-century confession of “one God, one Lord, and one Spirit,” yet this was not the same as acknowledging three persons in one Godhead: far from it. Even the Pauline benedictory formula of 2 Corinthians 13:14 (“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the

Rescuing Scripture 53 holy Spirit be with you all”) could in no way be construed as intimating three distinct persons of the Trinity. This deviation, as Biddle never tired of pointing out, was a direct consequence of the “traditions and commandments of men in after-ages.”'® VI

Biddle’s Patristic Theology in Testimonies of Irenaeus As we have noted earlier, Biddle was known for his classical abilities, being

thoroughly bilingual in Greek and Latin, by the time he entered Oxford.’ Displaying further his firm grasp of the text-critical skills required to assist in the editorial work of the Septuagint published in 1653, Biddle eked out a living by putting his Greek skills to work. The London bookseller Roger Daniel sought out Biddle for he was both “an exact Greecian [sic], and had time enough to follow it.” Working with the Sixtine text, Biddle contributed to the entries on scholia et varia.'© There is another clear indicator of Biddle’s classical skills, this time deployed explicitly for the cause of antitrinitarianism. In 1653, there was a reprint edition of Biddle’s work up to that point titled The Apostolical and True Opinion concerning the Holy Trinity, revived and asserted.

Included in it was The Testimonies of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatianus, Theophilus, Origen, Who lived in the two first Centuries after Christ was born, or thereabouts. According to the Thomason Catalogue, Testimonies of Irenaeus was received sometime in 1650.'®° It reflected Biddle’s heavy emphasis on the ante-Nicene fathers who occupied his theological imagination as he

sought to dislodge the Nicene and post-Nicene formulations on the Trinity as a corruption of the pristine and primitive orthodoxy of Christian monotheism. According to Biddle, this pure Christianity was hijacked by the sophistry of “Platonick” divinity, which had seeped into the foundation of Christianity, thus blinding Alexander, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, and other pro-Nicene theologians and bishops.'” Before we launch into a careful exegesis of this treatise, a brief genealogical survey of this type of literature among the antitrinitarians is in order. In 1568, a tour de force of antitrinitarian biblicism and an exercise in historicism of Christian dogma was published: De falsa et vera unius Dei Patri, Filii et Spiritus Sancti cognitione. It is attributed often to Ferenc David, a leading

Hungarian antitrinitarian who sought to historicize the Nicene trinitarian orthodoxy by adducing the testimony of Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, and even the redoubtable defenders of the Trinity: Cyril, Ambrose, Hilary of Poitiers, and Augustine, all of whom were less than full-orbed trinitarians.'®* ‘The provocative thesis of David was in some ways a

54 MYSTERY UNVEILED divergence from trinitarian orthodoxy further than even that of Servetus, who had maintained the preexistence of the Logos before the Incarnation. David established an uninterrupted concatenation of the Unitarian witness, starting with Jesus himself, then the Apologists in the second century, and on to the third and fourth, except for a major hiccup at the Council of Nicaea. Biddle’s The Testimonies of Irenaeus needs to be situated in this antitrinitarian intellectual milieu. In less than ten years after the publication of Biddle’s Testimonies, Daniel Zwicker, another leading Continental Unitarian, published Irenicum

Irenicorum (1658).'° For Zwicker, like both David and Biddle, it was crucial to establish the non-trinitarian, if not antitrinitarian, nature of the preNicene authorities. Similar to David, Zwicker established a “new tradition” of Unitarian witnesses to show that the Shepherd of Hermas, Clement I, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Irenaeus, and Tertullian

all taught a non-trinitarian view of God. Indeed, a radical subordinationist view of the agent of creation, namely, that the Word was ontologically inferior to God (the Father), was taught with varying degrees of cohesion among these fathers.'”” The epistolary connection between Biddle and a peripatetic Silesian antitrinitarian, Jeremias Felbinger, who might have been a colleague of Zwicker in Amsterdam, provides an intriguing possibility of mutual influence between Biddle and Zwicker.

Biddle’s privileging of ante-Nicene primitivism had a possible etiological link to Servetus as well. Irena Backus has judiciously noted that Calvin's Defensio Orthodoxae Fidei de sacra Trinitate contra errores Serueti (1554) was prompted, in substantial measure, because of the polemically “lethal weapon” given to Servetus, as he hammered away at the theme that on the basis of the ante-Nicene fathers the Trinity was “an unfortunate invention of the Council of Nicaea.” Servetus’s rhetorical strategy pushed Calvin and his allies into the

corner in that, were they to concede his point, then an unbridgeable chasm between the New Testament, the postapostolic church, and the “relatively late council of Nicaea” is established.'”' Needless to say, Servetus, siding with Jesus and Paul, could claim triumph over the Nicene priestcraft and its Platonismladen creed of homoousion, thus over Calvin. Such was precisely the polemical strategy appropriated by Biddle. Seen in this context, then, the full title of Testimonies of Irenaeus becomes all the more intriguing and illuminating. The figures mentioned on the title page, with the exception of Thomas Brightman, a millenarian exegete of the Elizabethan period, were all patristic figures and ante-Nicene writers: Irenaeus,

Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatianus, Theophilus, Origen, Arnobius, and Lactantius. Eusebius and Hilary are adduced as further authorities deemed to buttress Biddle’s authorial intention that, put succinctly, ante-Nicene writers were anti-Nicene, thus identifying trinitarian orthodoxy, both of Nicaea and

Rescuing Scripture 35 of his English contemporaries, as departures from the pristine Christianity of Jesus and the Apostles. Thus, there is a clear undergirding restorationist and primitivist impulse in Biddle. As Mario Turchetti and, more recently, JeanLouis Quantin have argued convincingly, looming behind these antitrinitarian patristic manuals was, ironically, a French Calvinist theologian, Jean Daille. Daillé’s Traité de lemploi des saints Péres (1632) helped launch his career as an internationally renowned author, simultaneously reviled by the Catholics and revered by the Puritan antitrinitarians and protrinitarians who held the first three or four centuries after Christ with varying degrees of suspicion.'”” In England, it was translated in 1651 as A Treatise concerning the Right Use of the Fathers, with a reprint run in 1675.'” The grundmotiv of Daillé’s Right Use of the Fathers was to show that there was doctrinal variance among the early church fathers on any given issue: “that it is no very easie matter to finde out, by the Writings of the Fathers, what hath really been their Opinion, in any of those Controversies, which are now in debate, betwixt the Protestant and the Church of Rome.” The three major reasons were (1) the paucity of extant writings of the fathers, particularly the first three centuries; (2) their religious and polemical contexts were quite different, thereby rendering a one-on-one correspondence a near impossibility; and (3) not all patristic writings circulating in Renaissance Europe were authentic: problems of forgeries, interpolations, and sincere mistakes further confound the effort to establish the true critical text. Intriguingly, for a Calvinist with an unimpeachable commitment to trinitarian orthodoxy, Daillé asserted that the first three centuries “are those, we are most especially to regard.” Again, since Biddle is rather parsimonious with citing sources and influences, it is difficult to establish if he had read Daillé, yet the similar sensibilities are clearly discernible. Biddle takes Daillé’s trajectory to its logical conclusion and denies the authority of the patristic writings after Nicaea completely. Throughout The Testimonies of Irenaeus, Biddle’s ideological commitment to the principle that “ante-Nicene” was “anti-Nicene” is manifestly present. Biddle used the 1545 Paris edition of Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses, which followed the recension of Erasmus.'” In book 1, chapter 2, Irenaeus stressed the unity of the Godhead and the fatherhood of God, thereby leading Biddle to conclude that Irenaeus did not endorse the doctrine of the Trinity. However, as many protrinitarians would aver, the same text could be read as a clue for the triadic formula, which was the basis for Nicene trinitarian orthodoxy. Here is what Irenaeus wrote: “The Church... hath both from the Apostles... received that faith, which is in one God the Father Almighty...and in one Jesus Christ the Son of God, incarnated for our salvation; and in one holy Spirit.” Moreover, while Irenaeus certainly identifies as Jesus as “our Lord, and God, and Saviour and King, according to the good pleasure of the Invisible Father,” Biddle was

56 MYSTERY UNVEILED in no way perturbed to consider the orthodox view of the Trinity, based on this text.!”

Irenaeus maintained against the Gnostics that God, the ineffable and invisible Father, created all things “by his Word and Spirit,” thereby giving “all things a being.” Numerous trinitarians interpreted that passage to indicate the divine identity of the Word and Spirit, for only God can create, and the agents involved in the act of creation had to be divine for them to be able to participate in the drama of creation. However, for Biddle, already committed to radical monotheism sans trinitarianism, there could only be one God. And as such this Creator of all was the “Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”'”’ Biddle, rather intriguingly, cites from Adversus Haereses 3.6.1 and 3.6.2, the two major sections dealing with the identity of those who were called “God” and “Lord.” As one reads carefully, Irenaeus actually seeks to get past the Gnostic quagmire by outrightly identifying Jesus as the One for whom the appellation of God and Lord was not a misnomer. So Irenaeus writes, and Biddle quotes: “No other therefore, as I said before, is named God, or called Lord, but he that is the God and Lord of all, who also said to Moses, I am that I am: and thus shalt thou say to the Children of Israel, He that Is sent me unto you: and his Son Jesus Christ.” However, the intriguing part is the way Biddle quotes from Adversus Haereses here. By stopping his quotation where he does, it is not as clear to Biddle’s reader that Irenaeus actually intended to convey that Jesus Christ is also deserving of the title of God and Lord. Irenaeus goes on to write: “and his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who makes those that believe in His name the sons of God.” In other words, the uniqueness of Christ’s role in the economy of salvation was such that, at least for Irenaeus, the one in whose name humanity believed in for salvation was the Lord of all, namely, Jesus.'” To Biddle’s credit, he tackled the binitarian-leaning theological exegesis of Irenaeus head-on and arrived at his radical monotheism, which emphasized the monopersonality of the Godhead this way. By citing from Adversus Haereses 4.1.1, where Irenaeus sought to refute the teaching of the Gnostics that emphasized the mediatorial role of the Demiurge, Biddle stressed the unique role of God the Father as the only true God. ‘Thus Biddle’s conclusion from the texts of Adversus Haereses was that:

Irenaeus...most firmly believed the Father only to be that one God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; & his son Jesus

Christ...to be that one Lord who received his Dominion from God the Father, and the Holy Spirit, to be neither that one God, nor that one Lord. So that had he not failed in imagining two natures in Christ, he had exactly hit the Doctrine of the HOLY TRINITY delivered in the Scripture.'*°

Rescuing Scripture 37 Fascinating here is the last qualifying statement by Biddle: “had he not failed in imagining two natures in Christ.” With that, Biddle acknowledged that at least a century and a half before Nicaea and Chalcedon, Irenaeus propounded the two-nature doctrine of Christ, which inexorably raised the question of the divinity of Christ and correspondingly the issue of the trinitarian, or at the least the binitarian, nature of God. Conversely, while Irenaeus endorsed the twonature doctrine of Christ, he certainly taught a subordinationist Christology in that the Son was always obedient to the Father’s will, which was appropriated by Biddle to support his grand thesis that Irenaeus and other ante-Nicene fathers would in no way support the creedal formulation at Nicaea. Justin Martyr was the second ante-Nicene writer Biddle cited to support his position. Biddle mistakenly cited the Second Apology—it was the First Apology—where Justin argued for what appears to be a triad of deity the Christians worshiped. In the sixth chapter, Justin wrote, “Father...Son...to gether with the prophetic Spirit we adore and worship,” which was almost an embryonic form of what would become the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, and a few trinitarians appropriated Justin Martyr to advance the opposite conclusion from that of Biddle.’

The very real issue of appropriating patristic authors to suit one’s own polemical position was nowhere more clearly seen than in the example of Thomas James, the first librarian of the Bodelian, Oxford, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His massive undertaking of establishing a reliable critical apparatus of patristic texts was fueled by his desire to revise the Roman Catholic editions of the church fathers. Archbishop Bancroft provided twelve young scholars at Oxford, and James managed to procure fifty-six manuscripts of various fathers. James’s 1623 letter to Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, who was in his own right a first-rate patristic scholar and a highly esteemed member of the “Republic of Letters,” illustrated this well. After having finished the “cleaned” versions of Gregory the Great, Cyprian, and Ambrose, James wrote to Ussher: I find infinite Corruptions in the Fathers Works, especially of the Roman Print: in the Canon Law and Decretals I can convince them of shameless Forgeries by the Parchments. But that which hath amazed or amused the World, and made it turn, or continue Popish, hath been the lack of Censurers of the Fathers Works, which made our Magdeburgians and some of our best learn’d, to lance the Fathers, and not to spare them, whereas they are but Pseudo-Fathers indeed.'*”

Thus it was a matter of establishing the putatively correct critical editions or competing interpretations of the same text that provides the overall picture of

58 MYSTERY UNVEILED the use of the fathers during this period. Anthony Milton rightly notes that James's patristic scholarship was fueled by his antipopery, and we see the same sensibilities with Biddle.'*? Biddle continued on to cite and provide running commentaries on Dialogue with Trypho. After a citation from chapter 48, he

concluded that “Justin Martyr did not think it inconsistent that Jesus should be the Christ, although he had no other then a Human nature; Secondly, that divers Christians, whom Iustin himself owned for such, for he saith that they were of the same kinde and opinion with him, did then de facto affirm that Jesus, whom they counted the Christ had none but a Humane nature.”"** What

was intriguing about Biddle’s interpretation was that Justin’s own authorial intent seemed to have been showing Trypho, an earnest Jew, that Christ was the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies. Furthermore, from chapter 55, Justin directly responded to Trypho’s request to demonstrate the deity of Christ. For instance, Biddle quotes from Justin: “God which is said...to have appeared to Abraham, Jacob and Moses is another then the God that made all things” to show that not only was this a pre-Incarnate appearance of Christ but precisely because it was other than the Creator of all things, Christ could not, therefore, be God in the biblical sense of the term. Biddle also took seriously Justin’s perspective on the subordination of the Son to the Father, not only economically but also ontologically. Although it might indeed have been the case that Justin was not a full-blown trinitarian, nor believed in ousia or hypostasis, yet it also seems rather clear that Justin did lean in the direction of believing in the deity of Christ.'® In his treatment of Tertullian, Biddle again emphasized that God’s nature was one and the Father was the “fountain of all divinity,’ while bemoaning that Tertullian “imagined Christ to have two Natures.” Nevertheless, Biddle offered this rejoinder: Tertullian did “not suppose him to be coeternal and coequal with the Father, in that he saith God did first of all produce him, and that there was a time when the Son was not.’'*° Here, Biddle entered an interpretative minefield. There seems to be a bit of theological/textual tension in capita 5 of Adversus Praxean. On the one hand, Tertullian did affirm, “God was before the constitution of the world, even to the generation of the Son,” whereas in the same chapter, Tertullian asserted, “Yet even then, was he not alone, for he had with him, what he had in himself, namely his reason,” which was followed by his paraphrasis of the Johannine Prologue: “the word or speech was in the beginning with God.”'* In a humorous polemical trope, Biddle conveniently attributed any high view of the Holy Spirit that attributed deity to the Spirit as a charismatic lapse of Tertullian while he was “delusional” as a Montanist.’** As we will see in chapter 3, the intransigent Laudian patristic scholar Herbert Thorndike used the same text of Adversus Praxean to “prove” the exact opposite point, that Tertullian believed in the deity of Christ, thereby

Rescuing Scripture 39 once again confirming the elusive nature of theological consensus by hearkening to patristic writings, even with the very same text.'* Biddle exploited the tensions within Tertullian concerning the economic order as a possible clue for the ontological inequality among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For many trinitarians, Tertullian was read as endorsing a monarchian view of the Trinity, whereby the Father was, due to his being the fons divinitatis (the source of divinity for all three divine Persons), greater than the Son and the Spirit, even though all three persons were, in varying degrees, divine.'”” Throughout the Testimonies of Irenaeus, Biddle kept his personal editorializing comments to a minimum, opting instead to create catenae of ante-Nicene

texts and let the order and concatenation itself reflect Biddle’s particular interpretive perspective. Biddle then proceeded to cite from Lactantius, a fourth-century North African apologist who had been a pupil of Arnobius, particularly from his Divinarum Institutionum. In book 4, Lactantius deals with true religion in general and more specifically with Christology. Biddle cites from the last quarter of chapter 14 to further bolster his subordinationist Christology, anchoring it in the last clause wherein Lactantius speaks of the eternal priesthood of Christ, which he received as a consequence of his obedience to the will of the One who sent him: “he received the dignity of a perpetual Priest, and the honour of a Soveraign King, and the power of a judge and

the name of a God.” In this intriguing translational exercise, Biddle rendered “sacerdotis...regis...judicis...¢ Dei” as “a priest, a king, a judge” and most importantly “a God.” That translational decision certainly reflected Biddle’s theological predilection of attributing to Christ a received status of deity, but not as the one and true God who, for Biddle, could only be the Father.'”' In his further interaction with Lactantius, Biddle cited from book 4, chapter 29, where a substantial part of the chapter was devoted to an explication of the fact that the Father was the fons divinitatis (fount of divinity) of the Son. Biddle appropriated Lactantius for his polemical purposes, not only by what he quoted but also by what he left out. In the quoted text, Biddle had “... because he faithfully obeyeth the will of the Father, and never doth or did but what the Father either willed, or commanded.——For there is one onely, free, Most High God, without original.”'”* Thusly cited, Lactantius’s text was construed as teaching a radical

monarchian and subordinationist ontological relation between the Father and the Son. However, the original of Divinarum Institutionum, especially the part skipped over by Biddle (noted by the dash in the quoted text) helps illuminate the tension within Lactantius’s ontology of the Father and the Son. Assuredly, Biddle correctly interpreted Lactantius as teaching the economic superiority of the Father vis-a-vis the Son; however, in the omitted part, what Lactantius wrote is rather telling: “Finally, Isaiah explained that there was one God, as much father as son,” then offered a messianic or binitarian exegesis of two

60 MYSTERY UNVEILED Isaianic texts, 45:14 and 44:6, which Biddle ostensibly excised from the text quoted because they would militate against his authorial intention of utilizing this ante-Nicene father.'”’ So perhaps the ante-Nicene voices were not so unison in opposing the plurality within the Godhead, Biddle’s selective quotation of these patristic texts notwithstanding. In other words, Biddle was certainly correct in pointing out the seemingly inchoate, or at least unsettled, nature of pre-Nicene witnesses regarding the ontological status of the triune persons, especially that of the Word made flesh, Christ, thereby siding with Daillé’s view that “patristic consensus’ was virtually oxymoronic. Nonetheless, to see the ante-Nicene perspectives as merely anti-Nicene would push the hermeneutical fulcrum to one extreme. There was perhaps equally as great a tension as there was certitude about the precise ontological makeup of the Son and the Holy Spirit and their relationship with the Father. Then, Biddle offered a truly sweeping indictment, or at least an interpretation of the decline of the pristine Christianity since the time of Jesus. It is interesting that he noted that the loss of purity of the faith in the man Jesus came about, ironically, with the Gospel of John. Partly out of the desire to avoid the scandal that would accompany worship of “a crucified Man,” deemed exceedingly odious among “Jews and Pagans,” Biddle averred that even as early as the end of the first century CE saw the deification of Jesus the man and the invention of the two-nature doctrine, to an extent because a number of the postapostolic apologists and Christians were “great Admirers of Plato” and, as Justus Lipsius argued, while they had in “outward profession so put-on Christ, as they in heart they did not put-off Plato.” This was a fascinating statement, articulating rather early in the 1650s, nearly half a century ahead of Jacques Souverain, that there was an unfortunate Platonic captivity of the pure church.’ The sign of the declension of the church was the encroachment of Platonic modality of thought in the development of the two-nature Christology, and yet, this systemic gangrene did not spread too far to cause the ante-Nicene patristic writers to affirm a full-blown trinitarian theology of the Nicene variety.’”°

Vil

Transplanting Socinianism, Politicizing Biddle’s Case Biddle’s metacritique of the primitive Christianity hijacked by Platonistic Nicene and post-Nicene theology continued throughout his writings after Testimonies of Irenaeus. In this section, we briefly survey his two translations, work done, probably while he was incarcerated, in the early 1650s: a biogra-

phy of Faustus Socinus and Dissertatio de Pace ec., and the complex issue

Rescuing Scripture 61 of politics of heresy and orthodoxy in the Interregnum.'”® Biddle’s Twofold Catechism earned him another imprisonment, and by December 12, 1654, the House created a committee to consider his Apostolical and True Opinion and Twofold Catechism as containing “impious and blasphemous Opinions” regarding the Trinity. On that day, it was resolved that Biddle be sent for in custody, after having been set free on February 10, 1652, as a beneficiary of the Act of Oblivion." On December 13, 1654, however, Biddle was examined twice, first for his view on the deity of the Holy Spirit, the second for the deity of Christ. For both, Biddle maintained that he stood by what his Apostolical and True Opinion and Twofold Catechism taught concerning them: a manifest denial due to the silence of Scripture on those points.’"¥ On December 21, 1654, an extraordinarily calculated event took place, unlikely a mere “curious irony

of fate.” As Biddle, John Cottrell (Biddle’s printer), and Richard Moone (his publisher) were in Gatehouse jail, a Biddle translation, Dissertatio de Pace, was delivered to members of Parliament.’ Philip Dancy and ‘Thomas Carpenter were responsible for bringing copies of Dissertatio de Pace to the House, and while Dancy did not crack under pressure, Carpenter relented and gave up

the name of John Daniel, an apprentice of Moone, to be the one who had ordered him to deliver the copies, thereby making it highly improbable that it was some coincidence. It is quite possible that Moone, Cottrell, and perhaps even Biddle arranged for copies of Dissertatio be brought forward as an act of ultimate challenge and to create further buzz in the public sphere.*”’ Their supposition turned out to be prophetic, as we shall note later. Protestations against the Cromwellian government's betrayal of tender consciences would press Cromwell to act, which ultimately led to Biddle’s banishment to the Isle of Scilly. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Why was Dissertatio de Pace so controversial? Upon a closer examination, one does notice a good deal of overlap between Samuel Przipkowski's (Przipcovius) Dissertatio de Pace and Biddle’s oeuvre up to 1653. At the same

time, Dissertatio offered more developed Socinian theological reflections, which Biddle’s biblicism and his penchant for writing catechisms did not allow.

In chapter 4, true to the Socinian perspective, Przipkowski argued that “erring persons may have” faith and the Holy Spirit. Erring in what? Trinity and all the metaphysical niceties encumbered with that, so averred Przipkowski. A logically expected, nonetheless ingenious, move made in Dissertatio de Pace was to show that the fundamentals of Christianity were encapsulated in the terms of the new covenant: faith in and obedience to Christ, the Son of God.*"' Throughout Dissertatio de Pace, there were repeated emphases on the nondamnable nature of one’s failure to know and confess the essence of God, especially if the mystery of Trinity was, by definition, unknowable.*” Conceding, for the purpose of polemic, that the trinitarians were in the right

62 MYSTERY UNVEILED and that the Socinians lacked the requisite theological sophistication that the trinitarians were endowed with, Przipkowski argued that the Socinians did their epistemic best, though their “bare error of minde” prevented them from arriving at the sanctioned trinitarian theology.*” If heresy was defined as a willful disobedience to the clearly revealed will of God, then Dissertatio de Pace indefatigably maintained, how could they be regarded as disobedient “who do not fully understand a mystery, which is no-where commanded to be fully understood?”?""

In chapter 6, Przipkowski espouses a Socinian version of apophatic theology, with a clear “democratic” bent. He articulates the following points: 1. Very few people can “penetrate into those abstruser secrets of sublime doctrines,” and yet fundamental articles ought to be such that they are known to, and knowable by, all. 2. Even the “Samosatenians” affirm the Trinity, but where they differ concerns the “difference of Essences and Persons,” communicatio idiomatum, and other aspects of Christology and trinitarian theology. 3. If one is “of the duller sort” that one fails to grasp the intricacies of the trinitarian doctrine, one should not “impute” that failure to “wickedness,” when in fact it has more to do with his epistemological “weakness.” 4. Furthermore, it is not merely the duller sort of Christians whose epistemological weakness prevents them from apprehending such a sublime doctrine. By definition, the mystery of the Trinity is such that it “never was, never will be comprehended by the minde of man.”””” In other words, if the Socinians could not put their heads around to confess the doctrine of the Trinity, it was not ascribable to their moral turpitude, but to their epistemological improper functioning. Nevertheless, Pryzpkowski attacked the hubris of the protrinitarians who dared to offer maxims upon axioms regarding the ineffable mystery of the Trinity, which, according to Pryzpkowski, was a self-contradictory exercise. In fact, Pryzpkowski bracketed off the possibility of epistemological certitude in this life, deferring it as an eschatological reality. What he proffered, in place of an acerbic and bellicose trinitarian dogmatism, was that “Faith, Hope, and Charity, are sufficient to Salvation.”*”° Thus Przipkowski’s plea for clemency for the “epistemologically-challenged” Socinians continued to be heard in the last two decades of the seventeenth century. Not only was Dissertatio de Pace republished in 1684 but also Richard Baxter, Stephen Nye, and John Locke, among others, pushed similar lines of

argumentation for toleration and the type of “mere Christianity” that God would reward so long as one did one’s epistemic best.*””

Rescuing Scripture 63 After the hubbub created by the Dissertatio de Pace incident had cooled down, on February 10, 1655, Biddle was released on bail, on condition that he report to the court in the beginning of the next term. However, since Oliver Cromwell dissolved Parliament on May 28, 1655, Biddle was released at the court of the Upper King’s Bench. Yet Biddle indefatigably continued his campaign to divulge the canard of the doctrine of the Trinity. So within a month, he was reincarcerated after holding a disputation with John Griffin in a new meeting house at St. Paul’s, “in presence of 500 persons” eagerly watching, on June 28, 1655.7" Biddle’s cause célébre became the veritable eye of the polemical hurricane in the middle part of the 1650s. While the issue of Biddle’s heresy was hotly debated

in November 1654, as a subcommittee of fourteen divines (including Richard Baxter and the “over-orthodox doctors” John Owen and Francis Cheynell) met to define more precisely what orthodoxy entailed, An Humble Advise to the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor was presented. ‘The pro-Biddle petitioners drove the wedge between the Marian martyrs and the self-styled Protestant Reformers of John Owen and Thomas Edwards’s ilk. They also roundly criticized the grave dangers of an Erastian ecclesiastical settlement: “the first evil which attends the Magistrates to incite and stir them up against conscientious persons, is the mistaken or uninformed zeal of Prosecutors... who having got an ordinance, or Act of Parliament, the Decree of a Councell, or Assembly of Divines, declaring such or such opinions to be Blasphemous, Heretical, or Schismatical, think they need no more for their warrant,” but use that politically expeditious connection to hereticate the “conscientious persons.” Here one can see a not so thinly veiled critique of all state-sanctioned convocations, councils, assemblies, and their doctrinal formularies to be used as litmus tests of orthodoxy. Furthermore, the petitioners assiduously pointed out the godly character and “conversation” of Biddle. They averred that his denial of the Trinity ought never to have received the censure apropos for the “most notorious Thieves, Harlots, and Murtherers, sending for them by like Warrants,” yet in the case of Biddle, his bail was refused, and he was scheduled to be “tried for his life as a Blasphemer.” Throughout An Humble Advise, the tone was such that the godly magis-

trate had been hoodwinked by the overorthodox and doctrinaire zeal of a small faction among the godly.” In one fell swoop, the petitioners pointed out that the “imperfect Vote” of Parliaments, “Synods, Councels or Assemblies” have most “grossly erred,” starting with the example of the rabble instigated by Demetrius the silversmith in Acts 19 and continuing with the Council of Constance (1414-1418), in which Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague were burned under egregiously specious charges. As a polemical clincher, the petitioners cited the successive councils of Nicaea I (325 cE) and Ariminum (359 cE).?!°

64 MYSTERY UNVEILED If one council, namely, at Nicaea, determined the consubstantial nature of the Son vis-a-vis the Father, whereas in the next at Ariminum, with no fewer than 400 bishops, it was decreed that “the Son of God was not the most high God, but a distinct Essence from him, and subordinate unto him,” then the punch line could not be lost: “which of these two councils was right?”*"' The irony of using the example of the Council of Ariminum could not be lost on astute English Protestant readers. In both John Jewel’s and George Abbot's defense of ecclesiastical legitimacy, indeed, of the putatively apostolic succession, of the Church of England, vis-a-vis the Roman Catholics, the Council of Ariminum was listed as a botched-up case showing the inconsistency of conciliarism.*'” Hence, we see that the tolerationist rhetoric was becoming far

more sophisticated than mere arguments from natural law. It was now utilizing the “twisted” histories of ecclesiastical councils as a way of reminding Parliamentarians of the inherent danger of “voting for orthodoxy,” thus violating one’s conscience. Similarly, in July 1655, a number of London General Baptists submitted a petition to the Cromwellian government on Biddle’s behalf, citing both the

illegality of Biddle’s current imprisonment and the thorny issue of liberty of conscience. In The Spirit of Persecution Again broken loose, published by the infamous radical London bookseller, Richard Moone, the comparison between the treatment given to John Biddle and to the London Baptist preacher William Kiffin was juxtaposed. The Spirit of Persecution argued that Biddle

did “heartily acknowledge” Christ to be “his LORD and GOD,” though not the “Almighty or most High God,” and this view accurately reflected Biddle’s published Christological views.’'* This pamphlet was designed as a clever rhe-

torical ploy, pushing the right political button for Cromwell by urging him to see that this farcical imprisonment of Biddle was making him “stalking Horse to carry on the old Presbyterian designe of persecution.” Moreover, these petitioners reminded Cromwell that he had gone through “Fire and Water” to procure for the greatest number of English people the hard-won right of “liberty of Religion,” which Cromwell had deemed, “a natural Light,” if not natural right.* Then the petitioners thrust the law of the land into the face of the vacillating Cromwellians, namely, Article 37 of the Instrument of Government: “That such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ, (though differing in Judgement from the Doctrine, Discipline, and Worship publickly held forth,) shall not be restrained from... the profession of their faith and exercise of their religion.”* This delicately phrased language, “faith in God by Jesus Christ,’ could very well include those who differed on the trinitarian doctrine, as the petitioners rightly saw. ‘There was yet another pamphlet, received by the London bookseller George Thomason a week before he had The Spirit of Persecution again broken loose, on July 14, 1655, in which the impassioned plea

Rescuing Scripture 65 and rational defense of Biddle’s nonheretical and nonblasphemous work was given. In A True State of the Case of Liberty of Conscience in the Common-wealth

of England. Together with a true Narrative of the Cause, Manner, of Mr. John Biddle’s Sufferings, the proponents for Biddle’s release from prison launched a probabilist argument based on the explicit language of, again, Article 37 of the Instrument of Government. Here, perhaps informed by the Przipkowski-Biddle publication of Dissertatio de Pace, Biddle’s supporters introduced an argument based, not on doctrinal precision, rather on sincerity, just as Dissertatio had argued for the toleration of Socinianism. Insofar as there was “zeal and love,” one’s doctrinal infelicities can, and will, be overlooked by God.’'® The proBiddle writers offered effusive praise of Oliver Cromwell for personally ensuring that the more inclusive—or ambiguous, depending on whether you were an antitrinitarian or protrinitarian—articles of faith, namely, 35, 36, 37, and 38, were passed to preserve “Liberty of Conscience.” After a brief analysis of the annals of the English Reformation, the writers reminded Cromwell and the others that under Mary, the “grossest Errors” such as belief in transubstantiation passed for “the most Orthodox Truths,” whereas the persecuted truths adhered to by Protestants were declared to be most heterodox, only to

be vindicated as most orthodox after the smoldering flames of persecution were put out. Similarly, the present-day persecution of Biddle was likely to be “accounted worthy of the names of Martyrs” in the future. The writers of this plea for Biddle articulated religious truth as a function of political power, and not vice versa, as they specifically cited the example of “Athanasians and Arians,’ whom the ebbs and flows of political fortune often made orthodox in one decade and heretics in the next.*”

Perhaps due to the persistent lobbying of the more radical tolerationists, Biddle was released from the Newgate prison on July 27, 1655.*'* On October 5, 1655, in a move designed to quell the furor from both sides, the Council of State devised a warrant to move Biddle to “the Scilly Islands.” He was to not only be provided a “fit vessel” to transport him but also be paid “10s. a week from Jan. lst,” as Parliament decided on January 29, 1656.7!” Biddle wrote a further defense of orthodoxy in Two Letter of Mr. lohn Biddle (1655), one to Oliver Cromwell, the other to Henry Lawrence, president of the Council of State.**°

Yet not all were content with the “beneficent exile” experience of Biddle. Biddle’s reputation was further besmirched by connecting him with other heretical firebrands. Thomas Underhill and Nathaniel Webb, two leading London Presbyterian booksellers, had been at the forefront of creating a furor over heretical publications. On October 24, 1655, Underhill and Webb’s petition to Council was read, and here, we note the nearly ubiquitous presence of

66 MYSTERY UNVEILED the rhetoric of slippery slope. They sternly remonstrated with the Cromwellian Council for having sent Biddle off to the Isle of Scilly, since they were “far from thinking you intend the same protection for blasphemers and heretics,” as the antiformalism of Cromwell’s religious perspectives created wiggle room for those proponents of liberty of conscience and those who differ “in lesser

matters.” Their premonition was that “your act about it may...eventually, though contrary to your intentions, prove the greater promoter of the book, as it has often fallen out in the like cases.” In other words, Underhill and Webb underscored the genuine Presbyterian fear that Cromwell’s sincere desire for protection of tender conscience would prove to be the Trojan horse of the antitrinitarians’ devising. Thus, in a cleverly calculated polemical move, Underhill and Webb then drew the council’s attention to the recent translation of Isaac La Peyreére’s Prae-Adamitae (Amsterdam, 1655) as Men before Adam (London, 1656). The Presbyterian booksellers called for its “suppression,” for it produced “blasphemous slur” on the biblical account of human origins and cosmogony.**' As William Poole has demonstrated, this notion of pre-Adamic humanity had found acceptance among the Ranters, Muggletonians, and Diggers, and this ended up vitiating the foundation of scriptural trustworthiness.*~* So by juxtaposing a new “blasphemous” threat to the Cromwellian religious settlement, Prae-Adamitae, with Biddle’s Twofold Catechism, Underhill and Webb were signaling that both these positions were virtually indistinguishable in the pernicious harm they would do to true religion. The thorny case of John Biddle put Cromwell and his more inclusive attitude toward the “erring yet wayfaring brethren” to a severe test. As Martin Dzelzainis suggests, the cause célébre of the two middle decades of the seventeenth century, the Biddle case, presented a genuine political and theological quandary: “a successful prosecution would alienate many of the godly” for the reason that many erstwhile persecuted sectaries, who were orthodox in terms of the doctrine of the Trinity, had considerable sympathies for Biddle. Consequently, Cromwell could not willy-nilly gerrymander the contours of Christian orthodoxy so that it got “stretched so farr as to countenance those who denie the divinity of our Saviour, or bolster up any blasphemous opinion,” thereby accommodating Biddle’s doctrinal deviation.’

Vill Conclusion: The Continuing Saga of Biddle After nearly three years in exile in St. Mary’s castle on the Isles of Scilly, Biddle was Officially freed by Lord Chief Justice John Glynn on June 5, 1658.*** Thanks

to the financial support by Thomas Firmin, the emerging antitrinitarian

Rescuing Scripture 67 merchant and philanthropist, Biddle led a small antitrinitarian conventicle into the early years of the Restoration. Yet such was not to be, and on June 1, 1662, Biddle was thrown into prison again for alleged violation of the newly implemented Act of Uniformity, though H. J. McLachlan thinks the Presbyterians were more culpable.** Regardless of who was ultimately to blame for Biddle’s last imprisonment, certainly exhausted by a decade-long imprisonment and

a three-year exile, John Biddle died on September 22, 1662. Nevertheless, whether as a virtuous martyr or a vociferous heretic, Biddle’s legacy was to continue through the 1660s. We have seen in this chapter the noticeable growth of antitrinitarian opinions in England, thanks to the smuggled Continental Socinian works, both in Latin or translated, whether by Thomas Lushington or Biddle himself. Paul Best's case shows an uncommon narrative of an English Protestant who, as a direct consequence of his peregrinations, turned into the first English writer who was openly antitrinitarian. His disputation with Roger Ley, his former colleague from Jesus College, Cambridge, shows in a dynamic fashion their exegetical divergence, their shared antipathy toward Rome, and their divergent perspectives on the history of the church in general and conciliar history in particular. With Biddle, it is salutary to remember that, as Nigel Smith has perceptively noted, the ongoing Whiggish fascination with Socinianism as the harbinger for the Enlightenment rationality does serve as a “further distorting factor” for understanding the historical specificities of earlier controversies. This can usher in a rather deleterious effect of softening the contemporary offensiveness of seventeenth-century English Socinianism, a tendency noted even in McLachlan’s otherwise superbly documented and robustly argued book.’® Biddle was not a secularizing Enlightenment figure who was ahead of his time. He was biblicistic to his core and had very little patience for philosophical sophistication if that were to veil the simple truth of Scripture. To be sure, his reputation lived on into the 1690s, and thus there is a line that connects Biddle with the next generation’s polemical issues and struggles. However, as I hope to show in the next chapter, and indeed for the remainder of the book, the “march toward a secularizing ontology” and the alleged Trinitas denudata was not a linear, predictable narrative.**’ Pace Hugh TrevorRoper, Socinianism was not a harbinger of the enlightened age, free from the shackles of a Calvinistic deity. The compounding effect of linguistic confusion (over the nature of “person,” human and divine), exegetical indeterminacy (radical divergence in the way the biblical texts were interpreted), and shifts in regimes and corresponding ecclesial shifts (from Presbyterian-Independent dominant Civil War and Interregnum to Episcopacy-led Restoration period) was a heightened sense of crisis over the doctrine of the Trinity. Furthermore,

68 MYSTERY UNVEILED the rise of empiricism in philosophy and advances in mathematical and physi-

cal sciences brought new modes of thinking about the issue of revelation and reason, faith and facts all the more furiously to the fore. Last, as we have already seen, the uneasy relationship between Christianity and Platonism and the supposedly corrosive role of the latter on the primitive church raised the question of the role of non-Christian ideologies in the articulation of trinitarian theology. Whether in the first four centuries after Christ’s ministry or in the century and a half after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, the nearly ubiquitous nature of philosophical reflections that inevitably affected theology in general and the doctrine of the Trinity in particular was a cause for much polemical ado.

Yet there is another distorting lens to the nice, neat paradigm of the Socinians all becoming Enlightenment Deists. Not all the nontrinitarians of the mid-seventeenth century were precursors of Deists. Radical religion in English Protestantism was almost as varied in its taxonomy and trajectory as the contemporary heresiographers made them out to be. The next chapter brings into sharper focus the parallel universe to the world of Biddle’s rationalistic, biblicistic antitrinitarianism. This universe was composed of new proclaimers of perfection in an allegedly utopian setting where all the letters of the law were no more and where human sin and the category of humanness itself were looked upon as straitjackets to extricate oneself from. We shall see this ideological component of radical religion in seventeenth-century England as a hitherto neglected historical piece of the mosaic of the controversy of the Trinity.

Z

Antinomian and Antitrinitarian? The Fate of the Trinity between 1640 and 1660

I

Introduction A Catalogue of the severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nations was published on January 19, 1647, encapsulating sardonically the dangerous vectors of heresy espoused by some radical English Protestants of the day (figure 2.1). Of the twenty-two doctrinally dubious groups, three were “Socinian,” “Arrian,’ and “Anti-Trinitarian,” whose preponderant emphasis on reason, rejection of the Trinity and Christ’s eternal existence, and denial of original sin were highlighted. Juxtaposed to the deniers of the doctrine of the Trinity—promulgated and sanctioned as a fundamental doctrine at the first ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 ceE—were the radicals such as Adamites,

Libertines, Familists, Seekers, Antinomians, and Thraskites (named after John Traske, who maintained that the Jewish ceremonial laws were still in effect for the Christians in England).' Rounding up this hall of shame of faith were the proclaimers of soul-sleep, divorce, and the advent of the new apostolic era, which rendered superfluous the existing ministry and ordinances.’

Equally picturesque was another broadside, also published in 1647, A Discovery of the Most Dangerovs and Damnable Tenets (figure 2.2).° It identified a “confectioner, “smith,” “shoemaker,” “taylor,” “sadler,” “porter,” “box-maker,”

“sope-boyler,” “glover,” “meal-man,” “chicken-man,” and “button-maker” as the pantheon of the alleged “mechanick preachers,” who were peddling doc-

trines that were simultaneously antinomian, antitrinitarian, antiscripturist, Anabaptist, mortalist, universalist, Arminian, and Pelagian. The pithy yet pungent message of the broadside captured the fear of the world turning upside down, as these “Erronious [sic], Heriticall [sic], Mechanick spirits” were propagating their strange ideas. Noteworthy here in this broadside against the popular

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