Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) [1 ed.] 9780195339468, 0195339460

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Rescuing Scripture from Popery, Reclaiming Mystery from Presbytery: Antitrinitarian Theology and Trajectory of Paul Best and John Biddle
2. Antinomian and Antitrinitarian? The Fate of the Trinity between 1640 and 1660
3. Many Weapons, One Aim: Trinitarian Reactions to John Biddle in Context
4. Polemical and Practical? The Trinitarian Spirituality of Francis Cheynell and John Owen in Context
5. Bishops Behaving Badly? Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell on the Problem of Conciliar History and the Nature of Heresy
6. Platonic Captivity or Sublime Mystery? The Trinity and the Gospel of John in Early Modern England
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z

Citation preview

Mystery Unveiled

OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY SERIES EDITOR David C. Steinmetz, Duke University EDITORIAL BOARD Irena Backus, Université de Genève Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität 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 Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth Stefania Tutino MARTIN BUCER’S DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION Reformation Theology and Early Modern Irenicism Brian Lugioyo CHRISTIAN GRACE AND PAGAN VIRTUE The Theological Foundation of Ambrose’s Ethics J. Warren Smith KARLSTADT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSY A Study in the Circulation of Ideas Amy Nelson Burnett READING AUGUSTINE IN THE REFORMATION The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 Arnoud S. Q. Visser SHAPERS OF ENGLISH CALVINISM, 1660–1714 Variety, Persistence, and Transformation Dewey D. Wallace, Jr.

THE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION OF WILLIAM OF ALTON Timothy Bellamah, OP MIRACLES AND THE PROTESTANT IMAGINATION The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany Philip M. Soergel THE REFORMATION OF SUFFERING Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany Ronald K. Rittgers CHRIST MEETS ME EVERYWHERE Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis Michael Cameron GOING DUTCH IN THE MODERN AGE Abraham Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free Church in the Netherlands John H. Wood

Mystery Unveiled The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England

PAUL C. H. LIM

1

3 Oxford 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 Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a 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 Trinity 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. I. Title. BT109.L56 2012 231c.044094209032—dc23 2011051535 ISBN 978–0 –19–533946–8

9 8 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

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Votes of Parliament Touching the Book commonly called the Racovian Catechism. Reproduced courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 1.2 The title page of John Biddle, A Twofold Catechism (1654). © The British Library Board, London. 2.1 A Catalogue of the severall Sects and Opinions in England (1647). © The British Library Board, London. 2.2 A Discovery of the Most Dangerovs and Damnable Tenets (1647). © The British Library Board, London. 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. 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. 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.

45 47 70 71

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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

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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 requisite 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 Duff y, understandably chagrined by my irrepressible interest in Trinitarian controversies 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

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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—conversation 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.

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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 für 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 Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford CH Church History CJ Commons Journal CSPD Calendar of the State Papers, Domestic Series DWL Doctor Williams’s Library, London EHR English Historical Review HJ Historical Journal HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HTR Harvard Theological Review JBS Journal of British Studies JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JRH Journal of Religious History JTS Journal of Theological Studies

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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. P&P 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. SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal SJT 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 DIATRIBH, 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.1 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.2 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

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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 ce.3 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 célèbre 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.4 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.5 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.6 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.7 This particular Erasmian sensibility was exploited considerably in early modern England, particularly in the defense of the Trinity.8 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

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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.

Mat. 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 fundamentall points, or principles of Christian Religion, then curiously to examine them by the rule of our reason.9

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.10 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. II

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.11 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.12 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

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Afflicted Christian Justifyed, published by the Leveller Richard Overton on May 18, 1646.13 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.14 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.15 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.16 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—unfl inchingly committed to their belief that the doctrine of Trinity itself was heresy.17 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 legitimate 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.18 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.19 So far, Hawes’s exegetical evidence is impeccably orthodox trinitarian. But when Hawes sought to explain the nature of

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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 affirmed that “there was a time when Christ was not the Sonne of God.”20 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 affirmed that “there was when the Son of God was not,” thereby concluding that Christ was the first of all creatures.21 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 mā, & the revelatiō of his mind.” After this, Hawes reports, they left the hat maker’s and went home.22 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.”23 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.24 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.25 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.26 Farthing was adept in shorthand writing and was enlisted by the ardent Presbyterian Christopher

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Love to take the notes of the trial in 1651.27 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?”28 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 1:1–3.29 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.30 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.”31 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.32 Also heretical in the eyes of Francis Woodcock was Hawes’s exegesis of Proverbs 8:22–23.33 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.34 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.35 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,”

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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.”36 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-à-vis contemporary historiography.

III

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.”37 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 antitrinitarian 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

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existed since McLachlan published his magnum opus fift y 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.”38 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 assuredly 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 profi le 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.39 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

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a mere subservient vehicle to explain political processes or economic shifts— has become a legitimate area of inquiry.40 Second, the emphasis of revisionism has been, especially vis-à-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.41 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.42 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.43

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

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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 I am trying to show that we understand history better when we understand the activity of orthodoxy within it.44 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

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a key historical phenomenon that has been thus far underexplored.45 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, particularly Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine; and intriguing overlap on identifying the Pope as antichrist, inter alia.46 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 preNicene 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

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Calvin’s “breaking down the wall” were harbingers to the foundation-shattering work of Socinus, as the raison d’être of Socinianism was encapsulated in this double hexameter: Tota ruet Babylon; destruxit tecta Lutherus, Calvinus muros, sed fundamenta Socinus.47 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.48 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

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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”),49 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.”50 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.51 In what I would call nontrinitarian modes of discourse, popular among some Ranters and the Familists, the formal affirmation 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.”52 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. Th is 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 1662.53 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-

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à-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.54 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 historiographical 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 (1610– 1674), the founder of the Labadists, whose comment encapsulates the pan-

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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.”55 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.

1

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.1 that God is not divided but distinguished into three equal persons, is . . . a Hocus Pocus and a Babylonian mouth.2 I

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.3 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

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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 perspectives 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.”4 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.5 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-à-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

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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. Th is tendency was made more evident in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s tour de force article, “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment.” Trevor-Roper correctly identifies 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.6 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.7 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.”8 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 nonresistance. . . . We have to draw this map anew, and if Socinianism was responsible for the ills of modernity, let us carefully understand of what

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it consisted.”9 Th is 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.10 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.11 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 à 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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”).12 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. Th is 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.13

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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.14 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).15 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.16 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.17 While Best and Biddle’s local intellectual context and network is indispensable, this chapter also places their antitrinitarian challenge vis-à-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

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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.18 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.19 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.20 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-à-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.

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II

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 1606.21 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 Lützen).22 A. B. Grosart speculated that Best spent nearly a decade or so in reflective retirement in Germany, delving into unitarian divinity.23 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.24 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.25 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 1645.26 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 1647.27 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.”28 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

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the obduracy of both Bartholomew Legate and Paul Best was similar, thereby heightening the sense of foreboding for Best’s fate.29 Consequently, on March 10, 1646, it recommended that Best be executed by hanging.30 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.31 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.”32 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.33 Venting in the same vein, Obadiah Sedgwick preached on the “nature and danger of heresies,” all too acutely aware of the cause célèbre of Paul Best.34 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.”35 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.36 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, 1646.37 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.38 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

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being “misled with Romes hobgoblins.”39 Similarly, Best pulled no punches as he indefatigably linked the idea of consubstantiality of the Son, vis-à-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 heavenly trinitie of all Romishe and popishe mists and maculations.”40 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, &c.” from accepting Christianity, without at the same time believing in “Polytheosie, or Apotheosie, i.e. many gods or a man-god.”41 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 cultic 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 affi rme many Demi-gods, which are his Deputies in gouerning the world.”42 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.”43

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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.44 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.45 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

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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.46 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.47 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 office—indeed, adoption as the Son of God—was through his resurrection.48 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.”49 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.50 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.”51 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

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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, I am . . . ”) 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.52 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

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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.53 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.54 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.”55 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 381.56 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.57 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.”58 This is where Best’s radical Puritan sensibilities exceeded that of the more conservative Presbyterian Puritans. As shown

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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. III

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.59 Ley lavished praise on Best’s Renaissance academic abilities, as he had apparently excelled in “philosophie,” “mathematics,” and “poetrie.”60 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.

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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-à-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.”61 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, Iohn 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 i. Cor. 10.9. This would haue kept Serveltus [sic] and others from denying the aeternall godhead of Christ.62 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 Lord, 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

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became a cause célèbre 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 contradistinction 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.63 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.”64 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 fulfi llment 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,65 Best’s riposte was that it was absolutely unconscionable to follow the Papists in making the Bible “a nose of wax.”66 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.67

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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.”68 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.69 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.70 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.71 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-à-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:

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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.72 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.73 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.74 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

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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.75 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.”76 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.”77 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.78 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.79 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

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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.80 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.81 Another key area where patristic authority came in handy was in constructing 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-à-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.”82 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-à-vis the Catholic polemic, Anglican writers were careful to obviate any criticism of their inordinate dependence on tradition.83 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.84 Cerinthus had espoused, according 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.”85 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.86 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

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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.”87 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.88 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.”89 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 summary, 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.

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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 approximate time of Best’s incarceration, then he had spent at least two and a half years in jail.90 Then his life was one of retirement in his home county, and Best died on September 17, 1657, in Great Driffield. Best was endowed with “more courage than prudence” and thus more “pugnacious” and unafraid of theological novelty than Biddle.91 According to Robert Wallace’s Antitrinitarian Biography, Best was known to have hurled the “most profane epiphets to the doctrine of the Trinity.”92 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. Th is 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.93 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.94 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. Th is 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 fi nal 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 fi rst two movements

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of the symphony called the Reformation, which was reaching its historical fulfi llment with the Socinians.95 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 identification of Socinianism and the trinitarian controversy as a unique sign of the late-seventeenth-century English zeitgeist is shown to be inadequate.96 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.97 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.98 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.99 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 1634.100 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.101 In May 1644, Biddle’s freshly arrived conclusion was reported to the civil magistrates in Gloucester by Presbyterian clergy, precipitating Biddle’s first

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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.102 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.103 In June 1646, James Ussher sought to disabuse Biddle of the heretical notion of attributing a nondivine status to the Holy Spirit.104 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.105 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.106 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.107 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.108 On December 14, 1647, fift y-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 fundamentall Truths of Christianity” were propagated.109 What A Testimony listed as pernicious heresies that ought not to be tolerated were mostly anti-Calvinist views, be they Arminian or Socinian, and

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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.110 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.111 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.112 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-à-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.113 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

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Biddle garnered from the radical tolerationists such as Richard Overton and the 1649 Leveller pamphlet Englands New Chaines Discovered.114 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.115 In all of Biddle’s publishing career, he wrote five treatises/catechisms, translated four works, and copyedited the Septuagint.116 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-à-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.117 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.118 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.119 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.120 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.”121 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.”122

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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.”123 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.124 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.125 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.”126 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”)!127 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, 1643.128 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.129 However, what is quite intriguing was the contextual nature of this

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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 III. 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.130 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.”131 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

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Hebrew “el gibbor” as “a mighty God,” and not “the most High God,” Biddle sought to demonstrate that Christ was a subordinate deity vis-à-vis the Father, thereby avoiding the typical trinitarian conclusion.132 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 wouldn’t 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 theological 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.”133 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.134 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.135 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 31.136 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

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further illuminate the fundamentals of faith. They clearly presented the sole sufficiency of Scripture for salvation (article 1) and explicitly affirmed 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

Figure 1.1 Votes of Parliament Touching the Book commonly called the Racovian Catechism. Reproduced courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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language of affirming Christ as Redeemer emerged: “who by paying a Ransom, and bearing our sins, hath made satisfaction for them.”137 Moreover, supplementary 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.138 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

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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.

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

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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.139 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.140 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.141 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.”142 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.143 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

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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.144 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.145 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.146 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

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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.147 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.”148 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.149 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.”150 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,

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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.151 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.152 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.153 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.154 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 resolutely 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.155 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.”156

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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.157 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.158 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.159 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.160 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.161 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.162 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

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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.”163 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.164 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.165 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 1650.166 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.167 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 Dávid, 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.168 The provocative thesis of Dávid was in some ways a

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divergence from trinitarian orthodoxy further than even that of Servetus, who had maintained the preexistence of the Logos before the Incarnation. Dávid 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).169 For Zwicker, like both Dávid and Biddle, it was crucial to establish the non-trinitarian, if not antitrinitarian, nature of the preNicene authorities. Similar to Dávid, 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.170 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.171 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

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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 Daillé. Daillé’s Traité de l’emploi des saints Pères (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.172 In England, it was translated in 1651 as A Treatise concerning the Right Use of the Fathers, with a reprint run in 1675.173 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.”174 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.175 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

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in no way perturbed to consider the orthodox view of the Trinity, based on this text.176 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.”177 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.”178 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.179 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.180

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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.181 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 fift y-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.182 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

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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.183 Biddle continued on to cite and provide running commentaries on Dialogue with Trypho. After a citation from chapter 48, he concluded that “Iustin 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.”184 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.185 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.”186 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.”187 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.188 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

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once again confirming the elusive nature of theological consensus by hearkening to patristic writings, even with the very same text.189 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.190 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.191 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.”192 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-à-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

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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.193 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.194 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.195 VII

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 biography of Faustus Socinus and Dissertatio de Pace &c., and the complex issue

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of politics of heresy and orthodoxy in the Interregnum.196 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.197 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.198 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.199 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.200 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.201 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.202 Conceding, for the purpose of polemic, that the trinitarians were in the right

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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.203 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?”204 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.”205 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.”206 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.207

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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, 1655.208 Biddle’s cause célèbre 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 magistrate had been hoodwinked by the overorthodox and doctrinaire zeal of a small faction among the godly.209 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).210

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If one council, namely, at Nicaea, determined the consubstantial nature of the Son vis-à-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?”211 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-à-vis the Roman Catholics, the Council of Ariminum was listed as a botched-up case showing the inconsistency of conciliarism.212 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.213 This pamphlet was designed as a clever rhetorical 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.214 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.”215 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

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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.216 The proBiddle writers offered eff usive 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.217 Perhaps due to the persistent lobbying of the more radical tolerationists, Biddle was released from the Newgate prison on July 27, 1655.218 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. 1st,” as Parliament decided on January 29, 1656.219 Biddle wrote a further defense of orthodoxy in Two Letter of Mr. Iohn Biddle (1655), one to Oliver Cromwell, the other to Henry Lawrence, president of the Council of State.220 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

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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 Peyrère’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.221 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.222 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 célèbre 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.223 VIII

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, 1658.224 Thanks to the financial support by Thomas Firmin, the emerging antitrinitarian

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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.225 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.226 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.227 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,

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the rise of empiricism in philosophy and advances in mathematical and physical 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.

2

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 ce—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).1 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.2 Equally picturesque was another broadside, also published in 1647, A Discovery of the Most Dangerovs and Damnable Tenets (figure 2.2).3 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 doctrines 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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Figure 2.1 A Catalogue of the severall Sects and Opinions in England (1647). © The British Library Board, London.

heresies of the day was the coalescence of heretical notions often regarded as separate in the minds of contemporary early modern English historians. In other words, for the pamphleteers in 1647 and their contemporaries seeking to manage and modify the emerging public sphere, the threats of the “antinomians” and the “antitrinitarians” were equally grave.4 For instance, it began with three statements on Christology: the nature of Christ’s righteousness, the nature of satisfaction through his blood, and the question of limited atonement. If these were, as Christopher Hill and others have opined, more indicative of

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

religious radicalism—indeed, they were symptomatic of the views aired by the maelstrom of these mechanic preachers—it begs an important question of their non-trinitarianism. If they deny the nature of Christ’s satisfaction and insist that Christ’s righteousness was a derived and nonintrinsic type, then it does vitiate the foundation of trinitarian orthodoxy. Moreover, these triumvirate

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Christological issues were eerily identical with those of the Socinians, which, as discussed in chapter 1, were encapsulated in the antitrinitarian heresies of John Biddle and Paul Best. After the three initial Christological salvoes, the Discovery of the Most Dangerovs and Damnable Tenets quickly follows with “errors,” among others: of Christian mortalism,5 insufficiency of the letters of Scripture, the abrogation of Old Testament as the authoritative text for the seventeenthcentury Christian, repudiation of “adultery and drunkennesse” as sin, that the sufferings of Christ were “for our example, and not to purchase Heaven for us,” and that those who perish in hell are cast there “onely because God would have it so,” thereby underscoring the reductio ad absurdum of Calvinistic soteriology. Of the seven foregoing representative errors excoriated, Best and Biddle had espoused four of them: mortalism; a metacritique of Calvinism; privileging of a commonsense, rational hermeneutic without hearkening to mystery; and a Christology of seeing Jesus as a moral exemplar.6 Then the three major areas of convergence between the proponents of “radical religion,” and “rational religion”—of the Best and Biddle type—suggest themselves. First, Calvinism was, unequivocally, the bête noire of both these groups; its alleged determinism either made God out to be the author of sin or sapped the individual Christian of any meaningful basis for moral self-exertion. In Discovery, the last heretical article asserts that “there is power in men to resist grace.” Any theologically astute reader would immediately notice this anti-Calvinist tone here. The Arminians indefatigably maintained that divine grace was resistible. Second, a simultaneous dethroning of clerical prerogative in interpretation and tradition as sole authority in adjudicating between competing claims, followed by the enthroning of human reason as the sacrosanct vehicle for aiding the individual reader to arrive at true interpretation, was another habitus shared by Best, Biddle, and the mechanic preachers.7 Third, the work of Christ was reduced to such a degree as to imply that he was no more divine than any other person who felt the Spirit within. As can be seen clearly from the foregoing broadsides, English Protestants in the revolutionary middle decades of the seventeenth century regarded antitrinitarian and antinomian threats (both rather broadly construed) as inseparable parts of a two-headed monster. Yet such has not always been the trajectory of subsequent historiography. This chapter contends that a skewed identification of radical religion in the middle decades of the seventeenth century has also contributed to a distorted picture of the controversy surrounding the doctrine of the Trinity in this key transitional century. The scope of attack on the Trinity, in other words, did not come solely from Best, Biddle, and the English Socinians. It was contributed also by the exponents of what David Como calls spiritist piety: those who believed that the powerful work of the Spirit accomplished perfection, helped them to create their spiritually elitist conventicles, and thus

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rendered them inimical to the priestcraft of Antichrist.8 Whether this was done through Christopher Hill’s Marxist historiographical penchant to privilege the radical, egalitarian fringes among the English Protestants in the 1640s and 1650s or whether the same telos was reached by forgetting that whether one is non-trinitarian or antitrinitarian, the ultimate consequence in such a theology is that one does not account for, or is explicitly opposed to, the Trinity. To elaborate further on the distinction between a non-trinitarian and an antitrinitarian religious idea, it is possible to construe the Ranter, Seeker, and Muggletonian doctrines of God less as an outright antitrinitarian rejection of Nicene orthodoxy and more as a nontrinitarian collapse, or near-collapse, of the ontological distinction between the Creator and creatures, thereby often making the person who is proclaiming the advent of the Word-Spirit within to be the second member of the Trinity. One did not have to repudiate the doctrine of the Trinity to espouse a heretical notion of the Christian God. If, as a few were wont to do, one assumed oneself to be the incarnate Son of God, then it could be that, formally speaking, there still was a trinity, but functionally this would be a heresy, where one of the trinity was you!9 As I hope to show later, there was a definite presence of such religious radicalism in the period, even as Christopher Hill, Keith Thomas, A. L. Morton, and others acknowledged, yet these radical ideologies were often interpreted through the lens of political thought, thereby creating an impression that the aforementioned “unholy trinity” of radicalism in the period had little to say or oppose regarding the classical, Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. One of the key contributions made by the late Christopher Hill was to take economic and socialist historical perspectives and utilize them with considerable acuity, leaving behind seminal texts such as the Economic Problems of the Church, Puritanism and Revolution, and The World Turned Upside Down, perhaps his deservedly celebrated magnum opus. Finding the radicals and their “Anabaptistic” and “socialistic” ideologies fascinating, and thus his key interlocutors for the historical narrative of this tumultuous period, Hill tended to privilege the contributions made by the “enthusiasts.”10 Consequently, the cumulative effect of Hill’s literary output was to show the indispensable role played by religious radicalism as disruptive elements in the struggle among the English toward the eschatological denouement. For Hill, then, it was the radical religion of the revolutionary period of the mid-seventeenth century, and not the rational religion of Biddle and Best, that became the primary lens through which historical agencies and agendas were interpreted.11 To be sure, Hill identified the theological affinity between the antitrinitarians such as John Biddle and the Ranters, Muggletonians, and others, yet this connection did not receive more than passing references in Hill’s World Turned Upside Down.12 Could it have been the case that we have so thoroughly discarded Thomas Edwards’s

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hysteria-generating Gangraena as an extreme version of the slippery slope argument that we simply disregard the possibility of their ideological connection? The historiographical consequence of this tendency was to think of Socinian rationalism and the Ranter radicalism as relatively hermetically sealed interpretive environs. Yet, with the recent contributions from Ariel Hessayon, Nicholas McDowell, John Coffey, and Nigel Smith, the fulcrum of radical religion of the plebeian “Ranterish rabble” has inched toward the center a good deal.13 Among the historians who identify with Socinianism and/or Unitarianism at a personal level, there has been little interest in the non-trinitarian nature of the radical English Protestants of the Civil War and the interregnum period. John Tulloch’s Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century and E. M. Wilbur’s significant synthetic analysis of Unitarianism, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America, present virtually no discussion of the radicals such as the Ranters or Muggletonians in their taxonomy of antitrinitarianism of the same period and place as Paul Best and John Biddle.14 Again, from the vantage point of denominational historiography, Wilbur’s omission of these rabid fringe radicals is clearly understandable. A similar trend manifests itself in H. J. McLachlan’s Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England, in which, again, perhaps owing to the warranted fear that if he discussed at length the non-trinitarianism of the left fringe of English Protestantism, the Socinians of both the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries would lose their intellectual credibility and have their reputations tarnished because of the association with the enthusiastic Ranters.15 The failure to see the central nexus of eventual denial of the Trinity in both radical and rational religious ideas proliferating in the 1640s and the 1650s was not limited to Christopher Hill or Keith Thomas alone. In an helpful survey of religion and politics of early modern England, Susan Doran and Christopher Durston list the Levellers, Ranters, Gerrard Winstanley, and John Biddle as radicalizing agents of English Protestantism, yet with no indication that all of the foregoing were either antitrinitarians or nontrinitarians, thereby contributing to the consequence of weakening the foothold of the received trinitarian orthodoxy. So Doran and Durston wrote: In the tract Man’s Mortalitie, published in 1644, the Leveller Richard Overton expressed his belief in mortalism, the heretical idea that the soul dies with the body at death to be reborn with it at the Second Coming. In the late 1640s and early 1650s, radical like William Walwyn and Gerrard Winstanley began to express doubts about the doctrine of hell, while the Ranters went so far as to deny the existence of sin, and some early English Unitarians, such as John Biddle, attacked the doctrine of the trinity and denied Christ’s divinity.16

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In what follows, this chapter seeks to move the current historiographical debate so that the distance between “radical” and “rational” divinity, at least judging from their common non-trinitarian or antitrinitarian perspectives, can be bridged. In their incisive analysis of the rearguard Puritan reaction to a London radical, Peter Shaw, in the 1630s, Peter Lake and David Como acknowledged the fluid membrane of separation between the construction of the view of one’s polemical other and what might have been verifiably the views espoused by the alleged bêtes noires: “This may well tell us more about the fears and polemical intentions of his opponents than it does about his substantive opinions or ipsissima verba.” To be sure, there is the ubiquitous real presence of polemical gray area. The nebulous nexus where one polemical lie ends and the politically expeditious truth begins is tantalizingly difficult to demarcate.17 Yet, weighing carefully the polemical contexts and interpreting the texts of these antitrinitarian and protrinitarian theologies, I am hopeful that one can offer a synthetic, if sympathetic, interpretive picture of the controversies over the Trinity. The thesis of this chapter is that seventeenth-century contemporaries were deeply aware of the dual threat of ethical emancipation and theological disintegration; that is, the Ranter and Socinian threats were seen as flip sides of the same destructive coin. In that case, the historical significance of the controversy over the Trinity becomes reframed as an intensely engaged conversation about the identity of the Christian God. This came about through the direct challenge of the more conspicuously antitrinitarian attacks of Paul Best and John Biddle. Yet that was not all. The Ranter phenomenon of the 1640s and 1650s provided a major critique of traditional theism: by proclaiming oneself to be freed from the legalistic straitjacket of Puritan, navel-gazing piety, one could go to the skid row of individualistic religious self-assertion and declare oneself to be God. Moreover, by analyzing the example of Robert Baillie and Daniel Featley’s genuinely construed ecclesiological slippery slope argument, one could see how the heresy charges on the Baptists and other radical sectaries created further confusion on the precise theological definition of the antitrinitarian heresy itself. I argue that such imprecision and mutual hereticating provided the requisite fodder for ridicule on the internecine Puritan strife and a metacritique of the history of Christian doctrine as a relatively uninterrupted series of “making heretics.”18 The subterranean Familist phenomenon, as Christopher Marsh, Peter Lake, and David Como have persuasively shown,19 often bubbled over into mainstream religious discourse, accentuating the fear that things were indeed falling apart, and the ecclesial “centre cannot hold” any longer.20 This chapter also argues that several projects of translating texts that had potentially antinomian vectors—especially the translation of Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei by John Everard—contributed to a further

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confusion over the nature of the God-human relational modality, thereby raising a corresponding trinitarian question as well. Last, I hope to show that those instituting the political measures to crack down on heresy in the late 1640s and throughout the 1650s were keenly aware of both the Ranter-antinomian and the Biddlean-antitrinitarian problems. One of the final historiographical lens fine-tunings will be on the impact this real presence of the multifaceted controversies on the Trinity had on the tendency to limit the trinitarian controversies in England to the late 1680s and 1690s. Before we get to the 1680s and 1690s, let us take a closer look at the genealogy of antitrinitarianism in England. II

A (Very) Brief History of Antitrinitarianism and Heresy Antitrinitarianism was a significant threat to the bene esse of the Church of England. Between 1548 and 1602, at least eight people in England were burned as antitrinitarian heretics.21 In Norwich alone, there were four such cases: Matthew Hamont (May 20, 1579), a plowwright who had maintained that “Christ is not God . . . but a mere . . . sinfull man, and an abominable Idoll” and further denied his resurrection and ascension, along with it the existence, let alone the deity, of the Holy Spirit; John Lewes (September 18, 1583); Peter Cole, a tanner from Ipswich, known as an “Arian Anabaptist” (1587); and the particularly tantalizing case of Francis Kett (1589), thereby accentuating the task of the Elizabethan ecclesiastical politics of dealing with heretics.22 Edward Wightman’s complex heresy trial in 1611 has been thoroughly analyzed recently.23 In Wightman, one sees a coalescence of two discrete strands of charismatic, subterranean Puritan piety gone horridly wrong, which would be replicated among the antinomians and other devotees of radical religion in the Civil War period: prophetic self-fashioning—a close corollary of an overrealized eschatology—and either antitrinitarian or non-trinitarian perspective with regard to the person(s) of God. Wightman was the latter-day prophet in the Elijah mold, the third member of the divine triad in the work of redemption of the world; thus while he might have adhered to a semblance of the Trinity, it was certainly not one recognizable as orthodox by any of the Jacobean bishops trying his case. In one of the documents surviving in the Lincolnshire Archive Office, Wightman flaunted himself “to be that prophet promised in the 18 of Deuteronomie And that Elyas in the 4th of Malachie promised to be sent before the great and fearfull day of the Lord. And that comforter in the 16th of John which should convince the world of sinne of righteousnes and of Judgment.”24 Glossing three biblical texts, two from the

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Old and one from the New Testament, in his self-identification, Wightman claimed that he was the messianic prophetic figure, often attributed to Jesus’ prophetic office in the Christian exegetical tradition, in Deuteronomy 18; the precursor of the messianic advent spoken of in Malachi 4 (often attributed to John the Baptist); and the Holy Spirit himself, as John 16 was regarded as the text foretelling of the advent of the Spirit among the believers! Combined with this megalomaniacal identity matrix, Wightman saw his mission as inseparably linked with the purposes of the “God the Father, and Christ,” in that he was the third link in this new triad “united togeather, for the same worke, of the salvacion of the world, by Christe through his death” and by his own work of restoring true faith in this eschatological ministry of witness.25 Even as close to the Civil War as 1639, Richard Neile, Archbishop of York, wanted to rekindle the flame for burning yet another suspected antitrinitarian heretic, John Trendall, a stonemason from Dover, though without success. Writing to William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, on August 23, Neile, after confirming that the burning of Bartholomew Legate did “a great deal of good in this Church,” remonstrated with Laud that “the present times do require like exemplary punishment.”26 Thus, when the Convocation of 1640 published its official promulgations as Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall, it should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the three major sections on the current threat to the Caroline Church was titled “Against Socinianisme,” and the Laudians were gravely concerned with the “frequent divulgation and dispersion of dangerous Books written in favour and furtherance of the same.”27 The outbreak of the Civil War and the de facto collapse of censorship in the 1640s gave way to a number of political and religious radicalisms. Baptism of cats, breakdown of social and sexual mores in the putative Ranter excesses and ecstasies, self-styled megalomaniacal deities in human flesh, and repudiation of the very fundamental pillars of religious orthodoxy, particularly the doctrine of the trinity: all these elements comprised the mosaic of a turbulent era. The intertwined task of reforming the church, root and branch, and the quest for political stability often brought an unexpected, certainly unpleasant, consequence in the proliferation of radical religion. Sammy Basu has noted that history, especially related to the cultural and religious analysis of the middle decades of the seventeenth century, can seem truly bizarre, incredible, and “too strange for sensible history.”28 A key theological concept with crucial cultural purchase in mid-seventeenth-century England was the notion of heresy.29 With the publication of Ann Hughes’s groundbreaking Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution and David Loewenstein and John Marshall’s edited volume, Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, the complex and often confusing topography of the religious and political ramifications of heresy has

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begun to garner increased historiographical attention.30 The task of circumscribing the boundary of orthodoxy, thereby giving a theological rationale and political legitimacy for the punishment of recalcitrant offenders, was seen as an indispensable part of the work of reformation, which, the Westminster Assembly was convinced, was its raison d’être. Inextricably linked together with the notion of heresy was liberty of conscience. Obadiah Sedgwick, Richard Vines, Thomas Edwards, Robert Baillie, and Samuel Rutherford regarded the allowance of liberty of conscience as Satan’s Trojan horse to destroy the basis of trinitarian orthodoxy and order.31 The peak period of publication of heresiologies, as Kei Nasu has convincingly shown, was between 1646 and 1648. The conflation of antinomian excesses and antitrinitarian privileging of reason in order to decry against “supra-rational” mystery, especially the Trinity, as inseparable evil twins was a key undergirding theme in these heresiographical texts.32 Patrick Simson’s Historie of the Church since the dayes of our Saviour Iesus Christ (1624) bore not insignificant resemblance to Matthias Illyricus’s Magdeburg Centuries. One of the undergirding themes of Protestant ecclesiastical histories was to discover the earliest traces of the hairline fracture in the unity of the church: its doctrine, theology, and praxis. As such, an etiological survey of heresies was regarded as of paramount significance. Simson’s was no exception. Simson (1556–1618) took the thirteenth-century Bishop of Lincoln and a widely regarded polymath Robert Grossteste’s definition to be axiomatic. Heresy, for Grossteste was a “sentence taken and chosen of mans owne braine contrarie to holy Scripture, openly maintained and stiflie defended,” against both Scripture and the accretion of the church’s wisdom in tradition.33 This was the prevailing definition of heresy in seventeenth-century England.34 In Repertorium canonicum (1678), John Godolphin reiterated the definition while broadening and simultaneously clarifying it when he called it any “Publish’d Opinion, repugnant to the Principles of our Christian Faith, obstinately maintain’d and persisted in by such as profess the Name of Christ; and so Hereticks are distinguish’d from Atheists and Infidels, properly so called, albeit in a sense they have somewhat of both the other in them.”35 Whether one consults Simson’s or Godolphin’s definition or Thomas Edwards’s famed Gangraena, the issue of heresy, this key early modern political and theological problematic, went through various iterations of revisions, redefinitions, and revamped articulations and remained at the forefront of the religious polemic of the day. One of the key heresies was antitrinitarianism. As Catholic apologists tirelessly emphasized, this Arianism redivivus, or Socinianism, was possible only on Protestant soil, which had departed from the nurturing bosom of the Mother Church, falling inexorably on the prickly thornbushes of individualistic hermeneutic, traditionless theologizing, and

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the virtually ineffectual ecclesiastical government to crack down on antitrinitarian heresy. Providing adequate answers to this Catholic ridicule, and far more pressing than merely scoring polemical points off the Roman pugilists, preoccupied the minds of a number of trinitarian Protestants in England. Was the revival of antitrinitarianism primarily a function of the disappearance of the Roman Catholic draconian ecclesiastical policies that had kept heretics in check, if only at the gallows and the stake? Did the intellectual milieu, combined with the cultural, religious, and political conditions endemic to Protestant church-states such as England, somehow further exacerbate and accelerate the centrifugal tendencies of radical Protestantism toward antitrinitarian heresies? Surveying the complex longue durée history of the doctrine of the Trinity, Jaroslav Pelikan judiciously acknowledged that “the unchallenged theological hegemony of the doctrine of the Trinity, beginning in the fourth century and ending in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was coextensive with the willingness and ability of civil authorities to go on enforcing it.” In other words, only as a result of policing mystery, or enforcing a certain mode of rationality and religiosity, could the doctrine of the Trinity be defended and maintained. Such sentiment is best encapsulated in the plethora of antitrinitarian jeremiads, especially vis-à-vis the sort of state-sanctioned persecutory measures meted out to the conscientious objectors of this doctrine in early modern England.36 III

Gangraena and the Muggletonians’ Attack on Antinomian and Antitrinitarian Heresies Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, published in three parts in 1646, encapsulates the effect of the collapse of censorship and the corresponding proliferation of radical religious ideas. Edwards’s sweeping taxonomy of all feigned and real destroyers of religion and society has often been labeled as an extreme case of rhetorical excess and thus has not been taken seriously as a source for politics of religion until Ann Hughes’s study of Gangraena was published in 2004. Admittedly, it is hard to not grow cynical of Edwards’s clearinghouse of heretical, “odious and pernicious” opinionators. He wrote that these were “one and the same society of persons in our times, being both Anabaptisticall, Antinomian, Manifestarian, Libertine, Socinian, Millenary, Independent, Enthusiasticall.” Aside from the palpably obvious anti-Independent streak in Edwards the Presbyterian, one is left wondering what sort of ideological commonalities, if any, exist among them, especially as he names the Socinians

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with the Anabaptists and Libertines.37 One of the cardinal errors Edwards both excoriated and warned against had to do with the declining Scriptural authority, which he saw as an inexorable consequence of the ascendancy of reason as the final arbiter of all religious truth claims: “That right Reason is the rule of Faith, and that we are to beleeve the Scripture, and the Doctrine of the Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection, so far as we see them agreeable to reason, and no farther.”38 Edwards was, essentially, succinctly encapsulating the gist of the Socinian solution to the dialectic between “reason and revelation.” Edwards listed 176 errors swarming in England that were threatening to destabilize, if not destroy, the foundation of church and state. Of these, twentyfour had to do with trinitarian and Christological errors, often associated with the notions espoused by Best, Biddle, and other rationalist Socinians, and juxtaposed side by side with the more rabidly anticlerical, non-trinitarian, pantheistic, megalomaniacal notions, the more typically Ranterish errors. Put differently, the harmonic convergence between these two groups, often separated in current historiography, is certainly noteworthy. In Error 22, Edwards noted this view: “Every creature in the first estate of creation was God, and every creature is God, every creature that hath life and breath being an efflux from God, and shall returne into God again, be swallowed up in him as a drop is in the ocean.”39 The idea of every creature being an “efflux from God” and returning to God, the source of all being, has its origin in the exitus-reditus scheme—a Plotinian idea made popular by Thomas Aquinas’s structuring of Summa Theologiae—and yet with a non-Thomistic variation: that every creature “in the first estate of creation” was God!40 This ontological confusion, further addled by the dash of bravado, led to the claim that all will be swallowed up in God so as to become part of God. Intriguingly, this was, almost verbatim, the sentiment of self-deification found in Laurence Clarkson’s A Single Eye, Jacob Bauthumley’s The Light and Dark sides of God, and other Ranter writings.41 Clarkson appropriated the frequently used analogy of the sun to illustrate the exitus-reditus principle as related to the mode of being between God and humanity, again, with the peculiar Ranter gloss on this theological perspective. Utilizing the analogy of the sun (God) and light beam(s) that stood for creation, Clarkson sought to emphasize that God was all-in-all: Notwithstanding several beams from one Sun, yet in their rise from the Sun, they were but one in the Sun; nay indeed, they were nothing but the Sun, but after they are issued out of the Sun, one this way, another that way from the Sun, then according to this divers appearance, it is no more called a Sun, but a Beam, not only Beam, but Beams, which when reduced to their being, they are no longer called a Beam, but a Sun.42

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In the previous iterations of the exitus-reditus model of thinking about the divine-human modality, whether used by Pseudo-Dionysius or Thomas Aquinas, it was used to speak, primarily, of the glorious and holy origins of humanity, namely, the Triune God. Since it was from this God we have come and to whom we shall return, what the pilgrim was called to do was to joyfully participate in the life divine, thus the doctrine of participation and consequently theosis, through the means of contemplation of divine love and pursuit of holiness. Assuredly, there was the common telos of theosis between the Dionysian tradition and the Ranters, as the former was appropriated by John Everard, Giles Randall, and others along the antinomian vector in Stuart England, but with a crucial caveat. From the Dionysian-Thomistic tradition, there is an undergirding assumption of—indeed, commitment to—the life of purgation, followed by illumination and contemplation. In other words, sin was an intractable reality that needed to be daily wrestled with in the power of the Holy Spirit. For the Ranters, however, it was the inordinate spiritual navel gazing of excessive dwelling on sin and one’s spiritual inadequacy that kept the possibility of communion and actuality of joy deeply bottled up. Their pathway of returning to God (reditus) did not require the type of Baxterian “laborious holiness,” since that was precisely what got the Ranters to want to throw off the concatenating bondage of intense Puritan spirituality and the power of the moribund and persecutory imagination.43 Right after the listing of the Ranterish pantheism as an egregious error, Edwards listed four errors, ad seriatim, pertaining specifically to the doctrine of the Trinity, thereby reminding the readers that both Ranter radicalism and Socinian rationalism were competing for the soul of England, and thus both were desperately in need of extirpation. Edwards reported: 24. That in the Unity of the God-head there is not a Trinity of Persons, but the Doctrine of the Trinity beleeved and professed in the Church of God, is a Popish tradition and a Doctrine of Rome. 25. There are not three distinct Persons in the Divine Essence, but only three Offices; the Father, Son and holy Ghost are not three Persons, but Offices. 26. That there is but one Person in the Divine nature.44 27. That Jesus Christ is not very God, not God essentially, but nominally, not the eternall Son of God by eternall generation, no otherwise may he be called the Son of God but as he was man.45 The foregoing encapsulates a good part of the antitrinitarian rhetorical strategy of Best, Biddle, and their Socinian coreligionists. The Trinity, they indefatigably contended, was one of the vestigial elements of popery that must

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be jettisoned from the religious mind-set of good Protestants. Modalism, or Sabellianism, was an ancient Christological view, declared to be heretical at Nicaea in that it flattened the personal distinctions to render the “reality” of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as lexical masks of the one God who manifested the divine identity in three distinct modes or historical periods.46 Similarly, Philip Dixon has demonstrated the penchant among the antitrinitarians to subject all theological discourse, or language vis-à-vis God, to an ordinary language analysis.47 So we find Edwards reporting that the Socinians maintained that to be a person meant a being with a unique center of consciousness, irrespective of whether it pertained to a divine or human person. Consequently, adherence to the notion of the three persons in one God inevitably amounted to tritheism, a heretical notion for both antitrinitarians and protrinitarians. Last, if Christ was, in any possible way at all, God, then he was so only “nominally,” or honorifically as a title bequeathed to him by God the Father, as a result of his life of obedience. Rejecting the essential deity of Christ and the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, the only legitimate title for Christ as “Son of God” was as a man. Then following these four antitrinitarian perspectives, Edwards’s polemical shuttlecock bounced back to the religious radicals who had opined that the quest for the historical Jesus was ultimately futile, indeed, inimical to true spirituality. With Error 29, Edwards lashed out against those who privileged “a Christ formed in us, the deity united to our humanity.” In another instance, Edwards fretted about collapsing the ontological distinction between God and humanity: “that a man baptized with the holy Ghost, knows all things even as God knows all things.” Here the incommunicable divine attribute of omniscience has conveniently become part of a human being proclaiming perfection.48 Another frightening ramification of their ontological confusion was the insistence that when someone in the “state of grace,” commits “murther or drunkennesse,” God sees no sin in that person, for such binary, “arbitrary” distinctions obtain only among humans, but when one’s life is “hid with Christ,” then one is in God, indeed, becomes God. Then all “plebeian,” “human,” “quotidian” moral calculus became irrelevant.49 There were, moreover, several significant areas of doctrinal overlap between Paul Best, John Biddle, the English Socinians, and the radicals blasted in Gangraena. Both were staunchly opposed to (1) Calvinistic notions of divine sovereignty, in particular, to the idea of predestination, which both Biddle and Clarkson were convinced would make God the author of sin (Error 36); (2) the federal headship of Adam and the transmission of original sin to posterity (Errors 58–59); (3) the Calvinistic doctrine of the irresistibility of divine grace (Error 63); (4) the doctrine of particular redemption; instead, they endorsed

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universal redemption (Error 31); (5) Christ’s sacrifice was to satisfy and vindicate divine justice (Error 40);and (6) the immortality of the soul (Error 83).50 For an anonymous author, added to the primarily trinitarian and Christological errors of Socinianism were two secondary doctrinal divergences from traditional orthodoxy. These concerned original sin and the immortality of the soul, both of which were rejected by the Socinians.51 In The third Part of Gangraena, Edwards continued to weave together the variegated strands of religious radicalism. Edwards treated in detail a gathering of antinomian-cum-antitrinitarian sectaries in London on July 8, 1648. That at a house in Red-crosse street or thereabouts, there met some Sectaries, where some forty persons being present, one of them exercised his gifts, and in his exercise preached these Doctrines. 1. That Jesus Christ was not God, not the Son of God. 2. That the Scriptures were not the word of God, and brought many arguments to prove it. 3. That the souls of men dye with their bodies. Now as he was delivering these points, there was a woman present that wept bitterly, speaking. . . . If this Doctrine be true, what shall I do? I have many years beleeved in Jesus Christ, and hoped to be saved, but now what will become of me?52 In this tantalizing account, Edwards clues in his readers on the dreadful consequence that departures from trinitarian orthodoxy would usher in. To the weeping woman, this antitrinitarian sectary offered a soteriological scheme shorn of Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice, and yet replete with reliance upon moral self-assertion: “good woman, you need not be troubled, for though Christ be not God, neither any certainly of the Scripture being the word of God, yet if you live honestly and modestly, you shall do well enough.” Living with honesty and modesty, while expecting the “two Witnesses or Prophets” to come, was the way forward for true religion. John Reeve (1608–1658) and Lodowick Muggleton (1609–1698) were two key radicals of the period related with the Civil War radical movement, although their sectarian group became collectively known as the Muggletonians. Both evinced a similar skepticism about the Trinity.53 In 1653, Reeve and Muggleton were committed to Bridewell for six months for their antitrinitarianism, shortly after their controversial treatise, A Transcendent Spiritual Treatise, was published.54 For Reeve and Muggleton, they were the last two witnesses, as prophesied in Revelation 11. This apocalyptic self-fashioning, combined with their antitrinitarian notions, was what earned them the prison sentence.

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Undeterred by incarceration, Reeve and Muggleton published their “third and last Testament,” A Divine Looking-Glass, where a substantial critique of the Scholastic categories of “person,” “homoousios,” and an evident demonstration of the illogicality of the Trinity were presented. From the outset, they argued that “the addition of two persons more unto this our onely wise God, blessed for ever, proceed onely from the old Serpentine Antichrist devil in carnal men.” In Chapter IX, Reeve and Muggleton proffered an “exact Scripture rule to prove the Man Christ glorified, to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in one distinct Person.”55 Intriguingly, Reeve and Muggleton appropriated the Johannine Prologue to argue that the Word, God, or Father “beareth but one sense onely,” namely, as referents to Jesus glorified. Moreover, juxtaposing John 1:1 with Genesis 1:1, a typical discursive strategy within Trinitarian theological exegesis, Reeve and Muggleton argued that the Word, that is, Christ was the agent of creation, yet with a crucial caveat: no personal distinction obtains between the Father and the Son. Then in the same section, Reeve and Muggleton, likely reflecting their own incarceration and persecution, threw a jab at the persecutory practice of the Civil War and Interregnum Puritan regimes. So long as the warring factions could confess that “Christ is Lord,” it ought not lead to internecine Christian persecutions. In fact, they went so far to aver that “if these men for difference in judgment onely concerning this Jesus, shall persecute each other before a Magistrate, or the like, there remains no more sacrifice for that sin.”56 Lest there be any doubt, Reeve and Muggleton clarified what they meant: mutual persecution among the Christians was the very sin against the Holy Spirit! Regarding the language of divine personhood and the question of tritheism, Reeve and Muggleton declared, “if the person of a Son or Holy Ghost were created or begotten, or proceeded from a Father, then it is contrary to all sober sense or reason” to claim that they were coequal with the Father or eternal of their own.57 Reeve and Muggleton adopted a clearly Arian, antitrinitarian mode of reasoning in inferring that to be “born/generated” or “proceeded” from the Father can only mean “fi nite created glories,” thus non-divine. In this vein, Reeve and Muggleton contended that those who were truly illuminati and “spiritual” could see the “fallacy of the three persons and one God,” stipulated in the Athanasian Creed. This challenged the Church of England’s exaltation of the Athanasian Creed to canonical status.58 At this juncture, one clarification is in order: Reeve and Muggleton’s view on the Trinity and Christology was genuinely muddled in that it is neither classically trinitarian nor Arian. For one, Reeve and Muggleton affi rmed the deity of Christ when they challenged the “Trinitary Literal-mongers” to answer this question: “what sober, sensible man then that hath any spiritual

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light in him, dares say that Christ and the Father are not one undivided personal being?” However, as one reads this statement and others peppered throughout A Divine Looking-Glass, it is unequivocally clear that Reeve and Muggleton adopted a modalist view of the Trinity.59 Contrary to the historiographical tradition, not all antitrinitarians denied Christ’s divinity. Assuredly, the vast majority of the Arians vociferously argued against the deity of Christ and the Trinity, regardless of whether in fourth-century Alexandria or in seventeenth-century London. Yet in seventeenthcentury English radical religion, one fi nds an intriguing coalescence of Christomonistic modalism that, while fully affi rming the deity of Christ, denied the tripersonal nature of God, thereby complexifying the narrative of English antitrinitarianism. Neither Reeve nor Muggleton was Socinian, strictly speaking, and that partly explains their omission from both Robert Wallace’s and H. J. McLachlan’s hagiographical treatments of the Socinian heroes.60 If Biddle’s antitrinitarianism can be called “Unitarianism of the Father,” the closest taxonomy of Reeve and Muggleton’s would be “Unitarianism of the Son.” In their Divine Looking-Glass, a key chapter was designed to “prove the Man Christ glorified, to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in one distinct Person.” Then the “exact Scripture rule” adduced by Reeve and Muggleton was a theological exegesis of the Johannine Prologue, particularly verses 1 and 14.61 In their interpretation of the Prologue, Reeve and Muggleton were committed to the notion of Christ’s full deity. Unacceptable to them was not the metaphysical impossibility of the coalescence of the “contrary impulses and essences” of divine and human, the very reason for Biddle’s repudiation of the Incarnation of the eternal Word. Rather, because the Word was God (John 1:1), and because it was through the “divine Word” that all things visible and invisible were created (Genesis 1:1), Reeve and Muggleton concluded that “without controversie he [Christ] is the alone Everlasting Father and Creator of both worlds.” Their Christomonistic theology was confirmed by John 10:30, “I and my Father are one.”62 Thus for Reeve and Muggleton, the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were nothing but the one and the same God revealing the divine identity “in a threefold Condition,” or in three distinct, though inseparable, modes.63 Based on the foregoing points raised by Clarkson and the Muggletonians, it is possible to assess the veracity and validity of the anti-Ranter critique given by their contemporaries, in addition to that of Thomas Edwards. Two shall suffice. John Holland’s The Smoke of the Bottomlesse Pit (1651) captured succinctly the gist of what the Ranters were propounding, both in London and in the countryside.64 He might have been an informant for the authorities, and his descriptions of the Ranter teachings help show how their nontrinitarian perspectives were deemed to be equally pernicious as those of

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more predictable destabilizers of Nicene trinitarian orthodoxy, such as Best and Biddle. Regarding God, Holland asserted that the Ranters maintained that God is essentially in every creature, and that there is as much of . . . the essence of God . . . in the Ivie leaf, as in the most glorious Angel; I heard another say, that the essence of God was in that board, as much as it was in heaven; he then laying his hand on a Deal board. They all say there is no other God but what is in them, and also in the whole Creation, and that men ought to pray and seek to [sic] no other God but what was in them.65 The Ranters tended to depersonalize God and used terms as “Fulnesse, the Great motion, Reason, the Immensity.” In addition to the panentheistic tendency to equate the divine presence in all creation as God itself, a more “disturbing” tendency among them was found: to equate the person in nature as divine. So Holland reported, “I heard a man swear that if there was any God at all he was one,” to which Holland’s riposte was since divine omniscience and omnipotence were not communicable attributes, the man was a “blasphemer.” There was another who claimed that “he was not The GOD, but he was God” because God was in him and in every creature in the cosmos. Regarding the second person of the Trinity, Holland offered a brief précis of Christological errors. First, it seems the Ranters saw in Christ a “form or a shadow” of the works of perfection that the current-day saints would perform and that Christ could in no way take the place of another’s suffering. Second, the tendency to cast aspersion on the authenticity and authority of Scripture meant a corresponding decline in the trustworthiness of the historical Jesus, particularly the details surrounding his death. In the Ranter-Quaker denial of the crucial nature of Christ’s historical death, the inexorable consequence was that they were “no more to eye or mind Christ that died at Jerusalem, but we are to mind Christ in our selves,” thereby giving greater credence to the Christ of one’s heart than to the Christ of history. In an intriguing way, this predated the bifurcation of the Jesus of history and Christ of faith, the external and historical Jesus and the interiorized and immanentized Christ who was indistinguishable from the Christian.66 As the fi nal clincher of the Christological deviations—and this after citing examples of those who had said that Christ was a “bastard” and that Christ would be “ashamed of what he did before”—Holland reported that “every man was God as much as Christ, for . . . there is as much of the God-head in every man, as was in Christ.”67 The rest of the “doctrine of the Ranters” included a radical rejection of Scripture as mere “Tale,” “dead Letter,” and “a bundle of contradictions”;

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affi rmation of polygamy, for monogamy was a “fruit of the curse”; and labeling of all commandments of God as fruits of the same curse, thereby providing the basis for antinomianism. Moreover, Holland indicted the Ranters of an inversion of the category of sin so that no such thing exists, that “sin and holinesse are all one to God.” Finally, for the Ranters, heaven and hell were merely places in the human heart; thus the last judgment was an invention of the priestcraft , as a “bugbaere to keep men in awe.”68 With such sweeping interiorization, allegorization, or simple rejection of the hitherto cardinal doctrines of Christianity, it was hardly surprising that the Ranters were fulminated against by the godly, who were deeply worried that the radicalism of the 1640s needed to be brought to a screeching halt, regardless of the cost. In a strikingly similar way, Claudius Gilbert, an Irish Calvinist minister from Limerick, argued against the errors of Best and Biddle, whose errors he connected with those of the Ranters as evil twins.69 While writing A Soveraign Antidote, Gilbert had been an active member of the Dublin ministers association, which was patterned after the model at the Worcestershire Association under the leadership of the indomitable Puritan Richard Baxter.70 Distinguishing between errors “more superficial” and “fundamental,” Gilbert identified errors antitrinitarian and antinomian-pantheistic as both belonging to the latter category. Arians and Sabellians, in Gilbert’s heresiographical taxonomy, were direct forefathers of “Paul Best, Biddle, &c.” via the aqueduct of Socinus, both “Uncle and Nephew” (Laelius and Faustus), whose “Italian Venom” came into England through the Racovian Catechism (1652). For Gilbert, the common thread of the Arians, Sabellians, Socinians, Best, and Biddle was their claim that Christ was at best “Deus factus” and thus not essentially or eternally divine.71 An entirely typical rhetorical method of raising the polemical temperature was to connect the antitrinitarians with “Turks and Jewes” agreeing with them. Gilbert exhorted his readers by citing from Colossians 2:9, John 1:3, and Hebrews 1:2–3 that since Christ was the eternal Son of God “in whom dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily,” and since the “same Titles and Attributes, the same Worship and works ascribed to God the Father” are also attributed to the Son, they need not fear the antitrinitarians. Again, similar to Edwards’s Gangraena, Gilbert offered a familiar juxtaposition of antinomian and antitrinitarian errors. Gilbert further discussed the problem of the contemporary Arians, that is, Biddle, Best, and others, by criticizing their “diminutive God,” who was made “of a like substance.” Furthermore, asked Gilbert, if Christ were not God eternal, of the same substance with the Father, how could he have made “infinite satisfaction” and procured salvation? At this juncture of Christological discussion, Gilbert turned his attention to the Ranter-Quaker phenomenon, which,

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though distinct, was equally threatening to orthodox Christology and to the Trinity. What shall we think of those quaking Impostors, that own no Christ above, but whats in them, that renew the Ranters blasphemy of Gods being in all things, their being Christed, &c? Do they not affront the God of Glory? The Godhead of Christ takes up man to God, conveying from God all good through his Manhood. There must be our strength against every sin, that Christ our surety is the blessed God.72 This represented a conflation of Gerrard Winstanley’s immanentist Christology with the Ranter insistence that God’s omnipresence meant that God was really and substantially present in all creation. That idea, then, was taken to mean that all creation was in God and was in fact indistinguishable from and identical with God. Against such heretical notions, Gilbert urged his readers to hold on to the Nicene orthodoxy of espousing that Christ was “the blessed God.” Disbanding the distinction between God and creation deviated from the Nicene trinitarian doctrine, for what had undergirded the pro-Nicene theology proper was that a clear line of demarcation existed between God and humanity, even though Christ was the perfect God-man and even if theosis was possible through the mediatorial work of Christ. This extremely fine balance was often liable to misunderstanding, if not willful distortion. And from that we shall turn our attention to the intriguing phenomenon of the Familist doctrine of being “Godded with God” and “Christed with Christ” as an outgrowth of Ranter ideas. IV

Misreading Your Neighbors’ Religious Intentions? Policing Orthodoxy and Politicizing Heresy As the Westminster Assembly continued to discuss acceptable doctrinal parameters for the truly Reformed Protestant Church in England, Robert Baillie came from Scotland as a Commissioner to help the process along.73 A keen observer and incisive commentator of contemporary religio-political affairs, Baillie published his alarmist heresiographical text in 1647 against “Anabaptism.” This was designed as an exposé of Independency as the fount of all “Antinomy” (that is, antinomianism), “Brownisme” (that is, separatism), and “Familisme” (that is, any and sundry perfectionistic sectaries). The polemical exercise of equating Anabaptism with denial of the Trinity was not a polemical novelty. In his Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, Sir Thomas More equated

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the Anabaptist communal ownership of property, intriguingly, with the denial of the divinity of Christ.74 In Anabaptism the Trve Fovntaine, Baillie followed an established historiographical pattern popular among the British writers of ecclesiastical history. He canvassed the British context and conflict synchronically vis-à-vis the broader convulsions within the European Reformation and diachronically vis-à-vis the context of the proliferation of heresy in the early church, especially the Augustinian clash against the Donatists.75 Baillie, uncannily similar to Edwards in terms of rearguard conservative sensibilities and with considerable accuracy of information, wrote that the collapse of censorship and the outbreak of the Civil War were directly culpable for the frontal attack on the fundamentals of Christianity. Nay, Baillie trenchantly maintained, the bleeding had already existed as the Laudian Church of England failed as a proselytizing institution, thus leaving the separatists justified in their own lacerating rebuke of the established church and eventual creation of conventicles and separatist churches. Simultaneously, calling a spade a spade, Baillie asserted that the radical call for toleration was equally reprehensible, and more directly responsible, for the vitiation of the fabric of Reformed religion, as he feared that in its stead, people would be led astray “to deny Christ, to embrace Mahomets Alcoran, the Jewish Talmud, the fables of the Pagan Poets” on an equal footing with the Bible as ultimate authority.76 Integral to the polemical sensibilities and rhetorical strategies of writers such as Baillie, Edwards, and Ephraim Pagitt—author of Heresiography (1645)—was the collusion between radical and rational religion. Creating a seamless connection between the Anabaptists, antinomians, and antitrinitarians was crucial for their purposes, for by doing so they could reestablish the indispensability of Presbyterianism as the way to ward off sectaries and heretics. With polemical flair, Baillie blamed the obduracy of the Episcopal divines for failing to crack down on the spread of “a free and absolute liberty” of religious expressions so that both the “Godhead and Manhood of Jesus Christ, the holy Ghost, the Divinity it self” were now exploded with a “blasphemous scorn,” replacing it with proclamations of humanity-now-deified and calling for a dissolution of “all Churches, all Sacraments,” all public worship, and the concatenating bondage of legalistic religion, be it that of the Miltonic “Old Priest” or the “New Presbyter.”77 It was in this context that Baillie singled out the significance of the story of Paul Best as an arch-heretic whose antitrinitarianism, joining the maelstrom of antinomian excesses, had managed to create the perfect storm of heresy and irreligion. Baillie’s exposé of Best occurred immediately after his discussion of the pernicious errors of antinomianism, ad seriatim, espoused by Henry Denne, Thomas Lamb, Laurence Clarkson, Paul Hobson, and John Saltmarsh. A key leitmotiv for the foregoing antinomians was an explicit denial of and

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departure from Calvinistic divinity: predestination, irresistibility of grace, and satisfaction of sin in Christ’s death.78 Interestingly enough, then, Baillie established that Arminianism, an inexorable by-product of Anabaptism, inevitably gave birth to Antinomianism, which, in turn, begot antitrinitarianism.79 Thus, Baillie’s polemical theme: leave Calvinism-Presbyterianism, then all hell will break loose! In this vein, Baillie’s polemical logic followed: But many Anabaptists are now begun to make havock of all. The Trinity they abominate, they will not only have Paul Bests blasphemy to go without any censure, but they do also joyn with him to preach down the Divinity of Jesus Christ and the Person of the holy Ghost . . . as their old Father the Anabaptist Servetus does lead them the way.80 The reference to “go without any censure” was likely recalling the support that Best had garnered among the Baptists and other radicals.81 Yet, as we have seen in chapter 1, Parliament and the Westminster Assembly divines were setting aside questions of polity and ecclesiology to delve into the thornier question of heresy.82 Bordering on polemical nitpicking, Baillie criticized the recently published manifesto among the seven London Baptist congregations, in particular, for being basically antitrinitarian. He insisted that the confession made no “mention at all of the Trinity,” nor any expressions of the Persons of Christ or the Holy Spirit, when they had “pregnant occasion” and pressing opportunity so to do. Since Paul Hobson was one of the signatories of the Confession of Faith of Seven Churches, Baillie’s point was to stretch the elasticity of the band of heretics: Anabaptists of Hobson’s sort espoused antinomian beliefs, and it was precisely the antinomians of this ilk who were most susceptible to buying the antitrinitarian convictions of Best.83 Yet, to be fair, it would seem Baillie intentionally misread the Confession of Faith of Seven Churches. In Article XVI, the London Baptists unequivocally affirmed the two-nature doctrine of Christ, which firmly buttressed an orthodox trinitarianism: “it was necessary hee should bee God, and also that hee shuld be man: for unlesse he had been God, he could never have perfectly understood the will of God; and unless he had been man, hee could not sutably have unfolded it in his own person to men.”84 As Barry Howson has convincingly demonstrated, despite all the rancor about the alleged heterodoxy of Hanserd Knollys, one of the signatories of the Confession of Faith, by the heresy hunters of the Baillie and Edwards type, this 1644 London Baptist Confession was Trinitarian and orthodox, although regarding baptism, their opinions were identical to the “subversive” revolutionaries, the Anabaptists of Münster.85 Was Baillie simply devoid of the fundamental Christian virtue of charity in his castigation of the London Baptists as antitrinitarians? Or was this an

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expression of “charitable Christian hatred,” which, Peter Lake and Alexandra Walsham have reminded us, was a key polemical theme of both Puritan and anti-Puritan discourse?86 In a prevalently binary oppositional mode of coexistence, which was a common feature of Elizabethan and early Stuart Puritanism, as Patrick Collinson has convincingly shown, it seems clear that with the collapse of censorship in early 1640s, and the ensuing Civil War radicalism, the argument against separatism, independency, and anticlericalism often took the form of excoriating the Baptists and Independents for their alleged doctrinal flaws, often maintaining a bit of a slippery slope argument.87 Adopt an Independent or Baptist ecclesiology; then one inexorably ended up denying the Trinity, Scripture, and ministry, and the whole house with the twin pillars of church and state would inevitably come tumbling down! Such was a common rhetorical strategy behind the vitriol of Thomas Edwards, Ephraim Pagitt, Robert Baillie, Daniel Featley, and Samuel Rutherford. Since denial of the Trinity was still a de facto capital offense, Baillie’s charge of the Anabaptists was not a mere divergence over an adiaphorous issue. By casting aspersions on the London Baptists’ trinitarian credentials, Baillie was indirectly, though knowingly, connecting the repudiation of infant baptism with something far more sinister: denial of the identity of the God in whose name one was baptized, infant or adult. The straightforward answer to this query seems elusive, although Baillie was certainly not alone in operating out of the milieu of heresy construction and weaving often reductionistic scenarios of the ramifications of these putative “errors unto damnation.” Daniel Featley (1582–1645) was a stalwart among the London godly clergy, particularly known for his theological acuity, which was put to ample use in the 1630s and 1640s. He held a debate with a Scottish Anabaptist and William Kiffin, a leading London Baptist minister, on October 17, 1642, and published the summary and commentary of the same as Dippers Dipt (1645). Featley was convinced that Anabaptism was a heresy roundly condemned both “by the Greeke and Latine Church.” Moreover, this corruption of the theology and praxis of the initiatory sacrament in Christianity was inexorably linked, argued Featley, with a corresponding denial of the Trinity, another clear demarcator of orthodoxy. Featley, throughout Dippers Dipt, invoked the names of the Donatists and Arians as the precursors of English Anabaptists. If these seventeenth-century Baptist “heresiarchs” were Donatus and Arius redivivus, then it followed that Featley could indulge in a form of Augustinian self-fashioning, as the beleaguered yet faithful defenders of Nicene orthodoxy and adherents of the unity of the church. Since denial of Catholic baptism and rejection of the pro-Nicene doctrine of the Trinity weakened the fabric of the church, there was a virulent attack on the London Baptists. Featley’s polemical strategy was to besmirch the overall credibility of the Baptists by demonstrating the flaws

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of their putative trinitarianism. If they were less than orthodox with regard to the fundamental aspect of the faith, as Featley sought to establish, then their baptismal theology was equally suspect, and vice versa. Yet as we can see, even in the “transcription” of the debate produced by Featley, he and his polemical others were treading on a fairly nebulous realm of trinitarian debates, where matters of semantic differences could be exaggerated as substantial divergence. When asked as to whether they believed that “each of the three persons is God,” the Baptist answer was that the “Father is said to be the only God in respect of Essence,” against which Featley fulminated it as a blasphemy. By framing the question as a comparative exegesis of John 17:3, which said that “the Father is the onely true God,” and John 15:26, which spoke of the Spirit coming from the Father, Featley was intending to trap the Baptists and show that they were less than trinitarian, thereby winning the debate on both trinitarian and baptismal theology.88 Furthermore, to show the ecclesial authenticity of the Church of England, Featley demanded from Kiffin whether he regarded the Thirty-Nine Articles as “agreeable to Gods word,” again, another cleverly lodged polemical slingshot. If Kiffin were to say that the Thirty-Nine Articles were agreeable, then Kiffin was basically shooting himself in the foot. On the other hand, if he were to say that the Thiry-Nine Articles were unbiblical, then Featly adduced the Articles One through Six and Eighteen to bolster the claims of the Church of England as being orthodox. The proofs had much to do with Trinity, Incarnation, resurrection, and the deity of the Holy Spirit. In other words, according to Featley’s simple binary mode of logic, the Church of England was orthodox in its trinitarian theology, thus its sacramental theology must be impeccable, whereas the Anabaptists were likely wrong on the Trinity, at least per Featley’s forced allegation, and certainly on baptism. Even though Featley’s obfuscating query about the Trinity took up only three pages (out of 219), the overall rhetorical effect was incontrovertibly clear. It behooves us to see what these alleged Anabaptists of London had confessed regarding the Holy Trinity, as both Baillie and Featley regarded them wrong on the Trinity. In the 1644 edition, Article I rendered the nature of divine identity as “one God, one Christ, one Spirit,” which, though explicitly Pauline, was often used by the antitrinitarians to buttress their view that God the “Father” alone was God, thereby leaving Christ and Spirit as, at best, subordinate deities or, at worst, mere creatures. In the 1646 edition, such language is left out, and the First Article has the new language of divine “subsistence” as existing “in himselfe.” Intriguingly, whereas the 1644 edition has an unambiguous affirmation of the deity of the three persons (“being every one of them one and the same God; and therefore not divided, but distinguished . . . by their severall properties”), the 1646 revised version shies away from adopting

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the language of personhood and resorted to the triad of “Father, the Word, and the holy Spirit.” Yet Bailey’s, and by implication Featley’s, accusation that these seven Baptist churches in London were antitrinitarians was an exercise in theological semantic range stretch, reaching its breaking point. The London Baptists were not antitrinitarians, but their avoidance of the language of personhood was interpreted as far more threatening than their intention. Based on the articles concerning Christology (Articles IX to XX in both editions), it is very difficult to conclude that the English Anabaptists were antitrinitarians, which Bailey and Featley misread. These accusations reflect the culture of fear among the proponents of paedobaptism. Their apparent polemical strategy was to destabilize the foundation of the Baptists by casting them as antitrinitarians. If so, could it be ironically the case that the sincerest efforts of the trinitarians added to the reigning confusion over the exact linguistic circumscribers regarding the Trinity? Alternatively, the “charitable Christian hatred” of Baillie and Featley ended up broadening the scope of hatred, yet at the critical expense of more precise definitions of antitrinitarian heresy. Baillie and Featley’s construction of an “inevitabilist paradigm” of Anabaptism leading to denial of the Trinity, or that an antinomian view would slide down to an antitrinitarian position, was followed in the 1650s as well. One important caveat needs to be placed here. The polemical telos of the conservative heresiographers was either heresy or atheism: adopt an “unbiblical” ecclesiology or sacramental theology; then you end up denying the Trinity and subverting the foundation of learned ministry as vicars of Christ. This interesting theological extrapolation of the inseparable connective tissue between priestly or pastoral ministry and trinitarian theology needs further explication. J. G. A. Pocock noted that in late-seventeenth-century Anglican polemic vis-à-vis the Dissenters, the place of episcopal ministry was exalted to the place of vicarious presence of Christ mediated through the priests. Then, do away with the office of ministry, and you do away with the earthly presence or site of Christ. You thus may end up inexorably with a hypertheorized symbol of Christ but no concrete presence of Christ; therefore, the denial of Trinity or the collapse of ecclesiastical foundation—for the Trinity was regarded a sacrosanct part of ecclesia catholica—was only a matter of time!89 While Pocock is certainly correct to see that as an indispensable accoutrement of Anglican apologetic in or around the Glorious Revolution, such tendency to see the pastoral ministry as the defender of Christian orthodoxy can also be found in the Puritan-Presbyterian rhetoric against the anticlericalism of the radical Protestants in the 1640s and the 1650s. Thomas Hall’s Pulpit Guarded is a case in point.90 Occasioned by a disputation at “Henly in Arden in Warwickshire,” on August 20, 1650, Hall, a redoubtable Presbyterian, held forth against five “mechanic preachers,” Lawrence Williams (a “Nailor”), Thomas Palmer (a

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baker), Thomas Hinde (a plowwright), Henry Oakes (a weaver), and Humfrey Rogers (a “Bakers boy”). Laid out in seventeen arguments, Hall made a predictable case connecting one’s ecclesiological radicalism with doctrinal declension. For Hall, A Looking-Glass for Anabaptists included repudiations of infant baptism as well as anticlericalism. But without making a distinction between General Baptists and Calvinistic Baptists, Hall followed the predictable narrative arc of describing the pernicious errors of the Anabaptists. To the litany of errors—denial of original sin, infant baptism, their espousal of human free will, mortalism, an overrealized eschatology that endorsed the possibility of perfection (theosis) in this life—Hall added their antitrinitarianism. This was a new feature of anti-Anabaptist writings of the 1640s and the 1650s. The twenty-first alleged error was “That the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not Three distinct Persons, and in Essence one God.”91 Hall’s description of the fall of the Anabaptists was peppered with hyperbole and fear. I shall give you a doleful instance of the fall of a friend of mine, a man of excellent parts, of strict life, and pious conversation; a careful observer of the Sabbath one that trained up his children and family in the way of the Lord; able to speak excellently in defence of Sabbath, Ordinances, Trinity, Baptism, &c. yet now is faln from all, most fearfully and obstinately, and is become a Socinian, an Arminian, and what not? ‘Tis time for us to fear, when Professors shall turn Blasphemers; and those that prized and pleaded for Ministry and Ordinances, shall not, abhor them. When the Cedar falls, let the Fir-tree howle.92 Similarly, John Brinsley presented both antinomian and antitrinitarian heresies as direct consequences of the “interval of Church-Government.” In other words, ecclesiological confusion and anticlericalism unavoidably produced doctrinal confusion. Brinsley offered a trenchant critique of what he perceived as the flip side of the same blasphemous coin: mere human beings usurping the divine prerogative of claiming themselves to be God would inevitably usher in doctrinal obfuscation regarding personal distinctions within the Triune Godhead. For Brinsley, while God was “acknowledged in word,” the megalomaniacal messiahs were the chief culprits of blaspheming the glory of God, as they brazenly claimed: “There is no God but what is within us.”93 Furthermore, there were explicit rejections of the language that had undergirded the doctrine of the Trinity. So thundered Brinsley: “as for that Orthodox distinction betwixt Essence and Person, how it is exploded? The very name of Trinity jeered at; and the thing renounced. The Deity of Christ the Son of God, as also of the Holy Ghost, and their equality with the Father, how is it professed against?”94 Thus the defense of the Trinity, according to Baillie, Featley, Hall, and Brinsley,

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was designed to obviate the further downward spiral of the church and state. So just how widespread was this phenomenon? V

Godded with God? Then, Where Has the Trinity Gone? The anxiety over and consequent attack on antinomianism and antitrinitarianism were often couched as a critique of the expression “Christed with Christ” (often with the other half of the couplet, “Godded with God”) and its rhetorical permutations.95 As Jean Dietz Moss has persuasively demonstrated, the phrase “Godded with God,” though not a neologism of Hendrik Niclaes, was regarded as sufficiently Familist that it became the shorthand for any Niclaean or Familist errors. Thomas Taylor’s (1576–1632) Regula Vitae reflected both the alarm of the nonradical Londoners and the alacrity with which Taylor, a luminary among the Cambridge-trained Puritans and an erstwhile protégé of William Perkins, acted to stem the ominous spread of antinomianism. Taylor declared that a peculiar emphasis of the maelstrom of antinomians was that “being in Christ, they are Christed with Christ, as pure as Christ, as perfect as Christ.” This was a logical corollary to the idea of the abrogation of sin in toto: that God saw no sin in the Christian and that the regenerate could not sin.96 Perhaps since Taylor himself had been castigated as a ringleader among the “Puritanicall Spirits,” a sobriquet bequeathed to him by Richard Montagu, he was all the more assiduously distancing the sober, godly Puritans from the radical, lunatic fringe.97 As historians have demonstrated convincingly, the fissiparous tendency within Puritan divinity, although noticeable in other parts of England, was skewed toward London, as a pamphlet in the 1640s had called London the cesspool of all radical ideas.98 In a pamphlet aimed at John Milton’s Doctrine and Discourse of Divorce, the author delivered a lacerating rebuke of divorce, linking the legitimation of divorce with the antinomian excess of deluding oneself to be “Christed with Christ and Godded with God.”99 In contemporary theology, there has been a veritable renaissance of articles, edited volumes, monographs, indeed, conferences dedicated to the theme of divinization, or theosis. With the resurgence of scholarly interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, particularly the liturgical and theological contributions of the Cappadocians, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory Nyssa, and Basil of Caesarea, along with the related phenomenon of trinitarian theology, becoming intensely au courant, the idea of theosis has become equally trendy.100 However, in most contemporary literature dealing with theosis, the only two early modern figures who have received any sustained scholarly analysis have been Luther and Calvin.101 The entire horizon of Reformation and post-Reformation English

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religious history, especially related to this theme, is virtually invisible. To be sure, the notion of theosis was transformed, indeed transmuted, in England, thereby veering off in the heterodox direction, as far as the Orthodox proponents of theosis are concerned. In other words, while to those who espouse the Cappadocian view of divinization as the truth, the English story will be nothing but heretical outgrowth, yet to those interested in the religious history of seventeenth-century England, this phenomenon needs closer scrutiny, as the field of radical, mystical religion has become reenergized with the postrevisionist turn in historiography. Writing with a perfect hindsight of the post-Restoration critique of “enthusiasm,” John Turner’s A Phisico-Theological Discourse (1698) surveyed the tendency of the “Weigelians and Familists,” whose shibboleths included the “Magnificent Language of being Godded with God, and Christed with Christ.” This frightening tendency, of persons attaining such a degree of union with God that it results in “Conjunction of Substance with the Deity,” had been taught in varying degrees by “Plotinus, Porphirius, Iamblicus and Proclus,” who were known Platonists. Turner then identified the “Arabian Philosophers” as those who had imbibed from this Neoplatonist fountain; from the Christian standpoint, it was Origen who bequeathed such proclivities toward theosis to the “Mystick Theologues” so that they indefatigably emphasized “an intimate Union with God, whereby the Soul becomes Deify’d.”102 Equipped with philosophical subtlety and sophistication, Turner continued to identify the problem of theosis and its impact on the orthodox doctrine of God, including that of the Trinity: For by their contending that the Divine Essence is immediately united as an intelligible Species to the Intellect of the blessed, and that this Species, and the glorify’d Understanding do not remain distinct things, but become identify’d, they do in effect affirm the Soul to be transubstantiated into God, and to be really deify’d . . . that their Souls become Deify’d and Essentially united to God by knowing him.103 Thus Turner’s orthodox proposal was that it was enough to “believe the Person of Christ, and the Persons Believers to remain distinct after all the Union that intercedes between them . . . let us detest those swelling Words of Pride . . . of being Christed and Deify’d.”104 It seems that even by the end of the seventeenth century, the haunting specter of those who had proclaimed themselves to be “Godded with God” and “Christed with Christ” had a real presence. So what was this phenomenon about, and how was this form of radical religion, if at all, related with the antitrinitarian fear of the middle decades of the seventeenth century?

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As a result of witnessing firsthand the proliferation of sectaries and radical religion in England, Samuel Rutherford, an avowed defender of Presbyterianism and a Scottish commissioner to the Westminster Assembly, wrote A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (1647).105 Rutherford’s attack on antinomianism was not limited to English radicalism alone. In fact, with all the news and rumors of the Hutchinsonian controversies reaching the English shores from Massachusetts, Rutherford also turned his attention to the problems there. For instance, he connected Samuel Gorton’s Simplicities Defence with Caspar Schwenckfeld, Thomas Müntzer, Hendrik Niclaes, and the Familists. Furthermore, by connecting Gorton with the teaching of Theologia Germanica, Rutherford connected all the requisite dots for his etiological analysis of Gorton’s “heresy” of antinomianism.106 Robert Baillie, according to Philip Gura, had sufficient warrant to be similarly convinced, especially after receiving from Roger Williams a manuscript written by Samuel Gorton. Known for his mystical, antinomian teaching, Gorton, by the late fall of 1645, had established notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic. Consequently, for Baillie, separatist polity inevitably degenerated into ecclesial cacophony, spiritual bankruptcy, conjugal breakdowns, and departure from trinitarian orthodoxy.107 The potential for spreading the poison of Gortonian radicalism increased exponentially when he crossed the Atlantic and returned temporarily to London and especially when Gorton became nestled in the church of Thomas Lamb, the leading Arminian Baptist in London. Lamb was an influential Baptist minister whose scope of influence in the 1640s was second only to John Goodwin. In terms of his polemical strategy, Rutherford shared the conservative sensibilities of Baillie and Edwards. Their common taxonomy of politically seditious and spiritually seductive ideologues, such as “Antinomians, Familists, Socinians, Arminians, Arrians, Antitrinitarians, Antiscripturians, Seekers, Anabaptists,” ran the gamut of sectaries that “completing the Reformation” had to expunge. Therefore, the complicity of those sympathetic to the foregoing radicals under the aegis of liberty of conscience was absolutely unconscionable.108 In his excoriating exposé of Hendrik Niclaes, Rutherford reiterated the point that Niclaes and the Familists were committed to this fanciful notion that all saints were “Christed with Christ,” referring to the depth of mystical union (unio mystica) between the saints and Christ. This idea of mystical union of the believers with Christ was an indispensable theme in Calvin’s perspective on the nature of the Christian life. Yet it could easily be taken to the extreme of conflating the ontological distinction between Christ as creator and Christians as creatures, who, though headed to the eschatological consummation, were nonetheless still mired in sin. For Rutherford, this overrealized eschatology was why these Familists and others ended up denying the pro-Nicene trinitarian theology.109 Rutherford used the expression that a believer is “Godded with God, Christed

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with Christ” on four separate occasions; in two instances, Rutherford sought to rectify the misguided notion that Luther’s teaching on justification by faith alone sanctioned antinomianism and espoused theosis.110 In the remaining two cases, Rutherford took direct aim at the antinomians and Familists, averred that “Familists will have us to be very Christ or Christed and Godded,” and urged readers to be extremely leery of the Familists, John Saltmarsh’s Sparkles of Glory, and Theologia Germanica. For Rutherford, the Achilles’ heel of this Familist doctrine was that it taught that a substantial transformation occurred as a result of “our conversion to God” so that we are “godded with the new heavenly being of God, in love, and Christed with Christ, and turned, when we are perfectly renewed, into all spirit.”111 Rutherford’s warning was all the more intriguing because he was known as a champion of mystical divinity himself. Yet even for Rutherford, the Familists had crossed the orthodox and ontological Rubicon with their inordinate language of theosis.112 The threat of antinomianism and its perceived threat on the traditional doctrine of God, both on divine transcendence and on the Trinity, was not merely a sectarian concern. It was shared across the “denominational” lines. Henry More, a leading Cambridge Platonist of the day, echoed the same alarmist sentiment. An intriguing element in his Second Lash of Alazonomastix was that while More clearly distanced himself from the abuses of the idea of mystical union with God, he, nonetheless, affirmed the right way of appropriating the Plotinian-Neoplatonist doctrine of the ascent of the soul to God, thereby acquiring nearness to God. After quoting from a euphoric song from “the Sibylle,” More called this process of transformation becoming “Deiform,” which was suspension of the soul from the “clotty dark Personality of this compacted body,” which was recast in love, freedom, justice, and equity. Yet, More truculently attacked the antinomians and, in this particular instance, the Welsh alchemist Thomas Vaughan. Vaughan’s writings had pantheistic tendencies, truncating the levels of distinction between the Creator and creatures and allegedly abusing this true Christian doctrine of theosis, which originated with Plato and reached its apotheosis with the Cappadocians in the fourth century ce. More sardonically, he asserted: “This is to be godded with God, and Christed with Christ, if you be in love with such affected language.” Lest anyone mistake his polemical other, More continued: “But you, O ye cages of unclean birds, that have so begodded your selves, that you are grown foul and black like brutes or devils, what will become of you?”113 Yet true to form as a Cambridge Platonist, More answered the “cavils” of his “reprehenders,” who had chided him for polemical hypocrisy in that he was known for propounding the doctrine of deification himself in his Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656). He defended that view and, in so doing, revealed a fascinating etiological connection between his own thought and the Theologia Germanica. It is

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startling, to say the least, since to acknowledge any influence from Theologia Germanica was to open oneself to the criticism of being an antinomian or even a denier of the Trinity. When one looks at the confluence of seemingly incongruous, if not contradictory, theological impulses that comprise the constellation of More’s Cambridge Platonism, one becomes quickly aware of the danger of facile taxonomization of seventeenth-century English philosophies and theologies. More was an avowed defender of the Trinity, so much so that Biddle singled him out in his treatise as an allegorizer of the worst sort, eager to prove the Trinity from the Old Testament.114 Thus More continued his surprising confession: And for my own part I understand nothing else by Deification which is so often repeated in that excellent Manual Theologia Germanica, in which, though there be much of Melancholy, yet I think there is more true and savory Divinity then in thousands of other writings that make a greater noise in the world.115 When it was de rigueur among the godly in the 1650s to sever any perceived or real connection with or dependence on Theologia Germanica, here was More, doing the very opposite. The critique of a careless exaltation of the theme of theosis was continued in a Presbyterian layman’s work. Edward Leigh’s Systeme or Body of Divinity (1654) contained a lengthy discussion of the union of the believer with Christ, which was punctuated by a parenthetical critique of those who asserted that “we were Godded with God, and Christed with Christ.” This is clearly in reference to the heralds of “Perfection Proclaimed,” such as the Familists, Antinomians, and the unintended deniers of the Trinity.116 On a marginal note, Leigh ruefully acknowledges that this idea of theosis (or deification) was an orthodox theme pushed to the extreme: “The Fathers hyperboles this way, followed by Luther, gave occasion to this,” thus cautioning the readers that he would not be “too bold with those expressions of Nazianzen,” because Gregory Nazianzus’s—the leading Cappadocian theologian of the fourth century and an avowed defender of the Trinity and of theosis—expression “Xristpoiei [n, Qeopoiei[n” was more abused than used judiciously by the seventeenth-century spiritists.117 In other words, Leigh was aware of the orthodox pedigree of the proponents, such as Gregory Nazianzen and Luther, whose positions, taken to extremes, could flatten the clear ontological distinction between God and humans, although they themselves would never endorse such flawed conclusions. Yet it is interesting that Leigh does affirm that our union with Christ was more than “a relative Union” in that it encompassed far greater reality than a mere notional or nominal state of mind, and yet it was “not an essential Union.”118

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Then Leigh maintained that since the believers’ union with Christ was often compared to the “Mystery of the Trinity, and is like to the Union of the Persons in the Divine Nature,” an overwrought identification with Christ could easily push the fulcrum of Creator-creature distinction to such a degree that the spirit-fi lled Christian virtually became Christ. On another marginal note, Leigh inveighed against the Ranter type of overrealized eschatology and its anthropological ramifications: “Some say, the actions of the Saints are of infinite value, as the obedience of Christs humane nature, because of the hypostatical Union [between, as the antinomians contended, the saint and Christ, not between the divine and human natures within Christ], and that they are so one with Christ that they can sinne no more then Christ can sinne.”119 In other words, even for this sober-minded Parliamentarian of Leigh’s type, the biblical teaching on Christians being “made partakers of the Divine Nature” (the locus classicus on deification, 2 Peter 1:4) was a text to be exegeted most assiduously, precisely because so much was at stake. Circumscription of the nature of the union with Christ was of cardinal significance for Leigh, due in great measure to the potential for abuse, so Leigh draws the line of demarcation clearly by asserting that there are three mystical unions that transcend the human ken to comprehend and participate in an essential manner: 1. The Mystery of the Trinity, wherein three distinct Persons make but one God, Deut. 6.4 2. Wherein two distinct Natures make one particular person, so there is one Christ, 1 Cor. 8.6 3. When two distinct Natures and Persons are united by one Spirit; so there is one Church, Cant. 6.8120 Again the rise of antinomianism and antitrinitarianism was a by-product both of the Lutheran, Familist, and Behmenist import from the Continent, and a zealous, spirit-seeking, and spirit-filled Puritan divinity.121 Similar concerns were raised by Leigh’s Puritan co-pugilists Anthony Burgess, Thomas Manton, and John Tombes. In a clever rhetorical conflation of categories, Burgess called those who espoused an absolute immanentist view of the Spirit’s dwelling upon the human that they had “fancied a transubstantiation into the God-head,” thereby in one polemical swipe getting at the Papists and the proclaimers of “Seraphick divinity,” the intentional antinomians and incidental antitrinitarians.122 Sir Henry Vane, in attempt to disavow his alleged connections with, and endorsement of, antinomians and antitrinitarians such as John Fry and John Biddle, wrote The Retired Mans Meditations (1655). Dubbed an antinomian and millenarian, Vane offered a countervailing perspective in chapter 26, in

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which he treated the nature and trajectory of the thousand-year reign of Christ. Vane certainly took the millennial rule of Christ literally, yet in his description of the eschatological human self, he was much more measured in his euphoric longing for de regno Christi: who by all this their exaltation are neither Godded with God, nor Christed with Christ, but are still in the proper capacity of creatures, but of the highest and best creatures under Christ their Head, exalted above all Angels or any particular nature whatsoever; and brought thus at last into the enjoyment of the beatifical vision of God, in the face of the blessed Trinity.123 Vane parried the blows of the trinitarians such as Owen, Cheynell, Baillie, Rutherford, and Edwards, for whom antinomianism and antitrinitarianism were identical ideological twins in slightly different garbs. He did so by disavowing his affi liation with antinomian perfectionism and by ascertaining his hope for the beatific vision of the triune God, as he clearly asserted that even in the glorified state, human beings will be neither “godded with god,” nor “christed with Christ,” if by that expression one meant a truncation of the distinction between the Creator and creatures. Coming from the other end of the ecclesiological spectrum, yet converging on the same diatribe against the excesses of antinomian and antitrinitarian proclaimers, was John Gauden (1600–1662), a Restoration bishop of Worcester and an ardent defender of Laudianism during the interregnum, who penned an apologia for the extruded Church of England. In IJ era; Dav k ria, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Suspiria (1659), Gauden located the ultimate culpability for the ecclesiological and theological malaise on the departure from the apostolic and primitive root of the church, the latest iteration of which was the Church of England. An unavoidable upshot of such departure, Gauden reasoned, was the proliferation of all radical religions: antinomian excesses, enthusiastic raptures, prophecies, supplanting of Episcopal ministry, and proponents of deification who ended up denying the Trinity. Here, again, we see the convenient rhetorical coupling of antinomian excesses as inseparable from antitrinitarian cul-de-sac. For Gauden, the enthusiastic excesses of antinomianism and antitrinitarianism, the proclaimers of which he calls “rare Master-cooks of Christianity” and “mysterious Mountebanks,” had an ancient pedigree: Gnostics, Valentinians, Manichees, Montanists, Circumcellians, and Donatists. In his defense, Gauden insisted that prior to the advent of such mechanic and perfectionistic preachers, the universitytrained clergy did know of the “sweet satisfactions, evident sealings, sincere sanctifyings, and undoubted assurings of the holy Ghost” and inculcated such

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trinitarian spirituality to their people, without telling them that they could be “Godded with God, Christed with Christ, Spirited with the Spirit” so that there was no real ontological distinction between God and the self, due to the intoxicating depth of union and communion with the divine. Such errors inexorably led the perfected saints to throw away the categories of sin, sanctification, divine transcendence, and the Trinity. Thus you had charismatically wanton Familists, Seekers, Ranters, and Quakers who insisted that they were “presently Deified . . . personally invested, and plenarily possessed with all the infi nite Attributes, essence and glory of God,” an exclusive prerogative applicable only to Christ. Consequently, this was Gauden’s justification for paving the polemical pathway between antinomianism and antitrinitarianism: by claiming oneself to be invested with divine attributes, one was de facto in denial of the Trinity, at least as promulgated at the Council of Nicaea.124 Origen of Alexandria was a pivotal and innovative exegete who, at least as assessed by Gauden, had gone from an amiable defender of orthodox Christianity as a catechist and biblical interpreter to a “Chymist in Divinity, & Allegorist in Religion,” and it is this tendency of allegorizing that begat the problem of antinomian and inexorably antitrinitarian excesses. In a tantalizing contrast, we shall explore in detail in chapter 6 the very problem of allegorizing, or Platonizing/Philonizing, applied to the trinitarians, in the case of Jacques Souverain. For Gauden, nonetheless, he proffered another hall of shame list of all the early modern influences imported from the Continent. From the Catholic side, Gauden listed Harpius, Thomas à Kempis, and Teresa of Avila.125 From the Protestant side, Gauden the Laudian’s list is nearly identical with the taxonomy provided by the Presbyterians Edwards, Baillie, and Rutherford: Theologia Germanica came first, followed by the religious “Rhodomontado’s of H.N.,” that is, the infamous progenitor of the Family of Love, Hendrik Niclaes, Jacob Behmen, and Jan Baptist van Helmont.126 Their collective “Familistic nonsense and Seraphick curiosity” produced considerable cacophony in divinity, particularly in confusing the Creator-creature distinction, which was regarded as axiomatic in sound divinity, whether Catholic or Protestant.127 Table 2.1 is designed to summarize the ideological affi nity between the radical antinomians and the rational antitrinitarians. As one can see, the affi nity runs substantially deeper than a mere polemical labeling of convenience. The next section suggests some reasons for the flurry of translations of patristic, medieval, and Renaissance texts of mystical theology and their potential contribution to the vitiating of the fabric of trinitarian orthodoxy.

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Table 2.1 Antinomian-Antitrinitarian Doctrinal Overlap Doctrinal Issue\Proponents

Antitrinitarians [Best, Biddle]

Antinomians (Clarkson, Bauthumley)

Infant Baptism

No

No

Original Sin

No

No

Predestination/Calvinism

No

No*128

Possibility of Theosis

(Qualified) Yes

Yes

Trinity

No

No (or sufficiently revised to distance itself from the Nicene orthodoxy)

* Indicates some variety of opinions.

VI

From Cusanus to Clarkson: Divinization, the Trinity, and the Spiritist Piety The middle decades of the seventeenth century are often regarded as the “most creative single epoch in the modern life of England.”129 According to the Quaker historian Rufus Jones, the “pantheistic-mystical sects,” gaining momentum in England since the fourteenth century, enjoyed a period of resurgence in late Tudor and early Stuart England, culminating with the Ranters, Seekers, Muggletonians, Familists, and Quakers. This movement had the Neoplatonist tinge and was indebted to Meister Eckart, the Jewish kabbalah, Theologica Germanica, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Nicholas of Cusa.130 In fact, it was precisely during this period that the idea of theosis (or deification), a theme suff used throughout Pseudo-Dionysius’s On the Name of God and Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei, was reflected in and, perhaps more crucially, refracted through the pantheistic perspectives of writers such as John Everard, Giles Randall, Laurence Clarkson, and other radicals. The Neoplatonist ideas of the soul’s ascent to God infiltrated and influenced the English Renaissance religious imagination in myriad ways. One such way was through translation of key texts. It is noteworthy that John Everard was the translator of Hermes Trismegistus and PseudoDionysius’s On the Name of God and had a hand in Cusanus’s De Visione Dei, even though the published version owed its fi nal translational touch to Giles Randall, another London radical, as it was printed in 1646 as The Single Eye. The porous membrane between conformity to the Church of England and nonconformity often ended up encouraging an intense form

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of spirituality expressed in sermon gaddings, clandestine prayer meetings, and other communal ecstatic exercises, which were well traveled by Everard’s followers.131 The Family of Love, the English exponents of the teaching of a certain H. N. (Henrik Niclaes), a Dutch charismatic mystic, was often castigated for being Arians. This critique needs slight revision: the Familists were assuredly nontrinitarians, but not because of their explicit denial of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, their emphasis lay on theosis, the conviction that humanity could achieve the loft iest goal of becoming “deified,” as seen in the blueprint of Christ, who perfectly imaged both humanity and divinity. It is not clear as to whether the Familists denied the Trinity per se, but it would seem that for the type of spirituality they had espoused, the doctrine became, more or less, superfluous. It was one thing to deny the divinity of Christ and the perichoretic nature of the three Persons in the Godhead; it was another matter to affirm that this Christ dwelled in you and was in fact rather indistinguishable from you. Whether via the former or the latter route, one ended up denying the Trinity.132 By implication of the relative unimportance of Nicene formulations of Christ’s consubstantiality (homoousion), it seems clear that both Niclaes and the Familists had little care for the doctrine of the Trinity in either their theology or praxis.133 Although no formal or explicit rejection of the Trinity is found in his commentaries on the Apostles’ Creed—Exhortatio I and Evangelium Regni—it was Niclaes’s mystical interpretation of the identity of God and the trajectory of the human communion with God that infuriated his interlocutors, such as John Knewstub and Henry More.134 Behind and before Niclaes, there was a figure whose mystical theology was slightly lost in translation, as it was transplanted on English soil by John Everard’s work: Nicholas of Cusa. In a recent essay designed to reassess the legacy of Nicholas of Cusa, the notion that he was hailed as the key impetus behind “Platonizing the Christian faith,” thus identifiable as one of the earliest theologians who “stressed God’s immanence in creation,” was brought to the fore.135 John Cooper, in his Panentheism, named Nicholas of Cusa, Jakob Böhme, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Meister Eckhart as popular influences on seventeenth-century Neoplatonism in England.136 While the obvious candidates for carrying on the legacies of (Neo)Platonism were the Cambridge Platonists—Ralph Cudworth (1617– 1688), Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), and Henry More (1614–1687)—the lesser known and more radical elements in seventeenth-century English religious history were John Everard, the coterie of Hendrik Niclaes (the Familists), and a few Ranters such as Laurence Clarkson and Jacob Bauthumley. Interestingly enough, Cusanus’s doctrine of theosis had a tincture of intrinsically overrealized eschatology, since he spoke of it not as a future

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reality yet to be, but rather as “the intellectual process of perceiving that the One, or God, is the immanent Cause of all things” and, most crucially, “as an already realized destiny.”137 Could this have been the theological perspective that prompted Everard and Randall to translate De Visione Dei? The dialectical tension between a “mystical union that culminates in theosis” and the transcendent, “absolute distance” of God was assiduously maintained in De Visione Dei, but it was the very issue that could get out of control in antinomian divinity, as seen in works by Hendrik Niclaes, Jacob Boehme, and others.138 As Nigel Smith and Ariel Hessayon have shown, this also explains the popularity of Hermes Trismegistus and Everard’s hand in translating the work. As a mystical theologian, Cusanus was keenly aware of the inherently apophatic nature of all theological discourse and that all anthropomorphic descriptions of God have their inescapable limitations. In God, all seemingly contrary realities are reconciled, so Nicholas declared: whereupon we attribute unto God seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, sence, reason, and understanding and such like. According to the severall reasons of the signification of every word, yet in him seeing is not another distinct thing from hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, and understanding, and so all Divinity is said to be put in a circle, because one of his Attributes is affirmed of another. And for God to have a thing is for him to be that thing, or his having is his being, his moving is his standing, his running is his resting, and in like manner all his other Attributes, so that although we ascribe unto him, moving in one respect, and standing in another, yet because hee is the absolute reason in which all alterity or othernesse is unitie or onenesse, and all diversitie is Ionecitie [sic] or selfe samenesse: Therefore that diversitie of reasons or formality (as wee conceive diversity, which is not Identity it selfe) cannot bee in God.139 Cusanus’s perspective on divine simplicity was orthodox and traditional. Yet since within God all polar opposite realities obtain, it was entirely conceivable that antinomians such as Giles Randall or John Everard would fi nd this treatise worthy of translation. As Nancy J. Hudson has convincingly argued, the Neoplatonic theme of the soul’s ascent to God was a pervasive presence in most of Cusanus’s writings.140 In books 1 to 16 of De Visione Dei, there was a general philosophical discussion of the possibility of the fi nite creature’s participation in things eternal and divine. In books 17 and 18, Cusanus made a trinitarian move, and in books 19 to 25, a complementary Christological move was made, to show that the theophilosophical maxim

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that the fi nite cannot grasp the infi nite (finitum non capax infiniti) found its resolution through the Incarnation and revelation of God through Jesus so that that which was infi nite could grasp the fi nite (infinitum capax finiti). Th is Cusan move, according to Hudson, was indebted to the Cappadocian tradition that saw theosis as a concrete ramification of the Incarnation of Christ. For Cusanus, this infinite deity, the divine lover, had to be triune since “thou canst never be loved by any thing as thou art worthy of love but by an infinite lover.”141 Adopting an Augustinian trinitarian perspective seeing God as “1. loving love and 2. Amiable love . . . 3. bond of either love, and this is nothing else but what I see in thy absolutely unity” of purpose and persons, Cusanus sought to maintain the distinction between God and the creature.142 Thus Cusanus praised the God of grace and glory who allowed him a fragmentary yet real glimpse into the divine mystery: O most wonderfull God, which neither art of the singular nor plural number, but above all plurality and singularity, one in three, and three in one: I see therefore in the Walls of Paradice, where thou my God art, plurality coincide with singularity, and that thou dwellest farre farre beyond that. Teach me O Lord how I may conceive that possible which I see to be of necessity, for there meets an impossibility that the plurality of three without which I cannot conceive thee to be perfect, and naturall love is a plurality without number, As hee that sayes, one, one, one, thrice sayes thrice one and yet hee sayes not three but one, and this one thrice but hee cannot say thrice without three, although hee say not three, for when he saies one thrice, he repeats the same, and doth not number, for to number is to alter one, but to repeat one and the same thrice, as to plurifie without number. Therefore that plurality which I see in my God, is an alterality without alterity, because it is an alterity which is Identitie.143 At the same time, there was a deeply mystical strand in Cusanus, so that for the individual Christian in her ecstatic experience of union with Christ, it was entirely possible to lose her individuality. This opened up the possibility for gross misinterpretation. If we add Cusanus’s The Single Eye (1646) to Clarkson’s A Single Eye (1650) and combine them with Jacob Boehme’s and Hendrik Niclaes’s writings, which, as we have seen, tended to stress both the depth of human-divine unity and thus the possibility for theosis, then the fear among the godly seems more justifiable. Union with Christ was simultaneously the cause for much comfort for the saint and much alarm when such ontological bounds between God and human were trespassed. Again, the extremely delicate balance between underattributing and overattributing the

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Christian’s union with Christ was the interpretive key for Cusanus. The Son was the “medium or mean of the union of all things, that all things by the mediation of thy Son may rest in thee.” Here, Cusanus was not suggesting that creatures could become “Godded with God,” but one can see how that type of exaggerated, misappropriated interpretation could emerge. In the immediately preceding chapter, however, Cusanus pushed the fulcrum slightly toward affirming theosis: “So being thou art the love lovely, the created loving will, may in thee its lovely God attaine union and felicity, for hee that receiveth thee God the reasonable receptible light, may come to such a union of thee that he may be united to thee as a Sun to his Father.”144 Since God was perfect reason and impeccable love itself, due to the moral and ontological gap between humans and God, no human initiative could avail in terms of seeking to be “united to thee a loving God.” However, the greatest felicity was found in God’s accommodation of Godself to humanity in need of revelation and redemption, so that, as Cusanus erupted in euphoric praise, “if thou the lovely God canst be more beloved by a man, then is that Bond come to the most perfect filiation, that, that filiation may be perfection complicating all possible filiation, by which all sonnes do attaine their last felicity and perfection.” Here, again, Cusanus stressed that Christological mediation was the link that achieved the “most perfect fi liation” in that the erstwhile sinful creatures, thanks to the mediatorial work of the true Son, could become adopted “sons” of God, thereby helping reach the apotheosis of the human journey.145 Nicholas of Cusa’s Neoplatonist perspectives gave rise to the “absolute sight” in the human mind of the divine Being so that, as Nigel Smith judiciously notes, “the perception of the divine, the universe, and human cognition are brought together in the simultaneous association of eye, circle, and globe.” The simultaneity within the divine mind—encompassing both light and darkness, good and evil, and other seemingly antithetical antinomies that coalesce in God—and the human participation in that graced reality was what Cusanus called visio intellectualis. In it, a hitherto unimaginable, unattainable “coincidence of opposites” obtained, so that both singular and plural are superseded, thus embraced in the “Eye” of God.146 The intellectual connection between Nicholas of Cusa and John Everard, the seventeenth-century translator of several of Cusanus’s treatises, has been fruitfully illuminated in Smith’s Perfection Proclaimed.147 As David Como has shown, Everard’s religious taxonomy defied, as many contemporaries puzzled over, facile dichotomization. Everard was neither a complete Calvinist—although there are elements that emphasize God’s electing sovereignty—nor was he a rank Arminian, although, similarly, he assiduously reminded his auditors of the capacity of human beings to cooperate with divine grace.148 This was no less true of his trinitarian theology. Placing the fulcrum of the ineffable mystery of the Trinity on

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the very delicate scale between overwrought rationalism, on the one extreme, and mystical enthusiasm on the other, Everard sought to achieve the elusive balance. Prompted by the Neoplatonism that was a central part of his philosophical mind-set and by his exegesis of the Johannine Prologue, Everard carefully sought to affirm two things: (1) that the ontological distinction between God and creation was adhered to with some semblance of vigilance, (2) yet at the same time, the barrier of true mediation and communion be sufficiently removed through the work of Christ. After citing from John 1:1, “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” Everard interpreted this to underscore that God was “In Himself,” and yet as a consequence of the act of creation through the Word, Everard asserts that there “is God IN the Creatures,” in that Christ is, qua his office as Creator, in every facet of the created order.149 Moreover, Everard, correctly reflecting the pro-Nicene emphasis on the perichoretic nature of mutual love between the Father and the Son, asserted that the Son encapsulated all the “Father’s Complacency, Content and Delight,” thus through this love, the love of God the Father for the created order could meaningfully exist. So Everard offered an ironic juxtaposition between God’s love for God’s own being and the reality of God’s love for the universe: “For its certain, God cannot love any thing But Himself; It is impossible His Love should Go Out of Himself, if it should, let me tell you, He could not be God Almighty.”150 The room for Christ-centered mediation was carved out for sure, and for this to work, Everard had to be a traditional trinitarian, affi rming the deity of Christ. It is arguably true that Everard kept the fulcrum somewhere near the middle, but there was an insatiable desire for a clearer “Experimental Vision” of parsing out the grammar of divine action and presence.151 Cusanus’s De Visione Dei was rendered as Or the Single Eye by Everard (1646). As seen in his Wednesday lecture given at Thomas Hodge’s congregation at St. Olave Old Jewry, London, Everard leaned on Cusa to make sense of the seemingly contradictory texts of God’s word and confusing themes therein as well. So Everard continued: “Alas, alas, we poor ignorant, low, narrow-spirited creatures, as we are not able to comprehend God, so neither can we Gods word.” Everard encapsulated his point about the limitations of human capacity, both moral and epistemological, to the story of Elijah’s encounter with God: As Elias, he could not apprehend God nor discover him neither in the Thunder, nor in the Lightning nor in the Mighty Rushing, nor in the Fire, though God was in them all; but when God came in A still soft Voice, then he could Apprehend God. . . . For in God there all things Coincide, Cold and Heat, Strength and Weakness, Wrath and Mercy, Patience and Fury,

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Meekness and Terribleness, &c. even all Contradictories coincide in him, as the Vision of God shews at large in some Chapters.152 Cusa was a trinitarian, and John Everard as well. Nevertheless, how posterity will read their texts was neither their fault nor concern. The dialectical tension evident in Cusa, which was starting to be pushed in Everard, got pushed overboard by Clarkson. VII

The Single Eye or A Single Eye: Lost in Translation? Laurence Clarkson was mentioned as a key Ranter who, by the time of Edwards’s Gangraena, had repented of his heretical ways. Yet A Single Eye, published in 1650, was a volte-face on his earlier, now lost, publication, The Pilgrimage of Saints (1648), in which he had recanted of his “Anabaptist” persuasions.153 In his controversial book on the Ranters, Fear, Myth, and History, Colin Davis mentions, but fails to trace further the significance of, the connection between Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei, which was translated into English as The Single Eye, and Clarkson’s A Single Eye All Light, no Darkness; or Light and Darkness One (1650).154 In A Single Eye, Clarkson articulated a majoritarian perspective within the so-called Ranters movement. J. C. Davis had criticized the monolithic presentation of the Ranters, as had A. L. Morton, Christopher Hill, and others, denying altogether the very existence of the Ranters, who owed their genesis more to the Marxist proclivities of the twentieth-century British historians than to what might have been percolating from the ground level up in the middle decades of seventeenth-century England. However, it is perhaps more apropos to argue that the Ranters did comprise a discernible group, although it would be far-fetched to see them as a self-demarcating denomination. Equipped with certain epicenters of doctrine, namely, the emphasis on the proximity and union between God and the individual person to such a radical extent that a fusion of essences was not out of the question; the emphasis on the nondual nature of God, thus, as an intriguing correlative, no real presence of sin in the believer; and, finally, the emphasis on perfection, denial of original sin, all comprise the mental furnishings of the Ranters. The “Preface” by Clarkson either stung or excited the reader (depending on the ethical orientation of the reader) in that he declared that just as in God there was no binary opposition of beings, for “with God they are but one, and that one Act holy, just, and good as God,” so were human moral distinctions of good and bad obsolete.155 Acutely aware of the gargantuan task of unloading “the Vessel fraughted with such hidden pearls,” and accommodating this

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sublime “mind of God” to the capacity of his readers who were accustomed to seeing a wrathful deity, Clarkson argued that this idea of God dwelling in you, canceling all the binary categorical realities, did “seem to appear contrary,” due to the enormity of human enmity against God.156 The next theological step of Clarkson took aim at the need for atonement or satisfaction, for he maintained that God will not take away darkness, but God will merely call that which had been nothing but darkness as light. How? Within God there was no such thing as love and hatred, light and darkness; all was love and light in God. The cumulative effect that Clarkson’s perspective would have on theological anthropology was dizzyingly troublesome for the godly. Clarkson unequivocally maintained these statements were true, namely, God is light; God’s “Being and Essence . . . admits not of the plural but singular”; darkness was a “seeming reality” that pertained to creatures alone, thus was none other than “imagined Darknesse,” and most worryingly, “there is no act whatsoever, that is impure in God, or sinful with or before God,” and sin has “conception only in the imagination.”157 Put simply, so long as a Christian was “in God,” none of her acts could be declared sinful, for her union with God has resulted in the complete absorption of the person’s selfhood in God, so that the quotidian reality of sin, which so easily entangled and dragged the saint in her pilgrimage to the eternal City of God, could no longer pose any threat whatsoever. If there ever was a doctrinal innovation within the structure of Puritan divinity, this was perhaps the most predictable yet no less ingenious.158 Upon closer scrutiny, Clarkson’s antinomianism stemmed from his seemingly earnest desire to defend God from the cavil that God was the author of sin. His defense was that all things were good in God, for no darkness could dwell with God. With a radical categorical inversion, Clarkson proceeded to argue an Augustinian point, yet with a clearly antinomian twist. Sin was “only a name without substance, hath no being in God,” and this was, as far as the post-Manichaean Augustine was concerned, fair enough. Yet the Clarksonian addendum would be rejected by Augustine and his seventeenthcentury followers with the greatest alacrity and disdain: that sin did not exist “in the Creature, but only by imagination.” The most remarkable assertion, repeated and reviled by many godly pamphleteers attacking Clarkson’s perfectionism, was: Consider what act soever, yea though it be the act of Swearing, Drunkennesse, Adultery and Theft; yet these acts simply, yea nakedly, as acts are nothing distinct from the act of Prayer and Prayses. Why dost thou wonder? Why art thou angry? they are all one in themselves; no more holynesse, no more puritie in one then the other.159

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Using an interesting exegesis of a Pauline text, “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure” (Titus 1:15), Clarkson argued that no matter what the act was—“though it be that act you call swearing, adultery, and theft”—yet to him no such thing existed, in fact, they were “pure act,” for the category of “unclean” has ceased to exist for him.160 In fact, the collapse of the Creator-creature distinction allowed the corresponding freedom for Clarkson to extricate himself from the bondage of sin and impure acts, and this, in turn, created space for a nontrinitarian reading of the divine-human mode of relationship. Second, the notion of God’s dwelling with the human self, as had already been espoused by the mystical theologians of the Eastern and Western traditions, reached the breaking point in Clarkson and other Ranters for their preponderant emphasis on the human self as the very site in which the fullness of divinity could, indeed did, dwell. Due to this turn-to-self and the internalistic preoccupation, there was considerably less need for the objective vindication from the text of Scripture. With regard to the thematic tapestry woven through A Single Eye, J. C. Davis had, even with all the skeptical attitudes concerning the historical reality of the Ranters, singled out “mystical pantheism” combined with dissolute “antinomianism” as the key theme.161 An imagined darkness: this was Clarkson’s undergirding ideological commitment, the lynchpin for proclaiming the advent of true creaturely freedom, thanks to the fusion of the creaturely horizon with that of the Creator. In this setting, it was hardly imaginable that the traditional pro-Nicene orthodox formulations of the Trinity could ever fly! Although Clarkson did not tackle the issue of trinitarian theology head-on, there was a place in which he showed his distaste for metaphysics and scholastic distinctions: “I find in his Divine Being, in his Essence, there is but one God. . . . So then, it is cleer by the History, That the Being and Essence of God admits not of the plural but singular”; this is an oblique, indirect, yet not a farfetched reading of Clarkson’s unease with the trinitarian theologic of homoousia, hypostases, and so on. If not overtly antitrinitarian, then, at least one can see how Clarkson adopted a more non-trinitarian reading of the essence of God. Trinitarian metaphysics was hardly Clarkson’s concern; overcoming the type of ontotheology, in favor of a more ecstatic union with the godhead, was. However, Clarkson made two intriguing philosophical moves: (1) to assert that since God is light, so light is God; (2) when Genesis 1 had this divine discourse, “Let there be light,” Clarkson asserted that this was equivalent to saying let there be God, and this was not a tautological statement. Since light is God, and since the first act of God’s creation was to call light into existence, outside of God, creation itself was suff used with God.162 Clarkson was, aware or not, deeply indebted to the Neoplatonist doctrine of creation as emanation,

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thereby establishing the possibility for communion; moreover, his reference to the entirety of creation as “the light of the candle” of the Lord sounded a good deal like the Cambridge Platonists, who, for justifiable reasons, would be aghast to be tarnished by being bracketed with Clarkson the Ranter. That is precisely, nonetheless, what was remarkable about this period of transition: the co-presence of several strange ideological bedfellows: Cusa and Clarkson, Biddle and Clarkson. Yet this convergence was, at least in the eyes of the trinitarians such as Francis Cheynell, John Wallis, John Owen, and Thomas Edwards, horribly dangerous. The frightening conflation of variegated notions regarding the human self and the trajectory of its journey toward God jolted the trinitarian ministers and members of Parliament into action, for they were cognizant of the threat posed by perfectionistic anthropology and pestilently antitrinitarian theology. To their mobilized efforts against antinomian-cum-antitrinitarian perspectives, we shall turn presently. VIII

The Anti-antinomian Backlash and Its Impact on the Trinity We have seen so far that fear of the Ranter radicals—whose teaching tended to jettison all previously honored notions of ministry, ecclesiology, sacramental theology and the idea of God, and the mode of divine revelation in Scripture— galvanized the trinitarians to parry the blows of this radical teaching. As the Presbyterians were firm believers in the civil authority’s sworn responsibility to uphold true religion, they assiduously sought to extirpate all vestigial elements of popery and heresy, transubstantiation and antitrinitarianism, while defending the notions of ministry and the mystery of the Trinity. Their indefatigable efforts got Marchamont Nedham, a radical-leaning journalist of the Cromwellian period, to say that the Presbyterians were “more bold than the bishops to intermeddle with civil affairs.” While this comment of June 1651 could certainly be seen as a reflection of the supposed Erastian turn among the Presbyterians, it is perhaps more accurate to see it as their reaction vis-à-vis the heightened sense of fear in the face of the gangrene of antinomian pantheism and antitrinitarian denials of the deity of Christ and the nature of his atonement as satisfaction.163 This section highlights some parliamentary measures to combat heresy and how their perception of heresy was also intertwined with antinomian and antitrinitarian errors. Finally, Thomas Goodwin’s treatises, written most likely in the 1650s, are examined in light of the Ranter and antitrinitarian onslaughts of the period as a way of further highlighting this coaxial phenomenon.

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On May 2, 1648, An Ordinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies, with the several penalties therein expressed was published. Its genesis lay with the two Presbyterian MPs, Nathaniel Bacon and Zouch Tate, who, on September 2, 1646, introduced an ordinance for extermination of blasphemy and heresy. For Bacon and Tate, errors deserving of death included the denial of the Trinity, deity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, certain divine attributes of the sinless nature of Christ’s humanity, and the denial of Scripture as the Word of God. The less severe doctrinal errors, punishable by imprisonment, included universalism, Pelagianism, liturgical use of pictures and images, belief in purgatory, soul-sleep, denial of the efficacy of sacraments of baptism and Lord’s Supper, antisabbatarianism, and repudiation of the ecclesial validity of the Church of England.164 The wide catchment area created by this Presbyterian dragnet was intended to foster a true godly communion of church and state and to offer a full-court press against the spread of religious radicalism. The ordinance passed in May 1648, and in the intervening period, this draconian ordinance created a furor among the radical Puritans such as John Goodwin and backlash from Thomas Edwards and others.165 However, this ordinance remained a dead letter, receiving its coup de grace seven months later in Pride’s Purge.166 For our purposes, the noteworthy aspect of this ordinance was the juxtaposition of the Christological, trinitarian errors with the issues of universal redemption, human perfectibility, and resistibility of grace. To be sure, the 1648 Ordinance ardently defended traditional Christian orthodoxy, particularly Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity, against the encroachment of antitrinitarianism and other heretical notions of Paul Best and John Biddle, as we have seen in chapter 1. It spelled out from the outset that those who insist that “Christ is not 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” shall suffer incarceration as felons in the first instance, and the contumacious repeat offenders “shall suffer death as in case of Felony, without benefit of Clergy.”167 In addition to enumerating the foregoing Christological and trinitarian errors, this ordinance sought to proscribe mortalism—denying the immortality of the human soul—universal redemption, and repudiation of a literal hell.168 These three foregoing doctrines were doctrinal hallmarks among the religious radicals such as Winstanley, the Ranters, the Muggletonians, inter alia. The 1650 Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions was directed at the real presence of a loosely defined group of radicals, the Ranters.169 Although J. F. McGregor has identified the Blasphemous Act of 1650 as an integral part of the Rump Parliament’s legislative efforts toward the

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“reformation of manners,” it is no less significant to see it as the Independents’ efforts to curb the centrifugal tendencies endemic to radical Puritanism of the Ranter type. Assuredly, McGregor is correct to see that the moral dissolution and promotion of adultery, fornication, and unbridled expressions of lustful desires were explicitly mentioned as the consequence of the Ranter ideology.170 However, at the core of the Ranter ideology was the near-collapse of ontological and moral distinction between God and the creature, so much so that not only were there individual Ranters who proclaimed themselves to be divine but also there were direct ramifications in the way one construed the ethical norms of society. If all things in God were good, pure, and light, then no quotidian activities—no matter how despicable they may seem to the human beholder—were sins. Consequently, whatever sinful acts were carried out, they not only failed to contaminate the person but also were right and utterly licit. Equally problematic as this moral categorical inversion was the indirect, yet no less potent attack on the doctrine of the Trinity. It was certainly possible for a Ranter to maintain the semblance of a trinitarian view of God, but that did not always make one orthodox. All the persons avowedly professing themselves “to be very God, or to be Infinite or Almighty, or in Honor, Excellency, Majesty and Power to be equal, and the same with the true God” were basically indistinguishable from Best and Biddle when it came to denying the proNicene view of the Trinity.171 The tendency to see the common thread of radical and rational religion, antinomian proclivities, and antitrinitarian propensities as flip sides of the same destructive coin in the mind-set of the galvanized trinitarians continued unabated in the mid-1650s. In A List of some of the Grand Blasphemers and Blasphemies (1654), which was delivered to the Committee for Religion to raise awareness of the proliferation of heretical and blasphemous notions in England, nine out of thirty entries had to do with deviations from or repudiations of traditional doctrine of God, whether in the pantheistic route of the Ranters or the antitrinitarian route of Paul Best. Megalomaniacal messiahs such as John Robins claimed himself to be “God Almighty,” whereas his acolyte Thomas Tidford echoed that Jesus Christ’s father was none other than Robins. In a slightly more bizarre fashion, Thomas Kerby maintained that Cain was the “third Person in the Trinity.” Mary Vanlop had found a human God, for which she was committed to the Gatehouse in London, 1651 (Entry 12); Mary Adams of Tillingham, Essex, was certain that she had been impregnated by the Holy Spirit and, in her Mariological self-fashioning, was equally convinced that her imminent son “was the true Messias.” Yet for all this confidence about the messianic advent through her delivery, Adams took a “Knife when she was alone,” ripping open her “own Bowels, and so died,

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1652” (Entry 16). Then the writer of this List of . . . Grand Blasphemers moved from the macabre and bizarre to the heretical and the unorthodox. In Entry 23, a certain Mr. Smalbone averred in the vestry at “White-hall Chappel,” London, that “all things, good and bad, are in God, and that Devils and Hell are in the Essence and being of God,” referring to the fact that God encompasses all beings, visible and invisible, and since God is all in all, in God there is technically no such thing as intrinsic or intractable evil. Such was precisely what had been articulated by Laurence Clarkson’s A Single Eye, as has been demonstrated earlier. Armed with this notion of a collapse of ontological distinction between the Creator and creatures, Clarkson and others propounded what was to have both liberative and revolutionary consequences. While it is true that this pantheistic libertinism was not the only existential possibility, as Tobias Crisp, a leading antinomian preacher of the pre–Civil War period, was wont to stress the freedom in Christ that inevitably led to a godly conversation, it would seem that this was the pathway of the least resistance. These anecdotes confirm Norman Cohn’s view that “self-exaltation,” rampant among the aforementioned figures, often amounted to “self-deification; a pursuit of a total emancipation which in practice could result in antinomianism and particularly in an anarchic eroticism.”172 IX

Thomas Goodwin and Politicizing the Trinity Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) was a leading Independent divine whose ecclesiastical career spanned the Caroline Church under the auspices of William Laud, the years as the leader of the Independents as a “Dissenting Brethren” in the Westminster Assembly, and, reaching the apex of his career, as president of Magdalen College, Oxford, during Oliver Cromwell’s reign in the 1650s.173 Michael Lawrence, in his superbly contextualized thesis of locating the historical background of the posthumous publication of Goodwin’s Works, published between 1682 and 1704, with Thomas Goodwin Jr. as the literary executor, contended pace Christopher Hill’s assumption that Goodwin’s Works were products of a disillusioned man whose experience of defeat led him to devote himself to a project of theological writing.174 Thus, rather than having been written in the Restoration context, Of the Creatures was likely to have been a direct response both to the proliferation of the pan(en)theistic perspectives gaining further foothold in the 1640s and early 1650s through Laurence Clarkson and to the evident threat of

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antitrinitarian heresiarch John Biddle. Goodwin sought to provide a systematic divinity, occasioned by the theological exigencies of the day. In a treatise entitled Of the Creatures, Goodwin sought to establish, fi rst of all, the clear line of demarcation between the Creator and creature. Aside from the fact that this was the conventional theological point to reiterate, why would Goodwin spend considerable time developing this theme in the three key religious-confessional documents of the Cromwellian period, the trenchant reassertion of the Creator-creature distinction going hand in hand with the affi rmation of the Trinity? Goodwin offered a corrective rejoinder to the view popular in the time of writing Of the Creatures that creatures could achieve such a level of transformation that they could become divine. Goodwin expressed this heresy as having “the divine essence of God transubstantiated into the outward appearance of several shapes of creatures, the substance of which is God, lying . . . hidden under that outward visibility.” With the Incarnation of Christ in the first Advent, and the defi nite reality of the believer’s participation in Christ further intensified through the work of the Holy Spirit, the spiritist piety of the radical Puritan could easily lead one to espouse that the saint had achieved a level of (comm)union with Christ so as to render it virtually impossible to see where divinity ended and humanity began and vice versa. This dual barb of polemic—directed on the one hand at the Roman Catholic adherence to transubstantiation and on the other at the Ranters’ insistence on the substantial change of the believer’s humanity into the substance divine—was nearly verbatim identical with the concern expressed by Anthony Burgess’s Commentary on First Corinthians (1659), thereby helping us situate the chronological parameters of Goodwin’s Of the Creatures as well. In Of the Creatures and the other part of Goodwin’s systematic divinity, one sees an undergirding trinitarian structure overlaid with covenant theology and a dual emphasis on the Creator-creature distinction (pace Clarkson, Ranters, and other proponents of an overrealized form of theosis) and the deity of Christ whose essential participation in the divine identity (pace Biddle) simultaneously made possible the trajectory of human divinization and precluded the category confusion of presuming that human creatures could become, in essence, God. In Of the Creatures (book 1), Goodwin identified the pantheistic claims “vented . . . with more daring Impudence” than hitherto, which asserted that “all things (which God hath made) are indeed but pieces and parcels of God himself: And that, that which is called by the Creation is but a Turqoising of God.”175 Similar verbiage is found in another of Goodwin’s pre-Restoration writings, Of the Knowledge of God the Father, and His Son Jesus Christ, and Goodwin further exposed the heretical notion of “the Ranters of our late Age,

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as appears by their Writings, and which put me upon writing this Discourse.”176 Goodwin thundered against the Clarksonian pantheistic heresy: “If all things were God, all difference of Good and Evil would be taken away, and God should sin in all that is acted in and by the Creature.” This was strikingly reminiscent of Arnhem separatist pastor John Archer’s Comfort for Beleevers (1645), as well as Clarkson’s A Single Eye. Since Archer was committed to a supralapsarian scheme of divine decrees, thus affirming a strong sense of predestination, he was equally committed to the idea that God was responsible for all contingent acts of the creature, both good and evil. The perennial tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility has exercised the minds of Augustine and Pelagius, Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard, Luther and Erasmus, William Perkins and Arminius. One of the key issues, judging from the standpoint of ethics, was God’s involvement in human sins. Push the fulcrum toward human responsibility a bit, and one veered off in the direction of privileging human self-assertion, whereas the opposite push will leave the human beings as putative automata in the stage of divine drama, thereby making God out to be the author of sin. In post-Reformation polemical divinity, it was arguably true that Arminius’s desires to exculpate God from the tarnish of being the author of sin inexorably led to his modification of divine foreknowledge and predestination. Traveling in the opposite direction—with nearly identical desires of defending the cause of God, as Thomas Bradwardine had done—Archer ended up making God (nearly) the author of sin. Even a hard-nosed double-predestinarian feared to tread on such a fragile surface. Yet it would seem that Archer waltzed right in, and this was the cause of Archer’s heretication.177 It would seem that if Archer had been an Arminian, he would not have fallen into the ditch of asserting that “all sinnes come also from God” and that God was the author not only of the good but also of the evil. In a biting critique of those well-intentioned “Pelagians, Arminians, and carnal hearts,” Archer claimed that They grant that God is willing Sinne should be, and that he permits it, and orders circumstances about its production, and overrules it, and hath an hand in, & is the author of the physical, or moral act, in, and with, which, sinne is; But in the essence of Sinne; that is, the pravity, & atazy, the anomye, or irregularity of the act, which is the sinfulness of it, God hath no hand, neither is he any author at all thereof; Which opinion, is safe enough from the error it shuns, and to avoid danger it keeps so farr off, that it goes wrong another way, and because it would not give to God too much, it gives him not enough in this, not so much as he takes to himself in Scripture: and tends, yea, is necessary, to his glory, and the comfort of his people.178

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Thus Archer’s pithy yet chilling—at least as regarded by the nonantinomian Puritans—conclusion was that “God is, and hath an hand in, and is the Author of, the sinfulness of his people.” Since God’s “Will & Pleasure” was the impetus of all creaturely actions, it was necessary to conclude that “why the Creature sinnes, must be, because Gods will was, that it should sinne.”179 God not only had the first hand in contriving and willing the sin of the creatures but also God’s attributes and the economy of grace were also perforce predicated on “Creatures Sinne.”180 Blair Worden recently suggested that the 1650 Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions Derogatory to the Honor of God had “no occasion to refer to anti-trinitarianism.”181 If by antitrinitarianism, one means an explicit repudiation of the Trinity, Worden is correct in seeing no anti-antitrinitarian assertions in the 1650 Act. However, the contemporaries were well aware of the nearly seamless connection: a Ranter assertion that any human being “him or her self, or any other meer Creature, to be very God” was certainly a functional, though not formal, rejection of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. Thus I would argue that there was a consonant undergirding fear, made greater now that the exegetical and theological repudiation of the Trinity had put on an antinomian garb of the most grotesque sort. Battling the threat of Socinianism, for Thomas Goodwin, was not merely a polemical issue. It was personal for him. While serving as President of Magdalen College, Oxford, Goodwin had established a gathered church in and around the college. A precocious, if spiritually tender, demy at Magdalen was Zachary Mayne (1631–1694). Mayne’s main preoccupation as a student was finding satisfactory answers to the Trinity: is it true, is it theologically, exegetically, and philosophically defensible? Judging from his short autobiographical account in his defense of the Trinity, written two years before his death, The Snare Broken, or the Natural and Eternal Deity of the Son of God; As also of the Holy Ghost Asserted (1692), it seems Mayne had to suspend his studies, due in large measures to the spiritual and intellectual disquiet he had experienced regarding the issue of the Trinity. Goodwin, according to Mayne, was a sympathetic, if consistently orthodox, patron and master for the young man. Mayne confessed his “Socinian Perswasion” and for about “two months near the Year 1651” remained in that state; traveling to London, he sought the company of John Biddle. Two months of sojourning in London, and having his doubts not cleared either way, Mayne returned to Magdalen. At this juncture in his memoir, Mayne offered an insight into the pastoral forbearance of Goodwin. Rather than censuring the man, and especially knowing that he had been at the belly of the Socinian beast, in Biddle’s “congregation,” Goodwin

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“was satisfied that I should receive the Sacrament with him, tho’ he knew of my Doubts.” In fact, Mayne confessed that “near twenty Years together,” he remained in that frightening nexus between Socinianism and trinitarianism.182 Whatever else might have been Mayne’s quibbles about the Trinity, he was incontrovertibly clear about the “Notion of Christ’s Death as a proper Sacrifice.” Moreover, whatever else Goodwin might have thought of Mayne’s struggles with the orthodox Nicene view of the Trinity, he was unwavering in his patronage of Mayne, for even when Mayne asked to be dismissed from Goodwin’s congregation, Goodwin’s heartfelt response was that he could not “dismiss me into the world.”183 Michael Lawrence’s suggestion that it was perhaps “Goodwin’s experience in attempting to win Mayne back to orthodoxy” and his desire to ward off the encroachment of the Ranters, antinomians, and other heralds of an overrealized eschatology of deification that could be seen as the “catalyst for his theological program” seems rather convincing, especially so based on Mayne’s own testimony.184 Goodwin was a key drafter of The Humble Proposals of 1652, which was the catalyst behind the creation of the Triers and Ejectors, a state-sponsored ministerial sanctioning and monitoring body.185 The Triers were for the purpose of examining, credentialing, and appointing ministerial candidates; the Ejectors were to carry on the function of investigating, disciplining, and, pro re nata, ejecting the incumbent minister. Although the language of Socinian threat was absent and specific heresies were not enumerated, as Carolyn Polizzotto has convincingly shown, The Humble Proposals signified the Independents’ grasping for hegemonic control in the ecclesiastical settlement, vis-à-vis both the radical sectaries and the Presbyterians. Sir Henry Vane unflinchingly argued that the old priest who had a metamorphosis into the new presbyter now has yet a new manifestation as the congregational man, as he hammered at Goodwin, Owen, and others in Zeal Examined, published weeks after The Humble Proposals was printed.186 If The Humble Proposals had been less than explicit about the threat of Socinianism and the clouding of the eschatological vision that preoccupied the minds not merely of the Fift h Monarchists but also of Goodwin, by 1654 the Sitz im Leben had changed considerably to necessitate a more direct refutation of antitrinitarian heresies. First of all, the publication of The Racovian Catechism (1652) sparked a flurry of debates regarding the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. Oliver Cromwell, as Blair Worden has shown, was concerned to propagate true religion, of a broadly Reformed type, and yet held the Presbyterians’ ambitions with considerable disdain and fear. The Instrument of Government, which was the Constitutional document for the Cromwellian regime, had an article concerning the parameters of sanctioned orthodoxy. For the high

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Calvinists of Owen, Cheynell, and Thomas Goodwin’s type, Article XXXVII was insufficiently Trinitarian, for it seemed to have provided an exculpatory clause for the Socinians: XXXVII. That such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgment from the doctrine, worship or discipline publicly held forth) shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and exercise of their religion; so as they abuse not this liberty to the civil injury of others and to the actual disturbance of the public peace on their parts: provided this liberty be not extended to Popery or Prelacy, nor to such as, under the profession of Christ, hold forth and practice licentiousness.187 The hotly controverted phrase was profession of “faith in God by Jesus Christ” and allowance of difference in “judgment from the doctrine.” The furor over this on the part of the Calvinistic Presbyterians and Independents (although the Baptists were, on the grounds of liberty of conscience, not very vocal on this issue, their Calvinistic perspectives notwithstanding) and the ebullient joy on the part of the radicals found its resolution in the gathering of the divines in November 1654.188 There are two versions of the fruits of the labor of this subcommittee of divines. The published version is The Principles of Faith, presented by Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Sydrach Simson, and other Ministers (1654). Another version was distributed to the members of the First Protectorate Parliament in November. Goodwin’s participation in A New Confession of Faith, or the First Principles of the Christian Religion (1654) [Thomason E 826(3)] was significant, although Baxter singled out John Owen and Francis Cheynell as the “over-orthodox doctors” who pushed the theological perspectives to be far more high Calvinist than Baxter himself would have liked.189 According to his own handwritten notes on the Thomason copy of A New Confession of Faith, this confession of twenty articles of faith was given to each member of the “Parliament which began the 3rd of September 1654 which was dissolved January 22, next following,” and it was “never published publiquely.” This was the third Protectorate Parliament, dissolved by Oliver Cromwell less than five months after convening. Both these doctrinal formulations encapsulated the theological issues deemed to be of urgent concern for the trinitarian and antiantinomian Puritans. Again, one notices the inevitable convergence and acknowledgment of the twin threat of antinomian and antitrinitarian theologies. In Articles II to IV, theology proper is presented, and it follows the order utilized, inter alia, by Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae in the way he

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had spoken of de deo uno (the unity/oneness of God), preceded by de deo trino (the Triunity of God). Knowing the particular polemical issues at hand helps the modern reader appreciate perhaps the way these three articles concerning God are articulated. Article II spoke of God as an absolute Being, followed by a typical litany of divine attributes to demarcate the Creatorcreature, divine-human ontological distinction, clearly aware of the way this fundamental theological maxim was flagrantly violated. In that vein, the reason this seemingly superfluous existence of Article III might have been deemed necessary by the formulators of the New Confession emerges. Article III stated, “That this God is infinitely distinct from all Creatures in his Being and Blessedness.” Article II had already articulated in no uncertain terms divine eternity, immutability, omniscience, and the like to render it impossible for one to confuse oneself as God. However, due to the proliferation—thanks, ironically, to the popularity of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena and Ephraim Pagitt’s Heresiography—of the Ranter and other antinomian ideas in which perfection of divine proportions was proclaimed, the fourteen Puritan divines wanted to explicitly state that God was absolutely Other than any self-styled human messiahs. Article IV presented the doctrine of the Trinity, and interesting here is the emphasis on the “economic Trinity,” God as revealed in redemptive history, as it cited from Matthew 3:16–17 (revelation of God as triune in the baptism of Jesus, with the fatherly benediction, the Spirit’s descent, and the Son as being identified as divine in his origin), Matthew 28:19–20 (in the baptismal practice, the disciples were to use the name of “Father, and of the Sonne, and of the Holy-Ghost,” and this was to be divine identity nonpareil, thereby bolstering the Trinity), and 2 Corithinans 13:14, in which St. Paul ended his epistle by invoking the name of and blessing of God as revealed through the “grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Ghost,” again thereby shoring up their trinitarian convictions. As denial of Christ’s substitutionary death became rather trendy among the avant garde radical Protestants in England, Article X unequivocally defended Christ’s death simultaneously as a demonstration of divine love (in Article VIII, the leading cause of Christ’s advent was “out of his [Father’s] Love,” who was, again, as a clear antiradical riposte, identified as the “onely Mediator between God and man”) and a fulfi llment of divine justice. It succinctly, yet substantially, buttressed the Anselmian and Calvinian view of atonement. X. That this Iesus Christ is our Redeemer and Surety, who dying in our stead, laying down his life as a ransome for us, and bearing our sins, hath made full satisfaction for them.190

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Article XI, pace the Quakers and other radicals who relegated the death of Jesus in Jerusalem to the dustbin of history, affirmed that crucial fact, which preceded, indeed vindicated, the resurrection, ascension, and the present intercession of Christ. For Owen and others, the historical death of Christ must be ascertained if orthodox Christian faith was to emerge triumphant after the infernal onslaught of the radicals. In Article XIII, pace the antinomians, the indispensable nature of sanctification is clearly laid out; similarly, in Article XV, another salvo at the antinomian is launched: “Whosoever allows himself to live in any known sin, upon any pretence or principle whatsoever, is in a state of damnation.”191 Having established the identity of the Christian deity as triune, Article XVI offered a Christocentric perspective in liturgy, pace Biddle and other antitrinitarians. Consequently, although often regarded as relatively distinct in the minds of contemporary historians, the antitrinitarian and antinomian tendencies and perspectives in mid-seventeenth-century England were often coupled together in the hearts of the defenders of the religious and sociopolitical order of the day. For Goodwin and others, the potential for vitiating the fabric of Reformed orthodoxy was equally serious coming from the Clarksonian antinomian, as it was coming from the Biddlean antitrinitarian. X

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have sought to advance a thesis: that the historiographical trend to isolate religious radicalism primarily in terms of anticlericalism, antinomianism, Ranterism, and Anabaptism presented a skewed picture, and as a corrective, the threat of antitrinitarianism—of Paul Best, John Biddle, and others—needs to be placed along with, and as an inseparable part of, the milieu of the world turning upside down. Here, an intriguing conundrum emerged for the avowed defenders of traditional Christianity, over against the twin threat we have discussed previously. That is, whereas the proclaimers of perfection were certainly threatening in their attack on traditional ethical mores, they were, ironically, less threatening! The graver threat came by way of the straitlaced, morally upright antitrinitarians of the Best and Biddle variety, who were not proclaiming themselves to be God, nor indulging in unacceptable extramarital escapades, nor yet espousing anything other than a literalist hermeneutic, which their trinitarian opponents would all be in agreement with. In these first two chapters, we have seen that the complex narrative of the trinitarian controversies in the 1640s and 1650s included both the more typical protagonists, such as Paul Best and John Biddle (chapter 1), and the

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Ranters, such as Laurence Clarkson, Jacob Bauthumley, and John Everard, whose translation of Nicholas of Cusa opened up the vista for seeing God as dwelling within the Christian, thereby potentially collapsing the distinction between God and humanity that the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity consistently espoused. Moreover, we have also seen a sampling of parliamentary responses to the Biddle and the Ranter heresy. Yet far more than official parliamentary ordinances surfaced in the 1650s to refute Biddle’s antitrinitarianism. We shall turn our attention to the variegated trinitarian reactions to further gauge the seriousness with which the antitrinitarian attack was taken in seventeenthcentury England.

3

Many Weapons, One Aim: Trinitarian Reactions to John Biddle in Context

I

Introduction Judging from the volume of works aimed at displaying his putatively “horrid errors,” John Biddle’s status as a heresiarch would place him in the upper echelon among his like-spirited contemporaries, inter alia, the Quakers, Ranters, Seekers, and Levellers. Biddle was as often misunderstood as he was incessantly maligned. In 1661, in a spectacular act of theological gerrymandering, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, in Divine Looking-Glass, argued that Athanasius, Socinus, and John Biddle were the three key “deceived persons” who affirm the “Holy One of Israel to consist of three persons.” Of the three foregoing heresiarchs, only Athanasius affirmed the three persons in the Godhead in the traditional sense, whereas neither Socinus’s nor Biddle’s tripersonal divine Being was anywhere near the barometer established by Nicene orthodoxy.1 Nonetheless, it is remarkable that Biddle’s infamy reached a nearcanonical status, along with a fourth-century defender of the Trinity and the sixteenth-century destroyer thereof. Similarly, in Remarks on the Life of Mr. Milton . . . with a Character of the Author and his Party (1699), the anonymous author assiduously defended Milton’s theological independence and orthodox faith, vis-à-vis the litany of heretical antagonists. In the “Postscript,” the author showed the complexity and utter lack of agreement among the leaders of European Socinianism. Among the Continental luminaries Valentinus Gentilis, Michael Servetus, George Blandrata, Faustus Socinus, Alciatus, Crellius, Smalcius, Ruarus, Schlichtingius, and Przipcovius, Biddle was the sole English author whose scope of influence and notoriety could equal his coreligionists across Europe.2 Again, it is interesting that while Biddle was singled out as the figurehead of

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this movement, there was nonetheless an intriguing unwillingness to claim him, even among those who felt deep sympathies with John Milton and his non-trinitarian brand of Christianity. Whether during his lifetime or in posthumous contexts, reactions to Biddle’s antitrinitarian writings were swift, severe, and substantial. The hostile trinitarian responses came not only from English theologians. They encompassed Continental writers as well, for whom the urgency and exegetical cogency of the Biddlean threat prompted them to respond. Johannes Cloppenburg, a leading Dutch covenant theologian, felt the sting of Biddle’s heresy when William Hamilton, a fellow at All Souls, Oxford, who refused to take the Oath of Engagement in 1651, left for Franeker and, upon arriving, gave Cloppenburg the Twelve Arguments (1648).3 The upshot of this visit by an Oxford don was the publication of Vindiciae pro deitate Spiritus sancti; adversus pneumatomachum Johannem Bidellum, Anglum in 1652. Two things are noteworthy. It seemed Cloppenburg wasted little time, for he was convinced that Biddle’s version of antitrinitarianism could easily filter down to the grassroots level via its easy-to-remember catechetical style. Second, judging from the title pneumatomachum, Cloppenburg saw Biddle as a Pneumatomachian redivivus, a fourth-century heretical sect that denied the deity of the Holy Spirit. By doing so, Cloppenburg sought to alert his readers that ancient heresies never die; they merely reincarnate. More importantly, however, the reactions within England included what could be regarded as mutually incommensurable groups: Catholics and Protestants, Laudians and Puritans, Calvinists and Arminians. Catholic writers such as Thomas White and Kenelm Digby wrote against Biddle, pushing to the fore tradition and the authority of the church as the cure for the Socinian cancer. Laudians such as Herbert Thorndike, Edmund Porter, Thomas Swadlin, and Peter Gunning spoke of the absolute, dual necessity of prayer book religion and Episcopacy, without both of which it was only a matter of time until Socinianism inundated England completely. Puritan Calvinists such as Matthew Poole, Francis Cheynell, Nicholas Estwick, Benjamin Needler, and the London Presbyterians all published treatises and preached sermons, pushed Parliament, and pleaded with the Cromwellian authorities to crack down on Biddle’s heresy. Even the redoubtable Arminian John Goodwin, who had been accused of being a Socinian himself, preached sermons precisely to restore his besmirched reputation against Socinianism. This chapter tells that story: the variegated ecclesial identities and unified theological response against the antitrinitarian threat presented by Biddle. The particular focus of this chapter is on a close reading and resultant textual analysis of the flurry of published pamphlets, treatises, and unpublished manuscripts, all aimed at divulging the errors of Biddle and his coreligionists.

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Thanks to the field-shaping work by H. J. McLachlan and E. M. Wilbur, we can identify the types of interlocutors, both Continental and British, who felt the urgency of proffering trinitarian responses because of both the popularity and the theological accessibility of Biddle, whose writings were mostly unadorned prose, catechetical in nature, and equally unaffected by rarefied Neoplatonist metaphysics.4 Even though we get a good glimpse that there were such reactions to and recriminations on Biddle, we are far less clear on how they disagreed with Biddle in particular and antitrinitarians in general. This chapter fills that surprising lacuna. With the recent work by Sarah Mortimer, the discourse of natural law tradition cannot be had without due recognition of the contribution made by a number of Socinian writers, yet it does leave us a good deal of ground to cover regarding the theological issues at stake between Biddle and his pugilistic interlocutors.5 The controversy surrounding the regula fidei was, as G. R. Evans astutely noted, exacerbated by disagreement over the issue of the ultimate authority in the Reformation debates. For Catholics, it had to be the Church and its authoritative interpretation of Scriptures as seen in tradition, the rivulets of cumulative wisdom of the Church converging in the living water of ecumenical councils.6 For Protestants, it was Scripture alone that was the final arbiter of truth. Nevertheless, as we have seen, sola scriptura, or the radical commitment among the Protestants to sensus literalis (away from allegory, and in the case of antitrinitarians, away, also, from typology) often generated more hermeneutical problems than it produced amiable détente among the involved parties. When it came to the issue of determining exegetical validity and theological veracity of the doctrine of the Trinity, it became a battle of triangulation. For the Catholic polemicists such as Thomas White and Kenelm Digby, they adhered to the Trinity, transubstantiation, and, last, tradition—the third reality vouching for the epistemological certitude of the first two. The second party was the Protestant trinitarians. They adhered to the Trinity while repudiating transubstantiation and tradition. It was regarded, both by the Catholics and antitrinitarians, as a position of polemical futility. The third party was the antitrinitarian Protestants, also known broadly as Socinians. They rejected all three of the foregoing Ts, based on their radical adherence to sola scriptura, as Scripture was interpreted by employing sound reason and a literalist hermeneutic. Thus, when it came time for the Catholic polemic vis-à-vis Protestants, it was often the case to single out the antitrinitarian Socinian position as the ultimate skid row of Protestantism; it was only a matter of time for the trinitarian Protestants to succumb to the pernicious logic of Socinianism. On the other hand, the Socinian metacritique of trinitarianism borrowed from the rhetorical arsenal of the Catholics. If, as the Catholics avowed, the Trinity—both the language and logic—can

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be substantiated only via dependence on postbiblical tradition, then as far as these radical Protestants were concerned, it was a mark, not of development of doctrine, but rather of the beast and of the corruption of primitive Christianity, which knew nothing of the Trinity. It is in this context of triangulation that this chapter needs to be seen. The following philosophers, ministers, and theologians serve as representative figures in our efforts to reconstruct the contour and analyze the content of the “Biddle affair.” They belong to roughly four groups: Catholics, Laudians, Calvinists, and Arminians and include, from the Catholic side, Thomas White and Sir Kenelm Digby; from the Laudian side, Edmund Porter, Peter Gunning, Thomas Swadlin, and Herbert Thorndike; from the Calvinist side, Matthew Poole, Nicholas Estwick, and Benjamin Needler; and, from the Arminian side, John Goodwin. II

Thomas White, Kenelm Digby, and the Catholic Response Thomas White (1593–1676) was a “learned priest and famous philosopher” who was also known for being an agent provocateur for all causes Catholic and for his “love of singularity.”7 White (alias Blacklo; his followers were called Blackloists), the indefatigable pugilist for Catholic theology and philosophy, is remembered for two major contributions: first, his protracted polemical exchange with Thomas Hobbes, especially over White’s De Mundo, and, second, for his quest for theological certitude amid much historical contingency, or a battle against what he would memorably call the inadvertent error of Protestantism in “hatching this dangerous Cockatrice, Incertitude.”8 The polemical exchange over the rule of faith (regula fidei) preoccupied the minds of Protestant and Catholic theologians since the very first day of the Reformation, whether it was between Johann Eck and Martin Luther, Cardinal Sadoleto and John Calvin, or in the English context, between Thomas Stapleton and John Jewel. Closer to the period in question, William Chillingworth, Lucius Cary, and the Great Tew Circle’s ongoing inquiry into the relationship between reason and revelation, Scripture, tradition, or the Church as the ultimate topos of God the Spirit’s authoritative operation, was carried out in contention with the Roman Catholic apologists Edward Knott, Robert Bellarmine, William Rushworth, and Thomas White. Hugh TrevorRoper and, more recently, Jean-Louis Quantin have provided lucid accounts of the theological and methodological questions with the Great Tew Circle and, in the case of Quantin, how patristic authority was viewed in these polemical exchanges.9

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Before we analyze White’s critique of Biddle, it is helpful to get a sense of White’s polemical perspectives on authority: patristic, ecclesial, or scriptural. One of the key texts for White’s view on this is found in his critical engagement with the maelstrom of Protestant patristic scholarship of Jean Daillé, whose Traité de l’emploi des Saints Pères was first published in Geneva in 1632, with its English edition appearing in 1651. Appended to White’s Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues (1654) was his diatribe against Daillé’s smear tactic of destabilizing patristic authority. Pace Daillé’s tripartite division of the church fathers, “from Christ to Constantine; from Constantine to Gregory the Great; and from Him to Us,” out of which “the first Age alone he freely acknowledges,” White’s riposte was that there was nothing so clearly cataclysmic or discernible to warrant such an arbitrary division. White was also deeply concerned that this provided the fodder for the Socinian clamor that the relatively unsullied purity of Christian doctrine lasted from “Christ to Constantine,” rendering, therefore, anything subsequent to that as dubious at best.10 Moreover, White was convinced that privileging ante-Nicene fathers as such was mere lip service, for at heart, Daillé and colleagues knew no church father but God, and not even Calvin. So White thundered: But Daillé and his Consorts fault is not, that they contract the compass of the Fathers; but that they acknowledge any. For they are all Mushrooms, sprung up as new as the morning . . . every one of them is bound to say to Calvin, as well as to the Saints, I believe not for thy word, but I have heard it from the Apostles own mouths in the Scripture . . . for, if he acknowledges the word Fathers, he denies the Thing or Vertue of it in them . . . and that it ought, by every private man, be brought to the test of the Bible, and so far accepted or refus’d, as, to the grave judgement of some judicious Blueapron, seems agreeable to the sense of Scripture.11 White’s pungent humor, directed at the putatively insane Protestant theological method, lampooned the improbable trade between a sanctimonious church father, say, Augustine, for a tradesperson wearing a blue apron.12 While this hermeneutical democratization might be the impetus for post-Reformation Protestantism, for White, this was the serpentine wile against which every good Catholic ought to be exceedingly vigilant.13 As we can see from the foregoing, White was adamant that the Protestant alternative of “every private man” becoming one’s own hermeneutical pope was clearly no better. White further exploited what he perceived to be Daillé’s theological inconsistency. If, in good Calvinistic fashion, Daillé subscribed to the notion of the total depravity of humanity, thus Daillé’s insistence that the Fathers are “ fallible,” why couldn’t the same be equally applicable to the

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women and men of blue aprons? White dismissed out of hand the likelihood of forgery and corruption of conciliar documents, per Daillé’s charge. Adducing the incident surrounding the conciliar records of the Councils at Nicaea (325 ce) and Sardica (343 ce), in which the Canons of Sardica were appended to the documents pertaining to Nicaea, White answered that this incidental faux pas was addressed in the next hundred years, and it cannot serve to derogate the authority of the fathers.14 In 1659, five years after the publication of Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues, White published his Controversy-Logicke, or the Methode to come to truth in debates of Religion with this view of quelling the furor of the Protestants, in particular, John Biddle, in whom White saw the haunting specter of William Chillingworth. After offering the encomium that Biddle was one of the “most learned and most rationall, among the enemies of the Roman Church,” White went on to dissect the alleged theological inadequacies of Biddle’s radical Protestantism.15 What is interesting is that White threw his Catholic gauntlet down by highlighting the “heretical tenets” of John Biddle from the very first page of Controversy-Logicke. If Biddle had argued based on Scripture alone that the Trinity was indefensible, it would have provided a rhetorical outlet for White, but what was loathsome for White was that Biddle had gone so far as to argue that the “Fathers of the first three Centuries” taught nothing of the Trinity whatsoever. This is a clear reference to Biddle’s patristic text, discussed earlier in chapter 1, Testimonies of Irenaeus, where this idea is developed most clearly. White sensibly noted that this prickly attack of Biddle would cause pain not only for himself but also for the “Calvinist” or any other “Protestant,” for trinitarians from both Catholic and Protestant sides agreed that the ante-Nicene fathers were not anti-Nicene, but in fact taught with increasing clarity the doctrine of Christ’s consubstantial nature with the Father, and the Spirit.16 Thus in one sentence, White sided with the Protestant trinitarians in the common task of opposing Biddle’s antitrinitarian cavils. Simultaneously, however, White had no problem hitting the shuttlecock of the Protestant trinitarians across to Biddle’s court for pointing out the horrid errors of private interpretation, whether it concerned scriptural authority or patristic authority. In fact, White pointed out that due to the Protestant creation of a hermeneutical Wild West, the problem of theological indeterminacy could never be solved by resorting to Scripture and its authority, so long as its interpretation was not anchored to the authority of the Church.17 Such was precisely the rationale behind White’s barbed comment that none of Biddle’s “persecutors is able to give a satisfactory answer” to Biddle’s antitrinitarian perspectives from Scripture alone, to such an extent that the “successe did not correspond to their wishes.” In fact, put bluntly, such intra-Protestant disputations were “meerely vaine and fruitlese.” 18 White, to Biddle’s delight and to

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the chagrin of the Protestant trinitarians, admitted that sans tradition, the doctrine of the Trinity could not be proven from Scripture alone. So White concluded his essay on theological method by beckoning the protrinitarian Protestants to return to Rome: As for Mr. Biddles booke: If those of his aduersaries who are separated from the Catholike Church, are able to confute it by their principles [N.B. sola scriptura], that is to say, if they can shew, not onely that the truth which they maintaine is more plaine in scripture then his errors are, but that it is so euident that the explications which may be brought for his party are not receiuable; and so, that his errors may be condemned out of the force of scripture alone: Then, Catholike writers will not neede to engage their pennes against him. But (if I am not much mistaken) whosoeuer shall goe about it, wil fi nd it a hard taske, the question being of such a nature as requireth a seeming contradiction in wordes to expresse it; and so, the knott of it lyeth in determining, which part of the seeming contradictory passages, ought to be explicated by the other. Now, how such a controuersy can be decided by bare wordes, I can not comprehend. . . . It may be necessary to vse Catholike arguments for the defence of Christian truth. Vnto such, the following considerations may prepare thee.19 White also accused Biddle as being strange ideological fellows with Daniel Chamier and Jean Daillé, for they all denied the normative role of the “fourth Age,” that is, the fourth century, thus signaling the noncanonical nature of the Council of Nicaea—a view that White regarded as “most ridiculous” and preposterous. For White, there was a greater affi nity of style and zeitgeist between the third-century, ante-Nicene writers—who, according to Biddle, would be aghast to see the Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity—and the fourth-century bishops at Nicaea. The whole business of dividing the Church’s past into several ages and castigating some as incorrigible (that is, during and after the Council of Nicaea) while reserving sanctity for the first three was, according to White, the perfect way to accomplish the Socinian strategy of divide et impera so that the trinitarian foundation could be razed completely. So White insisted that the “Great” Council of Nicaea was deemed to be so precisely because it succeeded in “condemning the Arrians of nouelty” and establishing the trinitarian orthodoxy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, White then threw the entire edifice of Protestantism itself in the water and declared that Catholic belief was “descended from their fore-Fathers,” thus in “quiet possession of belief in the Church,” whereas Protestantism was guilty of religious innovation and deviation from the ancient faith.20 Biddle’s

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“impudence” in charging the pre- and post-Nicene fathers agitated White so much that he argued: I will giue you for an example, this booke of Maister Biddle, that hath occasioned the following discourse, Reade the testimonyes he alleageth: they will seeme to you, the very contexture of the treatises out of which he hath drawne them; so large in some places, so continuedly, page after page. . . . And you neuer the lesse, nothing can be more manifest, then that the doctrine he pretendeth to abet by those testimonies, was not the opinion of the fathers he alleageth for it.21 White saw Biddle’s Testimonies of Irenaeus as a microcosmic reflection of the disease that had infected “our country at present,” the internecine religious strife that was at once “Needlesse, Vselesse and dangerous.” It was ultimately needless, for a divinely ordained means was otherwise available: the Church and her tradition. It was also useless in that it ultimately reduced to a hermeneutical one-upsmanship; whoever had greater political power backing up the particular viewpoint would win, regardless of the epistemic soundness of the position sanctioned. Last, it was dangerous because distempered souls could easily be swayed by Biddle and the antitrinitarian rationalists.22 Again, it is crucial to note that White argued that it was Biddle’s book that “occasioned the following discourse,” thereby signaling the galvanizing role Biddle’s antitrinitarianism had in mid-seventeenth-century England. Having exposed Biddle’s errors, White then moved to offer exhortations and some helpful caveats for those eager individuals seeking to defend the veracity of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. First, as a peremptory move, White sought to stem the zeal of those who would use natural theology— particularly “analogy of being” (analogia entis)—to show the validity of the Trinity over against the contemporary “Arrian or Sabellian.” Similar recognition of the existence of the “Mysteries of faith” was made concerning transubstantiation, or the “Mystery of the Eucharist,” regardless of whether a logically coherent answer could be given against the repudiators of these cardinal doctrines.23 White’s move was similar to the philosophical move made by Robert Boyle, who, in his defense of the Trinity vis-à-vis the Socinians, wrote A Discourse of Things above Reason. Inquiring Whether a Philosopher should admit there are any such (1681).24 Socinian critics jeered at this trump card of holding up “mystery” as a breach of philosophical terms of dispute, and claimed victory, regardless of whether they were in gallows or in exile, as Biddle had done. In a similar fashion, White’s confidant and coreligionist, Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665), argued for the exclusive claims of Catholic religion, especially

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against the religion of the Independents and Socinians who were, along with the Quakers, extreme expressions of the Protestant principle of private interpretation and of repudiation of the collective wisdom of the Church handed down in tradition.25 Amid Digby’s other noted writings, A Discourse, concerning Infallibility in Religion (1652) revealed his direct engagement with the threat posed by the Socinians. Equally interesting is that Digby, much like White, used the phenomenon of Biddle as an illustrative case study for the nadir of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura and the corresponding radically individualistic hermeneutic. As Digby was well aware of the meandering in the wilderness among English Protestants, an issue exacerbated by the politics of mutual “hereticating” and “persecuting” so au courant in the 1640s and 1650s (as his Discourse was published in 1652), he threw a jab at the utter lack of charity, intoning that the only way out of this imbroglio into the promised land was by returning to the authority of the Church. Thus Digby lampooned: Well may they, in pursuance of their owne rule quarrell at such as shall deny any point that is cleare and euident in Scripture: But to anathematise, and punish (when they haue the power) those that produce out of Scripture as faire proofs for their opinion, as any thing they are able to bring against them; seemeth to me a great iniustice.26 Digby continued his metacritique of the inanity of the Protestant position by calling it “meere guessing,” not “knowledge.”27 What problem did he see with the Socinians? “Incertitude” about the nature of Scripture. Just as the Protestant trinitarians had argued in the opposite direction, Digby asserted that the only way the Arians’ denial of Christ’s divinity, which was itself defended “by pregnant texts of Scripture,” could be refuted was by “Tradition,” providing, therefore, further fuel for the fire of antitrinitarian critique.28 Digby was resolute in pointing out the insufficiency of Scripture as the final court of arbitration for religious disputes, even though they were written “for the settling whereof in mens beliefs.” The only divinely ordained way forward in this impasse was tradition, so Digby averred: “neuer a one of them was euer conuinced and beaten downe by Scripture, or by any other meanes then by Tradition.”29 Similar to Digby and White was the perspective of Valerian Magni of Milan, quite likely the intellectual source of a good deal of Catholic apologetic efforts toward ecumenism. Magni, in A Censure about the Rule of Beleefe Practised by the Protestants, argued that without the anchoring presence of either the Church or her tradition, the individual Christian’s hearkening of the influence and guidance of the Holy Spirit could only lead to an interpretive pandemonium. Equally pernicious was the folly of linking the

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adjudication of Christian doctrine with the whims of Parliament: the error of Erastianism. There be so many putative churches of Christ as there be diversitie of braines among Christians, who after that they haue prayed & cōsulted the holy ghost out of ye Bible doe neuertheles fetch frō the said Bible cōtradictorie opinions. . . . As is euident in the Biblists of these our days, for a Lutheran he praieth & consulteth the holy ghost out of his Bible, and affirmeth tha the holy ghost teacheth him that this text of the bible This is my body is meant of the reall presence of the boddie of Christian in the Sacrament. . . . But a puritan prayeth & consulteth the same holy ghost out of his Bible about the true meaning of the rehearsed words. . . . And sweareth against the Lutheran, that Christ is only in the Sacrament as in a signe, & a figure. . . . Againe the Anabaptist he consulteth the holy ghost out of the scripture, & after a prolix praire . . . findeth that the holy ghost teacheth him . . . that Children be in no wise to be baptized.30 Taking the Protestant polemic against the Catholics on its head, Magni asseverated that if the secret testimony of the Holy Spirit was the authenticating divine presence for the true “sence of the Bible,” then irrespective of one’s ecclesial or trinitarian perspective, “Luther, Protestant, Puritan, Arrian, Anabaptist, Trinitarian, &c” can most “certainlie perswade himself ” that he was taught by the Holy Ghost.31 As Kenelm Digby, in his polemic against his cousin George, would maintain, the problem of radicalized religious individualism, combined with the difficulty of cracking down on heresies, even of Biddlean proportions, could be resolved only by returning to the mother of the faithful: the Church Catholic. For that reason, there was little difference between Independents and the Socinians, for both were committed to the notion of sole sufficiency of Scripture. Digby wrote of the contemporary lightning rod of antitrinitarians that “diuers of them directly impugning our Sauiour himselfe and his dignity and Godhead.”32 So it seems most ironic that the rule of faith controversy contributed to the further hardening of the Socinian commitment to the nonscriptural nature of the Trinity, due in large measure to the Catholic insistence that only by adhering to tradition can one salvage the doctrine of the Trinity, which was virtually proof of its illogicality. If White and Digby represent the mainstream English Catholic apologists, over against the all-too-evident threat of Biddle and Socinianism, we shall turn to another intriguing group of trinitarians whose mode of argumentation, though different from that of White and the Blackloists, illustrates the present and clear immediacy of the controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity. We shall presently turn our attention to the

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Laudians in the 1650s, in particular, Herbert Thorndike, Peter Gunning, and Edmund Porter. III

A Most Surprising Foe? Laudian Reactions to Biddle’s Antitrinitarianism Anti-Biddleana, a veritable cottage publishing industry created in the 1640s and 1650s, was not monopolized by the Puritans alone. Even among the second-generation Laudians, a clear threat of antitrinitarianism was felt, thus the urgency to respond to it theologically.33 Herbert Thorndike (1598–1672), a trenchant critic of all things non-Laudian, took up the cudgel against Socinianism, as proliferated through Biddle in England. His An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, published in 1659, was an unmitigated assault on the panoply of factors that contributed to the temporary lapse of the Church of England. While it is fair to categorize Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, and Thorndike as the leaders among the Laudians in exile in the 1650s, it seems Thorndike’s Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England came as an unsettling blow, even to his coreligionists. Sir Edward Hyde wrote in consternation to John Barwick: “I pray tell me, what melancholy hath possessed poor Mr. Thorndike?” Similarly, Sir Justinian Isham also expressed substantial doubts on Thorndike’s points raised therein, as he corresponded with Thorndike on the question of the ecclesial validity of the Roman Catholic church.34 Isham took a more traditional Episcopalian position of drawing the line between the Church of England and the Church of Rome.35 Among the non-Laudians and Puritans, the reception of Thorndike’s Epilogue caused even greater consternation. Pierre DuMoulin wrote to Richard Baxter, fuming with alarm and agitation: “I have Thorndyke’s last book with me, which I cannot read without a just indignacion almost at every page.” Baxter had identified Thorndike as one of the Grotian divines whose ecclesiological dalliance with Catholicism, especially of the Gallican variety, would usher in the demise of Protestantism in England.36 The main thrust of An Epilogue was that unless the church was reconfigured, centered around the bishop, all hope for rapprochement with the Catholic Church would be in vain. This Episcopalian exclusivism, combined with utter disdain and repudiation of the Presbyterian form of ordination, was what prompted the ire of Baxter, DuMoulin, Henry Hickman, and Thomas Fuller. The second book of his Epilogue was Covenant of Grace, through which all Christians enter into communion with the Triune God. Thorndike’s defense of the Church of England, which comprised the larger scope of his Epilogue, was

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couched, first, in his defense of the Trinity, for without a God whose intratrinitarian mode of covenanting was the blueprint for all of God’s work ad extra, he was convinced no true covenant of grace could obtain. Thus Covenant of Grace began and maintained a substantial and sustained attack on Socinianism. Thorndike assiduously argued that the divine identity of Christ and the Trinity was inextricably linked together with the salutary nature of the Covenant of Grace, prompting him, therefore, to write, “And thus you see, how that part of Socinus his heresy, in denying the faith of the Holy Trinity, indirectly cometh into the question of the ‘Covenant of Grace;’ seeing it is manifest to the sense of all men,” that if Socinus had not “questioned the Godhead of Christ,” there would have been “no pretence of bringing the faith of the Trinity into any dispute.”37 Thus what we see in Thorndike is a Laudian, anti-Calvinist critique of Socinianism, mediated through Socinus and Biddle. Thorndike grounded his theological discourse on the salutarity of the covenant of grace, yet with a clear Laudian inflection on ecclesiocentricity and, correspondingly, on sacramental piety: baptism as the initiatory rite of immersing one in the sacramental body of Christ and the Eucharist as both a confirming and converting sacrament. Throughout his Covenant of Grace, Thorndike endeavored to show how divine grace redirected human desires, assisted the fulfillment of the human side of the covenantal responsibility, and thus through it all “compensates human effort.” True to his Arminian theological predilections, Thorndike offered a clearly compatibilist reading of the freedom of human moral will without curtailing or circumscribing the sovereign freedom of God. As Michael McGiffert has shown, at the core of Thorndike’s covenant theology is the “divine-human reciprocity of pledge and performance.”38 In fact, as he began his Covenant of Grace, which was the second book of An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, Thorndike fired a salvo against the spread of doctrinal heresy, with a not-so-opaque allusion to Biddle and English Socinianism, encapsulating the core layers of Thorndike’s critique of the danger of antitrinitarianism. I know it may be said, that the heresy of Socinus is of the number of those that have footing among us, and, that the principal point of it, concerning the faith of the Holy Trinity. . . . It is very dangerous for us in regard to two points, that have so great vogue among us: The first is the cleare sufficience of the Scriptures, commonly passing so without any limits, that it seems to follow of good right, that what is not clear out of the Scriptures to all understandings, cannot be necessary for the salvation of all Christians to believe: So that no man can be bound, to take that for an Article of his Faith, against which they can show him arguments out of the Scriptures, which he cannot clearly assoile. The other is, that they put in the power of Christians to erect

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Churches at their pleasure (though supposing the Faith which Socinus teacheth . . . ) without communion with, or obligation of dependence one upon another, either in the Rule of Faith, or service of God according to it.39 In the 1849 edition of Thorndike’s Works, the editor explicitly identified, after the phrase “those that have footing among us,” Biddle as the target of Thorndike’s ire. Three points of interest emerge: two from the foregoing quotation and the third throughout Thorndike’s critique of Socinus and his English followers’ covenant theology. First, the point Thorndike latched on to criticize was the inordinate confidence the Socinians had placed on the “cleare sufficience” of Scripture. In this step toward a radical hermeneutical democratization process, which Thorndike obviously lamented, Socinians insisted that what was not clear to all peoples from Scripture alone could not be “necessary for the salvation of all Christians.” A similar move was made by Biddle in his Twofold Catechism, and as well in Dissertatio de Pace, which, written by Samuel Przykowski, was translated by Biddle. Thorndike’s critique here argued that this emphasis on universal clarity of Scripture ended up curtailing the fundamentals of faith, eventually leaving the Church bereft of the doctrine of the Trinity, since it was deemed to be an ineffable mystery of faith and thus, by definition, not available to all to understand.40 In this vein, Thorndike was far more like Erasmus, certainly so vis-à-vis Luther in their debates on the (in) sufficiency and/or clarity of Scripture, than his avowed Puritan opponents. Thorndike’s lacerating rebuke of the Socinians was this: since the rule of faith became reduced to the “nose of wax” of sola scriptura, the corresponding insistence on the perspicuity of Scripture (claritas scripturae) inexorably engendered further ecclesiological and theological confusion. That is why Thorndike followed his first critique with the second one: the founding of gathered churches willy-nilly without being cognizant of the ecclesial validity of other churches, an obvious reference to the proscribed Church of England.41 The third and longer critique was on the putative connection between the denial of Christ’s work of satisfaction and the unavoidable consequence of denial, not merely of the Trinity but also of the covenant of grace. Therefore, an analysis of this critique will concern us for the rest of the section. Ironically, Thorndike argued that Socinus reacted against an extreme form of understanding the nature of Christ’s satisfaction, against Calvin, en route to denying not only “satisfaction of Christ” but also the divinity of Christ and the Trinity and, as well, the entire fabric of the Church held together by the covenant of grace.42 Thorndike offered an incisive analysis of the Socinian perspective on the reason for Christ’s coming in that it was not “to purchase at God’s hands those helps of grace,” nor was it “to reconcile us to God, in the nature of a meritorious cause” of Christ’s obedience, but rather “to persuade us

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of the truth of His message (as by the rest of His works, so especially by rising again from the dead), and also to induce us to embrace the Gospel” and emulate the pathway of obedience marked by the steps Christ himself took.43 What was perhaps typical among the Laudians during the Interregnum was to offer a double-pronged attack, against the libertines, or the solifidians—those who taught that justification was by faith alone—and against the Socinians, whom Thorndike and colleagues saw overreacting against a caricature of Christianity, namely, Calvinism. Thorndike was convinced that Calvinism was a travesty of Christianity, especially that which “our Presbyterians” had owned. Thus he fulminated against them by saying that he “could wish that no man that is a called a Christian would own” the solifidian teaching.44 Thorndike’s conclusion was that had Socinus not “questioned the Godhead of Christ,” then there would have been no dispute over the “faith of the Trinity.”45 In other words, Thorndike seems to be laying the blame on the Calvinistic emphasis on predestination and satisfaction of Christ as the reason that the Socinians “overreacted.” Offering a dual barb, one against the Socinians and the other against the Puritan ecclesiastical architects under Oliver Cromwell (especially the Presbyterians), was not confined to Thorndike. Strikingly similar to Thorndike, Edmund Porter, a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Prebend of Norwich Cathedral during the Laudian hegemony until the early 1640s, offered a blistering rebuke of the Presbyterians, Independents, and other groups who sought to eliminate the Book of Common Prayer from parish worship. Porter’s point was as simple as stinging: do away with the Church of England, do away with the Prayer Book, and then the entire edifice of trinitarian faith falls apart, notwithstanding the most laudable and indefatigable trinitarian efforts of the Puritans. As Judith Maltby and John Morrill have argued, there was a resilient Laudian intransigence in its use of the Prayer Book. Nevertheless, the Laudians felt the sting of exile, regardless of the significant number of episcopal ordination and Prayer Book worship services in London—of which the diarist John Evelyn wrote affectionately.46 In his Trin-Unus-Deus. Or the Trinity, and the Unity of God (1657),47 Porter devoted a rather lengthy chapter to argue against the Interregnum Cromwellian Puritans who were trinitarians by confession and doctrine but who, he claimed, were perilously close to being functional non-trinitarians (if not all-out antitrinitarians) due to the relative silence with regard to explicitly invoking the names of the “Father, Son and the Holy Spirit” in their liturgy. In it, we find Porter’s unrelenting critique of the Puritans: Now although the dangerous heresies of Arians and Socinians have been discountenanced, both by the late Parliaments, and also by the present

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Government, and some of their writings condemned to the fire . . . yet many Land-marks, and excellent parcels of our Christian Religion; and those things wherein the Church of England did correspond with the Primitive Church, are of late, in many places, removed, and disused, as if they were, either impious, or Superstituous, or of very little, or no concernment, although some of them are of very great use and necessary.48 Porter had in mind, inter alia, prohibition of bowing at the name of Jesus, “disuse of the Doxologie, or glorification of the Trinity,” the disuse of “the Creeds . . . wherein the confession of our faith in the Trinity, and our assent to all the necessary Doctrines of Christianity is expressed,” and, unsurprisingly, the abrogation of the office and “Order Episcopal,” for he deemed it to be a clear sin against the dominical injunction of Acts 20:28 (“Spiritus sanctus posuit Episcopos”), and he lamented the inversion of the order of the Church between presbyters and bishops.49 In a similar way, Thomas Swadlin (1600– 1670), preached a sermon on Whitsunday, on June 26, 1646, in Oxford, seeking to prove the deity of the Holy Spirit and perhaps occasioned by his recent conferral of an Oxford D.D. by Charles I.50 The fact that Whitsunday was observed is itself noteworthy in that this was part of the Catholic and Anglican calendrical piety to celebrate Pentecost, the advent of God the Spirit upon the Church, whereas among the Puritans, this was considerably less so. Swadlin’s homiletical aim was to show that the Spirit was truly sent by God the Father and the Son (thus espousing the Western view of the filioque), while criticizing the Puritans’ seditious stratagems, thus praying that Holy Spirit would “Blowe away all schism, herecie, & rebellion by the winde,” and that the Christians in “Engl, Scot, and Irel.” could experience the “unitie Peace concord” under the royal aegis of Charles I.51 It seems that the wind of Best and Biddle’s antitrinitarianism, in addition to the immediate occasion of Pentecost, prompted Swadlin to attack antitrinitarian heresy, for which he blames the Puritans, to defend the honor of king and God.52 In the same way, the embattled Laudians during the Cromwellian era had to continue to offer the raison d’être of their church in exile over and against the intrusive imposters, the Presbyterians, as well as criticize the soteriological and sacramental minimalism of Socinus, Biddle, and the others. To not require baptism as a sine qua non in one’s entrance into the Body of Christ, averred Thorndike, was a lethal mistake of Socinus, which inevitably ended up vitiating the foundation of the Church.53 Baptism was necessary for church membership, to go from a catechumen to a communicant member, and, equally crucially, the “gift of the Holy Ghost dependeth upon the same.”54 Thorndike saw these dangerous tendencies of Socinus being replicated in England in the late 1650s as well. Thus, Thorndike excoriated the Socinians for despising the

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baptism with water as a mere “outward ceremony,” an utterly superfluous ritual that confounded the simple nature of the gospel.55 Displaying his Laudian sensibilities, Thorndike went to point out that the commonality between the Socinians and the Antinomians was their resolute refusal to acknowledge the ecclesial validity of the Catholic Church. In addition, it was their refusal to give any credence whatsoever to tradition, as a supplementary authority to Scripture, that brought the trinitarian Antinomians and antitrinitarian Socinians together as accidental polemical bedfellows, at least in the mind of Thorndike.56 Thorndike unhesitatingly castigated the Antinomian and Socinian perspectives equally as “heresies” for their denial of the indispensable nature of the work of God the Spirit in baptism. In his concluding section on the Socinian heresy, Thorndike reiterated his threefold critique: first, the Socinians were wrong in assuming that true Christianity comprised believing in the Lordship of Christ and “resolving to live as He has taught” without any consideration of Christ’s “merits and sufferings.” Here, Thorndike the Arminian criticized the moralistic soteriological scheme of Socinianism. This challenges C. F. Allison’s trenchant critique of the moralistic divinity of Restoration Anglicanism, of which Thorndike was a key factor.57 Second, the Socinian hermeneutic was doomed to failure for their patent disregard for the interpretive authority and tradition of the Church. In this regard, Thorndike offered an unbridled critique of sola scriptura and situated himself much closer to the Roman Catholic view. Third, symptomatic of the two ill-reasoned commitments, the relatively unnecessary nature of baptism showed how far the English Socinians had followed their heresiarch.58 In a shockingly revealing statement—revealing, because it helps explain why he was often castigated for being a Roman sympathizer, and shocking, because, nonetheless, he seemingly prefers Rome to the Socinians and Antinomians— Thorndike asserted that someone who trusted his hermeneutical sensibilities over against and without the authority of the Church (the refusal of which, as Thorndike never tired of emphasizing, was the leading cause for ruptures of the unity of the Church) deserved to die. So Thorndike insisted: He that bounds the interpretation of the Scriptures within the sense of the Catholic Church, shall not transgress the law of God’s truth in that enquiry. He that accepts the bounds of his own fancy instead of them, is it not just with God, if he die? If our common Christianity, and the maintenance thereof, depend so much upon the unity of the Church, is it not reason, that the benefit of it should depend upon the same?59 The other significant aspect of Thorndike’s critique of Crell and his English followers such as Biddle focused on the way patristic authorities were interpreted

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by Biddle and others. Assuredly, as Jean-Louis Quantin and Joseph Levine have convincingly shown, Anglican polemic was increasingly preoccupied with arguments from history, and Thorndike mounted a formidable historical, exegetical, and text-critical defense of the faith of the Church of England. In fact, Thorndike devoted nearly one fourth of Covenant of Grace to show the veracity of the deity of Christ and the continuity between the ante- and postNicene writers.60 What is fascinating about Thorndike’s scrupulous quotation of these ante-Nicene authorities was that they were precisely the same figures mentioned by Biddle to arrive at a diametrically opposite conclusion: that the ecclesiastical tradition before Nicaea taught nothing of the deity of Christ, as would be codified in 325 ce, thus providing another clue that Thorndike was clearly reacting to the threat of Biddle.61 Yet it would be a mistake to lump Thorndike with Cheynell, Owen, Matthew Poole, and other sworn enemies of Biddle of the Puritan sort. While both Owen and Thorndike acknowledged that pre-Nicene writers affirmed the Trinity, albeit in an embryonic and less than fully developed fashion, Owen latched onto sola scriptura as his main cudgel to fight against Biddle, whereas Thorndike, following Petavius in this key point of the polemic, adopted the following view: Whereby you may see, that this learned Jesuit is not agreed with the Cardinal du Perron, to derive the reason why we hold the faith of the Holy Trinity originally from the decree of the council of Nicaea, and from that authority of the Church which maintained it; but from the reason whereupon that decree was grounded and made, that is, from the meaning of the Scriptures expressed and limited by the tradition of the Church.62 Perron had maintained that the doctrine of the Trinity was unknown in preNicene theologies, amplifying this tantalizing view by asserting that had Arius been tried at a council in the second or third century, he would have been exonerated without any qualification or equivocation.63 Notice, as well, how Thorndike juxtaposed Scripture and tradition to emphasize the mutual correlativity between the two, in particular, the inflection given to tradition. Then Thorndike clearly refuted a key text used by Biddle to show that a major pre-Nicene Father, Tertullian, espoused a subordinationist Christology, although antitrinitarianism was not an option (Adv. Prax. cap. 5, 6, 7).64 For example, with Tertullian, two texts were cited to show the prevalent Socinian theological modus operandi: first, Adversus Hermogenem, chapter 3, followed by Adversus Praxean, chapter 5. These two texts were identical to the texts cited in Biddle’s Testimonies of Irenaeus to buttress a diametrically opposite conclusion: namely, that there was “a time, when neither sin was to make God a judge, nor Son to make God a Father.”65 Furthermore, Thorndike tirelessly

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sought to bring Socinus and his English followers into a polemical submission by citing the following constellation of pre-Nicene luminaries: (1) Ignatius’s Epistle to the Ephesians, in which Christ is called “God manifest as man”; (2) Athanasius’s De Synodis Arminum et Seleucum, which appropriates an Ignatian maxim that Christ was simultaneously “bodily and incorporeal, engendered and not engendered, God in man”; and (3) Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, in which Christ is spoken of as “the Lord of hosts, and the King of glory,” also as proceeding from “light from light, and fire from fire,” denoting a sort of consubtantiality with the Father.66 Thorndike accumulated further patristic testimony to argue against the English Socinians of Biddle’s sort. He cited Irenaeus, who maintained that the Son’s generation was “ineffable, without beginning and from everlasting,” and Clement of Alexandria carried on the same Christological sentiment wherein Christ was called “God equal to God, as His Son,” indicating both the equality with and distinction from the Father.67 Finally, Thorndike offered an interesting anti-Socinian caveat lector of sorts at the end of what is arguably the pivotal chapter of the book (chapter 17): a radically apophatic stance on the extent and reality of human knowledge of the ineffable Deity and the complexifying effect this has on the nature of Scripture as the final arbiter of religious opinions. All the possible Socinian ripostes notwithstanding, this was Thorndike’s “desperate” anti-rationalist punch in that he asseverated the impossibility of human reason to understand what is proper to the nature of God in se. For though reason force me to attribute to God all that is of perfection, and to remove from God all that is of imperfection, in the creature; yet by all that I understand nothing proper to God: those things that are revealed, signifying nothing else but His proper nature, incomprehensible to man, till he “see Him as He is.” What is the Word and Spirit of God, besides God, I understand not at all; but stick not therefore to believe, that the Word took our flesh, and not the Father, having in It the Holy Ghost without measure, whereof It giveth a certain measure to believers. And had I a proper conceit of that which they express, that which seems a contradiction would then appear necessary.68 The basic move in natural theology was to attribute all perfections to God, yet this did not teach anything that was proper to God. Thorndike, however, not only posited a radical impossibility of knowing God in se but also espoused an eschatological denouement in our pursuit to know God till we “see Him as He is.” The clincher for Thorndike proceeded as follows: as human beings, we cannot know God as God truly is, thus what we often regard as contradictory

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and impossible to our epistemological apparatus would appear “necessary” only if we had “a proper conceit” of the reality of the Trinity. Thus Thorndike was convinced that “all the dispute that the schools can have, of the Holy Trinity, and Incarnation of our Lord Christ, cannot advance us in the understanding of those mysteries; but only teach us, by what terms we may express ourselves in them according to the faith of the Church.”69 After issuing a radical moratorium on all human efforts to understand God’s essential being, Thorndike made a move—often castigated by the Socinians as an unwarranted philosophical legerdemain—that the only possible source of knowledge of things divine was the Church. In other words, what Thorndike offered was not so much a covenant theology as a covenant ecclesiology. Whereas Thorndike’s critique of Socinianism in general and Biddle in particular was based on ecclesiology and covenant theology, in Peter Gunning’s public disputation with John Biddle, one gets a rare glimpse of the two leading minds of the mid-seventeenth century, offering divergent perspectives on the nature and office of Christ, the issue of idolatry, and the culture of the trinitarian polemic. Peter Gunning (1614–1684), the “eager controversialist,” was arguably the most likely candidate among the second-generation Laudians to launch polemical salvoes at Biddle.70 Educated at Clare College, Cambridge, Gunning became a fellow of Clare in 1635 and remained there until 1644, when he was ejected by the Parliamentary Commissioners, who found his ecclesiastical sensibilities unsuitable for their reforming vision.71 Moving to Oxford, where the Royalist party was firmly ensconced, Gunning quickly rose to prominence: he was appointed to chaplaincy at New College in July 1644 and received an Oxford BD in July 1646. Among his circles and confidants were committed royalist gentry such as Lord Hatton and Sir Francis Compton, and for the purpose of being Sir Robert Shirley’s new chaplain, Gunning was brought to London. Gunning’s disputation with Biddle was not an isolated incident. Not only did Gunning debate over the veracity of the trinitarian doctrine but also he debated with a General Baptist Henry Denne twice in November 1658 over the legitimacy of infant baptism.72 Gunning was also instrumental in dissuading Thomas Warmestry and Thomas Good, two moderate Episcopalians, from joining Richard Baxter’s association movement in 1653, consequently frustrating Baxter’s efforts in ecclesiological rapprochement between moderates on the Presbyterian, Congregational, and Episcopal sides.73 Furthermore, in May to July 1657, Gunning’s ardent zeal to defend the ecclesial validity of the Church of England carried him and John Pearson, future Restoration Bishop of Chester, to strike out against two Roman Catholic apologists in a series of disputations. The proceedings, written distinctly from the Catholic vantage point, were published in Paris in 1658.74

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Gunning, while serving at the chapel of Exeter House on the Strand, paid a surprise visit to “Mr. Bidle’s Meeting” on a Sunday and held a disputation regarding the deity of the Holy Spirit in June 1654, followed by two more such meetings.75 Neither McLachlan nor Wilbur seemed to be aware of the specifics of the disputation between Biddle and Gunning. The Rawlinson MS C 166, held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is an ex post facto narrative of the disputation between Biddle and Gunning, along with a subsequent analysis with a decidedly Biddlean tint. This hitherto unexamined manuscript sheds crucial light on the culture of biblical exegesis for both antitrinitarians and trinitarians, offers insight into the issue of idolatry, and provides clues for the valence of Christ’s questioned two natures, as Gunning resorted to the patristic theological category of communicatio idiomatum to shore up his belief in the Trinity. Another ancillary, though not insignificant, aspect of religious controversy in the mid-seventeenth century we can learn from this disputation between Gunning and Biddle is that it offers a more nuanced understanding of the activity of the nature of the second wave of Laudian theologians such as Gunning, Henry Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, and Thomas Pierce, inter alia.76 Laudianism did not automatically slide down to Arminianism, then inexorably to antitrinitarianism. From the very beginning, the Biddle-Gunning disputation was a drawn-out exegetical battle. Yet, as we shall see later, it was never a pure interpretation de novo. Both Biddle and Gunning were already situated in the established traditions of biblical interpretation, whether antitrinitarian or trinitarian. The type of “discord in zion”77 between Gunning and Biddle stemmed from the fact that while both parties acknowledged the primacy or sole authority of Scripture, this appeal itself became problematized as they came to a painful recognition that “such appeals are first and foremost to the various interpretations of Scripture—interpretations that very often exhibited numerous levels of disagreement.”78 G. Sujin Pak’s foregoing quote helps encapsulate the zeitgeist of the early modern exegetical squabbles over the legitimacy of messianic exegesis. Closely related to this was the hermeneutical divergence between Biddle and Gunning on how to read the Old Testament in light of the New. Adjudicating between diverse interpretive options regarding the use of the Hebrew Bible, especially concerning predictive prophecies, in Psalms as well as prophetic writings, had occupied the minds of Jewish and Christian exegetes since the days of St. Paul, passed onto Justin Martyr (vis-à-vis Trypho), Origen (vis-àvis Celsus), and so on. In general, the hermeneutical divergence had to with the nature of Christ’s fulfillment—or the absence thereof—of the things the New Testament writers appropriated the Old Testament texts for evidence of. For instance, Gunning and Biddle had a heated exchange over how best to

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interpret Romans 9:33 (“Behold I lay in Sion a stumbling stone, & Rock of Offence”). For Gunning, Isaiah 8:14 was the text Paul appropriated. The following is Gunning’s mode of theological exegesis of the two texts: 1. “The Lord of hosts” (v. 13) was the one speaking of himself being a “stumbling stone, & a rock of Offence to both houses of Israel.” 2. Paul adopts this language to describe, in agonizing terms, the tragedy of the temporary rejection of the Lord’s appointed Messiah in Christ in Romans 9:33. 3. “From whence it is cleare” that he who is called “Lord of Hosts Esai 8” is “spoken of Christ, Rom. ix & last.”79 Biddle’s quick rejoinder was that Isaiah 28:16 was a better text, to buttress his subordinationist conclusion. Since Isaiah 28 has language nearly identical to “I lay in Sion a stumbling stone,” Biddle was convinced that this had to be the preferred reading the apostle appropriated. If that were the case, then this Isaianic text helped serve Biddle’s theological purposes better in that there is an identificational difference between the one who was laying the stumbling stone and the stone personified as one worthy of Israel’s trust. The one who was laying down the stone was God, and Christ “is a stumbling stone & c. in a different way from God, For God is simply & of Himself so,” but Christ was “laid by another” as seen in this text; thus Christ owed his essence to someone other than himself. Thus this personal distinction, for Biddle, had to mean an essential hierarchy as well. Gunning’s riposte, again, was firmly anchored in his own trinitarian metaphysic and messianic hermeneutic. Since he allowed for personal distinction between the Father and the Son within the trinitarian framework of essential unity among the Persons, having the agent of laying the stone in Sion as the Father was not an insurmountable hurdle. The “stumbling stone & Rock of Offence” referred to Christ. But here, Gunning made an intriguing hermeneutical move and argued that the this stumbling stone and Rock of Offence is “Jehovah the Lord of Hosts”; therefore, he concludes that “some Person” aside from the Father is “Jehovah the Lord of Hosts.” As sloppy as this might sound, so long as one accepts the personal plurality and ontological unity and singularity, then Gunning’s strange theological arithmetic could make sense.80 The second key Christological issue of divergence between Biddle and Gunning focused on Christ as a worthy object of worship. Put bluntly, both Biddle and Gunning were accusing each other of idolatry. Idolatry was such a key theme in the confessional debates between Catholics and Protestants that this became a rather effective polemical label for mutual demonization. For instance, as Carlos Eire has persuasively argued, the language of idolatry

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became an indispensable part of the Protestant arsenal against the Catholic belief in transubstantiation, masses for the dead, and the like, whether it was Calvin’s critique of Catholicism or the Puritans’ stinging rebuke of the Laudian “beauty of holiness” and sacramentarianism for their putatively idolatrous proclivities.81 In an act of ironic transposition, we find Gunning arguing that Biddle’s version of Puritanism was directly responsible for idolatry of the grossest sort. Gunning was not alone in charging Biddle with idolatry: Nicholas Estwick, Matthew Poole, John Owen, and other English Protestants had found Biddle’s insistence on Christ being a lawful recipient of divine worship incongruous with his antitrinitarianism. An intriguing episode in the early phase of Socinianism helps us contextualize Biddle’s seeming singularity. In a series of debates between Ferenc Dávid and Faustus Socinus, which took place between November 1578 and April 1579, liturgical and Christological issues brought them to a gridlock.82 Dávid was convinced that since God the Father alone was worthy of Christians’ invocation of God, directing worship to Christ constituted an unbiblical, idolatrous practice. Likely owing to his erstwhile training as a Calvinist minister, Dávid’s liturgical theology was defined by his commitment to the Reformed version of the regulative principle: unless Scripture specifically commands, it cannot be part of Christian liturgy. Since Scripture was silent on invoking the name of Christ in worship, Dávid was resolutely opposed to Socinus.83 Socinus published his views on the matter in De Jesu Christi Invocatione Disputatio (1579). The touchstone of Socinus’s argument against Dávid was Christ’s exaltation, bequeathing of divine honor, and, most crucially, the mediatorial kingdom of the Church. Thus, while God the Father was of himself and exercises sovereignty over all (“Pater per ipsum eam exerceat”), Jesus’ adopted sonship was not without privileges. Key among such privileges was that within the mediatorial reign of Christ in the Church, he was the One to whom all Christians ought to direct worship, for Christ, true to his filial piety, would not let that rest on him, but complete that act of worship by rendering it unto the most high God.84 As we shall see, that was precisely what Biddle would argue. Consequently, Gunning latched onto this as a first point of contention. Convinced as he was that Biddle was guilty of idolatry, Gunning layered biblical text after text to show the danger of Biddle’s sincere yet woefully misguided liturgical praxis. By linking together Isaiah 2:2, 11, 17 and Matthew 4:10, Gunning constructed a syllogism arguing that God alone deserves to be worshipped and that any doctrine that encourages people to worship anyone other than God is guilty of idolatry.85 Thus the conclusion to be proven was whether offering worship to Christ was idolatrous. Ironically, on this point, thus to the chagrin of Gunning, both Biddle and Gunning agreed that offering worship to the Father through the Son (Gunning would add “in the Spirit”) was biblically

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sanctioned. But the theological watershed was this. While Gunning was committed to prove that since after the ascension of Christ, the early church offered worship in the name of Christ, consequently elucidating the nature of Christ’s person, namely, his deity, Biddle was convinced that worship can be directed to a mediatorial figure, such as Christ, as long as the ultimate telos of worship was the Most High God. So Gunning pithily summarized the point to which he would return throughout the dispute to show Biddle as a blasphemer and idolator: That Doctrine [NB: of Biddle] I say which doth teach us as aforesaid, doth introduce a most grosse Idolatry, But I reason thus, your Doctrine denying Christ to bee the most high God, & asserting but one nature in Him, & yet not denying but teaching rightly, that Men ought to pray unto him, to give Glory & Honor unto Him, as was unto God the Father, & as equall with God, yea, that honor spoken of Isaiah 45 [vv. 23–24] & to trust him for Eternall Life . . . is grosse Idolatry.86 Thus for Gunning, worship can be directed to and rendered through Christ because he is the “Most High God,” thereby establishing the possibility of a trinitarian theo-logic. For Biddle, on the contrary, Christ is made an object of worship due to his exaltation by the Father. Had it not been so, no such act of adoration would be acceptable. So Biddle reasoned: “I denyed your Major before namely, that the Doctrine, which teacheth, that another besides the most high God is to bee worshipped, invocated, & confided in, doth introduce Idolatry.” As strange as it must have sounded to Gunning, Biddle continued to offer his antitrinitarian theo-logic: “And the Reason for my Deniall is because the Scripture doth testify from place to place, that God hath Exalted his Son, that Hee should bee worshipped, invocated, & that Men should put confidence in him.”87 Consequently, offering worship to God through Christ—as an exalted figure, nonetheless a man, in essence—did not “derogate” from the worship of the Most High God.88 Known as a man who did not shy from a good polemical skirmish, Gunning continued to charge Biddle with idolatry of the popery’s magnitude.89 Since it was customary to charge Roman practices of adoration of saints and celebration of Christianized pagan holidays, among others, Gunning laid the polemical pathway connecting paganism, Catholicism, and Socinianism of Biddle’s sort.90 Crucial in Gunning’s polemical strategy was marshaling his exegetical “evidence” against Biddle to show that the only reason that worship directed at Christ was non-idolatrous was because Jesus is “the Most High God.” Weaving together Hebrews 1:6 and Psalm 97:7, Gunning sought to prove that very contentious point. Citing from the Douay-Rheims version, rather than the King

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James or the Geneva versions, Gunning rendered Psalm 97:7b as “worship Him all yee Angells of his,” thereby showing that since Christ is spoken of in Hebrews 1:6 as the one whom all the angels were exhorted to worship, the ministry of Christ as the covenant mediator made him the referent of Psalm 97:7b, namely, the God of heaven and earth, thus the “most high God.”91 Biddle’s exegesis of the very same text, however, followed a radically different trajectory. Taking the cue from the Hebrews 1:6, “And when Hee bringeth his First begotten,” Biddle concluded that the Son was begotten, not of the same substance, thus inferior to the Father. Yet here, one finds a substantial revision of Biddle’s Christology. Immediately prior to that, Biddle had mentioned that “wee grant that Christ is really & truly a God by nature.” What does this mean? He seems to have moved along the orthodox route of Gunning a bit, though not far enough. In fact, this is closer to the classic Arian view. Indeed, the text of Hebrews 1:6 does present the themes in tension between the Arian and Nicene Christologies, as replicated in Biddle and Gunning in the seventeenth century. By focusing on the temporal begottenness of the Son, Biddle made Jesus ontologically subordinate to God the most high God, yet by focusing on the text itself, Biddle saw no contradiction in having angels and humans worship Christ.92 However, for Gunning, since anyone who was worthy of receiving “divine worship” must be God, and since Christ the eternally begotten One from the Father was consubstantial with Him, it was perfectly legitimate, indeed required, for the Christians to direct their worship through Christ.93 Rather than assuming a merely defensive posture, Biddle sought to score polemical points in his excoriating remark on Gunning’s accusation of Biddle as an idolator. After denying the consequence that since Christ is worshipped, he must be the “most high God,” Biddle continued: I say, that though Hee, that is spoken of in the Psalmes is the most high God, but Hee, y t is to bee worshipped by the Angells Hebr. 1. is Christ, yet it doth not follow, that Christ Jesus is Almighty God, And the reason is because God is to bee worshipped, through Jesus, & the worship, that is given to Him, doth rest in God, as appears Philip. 2.11. Every Tongue shall confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God the Father.94 The italicized part, taken from Philippians 2:11, was another crucial test case for their hermeneutical divergence. While looking at the same text, Gunning focused on the fact that Christ is called “Lord,” thereby equating him with the title given to Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible as the covenant “Lord.” Biddle, on the contrary, focused on “to the Glory of God the Father,” in that neither the worship directed to Christ nor his identity as the adopted Son of God did “rest in” him, but rather in God. In other words, for Gunning, Christ is the most

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high God who took on full humanity, whereas for Biddle, Christ is an exalted man, who through the resurrection becomes exalted, adopted as the Son of God, thus a God. The third area of exegetical divergence between Biddle and Gunning focused on readings of New Testament texts in which Christ was spoken of as inferior to, sent by, and obedient to the Father. For Biddle, these texts—such as John 14:28 (the Father is greater than Jesus); Matthew 24:36, Mark 13:32 (Jesus did not know the time of the eschaton); 1 Corinthians 15:24–28 (Jesus will surrender the kingdom to the Father, and God will be all in all); John 6:38 (Jesus did the will of the Father)—gave occasions for claiming victory. In contradistinction, Gunning tapped into a millennium-long hermeneutical trajectory of the two-nature doctrine of Christ. Gunning utilized communicatio idiomatum to distinguish between that which belonged to Christ as man, Christ as God, and Christ as God-man. This is, as discussed later, the very Christological hermeneutical guide offered by the London Presbyterian minister, Benjamin Needler, for his parish, in his Notes with Practical Observations; towards the opening of the five first Chapters of the first Book of Moses called Genesis.95 While Biddle called foul, charging Gunning of wanting to have the polemical cake and eat it, too, Gunning was resolute in affirming that this had been the established orthodox tradition for interpreting the oft-confusing identity matrix of Christ. Throughout this section dealing with the putatively two-nature doctrine of Christ, Gunning appropriated this patristic mode of argumentation to good effect. Before we launch into a further discussion of Gunning’s doctrine of communicatio idiomatum against Biddle, a historical excursus is perhaps in order. Communicatio idiomatum (lit. communication/sharing of properties) had impressive historical precedents before Gunning appropriated it against Biddle. Ignatius in his letters to Ephesus and Rome put two antithetical statements about Christ, the irreconcilability thereof gets resolved if and only if Christ possessed both natures, divine and human. Expressions such as “stirring up yourselves with the blood of God” (referring to Acts 20:28), “our God, Jesus Christ, was . . . conceived in the womb by Mary . . . born and baptized,” and that this Christ was simultaneously “generate and ingenerate, God in man . . . first passible and then impassible” were designed to present the mystery of the Incarnation in which Christ’s “human and divine attributes, experiences, etc. might properly be interchanged.”96 Tertullian explained the mysterious coalescence of the two natures in one Christ by simply juxtaposing these seemingly contradictory statements. Such is what we find in his diatribe against Marcion, De Carne Christi: Thus the nature of the two substances displayed him as human and God—in one respect born, in the other unborn; in one respect corporeal, in the other

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spiritual; in one sense weak, in the other exceeding strong; in one sense dying, in the other living. This property of the two states— the divine and the human—is distinctly asserted with equal truth of both natures simultaneously, with the same conviction both of the Spirit and of the flesh.97 Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa both fully affirmed the communicatio idiomatum, leading both of them to call Mary “theotokos,” the bearer of God.98 Within the context of the Reformation debates, it was Calvin who articulated this patristic doctrine most ecumenically and succinctly. Well aware of both the Lutherans’ emphasis on the bodily ubiquity in their eucharistic theology and Servetus’s radical rejection of communicatio idiomatum in his De Trinitatis Erroribus, Calvin thought that a truly Catholic Christology would have to affirm it since it was mandated by the plain meaning of Scripture. It seems that Calvin’s perspective on communicatio idiomatum was appropriated by a number of his English contemporaries and the seventeenth-century English divines, including Gunning. So Calvin expounded on it in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (II.xiv.1, 2): Thus, also, the Scriptures speak of Christ: they sometimes attribute to him what must be referred solely to his humanity, sometimes what belongs uniquely to his divinity; and sometimes what embraces both natures but fits neither alone. And they so earnestly express this union of the two natures that is in Christ as sometimes to interchange them. This figure of speech is called by the ancient writers “the communicating of properties.” . . . But the communicating of characteristics or properties consists in what Paul says: “God purchased the church with his blood,” and “the Lord of glory was crucified.” . . . Surely God does not have blood, does not suffer. . . . But since Christ, who was true God and also true man, was crucified and shed his blood for us, the things that he carried out in his human nature are transferred improperly, although not without reason, to his divinity.99 As we have seen, the foregoing text of Acts 20:28 – of God shedding blood – was argued against most vociferously by Biddle and other Socinians on textcritical and theological grounds. Biddle argued that the idea of God bleeding was a later interpolation after Nicene orthodoxy was established by political force. Moreover, Biddle had maintained the idea of divine bloodshed utterly preposterous and unseemly of God. Gunning, on the other hand, asseverated, perhaps following Tertullian on this, that the only way these texts can make sense is within the framework of affirming Christ’s deity, therefore within at least a binitarian or a trinitarian scheme.

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Over against Biddle’s challenge that John 14:28 showed that “the Father is greater than I,” Gunning’s response, which Biddle simply regarded as a theological legerdemain, was that Christ had two natures, eternal Word made incarnate, thereby having divine and human nature coming together in one person. Thus, Jesus, “as the Most high God, hath none greater, than Himself, But the most high God as a Man, hath One greater, than Himself.” In other words, when Jesus said the foregoing in John 14:28, it was Jesus the human who uttered them. Then, the immediate philosophical conundrum was created: a split between Christ the eternal Word and Jesus the first-century Jewish man, and how to speak meaningfully about this relationship. Finding that quasiscriptural distinction utterly inane, Biddle accused Gunning of doing gross injustice to the plain, literal meaning of the text: “Christ saith expressly, my Father is Greater than I. Here the Comparison is made between the Father & Christ himself,” not Christ as a human person, in separate consideration from the divine half.100 Nonetheless, Gunning did not give up. Due to the eternal generation and his resurrection from the dead, while the Father has priority in terms being the fons deitatis, that did not diminish the Son’s participation in the glory, joy, and love of the Father. After all, whom could the Father love without the Son? How can God the Father who knows no beginning become a Father, in time? Adducing such examples, Gunning attempted to shore up the equality of the Son vis-à-vis the Father. Pithily, Gunning added that the wonder of the Incarnation was that while the divinity of Christ did not diminish per se, judging from the grammar of faith, it was correct to say that “by becoming a Man he became Lesse,” that he that was “no Servant before, & is a Servant now.”101 Biddle’s countervailing perspective was one of eternal subordinationism. Another text with a long paper trail of polemical exchange was 1 Corinthians 15:24–28. Starting from Augustine’s De Trinitate to Calvin’s extended discussion of it in the Institutes, these words of St. Paul—especially verses 24 and 28—provided the requisite fodder for Arian and Socinian exegesis: “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. . . . And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Expressions such as the Son delivering up the kingdom to the Father and the Son himself becoming subject unto the Father clearly seemed to support either an Arian reading or at best an eschatological subordinationist reading of the Trinity. Gunning’s argument based on communicatio idiomatum was: Christ gave up a less kingdom, qua his humanity, and retained a greater kingdom, qua his divinity, thus it did not hinder the fact that “Hee may bee the Most high God,” and since Luke 1:33 taught that Christ’s kingdom shall have no end, it

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was wrong to assume from this text alone that Christ’s mediatorial kingdom will come to an end.102 The last exegetical dispute had to do, again, with the alleged essential inferiority of the Son vis-à-vis the most high God. In John 6:38, Christ confessed that he came down from heaven “not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me,” thereby supposedly strengthening the case for Arian and Socinian exegesis. A cursory reading of these words can easily convince one that Christ saw his identity as being both bound up with, and dependent on, the One who sent him. Such was precisely the interpretation given by Biddle. Against this theological quandary, Gunning offered a traditional interpretation, steeped in patristic theological trajectory, of speaking of two wills in Christ. In this regard, Gunning was following Athanasius, who had written of the two wills in Christ. The Sixth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (680–81 ce) had decreed that just as there are two natures in Christ that undergo “no confusion, no change, no separation and no division,” in a similar fashion, there are “equally two natural volitions or wills in him . . . which undergo no division, no change, no partition, no confusion.” Then it cites Athanasius, who affirmed that: Just as his flesh is said to be and is flesh of the Word of God, so too the natural will of his flesh is said to and does belong to the Word of God, just as he says himself: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of the Father who sent me, calling his own will that of his flesh, since his flesh too became his own. For in the same way that his all holy and blameless animate flesh was not destroyed in being made divine but remained in its own limit and category, so his human will as well was not destroyed by being made divine, but rather was preserved.103 It is fascinating to note that John 6:38 was quoted by the bishops at the Third Council of Constantinople to argue for the two wills in Christ, just as the BiddleGunning disputation also focused on the same text. Similar to Athanasius and the conciliar decision at Constantinople III, Gunning maintained his view that Christ has a double will. From the vantage point of the human will, he came to do the will of another, namely, God the Father. However, from the perspective of seeing Christ as one who had a “will Common with God,” then it was most appropriate to assert that Christ came to do his own will. Seemingly flustered with this theological double-talk, Biddle challenged him, “Doth Hee speak of Christ here as Man or as the Eternal God?” Gunning’s allegedly flatfooted answer, yet one with plethora of patristic and medieval precedents, was as “He was God & Man.” In the same way, alluding to another locus classicus, Acts 20:28 (“to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own

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blood”), Gunning argued that “it is true in one sense & not in another to say God did not dye, & as in one sense God had blood, & in another sense Hee had not blood.”104 Although to Biddle this was patently a case of Platonistic philosophy gone mad, for Gunning this was the best way to defend the ironic and mysterious juxtaposition of the two wills, two natures in Christ who along with two other persons comprised the ineffable and eternal Trinity. Now we shall turn our attention to the ones who had the most to lose in the late 1640s and 1650s—the Puritans—whose ecclesiological reconfiguration and political settlement were significantly hampered by Biddle’s antitrinitarian metacritique. IV

Calvinist Puritans’ Polemical Charge on Biddle We have seen in chapter 1 that Biddle’s Twelve Arguments sent shock waves to the pulpits and pews in England, precipitating a plethora of responses and petitions, fearing that his antitrinitarianism was tearing English Christianity at its seams. Nicholas Estwick, a stalwart among Northamptonshire Puritans, was one of the first to respond, by publishing his PNEUMATOLOGIA: Or, a Treatise of the Holy Ghost in 1648.105 Estwick’s estimation of Biddle’s Twelve Arguments was that it was “Sophistically penned, and plausibly contrived” to infect the readers with the spiritual “leprosie” of the denial of the deity of the Holy Spirit.106 Estwick noted that while Biddle’s Christology was full of “Sophistical knots of carnal and humane reason” and would assuredly have been condemned at the Council of Nicaea, whereas his pneumatology would have met a similar fate at the Council of Constantinople I in 381, thus denying the novelty factor of Biddle’s heresy.107 The Pneumatomachians were named after Macedonius, Bishop of Constantinople, for their rejection of the Spirit’s divinity, and Estwick cited from Epiphanius of Salamis’s Panarion and Augustine’s anti-heretical treatise to establish the authenticity of the Pneumatomachians’ errors.108 For instance, Estwick built his case for showing the deity of Christ by paying close attention to the use of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament. So he argued that Isaiah 6:9 (“Go, and tell his people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not”) was interpreted by Paul, “an infallible Interpreter,” in Acts 28:25–26 (“Well speak the Holy Ghost to Esias the prophet unto our fathers, saying, Go unto this people, and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand”) to show the deity of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, Leviticus 26:12—in which divine presence is promised to Israel—was interpreted in the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 3:16 to bolster the deity of the Holy Spirit.109 Not only did Estwick offer a point-by-point refutation of Biddle’s Twelve Arguments but also he

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provided eight rejoinders to argue for the deity of the Holy Spirit, thus bolstering the salutarity of the doctrine of the Trinity.110 Weaving together Genesis 1:26–27, Psalms 33:6, 104:30, 149:2, and Job 35:10, Estwick argued that the agent of creation in the Old Testament was none other than the “Spirit” or the “Spirit of God.” And since only God can create things ex nihilo, Estwick averred that this demonstrates the deity of the Holy Spirit.111 Estwick chastised Biddle for his radical rejection of natural theology, especially the so-called vestigia trinitatis discernible in nature. Over against Biddle, Estwick cited Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum (lib. 1, dist. 3) and the much “admired and honored” Philippe de Mornay’s De veritate religionis christianae (cap. 5, 6), neither of which, Estwick confessed, would be “convincing demonstrations” for Biddle but adequate to parry the blows of a “captious Adversarie.”112 Simultaneously to his citation from Peter Lombard and Philippe de Mornay to show the vestigial elements of the Trinity in nature and pagan philosophy, Estwick did not hesitate to offer up a heft y dose of apophatic theology: I conclude in S. Austin’s words, Whatsoever the Father is, as hee is God, as hee is a substance, as hee is eternitie, the same is the Son of God, and the holy Ghost. If you will say, What riddles are these? I answer, How little is that wee conceive of God? Wee can have better apprehensions of God, then wee can make expressions of him, and hee is transcendently above both our apprehensions and expressions of him.113 Brandishing such a trump card of divine incomprehensibility and mystery as a way of critiquing the Socinian’s seemingly overweening dependence on reason was itself criticized by Biddle as a polemical cheap shot. But for Estwick and his protrinitarian colleagues, this was peering into an area of God that no human wit could adequately comprehend.114 Aside from the role of apophatic theology, another key divergence between Estwick and Biddle had to do with biblical hermeneutics, particularly on how far one could press literal sense (sensus literalis). Estwick sought to disabuse Biddle of the wooden, literalistic exegesis that led Biddle to espouse that God was circumscribed in a particular place; thus he argued, “if you literally press the very words against the ubiquitie of the holy Ghost, might not an Atheist as strongly argue . . . that God is not on earth, hee is confined within the circles of heaven, Why? Because the Father spoke from heaven, This is my welbeloved [sic] Son.”115 By juxtaposing this text with statements from Psalms such as “hee came from heaven” and “Hee rode upon a Cherub, and did flie,” Estwick sought to show the terminus ad quem of Biddle’s position that “the supreme Majestie changeth place” to be “transcendently absurd.” Instead, Estwick maintained

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that accommodation to human logic and language has led this and other anthropomorphic expressions to abound in Scripture, which in no way compromised divine omnipresence, which Estwick regarded as an incommunicable attribute of God. The other key hermeneutical divergence concerned the identity of the “Angel of the Lord” in the Old Testament. For Biddle, committed as he was to an antitrinitarian view of God, all the occurrences of the “angel of the Lord” meant a messenger dispatched by God to do God’s bidding, but in no way identifiable essentially with God. One such controversial text was Exodus 3:1–15, the account of Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush. The question surrounding the specifics of the identity of this God of Abraham who had appeared to Moses had been debated over a millennium by the time Estwick and Biddle came to the scene and was raging among their contemporaries as well.116 In verse 2, “the Angel of the Lord” appeared to Moses in the burning bush; verses 4 and 6 make a seemingly seamless transition from the “Angel of the Lord” to God, especially God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, moving further along in verse 7 as Lord. Estwick argued that “an Angel that spoke to Moses out of the Bush” was “Jehovah the Lord.” For Estwick, this angel was the same as “an uncreated Angel, the Angel of the Covenant” in Malachi 3:1, the Angel who had wrestled with and was “invocated by” Jacob (an interesting collation of Genesis 32:24–30, 48:16, and Hosea 12:3–4): if this Angel had not been God, known by the “proper name of God” (YHWH), Moses and all of the Israelites would have been guilty of idolatry. He expounded on the identity of this Angel of the Lord who is himself Lord further: I will bee that I will bee. It’s a name full of mysteries, and note’s [sic] the eternal and immutable essence of God, and that in time, as great Clerks have from thence collected. This eternal and immutable God would become man: and if there bee any strength in the testimonie of the ancient Fathers, Justin. Apol. 2 ad Antonin. Irenae. Adv Haeres. l. 4. c. 11. Tertul. Adver. Praxean, they will give their suffrages for us. To name no more.117 In this regard, Estwick was following the interpretive trajectory of Gervase Babington, Andrew Willet, and the separatist biblical scholar nonpareil, Henry Ainsworth, who have all interpreted the account of Moses and the burning bush as an embryonic revelation of Christ.118 Citing from Theodoret, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nyssa, and finally Augustine, Gervase Babington sought to show that the referent of “Angel of the Lord” in this text was none other than the “onely begotten Sonne of God,” his preincarnate appearance. While acknowledging that God had appeared in a vision of Isaiah as the supreme judge of the universe (Isaiah 6:1), as a dove in the descent of God the Holy

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Spirit (Matthew 3:16), and as cloven tongues of fire (Acts 2:23), God’s intimate covenantal love prompted this appearance of the Angel of the Lord. For Babington, the climax of revelation in the divine economy of salvation was none other than Christ, thus while not delving into the metaphysical discussion how this angel could be Christ, he simply noted that it was through Christ that God is most present with the people of God.119 Since God did not undergo a metamorphosis of essence between the Old and the New Testaments, it was theologically warranted for Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertulian to believe that the preincarnate Logos can be found in the revelation of God in the Hebrew Bible, thereby buttressing their commitment to the Son’s preexistence. So Justin had argued in his Dialogue with Trypho that “there exists and is mentioned in Scripture another God and Lord under the Creator of all things, who is also called an Angel, because he proclaims to man whatever the Creator of the world . . . wishes to reveal to them.”120 As has been mentioned in chapter 1, Biddle took the same ante-Nicene fathers, Justin, Irenaeus and Tertullian, to show the very opposite, the nondivinity and nonpreexistence of the Logos, or the Son of God. In fact, in a supplementary argument in Twelve Arguments, Biddle continued his patristic exegesis, attempting to show the subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father and, most crucially, to demonstrate how this inequality shows them to be essentially different from God the Father: “I do place him [N.B. Holy Spirit] . . . in the third rank after God and Christ, giving him a preheminence [sic] above all the rest of the heavenly host,” and he explicitly cited Justin Martyr’s Apology.121 Biddle correctly identified the tendency in Justin to speak of “order” and priority among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or God, Logos, and Spirit. According to Franz Dünzl, this subordinationist tendency continued until Nicaea, and yet it is perhaps fairer to argue that in ante-Nicene writings, there was sufficient ambiguity to allow for both types of subordinationist theologies: one, the Biddle type that sees subordination and order as an indicator of superiority of the Father vis-à-vis Son and the Spirit. The other, adopted by a number of trinitarians such as Estwick, was to say that: since there is a Trinitie of Persons, there must of necessitie bee acknowledged an order amongst them. But how? Not in regard of time, as though the holy Ghost should bee in time after the Father, and the Son of God, for they are co-eternal: nor 2ly in order of nature, as if the holy Ghost should bee in nature after God the Father, and God the Son; for in this sense, that is said to bee after another, which depend’s upon the nature of another, which hath no place in this subject, because the three Persons have but one undivided nature.122

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After asserting the essential unity and equality of the three Persons, Estwick went on to explain that the order had to do with “original and principle” and affirmed that the Father was fons deitatis. In the postscript to the readers, Estwick included an intriguing paragraph calling for a moratorium on the debate over the Son and the Spirit being autotheos (ajutov q eoV), a term Calvin used over against Valentine Gentilis, since Gentilis spoke of the Son being inferior to the Father in that the Son’s divinity was derived from the Father. This issue of autotheos became a shibboleth among the Puritans between 1630 and 1660, especially, as Peter Lake has shown, in the George Walker–Anthony Wotton debate over the latter’s putative Socinianism.123 In other words, it is significant to note that even in a treatise aimed at a common antitrinitarian opponent, John Biddle, Estwick was having to apologize for his “temerity” to maintain that “the holy Ghost, not as the holy Ghost, yet, as God, is of himself.”124 In his 1656 tome, Mr. Bidle’s Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity . . . Examined and Confuted, Estwick lamented that to the extent that the “Deity of Gods Son is denied,” then “true Divinity is overturned, the faith of many is shaken, salvation is lost, and horrible impiety, to the griefe of the godly, is pieced out of infamous, and long since condemned Heresies.”125 Consisting of nearly 490 octavo pages, Estwick’s second salvo was designed to stop Biddle’s dismantling of the deity of Christ. This treatise demonstrates even more convincingly the exceedingly meticulous manner of Estwick’s scholarly method and mode of argumentation. In his Pneumatologia, Estwick had provided a point-by-point refutation of Biddle’s Twelve Arguments to show that the Holy Spirit could not be God. Similarly, and in far greater detail, in Mr. Bidle’s Confession of Faith, Estwick sought to pick apart Biddle’s 1648 treatise, A Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity, adding twelve of his own arguments to prove the deity of the Son of God. Toward the end of the treatise, Estwick devoted 100 pages of text to offer yet another point-by-point refutation of Biddle’s appropriation of ante-Nicene fathers (Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatian, Origen, Arnobius, and others) for the obvious purpose of showing that they were taken out of context, misquoted, or clearly misunderstood, illustrating the primary role patristic writings played in the trinitarian polemic of the period.126 If Nicholas Estwick represented the older generation of the “hotter sort of Protestants,” Matthew Poole and Benjamin Needler represented the Presbyterian edges of the Puritan tradition, whose experience during the Civil War and the Interregnum helped fine-tune their theological perspectives and polemical positions. Matthew Poole (1624–1679) was a zealous Presbyterian whose acumen as a biblical commentator was admired across the confessional divide in England. Born in York, Poole entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge,

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in July 1645; his theological acuity was widely recognized. Upon graduation in 1649, Poole took the rectory at St. Michael-le-Querne. It was a living belonging to Anthony Tuckney, the master at Emmanuel while Poole had been a student.127 Formally adopting a Presbyterian ecclesial identity and enlisting himself as a pugilist for the cause of orthodoxy, which was sine qua non in the task of completing what was then known as “the second Reformation,” Poole responded to Biddle’s antitrinitarian heresy and published BLASFHMOKTONIA: The Blasphemer Slaine with the Sword of the Spirit in 1653.128 It proved to be an influential text, requiring his publisher, fellow Presbyterian John Rothwell, to publish the second and revised edition in 1654. As is to be expected from a man steeped in philology and text-critical studies, Poole offered a trenchant critique of Biddle. Again, similar to Nicholas Estwick, the focus was on shoring up the deity of the Holy Spirit. In the epistle to the reader, James Cranford and Arthur Jackson, the two leading London Presbyterians, offered a brief syllogism: all heresies come from and lead back to hell; among all heresies, there’s none more “dangerous and infectious” than the assailing of the Trinity, for the entire foundation and edifice of Christianity depended on it. The brief preamble was followed by a précis of history of the denial of the Spirit’s deity, starting with Arius’s implicit denial of the Holy Spirit’s divinity and reaching its apex with Macedonius, “the furious Bishop of Constantinople, Marathonius and Eleusius”; Cranford and Jackson connected the dots from the fourth century to the sixteenth with Servetus and Socinus.129 They were keenly aware of the network of international Calvinism that served as a conduit of intellectual currents and crosscurrents in mid-seventeenth-century Europe.130 They specifically noted Johannes Cloppenburg’s Compendiolum Socinianismi Confutati, and as well on the margin, similar antiSocinian texts by Johannes Hoornbeeck131 and Samuel Maresius.132 Along with the Continental authors, Francis Cheynell and Nicholas Estwick are named as two English stalwarts in their fight against the Biddlean heresy.133 In fact, Poole specifically expressed his indebtedness to Cheynell, Estwick, and Cloppenburg; Poole’s theological exegesis to demonstrate the deity of the Holy Spirit was virtually identical with that of Estwick’s.134 Poole also followed Estwick’s mode of argumentation in Argument 2 (issue of “Religious Worship” given to the Holy Spirit and the corresponding question of idolatry),135 although from Argument 3, Poole diverged from Estwick’s precedence.136 In his own prefatory comments on Biddle, Poole insinuated that the translation of the Racovian Catechism went through Biddle’s hands and that public disputation was another mode of disseminating Biddle’s heretical notions.137 One of Poole’s areas of attack was the privileging of reason by Biddle and his Socinian coreligionists, so he wrote that all “men are Socinians by nature, they will believe God and the word of God no farther then they can see

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reason.”138 “Essential” and “personal” distinction within the Godhead, a farcical notion summarily jettisoned by Biddle, had been part of the trinitarian theologic, one Poole embraces as a way of moving forward in his critique of Biddle. For Poole, John 1:1 supplied the textual basis for maintaining this distinction. But he [Biddle] saith, It is a distinction unheard of in Scripture. Answ. That is false: 1 It is clearly, Joh. 1.1. The word was with God, and the word was God: With God; there God is taken personally, the Son was with the Father. Was God; there it is taken essentially, the Son was God, had the Essence of God. . . . We say, God essentially considered, acts, not as if the abstracted nature of God did act, but because it is an act common to all the Persons: Thus to create, is an act of God essentially considered, because all the Trinity creates; but to beget the Son is an act of God personally considered, because that is an act proper to the first Person.139 In the second edition of The Blasphemer Slaine, Poole added further exegetical weapons to his arsenal. Typical in Socinian Johannine exegesis was to differentiate between God the one and only and the Father who is rendered in John 1:1 as “oJ qeo;V, the God,” whereas Christ is rendered “onely qeo; V, a God.” Poking fun at Biddle’s improbable lexical analysis and, as well, his “puny disciples,” Poole offered cases in which the “Father” is rendered qeo; V anarthrously: “Seek the Kingdom Qeou: “ (Matthew 6:33) and “ejn pneuv mati qeou: “ (Matthew 12:28).140 Neither of the foregoing verses is translated as “seek the kingdom of a God” or “by the spirit of a God,” Poole insisted. Conversely, he adduced two cases where “Christ is called oJ qeo; V with an article,” Hebrews 1:8 and 1 John 5:20. The final clincher for Poole was that the Son, rendered as the Word in John 1:1, when spoken of as “with God,” was “taken personally,” for it differentiated the Word from God, and the expression in the same verse, “was God,” needed be “taken essentially,” in that the Son participated in the essence of God.141 And by doing so, Poole sought to repudiate Biddle’s maxim: “God is the name of a person,” thereby creating philosophical elbow room for God to be spoken of essentially, and personal distinctions be obtained meaningfully as well.142 As much carping as Poole could heap on Biddle’s illogicality and lack of philosophical sophistication, the issues dividing the antitrinitarians and trinitarians were of fundamental difference. From the immediately foregoing example, one can see that Poole uses the very distinction Biddle would not accept as legitimate, Poole’s exegesis of the Johannine prologue notwithstanding. This encapsulates, in my opinion, the key aspect of methodological divergence between Biddle and Poole. Whether it had to do with typological

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and literal exegesis or the language of accommodation (“there are many things that are spoken of God, aj n qrwpopaqw: V, after the manner of men, & must be understood qeoprepw: V, so as it do not reflect dishonour upon God”), it would seem that due to the fundamental presuppositional differences, they were shadowboxing in vain.143 Then all the trinitarians could do was either legislate orthodoxy tout court or keep the printing presses running to publish helpful practical and polemical divinity, which would stop the gangrene of antitrinitarian heresy from spreading. One such gargantuan effort to galvanize the godly in London in May 1659 took the form of morning exercise sermons in which the entire “heads of divinity” were preached in a systematic fashion, much akin to the loci communes format. And it is to that we shall turn, focusing our attention on the pulpit strategy of Benjamin Needler. Benjamin Needler (1620–1682) was an assiduous preacher who spent fourteen profitable years, between 1648 and 1662, as rector of the parish church of St. Margaret Moyses on Friday Street, London.144 There are three discrete sources in our endeavor to contextualize Needler’s attack on Socinianism: (1) Needler’s sermons on systematic divinity, preached between 1655 and 1659, as recorded by John Harper; (2) Needler’s morning exercise sermon on the Trinity; and (3) his exposition on the Pentateuch, especially the hermeneutical guide he offered as an appendix. John Harper, a London fishmonger and a dedicated layman at St. Margaret’s, took notes on the Sunday sermons delivered by Needler. Known as a “very humble, grave, and peaceable divine,” Needler was an active member of the London Provincial Assembly.145 Harper’s notes from thirty-two of Needler’s sermons span three and a half years (August 1655–February 1659), and the politics of religion in London during the middle part of the 1650s was abuzz with the fear factor of the antitrinitarians, Quakers, and Ranters, who might just create theopolitical pandemonium. Thus, the urgency to inculcate sound faith to his parish was all the more acutely felt in his sermons. Of the thirty-two sermons, six dealt specifically with the question of God’s Triune identity (Sermons 2–7), twelve sermons dealt with divine attributes, and thirteen were on various heads of systematic divinity. Faithful to his Calvinistic training, Needler followed the theological method of John Calvin’s Confession de la Foy (1536), which began with a prolegomenon on the Word of God as Scripture (“La parolle de Dieu”), as opposed to Philip Melanchthon or Wolfgang Musculus, two other authors whose Loci Communes began with “De Deo,” proceeding either with the tripersonal nature of God (“De tribus Personis,” for Melanchthon) or the divinity of Christ (“de divinitate Christi,” for Musculus).146 Aside from Calvin, the other immediate source for Needler’s theology was the Westminster Confession of

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Faith (1647). It also began, much like the 1536 Geneva Confession, with the discussion of the source of our knowledge of God, namely, Scripture.147 The “preamble” sermon on Scripture (dated August 5, 1655) was followed by a second sermon on the existence of God (January 20, 1656), and then one on the deity of Christ (February 24, 1656), and it is here, perhaps unsurprisingly, that we fi rst notice the Socinians to be Needler’s polemical interlocutors, as he notes the interpretive divergence between the trinitarians and Socinians on Philippians 2:6 (“who being in the forme of God, thought it not robbery to bee equall with God”): Christ’s deity was affi rmed by Needler and others, based on this verse, whereas the Socinians denied it. Citing Calvin and Beza, Needler buttressed his trinitarianism by arguing that “the forme of God” as verse 6 rendered was in reference to “ye essence of God,” and that while the fi rst Adam, though ontologically inferior to God, sought to be equal with God, the second Adam, Christ, though fully consubstantial with God the Father, humbled himself.148 For Needler, the deity of Christ and his incarnation was a “fundamental point of Christianity” and a great mystery. In his sermon to prove that the “holy Ghost is God” (Sermon 6), Needler explicitly mentioned his contemporary Socinians as the deniers of the deity of the Spirit, and established an ancient pedigree of their errors by connecting the “blasphemers of these dayes who say the holy Ghost is a creature” with the fourth-century Macedonians. Thus for Needler, indeed, for all the godly preachers, their present-day polemical skirmishes were but a microcosmic view of the universal, cosmic war between orthodoxy and heresy, the elect and the reprobate, indeed, God and Satan.149 Needler correctly distinguished between the Socinians and the modern-day Macedonians, for Socinus had interpreted the Holy Spirit as “an attribute of God,” whereas Biddle had given the Spirit a personal identity, not a divine one, but rather an angelic one. Between October 1658 and February 1659, Needler preached four sermons on original sin. Now, while it might be an unrelated phenomenon, could the Socinian and Biddle’s denial of the original sin have prompted Needler to dwell on this crucial piece of Calvinistic divinity? Thus, while Biddle might not have been the only guilty one in this, it is noteworthy that Needler tells his parishioners to “keep out of the Company of Apostates,” namely, those who would deny its presence. More specifically yet, Needler points out that “nowadays” this Socinian exegesis of denial of transmission of original sin was very much au courant, and he warned his auditors against the Socinian labor of denying “the corruption of nature.”150 A closely related corollary to the repudiation of original sin was the corresponding confidence in the natural ability of the person to plumb the depth of God’s being with reason, untrammeled and uncorrupt. Thus, in his efforts to dislodge the basis

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of Socinian natural theology, Needler argued that the Trinity cannot be discovered with “the light of nature without divine Revelation.” However, after the light of nature has been redeemed and is being sanctified with the proper use of reason in submission to divine revelation, Needler noted that “light of nature . . . cannot oppose” the doctrine of the Trinity. Adducing several examples in which the light of nature could in no way find out on its own (“that the Tree of life should be a Sacrament to Adam in Paradise,” that the “Priesthood was settled in the Tribe of Levi,” and how Israel came to see “what creatures were clean, and what were unclean”), Needler argued that such overweening confidence in human nature—the Pelagian and Socinian error—would only lead to idolatry, for we will end up worshipping a God created in our image, not vice versa.151 Needler further clarified his trinitarian theology in his sermon on the Trinity (Sermon 7; May 25, 1656), for which he used the highly disputed text 1 John 5:7 (“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”) as his text. Unsurprisingly, he would use the same text in his morning exercise sermon, which he would preach, in tandem with his fellow London Presbyterian ministers, in May 1659. During the month of May 1659, twenty-seven London Presbyterian ministers preached morning exercise sermons, a mid-seventeenth-century version of sermon gadding with an interesting twist: these “exercises” were to occur daily, early in the morning, and they lasted the entire month. What was even more intriguing is that these Presbyterian preachers covered “certain chief Heads and Points of the Christian Religion,” for the purpose of teaching the fundamentals of the faith to the entire citywide parishes as a “preservative against apostasy” and in opposition to the “ false teachers of those times, those Antichrists.”152 Published by London Presbyterian bookseller Ralph Smith almost immediately after the sermons were delivered in 1659, the Morning Exercise Methodized was unique, the first collection of sermons by any group of ministers in Reformation Europe covering the entire gamut of systematic theology. Indeed, while there had been Loci Communes among the sixteenth-century divines (Melanchthon, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Musculus’s Loci were influential), there was no historical precedent of a citywide homiletical campaign to preach each morning in a specific London location before parishioners headed off to work.153 The designated preacher for the doctrine of the Trinity was Benjamin Needler. Taking 1 John 5:7 as his text, Needler offered a positive and yet not inordinately “polemical” discourse on the veracity of the Trinity. The first point he sought to establish was the very bone of contention raised by Biddle: the incongruity of alleging that generation of the son could indicate equality and essential identity. Although he regarded the Son’s eternal generation as a “great mystery,” he proffered the following five points:

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1. God the Father communicates the whole divine essence unto the Sonne, and yet hath the whole divine essence in himself: If God communicates his essence, it must be his whole essence; for that which is infi nite, cannot admit of any division, partition, or diminution. . . . 2. God the Father, and God the Sonne are one essence, and yet though the Father begets the Sonne, the Sonne doth not beget himself. . . . 3. God the Father begetteth God the Sonne, and yet the Father is not elder than the Sonne, nor the Sonne younger than the father; he that begetteth, is not in time before him that is begotten; if God was a Father from everlasting, then Christ was a Sonne from everlasting; for relata sunt simul natura, an eternal Father must have an eternal Sonne. . . . 4. The Father begets the Sonne, yet the Sonne is not inferior to the Father, nor the Father superior to the Sonne. . . . 5. The Father begets the Sonne, yet the Sonne hath the same numerical nature with the Father, and the Father the same numerical nature with the Sonne.154 From the fi rst principle, Needler argued that God’s eternal action was always indivisible, thus the act of generation of the Son itself had to be communication of the undiminished essence of God. Even though they are of the same essence, and even though the Father is the begetting one and the Son the begotten, it could not follow that the Father was older and superior vis-à-vis the Son. Biddle and other Socinians carped at the trinitarian formulas of this sort by asserting that the foregoing created a quaternity in that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all participate in the divine essence that is located “outside” of themselves. Such was precisely the critique leveled by Joachim of Fiore against Peter Lombard, which prompted the Fourth Lateran Council to hereticate Joachim and declare, in no uncertain terms, that divine quaternity was an oxymoron of the most heretical type.155 Over against the Socinian gloss on 1 John 5:7 that the oneness spoken of in the text was a “unity in consent,” not of a unity of essence, Needler sought to show that this heresy, if left unchecked, would jeopardize the salvific possibility of his auditors.156 In the sermon, he sought to demonstrate that the language of “personhood,” when applied to God, does not always correspond to human existence or linguistic expressions. By establishing a clear distinction between “person and nature,” a Christological metaphysical consideration that also had purchase in trinitarian theology, Needler wanted to show that, unlike human beings, three divine persons could share the same nature without

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creating three separate deities. Sebastian Rehnman has convincingly shown an inextricable correlativity between “theistic metaphysics and biblical exegesis,” and we see the same in Needler.157 Juxtaposing the Socinian exegesis of 1 John 5:7 and that of Needler, there is an unabridgeable gap, and without using the categories of orthodoxy and heresy, one must be cognizant of the metaphysical presuppositions that guided, if not governed, their scriptural hermeneutics. Needler was convinced that God’s identity was “Father, Son, and Spirit,” and these three are, as seen in the economy of salvation, not three masks of the one inseparable being, but three distinct yet inseparable persons of the One God. While Needler was willing to acknowledge that the Father was the “fountain or prniciple” (principium) of deity, he was aghast to see how some Socinians took that to be that the Father was the cause of the Son’s and Spirit’s deity, thereby arriving at an inescapable subordinationism. Separated by nearly 400 years, and inhabiting a world that regards Calvinistic systematic divinity as irrevocably arcane, contemporary historians could easily be tone-deaf to the nuances of these Scholastic issues, yet as such Needler was seeking to elucidate the London godly crowd about the Father being the fons deitatis as absolutely crucial.158 Again, convinced of the veracity and validity of regarding the Father as the fountain of divinity, though not the cause, this trinitarian metaphysics influenced his exegesis of Hebrews 1:3, so that the language of Christ being “the brightnesse of his glory, and the expresse Image of his person” was “proven” to be vouchsafi ng the Son’s deity.159 Indeed, this trinitarian metaphysics had been a guiding hermeneutical principle for Needler, which he shared in his little-known Expository Notes with Practical Observations; towards the opening of the five first Chapters of the first Book of Moses called Genesis (1654). Originally delivered as Sunday sermons at his church, it would seem that Needler wanted to furnish his parishioners with some hermeneutical guide, so that as personal affective piety was increasing among the London laity, whether Nehemiah Wallington or John Harper, a more acute need arose for properly interpreting Scripture among the literate, non-university-trained laity against the dangers of Socinianism and other expressions of religious radicalism. Appended to his expositions on Genesis 1–5 were “Directions for the right understanding of the Scriptures,” and of the thirty-six hermeneutical rules, two are of direct relevance to his “trinitarian metaphysics.” The Eighth Rule called for a contextual exegesis; that is, the words and phrases in biblical texts ought not be isolated from the specific verse and need to be canvassed over against the general thrust of the chapter, book, and, indeed, the entire witness of Scripture. The concrete examples he adduced here had all to do with how the Word of God was to be understood, and here Needler took a

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Trinitarian turn. The fi rst text was John 17:3, which raised an inescapable hermeneutical question: This is life eternall, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent: If the Father be the only true God, how then is the Son or the Holy Ghost God? For the answering of this difficulty, we must consider upon on what account, Christ calleth God Father in this place: we must know therefore, that though he useth the word Father: yet Father is not there taken for the first person in the Trinity, but as a common attribute of the Deity.160 By asking “how then is the Son or the Holy Ghost God?” Needler adopted a trinitarian metaphysic as the philosophical presupposition that will help situate his theological inquiries. His exegetical proofs rested on the theological premise that only God can forgive sins. If so, then there are two texts, Matthew 6:14 (“If ye forgive men of their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you”) and 1 Timothy 2:5 in which it speaks of the mediator between “God and man,” namely, “the man Christ Jesus.” Since forgiveness was a divine prerogative, the mediating work of Christ also indicated that he was more than a mere man or a punctilious priest. He had to be God. Here is precisely where the watershed lay. Biddle would acknowledge the office of Christ to be that of priest, prophet, and king, much as Calvin did, but would use the munus triplex not as a way of buttressing the deity of Christ, but as a way of showing the work of Christ the human mediator, who was exalted and “adopted” as a son of God through the resurrection. With Needler, on the other hand, such was precisely unwarranted from the scope of Scripture. The Eleventh Rule offered a specific guideline for Christological exegesis: When we read concerning Christ in the Scriptures, we must consider what expressions refer to Christ as he was God, what expressions referre to Christ as he was man, and what referre to his person as he was qeavnqropwV, Godman: This Rule must heedfully be observed, that we may neither confound the natures of Christ with Eutyches, or cry up two persons in Christ with Nestorius.161 The authorial intent of Needler in writing these hermeneutical rules was for establishing and confirming his parishioners’ faith “in these erroneous days” since “for these late years especially, the Devill” has a new weapon, the Bible, out of which he clamors, “Scriptum est, It is written,” while twisting its meaning to depart from the ancient trinitarian faith.162 The book was dedicated to his parishioners, and the letter being written on November 17,

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1654, it is possible to reconstruct his intention of dwelling on these Eutychian and Nestorian heresies and propounding the subtleties of the communicatio idiomatum about Christ the God-man for the purpose of withstanding the onslaught of Biddle. As we have seen earlier, in the disputations between Biddle and Gunning in June 1654, one of the key foci of debate had to with the issue of communicatio idiomatum: how the two natures of Christ could coinhere. Biddle’s Twofold Catechism had been published in the fall of 1654, and as Needler was instructing readers how to biblically understand the nature of Christ’s deity and humanity, the very thing Biddle found utterly repugnant, Parliament would, in less than a month, decide to form a committee to decide on a course of action vis-à-vis Biddle, who had become a veritable cancer cell in the minds of the godly Parliamentarians. The Twofold Catechism was burned, by the order of Parliament, December 12, 1654, thus highlighting the urgency shared by Needler and his coreligionists for propagating the trinitarian faith.163 Although Needler did not shy away from messianic exegesis of the Old Testament texts or from fi nding certain isolated texts thereof to be illustrative of divine plurality in Israelite religion, he spent most of his time seeking to show from the New that with the advent of Christ, the human cultic experience of God entered a new (rather, fulfi lled) stage.164 Perhaps Needler was, like his favorite theologian, Calvin, leery of a maximalist Christological hermeneutic of seeing textual and lexical proofs of Christ’s deity or the Trinity nearly ubiquitously in the Hebrew Bible.165 Yet at the same time, where it was “clearer” to Needler, he did not shy away from seeing the embryonic expressions of the Trinity in the Old Testament. For instance, his exegesis of Isaiah 63:7–10 led him to conclude that “in the seventh verse you have mention made of Jehovah, or the Lord; in the ninth verse, of Jesus Christ, called the Angel of his presence; in the tenth verse, of the holy Spirit; but they rebelled, and vexed his holy Spirit.” The hermeneutical hinge here—indeed, the issue that Biddle himself had with this type of exegesis—turned on what identity one assigned to the “Angel of his presence.” For Needler and his trinitarian exegetes, this linguistic coalescence and distinction between the Lord (v. 7), the Angel (v. 9), and the Lord’s Spirit (v. 10) was no fortuitous thing.166 Needler was ejected at the Restoration in August 1662 for his refusal to subscribe to the new Act of Uniformity. Yet he continued to dispense his ministerial duties when possible, preaching at Finsbury Fields in 1669. After losing his wife and two of his daughters to the plague of 1665–1666, he returned to North Warnborough, holding a conventicle until his death in 1682. The trinitarian controversy did not, however, disappear with the passing on of the protrinitarian Puritan stalwarts. In the next section, we analyze a surprising defender

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of the Trinity, John Goodwin, a leading London Arminian who inveighed against Socinianism from the pulpit, precisely because he was castigated as being a Socinian in disguise. V

John Goodwin: An Ironic yet Ideal Pugilist against Socinianism? John Goodwin (1594–1665) enjoyed the ironic reputation of being simultaneously reviled as a promoter of heresy, a champion of religious liberty, trenchant defender of Arminianism, and an ardent proponent of Independent ecclesiology. Perhaps due to his attachment to Arminianism, Goodwin was not regarded as a usual pugilist for orthodoxy and scurrilous heresy hunter.167 In a recent intellectual biography on Goodwin, however, John Coffey produced a different picture of the “heresiarch of Coleman Street.” There in London, Goodwin was an embattled yet resilient defender of the synergistic soteriology for which Arminianism was best known and, as well, an avowed proponent of trinitarian orthodoxy.168 Much like Thomas Goodwin’s case with Zachary Mayne, John Goodwin’s reasons for going after Socinianism were also partly personal. Unlike Thomas Goodwin, John had been called a Socinian and much worse. One of Goodwin’s parishioners was a bright, engaging, if perhaps slightly impressionable young man named Thomas Firmin. Firmin’s biographer, in 1698, spoke of the years of apprenticeship in London and the religious migrations and theological metamorphosis Firmin underwent: from Puritanism as a youth in Ipswich to Arminianism while sitting under Goodwin, then from Arminianism carried by John Biddle’s teaching to affirm that “the Unity of God is a Unity of Person as well as of Nature,” that is, a repudiation of Nicene orthodoxy of the three persons in one God.169 Thus it became increasingly untenable for Firmin to continue as Goodwin’s parishioner. The sting of this departure was partly what prompted Goodwin to preach a series of sermons on being filled with the Spirit and the defense of the “Divinity, or Godhead of the Holy Ghost.” These sermons were published posthumously in 1670 as Plhv r wma to; Pneumatikovn, or A Being Filled with the Spirit, and they are arguably best distillations of “Goodwin’s mature theology” in which one can see an interesting triptych of “Arminianism, Trinitarianism and Puritanism.”170 Internal evidence helps us narrow the chronological parameters to the 1650s. Henry Eversden, for instance, was Goodwin’s publisher, and in his epistle to the reader, he indicates that these discourses were delivered in the “course of his Publick Ministry” and that there were “many yet alive of those that heard it” who now have the “opportunity of a second review of them.”171 Such was a timely publication precisely because the “Spirit of Error is now stirring more

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effectually than of latter times,” indicating the continual influence of the antitrinitarian doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The other key clue is Goodwin’s own defense, vis-à-vis the vicious attack from the six London Presbyterian booksellers in October 9, 1654, published as A Second beacon fired humbly presented to the Lord Protector and the Parliament by the publishers of the first. The Presbyterian cabal was Luke Fawne, Samuel Gellibrand, Joshua Kirton, John Rothwell, Nathaniel Webb, and Thomas Underhill; they included Goodwin’s Redemption Redeemed as a heretical book that should be suppressed. That his “heresy” was juxtaposed to those of Biddle and the Quakers raised the stakes of Goodwin’s growing reputation as a theological wolf in sheep’s clothing.172 That prompted his publication of A Fresh Discovery of the High-Presbyterian Spirit, and he assiduously defended his orthodox credentials, especially with regard to the Trinity, averring that “concerning Mr. Biddles Blasphemies, I beleeve, and beleeve it to be the sence of many others, that I have labored, and this publickly, more abundantly in opposing them” than all the Presbyterians in town.173 Thus it is quite likely that Goodwin was referring to these sermons on the Holy Spirit as the fruit of his public ministry. Of the nineteen chapters of Being Filled with the Spirit, three were devoted to demonstrating explicitly the deity of the Holy Spirit, directly aimed at answering the Socinian varieties of denying the Spirit’s divinity. For Faustus Socinus, the Spirit was an impersonal being, indeed inseparable from God in that God was Spirit. Biddle, in his fastidious attachment to biblicism, disagreed with Socinus and advanced the thesis that the Spirit was a person, not divine, but angelic. Regardless of either provenance, Goodwin was convinced that both ended up weakening trinitarian orthodoxy. So he spent the entirety of chapter 7 to answer the question: whether the Spirit “be an increated [sic] Spirit, even God blessed for ever; or whether a created Spirit?” Goodwin warned his auditors of the presence, indeed, prevalence, of “an Antitrinitarian Spirit that hath broken prison of late,” which was seeking proselytes wherever they may be found.174 Reflecting the polemical habitus he had inherited, Goodwin argued that this Socinian wind blowing from the Continent had an ancient pedigree and that this antitrinitarian spirit taught that the other two, the Son and the Spirit, were created by the Father, receiving “very excellent, yet only finite, and limited Being” from God.175 Goodwin’s syllogism to prove the deity of the Holy Spirit noted that God spoke through the prophets in the Old Testament era, and that was “interpreted by Christ to be the Holy Ghost, then Jehovah, or the Lord in the Old Testament, is the Spirit.” In other words, Goodwin’s strategy to investigate the identity of the Spirit followed the use of the Old in the New Testament; so, Leviticus 19:1–2 and 26:12 refer to God as the actor, and the way the New Testament picks up these texts ends up replacing God with the Spirit, therefore

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raising the interpretive possibility that the Holy Spirit might be “Jehovah” himself. Similarly, Goodwin followed Paul’s appropriation of Isaiah 6 in Acts 28:25–26, averring that nothing could be plainer than that “he who was worshipped by the Seraphims, and is termed the Lord of Hosts by Isaiah, is by the Apostle Paul’s interpretation the Holy Ghost.”176 The controversial text of 1 John 5:7 (“For there are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one”), both regarding its authenticity and its profound implications for trinitarian theology, received considerable attention from Goodwin. Referring to Biddle as “the Adversary” who had noted from his very first publication that this verse was “wanting in some Greek Copies,” Goodwin’s riposte was that it could have been the Arians’ malicious act of excision or that there might well have been genuine textual and manuscript diversity to be accounted for. After excoriating the Catholics for their Indices expurgatorii, which were a record of “what Sentences are left out, and what are put in” to clean and “improve” patristic authors, Goodwin argued that first the Arians, then Catholics, and now his “Adversary” Biddle were cut from the same cloth: deleting and interpolating texts to make them fit their polemical and political ends.177 Goodwin then moved from philological and text-critical issues to a point-by-point refutation of Biddle’s text. Chapter 8 of Being Filled with the Spirit offered a direct engagement with Biddle’s Twelve Arguments and is heavily dependent on Estwick. Understandably, one of the key exegetical battles took place over the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament in the so-called messianic contexts, nearly identical with the Biddle-Gunning disptuation. Hebrews 1:8–9 quotes from Psalm 45:6–7, and Goodwin focused on this as a key issue. Goodwin’s text rendered Hebrews 1:8–9 as “But unto the Son he saith, Thy Throne O God is for ever and ever: A Scepter of righteousness is the Scepter of thy Kingdom; thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity, therefore God, even thy God hath anointed thee, &c.” Here, Goodwin leaned heavily on Theodore Beza, Franciscus Junius, and Immanuel Tremelius to show that all three had rendered this verse as “Therefore O God, thy God hath anointed, &c,” thereby leading to the interpretation that the anointed himself is also God (“O God”).178 Goodwin elaborated the point by arguing that the word God in the foregoing (“Thy throne O God” and “Therefore O God”) was to be “understood personally, and that of Christ the Second Person subsisting in the Godhead or divine Essence,” whereas in the “latter place of this Clause, Therefore O God, thy God hath anointed thee, it is to be understood personally of the Father or First Person.”179 The idea of the virgin birth of Christ, embedded in the Hebrews 1:6 text, though “plainly affirmed in the Gospel” was nonetheless a mystery, similar to the Trinity and the two natures of Christ. Regarding the virgin birth, Goodwin

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made a startling concession: that in respect of the specifics of the immaculate conception, they were “purposely veiled by God.” Anticipating a riposte from a person whose religion could contain only rational divinity, Goodwin stated that one should not give up on Christianity just “because it requireth us to believe such a thing which we cannot conceive how it was or should be,” nor should one deny the deity of Christ just because rational discourse reached its cul-de-sac when seeking to speak adequately of how “a divine Person and the divine Essence can be distinguished.” Thus Goodwin the Arminian is seen defending the validity of maintaining belief in the Trinity by using mystery as a category to be reserved.180 In the same vein, Goodwin, who would balk at Augustine’s perspective on predestination, had no qualms whatsoever in citing his perspective on apophatic theology or the recognition of the limits of analogy of being. So Goodwin encouraged the readers to come to grips with the infinity, eternity, and “incomprehensibleness” of God. Then the corresponding truth will dawn: We must of necessity admit of, and own that Rule delivered long since by Austin . . . Quando humana transferuntur ad Deum, &c. When things properly belonging unto men, are transferred over unto God, they are to be understood, so that no dishonor nor disparagement be offered unto the Divine Nature, and whatsoever in them imports imperfection is to be separated and left behind, and only that to be conceived to be meant of God which implieth perfection; for whatsoever proceeds from God, so far as it cometh from him, hath no imperfection in it; therefore nothing which includes imperfection in it, so far as it includes it, can be with truth attributed unto him.181 This was Goodwin’s efforts to appropriate patristic wisdom vis-à-vis his own controversy with Biddle and the Socinians. While not disbanding analogia entis entirely, Goodwin nonetheless offered this crucial caveat to preserve room for God to be God, irrespective of the availability of human analogy and in spite of the inability of human ratio to exhaustively comprehend. The other crucial area of dispute between Goodwin and Biddle can be encapsulated as “bring out your dead” to speak on behalf of the living, to settle present-day theological disputes with the ancient wisdom from the patristic authors. As we have seen, Biddle’s Testimonies of Irenaeus established the antitrinitarian mode of interpreting patristic voices. Goodwin discussed in chapter 13 the issue of patristic appropriation, specifically, whether their witness regarding the deity of the Holy Spirit was misguided, though sincere they might have been. Put differently, Biddle had argued that “ante-Nicene” fathers were “anti-Nicene,” thus putting the onus on Goodwin and other protrinitarians to

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show the opposite scenario. He lists “Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Jerome, Tertullian, Lactantius, Hilary,” and Irenaeus, thus displaying Goodwin’s willingness to match one on one the patristic perspectives on the deity of the Holy Spirit. In addition, Goodwin cites from Augustine’s De Trinitate (I.vi.12) to show Paul’s doxological statement of confessing God to be beyond tracing out in Romans 11:36 (“For of him, and through him, and in him are all things”); it was interpreted by Augustine as of the Father (“ex Patre”), through him (of the Son, “per Filium”), and in him (in the Holy Spirit, “in Spiritus Sancto”). Thus it was manifest that the “Father, son and Holy Ghost” is one God, since the apostle “infers in the Singular number, To him be glory for ever and ever.”182 Thus the Arminian champion in English Puritanism leaned heavily on Augustine and Beza to ward off the sinister encroachment of antitrinitarianism embodied in Biddle and his followers, thereby, once again, showing the difficulty of a facile bifurcation of Calvinist Puritans and Arminian Laudians: a notion demythologized in John Coffey’s magisterial intellectual biography of Goodwin the Arminian Puritan, who cared deeply about practical divinity and spirituality, in addition to withstanding the onslaught of his Calvinist coreligionists. VI

Conclusion All the flurry of trinitarian defense, of Catholic and Protestant varieties, notwithstanding, antitrinitarianism in general and Biddle’s ideas in particular lived on, though not without nearly steady stream of defenses of the Trinity into the Restoration period. This chapter has sought to demonstrate the complexity of the trinitarian agents involved in attacking the Socinian foundations of biblical exegesis and the commonality they shared in their hermeneutical assumptions and theological first principles. By this sustained analysis of the texts produced, whether published or not, the specifics of the culture of trinitarian biblical interpretation have become, hopefully, clearer, serving perhaps as a stimulus for further research in this immense field. Whereas in the field of Continental Reformation studies there exists an established tradition of the history of biblical exegesis, such is not so well established in the field of English Reformation historiography. This chapter has sought to advance the argument for such future development. Another key theme that received some attention, to be developed further in the next chapter, is the polemical valence of the term mystery and its theological appropriation in apophatic theology. For instance, as we have seen, for all three major groups of Biddle’s polemical opponents—Catholics (White and Digby), Laudians (Thorndike and Porter), and the Puritans (Goodwin and

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Estwick)—the mystery of God’s ineffable Trinity served as more than a rhetorical device, though it served that function as well. For White and Digby, the mystery of the Trinity could be solved only within the context of the church and its tradition. As God’s continuing revelation of divine identity throughout post-Apostolic period reached its culmination at Nicaea, tradition was the best God-given tool to understand this mystery of God’s intrinsic glory. Thorndike unequivocally opposed Socinianism, thereby giving lie to the idea that all Arminians were basically Socinians, yet his emphasis on the church and his greater willingness to include Rome as true church demonstrated the complexity of the second-generation Laudians’ ecclesiological identity. Yet Thorndike also spoke of apophatic theology as one that would await its eschatological denoument and its provisional embodiment in the life of the church. For Goodwin and Estwick, the mystery of the Trinity was no less important. It would seem that for all three groups, but particularly the Puritans, there was a greater willingness to acknowledge the fractured nature of human reason to adequately comprehend God, thus the undergirding emphasis on mystery, while seeking to explicate verbally the ineffable glory of the Trinity, which exceeds human linguistic capacity. Among all the opponents of Biddle, as the reader might perhaps have been wondering, there was one conspicuously missing: John Owen, the vice chancellor of Oxford during the Cromwellian era and arguably the leading theological voice among the Independents before and after the Restoration. Much has been written of Owen recently, as scholarship surrounding him has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance. We shall turn our attention to an underexplored aspect of Owen’s trinitarian theology: his appropriation of the principle lex orandi, lex crendendi precisely in the context of his anti-Socinian writings. Owen, similar to his Puritan coreligionists, correctly saw the liturgical implications of dogmatic theology, and our analysis of Owen’s trinitarian spiritual theology is juxtaposed to that of his close colleague, Francis Cheynell, to present a well-rounded picture of the polemical and pastoral trinitarian spirituality and apophatic theology of mid- to lateseventeenth-century English Puritanism.

4

Polemical and Practical? The Trinitarian Spirituality of Francis Cheynell and John Owen in Context

I

Introduction In a famous anti-Nicodemite treatise by the Italian reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful, nine theses were presented to sanction the coexistence of the faithful Protestants with the unfaithful, laid out in the first two pages, followed by a fulsome rebuke of the practice of religious dissimulation and hypocrisy in the ensuing 128 pages.1 For many early modern English historians, Vermigli’s treatise is perhaps more familiar because it became the title of an incisive essay by Patrick Collinson in which he canvasses the anti-Puritan vitriol and the uneasy social tension between the godly and the ungodly that emerged during the Marian period and continued all the way through the early Stuart period. Issues of conscience, questions of conformity, and problems arising from the desire for a more thoroughgoing reform comprise, according to Collinson, key components of the cultural matrix of English Puritanism.2 In essence, what was already thick in the religious tension and cultural unease between the godly and their cultic and cultural others became literally explosive finally during the Civil War period and through the Restoration. The trinitarian controversy in seventeenth-century England was an integral piece of the religious puzzle which was being re-shuffled during the Civil War and throughout the century, rather than erupting in the late 1680s or early 1690s, as current historiography often depicts. Much more than a topic for theological disputation and published debates, the antitrinitarians and trinitarians took matters in their own hands to shape and influence the emerging public sphere in early modern

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England, pulpit and print being two key modes of ideological dissemination. Can antitrinitarians and trinitarians live together in the same household? In the same church? In one Commonwealth? This chapter presents the two major proponents of trinitarian spirituality among the Puritans, John Owen and Francis Cheynell. To select these two “over-Orthodox Doctors, Owen and Cheynell” as exemplars of spirituality may come as a surprise, as Baxter was wont to equate their brand of Calvinism with the seedbed of Antinomianism.3 As Peter Lake has argued, the “charitable Christian hatred” was, far from being oxymoronic, the very habitus that fueled the godly’s campaign for reformation, both of manners and of doctrine.4 In other words, Puritan spirituality was as polemical as it was practical. Moreover, as both Cheynell and Owen were steeped in patristic theology and medieval and Protestant Scholasticism, they were keenly aware of the salutarity of lex orandi, lex credendi, lex videndi (literally, law of prayer is the law of belief, which is the law of life) or that the proof of good theology was found in the liturgical pudding. It was not enough to merely write against Biddle and the antitrinitarians; Cheynell and Owen also had to write to foster a more robust, experimental divinity that was at once trinitarian and practical. Rather than treating the polemical treatises of Cheynell and Owen as timeless texts of trinitarian theology, we will analyze them in situ, thereby helping us to fine-tune a historiographical lens. While there has been a good deal of recent work on Puritan spirituality, it has tended to treat the subjects and questions in a relative historical vacuum. Thus, the idea of polemical spirituality might come across as jarring. As Richard Muller has persuasively shown, however, both for Calvin and the Calvinist traditions, one needs to be aware of the tendency of historiographical narcissism (thus his Unaccommodated Calvin), and one needs to be equally vigilant to situate any ideas and movements in their own context (thus his After Calvin). In this regard, Muller and Quentin Skinner’s methodological commitments do overlap considerably.5 By contextualizing Cheynell’s and Owen’s polemical and practical trinitarian divinity, this chapter seeks to contribute to the growing field of Owen studies and to the increased interest in early modern studies in spirituality, whether from literary, historical, or theological angles, and further complicate the narrative of the putative “demise of the doctrine of the Trinity.”6 The first part of the chapter situates the context of Francis Cheynell’s defense of the Trinity in the Civil War and Interregnum Oxford, after which his undeservedly neglected The Divine Triunity is analyzed as an exemplar among Puritan “polemical and practical” divinity. The larger part of the chapter, however, deals with various aspects of Owen’s writings on the Trinity: the nature of the triune God promulgated vis-à-vis John Biddle’s antitrinitarian insistence, the importance of “mystery” and “apophatic” theology in Owen’s

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defense of the Trinity, his exegesis of the Song of Songs not only as a way of encouraging a more Christocentric biblical interpretation but also as a mode of fostering a deeper communion with the triune God, and, finally, how this mystical tendency was challenged by William Sherlock in the Restoration and yet remained as sine qua non in Owen’s vision of trinitarian spirituality and theology. Furthermore, by noting the continuity of theological issues with which Owen was engaged, with nearly identical type of casts, namely, Socinians and anti-Puritan Church of England divines, this chapter further confirms and suggests ways in which the Restoration controversies over politics of religion can be better evaluated. II

A “Charitable Trinitarian Hatred” of Francis Cheynell7 Cheynell (1605–1665) was as revered for his erudition and command of patristic and Scholastic divinity as he was reviled for his bigotry, distemper, and zeal against Socinianism.8 Cheynell graduated BA from Balliol College, Oxford, in February 1627, elected to fellowship at Merton in 1629, and ordained in Peterborough in 1638. Certainly by then, Cheynell had emerged as an avowed Calvinist: his year-long suspension from ministry in 1638 was prompted by a refusal to bow at the altar; subsequent to his attack of Arminianism in a Latin sermon in 1640, he was refused the grace for his BD.9 In April 1642, he represented Pembrokeshire at the Westminster Assembly of Divines. Anthony A. Wood contemptuously called him “eager and hot-headed fury, and accounted no better than madman.” Thus at first blush, Cheynell might not be the first candidate as a champion for practical divinity, although for polemical divinity, quite likely! Yet I hope to show that such a bifurcation was unwarranted in either Cheynell or Owen. Cheynell’s pugilistic career was marked by antipopery, anti-Socinian, anti-tolerationist, and pro-Presbyterian commitments, to which we shall briefly turn our attention before a close reading of The Divine Triunity (1650) as a text of “polemical and practical divinity.” In his Rise, Growth and Danger of Socinianisme (1643), Cheynell displayed considerable grasp of the Continental literature on the issue at hand, from both antitrinitarians and trinitarians.10 Perhaps reflective of his deep-seated animosity toward Arminianism and the putative Laudian dalliance with Rome, Cheynell targeted William Chillingworth. Cheynell saw Chillingworth as the popularizer of the alleged Arminian and Socinian-leaning tendenz of the Great Tew Circle, as The Religion of Protestants became at once controversial and celebrated.11 While reactions to this putative anti-Catholic polemic varied, Cheynell’s certainly represented the Calvinist fear, rampant

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among Parliamentarians (he had been chaplain to the Earl of Essex), that Chillingworth’s disavowals notwithstanding, The Religion of Protestants would weaken Protestantism, let in Socinianism through the back door, and let Laudianism continue unabated. This might explain Cheynell’s peripatetic efforts to write against Chillingworth and Hammond through the 1650s. Walking up to his graveside in February 1644, Cheynell ostentatiously declared Chillingworth to be no true son of the Church of England and hurled The Religion of Protestants, imprecating that it “rot with thy Author, and see corruption.”12 A second vignette is Cheynell’s confrontation with William Erbury. After an intense disputation, held on January 11, 1646, in which Cheynell accused the Welsh mystical preacher Erbury of allegedly conflating the Being of God with the being of the creature, thus an indirect yet real denial of the Trinity, the proceedings were published.13 For Cheynell, the problem of Socinianism was now exacerbated by an ironic link with Erbury’s radical, millenarian, anticlerical spirituality, with dangerous implications for orthodox trinitarian theology: the blurred boundary between Christ and the saints as those endowed with the same Spirit of God. As we have seen in chapter 2, this had a deleterious effect of combining the categories of attack on the Trinity as either antitrinitarian or non-trinitarian. With Erbury, it would be the latter. Cheynell regarded Erbury’s teaching as a case of dangerous over-realized eschatology: “in the day of Christs coming, and appearing in us, we shall know that as he is in the Father, and hath his being in God onely, so we also shall see, that we are in him, and he in us; and that we have the same being in God: We shall appear with him in glory.” Such was Erbury’s eschatological fervor, which Cheynell took it as a dangerous, chiliastic teaching.14 Similarly, Cheynell believed that leading second-generation Laudian theologian Henry Hammond’s defense of Hugo Grotius and unwavering commitment to Arminianism would also vitiate the fabric of Reformed Calvinism, which he believed was the only antidote to the swarm of Socinianism. In 1646, Parliament’s efforts to enforce the reform of Oxford along the lines outlined by the Westminster Assembly led to Cheynell’s appointment as a member of the board of visitors to the university. Subsequently, in 1648 he was appointed, or intruded as the Royalists averred, as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and President of St. John’s College, two key posts at Oxford, and became the cause of much ridicule and reviling.15 As a staunch Presbyterian, Calvinist, and trinitarian, he sought to reform St. John’s and Oxford along those lines, but he had to step down from both when he refused to sign the Oath of Engagement to the new government in 1650.16 In the context of being involved in reforming Oxford’s theology and polity, Cheynell got tangled up in an epistolary skirmish with Henry Hammond.

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Cheynell became convinced that Hammond’s omission of any exposition on the Trinity in his Practical Catechism created an impression of its relative unimportance. In fact, in Hammond’s discussion of Christology, there was no discussion of Christ’s deity, a typical place where most catechisms and Loci Communes of the period would discuss that, typically having been already preceded by a discussion of Christ’s divine nature in the section on the Trinity. That neither God’s triune nature nor Christ’s deity under Christology proper was present in Practical Catechism aroused further suspicion that the Arminian theological program was a direct pathway to Socinianism.17 Hammond’s response was that since it was a catechism for the unlearned and philosophically uncouth, such “speculative mysterie” had no room. Hammond’s second rejoinder was that the very last paragraph of Practical Catechism—the prayer Hammond offers to the “blessed Trinity coeternall”—should have prevented Cheynell from his uncharitable conclusions.18 Cheynell’s sub-rejoinder highlights a crucial dogmatic commitment: the eminently practical nature of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is worthy quoting extensively, for it was further amplified in his Divine Triunity (1650). For Cheynell and Owen, then, polemical and practical divinity were, due to the political exigencies of the day, often coextensive, and separating the two, which Cheynell accused Hammond of doing, was ill advised. Cheynell insisted: Beleeve it, the Doctrine of the Trinity is a Practicall mysterie, the very foundation and ground-worke of the mysterie of godlinesse. The blessed Trinity is not onely the object of our faith, but of our Worship too; nay, the Doctrine of the Trinity hath by Gods blessing a comfortable and quickening inference into the maine passages of the life and conversation of all Orthodox and judicious Christians. I hope, I need not remember you of your Baptisme, or tell you that a Sacramental Covenant is Practicall. Sir, rectifie that mistake.19 Here we see how polity and theology were connected, how practical and polemical divinity intertwined, and how Cheynell’s experience of seeking to reform Oxford and the exchange he had with Hammond formed the crucible in which his trinitarian theology matured. Was it perhaps because of Jacob Acontius’s emphasis in his Satans Stratagems on the fundamental articles of Christianity being eminently reasonable, or was it due to his frenetic opposition to William Chillingworth’s emphasis on reason as the Protestant principle, both of which he regarded as inherently Socinian, that Cheynell began to espouse the incomprehensibility of God, which tended to curtail reason’s capacity to know God?20 In his first publication, The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianisme (1643), Cheynell accused Socinus of

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mounting reason above Scripture as the ultimate adjudicatory criterion. Thus, for the Socinian, if some texts and teachings of Scripture seem impossible to be supported by “some demonstrative argument” operating under regula ratio, then one must “goe looke out for some other sense” until one finds the sense that speaks “consonantly to my corrupt reason, and our vaine Customes.” The two specific instances adduced by Cheynell were Socinus’s doctrine of justification and of Christ’s satisfaction.21 Moreover, in an ultimate polemical shove, Cheynell insisted that although not as “Rationall” as the Socinians, the Arians were more “devout” than their sixteenth-century descendants, as they affirmed Christ’s role as an agent of creation, though not as God: a position the Socinians clearly repudiated.22 After seeking to demonstrate the Socinian inversion of reason over revelation in his Rise . . . of Socinianism, and perhaps further agitated by some radical Protestants and Familists, by the time The Divine Triunity was published in 1650, Cheynell anchored the 480-page treatise of the Trinity with his first chapter: “The Godhead is Spiritual, Infinite, Incomprehensible.”23 Cheynell offered a firm conclusion that no matter how Herculean the philosophical endeavors might be, they “can never comprehend” God, who is “Infinite, and therefore incomprehensible.”24 In other words, as an ironic consequence of the most painstaking search into God, “men and Angels” will discover their own imperfection, since it is “impossible by our most accurate disquisition to finde out the Almighty unto perfection.” This was meant as a radical curtailment of human knowledge of God via creation and reason alone. Cheynell was also convinced that nature and human reason were marred vehicles to convey God’s saving purposes. Anticipating the next query regarding the extent of true knowledge of God’s triunity in “Plato, Iamblichus, Trismegistus,” which was made more popular in his day partly because of the Renaissance influence of Ficino, Valla, and Erasmus, Cheynell posited a Hebrew precedence, or Greek plagiarism, theory, a prevalent answer among the Calvinists, that Plato was “not called the Atticising Moses in vaine.”25 So without a whit of moral indignation, Cheynell stated laconically that some Christians had interpolated more Christian-sounding passages into pagan texts to create a longer pseudo-pedigree of Christianity.26 All Christian forgeries notwithstanding, Cheynell was convinced that the super-eminence of the Trinity far exceeded the human linguistic faculty, far transcending our “senses and . . . understanding,” citing Augustine’s De Trinitate 7.4.7 for support.27 Thus there was a greater need for apophatic theology and hushed contemplation of God in worship than rationalistic disquisitions to “pry into him.”28 To be sure, the incomprehensibility of God, while not discussed throughout Divine Triunity, nonetheless offers an undergirding structure to the treatise. As Richard Muller has argued, the Protestant

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Scholastic tradition consistently taught two types of the knowledge of God: theologia archetypa and theologia ectypa. The archetypal theology referred to God’s self-knowledge, and the latter to our analogical knowledge of God.29 Then to avoid an overwrought dependence on reason in scriptural hermeneutic, Cheynell anchored both his doctrine of Scripture and hermeneutics on the Trinity, a novel yet Reformed move. For Cheynell, the saving knowledge of “God in Christ is revealed by the Spirit speaking in the Scripture.” Lest one had not seen the Trinitarian undergirding, Cheynell reiterates: the “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost do all joyne in revealing to us the saving mystery of faith and godlinesse, that by the grace of Christ, the love of God, and Communion of the Holy Ghost, we may have a glorious fellowship with all three as one God, the only true God.”30 As we will see later, this theme of communion with each Person of the Trinity is further accentuated and amplified in Owen’s Of Communion, yet it is clear that such notions are clearly noted, though not fully developed, in Cheynell. Connecting spirituality with Scholastic divinity, indeed, emphasizing both these disparate strands within the context of a polemical defense of the Trinity, is often missed by scholars of spirituality in general or of theology. Yet such is the very thesis of this chapter: to see them as separate entities—that is, either spirituality in a historical vacuum or theology without any concern for spiritual, liturgical ramifications—misses what was central to Cheynell’s and Owen’s defense of the Trinity. For him, Arminianism and Socinianism were virtually indistinguishable, cut from the same heretical cloth.31 Yet Cheynell was more than merely polemical. Cheynell knew that heretical ideas had powerful behavioral and social impact. Cold and rational divinity, he feared, would usher in formal religion, devoid of heart. Thus, far from being “a School-point,” or a “meer speculative Doctrine,” the Trinity set forth the delightful pathway of encountering daily to learn of the Father’s love, “drawn by the Spirit,” thereby coming “unto the Son.” This communion with the Triune God was to be the saint’s “Heaven upon earth.”32 However, the problem of idolatry among the Socinians remained incorrigible. Worshipping the Father as “the only Absolute Supreme Independent God” and Christ as a creature who was made a subordinate deity exacerbated the problem of idolatry while ostensibly maintaining the structure of monotheism.33 Since the patristic doctrine of divine simplicity precluded the possibility of “degrees” of divinity and “excellency,” it was equally unthinkable that one kind of divine honor and worship could be rendered unto the Father and another to the Son.34 Then is Christ to be worshipped? Absolutely, declared Cheynell, for to do otherwise would be failing to render unto God that which was God’s. The formal and proper reason for directing worship to Christ was because of his “divine nature,” which, taking on the human nature, allowed him to bring

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about the “infinite excellency of our Mediatour,” citing Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius, and the Council of Ephesus as his patristic authorities.35 Thus for Cheynell, it was crucial to appropriate the various means of grace of sermons, sacraments, and worship to gaine a spirituall, Practicall, experimentall knowledge of the love of Iesus Christ, a knowledge which surpasses all intellectual knowledge, an affectionate knowledge which is felt in the heart, but cannot be comprehended in the braine. This is the right Evangelicall knowledge, which prepares a man for spirituall and Evangelical worship, for heavenly Communion with Father, Son, and holy Ghost.36 Why is there such an explicit linkage between knowledge of God and communion in worship? Cheynell, in good Augustinian and Calvinistic fashion, was convinced that a mere intellectualist approach to Christology was unacceptable. To know Christ meant, above all, as the Calvinistic practical divinity of the Puritans never tired of stressing, to know the benefits of Christ: to know Christ in his obedience, suffering, death, resurrection, exaltation, and present intercession. All the foregoing cannot merely be discussed exclusively in analytic terms. It elicited affective responses. For Cheynell, then, the doctrine of the Trinity was Christologically grounded, and if so, then all of theology was as well. Historically speaking, the vast majority of ecumenical councils were occasioned by one Christological error or another, and thus all the fundamental articles of faith refer to “Christ as the Foundation” because they all have to do with his “Father, his Spirit, his Incarnation, Mediation, or his Church.”37 Simultaneously, as Cheynell consistently maintained, to know Christ the Son, who was sent for the redemption of the world, necessarily implies the One who sent him and also indicates, qua Christ’s bodily absence, the presence of the Spirit of God/Christ.38 After all this ebullient praise of the triune God, Cheynell proceeded to the simultaneous nature of polemical and practical divinity in the last chapter. He exhorts those who have an experimental knowledge of the triune God to avoid holding “Communion with such as those who pretend” to be Christians but are not, because of their rejection of Christ’s deity. In other words, the question “Should we have communion with—Socinian—heretics?” was far more than a mere rhetorical question. Issuing his jeremiad that we are living in this “Licentious Age,” Cheynell warned against the two types of “Seekers”: the antinomian Seekers (whom he calls “Deifyed Atheists”) and “Socinian Seekers.” Known for his provocative monikers, Cheynell calls these Seekers “Nullifidians” (a word play on Solifidians, those who espoused that justification was by faith alone, sola fide) and pronounces them atheists.39 In other words,

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he links the question of heresy with atheism. How? By re-classifying atheism and atheists: he divides atheism into three camps. First came the “speculative Atheists,” comprised of the “Libertines and Enthysiasts,” and then “Practical Atheists,” those whose aim of life was “sensuall” pursuit. The third camp was the Socinian atheists who deny the deity of the Son and the Holy Spirit “upon mature deliberation, after the application of so many gracious remedies.”40 After listing five theological reasons as to why Socinians were undeserving of the label Christian, Cheynell trenchantly argued that even “civill respect” toward them was a luxury that a godly Parliamentarian or a pastor could ill afford.41 This anti-tolerationist argument was not made in a vacuum. It was uttered in the context of having John Fry, Member of Parliament (MP), incarcerated for his heresy. Fry (1609–1657) had been a member of the Committee for Plundered Ministers, and at the behest of Independent MP Cornelius Holland, about January 15, 1649, Fry agreed to look into freeing John Biddle, who had been in prison for his antitrinitarian convictions. Colonel John Downes, a fellow MP, cried foul and insisted that under no circumstances should Biddle be allowed out as a free man, for heresy of Biddle’s magnitude deserved hanging. It was in this context that Fry’s own personal musings about the illogicality of the Trinity were made public, and that Fry himself joined Biddle as men accused of antitrinitarian heresy. Such was the immediate political context of Cheynell’s push to deny civil respect to the antitrinitarians. Although the Family of Love was mentioned, it seems the real bête noire for Cheynell was Fry and Biddle (though Biddle is nowhere explicitly mentioned). If Fry had maintained, along with the Familists, following their founder Hendrik Niclaes, that Jesus Christ was a “meere man in glory” and that he was “no more God then” Fry himself, then Cheynell was calling for a “charitable Trinitarian hatred” by denying him civil respect, let alone Christian communion.42 In a nutshell, Cheynell’s call for a firmer union between ministry and magistracy to stamp out “these bold Atheists” coincided with a number of petitions sent in by various county ministers to Parliament for the same desiderata.43 Moreover, Cheynell was convinced that since the Mosaic law, qua civil law, was not abrogated, its efficacy in punishing heretics was justified. Citing also from Deuteronomy 13, Zechariah 13, and Romans 13, Cheynell justified the “Moral equity” of extirpating heretics, especially those who remained obdurate after being shown the “Clearer light.” If England were to prove sluggish or fail to carry out this mandate, Cheynell warned, it might replicate the Arian legacy. Citing Jerome’s authority, Cheynell argued that “because Arius who was but a sparke of fire in Alexandria, was not quenched immediately, he kindled a flame which devoured almost the whole Christian World.” Whose fault was it? Therein lay the problem. In a language reeking of violence, Cheynell called for a radical charitable hatred by asking the “Civil Shepheard” to hunt

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the heretical wolves with his “hunting dogs” to capture them, lest they “worry and destroy the Sheep.”44 Augustine was, again, brought in as a patristic expert witness to argue that liberty which promoted sacrilege would inevitably “overthrow the power of Christianity” and remove the only platform that would ensure all other liberties.45 Cheynell ended his 480-page treatise on the Trinity by asserting that the attempt to seduce a soul away from the true God was a “Capitall crime,” thereby recapitulating the sense of polemical urgency and the equally compelling need to offer a practical, trinitarian divinity. The other “over-orthodox Doctor” with whom Baxter had so much difficulty was the darling of the Cromwellian Church at Oxford during the Interregnum, John Owen. It is to his perspective on polemical and practical, trinitarian and mystical spirituality we turn now. III

Calvin of England? Owen’s Context of Trinitarian Spirituality John Owen (1615–1683) suffered no shortage of opinions written about him, then or now.46 In a humorous broadside, A Dialogue between the Pope and the Devil, about Owen and Baxter (1681), the reason for this cabal was to conspire against “these Scribbling Fellows” whose writings have cast such a spell on the people that a “MASS-BOOK, a Crucifi x” or the “Common prayer” could be no match.47 In another broadside, The Presbyterian Pater Noster (1681), the spoof on the Creed reads: “I Believe in John Calvin, the Father of our Religion . . . and in Owen, Baxter, and Jenkins &c. his dear Sons our Lords, who were Conceived by the Spirit of Fanaticism, born of Schism and Faction,” thereby signaling the height of scorn and esteem in which he was held by foes and friends.48 Anthony Wood, no friend of Owen’s theology or ecclesiology, called him, along with Thomas Goodwin, the “two Atlases and patriarchs of Independency.”49 Born in Stadham, Oxfordshire, as a son of a nonconforming minister, John matriculated in November 1631 at Queen’s College, Oxford, where Thomas Barlow tutored the young Owen in logic and philosophy. After procuring his BA in June 1632 and proceeding to his MA in April 1635, Owen was episcopally ordained that year in Oxford.50 However, by the time he took his living at Fordham in 1643, he had become a Presbyterian, and by the time he became vicar of Coggeshall in August 1646, he had managed to convert to Independency, an ecclesiological position he adhered to until his dying day.51 By December 1648, Owen was a prominent figure, not only well connected with Oliver Cromwell but also instrumental in bringing Bulstrode Whitelocke to Westminster to restore order and political stability amid the cacophony of the Civil War.52 On January 31, 1649, immediately following the regicide of

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Charles I, Owen preached a fast sermon to the Commons, encouraging the MPs to forge ahead in their “Righteous Zeal,” for they were assured of “Divine Protection,” and warned them against “Oppression,” “Self-seeking,” and “Contrivances for persecution.”53 By January 1649, Owen enjoyed the privilege of being Cromwell’s confidant, so that according to Blair Worden, “Cromwell certainly pursued the policies which Owen advocated.”54 In June 1649, Owen, along with Thomas Goodwin, was preaching in the Rump Parliament, as appointed preachers by the Council of State.55 While the Rump Parliament might have had a slight majority of Independents, it was by no means decisively so, and indeed throughout the Interregnum, the Presbyterian-Independent conflict was constantly present, as both jockeyed for hegemonic dominance.56 Owen’s steady rise continued in 1651. Shortly after giving his sermon to Parliament on March 13, 1651, Owen rose to be Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and assumed his decade-long leadership role at his alma mater, rising to vice-chancellorship in 1652 and serving until 1657.57 By 1652, Owen began to endorse a more draconian approach toward establishing orthodoxy, particularly compared to his stance in 1649.58 Owen saw the twin axis of tumultuous impiety: first, the religious radicalism of the Ranters, Levellers, and Quakers who would be content to extirpate learned ministry, sacraments, and other ecclesial accoutrements traditionally regarded as sacrosanct and, second, the Socinian rationalism that cried up toleration of all sects. Such was the gist of his jeremiad in his fast sermon in October 1652, as he lamented the threat from “Scotland and Holland.”59 However, from the standpoint of polemical divinity, it was immediately after the English translation of the Racovian Catechism was published in 1652 that Owen rose to the occasion. On February 10, 1652, he, along with his Independent colleagues Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, presented to the Committee on the Propagation of the Gospel a list of fifteen fundamental articles “without acknowledgment whereof . . . salvation is not be obtained”; furthermore, this would be the baseline litmus test for anyone seeking to minister in the realm.60 His tireless strategizing to move the Rump Parliament to a more actively trinitarian form of orthodoxy caused not inconsiderable dismay for John Milton.61 According to Worden, Owen’s extensive scheme was “a central if not the central element” for Cromwell’s program of religious reform.62 By March 26, 1652, Owen was a member ordered by Parliament to scrutinize the Racovian Catechism for doctrinal errors;63 and on April 2, it was extensively discussed, as the committee drew Parliament’s attention to the following errors contained in the Racovian Catechism: divine essence, deity of Christ, the nature of Christ, the deity of the Holy Spirit, predestination repudiated, satisfaction of Christ denied, Pelagian anthropology with respect to human perfectibility, and denial of original sin.64 On September 26, 1652, Owen reached

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his academic apotheosis, being appointed successor to Daniel Greenwood as Oxford’s vice-chancellor.65 In March 1654, the Council of State commissioned Owen to write a refutation of Biddle’s Twofold Catechism, which was deemed to be subversive of both church and state.66 Gifted with an exceptionally keen sense of detecting the heretical fault lines, Owen produced a massively erudite Vindiciae Evangelicae in 1655. To the one writing assignment in which Owen, as vice-chancellor of Oxford, was asked to refute the heresy of one of its own graduates—John Biddle—we shall now turn. IV

Vindiciae Evangelicae and Owen’s Polemical and Practical Spirituality With John Biddle’s Twofold Catechism, Owen had reasons to be alarmed. Essentially, Biddle aimed straight at the jugular of the Cromwellian church and state by speaking of the irrationality of the Trinity. Why? If, as Owen had insisted, the Trinity was a foundational doctrine, then denying it was tantamount to rejecting the fundamental identity of God, and then a key political vector undergirding Biddle’s metacritique of the Trinity was the inanity and instability of any government that supports such an illogical and indefensible view, punishing anyone who would write against that! In the preface to his Twofold Catechism, Biddle’s polemical strategy was to compare the recent hubbub surrounding the writing of new confessions of faith to all ecumenical councils, and subsequent creeds and confessions of faith, and argue trenchantly that all of them were composed according to “the fancies and interests of men.” The rhetorical upshot of this rendered the faith the Cromwellian government was propagating and its veracity, which Owen was vigilantly protecting, as a sham, lacking the requisite veridical status. Its credibility, then, could be enjoined upon the hoi polloi only if the magistrate and ministers enforced it at the threat of incarceration and death.67 Detecting the Socinian penchant for espousing a broad-minded, non-dogmatic version of Christianity, captured in Biddle’s self-designation as a “meer Christian,” Owen charged that Biddle’s denial of God’s attributes of “infinity and incomprehensibility” proved that he was worse than the pagan Simonides, who, in De Natura Deorum, confessed to Cicero that “the more he inquired, the more he admired, & the lesse he understood, had a more noble reverence of the Eternall Being.”68 Thus Owen wondered whether Biddle was a mere Christian or a “meere Lucian.”69 Hyperbole aside, Owen’s critique of Biddle in Vindiciae Evangelicae was not mere polemic. Providing an alternative form of theology and spirituality was of paramount significance. Deconstruction of Biddle’s flawed antitrinitarian paradigm was important but ultimately

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insufficient. Reconstructive spirituality was needed. Furthermore, Owen charged that Biddle’s denial of the simplicity of God by attributing “Shape, Corporeity, and limitedness of the Essence of God” was worse than the teachings of the “Alcoran.”70 Displaying his ecumenical sensibilities, at least with regard to the sources he adapted for polemical purposes, Owen was dependent on Suarez’s Metaphysicarum Disputationum and Cajetan’s commentary on Aquinas in De Ente et Essentia to show that the perfection of God was known to us not positively, but negatively, so that “we can only conceive, what is not to be ascribed to God.” 71 Catholics affi rmed the Trinity, and while Owen could quibble over the normative authority of tradition, he utilized Aquinas, Suarez, and Cajetan to carve metaphysical space for apophatic theology.72 As we shall see, Owen’s emphasis on divine incomprehensibility, thus a corresponding stress on apophatic theology, was a key polemical stance, vis-à-vis William Sherlock, although we see that already in the 1650s as well. The theological trope of divine incomprehensibility was resolved in the Incarnation of the eternal Son of God, Christ Jesus. Thus, seen in the light of Biddle’s virulent attack, Owen asserted that the “denyall of the Eternall Deity of the Sonne of God” was the key doctrine.73 In fact, both in Vindiciae Evangelicae (1655) and in Communion with God the Father, Sonne, and Holy Ghost (1657), Christological concerns drive his trinitarian theology.74 So Owen asked whether it was right to call Christ the Son of God, based exclusively on his work after the “Incarnation, Mission, Resurrection, and Exaltation”? If one’s answer was yes, then one has fallen into the snare of the Socinian/ Biddlean. Christ’s sonship, as Owen never tired of stressing, was an eternal one. Otherwise, Christ was created, adopted, and qualitatively more similar to human beings than he was to God.75 Hugo Grotius was a celebrated Dutch jurist, linguist, and text critic, whose clear Arminian and crypto-Socinian proclivities Owen criticized severely. Considerably exceeding his critique of Episcopious, Owen took Grotius’s Annotationes in Novum Testamentum to task, exposing its putatively Socinian tendencies and challenging the lexical and text-critical conclusions Grotius drew, which, Owen was certain, would vitiate trinitarian orthodoxy.76 Owen’s critique of Grotius led to Hammond’s fiery defense, in which Hammond offered rejoinders to preserve the orthodoxy of Grotius’s Annotationes. For instance, as Owen was convinced that the Grotian exegesis of the Johannine Prologue was deviating from the affirmation of Christ’s deity, Hammond was equally adamant such a conclusion was a mere chimera, bathed in malicious desires for besmirching Grotius’s reputation.77 A rough publication chronology of the heated exchange between Hammond and Owen is as follows: The first blow came from Owen’s Vindiciae Evangelicae (May 1655), followed by Hammond’s

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response in his A Second Defence of the learned Hugo Grotius (August 1655). Owen’s rejoinder to Hammond was A Review of the Annotations of Hugo Grotius (May 1656), and Hammond’s counter-rejoinder was A Continuation of the Defence of Hugo Grotius, in an Answer to The Review of his Annotations (September 1656).78 So in a sixteen-month span, four treatises were published discussing a rather narrow theme of Christ’s deity and Grotius’s purported repudiation of the same in his Annotationes. Owen was convinced that the Johannine Prologue was a key text to demonstrate the deity of Christ.79 Thus, Owen argued, pace Biddle and the Racovian Catechism, that the “beginning” in John 1:1 could not refer to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Contrasting John 1:1 with Genesis 1:1, Owen took both these texts as referring to the beginning of creation, thereby bolstering the doctrine of Christ as creator. According to Owen, the Septuagint used the word egeneto (ejg evn eto) in Genesis 1:3, which was also used in John 1:3 to speak of Christ’s role as the creator.80 Moreover, he maintained that John 1:1 taught that as the Word was “in the beginning,” was “with God,” and was “God,” it showed that “he is God by nature,” who was “made flesh” for our salvation.81 Citing with approbation Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Theodoret, and Eusebius, Owen bolstered his Johannine exegesis to demonstrate that the deity of Christ was explicitly put in the beginning of the Gospel, vis-à-vis the Gnostic exegesis of assigning creation to “another Demiurgus” rather than the eternal Word.82 However, the key function John 1:1–3 had for Owen’s trinitarian theology was that the words (“In the beginning was the Word, and was with God, and was God”) clearly affirmed the “flat contrary” of the antitrinitarian Christology by convincingly showing the personal (“was with God,” thus differentiating the Word from God) and essential (“was God”) natures of the Word, who became incarnate for the defi nitive revelation of God’s identity and salvation. For Owen, Grotius’s main exegetical problem was his less than fi rm endorsement of the deity of Christ based on the Johannine Prologue, a charge Hammond vehemently denied.83 One of the key teachings of the Johannine Prologue was 1:14 (“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”), which necessarily implied the two natures of Christ, as Owen sedulously maintained. Yet this was, with equal fervency, denied by Biddle. For the purpose of discussing the two natures of Christ, personal distinction and ontological equality between the Father and the Son, Owen turned to Philippians 2:6–11. In Vindiciae Evangelicae, Owen has three extensive exegetical and theological discussions on this text to prove the patristic maxim: “inaequalitas officii non tollit aequalitatem naturae” (inequality of office/role does not take away equality of nature).84 From verse 6, Owen painstakingly showed that Christ was in the form of God and yet, astoundingly, did not insist

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on maintaining that divine prerogative.85 The Incarnation, for Owen, implied neither a real change nor a diminution in his divine nature. It was, rather, adding a human nature, all of which seemed a theological chimera, as Best and Biddle trenchantly argued. Thus for Owen, versus 6 and 7 juxtaposed the divine and human natures of Christ, presenting a biblical portraiture of the hypostatic union and of the economic distinction of the Father sending and exalting and the Son obeying and being exalted. Owen continued his trinitarian and Christological defense: “Christ was still in the forme of God, as taken essentially, even then, when he was a servant, though as to the dispensation He had submitted to, He emptied himself of the Glory of it, and was not knowne to be the Lord of Glory, 2 Cor. 8.3.” In other words, for the economy of salvation, as the Mediator, Christ was less than the Father, although, following Cyril, Owen insisted that his self-emptying was mostly in the taking on of humanity, not losing his deity.86 He who was “in the form of God” was obedient, and the wonder of the Incarnation lay precisely in the depth of divine condescension in the event of Christ’s entrance into the “state of humiliation,” as both Lutherans and Calvinists spoke of the earthly life of Christ. Since Christ the Word of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity who had enjoyed the eternal bliss of sonship vis-à-vis the Father, became incarnate for us, Owen’s practical divinity is marked with frequent references to “consolation” from our union with Christ and “flying for refuge” to Christ. Tossed to and fro by “strange” yet seductive teachings of Biddle, the Ranters, Quakers, inter alia, and hemmed in by the besetting nature of the flesh, Owen was convinced that the only hope for all English Christians was that Christ knows how to be “compassionate unto us,” for he was and remains one with us. Christ had to be God to satisfy divine justice and be the surety for our redemption.87 Such affective divinity was both preceded and followed by polemical divinity. After this quote, Owen continues on to ask if the Socinians who truculently refuse to own the deity of Christ can participate in any of the double benefits of Christ. His answer is a laconic no, for they end up concocting an idolatrous cult by adoring “a made God, a second-rank God, a Deifyed man” who was no God at all.88 It has been suggested that Owen’s Vindiciae Evangelicae may be the best exposition of the Trinity written in seventeenth-century England. And indeed, it may be so. However, one of the hallmarks of Vindiciae Evangelicae is the caveat lector Owen issues at the close of his “Preface to the Reader.” This was most likely addressed to a learned readership, as he often left his Latin and Greek untranslated and peppered the discourse with classical citations and allusions without explanatory remarks. Therefore, it was all the more apropos to remind them that cerebral theology was not the telos: practical acquaintance with the living triune God was, as Geoffrey F. Nuttall put it to describe Owen’s theological program as a theology “hardly known since St. Augustine . . . a theologia pectoris.”89 So Owen ended his prefatory epistle:

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6. That direction in this kind is that . . . we may not contend for notions; but what we have a practical acquantaince with in our own soules. . . . What am I the better if I can dispute that Christ is God, but have no sense or sweetnesse in my heart from hence, that he is a God in Covenant with my soule, what will it availe me to evince by Testimonies and Arguments, that he hath made satisfaction for sin, If through my unbelief the wrath of God abides on me, and I have no experience of my owne being made the Righteousnesse of God in him. . . . It is the power of Truth in the heart alone, that will make us cleave unto it indeed, in an hour of temptation.90 This, in a book known for its polemical divinity, might come as a surprise, but, as I hope to show in this chapter, polemical divinity was inseparable from practical divinity. Writing in the “hour of temptation” was what Owen was doing, but with the publication of Of Communion with God the Father, Sonne, and the holy Ghost, he turned his attention to paving more concretely the “plain man’s pathway to heaven.” V

Of Communion with God, the Canticles, and Trinitarian Spirituality Seen from the structure of Of Communion with God (figure 4.1), he offered a clearly trinitarian treatment of the nature, extent, and trajectory of human communion with God: with the Father (pp. 15–40), with the Son (pp. 41–256), and with the Holy Spirit (pp. 257–320). Thus it is arguably true that Owen’s trinitarian theology hinged on his Christological formulation, for it was the deity of the Son, far more than that of the Holy Spirit, and certainly that of the Father (which was never seriously questioned), that had been the topos of his most vehement and epoch-making polemics and conciliar decrees. Before we delve further into a close analysis Of Communion with God, it behooves us to raise questions about its historical context. Seeing that Vindiciae Evangelicae (1655), written at the behest of the Council of State to quell the furor John Biddle caused, was published only two years before Of Communion with God appeared in print, what connections can we draw, provisional though they might be? With the work of creating yet another workable national confession of faith in the autumn of 1654, merely six years after the Westminster Confession of Faith was published, Owen and his colleagues, including Francis Cheynell and the bête noire of this gathering, Richard Baxter, hammered out a fundamental doctrinal platform that was as anti-Biddlean as it was antiRanter. Yet what was missing in both the Sixteen Articles of Faith, attached to Proposals for the furtherance and propagation of the Gospell in this Nation (1652), the “New Confession of Faith” (1654), and Vindiciae Evangelicae (1655)

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Figure 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.

was a positive and practical divinity offering a blueprint for the practice of piety. People simply cannot live on polemical divinity. Seen in that light, Of Communion with God offered a seamless connection between polemical and practical divinity, which were in fact co-extensive, given the proliferation of radical religion in mid-seventeenth-century England and the simultaneous need for correcting errors and fostering godliness.91 From the outset, Owen’s high Calvinism was set in sharp relief, both visà-vis Arminianism and Socinianism. Barely into the second page of the treatise, Owen underscores the radically vitiated nature of postlapsarian human will, so that “by Nature . . . no man hath nay Communion with God,” thereby necessitating the divine initiative of “manifestation of Grace and pardoning

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Mercy.”92 This economy of salvation, for Owen, required God to be triune, since the accomplishment of redemption can be described as “in whom it is, by whom that Grace and mercy was purchase, through whom it is dispensed, who reveals it from the Bosome of the Father.” Therefore, Owen made a startling comment that communion with God was not “in expresse termes” mentioned in the Old Testament, although he was unmitigatedly opposed to Marcion, who divided the Scripture into two: the Old Testament revealing a vengeful deity, and the New describing the advent of the deity of love: “The thing it selfe is found there; but the cleare light of it, & the boldnesse of Faith in it, is discovered in the Gospell, and by the spirit administred therein.” Then the dividing plumb line for God’s revelation of God’s true self was Christ, and his ontological and economic significance savingly applied by the Spirit.93 In other words, Owen argued that while God does not change God’s intrinsic identity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit between the two testaments, the depth and level of human perception of and participation in this triune God differed. With the coming of Christ, the one whose sacrifice had been prefigured in the types of Jewish sacrificial systems, the veil of the curtain in the temple was lifted so that an “astonishing dispensation” of “sinners [having] fellowship with God, the infinitely holy God” could be actualized.94 Having established that the basis of any communion or participation was common interest or sharing of the same nature, Owen was faced with an immediate conundrum: God was holy, humans were not; God was divine, humans were not. Then was not this talk of communion with God a mere mirage? To further compound the ontological and moral gap between God and humanity, Owen cited from Aristotle (Ethics, viii.7), who taught that due to the qualitative disparity between God and humans, there can be “no fellowship between them,” and from Cicero (De Natura Deorum, i. 116), who, in spite of affirming the possibility of “communitas homini cum Deo,” acknowledged that apprehending general providence was the extent of his communion with God.95 For Owen, this Gordian knot of the dual gap could be cut through only if God desired such a turn of events, and if the coming of Christ in redemptive history managed to untie it. Thus Owen exulted: Those who enjoy this Communion have the most excellent Union, for the foundation of it; and the Issues of that Union which they mutually communicate are the most pretious and eminent. . . . Our Communion then with God, consisteth in his communication of himself unto us, with our returnall unto him, of that which he requireth and accepteth, flowing from that Union which in Jesus Christ we have with him: And it is twofold, 1. Perfect and compleat, in the full fruition of his Glory, and totall giving up of our selves to him, resting in him, as our utmost end, which we shall enjoy, when

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we see him as he is: and 2. Initiall and incompleat, in the first fruits and dawning of that perfection, which we have here in Grace.96 In other words, established as a result of the covenant of redemption between the Father and the Son, in the Spirit, the basis of the saint’s union with Christ was immutable, although the Christians’ experience of this eternal covenant faithfulness of God in their quotidian journey toward the City of God could ebb and flow. When the Independents gathered at the Savoy Palace to hammer out their counterpart to the Westminster Confession of Faith, widely regarded as Presbyterian in its platform, the vast majority of soteriological perspectives remained the same (except, of course, their Congregationalist ecclesiology). However, one complementary sentence was added in the article on the Trinity: “Which Doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our Communion with God, and comfortable Dependence upon him.”97 Seeing that Of Communion predates the Savoy Confession of Faith by one year, Owen’s influence in making the connection explicit between the union within the Trinity and the believer’s communion with each Person of the Trinity might have been reflected.98 Owen followed Calvin in asserting that the Father was the “ fountain of the Deity,” and yet worship was to be distinctly directed to all three persons of the Trinity. Since acknowledgment of the Father as fons divinitas was feared to vitiate a robust trinitarian theology, Owen quickly followed by saying Christ as God and “not as Mediator” is a fit object of worship. Interpreting the story of Stephen’s vision of Christ (Acts 7:59–60) and the expression “call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord” as a signifier of early Christian worship (1 Corinthians 1:2), Owen was clearly tackling Socinus’s and Biddle’s insistence that Christ, in his role as mediator, deserved to be worshipped.99 The overwrought emphasis of the first two chapters in Of Communion was that each person in the Trinity was a right recipient of worship, and distinct communion with Father, Son, and Spirit was not merely possible but strongly recommended, so that just as there exists “such a distinct Communion of Grace from the severall persons of the Deity, the Saints must needs have distinct Communion with them.”100 Committed as he was to the patristic maxim undergirding trinitarian theology that all the acts of the triune God are indivisible (“opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa”), Owen was adamant that the distinct communion that Christians were to enjoy would neither arouse divine jealousy nor fracture the harmony within the Trinity. Thus the Christian enjoys the Father by way of “Originall Authority,” the Son by way of “purchased Treasury,” and the Spirit by way of “immediate Efficacy.”101 This firmly trinitarian and Calvinistic framework of spirituality was designed to ward off the dual threat from Arminianism and Socinianism. For instance, in his discussion of the immutability of God’s purposes, especially God’s love

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for the elect, Owen was resolutely opposed to Arminianism and Socinianism, because of its pastorally disastrous consequences. Judged from the data of quotidian interactions with God, however, Owen confessed that God does seem to change God’s affections toward the elect, yet they all “clearly proceed from Love,” which changes not. Then if God’s disposition of love toward those God had foreknown, elected, and called does not change, someone who was leery of antinomian proclivities might ask, “But will not this encourage to sinne?” Owen’s riposte was that those who can “seriously make this objection” had never experienced the transforming love of God, and he acknowledged that while the “doctrine of Grace” can turn into “wantonesse,” the “Principle” of grace certainly cannot.102 However, there was another reason that such a robust and clearly Calvinistic and trinitarian practical divinity was needed. It was, ironically, engendered not by “backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers,” but by those who were most precise and punctilious about their faith.103 The precise morphology of Puritan spirituality has been a subject of ongoing scholarly debate. John Stachniewski inhabits one pole of historiography in his trenchantly argued Persecutory Imagination that the morose, despondency-inducing Calvinism was the cause of much psychological malaise and religious despair in early modern England. Michael Davies, however, has recently argued in Graceful Reading that while Stachniewski’s portraiture of Puritan psychology of piety was true, it was only half true. Davies then argued for the intra-Puritan fine-tuning of such despair-generating tendencies endemic to Calvinism, thereby creating an intrinsic dialectic wherein the total depravity of humanity (complete with the inherited original sin and the moral impotence to achieve salvation on its own) was always paired up with God’s gracious willingness to love and save.104 Seen from that perspective, the following quote by Owen helps us recognize the copresence of both strands, contested in Stachniewski and Davies. I come now to declare what it is, wherein peculiarly and eminently the Saints have Communion with the Father: And this is LOVE. Free, undeserved, and eternal Love. This the Father peculiarly fixes upon the Saints: this they are immediately to eye in him, to receive of him, and to make such Returnes thereof, as he is delighted withal. This is the great discovery of the Gospell. For whereas the Father as the Fountaine of Deity, is not known any other way but as full of wrath, anger, and indignation against sinne, nor can the Sons of men have any other thoughts of him.105 How can one be assured of the Father’s love? Owen knew well that most laity in England were less fearful of Christ, thus he offers two analogies, frequently used since the patristic period, to illustrate the inseparable, consubstantial

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nature of the Father and the Son: beam and the sun, and stream and fountain. Jesus Christ, in relation to the “love of the Father” was the beam and the stream, and it was through the effects of the light and water that “we are lead [sic] to the Fountaine, the Sunne of Eternall Love it selfe.” Thus, it was inconceivable, though pastorally understandable, to think of the Father and Son having antithetical dispositions.106 To view the Father “under any other Apprehensions” than that of love, Owen was convinced, breeds “dread and Aversation,” precipitating “flying and hiding of sinners.”107 Judging from the frequency of his exhortation for the “saints” to have “good thoughts of God,” and seeing also from the fact that thirteen years after the publication Of Communion, an Essex Independent, Giles Firmin, would cause a quiet revolution in the way Puritan divinity was understood and its legacy assessed by his The Real Christian (1670), in which he charged a number of stalwarts of early Stuart Puritanism, such as Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Rogers, Daniel Rogers, Richard Rogers, and Richard Baxter, for inducing “legal terror” by their inordinate emphasis on preparationism, such craven fears and unworthy thoughts of God harbored by many of Owen’s readers were not likely to have been mere rhetorical devices.108 Just as it was impossible to separate the Father from the Son ontologically, equally unthinkable was to conceive of the love of the Father apart from the Son: “in the powring out of his love, there is not one drop falls besides the Lord Christ.”109 Only within a Calvinistic and trinitarian framework, Owen was convinced, can one get beyond the haunting sense of inadequacy of one’s own work. Anticipating a query of a vexed soul who felt that since she had not loved God enough, she cannot be convinced of the Father’s love, Owen wrote: This is the most preposterous course, that possibly thy thoughts can pitch upon. . . . Herein is Love (saith the Holy Ghost) not that we loved God, but that he loved us first. I Joh. 4. 10, 19. Now, thou wouldest invert this Order, and say, herein is Love, not that God loved me, but that I loved him first. This is to take the Glory of God from him: that whereas he loves us without a cause, that is in our selves, and we have all cause in the World to love him. . . . Lay downe then thy Reasonings; take up the Love of the Father upon a pure Act of believing, and that will open thy Soule to let it out unto the Lord in the Communion of Love.110 Owen was, in essence, calling for a teleological suspension of the logical (“take downe then thy Reasonings . . . take up . . . a pure Act of believing”) for the soul to experience the love that neither an Arminian nor a Socinian could experience within their systems of divinity. He was convinced that their divinity, steeped as it was in human self-exertion, could never get people off the ground, for

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if having done enough was the criterion, those with “consciences” will never believe they have done their best. Again, seen from the repeated exhortations to stop wallowing in self-pity and cleave to the covenantal faithfulness of God, one wonders if the intractable problem of spiritual calculus in adding up their work, vis-à-vis what one perceives to be required by God, was more widespread than in the 1650s, thus giving credence to Firmin’s impeachment of the longue durée of Puritan preparationism.111 The only place this faithful suspension of the logical could land safely, and not dash against the rock of antinomianism or self-delusion, was in the arms of Christ, thus Owen’s reason for devoting nearly two thirds of this trinitarian spiritual manual to Christological reflections, meditations, and exhortations. And it is nowhere more clearly seen than in Owen’s exegesis of the Song of Songs in Of Communion with God. VI

Song of Songs and Trinitarian Spirituality in Of Communion with God In Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism, Regina Schwartz makes a compelling argument: the disappearance of the Eucharist due to the rise of Protestantism made an irreversible trend of disenchantment of the world. With the celebration of the Mass, especially at the moment of transubstantiation, the quotidian reality of the peasants, merchants, and other members of the corpus christianum was transformed into magic, which, then, provided the requisite glimpse of the eschatological glory awaiting them.112 Owen, admittedly an avowed opponent of Catholicism and assuredly known more for his Protestant Scholasticism than for ecstatic spiritual discourse, serves as an interesting test case for Schwartz’s theory of the irrevocable slippage of sacramental poetics within seventeenth-century Protestantism. As we have shown so far, with all the attendant difficulties of preserving “epistemic space” for the mystery of the Trinity in theological discourse, trinitarians of Owen’s type assiduously defended its validity and veracity. Part of the way they sought to achieve their polemical aim was, unsurprisingly, through their sermonic discourse on the beauty, excellence, and indispensability of the Lord’s Supper. In Owen’s thought, however, another key discursive strand appears: his own sacramental poetics in the way that Song of Songs is interpreted. As David Steinmetz had argued compellingly for the “superiority of pre-critical exegesis,” Owen certainly stands as a leading Protestant exegete in early modern England in this transitional period of negotiating and jettisoning the authenticity of the fourfold meaning of Scripture, thus privileging the sensus literalis over the other three sites of meaning: tropological (moral), allegorical (spiritual), and

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anagogical (eschatological). At least that is the standard account of Owen as biblical exegete.113 In patristic and medieval exegesis of the Canticles, interconnected themes such as desire for Christ, contemplation of the beauty in creation, celebration of the conjugal bond (understood both physically and sacramentally), and prescription for deeper and ecstatic spirituality formed the hermeneutical core.114 Nowhere else in all of Scripture was the issue of allegory, spiritual meaning, and what constituted historical/literal sense more intensely disputed than on the pages of Song of Songs. The contested nexus between human “love affair” based on an “actual carnal relationship” and the mystery of God’s love for the Church brought to the fore the interpretive and historical questions. Did it matter if “Solomon and a Shulamite” woman actually existed? How do we go from literal to spiritual meaning? As Denys Turner, in his influential work on medieval exegesis of the Canticles, asserts: “In the Song all is different. . . . In practice it is the general, formal characteristics of erotic love as such which have the power to signify how Christ and the Church, the soul and God, are joined in love.”115 Surprisingly, the Christological, allegorical interpretive trajectories of the Song of Songs of the medieval period were absorbed with little substantive revision among the Puritans. Starting with a Harmar translation of Theodore Beza’s sermons, the commentaries, glosses, sermons, and treatises on the Song of Songs were produced in greater numbers than all the wisdom literature books in the Hebrew Bible, second only to Psalms.116 As Susan Hardman Moore convincingly demonstrates, the Puritan “quest for intimacy with God” found a “perfect metaphor in marriage,” as the preachers themselves often placed their spiritual identity as the female protagonist in the Song of Songs. It is this ironic transposition of gender roles, according to Hardman Moore, that “infected spirituality and theology as well as conduct books,” thus rendering this reversal to be a sine qua non to Puritan “heart religion.”117 As Sharon Achinstein notes, it is perplexing to discover that as the very proponents of historical-grammatical biblical exegesis, the Puritans and Dissenters felt a strange attraction to the Song of Songs, in a way that the Restoration Church of England divines did not.118 This tendency of Christological exegesis was also found in Owen, and its implication both for spirituality and for trinitarian theology is next discussed. Of Communion with God was an intriguing text in “polemical spirituality”: polemical in that it still had Biddle and the Socinians as his shadowboxing interlocutors and spiritual for the obvious reason that Owen was convinced that the theological proof is in the liturgical pudding; that is, whatever one’s theological discourse, it has to lead to character transformation.119 Here in this manual for Reformed spirituality, Owen engaged in his own sacramental

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poetics in that he interpreted Song of Songs sacramentally. Rather than seeing this typology of the woman and the man in Song of Songs as two individual persons and no more, Owen saw it sacramentally, yet with a twist. Traditionally, the woman and the man in the Song of Songs found their hermeneutical counterpart in the way that Paul offers a sacramental reading of the conjugal bond between a man and a woman in Ephesians. In Owen’s interpretation of the Canticles, however, he made yet another intriguing, though not utterly novel, move. Owen saw the individual Christian, and not the Church, as the sacramental body of Christ. So in Owen, the woman became the Christian reader; the lover was Christ. In this regard, Achinstein’s astute comment regarding the Dissenters’ writings on the Song of Songs is apropos for Owen as well: “translating the mystery of the sacrament onto the very act of reading, the religious interpreter would perform both rituals, that of re-enactment as well as remembering. Reading itself could become sacramental.”120 Aware of the heuristic value of reading the Canticles sacramentally, Owen provided a succinct summary of his hermeneutical commitments: “In briefe, this whole Book is taken up in the description of the Communion that is between the Lord Christ and his saints. . . . Christ is the subject of neare one halfe of the book of Canticles.”121 Assuredly, he extrapolated these exegetical convictions further in his commendatory epistle for James Durham’s Clavis Cantici: or an Exposition of the Song of Solomon, published in Edinburgh in 1669.122 Durham, similar to Owen, saw the Canticles first as an ancient Jewish romance poem, but one whose ultimate hermeneutical telos was the typological fulfillment in the relationship between the saints and Christ. Also like Owen, Durham assiduously argued that the lover of the undeserved soul was none other than Christ the eternal Son of God, who was consubstantial with the Father. Consequently, Durham saw the progression of the soul to the triune God as prefigured in the Canticles. After making an improbable hermeneutical leap that the “we” in Canticles 1:11 is analogous to Genesis 1:26 in that this “refers” to the Trinity, Durham continued: All the persons of the blessed Trinity concur, & are ingaged in promoving the holinesse, & in perfecting the beauty of a believer. 6. All the graces of a believer are pieces of the workmanship of the holy Trinity: Grace then must be an excellent thing. 7. The perfecting and perseverance of a believer is infallibly sure & certain, seeing all the persons of the Godhead are ingaged in this work, and they who this day are believers, may promise this to themselves.123 Christological and trinitarian exegesis of Canticles was not unique to Owen. This polemical edge while providing spiritual cordials was a shared practice

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among his Puritan contemporaries. Hanserd Knollys (1598–1691), a leader among Particular Baptists, in his Exposition of the first Chapter of the Song of Solomon, maintained that the “Excellency of this Song” was found in its revelation of the “great Mysterie of Christ and his Church.” Moreover, although the style was rather “darkly,” due to its all-too-frequent use of “Metaphors and Allegories,” when properly “opened,” the Song of Songs was most proper, even “elegant.”124 Knollys, in his meditation on the “Name of Christ,” offered a catena of the titles of Christ, beginning with “God,” “God with us,” “Manna,” and “Water of life” and ending with “Oyntment” (1:3 of Canticles).125 As he latched firmly onto Christological exegesis of the Canticles, Knollys had occasions to indulge in meditations upon Christ’s person and work. Christ was beautiful, exulted Knollys, because he was fully divine and revealed the glory of the Triune God in an accommodated fashion for his children: “The full knowledge of God in Christ is too wonderful and high to be attained by Beleevers, whilest they are in this corruptible state, and tabernacle of clay. . . . Yet Christ is that living Word of God, whereby God speaks forth himself, and the riches, yea and fullness of his grace and glory . . . by such ways and means as the Creature is made capable to receive the discovery thereof.”126 The transcendent beauty of Christ was nowhere better experienced, Knollys emphasized throughout the exposition, than in the “Ordinances” of the Church, particularly in the Eucharist, knowing that it was none other than God who became enfleshed for us, whose body was broken for the redemption of the world, and whose Spirit now unites the believers to their Spouse through the Eucharistic Communion.127 This “mutual communion” between Christ and the Church was framed in a trinitarian language. Christ was the “excellent Soveraign cordial” for the wounded conscience, afflicted soul, and disconsolate spirit. His advent was promised in the eternal covenant of redemption, and this shows the indescribable sweetness of the “love of God in Christ, applied by faith in a promise of grace unto his [believer’s] heart by the Spirit of God.”128 Since Knollys used the covenantal and conjugal language of love, part of the saint’s duty was to steer clear of the detractors of “Christs kingdome of grace.” Adopting the expression of “Antichrist,” Knollys hurled that invective at anyone who “denyeth the Father and the Son,” a clear reference to the Socinian penchant to repudiate the consubstantial nature of the Son with the Father.129 Far from being dour exegetes, Puritan preachers on both sides of the Atlantic took seriously the sensual expressions and the depth of conjugal metaphors to explore the delirious extent of human-divine communion. Owen was no exception. Owen spoke of the believers’ souls as Christ’s garden of delight, made references to the breathing of the Spirit (as the wind from the north, in Canticles 4.16) designed to provide “meet and acceptable entertainment” for Christ, and connected this Canticles passage with the eschatological

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banquet as it prefigured the feast, wedding, and “wine upon the Lees” (Isaiah 25.6; Matthew 22.8; Revelation 19.7).130 While not abandoning literal exegesis entirely, the telos of interpretation for Owen was nearly the participatory communion between Christ and the believer/Church. Commenting on the delight Christ unfailingly brings to the believer, ravishing the soul with the “sweetnesse” of his presence, Owen leaned on sensual and romantic language to adequately encapsulate the ecstatic joy of this union.131 As Owen will build the case soon, this can in no way be brought about by natural religion; only substitutionary satisfaction of Christ would do. Nor could this be firmly anchored in the ever-mutable will of humanity; only the unchanging eternal covenantal love of the triune God could manage it. Thus, again, Owen not only built his exegesis of the Canticles as a critique of Arminianism and Socinianism but also used it as a site of uplifting the despondent soul of the godly. The Spouse finds, Owen glowed: love and care and kindness bestowed by Christ in the assembly of the Saints: hence she cryes out v. 5. Stay with me with Flaggons, comfort me with Apples, for I am sick of Love. Upon the discovery of the Excellency and sweetnesse of Christ in the banqueting house, the soule is instantly overpowered, and cryes out to be made partaker of the fulnesse of it. She is sick of Love: not (as some suppose) fainting for want of a sense of Love, under the Apprehension of Wrath, but made sick, and faint, even overcome with the mighty actings of that divine Affection, after she had once tasted of the sweetnesse of Christ in the Banqueting house. . . . Oh support and sustaine my Spirit, with his presence in his Ordinances, those Flaggons and Apples of his banqueting house, or I shall quite sinke and faint. . . . And thus sweetly and with delight is this Communion carried on.132 Owen’s affective divinity, drenching with the longing for the divine lover, spoke of the soul aching for more, as her desire was “deferred,” thereby making the heart sick. The banqueting house, as Owen explained throughout his exposition of Song of Songs, was the Church, and the “Flaggons and Apples” stood for sacraments that, though quenching the thirst for the presence of Christ temporarily, nonetheless ended up making the soul crave for more, until the eschatological banquet of the Lord. Another passage of Song of Songs which received an intriguing Christological exegesis by Owen was 5:10 (“My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand”). Seeing the quality of white—as in Daniel 7:9, “Ancient of Days . . . whose garment was white as snow,” and the story of Christ’s transfiguration in Matthew 17:2, “his raiment was white as the light”—in verse 10 as a signifier of the “might Lustre of the Deity” of Christ and the beloved’s “ruddy”

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quality as indicative of his humanity, Owen argued that this verse displayed the beauty of Christ’s two natures.133 So Owen exulted, “He who was white, became ruddy for our sakes, powring out his blood, an oblation for Sinne. This also renders him Gracefull: by his Whitenesse, he fulfilled the Law, by his rednesse he satisfied Justice: this is our beloved, O yee daughters of Jerusalem.”134 Again, here is how Owen connected his Chalcedonian Christology with his Calvinistic practical divinity; Christ’s “fitnesse” to save came from the grace of union of the two natures, without both of which true redemption could not occur. On this point, he followed Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus, who had argued that Christ’s two natures were necessary, for as man he could die as the second Adam representing all humanity in his death, and as God he could redeem and restore humanity in their path toward divinization (Athanasius), and that which Christ “has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved” (Gregory Nazianzen).135 Related to Christ’s fitness to save was his “Fulnesse to save,” which was inextricably tied to the grace of “Communion.”136 In other words, the anti-Arian and anti-Apollinarian concerns of Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus manifested themselves in Owen’s anti-Socinian commitment to present an orthodox Christology, thus to propagate a trinitarian and transformative practical divinity and spirituality. Woven throughout Of Communion was Owen’s emphasis on reciprocity of covenantal love, which was the only hope for true sanctification. Although Owen was extremely careful to assert that it was never a divine-human “quid pro quo,” thereby falling into a Baxterian neonomianism or Biddlean Socinianism, he certainly had no interest in falling into the other extreme of antinomianism. In this context, as before, the conjugal relations and “consequentiall Affections” were discussed. To further entice readers to delve into the sacramental delight of communing with Christ through the act of reading, Owen urged “every day whilst we live is his wedding day.”137 Th is delirious joy of communion with Christ was “abundantly insisted on” in Song of Songs, so that the “Spouse tells us, that she sits downe under his shadow with great delight, ch. 2, 3.”138 Yet not everything would be an uninterruptible, pure joy. In his exegesis of Song of Songs 3:1–3 (“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loved, I sought him but I found him not. I will rise now and goe about the City in the streets and in the broad ways”), Owen seemed to have run into a potential allegorical excess, and yet, intriguingly, he did not steer away! Writing “not to insist upon the particulars, nor to strain the parts of the Allegory too far,” Owen clearly seemed aware of the pitfalls, yet he interpreted the city as the “City of God; the Church,” and the search through the streets as the soul’s disquiet in the seeming and perceived absence of

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Christ. Th is search was analogous to “Ordinances of publique worship . . . in Administration of the seales doth it look after Christ.”139 Encountering the dark night of the soul, further accentuated by Christ’s absence, the soul was left with “but the bare letter in the promise.”140 The woman had written of the longing and anguish caused by the lover’s absence, though she sought him in the city streets and asked the watchmen: “Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?” Yet the lover was nowhere to be found; the very fountain of encountering Christ seemed dry. Capturing the sense of barrenness and even forsakenness that may strike at the godly without the least bit of warning, Owen said that when both private and public means of grace, sermons and sacraments, fail, then, the best thing to do is wait. Why? Shouldn’t one try harder? Owen’s Calvinism was committed to the notion of the “perseverance of the saints,” in that God will preserve the elect so that no matter how barren, dry, and dead one might be, God’s grace will emerge triumphant. So we fi nd Owen jubilating: “Christ honours his immediate absolute actings sometimes; though ordinarily he crowns his ordinances. Christ often manifests himself immediately, and out of Ordinances, to them that wayte for him in them. That he will do so to them that despise them, I know not.”141 Th is “immediacy” and unmediated acts of Christ upon the soul were regarded as a true emblem of enthusiasm, virtually indistinguishable from Quakerism, as far as William Clagett and William Sherlock were concerned.142 As we will see in the following section, the charge of enthusiasm became a popular anti-Puritan/Dissent invective, used with great effect by the Restoration churchmen. Ronald Knox, Michael Heyd, and, more recently, J. G. A. Pocock have all noted the significance of the polemical vector of the terms enthusiasm and enthusiasts in Restoration politics of religion. Owen’s defense of the Trinity, vis-à-vis both Socinians and Sherlock, incurred this opprobrious label.143 Owen assured readers that, although Christ ordinarily met his saints through the ordinances, primarily through the Lord’s Supper, there were times, perhaps when someone had been ardently longing for Christ, precisely in his absence, when he manifests himself “immediately,” exceeding the yearning the saint had for her Bridegroom. Here was, as Owen noted repeatedly, the irony of these experiences of spiritual absence of Christ: it was not always brought about by sin. Taken the wrong way, especially with the intent of besmirching the reputation of the “Enthusiasts” of Owen’s sort, this was the perfect statement to attack, and so they did. However, before we turn to the controversy started by William Sherlock and carried on by William Clagett, charging Owen as the duplicitous champion of dissenting enthusiasts, it would help us to connect Owen’s ecstatic spirituality with a Spanish mystic, John of the Cross (1542– 1591), the famed author of The Spiritual Canticle. As we have seen in Owen’s

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Canticles exegesis, it was this marital and filial metaphor that also formed the core of John of the Cross’s trinitarian spirituality, as interpreted by Rowan Williams: The eros of the created self for God, understood as the longing for communion with the Word, is a desire not for the Word or Son as terminus of prayer and love, but a desire for the desire of the Word—i.e. for the Word’s own desire for the Father and the relation in which that desire exists, the relation we call “filial.” Union with the divine partner is union with that partner already and eternally in relation to the Source from which the partner originates. . . . Thus we, incorporated into this relation to the Father, share the “deflection” of the Son’s desire toward the Father’s excess of love: we are taken into the movement of the Spirit.144 Probing the sacred mystery of how the triune God could invite, make effectual, and seal the communion with the frail mortals necessitated buttressing Owen’s polemical divinity with a heft y dose of apophatic theology, to which we turn presently. VII

Owen’s Apophatic Theology in Context For it is the most ineffable Effect of the Divine Wisdom of the Father and of the Love of the Son, the highest Evidence of the Care of God towards mankind. What can be equal unto it? . . . It is the Glory of Christian Religion. . . . This carrieth the Mystery of the Wisdom of God, above the Reason or Understanding of Men and Angels to be the Object of Faith and Admiration only. A Mystery it is that becomes the Greatness of God with his Infinite Distance from the whole Creation; which renders it unbecoming him, that all his ways and works should be comprehensible by any of his Creatures.145 Thus Owen recapitulated the main theme of Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, his last known work, published posthumously in 1684. Several themes present themselves from the foregoing: the Incarnation was fi rmly ensconced in the realm of “ineffable” mystery and expression of God’s wisdom and love. Indeed, Owen asserted that in the Incarnation one saw the “highest Evidence” of the grace and mercy of God. Not only was the Incarnation the indispensable impetus behind the propagation of the

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Gospel but also it was—ironically—an article of faith, but not of complete rational explanation (note “Object of Faith and Admiration only”). Owen noted that placed on the other end of the spectrum of God’s greatness, the Incarnation of the eternal Son of God was, at fi rst blush, “unbecoming of him,” in that this otherwise utterly transcendent Deity became “comprehensible,” thereby partly explaining why so many end up repudiating or revising this mysterious truth. Owen continued to propound clearly that Christ the Incarnate one was “Eternally in the Form of God,” taken from Philippians 2:6, a favorite text among trinitarians to bolster the deity of Christ, and “equally participant of the same Divine Nature,” thus making this Incarnation even more improbable, logically speaking. Equally incredible to the one without the spectacle of faith to behold the Incarnation was that Christ was, as Owen put it memorably, “no less truly a man in time, than he was truly God from Eternity.”146 Yet most incredible of all was that he debased himself so much that often his divinity was veiled, causing both temporary consternation and confusion, until the post-resurrection clarification through the fi rst Pentecost. All of the foregoing statements were designed to “fight for” an epistemic space where things beyond reason could be allowed as real. In other words, Owen was committed to the notion of mystery and apophatic theology as undergirding modes to support his trinitarian theology, as it was also buttressed by rigorous scriptural exegesis and deep awareness of patristic theology. The two strands, apophatic theology and scriptural-patristic exegesis, were not separated in Owen, even though this dialectical tension was in the process of giving away under the enormous pressure of Socinian rationalism and natural religion. Both Socinianism and natural religion took it as axiomatic that reason itself was not hampered by original or actual sin, thus marking a radical departure from Owen. As Sarah Mortimer has recently argued, a key contribution made by the Socinians in early modern Europe was to revitalize their reputation as key natural law theorists.147 When Owen described Christ’s active righteousness as “that compleat absolutely perfect Accomplishment of the whole Law of God,” indeed, as he qualified it three sentences below as obedience to “any Law of God,” and that this was “in our stead,” then at least within the Owenian system of divinity, there was no possibility of fulfi lling the natural law on our own.148 In fact, he leaned slightly in the Antinomian direction: “Are we then free from this obedience?” Here is how Owen answered this query: “yes, but how farre? From doing it in our own strength, from doing it for this end, that we may obtaine life everlasting. It is vaine that some say confidently, that we must yet work for life, It is all one, as to say, we are yet under the old covenant, hoc fac & vives.”149

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Thus, part of Owen’s anti-Socinian polemic was to attribute natural religion as the telos of Socinianism. To be fair, Biddle was hardly a proponent of natural religion. His protestation that the doctrine of the Trinity was the very stumbling block preventing the heathens, Jews, and Muslims from embracing Christianity was far from an endorsement of the validity of natural religion. Thus, as a salvo against Biddle, Owen missed the mark. Yet, seen as an ideological trajectory, he was correct to see that the Socinian emphasis on natural religion would inexorably compromise the Christological exclusivity and render irrelevant the apophatic nature of theological discourse. “Natural Religion” was the constant mantra of the Socinians, “as if it were sufficient unto all ends of our living unto God.” Owen further argued, offering his own psychological analysis of the Socinian problem, that it proceeded from their disaffection from “Supernatural Revelations, with the Mystery of the Gospel,” and, most importantly, since they have never had the experience of “its Power in the Life of God.”150 In other words, the inherent praxis orientation within trinitarian spirituality was what Owen was accusing the Socinians of being utterly devoid of, thereby leading them to adopt natural religion as their divinity. In the last chapter, Owen offered this instruction on how to worship and commune with the three distinct persons of the Trinity. As we shall see later, there was a good deal of trinitarian apophatic spirituality of Gregory of Nazianzus in Owen’s liturgical meditations: When we bring our Prayers to God the Father, and end them in the name of Jesus Christ: yet the Sonne is no lesse invocated, and worshipped in the beginning then the Father, though he be peculiarly mentioned as mediator in the close; not as Sonne to himself, but as Mediator of the whole Trinity, or God in Trinity. . . . For the Sonne, and the Holy Ghost are no lesse worshipped, in our accesse to God, then the Father himself. . . . So that when by the distinct dispensation of the Trinity, and every Person, by what name soever, of Father, Sonne, or Holy Ghost, we invocate him.151 In this rather contorted passage, the gist of Owen’s trinitarian spirituality was predicated on the maxim “opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa”; therefore, to speak of which aspect of God’s work one should attribute to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit became an increasingly difficult matter. When one thinks of one, then the three emerges, and the prayer uttered in the name of Christ is directed “in, to, and through” all three persons of the Trinity. Rather than being theologically imprecise, Owen, and Gregory Nazianzen much more, spoke of the ineffable mystery of the Trinity, for which the best proof is found in one’s participation in worship, although Biddle and the Socinians never

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tired of pointing out the linguistic indeterminacy and imprecision of the trinitarians’ liturgical praxis. In the same spirit, Gregory confessed in his “Oration on Holy Baptism,” preached in January 381, presumably in front of the catachumens who were about to be initiated into the sacred mystery of the Triune God, that: No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three I think of Him as the Whole, and my eyes are fi lled, and the greater part of what I am thinking of escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of That One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the Rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the Undivided Light.152 Both Owen and Gregory of Nazianzus had cultured rationalistic despisers grasping at their heels, whether Biddle or Eunomius, for their exalted, enthusiastic language tended to veil more than disclose. Undeterred, Owen and Gregory spoke of the incomprehensibility of God, emphasized apophatic theology, and hereticated without any qualm those who differed on this ultimately unfathomable mystery of the Trinity. This was, as mentioned before, the key problematic. If the Trinity is ultimately a mystery, how can one really know it? If Scripture is the key source for knowing the Trinity, who gets to decide which interpretation is authoritative? If this mystery is given only to the elect, why should the reprobate suffer hellish punishment already on earth, when all of eternity awaited? The recourse to mystery, though not a mere polemical ploy, resolved many quandaries as it generated a few more. Consequently, even among those who would affirm the doctrine of the Trinity, there were attempts to couch it without heavy reliance on mystery, for such discourse of mystery was interpreted by the Socinians as a telltale sign of the trinitarian priestcraft. Owen encountered another cultured despiser of his form of dissent in the person of William Sherlock, a formidable polemicist, who helped further finetune Owen’s polemical and practical, Calvinistic and trinitarian divinity. Ironically, however, with the Restoration, neither Cheynell nor Owen could call for a “charitable Trinitarian hatred,” for they were now ousted, and the law was hunting them, rather than its being on their side. Yet the polemical context of the Owen-Sherlock controversy sheds further light on Owen’s trinitarian spirituality.

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VIII

The Owen-Sherlock Controversy over the Mystical Union with Christ: Sherlock’s Attack The Restoration of Charles II to the throne accompanied the return of both exiled bishops and younger, ardent devotees of the Church of England. After the failed negotiations at the Savoy Conference of 1661, during which Richard Baxter and his moderate Presbyterian-cum-Episcopalians ended up as losers, the fate of the Dissenters varied, although they were barred from both ministry and university. Dissenting chapels and academies were products of this unfortunate division between church and chapel and the Clarendon Codes. In recent historiography of the Restoration, there has been a welcome emphasis on the continuity between the 1650s, 1660s, and beyond. Historians such as Gary De Krey, John Spurr, Tim Harris, and recently Stephen Hampton have all contributed to this revisionistic portraiture of the Restoration church. The Restoration Church of England, according to them, was not a monolith, nor was it a new entity separated from the horrific memories of the Interregnum. It was not sliding down toward a Latitudinarian moralism, although such elements were certainly present; it appropriated the harrowing memories and channeled them into rigorous reform measures of anti-Donatism (which suited better than “anti-Puritanism” for the Restoration divines with a penchant for Augustinian self-fashioning); Charles II’s ecclesiastical policies toward indulgence, combined with the fear of popery, provided ample ammunition for persecutory politics of religion, as Mark Goldie has written of.153 It is in this context of what Gary De Krey calls “the first Restoration crisis” that the Sherlock-Owen controversy needs to be seen. The Owen-Sherlock controversy helps address a few salient aspects of contemporary historiography regarding the nature of the theology in the Restoration Church of England primarily and the ongoing struggle over the telos of the second Reformation, as envisaged by Peter Heylyn, Baxter, and Owen.154 In a half century known for its fair share of polemical pit bulls, William Sherlock (1640–1707) could be a worthy contender. Presaging the trajectory of his illustrious publishing career, Sherlock’s first book was also his initial foray into polemical divinity: The Knowledge of Jesus Christ, and Union with Him (1674), taking the doyen of Independency’s Of Communion with God to task and seeking to expose its enthusiasm, antinomianism, and irreligion. Since August 1669, Sherlock had been the rector of St. George’s, Botolph Lane, London, and judging from Owen’s steady literary output, combined with the failed yet sincere efforts toward ecclesial rapprochement between moderate Anglicans, Dissenting Presbyterians, and a few Independents, Sherlock might

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have opted for an ad hominem polemical attack to stall the project and further alienate the Dissenters. Political motives aside, once one juxtaposes Sherlock’s Knowledge of Jesus Christ and Owen’s Of Communion with God, the divergent perspectives on the nature and telos of the Christian’s participation in the life of the triune God come to the fore. According to Kelly Kapic, Sherlock’s “tendency toward rationalism” was further accentuated by his strong antipathy toward “Puritan mysticism.”155 Sherlock found Owen’s constant “prattle” about Christocentric piety utterly repugnant, doing gross injustice to the way the “Jews and Heathens” had encountered God to be “gracious and merciful to Sinners.” For Sherlock, such attributes of God were revealed both through the Mosaic law and through the “works of Creation and Providence.”156 Herein lay the watershed issue, separating Owen and Sherlock more than mere ecclesiological or political divide would have it, though they were not unconnected. Due in great measure to this tilt toward affirming a certain salutarity of natural religion in Sherlock’s divinity, Owen saw it all the more imperative to affirm revealed religion. This revealed religion was mysterious and utterly beyond any human ken to comprehend. It is in this polemical context that the “mystical divinity,” trinitarian spirituality of Owen needs to be situated. Such impulses to stress the apophatic nature of theology were already embedded in Owen’s pre-Restoration writings, although it assumes greater prominence in his polemical spirituality afterward. Ironically, in a treatise designed to clearly lay out the contours of the Christian duty of sanctification, Of the Mortification of Sinne in Believers (1656), Owen emphasized the utter unknowability of God’s nature in se, thus the absolute necessity of the gift of faith and revelation. While one can confess God’s infinity, omnipotence, and eternality, and while one has “words and notions” about them, yet to try to conceive, let alone express, what they are was tantamount to be being swallowed up in an “infinite Abysse.” Here is where Owen clearly owned the indispensability of apophatic theology, for “the perfection of our understanding, is, not to understand, and to rest there”! Owen went on to say, if we cannot even conceive of infinity, omnipresence, then what of the Trinity and the subsistence of the three divine persons in the same essence? Herein lay, for Owen, the dual gap for the fallen humanity: moral and ontological. Thus without the gift of faith, one could not know anything about what God has done, let alone who God was.157 For Sherlock, on the other hand, such Calvinistic emphasis on the incomprehensibility of God, suff used throughout the “Fanaticks Preachments,” was inimical to true piety. Rather than locating the cause of redemption in God’s “own arbitrary will,” Sherlock set forth the “holiness of a Creature” as the reason for God’s love and goodness, a clearly Arminian, and potentially Socinian, move, as Owen and Thomas Danson assiduously argued.158

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Sherlock found Owen’s Of Communion deeply flawed and inherently dangerous for the following three reasons: First, Owen’s repeated mystical language, enjoining the readers for a delightful communion with the “Person of Christ” was utterly distasteful, reeking of Enthusiasm for Sherlock.159 A close examination of the Owen-Sherlock controversy reveals that Sherlock was afraid of Owen for the very same tendencies that Owen himself was deeply concerned about with the Quakers and the Ranters: the fusion of ontological distinction between Christ’s person and the human person. So he criticized Owen’s “fooling with Scripture-Metaphors” to arrive at a view of the union “as makes all Christ ours, and us Christs” so that the believer has propriety and interest in all Christ’s “Personal Graces and Eminences,” not merely economically (in terms of receiving the benefit of Christ’s acts) but also ontologically: “whatever Christ hath done, or suffer’d, is all his as much, as if he had done and suffer’d the same things himself.”160 Second, Sherlock was aghast to see Owen’s constant emphasis on the believer’s individual union with Christ. He was convinced that this could further incite political and religious Dissent, for it could be misconstrued as eclipsing the need for priestly mediation. Just as J. G. A. Pocock noted, the reason the doctrine of the Trinity and office of the priest were inextricably intertwined in Restoration Anglican political thought was that the church was the site wherein the presence of Christ could be mediated.161 Seen in that light, Sherlock’s critique of Owen can be seen as the Restoration Anglicans’ fear that Dissent was virtually synonymous with radically individualistic religion. In response, Sherlock reiterated that the topos of Christ’s union was the Church. In this regard, Sherlock’s view greatly overlapped with the covenant ecclesiology of Herbert Thorndike, as we discussed in chapter 3. Indeed, Sherlock devoted the entirety of chapter 4 to extol the beauty of the Church’s union with Christ.162 So Sherlock triumphantly declared, after quoting from a sermon on 1 Corinthians 3 by John Chrysostom, that “our Union to Christ consists in our Union to the Christian Church, and when we divide and separate from the Church, we are broken off Christ, as a branch is from the Vine.” Given the rancorous politics of religion in the late 1660s and early 1670s, one can easily see the political maneuver Sherlock made, as he sought to buttress his authority by citing also from Ambrose, the celebrated fourth-century preacher bishop of Milan.163 This patristic dependence also explains the republication of Cyprian’s De Unitate Ecclesiae by the leading Restoration patristic scholar, Bishop of Oxford John Fell, as a way of bolstering the apostolicity of the Church of England, vis-à-vis both Protestant Dissent and Catholic polemic.164 In point of fact, after another quotation from Chrysostom, Sherlock excoriated the dissenting and divisive practice of his Protestant renegades as those “who boast so much of their Union to Christ, and yet rend his Church into thousand little

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factions . . . do now erect more Partition Walls in the Christian, than ever were in the Jewish Temple.”165 With such a thinly veiled attack, Sherlock can easily be seen targeting the Independents such as Owen who posited congregational autonomy as the nucleus of ecclesiology, chary about the prospect of comprehension. For Sherlock, the sine qua non of the Church, which was the locus of participating in the union with Christ, was its bishops.166 Third, Owen’s emphasis on Christ’s righteousness as the cause of our justification, both initial and eschatological, was, for Sherlock, another perfect recipe for the dissolution of the foundation of civil society and church. So Sherlock sneered: “This is a mighty comfortable discovery, how we may be righteous without doing any thing that is good, or religious,” as he found the imputation of Christ’s active righteousness to the believer a delusional notion.167 It must be said that both Sherlock and Owen were opposed to antinomianism; both espoused a robust doctrine of sanctification. Where they diverged, however, was whose righteousness and how much of it would be required at the eschatological tribunal. For Sherlock, since God loves only those who were good, and though our obedience might not be perfect, “if it be sincere, we shall be accepted for the sake of Christ.”168 As Owen rightly noted, was it the person’s sincerity or was it Christ’s righteousness that weighed more heavily? Of particular note in Sherlock’s Discourse was that while Owen might have been the grand foil around which he attacked Owen’s mystical divinity of “overexalting” the person of Christ, other Puritan authors’ works were adduced as incriminating evidence: Thomas Watson, William Jenkyn, Thomas Shepherd, Thomas Jacombe. They were too inexact, their expositions of the intercourse of divine-human love too erotic and all too reliant upon what Christ has done, which was the perfect recipe for spiritual indolence. Moreover, Sherlock was convinced that Owen had, perhaps unintentionally, with his obfuscating language in depicting the union with Christ, made it “more than mystical,” thus “an unintelligible Union.”169 Then Sherlock went after a leading London dissenting preacher, Thomas Jacombe, for his prolix mystical divinity. Jacombe, much like Owen, both following Calvin closely, stressed the beauty, indeed, imperative, of the believer’s mystical union with Christ. There were three types of union, the third of which was the privilege accorded to the believer; the other two, in fact, formed the basis of the third. First was the union of “three Persons in one Nature,” followed by the second union of “two Natures in one Person.” Of the two, Jacombe emphasized the fractured and woefully provisional nature of our concepts regarding the nature of the union of the Persons in the Trinity: This is that ineffable, incomprehensible Union . . . between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in the same common Nature of the Godhead. . . . This is a

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Mystery to be adored, not to be fathomed; a Mystery much too deep for the Plummet of Reason to reach; he that by Reason would go about to grasp it, is as foolish as he that would attempt to put the Ocean into a bucket, or to grasp the Universe in the hollow of his hand.170 Now, it is an intriguing question to raise, one, I suspect, impossible of proving one way or another: were the Puritans equally as reticent to speak of the ineffable mystery of the Trinity between, say, 1648 and 1660, when they were on the winning side of the hegemonic divide? When they could prosecute heretics and hereticate dissenting voices, did they also hearken to apophatic theology, as Jacombe did in 1672? For Jan Wojcik, it was the frustration stemming from the perennial polemical stalemate that drove thinkers such as Robert Boyle and John Owen to argue much more for the limits of reason to plumb the depth of the Trinity in the second half of the century.171 Jaroslav Pelikan perceptively noted that the only way the doctrine of the Trinity could be enforced with any degree of success—from the fourth until about the eighteenth century—was when it was sanctioned and “enforced” by civil authorities.172 It is not suggested here that Owen and others were opposed to apophatic theology or that divine incomprehensibility was never espoused; they were. Yet, it was a matter of emphasis, as Michael Questier and Peter Lake remind us, that orthodoxy should be seen “not as stable quantities but rather as sites of conflict and contest,” so the shifting lines of theological vocabulary is a better way of interpreting the change of voice.173 The specific value of distancing the Church of England from this mystical notion of union with Christ’s person, as Sherlock saw it, was to promote a gospel-driven holiness. In section 4 of Knowledge of Jesus Christ, Sherlock reiterated his anti-Owenian charge, which was synonymous with anti-Antinomianism. His twofold critique was (1) the putative personal union with Christ will create false security so that “men may, nay must be united to Christ, while they continue in their sins” and, conversely, (2) no one can have defi nite assurance of “get[ting] into Christ, or know[ing] whether he be in Christ or not.” Why? Sherlock was afraid because Owen’s high Calvinism would exalt the objective element of Christ’s fi nished work as mediator so much that there would be little, if any, room for holiness. Surely this was a caricature, but surely Sherlock was not the first one to heckle Owen and others for this inherent antinomian potential.174 Anthony A. Wood, the noted high church antiquary, censoriously noted that Owen “doth strangely affect in ambiguous and uncouth words, canting, mystical, and unintelligible phrases to obscure” the plainest verities of Christianity, simultaneously seeking to unveil enthusiastic notions by employing a catena of “mist and cloud of senseless terms.”175

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Following at the heel of the Sherlock-Owen controversy was one involving Owen’s PNEUMATOLOGIA: Or, a Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit (1674).176 Seeing it as a turgid yet unmistakable defense of enthusiasm popular among the Dissenters’ doctrine of the Holy Spirit, William Clagett (1646–1688) published his refutation of Owen in A Discourse concerning the Operations of the Holy Spirit (1678).177 Similar to Sherlock, Clagett owed his meteoric rise as a darling of the High Church partly to the fight he waged with Owen. Evident from the title page itself (the subtitle was “The Nature also and Necessity of Gospel-Holiness”), as Owen was waging his campaign against the Quakers, and woven throughout the PNEUMATOLOGIA was Owen’s constant emphasis that justifying grace, if true, inevitably begot sanctifying effects. For Clagett, however, that was a thinly veiled canard, hiding the volcanic potential for Enthusiasm, further fueled by Owen’s high Calvinism. Clagett was convinced that there was virtually no stark contrast, only shades of gray, between the over-realized eschatology of the Quakers and the perspective of Owen. Indeed, as G. F. Nuttall maintained, the distance between John Owen and George Fox was much closer than what modern-day Calvinists and Quakers would like to acknowledge. IX

Owen’s Defense of a Calvinistic, Mystical Communion with Christ Owen rose to the challenge to defend his reputation by publishing A Vindication of some Passages in a Discourse concerning Communion with God shortly after Sherlock’s hit the market. Two discernible polemical strategies suggest themselves. First, Owen argued that the true innovator, a clear term of abuse, was Sherlock, not himself, for deviating from the doctrinal trajectory of the Church of England. Second, Owen asserted that Sherlock’s divinity was dangerously close to Socinianism and definitely Arminian. The “patron saint” from the Elizabethan church whom Owen selected for his first pugilistic purpose was none other than Richard Hooker—no friend of the Puritans and one whose doctrinal identity and legacy as a putative representative of the Anglican tradition is still being debated.178 In a clever polemical move, Owen argued that the mystical theology, and theosis-sounding divinity, was first formulated in the Church of England by the celebrated author of Of the Lavves of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593). The first passage of Hooker cited by Owen was, unsurprisingly, to do with the union with Christ, which Hooker called “participation”: “Participation is that mutual inward hold which Christ hath of us and we of him, in such sort that each possesseth other by way of special Interest, Property, and Inherent Copulation.”179 Furthermore, this “mystical

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conjunction” with Christ could become “too cold an Interpretation” when all one affirmed was that Christ took on our flesh, and so Christ is “Man as We are.” The participation of Christ, consequently, was far more glorious than merely notional. Hooker continued, to Owen’s evident delight and Sherlock’s subsequent chagrin: besides the Mystical Copulation thereof with the parts and Members of his whole Church, a true actual Influence of Grace whereby the life which we live according to Godliness is his, and from him we receive those perfections wherein our Eternal Happiness consisteth. Thus we participate Christ partly by Imputation, as when those things which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for Righteousness; Partly by habitual and real Infusion, as when Grace is inwardly bestowed while we are on Earth, and afterwards more fully both our Souls and Bodies made like unto his in Glory.180 In this and numerous other passages, Hooker became the theological ventriloquist for Owen’s purposes of defending all the issues regarding election, effectual calling, “Justification by the Imputation of the Righteousness of Christ,” participation in Christ through the Spirit, “Union of Believers unto and with his Person,” and derivation of grace entirely from and through him and the Spirit—all of which Sherlock had indicted Owen for having breached the doctrinal pedigree of the Church of England.181 Owen scoffingly challenged Sherlock to not merely follow Hooker “in point of Discipline” but with regard to doctrine as well.182 The second target was to show that Sherlock’s Arminian divinity was teetering too close to the Socinian edges. Classic Arminianism did affirm the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, not as a cloak for ongoing human unrighteousness, but as the instrumental cause for making Christians partakers of Christ.183 It seems by the time one reaches the Restoration Anglican divinity of Sherlock’s sort, the imputation concept itself became synonymous with enthusiasm and uncouth Dissenting divinity. Yet Thomas Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln and a former tutor of Owen himself at Oxford, remained an avowed defender of both Calvinism and Episcopacy, representing thereby the other wing of Restoration Anglican theology.184 Thus Sherlock’s absolute refusal to acknowledge any type of imputation, as he saw it as a bugbear of antinomianism. Owen found Sherlock’s preference for “Gospel” over the person of Christ as an unwarranted bifurcation, since the person of Christ could be a synecdoche for the gospel itself, for the two were inextricably linked.185 In fact, Owen also threw down his gauntlet and argued that if God’s desires and “readiness to pardon Sinners is revealed in Scripture without respect unto the Person of Jesus Christ,” it was but a dull version of Socinianism!186

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As mentioned earlier, Owen was concerned that an inordinate emphasis on “Light of Nature” to teach us the will and character of God would cause a slow yet substantial deviation from the singular work of Christ as revealer of the identity and the work of God. Indeed, Sherlock was of the opinion that God had revealed who God was to the people Israel without any reference to Jesus at all. Not so, averred Owen, for he took the promise that God makes in Genesis 3:15 to be the primordial and very embryonic proleptic announcement of the victory of God (called protoevangelion) through the “Promised Seed” who came to “destroy the works of the Devil.” In other words, by glossing Genesis 3:15 and 1 John 3:8, Owen argued that all the theophanies and typologies in the Old Testament find their ultimate fulfillment only in Jesus.187 The other point of attack for Sherlock had to do with the nature of divine justice, the scope of redemption, and the resulting picture of God’s love. Owen had defended the necessity of divine justice, and the reconcilability of divine justice and love in his Diatriba de Justitia Divina, shortly after he had been made Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1652.188 In it, he had attacked the evident deficiency in the Racovian Catechism, Johann Crellius, and Faustus Socinus, who had all denied that God’s justice and love could coinhere in the way God has acted toward creation.189 Now in 1674, he expressed shock that a “Son of the Church of England” was squeamish about the nature of satisfaction and justice which Christ through his death demonstrated. Such demurral was more easily expected from “a Mahumetan . . . Servetus or Socinus.”190 At one point, Owen averred that aside from linguistic nitpicking, Sherlock and Owen could agree on the fact that Christ’s mediatorial work could be learned only by revelation.191 Sherlock had criticized Owen’s alleged tendencies to speak separately of Christ as God and as man.192 In his own defense, Owen charged Sherlock of selective quotations, truncating the overall meaning that was clearly otherwise. Owen launched into a substantial discussion of the union of the two natures, divine and human, in the one person of the Mediator, Christ the “God-man.” Consequently, this communication of properties, communicatio idiomatum, was what helped make sense of texts such as Acts 20:28 and John 3:13, which spoke of God’s blood and man ascending to heaven. More stinging yet was Owen’s charge that had Sherlock been even slightly acquainted with the history of the “first General Councils,” he would not have arrived at such embarrassingly sophomoric notions about Owen’s Christology.193 And it is in this context that Owen appropriated, to good effect, the notion of Christ’s actions being “Theandrical,” since in Christ acts that are “absolutely Divine” and those “absolutely Humane” coalesce in this one theandrical person.194 As the Racovian Catechism clearly repudiated the perseverance of the saints, so did Owen detect in Sherlock’s critique of his Calvinism the same

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tendency to limit the presence of love of God only when “they continue to be good.”195 This would have cataclysmic consequences for our understanding of God and the nature of Christ’s redeeming work, contended Owen. If Christ has no other kind of love than what Sherlock had described, then “the state of the Church . . . depends on a very slender thread.” In contradistinction to Sherlock’s Arminianism, Owen affirmed that it is “from the Love of Christ” that believers are “preserved in that condition wherein he doth and will approve of them,” and to propound otherwise, that Christ “by his Grace neither makes them Good, nor preserve them,” was to “renounce” all that was true of the Gospel.196 In fact, Sherlock’s repudiation of Owen’s Calvinism, especially the doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, was criticized by Owen as thinly veiled Socinianism.197 Questioning Sherlock’s exegesis of Galatians 4:4–5, which explained the nature of Christ’s fulfi llment of the Law, Owen railed against the apish dependence of Sherlock on “Crellius in his Book against Grotius” and the comment of Schlichtingius on the same Pauline text.198 Rather than seeing Christ’s role as the mediator of the new covenant, Sherlock had spoken of God entering into “a new Covenant with mankind, wherein he promises pardon of sin and eternal life to those who belief [sic] and obey the Gospel.” For Owen, this was adding conditionality to the covenant of grace, rendering it nearly identical to the covenant of works. By excluding Christ’s “Purchase of the Inheritance of Grace and Glory,” this pernicious new idea was one that the “Elder Church” of England knew nothing of.199 If Sherlock’s impact as an author could be gauged solely by the number of published ripostes, his beginning as a writer was an auspicious one. Within two years of Knowledge of Jesus Christ’s publication in 1674, seven treatises were published, mostly against Sherlock, though he was not without supporters. Merely four years after the first edition was published, the third corrected and expanded edition appeared.200 Sherlock’s scurrilous attack on Owen naturally invited equally opprobrious ripostes, unfailingly full of sardonic barbs and matching the vituperative vigor of the 1640s. First off the block was Samuel Rolls (1628–1680), followed by Henry Hickman (1629–1692). If Rolls’s Prodromus was a personal admonition coming from a family friend and a well-wisher, Hickman’s Speculum Sherlockianum was a fulminating diatribe, less an ad hominem attack, but more measured yet incisively divulging Sherlock’s theological “absurdities.”201 Rolls chided Sherlock for his lack of humility and urged him to awaken from his lapse of reason in thinking that the Church of England’s past witness was on his side. For Rolls, Sherlock’s perversion and misrepresentation of the saint’s “Union and Communion with Christ,” “the Doctrine of Justification by Faith, and not by

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Works,” and imputation of Christ’s righteousness could easily amount to a frightening charge of heterodoxy. Thus he gently reminded Sherlock of Luther’s maxim that justification was the article upon which the Church stands or falls (“Stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiae articulum”).202 Thus Rolls’s chilling verdict was that Sherlock had given the “better halfe” of Protestantism away and that he was a veritable “Leviathan without fear.”203 The second person to pick up the cudgel against Sherlock was Henry Hickman. Hickman was well-known as an avowed opponent of Laudianism during the Interregnum as a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford (March 1649–August 1662). After his ejection from both his living at St. Aldate’s and his fellowship—both at Oxford—Hickman was involved with the Dissenting Academy in Worcestershire from about January 1669 until he went to the Netherlands to pastor an English church in 1674. It was around this time of his move that Hickman published his critique of Sherlock. With a flair of hyperbole, Hickman wrote that after reading the first chapter of A Discourse of the Knowledge of Jesus Christ, he wished he had the money he had given for the “Book in my Pocket again.” 204 The primary area of critique was a historical one, quite similar to his long-standing battle vis-à-vis Peter Heylyn over the true nature of the Church of England. Moreover, Hickman criticized Sherlock’s view of justification for diverging not only from Bishop Ponet’s Catechism (sanctioned by Edward VI) but also from Alexander Nowell’s Catechism, one of the most influential catechisms in Elizabethan England, as well. Thus, Hickman argued that the guilt of theological innovation fell not on Owen, but on Sherlock himself.205 Similar to Rolls, Hickman’s rhetorical strategy was to show that Owen, Watson, and Jacombe—rather than Sherlock himself—were, their current Dissenter status notwithstanding, closer to the historical identity of the Church of England. Yet such was the very bone of contention. Subtly, Hickman chided Sherlock for courting Socinian sensibilities a bit too close when Sherlock refuted the legitimacy of Christ’s imputed righteousness on the grounds that such words were not found in Scripture. That was the very mode of argumentation appropriated by Arius, Socinus, and now Sherlock.206 Known for his own proclivities to thrive on polemical divinity, and an equal match for Owen as far as Calvinism was concerned, Thomas Danson wrote A Friendly-Debate between Satan and Sherlock. More pungent yet were (1) that Sherlock’s divinity was sure to “transform Christianity into Mahumentanism” and (2) that it was written by “an hearty Enemy of Mahumetanism.” With the incipient fears of Islam as the religion of choice for those who veered off from Calvinistic divinity, Danson’s title said at least as much about his own religious fears as it did about the actual philoIslamic trajectory of Sherlock.207 Already relatively short (fi ft y pages, sans the

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dedicatory epistle and the postscript), Danson’s Friendly-Debate was chockfull of polemical aphorisms and one-liners, thereby disallowing a substantive analysis of Sherlock’s “pernicious errors.” Yet Danson was convinced that Sherlock was indebted to Samuel Hoard’s Gods Love to Mankind, the controversial Arminian text from the 1640s. Rather than the Restoration being a major rupture, thus making it little connected to the battles of the 1640s and 1650s, it is clear that strikingly similar battles were raging in the mid-1670s as well.208 Danson’s strategy of quotation was as selective as Sherlock’s had been, designed to besmirch and render Sherlock’s reputation as odious as possible. His opening salvo was an exercise of making Sherlock sound like a proponent of natural religion: “The light of nature, and works of Creation and Providence assure us, that God is so good, that he designs and desires the happiness of all his creatures according to the capacity of their Natures, p. 42.”209 Yet as one goes back to the referred page in Sherlock’s Discourse concerning the Knowledge of Jesus Christ, one notes immediately what Danson omitted to make Sherlock a natural religion proponent. Since Danson did not provide an ellipsis between “Providence” and “assure,” one assumes it was so in Sherlock’s text. Such was Danson’s polemical sleight of hand. What fell between the foregoing two words was “and those manifold Revelations God hath made of himself to the World, especially that last and most perfect Revelation by Jesus Christ our Lord.” Th is changes nearly everything, potentially rendering the Islamic charge almost a moot point! Surely, Sherlock was an Arminian; surely, he was aghast at seeing the mystery-laden divinity of Owen, but he was surely as opposed to “Mahumentanism” as he was to Calvinism. Yet in terms of scoring polemical points, Danson was an equal match for Sherlock, as he queries whether Sherlock’s Arminian divinity was to make ultimately “useless, and to reduce Religion to its first natural state, when you make no other duty necessary to happiness, than what the light of Nature suggests; and no other ground needful to the hopes of it, than the goodness of God, which had been known as fully (as now it is) if Christ had never appeared in the world.”210 Danson imputed to Sherlock the opinion that Adam and Eve’s salvation depended on their adherence to the “Principles of the Natural Religion” and, in a predictable polemical move, cited Valentinus Smalcius’s comment that the words of God to Eve, presumably referring to Genesis 3:15, contained no promise of Christ.211 Such scurrilous attacks from both sides did not change anyone’s view about the foregoing topics, although it did change the career path of Sherlock. He was made D.D. in 1680, two years after the third edition of A Discourse concerning the Knowledge of Jesus Christ came out, and Dean of St. Paul’s in 1691, thereby confi rming the status of Owen as a Sisyphean agent on the wrong side of the theological battle line.

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X

Conclusion Assuredly, Sherlock became more prominent as a result of tackling the Independent elephant. While Owen’s former tutor, Thomas Barlow—now Bishop of Lincoln—might express his ire over the scurrility of Sherlock and maintained the Calvinistic minority position within the church, Owen went on to write his last book, Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, published posthumously. Taking cues from the subtitle, Owen’s shadowboxing with Biddle, the Continental Socinians, Sherlock, and Clagett was all effort from those who, with modicum of faith, strove toward sight, differing over the particulars of the Trinity, the nature of the union of the two natures in Christ, and the mysterious nature of the saints’ union with their Lord. Owen exulted in Meditations for Christ’s forming of “his own nature in us” as a concrete benefit of the believer’s union with Christ and justification by faith alone. The nature Owen has in mind seems to be the divine, not human, and as one reads on, it is easy to see why Clagett, Sherlock, Thomas Hotchkiss, and others found a good number of Dissenters to be indistinguishable from Enthusiasts: He thus communicates himself unto us, by the Formation of a new Nature, his own nature in us; so as that the very same spiritual nature is in him, and in the Church. . . . But the same Divine Nature it is, that is in him and us; for through the precious promises of the Gospel, we are made partakers of his Divine Nature. It is not enough for us, that he hath taken our nature to be his, unless he gives us also his nature to be ours; that is, implants in our souls all those gracious qualifications, as unto the essence and substance of them, wherewith he himself in his human nature is endued. This is that new man, that new Creature that Divine Natures, that Spirit, which is born of the spirit, that Transformation into the Image of Christ.212 This rapturous vision of the eschatological glory was usually not part of Sherlock’s theological or homiletical reflections. Here as he was waiting for his faith to be turned into sight, Owen allowed the readers to see the eschatological shape of the human self, as the Spirit continues to transform the believers by ever deeper communion with the triune God. Again, that was what he found so woefully lacking in Socinian divinity: the joy of communion. We have seen in this chapter that the trinitarian spirituality of the two leading Puritans, Cheynell and Owen, was never a static entity. Instead, it was formed in the context of polemic, responding to and being shaped by the contours of the crisis over the identity of God.

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The innumerable theological battles and hermeneutical divergences between antitrinitarians and trinitarians hinged on the use of the Bible and appropriation of the Church Fathers. Both Scripture and patristic writings had this in common: they were historical documents. How one viewed and appropriated these historical texts, the patristic writings in particular, was predicated on how one interpreted the past itself, in toto. As seen in previous chapters, the Church’s historical past was never really in the past, filed away, and deemed irrelevant. Quite the contrary, it became the very topos of confessional conflicts and theological skirmishes and continued to provide fuel for burning, of books and people. In the chapter following, we look at two strange polemical bedfellows, Thomas Hobbes and Richard Baxter, whose perspectives on the Church’s past, especially the hegemonic emergence of the power of bishops, their councils, and the authority thereof, became hotly contested. While trinitarian spirituality might have been important for Baxter, in the throes of the Exclusion Crisis and continuing persecution of the Dissenters, he began to telescope his present-day experience of persecutory bishops into the fourthcentury context of Nicaea and, indeed, vice versa. We hope to see that albeit an indirect blow, Hobbes’s and Baxter’s respective “ecclesiastical histories” and their challenge of conciliar authority became yet another key in challenging the epistemological and historical basis for trinitarian orthodoxy.

5

Bishops Behaving Badly? Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell on the Problem of Conciliar History and the Nature of Heresy

Vincere Catholicum, vinci erat Haereticum1 Shall we believe you, or St. CYRIL, and the Major part of that Great Council?2

I

Introduction On Saturday, July 21, 1683, about 250 Oxford dons held Convocation, led by William Jane, the newly appointed Regius Professor of Divinity (figure 5.1). The extraordinary events of the Rye House Plot undoubtedly still on their minds, the university officials wanted to make a definitive statement about the cost of rebellion. They produced a list of heretical books that would not only be prohibited from purchase, publication, and perusal but also be burned. Along with works by Milton, Samuel Rutherford, and John Owen were the books by Richard Baxter and Thomas Hobbes.3 Intriguingly, the Oxford decree defined the ultimate adjudicators of orthodoxy as “holy Scriptures,” “Faith and Profession of the Primitive Church,” the conciliar decrees, and patristic writings. In other words, aside from Scripture and primitive witness, the Restoration Church was leaning heavily on the authority of the “dead bishops.”4 William Lamont suggested that to put Baxter at Hobbes’s level would be to flatter Baxter.5 Perhaps so. However, the 1683 Oxford Convocation had a precedent. In an interesting exercise of lumping together all enemies of the Restoration Church of England and government, William Assheton,

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Figure 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.

a fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford, hereticated Baxter’s and Hobbes’s political theologies together in his Evangelium Armatum (1663).6 His venom against the Dissenters, prompted by his conviction that they could never

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be loyal subjects to Charles II, continued unabated for the rest of the century.7 Not to be outdone in either polemic or prolixity, the spokesman of the “Presbyterians,” Baxter, thundered back, arguing that Assheton’s inveterate hatred of the Dissenters was “false and impudent, beseeming the Devil himself.”8 However, a hitherto underexplored common thread between Hobbes, Baxter, and Andrew Marvell—who is perhaps better known as a poet and a friend of John Milton, rather than a critic of the council of Nicaea or of the Trinity—is the main focus of this chapter; perhaps similar religious and historical sensibilities would be a better way of capturing what follows. Why is this so important? Although there has been renewed interest in Hobbes’s religion, there has been relatively little attention given to his perspective on heresy and historiography until recently.9 Baxter is somewhat ironically similar. As a best-selling author of practical divinity and one who seemed to find it nearly impossible to stay away from the religio-political controversies of his day, much has been written on Baxter’s political theology, devotional literature, and his celebrated pastorate.10 Concerning the topic of heresy, an interesting lacuna exists; aside from a recent essay by Neil Keeble, little has been done on this key theme in early modern English culture, politics and religion.11 The antitrinitarian controversy which occupied the religious imagination of many in seventeenth-century England had several causes. First, there were explicit and direct attacks on and repudiation of the ontological status of Christ, as we have seen in Paul Best and John Biddle. Second, the corrosive blows chipping away at the foundation of trinitarian orthodoxy also came from the “radical” religious groups in the 1640s and 1650s, who—along with the “rational” divinity of Biddle, Best, and other explicitly antitrinitarians—because of their repudiation of the truth of homoousion, the extra-biblical nature of the Nicene Creed, and the like ended up either denying the Trinity or, even more, argued that they comprised one person of the heavenly Trinity themselves. Consequently, whether one repudiated the Trinity explicitly or affirmed it by enlisting oneself as a member of the divine Trinity, one veered off the traditional notion of the Trinity. The third cause, as we shall see in this chapter, was less directly targeted at the ontological status of Jesus, nor concerned with this incipient form of religious diversity or radical religion. Instead, it had to do with the metacritique of the power mongering among the bishops at the councils and an emphasis on the radically historicized, thus contingent, nature of orthodoxy and heresy, thereby destabilizing the historical basis of trinitarian orthodoxy, for example, the authority of the Councils of Nicaea and Ephesus.

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Irena Backus’s Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615), an immensely erudite and nuanced book, concludes by ascertaining: History was a vital omnipresent force in the Reformation era and theologians of different confessions drew different inspirations from it. . . . Discovery and promulgations of historical method was a source of inspiration to representatives of all confessions. Historical scholarship during the Reformation era had two main components. One of these was a genuine interest in the past; the other was the concern to affirm confessional identity by privileging a particular historical method.12 Backus convincingly demonstrated that history was an important arsenal in establishing and bolstering one’s confessional identity. In that regard, Melanchthon’s Chronicon Carionis (1558); Baronius’s Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607), which was more than a mere Catholic counterpolemic vis-à-vis Matthias Flacius’s Magdeburg Centuries (1559–1574); and Abraham Scultetus’s Medullae theologiae patrum syntagma (1598–1613), ranging from Lutheran to Roman Catholic to Calvinist, all sought to confirm their orthodox pedigree and apostolic succession by demonstrating the connection with the primitive church.13 The origins and nature of ecclesiastical historiography was, as Arnaldo Momigliano has suggested, intensely controversial. Since one’s putative eternal destiny depended on ecclesiology and theology, competing groups challenged their opponents on their facts, interpretations, methodologies, and even their opponents’ own intellectual qualifications.14 Therefore, it was hardly a surprise to see both Catholic and Protestant polemicists providing long catenae of sources to produce the “evidence,” which was almost always rejected by their rivals. Polemical scholarship and scholarly polemic was not oxymoronic; instead, this was the very cauldron out of which critical scholarship was birthed.15 This Continental historiographical battle line was replicated similarly in the English context as well. Historical identities were crucial for all Christians in England: Catholic and Protestant; Foxe (and the Marian exiles), Thomas Stapleton, Nicholas Harpsfield, and Thomas Harding; Laudian and Puritan; and radical separatist and intransigent conformist.16 In the ecclesiastical consolidation of the Church of England, especially in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, establishing a historical pedigree of the Church with its lineage traceable to the apostles without its dependence on Rome was deemed absolutely crucial. Its intensity was such that, as Patrick Collinson rightly noted, the amphitheater of ecclesiastical history of this period proved to be the topos of perhaps the fiercest “ideological conflict over competing versions of truth.”17 In general, constructing one’s historical argument from antiquity and apostolicity was a

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typical mode of polemic, thereby prompting the nearly ubiquitous Catholic ecclesiological polemic: “Where was your church before Luther?”18 Bishop of Salisbury and a leading apologist for the Church of England, John Jewel’s deft defense of the Anglican historical authenticity would occasionally touch on the corruption of Rome, both its ecclesiology and theology (especially of transubstantiation). Yet he shied away from using conciliar history to cast aspersions on the credibility of the doctrine of the Trinity, which was, as we shall see, the eventual trajectory of the polemic of Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell. If doctrine provided an ideological compass of who they were, ecclesiastical histories offered a narrative vector of where they came from and why their sociopolitical, religious situations were in that particular mode then. Historical identities also provided the requisite arsenal for polemical exchanges. In the case of all three of our interlocutors, Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell, they explored and exploited history for their own polemical purposes, namely, to lay blame for the Church’s loss of primitive purity on the avaricious and bellicose bishops and their inordinate hereticating practices. Given this particular penchant for interpreting the Christian past, it was little surprise that Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell all found the “four general councils” of Nicaea (325 ce), Constantinople (381 ce), Ephesus (431 ce), and Chalcedon (451CE) not primarily as sites where the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was formulated. Rather, they found them to be the beginning of an incorrigible and irreversible downward trend in the Church’s proliferation of creeds ad infinitum and the corresponding rise of priestcraft. This chapter contends that a key component of the antitrinitarian cultural and religious habitus was historical, as well as exegetical-theological. In other words, not only were the Socinians adroit at interpreting certain contested texts in an antitrinitarian direction but also they were keenly aware that no biblical exegesis could stand on its own unless one could demonstrate that one’s exegesis put him in the middle of the historical stream of “faithful exegetes.” Such was precisely the reason for Biddle’s interest in historical reconstruction of the doctrine of the Trinity, especially in the ante-Nicene period. We also recall that the typical list of ante-Nicene Church Fathers, including Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, was also utilized by Herbert Thorndike and Nicholas Estwick, two trinitarian exegetes of the mid-seventeenth century, to propose a view diametrically opposed to Biddle’s. Jean-Louis Quantin, in his magisterial The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, shows that the Anglican tradition waged its polemical battles, vis-à-vis Catholics on the one hand and vis-à-vis Protestant radicals and Puritans on the other, often in historical terms. Even when systematic theological issues were argued, transubstantiation or predestination, they were never merely polemicized from scriptural texts and “evidences” alone.19 For Anthony Milton, the dialectical tension between Catholic and Reformed was precisely the nexus of

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identity confirmation and contestation, thus accelerating the pace and scope of Anglican ecclesiastical historical scholarship. However, when surveying the contemporary historiography that covers the doctrinal issues of the trinitarian controversies in seventeenth-century England, one is hard-pressed to see the connection between the Christological issues hammered out in the first four ecumenical councils and the way these historical narratives were appropriated for varying polemical purposes: antitrinitarian or trinitarian. In the two standard works on Socinianism and Unitarianism in early modern England, by H. J. McLachlan and E. M. Wilbur, there is little to no discussion of this crucial matrix to situate the doctrinal issues promulgated by the contestants from both sides.20 A similar trend continued recently in the monographs by Philip Dixon and Sarah Mortimer, although Mortimer does offer helpful analyses of Socinian historiography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet even in Mortimer’s incisive analysis, the influence of early church history and its intellectual legacy on the Socinian natural law theory was lacking.21 Despite a welcome shift in the trend in early modern English historiography to engage more fruitfully with Rezeptionsgeschichte, especially through the work of Jean-Louis Quantin, Mark Vessey, and the recently completed John Foxe project, a more substantial analysis of the use of ecclesiastical history in various trinitarian debates is needed. In the analysis here, we shall discuss the evident presentist concerns for Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell. Rather than constructing dispassionate, objective histories of the patristic period, which was, as Backus noted, a mere rhetorical trope, they veiled intensely partisan and polemical aims. The three “historians” offer a focused account of the abuses, mishaps, and persecutory praxis surrounding the history of the councils. Furthermore, the corrosive influence of bishops and popes on the Church’s primitive roots became the polemical preoccupation for Hobbes, seen especially in Leviathan, Appendix to his Latin Leviathan (1668), and Historia Ecclesiastica. Baxter contributed to this genre with his Church-History of the Government of Bishops and their Councils Abbreviated (1680) and The True History of Councils Enlarged and Defended (1682). Finally, Marvell wrote Mr. Smirke and A Short Historical Essay concerning General Councils. Their trinitarian contemporaries were well aware that this mode of historical argument would have deleterious effects on the credibility of the trinitarian doctrine. If the bishops, who were the formularies of the doctrine of the ineffable mystery of the Trinity, behaved worse than pagans and infidels, how reliable was their doctrine? Moreover, if their primary pursuit was power and self-aggrandizement, not purity of doctrine and sanctification of the Church, was not the Trinity a mere polemical tool to oust the bishops’ polemical and political enemies, such as Arius, Eunomius, and Nestorius? Even though in modern accounts of trinitarian theology, these three early modern critics of the abuses of ecumenical councils are hardly

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mentioned, both their contemporaries and the Deists of the next century appropriated their contributions for their own antitrinitarian purposes. By connecting Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell in their common critique of priestcraft, particularly the episcopal abuses of power to determine orthodoxy and heresy, one gets a fresh perspective on the movement of antitrinitarianism in early modern England. It was as historical as it was exegetical. Pace Pierre Legouis and William K. Jordan, who saw Marvell and Baxter as migrating “under rationalist influence to Deism,” this chapter argues that their denunciation of conciliar abuses nonetheless comprised a formidable intra-Protestant critique with a protean antitrinitarian vector.22 These three histories of the councils created a powerful impression that, while the doctrine of the Trinity promulgated at the Council of Nicaea might have been scriptural (although that, too, was contested), the metaphysical preoccupation and episcopal manhandling of the opposition was certainly not. As Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell were responding to the political crises of Restoration in the late 1660s through early 1680s, I hope to show that this prelude and the full-blown Trinitarian Controversy of the early 1690s are inseparably linked. Consequently, irrespective of their intentions, it would seem that Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell have contributed to what Alexandra Walsham calls a cultural “creation of a fresh corpus of historical myth” concerning the nature of the first four ecumenical councils and beyond.23 This historiographical creation of priestcraft gained such a quick cultural purchase that Gilbert Burnet bitterly complained of it, particularly in relation to the attack on the Trinity: “priestcraft grew to be another word in fashion, and the enemies of religion vented all their impieties under the cover of these words.”24

II

Hobbes’s Perspective on Heresy and Early Church Councils If anyone knew the didactic function of history, it was Hobbes. One of his earliest publications was the first Greek-to-English translation of Thucydides’s Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War (1629). Noting that the true genius of Thucydides lay not in mere regurgitation of historical facts but also in effectively employing “Eloquution [that is, eloquence]” to “the Body of history,” Hobbes argued that good history moved the heart while simultaneously informing the mind of the reader. Thus for Hobbes, truth and eloquence were coextensive in any good historical writing, for the “latter without the former, is but a picture of History; and the former without the latter, vnapt to instruct.”25 It seems that was precisely the maxim he sought to adhere to in his own historical writings in the Restoration period.

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The publication of his Leviathan in 1651 catapulted him into scorn and scrutiny among the ardent trinitarians: Laudians, Presbyterians, Independents, or Catholics. Hobbes’s critics assiduously cited from patristic authors, conciliar histories, a plethora of biblical texts, and theological treatises from Peter Lombard to Calvin to show the singularity of his views on the Trinity and the radical Erastianism which effectively dislodged the power of ecclesiastical governance from the hands of the clergy, vesting it in the hands of the sovereign.26 In this section, we shall discuss the way Hobbes sought to render the specifics of trinitarian theology almost irrelevant by arguing that the Council of Nicaea was marked by metaphysical obfuscation and the moral turpitude of the priest-bishops and the simultaneous gentleness and diffidence of Constantine. Thus, he could confess his “belief” in the Trinity, while seriously questioning the credibility of those who formulated it.27 Consequently, Nicaea was the beginning of the long slumber of the Church, only to be rudely awakened by the prophetic work of Luther. Hobbes went to work in the 1660s, carrying forward and consolidating his doctrinal minimalism, historicist perspective on the nature of heresy, and primitive Christocentrism undergirded by sola scriptura, as a means of self-defense and presentation of his mature thought on ecclesiastical history and its dubious theological legacy. John Aubrey, Hobbes’s biographer, reported that around the time of the Restoration, Hobbes was composing a Latin poem in hexameters, designed to chronicle the “History of the Encroachment of the clergie (both Roman and Reformed) on the Civil Power.” In the same essay, Aubrey spoke of the alleged fact that “the Bishops would have him burn’t for a Heretique,” which prompted Hobbes to burn some of his papers lest there be a raid and search of his literary remains.28 In October 1666, the Commons deliberated on the “Bill against Atheism and Profaneness” to make heresy a crime, punishable by imprisonment, and if persistently incorrigible, then death. This bill was strikingly similar to the 1648 “Draconick Ordinance.”29 Though rebuffed in 1666, 1674, 1675, and 1680, the mere fact of its repeated appearance indicates the raised alert level vis-à-vis the growth of heresies: antitrinitarianism, denial of hell, repudiation of original sin, and materialist conceptions of the universe, among others, usually topped the list of popular heresies of the period. Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, both accused of denying the Trinity, were the last to be burned for heresy in 1612, until the Restoration.30 A key area of attack on the Leviathan surrounded its trenchant critique of the doctrine of the Trinity, and critics such as Alexander Ross and John Bramhall asserted that Hobbes’s strange conception of the Trinity was even more pernicious than outright rejection. Seen against this backdrop of heresy hunting during Charles II’s reign, often precipitated by, and reinforcing, the Restoration Crises, Hobbes’s “Appendix” to his Latin Leviathan, expounding on the themes

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of the nature of heresy, the Nicene Creed, and his Historia Ecclesiastica can be read “as a form of self-defense.”31 The three aspects of Hobbes’s historicized view of heresy and the Trinity are (1) his trenchantly deconstructed notion of heresy; (2) his radical anti-popery and anticlericalism, with its concomitant Erastianism; and (3) his doctrinal minimalism, or primitive Christocentrism, without the Hellenistic straitjacket. The two main areas of the opposition to Leviathan had to with his doctrine of the Trinity and his radical Erastianism. Hobbes’s heterodox view of the Trinity was basically a strange concoction of Sabellianism. Whereas Sabellius, a third-century heretic, had taught that “Father, Son, and Spirit” were three different modes of divine revelation in history, Hobbes added his own twist by averring that it was Moses, Christ, and the Holy Spirit who comprised the Trinity. Among his religious ideas, as Noel Malcolm, Jeffrey Collins, and Jon Parkin have argued, his view of the Trinity, aside from his Erastian ecclesiology, was the most controversial.32 Consequently, by the time his Latin version of the Leviathan was published, it was amended, allegedly to placate the wrath of the orthodox trinitarians, be they Anglicans or Dissenters.33 In his letter to Matthew Wren of October 21, 1651, Henry Hammond called Leviathan a “farrago of all the maddest divinity that ever was read,” with a clear penchant for demolishing the “Trinity, Heaven, Hell” and other cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith in one fell swoop.34 In the following section, we examine the continuity of the “maddest divinity” of Hobbes in the postRestoration writings dealing with heresy and the nature of conciliar history. III

Hobbes on Heresy in the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan Writing in 1996, Patricia Springborg noted that the two key Hobbes texts that deal exclusively with “religious and ecclesiastical history,” Historical Narrative Concerning Heresy and the Punishment Thereof and Historia Ecclesiastica, were either not properly translated (for the latter) or received insufficient scholarly attention (for both).35 Two major advances in Hobbes studies in the last decade have been the publication of the critical edition of Historia Ecclesiastica in 200836 and George Wright’s Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes, particularly the translation of the 1668 appendix to the Latin Leviathan, which allows greater access to this key aspect of Hobbes’s political theology.37 In the first chapter of the appendix, Hobbes offered a seemingly straightforward orthodox exposition of the Nicene Creed. The nature and treatment of heresy was the focus of the second chapter, followed by Hobbes’s own rejoinders to a plethora of objections to Leviathan, especially about the Trinity.

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This revision, rather than a recantation (which asserts that the “intention is impeccable, but the explication was erroneous”) of the Trinity has been subject to divergent interpretations.38 Summarizing Hobbes’s religious views in general, and those reflected in the 1668 appendix in particular, Wright maintained that: Hobbes’s formulations of religious themes, in themselves and in relation to his doctrine of political obligation, are intrinsic to his theoretical project. His views on these matters are less heterodox in context and more revealing than usually thought. Critics have failed to appreciate some features of the Protestant tradition of which Hobbes was a trenchant proponent.39 Rather than representing a repentant mea culpa maxima of an elderly Hobbes, it was simultaneously continuous with the themes of critique of priestcraft and Aristotelian divinity. Indeed it can even be seen as amplification and clarification of his earlier views, but certainly not a “retraction or capitulation.”40 Woven throughout the tapestry of his 1668 appendix was Hobbes’s defense of the primitive, minimalistic, Christocentric, and, most crucially, non-Aristotelian, scriptural faith. Against this simple faith focusing on Jesus and the apostles came the accretion of the Church’s tradition, codified in councils and creeds, whose purposes were gleefully served by the Aristotle-mimicking theologian. Moreover, Hobbes consistently espoused the place of the civil sovereign to determine the contour of the Church’s doctrine.41 Yet affirming all the foregoing does not a heretic make. In his exposition on the doctrine of creation, as part of his commentary on the Nicene Creed, Hobbes affirmed creatio ex nihilo, that the universe came from nothing, clearly distancing himself from the Aristotelian cosmology, and affirmed both the contingency of creation and the future eternity of the created order: “they shall be to everlasting.”42 Moreover, clearly aware of the Socinian shibboleth of regarding Jesus as God’s “adoptive son” through the resurrection, Hobbes called it an opinion of the heretics, bolstering his Nicene Christological credentials.43 Anchoring instead the Son’s eternal generation as expressly taught “throughout the Sacred Scriptures,” Hobbes proceeded to show that articles of the Nicene Creed of Christ being “God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made” was scripturally defensible, thereby affirming the confessional core of the creed.44 Again, as we shall see later, this was not his key battle. What was taught, or the substance of the creed, was not his primary concern. Who had the ultimate authority to interpret, and enjoin it upon the general populace, was. Seeking to respond to the request that some rational explanation be made regarding the specific mode of Christ’s Incarnation, Hobbes “fumbled” along, and said: “But, how He was made man is not mine to inquire after. It is sufficient

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for me that He has become my Redeemer. And, what then?”45 While the foregoing expressions might be examples of Hobbes’s ironic and insincere dicta, yet there is another mode of explication. It seems the ingenious “solution” that Hobbes offered, to which contemporary scholarship, with the exception of George Wright and Gianni Paganini, has not paid sufficient attention, was his potential commitment to and endorsement of apophatic theology, which underscored divine incomprehensibility. Natural revelation taught that God exists and this deity was worthy of worship, so averred Hobbes. The metamorphosis of this unknown science into theology essentially amounted to delimiting of God “who is infinite,” thus Hobbes, again, issued an apophatic warning in his posthumous publication, Historia Ecclesiastica.46 Assuredly, and quite possibly, this apophatic gesture might have been indeed just that: rhetorical posturing to curtail the scope of what can and cannot be said about God. George Wright, however, sees philosophical moves of this sort as more than mere rhetoric and correctly offers a rejoinder to the Curley-Martinich debate that Hobbes’s apophatic theology serves as a key matrix to understand the nature of his religion.47 Because Hobbes believed that God was ultimately unknowable, human squabbles while peering into the nature of God, as in Council of Nicaea and beyond, were exercises in theological futility. Hobbes contended that the task of adjudicating between competing claims of biblical interpretation and religious controversies was best left alone to the sovereign, whose threefold office (munus triplex), prophetic, kingly, and priestly, could be combined. This was, as his contemporaries found, the most threatening of ecclesiastical order, to cede interpretive control to the heirs of Constantine. Hobbes’s apophatic theology was circumscribed and guided by “the Holy Writing,” which articulated what can be said about the “divine nature” and what transcends human language.48 Having just said that Scripture provided the blueprint sine qua non in our understanding of divine nature, Hobbes enjoined immediately that what counts for true Christian faith was acceptance of Christ, conformity to “Divine Law,” but certainly not “an understanding of the nature of the divine.”49 Nevertheless, Hobbes noted in his exposition of the Nicene Creed in the appendix of the Latin Leviathan that deviation from the scripto-centrism of the primitive Church and the hegemonic struggle among the power-mongering clergy brought about the downfall of true piety. The most devastating blow Hobbes delivered to the historical basis and theological foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity was not his explicit repudiation of the deity of Christ, for he most assuredly did not. Given the heightened alert level to hunt Hobbes down for heresy in the second half of the 1660s, Hobbes would be insane to do so. Yet not one to simply cower under pressure, Hobbes hurled his polemical salvo to effectively vitiate the trinitarian foundation in two ways.

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First of all, in his appendix he spoke of the cruelty surrounding the Council of Nicaea and reiterated his conviction that conciliar history revealed the greed and self-delusional grandeur of the priests who would rather be popes. After castigating the bishops at Nicaea for their hubris to explain the ineffable mystery of the Trinity, which can only be received by faith, not rationally explained, Hobbes maintained that the “great article” of homoousion, that is, Christ being of “one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made,” brought “so many disorders into the ancient church, so many banishments and killings (‘exilia et homocidia’).”50 Hobbes’s critique of Nicene theology can be summarized in the following: 1. The mystery of Christ’s consubstantiality with the Father cannot be rationally expounded, certainly not by employing Aristotelian metaphysics. 2. Such hubris was precisely what was attempted at Nicaea and contaminated the bishops at Nicaea, both orthodox and heterodox. 3. While Nicaea did right by affirming the deity of Christ, it also committed an egregious error by officially endorsing a philosophy-laden theology. The other bombshell Hobbes threw at the playground of homoousion-mongering trinitarians in Restoration England was politicizing the process of adjudicating between heresy and orthodoxy. For him, truth was not an independent entity apart from political decisions. Whatsoever the sovereign decreed in terms of religious confession was indeed true. Power determined truth. So we fi nd Hobbes puts it tersely: “vincere Catholicum, vinci erat Haereticum”; that is, to conquer was to be Catholic, and to be conquered was to be heretical.51 Such seeming arbitrariness in anchoring the reality of orthodoxy to the decision of whoever is ruling (thus the Peace of Westphalia, “cuius regio, eius religio,” underscoring the radical Erastian settlement of 1648, after the Th irty Years War) was seen by Bishop John Bramhall as a sign of capitulation of the Church’s interpretive authority, which was its by jure divino. In his appendix to the Latin Leviathan, Hobbes reiterated almost exactly the same sentiment. Speaking of all ecclesiastical councils, starting with Nicaea, Hobbes notes: In these councils, the participants defined what one was to believe concerning the faith in any area of dispute. That which was defined was called the Catholic faith; what was condemned, heresy. For, with respect to the individual bishop or pastor, the council was the catholic church, that is, the whole or universal church. So also was their opinion the catholic opinion,

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while a specific teaching held by an individual pastor was heresy . . . in every church, the words “catholic” and “heretic” are relative terms.52 Hobbes noted elsewhere that the eternal truth concerning the everlasting God was decided by majority votes, and whoever could wield greater political influence would ensure that he would be on the winning side, thus Catholic and orthodox. The less popular, absolutely irrespective of the veridical status, would be the losers of history, thus heretics. Yet all such terms were relative, time-bound, contingent on the political sitz im leben. As Hobbes’s critics noted, this was to demolish the edifice of the trinitarian faith that had held the “Catholic” church together since the days of Christ and the apostles. For Restoration Anglicans, Hobbes’s highly idiosyncratic and selective, indeed Socinian, theological method of adhering to Christ’s messianic office while being dismissive of conciliar authority was tantamount to a denial of Christ’s deity in the final analysis. Then in an intriguing exercise of ideological gerrymandering, Hobbes insisted that when heretics were burned by the Catholics, they were burned as Christians. If so, the Church was guilty of burning erring yet sincere Christians! A. Those whom the Roman Church ordered to be burned, the Lutherans, the Anabaptists and others, did it consider them Christians or pagans? B. Without a doubt, Christians, and not only them, but surely also the Arians and all the others whom the Nicene Synod condemned; nor did it call them anything other than heretics. For, even though, by using philosophic reasonings concerning the nature of the Savior, they felt differently than they should have about the Holy Trinity, against the Holy Scriptures, nonetheless they looked upon Christ as the true Messiah and Jesus Christ as the Son of God and called upon his name.53 To bring matters closer to the English shores, Hobbes cited the example of the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy of 1559, whereby, at least as Hobbes read the intentions of the Act, lest bishops’ whimsical prejudice hereticate someone willy-nilly, the Act restricted heresies to those repudiated in the “first four general Councils.” Hobbes, as he tirelessly inveighed against his opponents, never denied the Trinity; thus he cannot be declared a heretic, neither by the first four ecumenical councils nor by the Elizabethan statute.54 For Hobbes, the nearly interminable linguistic imprecision over Greek and Latin ascriptions of the mode of divine substance and essence—hypostasis,

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substantia, personae—was a cause for further deviation of post-Nicene trinitarian theology from primitive Christianity.55 In fact, the longest part of Hobbes’s exposition of the Nicene Creed dealt with how to make sense, if at all, of “hypostasis, essential, substantia, persona.” In the middle of a long-winded philosophical disquisition, Hobbes uttered, “O, the amazing sleights of a vain philosophy!” This summed it all for Hobbes and his attitude to “metaphysics” of the Nicene trinitarian theo-logic.56 Then Hobbes proceeded to dismantle the ultimate credibility of the trinitarian theology by arguing that the traditional definition of person as a “rational substance . . . an individual substance that is single but intelligent.” For Hobbes, this Boethian influence signaled the death knell for the credibility of trinitarian theology, leading therefore to the conclusion that tritheism was the unexpected theological cul-de-sac that Bellarmine and others had stepped into.57 So what is Hobbes basically saying, deny the eternal generation and deity of Christ? Not at all! Again, Hobbes’s main frustration was the overly inquisitive metaphysical dealings of the wellmeaning, second-rate philosophers called bishops, who bequeathed to posterity even more confusing pseudo-explanations: A. But why was it necessary to explain such things at all, which they knew to be incomprehensible, that is, inexplicable? B. The Fathers of the Church, both before and after the Council of Nicaea, freely owned that the Incarnation of the Son of God could not be understood, but they pleaded in excuse that they were forced to debate the matter by heretics.58 After this response, Hobbes quoted from Epiphanius of Salamis, Bellamine, Peter Lombard, and Augustine to show that the trinitarian metaphysic was forced to be developed in the face of the heretical attack. Yet the fact that orthodox defense of the Trinity took this path, argued Hobbes, was the downfall of and departure from Christianity undergirded by sola scriptura. As George Wright has convincingly demonstrated, this repeated reference to the sole authority of Scripture, far more than a mere verbal legerdemain, indicates Hobbes’s indebtedness to Luther, and in more than just one area. Luther’s antipathy toward Aristotelian-toting late medieval Scholastic theology, his view on human soul, his two-kingdom theory, his Erastian-leaning political theology, and his deep-seated anti-popery, according to Wright, resonated deeply with Hobbes. Thus it is Luther who emerges as the last witness in the end of Historia Ecclesiastica.59 Hobbes is unequivocally clear in his confession of belief in the Trinity, which he saw was derivable from Scripture. Yet he was also unflinchingly committed to denouncing Bellarmine’s and other theologians’ explanations of the Trinity as amounting to a tritheistic heresy. So to add

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a few qualifiers to Hobbes’s doctrinal minimalism: his was a Nicene, trinitarian minimalistic creed with a corresponding commitment to sola scriptura. IV

Heresy Historicized: An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie Significantly, Hobbes started off with a radically altered definition of heresy in Historical Narration concerning Heresie: “The word heresy is Greek, and signifies a taking of any thing, and particularly the taking of an opinion.” Compare that to any standard heresiography of Thomas Edwards, Ephraim Pagitt, or Richard Vines.60 Three clear contrasts suggest themselves. Whereas Hobbes started his deconstructive redefinition of heresy by taking the reader back to Hellenistic philosophical schools, Edwards, Pagitt, and Vines tended to limit themselves to Christian heresies. Second, related to the first point, Hobbes broadened the category of heresy to be inclusive just about any opinion. Third, whereas Hobbes tended to lump all heresies in one category of espousing any opinion regarding matters religious, Richard Vines, more so than Edwards or Pagitt, sought to differentiate between fundamental heresies and non-fundamental errors.61 John Coffey has recently suggested that before Vines’s tract The Authors, Nature and Danger of Haeresie appeared in 1647, the oft-vituperative rhetoric of the Presbyterians since the floodgates of censorship opened in 1640 “generated much polemical heat but little theological light.”62 Hobbes’s Leviathan and his perspectives on heresy reflect the mind of a philosopher swimming against the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist. So Hobbes’s first “deconstructive” point: since heresy meant no more than a private opinion, there was “no reference to truth or falshood.”63 Enumerating the philosophical sects of Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics as competing schools, Hobbes noted that jealousy and fierce competition became more common. The Stoics, in particular, “used to revile those that differed from them with the most despightful words they could invent.”64 What followed in Hobbes’s taxonomy of heresy warrants a close reading. He went on to write: By the preaching of the Apostles and Disciples of Christ in Greece and other parts of the Roman Empire, full of these Philosophers, many thousands of men were converted to the Christian Faith, some really, and some feignedly, for factious ends, or for need . . . and because most of these Philosophers had better skill in Disputing and Oratory than the Common people, and thereby were better qualified both to defend and propagate the Gospel, there is no doubt (I say) but most of the Pastors of the Primitive Church were for that reason chosen out of the number of these Philosophers; who retaining still

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many Doctrines which they had taken up on the authority of their former Masters, whom they had in reverence, endeavoured many of them to draw the Scriptures every one to his own Heresie. And thus at first entred Heresie into the Church of Christ.65 This last sentence might be a cleverly subversive case of double entendre, or ironic insincerity, on Hobbes’s part. First, he asserts that most of the early Christian pastors were erstwhile peripatetic philosophers, espousing their respective “heresies,” that is, mere opinions. Second, Hobbes noted their becoming pastors marked the entrance of thus-far innocuous heresies into the Church. There seems to be something deeper at work here. Initially, heresy meant differing opinion without any notable consequence on the veridical status, or the salvific possibility of someone espousing merely a different opinion. But Hobbes went on to write that the prevailing hermeneutical lens of these erstwhile pagan philosophers was their previous heresy they had adhered to. Not having extricated themselves from them completely, according to Hobbes, these philosophy-laden pastors started the church on this most horrific downward spiral. While they did not deny the canonical authority of the “Writings . . . left by the Apostles and Evangelists,” they certainly interpreted them, perhaps differently from the kerygma of the first-generation church. Third, Hobbes seemed to be driving a wedge between the apostles and evangelists and the philosophy-laden, heresy-espousing second-generation pastors. This hermeneutical perspective continued to be the lens through which Hobbes interpreted the nature of Christian doctrine and the declension thereof. Not only did Hobbes soften the provenance of the word and reality of heresy by attributing it as mere opinions held by different philosophers. Hobbes also asserted that “Catholick and Heretick were terms relative,” not absolute standards etched across the history of the Church. Even in instances where certain individuals were hereticated, Hobbes seemed to be asserting that they were locally put out of fellowship, not universally so.66 For Hobbes, orthodoxy was for the maintenance of order in civil society. Thus its main function was “disciplinary and civil rather than theological.”67 Orthodoxy and heresy were more functions of realpolitik than some willful perversion of the perennial Christian truth concerning the Savior. It was, therefore, the civil sovereign who had a moral obligation to determine heresy and orthodoxy. Obviously, it was far more clearly articulated in Hobbes than Baxter; Baxter, after all, did believe that primitive simplicity was in fact the base for all times and all places, and for all, indeed, following the Vincentian Canon.68 In his discussion of the “first and most troublesome Heresies in the Primitive Church,” namely, about the Trinity, Hobbes blamed the disputatious nature of these philosophers and maintained: “A great many other Heresies arose from

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the too much adherence to the Philosophy of those times, whereof some were supprest for a time by St. John’s publishing his Gospel, and some by their own unreasonableness vanished, and some lasted till the time of Constantine the Great, and after.”69 Hobbes’s description of the theological debates between Arius and Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, was concise and correct. Indeed, it was centered on an exegetical debate, with particular focus given to the variant readings of the Gospel of John.70 Then he discussed the extent of Constantine’s involvement. Hobbes was very clear that Constantine was largely indifferent to the outcome of the Council of Nicaea, as he allegedly said that “whatsover they should decree therein, he would cause to be observed.” Whatsoever? Was it Constantine’s tipping his hat toward the bishops? If that was the perceived intention of Constantine, that would not serve Hobbes’s cause well, seeing a civil sovereign genuflecting before ecclesiastical leaders. But he clarified what Constantine meant to say: “This may perhaps seem a greater indifferency than would in these days be approved of.” Then Hobbes spoke of the historically contingent nature of unchanging dogmas: “But so it is in the History; and the Articles of Faith necessary to Salvation, were not thought then to be so many as afterwards they were defined to be by the Church of Rome.” For Hobbes, the argument from either papal or conciliar authority was the cordon sanitaire in which the mysteries of the Trinity and transubstantiation were protected, which was dubious at best. His discussion of the Nicene Creed placed at the center the role of Constantine and not that of Athanasius, Alexander, or even Arius. It was not “so much the Truth,” Hobbes noted, but “the Uniformity of the Doctrine” and civil peace that primarily concerned Constantine. Thus he read Constantine’s utterance “That in a divine Mystery it was fit to use divina & arcana Verba” as reflection of doctrinal nonchalance, rather than confession of the apophatic nature of God and creed-making.71 Thus, his verdict on the use of philosophy in formulating essential article(s) of faith was as terse as pungent: “Such abstracted words ought not to be used in Arguing, and especially in the deducing the Articles of our Faith.”72 The deadly combination of the Aristotelian captivity of the primitive Church and Constantine’s unfortunate concession of his prerogative to determine the confessional contour to the avaricious bishops was the death knell for the Church. Perhaps Hobbes’s post-Restoration writing projects allow us insights into a man wrestling with the problem of Lessing’s “ugly ditch” avant la lettre—the problem of historical contingency and the necessary, materialistic conceptions, of reason. For example, toward the end of his Narration, Hobbes comments on the rise of the “Power of the Roman Church,” caused most likely by the incompetence or impotence of the emperors. The terminus a quo of this papal hegemonic dominance, for Hobbes, was at the close of the “four first General Councils.” It

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might just have been a historical observation: that the further loosening of the imperial grip on religious affairs happened after Chalcedon. Or it could be that he saw the golden age of orthodoxy to have been until the end of the fourth council: Hobbes would not be alone in this confessional framework. Lancelot Andrewes quipped in a sermon that the faith of the Church of England is encapsulated in “one canon of scripture inscribed by God himself, two testaments, three symbols [of Creeds], four general councils [“Priora Concilia”], five centuries, and the Fathers during the period—three before Constantine and two after—they fi x the rule of our faith.”73 As he developed this theme further in Historia Ecclesiastica, Hobbes indicted the papacy of the most pernicious usurpation in the form of political anarchy. The pope, having usurped the civil sovereign’s power to decide on matters religious, sought to expand the scope of the pontifical power by releasing the subjects of the sovereign from allegiance in the event that the sovereign failed to purge his “Dominions of Hereticks,” the tragic ramification of which was excommunication, interdiction, and abolition of the power of the sovereign.74 Most of what Hobbes articulated in An Historical Narration was amplified and buttressed with more historical “evidence” in his Latin hexameter poem, Historia Ecclesiastica. We shall examine its content and significance next. V

Historia Ecclesiastica and the Heresy of Heresies: Papacy and the Hereticating Councils Patricia Springborg, in a seminal article dealing with Historia Ecclesiastica, argued persuasively that the apotheosis of Hobbes’s preoccupation with civil religion and heresy was this posthumous publication, especially in the throes of the “vilification campaign” against him in 1666. Intriguingly, Historia Ecclesiastica was, until recently, an “almost wholly neglected source” for analyzing his political and religious views.75 Perhaps due to its daring nature, as Jeffrey Collins calls it the “most openly heretical book” within the Hobbes corpus, Historia Ecclesiastica was published posthumously in 1688.76 In this short history of the Church, Hobbes highlighted the surreptitious encroachment of the Trojan horse of Hellenistic philosophy into the Church, the unfortunate loss of control over the church and state by the civil sovereign, starting with Constantine, and with the corresponding dominance of the papacy. Hobbes further discussed the true nature of orthodoxies promulgated at these councils convened by the bishops without civil sanction and summed it all up by returning to his initial conviction found as early as De Cive, that heresy was a civil and not a theological issue, and thus it was the sovereign’s prerogative.77 In

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Historia Ecclesiastica, the irony was more striking, his criticism unrelenting, and the loss of ecclesial innocence seemingly irretrievable, unless, of course, a new Constantinian figure could restore order. Unlike Baxter, who had thought Richard Cromwell to be that godly ruler par excellence and was proven disastrously wrong, Hobbes was not holding out any great hopes. Hobbes’s mood seemed full of ire and ironic resignation. For Hobbes, an analysis of the four general councils, Nicaea (325 ce), Constantinople (381 ce), Ephesus (431 ce), and Chalcedon (451 ce), ascertained the correlative nature of history and doctrine: “doctrines confer some measure of intelligibility on history, and history gives greater visibility to the doctrines,” as Franck Lessay noted.78 It was a touch of irony that for one better known as a philosopher, political thinker, and natural law theorist, Hobbes’s literary bookends began with Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War and ended with Historia Ecclesiastica. Perhaps not. Convinced that heresy was “an ecclesiological issue best approached in an historical manner,” Hobbes began what turned out to be one of his last writings.79 The title Historia Ecclesiastica itself was not a mere coincidence, as Hobbes had access to a few Latin translations of the Greek Fathers in his personal library. In that intentional patristic self-fashioning, Hobbes was situating his work in the stream of venerable ecclesiastical historians such as Eusebius of Caesarea,80 Socrates Scholasticus,81 Sozomen Salaminius, Evagrius of Pontus, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus.82 Moreover, Epiphanius of Salamis, the leading fourth-century heresiographer and the author of Panarion, might have ironically shaped Hobbes’s historical vision as well.83 From the preface, Hobbes kicked the door of the Church bolted down by Aristotelianism and priestcraft: “our author preferred on this matter to learn Christian simplicity among the first Apostle and fishermen rather than to lose his little brain, bewildered, among the Nicene Fathers and Greekling Theosophists.”84 By the time one gets down only to line 50, the reader is confronted by a Hobbesian riddle: if it is true that one cannot know anything about God, aside from God’s “work, sacred laws, and his name to be feared,” how could one arrive at the conclusion that Christ is “himself God”?85 Either fideism, or “theological lying” masquerading as chastened humility before God, or yet an expression of apophatic theology, thereby utterly dependent upon Scripture to reveal further the divine identity? Whatever else might be knowable about God, Hobbes was absolutely certain that “these learned disputes” that focused on semantic differences, not substantial divergence, were the leading causes for the obfuscation of religious truth, thereby shipwrecking the “holy boat” of faith, jettisoning “piety and simplicity” along with it.86 In lines 63–64, Hobbes pronounced an anticlerical statement about hermeneutical equal access, as he spoke of the “perspicuity of scripture,”

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which was, as George Wright has shown, a key principle of the Lutheran Reformation embedded in Hobbes’s theopolitics as well: “The Lord speaks to everyone through the Holy Bible and he whispers to them [that is, ‘the Doctors,’ priests] no words secretly from us.”87 If everyone has equal access to God through sola scriptura and if Christ and his apostles required no Hellenistic syllogism to be saved, what, Hobbes asked, happened to the Church that we have heresies upon heresies, syllogisms after syllogisms, ad nauseam? Heresy, according to Hobbes, was caused by the “fighting of . . . doctrine against doctrine,” and yet since no one “errs deliberately,” and since philosophy was deemed to be a free inquiry, it was neither a crime nor a violation. However, soon bloodbaths began to proliferate, “fought with clubs and sticks.”88 With pungent humor, Hobbes ridiculed the pugilistic and idiotic tendencies of these heresy hunters: “however far the Roman world extended, the quarrel was among the blind about who had the clearer eyes.”89 Lamenting and registering surprise at the degree of fulmination against the putative “blasphemers,” “atheists,” and “heretics” hurled by the theologians, Hobbes went on to hurl his own invective that the conversion of theologians was born out of convenience and prospect of economic gain, not out of conviction of the veracity of the gospel truth, certainly not out of desires to emulate the crucified Christ. Consequently, their faith “grew as a parasite.”90 This was nowhere more manifest than at the Council of Nicaea.91 In a pivotal transition—lines 545–554—Hobbes introduced the troubles begun at Nicaea. Though Hobbes might pay lip service to the doctrine of the Trinity promulgated there, his description of the fracas and frenzy did not exude affection for the first ecumenical council: The dispute was fought out between Alexander and Arius, that is between a Bishop and his own Elder, Over whether Christ was equal to or lesser than the Father, to the former he seemed equal to God, to the latter lesser than God. The matter began to be discussed at dinner and when drinking (at dinner, wine usually loosens the tongue), From here the religious controversy went to the sacred Sees, and from there stirred up the flock, dividing it into factions. Soon there was fighting even in the crowd city of Alexandria, and crazed soldiers rushed to join the opposing forces.92 Hobbes continued to link together the doctrinal formulation at Nicaea and beyond as being incorrigibly tainted by the “cheap frauds” who were philosophical charlatans and moneychangers at the temple who had no real acquaintance with the living God. Moreover, Hobbes was adamant that the words of the

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Nicene Creed were tautological “darkness,” thereby prompting him to raise a penetrating query about the putatively fundamental nature of the doctrine of the Trinity. If the homoousios doctrine signified nothing, and “foreign” to the language of Scripture, how can belief thereof “guarantee eternal life,” and repudiation thereof usher in eternal anguish?93 Not only were these bishops not good philosophers, they were not even sanctified Christians, for they were marked by arrogance, vituperative spirits, blithely unaware of their ignorance thinly veiled by their office, and ever bellicose, ready to “generate a war of words.”94 Due to the establishment of priestcraft, the authority of interpretation of the “holy oracles” could “speak only through the mouth of the priest.” Since for Hobbes, all things diabolical came through priestcraft and the self-exaltation of priests/bishops, and since in Constantine one had an inimitable exemplar, it was no surprise that his political theology would take a decisive Erastian turn.95 In fact, for Hobbes, the undergirding leitmotiv of the first four ecumenical councils was one of expansion of the papal power base: “During the first four Councils, and for a hundred years, due to the lack of attention by Emperors and the fickleness of the people, the power of the Pope (power that was stolen), secretly increased, until he was more powerful than the Roman Emperor.”96 In an act of ultimate anticlerical swipe, Hobbes called the pope a “poor pseudo-philosopher” who, though chicanery and Machiavellian appropriation of religious violence, got to be “second to God on earth.”97 Not only were there linguistic errors at the councils but also the unintended effect of the first few councils was the bloating of the Bishop of Rome’s ego for hegemonic control. A great portion of Historia Ecclesiastica, therefore, focused on this “sin of supererogation” on the part of the papacy. Among numerous other things, three concrete instances of Hobbes’s indictment of papal avarice and ambition were thrust forward. First was the coronation of Charlemagne (c. 742– 814), which took place in December 800 by Pope Leo III, which Hobbes saw as the mutual exaltation of Pope Leo and Emperor Charlemagne (lines 1741–1780). Hobbes’s terse summary of its crucial place in the “church-state relations” was: “After these events all the kingdoms of the Christians began to be seen to have been given by the Pope through Divine Right.” For Hobbes, Charlemagne was the “generous king,” the Lamb, whose domain was stealthily devoured by the Lion with an insatiable appetite. Lamenting this loss of balance, Hobbes wrote: The lion Pope and Charles the Lamb handed other to each other by agreement their respective kingdoms of the Spirit and the Flesh But later Popes did not abide by this agreement; it wasn’t right to make the authority of the Flesh and the Spirit equal. For without consulting the emperor, the clergy often dared to appoint Popes for themselves.98

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After this, Hobbes noted that popes, still unsatisfied with the hegemonic rise, ensured the stability of his power by keeping people in darkness. Hobbes averred that the pope did so by having priests keep people stupefied by the philosophy-laden jargon of “mysteries,” so that they could not “detect the smell of fraud” of the putatively transubstantiated Body of Christ. Moreover, he saw the power of hereticating and the putative prerogative of selling indulgences as just two further pieces of the papal mosaic to keep people under his thumb.99 The question of Hobbes’s personal religious commitments might be ultimately unanswerable, yet judging from the most “heretical” text, Historia Ecclesiastica, it seems he needed the primitivism of sola scriptura as a club to fight off the Hellenistic encroachments. So Hobbes thundered: O Greek Doctors, why do you claim there are three persons in one single God? How do you know? If you don’t know, don’t speak in vain. Let the plain words of the Holy Bible be enough for you. This book openly declares Christ is God, and begotten of God. Do you ask how that can be? Fool, first consider whether you can yourself know that you were begotten by the act of your father. You, who will not know in an eternity what a fly is, do you expect, vile man, to know what God is?100 Hobbes had expressed similar sentiments, albeit more moderately, in both the appendix to his Latin Leviathan (1668) and in An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie (1680), underscoring therefore his unequivocal aversion to the metaphysical imposition in Christianity and its creeds.101 This intentional departure from sola scriptura of the primitive Church led to heart trouble for the pope: his heart was “swelled with great hope,” vigorously endeavoring toward dominion over the whole world.102 Above all, Hobbes noted, the pope craved to be the hermeneutical “alpha and omega,” thereby taking the last piece of the triad of Christ’s threefold office, the prophetic office. If, in addition to all the wealth and domination over the emperors (the kingly office), and in addition to the sacramental administration (the priestly office), if he could have the authority to pontificate over all scriptural interpretations, then the pope, so Hobbes passionately argued, completes the diabolical trifecta. The role of the reformers in the mold of Luther, the Waldensians, Wycliffe, and the Lollards was to expose the pope and the papal superstructure for a fraud.103 Consequently, after all the unequivocal attacks on the bishops behaving badly, and concomitant exposé of the so-called Hellenistic theologies getting lost in translation as Nicene orthodoxy was juggled back-and-forth between

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Greek and Latin, Hobbes rested his case. Historia Ecclesiastica ends abruptly after mentioning the emergence of Luther in the mode of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, yet it seemed as though compared to the pomp, prestige, and power, the movement of Luther and the Protestant “heretics” was too weak to withstand it. Yet a confidant of Hobbes, Charles Blount noted in his letter to Hobbes, summarizing what appears to be his reading of an unpublished manuscript of An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie, which had a great deal of polemical overlap with Historia Ecclesiastica. Blount followed Hobbes’s polemical logic all the way and agreed that due to the numerous volte-faces in who was decreed orthodox, it clearly historicized and relativized the notion of permanent orthodoxy. So Blount noted: “the Arrian Doctrine was not only confirmed by Eight Councils several times assembled at Tyre . . . particularly at Ariminum.”104 Blount further adduced proof of the linguistic incompetence of the bishops at the Council of Chalcedon, known for closing all the Christological disputes by affirming the two-nature doctrine of Christ, who had either Greek or Latin, but hardly both, which created a genuine problem of understanding. For Blount and Hobbes, this was the convincing proof that “there is as little Trust to be reposed in General Councils, who have been Guilty of so much Ignorance and Interest, as well as so frequently contradicting one another.” Citing Jean Daillé with evident approval, Blount argued that one should be extremely leery of an inordinate dependence on the Church Fathers.105 The final clincher for Blount and Hobbes was that the oft-cited defense among the conciliarists “that Councils may not Err, though private Persons may” was tantamount to saying that every single soldier may run away, but “the whole Army cannot,” an exercise in logical contradiction of the grossest sort, and quoted from John Hales (1584–1656), who, at the Synod of Dort, famously kissed good-bye to Calvin.106 Such lessened or nearly nonexistent trust in councils was not only shared by Blount the Deist and his coreligionist Hobbes but also by Richard Baxter. Yet as will be evident in our discussion of the political exigencies of both the 1650s and the 1670s, Baxter would end up arriving at strikingly similar conclusions about conciliar authority, and its pernicious potential effect in the English politics of religion. To Baxter we shall turn now. VI

Baxter, a Hater or an Inventor of False History? Church-History of . . . Councils in Controversy William Lamont has mentioned that the ecclesiological, political, and theological issues of the 1650s “lived on into the 1670s in England in ways which

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we do not yet fully understand.”107 More recently, and with a more particular attention to the trajectory of Anglican polemic, Jean-Louis Quantin noted that the “trauma left by the experience of the revolutionary years can hardly be overestimated. Many episcopalian divines came back from . . . a period in hiding in England with the conviction that their Church was now permanently threatened,” and it is this sense of threat, combined with the intransigence of Dissent, which drove the wedge between Baxter and the second-generation Laudian Anglicans even further, especially during the Restoration crises.108 This was the immediate political context of the longue durée of the Restoration ecclesiastical settlement and the ongoing trauma of shared antipathy. These Baxterian sensibilities were causes for both intense criticism and accolade, the boon of more liberal-minded Arminianism and/or Socinianism and the bane of Calvinistic orthodoxy. According to N. H. Keeble, Baxter would certainly “err in granting too much liberty, than too little” with regard to scope of orthodoxy and heresy. Perhaps perceiving Baxter’s “historicist” tendencies, Keeble continued that heresy “served rather to define the theological bias of those who deployed it than the relationship to the Christian tradition of those it condemned.”109 As we have seen in the last chapter, Owen’s key nemesis was John Biddle. In Vindiciae Evangelicae, Owen ridiculed Biddle’s use of the term “meer Christian,” calling him a “meere Lucian,” judging from the heretical notion regarding the Trinity, satisfaction, original sin, and the like.110 Owen did not have to look far to find Biddle’s self-designated appellation. The title page of his Twofold Catechism—the precipitating cause of Owen’s Vindiciae—read A Twofold Catechism . . . composed for their sakes that would fain be meer Christians.111 What has not been noted in contemporary scholarship is this intriguing connection of phraseology between Biddle and Baxter. N. H. Keeble had noted the frequent use of “meer Christian,” “meer Catholic” by Baxter, yet it seems the phrase “meer Christian” is first used by Biddle, not Baxter.112 Moreover, in ways that may be lost to contemporary historians, this phrase was coded, embedded with the significance of ecumenical sensibilities, which were often taken as a Socinian rhetorical trope. I have argued elsewhere that even in the heyday of his pastoral ministry in the 1650s, he was suspected of being less than forthright about requiring an explicitly Trinitarian confession as a litmus test of orthodoxy, even though he had no problems with affirming such narrowly defined confessional parameters himself.113 Baxter, brandishing his ecclesiological badge in his 1680 polemical treatise, Church-History of the Government of Bishops and their Councils abbreviated, writes that “but you know not what Party I am of [he had just called his opponents Arminian and Laudian], nor what to call me. . . . I will tell you, I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN.”114 What, then, has mere Christianity to do with conciliar

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history, and how did Baxter read that critical part of ecclesiastical history in light of the political exigencies of the Exclusion Crisis in particular and the Restoration Crises in general? Before we launch into a discussion of Baxter’s interpretation of ecclesiastical history and the councils thereof, and to better situate his context and contribution, we next discuss the nature, role, and trajectory of conciliar authority in English Protestant thought. VII

Conciliar Authority in English Protestant Thought Conciliar decrees, especially those of the first four, were widely acknowledged as an indispensable interpretive tool for the teachings of Scripture, both for Catholics and Protestants. This was especially the case with determining the bounds of heresy. In the Act of Supremacy of 1559, Elizabeth declared that nothing could be condemned as heresy unless it explicitly contravened scriptural and teachings of the “first four general councils.”115 Yet in the ongoing confessional polemic between the Elizabethan church and the Catholics, various conciliar matters were intensely debated: the question of who can convene ecumenical councils; whether conciliar teaching can be universally applicable; the thorny issue of putatively conflicting, contradictory teachings between different councils; and perhaps most crucially for the English Protestants, the relationship between Scripture and councils. English bishops and theologians were not the first ones to struggle with the last issue, of Scripture and councils. Augustine, in fact, had wrestled with this issue in his polemical exchange with Maximin the Arian. His Contra Maximinum Haereticum Arianorum Episcopum delved deeply into that thorny question. Maximin had invoked the authority of the Council of Ariminum (359 ce), in which a compromise solution between the Arians and the homoousians was attempted, thus endorsing his non-consubstantial interpretation of John 10:30. Augustine, on the other hand, had hearkened to the authority of the Council of Nicaea, for it was in this first ecumenical council that the doctrine of the Son’s consubstantiality (thus the term homoousion, “of one substance”) with the Father was sanctioned as catholic dogma. Yet, here Augustine made an interesting rhetorical move, seeking to avoid a stalemate by invoking the authority of Scripture as higher authority vis-à-vis all councils, including Ariminum and Nicaea: Neither ought I to object against thee the Council of Nicaea, nor you against me the Council of Ariminum, as to the intent to conclude one another by prejudged verdict. Neither am I bound by the authority of the one

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[Ariminum], nor are you by the other [Nicaea]. By authorities of Scripture, not such as proper to either one, but such as are common to both, let matter strive with matter, cause with cause, reason with reason.116 In the Reformation debates, the foregoing text regarding the Council of Ariminum often resurfaced. Calvin, in his discussion of the authority of councils, cited this text from Augustine to show that while councils should have “the majesty that is their due,” they were always to be subordinate to Scripture, so that nothing, including conciliar decrees and creeds, should usurp its divinely vested authority.117 More provocatively, John Bridges, the English translator of Rudolf Gwalter’s sermons on Acts, noted that Gwalter had indefatigably pointed out, pace the Catholic claim that “heresies haue bene always confuted in Councelles,” heresies were always “confirmed in Councels.” The first historical evidence adduced by Bridges was: “Did not the Councell at Ariminum in Italie holde and conclude with the Arrianes? Did not the second Councell at Ephesus, holde with Eutiches?”118 Not only Calvin and Gwalter on the Continent but also John Jewell, William Whitaker, Alexander Nowell, and John Bridges had raised questions concerning the harmony of patristic voices and conciliar decisions. Thus, it is possible to argue that their views tended to have the effect of “deparentifying” the Church Fathers and councils.119 Yet as Scott Hendrix notes, it would be wrong to regard the Reformers’ attitude toward the Church Fathers and councils merely as “deparentifying.” It was more nuanced.120 The Reformers assiduously upheld, for instance, the doctrine of the Trinity, declaring that it was primarily a scriptural truth that the council confirmed and ratified, rather than discovering it sui generis. The foregoing example of John Bridges excoriating the Catholics for adhering to the infallibility of the councils continued among the contemporaries of Baxter. The leading New England Puritan preacher John Cotton’s millenarian exegesis was not limited to the Book of Revelation. His sermons on the Song of Songs were published in 1642.121 Cotton’s exegesis of chapter 5 of Song of Songs led him into the forays of seeing the identity of the Church vis-à-vis historical developments, particularly with regard to Constantine’s official sanctioning of Christianity in the Roman Empire. For this mode of eschatological exegesis, Cotton was influenced by Thomas Brightman’s (1562–1607) “Propheticall Exposition” in his Scholia in Canticum Canticorum (1614).122 For Cotton, the hortatory value of Constantine’s sanctioning of Christianity was mainly negative: “Constantine came into the Church, enjoyed the fellowship of it . . . so that the Church and all her friends . . . did drinke abundantly of wealth, preferments, &c. whence it was that shee fell into a deepe sleepe.” Strikingly similar to the Anabaptist critique of Constantinian religion, Cotton contended that the church fell asleep in the “bosom of Constantine.”123 Enjoying a permanent

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reprieve from suffering, Cotton ruefully reflected, the Church “neglected the purity and power both of doctrine and worship, and received corruptions.” Moreover, Cotton insisted that the corruptions had to do with image worship, invocation of saints, transubstantiation, purgatory, and “applauding Monkinsh life.”124 Nonetheless, Cotton differed from his Anabaptist forebears in that rather than rejecting the Constantinian church tout court, he argued that the Church was still awake, and its vital signs were seen in its fight against the “impiety of Arius,” who had denied the “God-head of Christ; of Macedonius and Eunomius,” who had denied the “person of the holy Ghost”; and of Nestorius, Eutyches. In other words, concurrent with the beginnings of the corrupt sacramental and liturgical praxis in the Church, the four major councils warded off the encroachments of various Christological and trinitarian heresies.125 Yet Cotton was also unsparing of criticism directed at the councils themselves: “The Bishops assembled in those Councels of that time, condemned those gross heresies which blasphemed the doctrine of the Trinity; but how deeply did they neglect to redresse all other enormities and corruptions?”126 By the time Cotton came around to his exegesis of Song of Songs 5:14, his sweep of ecclesiastical history has led him to the fifteenth century, and he offered a scathing critique of the errors of the Council of Constance (1414–1418) in hereticating John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, and Jerome of Prague.127 Thus, Cotton did not spare criticism regarding conciliar lapses and errors, for he did not regard them infallible. At the same time, however, there was a concerted effort to speak of God’s providential guidance and to affirm the good of the councils, particularly in the way the doctrine of the Trinity and two natures of Christ were upheld.128 These two emphases, providentialism and the upholding of the doctrine of the Trinity, as we shall see later with Baxter, received surprisingly thin treatment. Ironically for a synod-like gathering, the Westminster Assembly and its Confession of Faith (1647) demonstrated a sufficiently self-critical attitude in the way it spoke of the purpose of “Synods or Councels.” It asserted that councils, “whether general, or particular, may erre; and many have erred. Therefore, they are not to be made the Rule of Faith; but to be used as an Help in both.”129 As Chad van Dixhoorn convincingly argued, the authority of the Church Fathers and of the councils were fiercely debated within the Assembly. Certainly compared to the Elizabethan Supremacy Act, the authority of general councils has been significantly brought low in the final formulations of the Westminster Assembly, while at the same time affirming all the doctrinal formulations, particularly that of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ.130 John Owen was, along with Baxter, regarded as the twin pillars of Restoration Dissent. While they found themselves on the same side of the broad ecclesial divide between Established Church and Dissenting chapels, Baxter and

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Owen were at loggerheads with regard to soteriology and ecclesiology. Yet when it came time for their critique of the mishaps and monstrosities at various ecumenical councils, Owen and Baxter converged. Or so it seemed. In his Preface to Christologia (1679), Owen noted with regret that while the doctrine of the Trinity was upheld at Nicaea, a tragic, unforeseen upshot was that many Christians began to look to the opinions and “Authority of men” as weightier authority than that of Scripture. Moreover, Owen lamented that utilizing words, concepts, and “whose signification” unto the purpose of deciphering the “Divine Nature” were not in Scripture, brought about “endless contentions” about words.131 Even more tragic yet, for Owen, was the way these theological differences were “managed with great scandal unto Christian Religion.” The truths concerning the divine nature of Christ, though rightly formulated at the councils of Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, gave rise unto “new divisions, animosities, and even mutual hatreds, among the principal Leaders of the Christian People. And great contests there were among some of them who pretended to believe the same Truth, whether such or such a Councel should be received.”132 Here Owen noted, in particular, Cyril of Alexandria and others who fell into “unjustifiable excess themselves” against the errors of the Arians, Nestorians, and others.133 After going so far as to mention that Cyril did numerous things “exceeding the bounds of sobriety” given in Romans 12:3,134 Owen recognized that such thuggish behavior from Cyril precipitated partially understandable attacks on Cyril’s person and even his Christology. Here is where, as we shall see later, Owen and Baxter parted company, especially in the way they thought of doctrinal formulations at councils. Whereas Owen was willing to criticize bishops’ behaviors, yet was equally quick to follow up with an affirmation of the doctrine they formulated in councils, Baxter did not. So Owen wrote: Hence it is come to pass, that many Learned men begin to think and write that Cyrillus was in the wrong, and Nestorius by his men as condemned undeservedly. However it is certain to me, that the Doctrine condemned at Ephesus and Chalcedon as the Doctrine of Nestorius, was destructive to the true Person of Christ; and that Cyril, though he missed it in sundry expressions, yet aimed at the declaration and confirmation of the Truth.135 In a very similar way, David Clarkson, a protégé of Owen, showed similar tension with regard to patristic authorities in his polemical exchange with Edward Stillingfleet in 1681–1682.136 In what follows, we analyze Baxter’s critique of councils led by bishops in which he averred that they did more far more harm than good for the life of the Church. We will also see how the Restoration

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Anglican polemicists interpreted Baxter’s critique as far more than a mere castigation of the Restoration Church and as a potential departure from Christian orthodoxy itself. Baxter’s attitude toward councils was a case of ambiguities and tension. Earlier on in his pastoral career, Baxter was far more sanguine about the prospect of a new church council: much like Luther’s hopes in desiring an ecumenical council before the Council of Trent declared him a heretic. In a letter to John Dury of November 20, 1652, Baxter hoped that Oliver Cromwell would convene a council, or a consultative assembly of the clergy, as Constantine did the first Council of Nicaea.137 However, in a tantalizingly revealing epistolary exchange with a certain Thomas Hone in January and February 1657, we get to see Baxter’s perspective on patristic authority. Hone, an episcopalian divine, wrote Baxter that in all things of Christian principle and practice which was obscurely revealed in Scripture, he took the first “360 years after Christ” as the hermeneutical key.138 Baxter’s reply was composed of six reasons, and the third reason—that patristic writers did err themselves—received detailed attention. Interestingly, Baxter “confined himself to ante-Nicene Fathers,” as he sought to reveal their various errors, with the cumulative effect of denying any authoritative stance the pre-Nicene fathers had for the contemporary rule of faith controversy. For instance, angels having sex with women, a likely reference to Genesis 6:1–4, was purportedly maintained by Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Lactantius. Both Lactantius and Theophilus of Antioch held heretical notions of the Trinity. Tertullian held that soul, angels, even “God is corporeall,” whose name Hobbes would invoke to justify his own version of philosophical materialism. Clement of Alexandria’s view on biblical canon was so elastic, indeed erratic, that it accommodated the Gospels according to the Hebrews and the Egyptians. Thus the cumulative effect of this rather desultory listing of the errors of the Church Fathers was to deny the possibility of tradition being the category of orthodoxy.139 As Jean-Louis Quantin has rightly noted, Baxter’s list and display of patristic knowledge was clearly no match for Jean Daillé’s far more learned The Use of the Fathers, and he is right.140 There is, however, an intriguing harmonic convergence on Baxter’s, Biddle’s, and Hobbes’s perspectives on ante-Nicene Fathers. Although Baxter does not emphatically declare that all the ante-Nicene fathers were anti-Nicene, as Biddle and Hobbes would, he nevertheless seems to leave the door slightly ajar. Yet, perhaps wounded by his skirmishes with the Laudian intransigency in the 1650s—personified in his Kidderminster parish in Sir Ralph Clare (the go-between for Henry Hammond) who would not take the Eucharist from Baxter unless he could kneel to receive it, and in his epistolary battles with

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Peter Gunning, Peter Heylyn, and others—Baxter’s tone had changed by 1661. In 1658, to be sure, Baxter had warned England of the “Grotian Religion,” the conciliarist, Gallican Catholicism of France, rather than the Italian curialism of regarding the pope as the head of the Church.141 Peter Heylyn fulminated against what he saw as Baxter’s smear tactic of kicking the Laudians while they were down by publishing Certamen Epistolare in 1659.142 In his True Catholick and the Catholick Church Described (1661), Baxter listed both conciliarism and curialism as the twin culprits of the destroying the church’s peace. Both general councils and popes were shabby substitutes for Christ, the “universall proper Center.” Fully aware that the immediate causes of various councils were for extirpation of heresies, Baxter noted that when bishops and popes “build a Babel of their own invention, for the preventing of the inundation of heresies, they are upon the most dreadful work of confusion.” Essentially, for Baxter, conciliar decrees were one step too far removed from the language of Scripture, thus unfit for uniting the Church. He was certain the opposite reality of division and cacophony would reign.143 Although the Reformers of the previous century, Luther, Bullinger, Calvin, inter alia, were not without criticisms of the councils, and they, much like Baxter, set forth sola scriptura as the formal authority for faith, none was as relentless as Baxter. Again, Baxter’s truculent opposition to councils presented an ambiguous and dialectical tension. While he did not deny the Trinity or the two natures of Christ (both of which were formulated at the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon), his relentless exposé of the bishops’ horrific behaviors began to take its toll on those who were not as favorably disposed to these doctrines, let alone the Church! For them, the historical critique of Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell became the very fuel for burning down the entire edifice of priestcraft. So Baxter fulminated: The Papists have set up whole volumes of Councils and Decrees, for the Rule, forsooth because the Scripture is dark, and all Hereticks plead Scripture. And what have they done by it, but cause more darkness, and set the world and their own Doctors too, in greater contentions, so that now Councils crosse Councils, and they can neither agree which be true approved Councils, and which not: nor when they intend a Decree to be an Article of faith, and when not, no nor what sense to take their words in, and how to reconcile them. And thus men lose themselves, and abuse the Church.144 Baxter’s Restoration Anglican polemicists and the Catholic pamphleteer, William Johnson, called Baxter a near Socinian for the opprobrium he cast on conciliar decrees and the radical biblicism, which was virtually identical to

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the Socinian perspective.145 Full of pungency, Baxter asked Henry Hammond, sensing that his efforts toward ecclesiological rapprochement might prove futile: “Did the Primitive Church require Subscription to all our 39 Articles, or to any more than the words of Scripture”?146 This intensely acrimonious exchange between Baxter and the ardent defenders of the Restoration Church fits Michel de Certeau’s dictum that “religious faithfulness and deviance are everywhere politicized” in early modern Europe.147 Aside from the deviation from the Scripture’s simplicity and primitive purity, Baxter fastidiously noted that popes and hereticating bishops were themselves guilty of “Adultery, Murder, Simony, and such works of darkness!”148 Such behaviors, far more than their doctrinal formulations of the Trinity or the two natures of Christ, were what mattered to Baxter. If Baxter never denied the Trinity himself, how can he be seriously regarded as a father of Unitarianism? Baxter assiduously carved out the space for a neonomian via media between high Calvinism, which he regarded as the pathway to Antinomianism, and Arminianism. According to David L. Wykes and Isabel Rivers, this Baxterian synthesis was “perceived by many” in late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as “an attack upon fundamental Christian truths, in particular the doctrine of the Trinity.”149 Alexander Gordon’s Heads of English Unitarian History, originally delivered as lectures at Oxford in 1894, had two appended lectures on Baxter and Joseph Priestley as key figures in Unitarian identity. The latter figure of Priestley is predictable, yet Baxter? For Gordon, it was Baxter’s Arminian proclivities, his allegedly ambiguous attitude toward the Socinians, and his view on toleration that earned him the sobriquet “Founder of Liberal Nonconformity,” which was precisely the identity matrix of late-nineteenthcentury Unitarians.150 Nowhere mentioned, surprisingly, is Baxter’s trenchant critique of conciliar history, even though Gordon rightly notes that Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) was a first-rate critical historical scholarship along this Baxterian perspective.151 This tendency to read Baxter’s affinities with modern-day Unitarianism merely along his putative “broad-minded” theological and ecclesiological outlook has further eliminated the necessity to look beyond that “self-evident” truth. VIII

Baxter on Conciliar Authority This section seeks to revise the foregoing conventional truth and argues that Baxter’s historical critique of the first four councils was seen as a dangerous potential deviation from adherence to trinitarian orthodoxy, and it is this—at least as much as his Arminian sensibilities—that influenced the future

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Unitarians. Baxter saw sanctification or “laborious holiness” as an existential proof of the theological pudding. Seeing the utter absence of such saintly dispositions and behaviors at Nicaea and Ephesus was what turned Baxter off from being enthusiastic about the doctrines formulated therein. As we have seen before, pace Baxter, his contemporaries John Cotton, David Clarkson, and John Owen were explicit in their affirmation of the doctrine of two natures and the Trinity, while decrying the lapse of Christian charity at the early councils. And these statements of doctrinal sanctity and personal cruelty were always stated together, lest one gets the impression that since these councils were gatherings of power-mongering bishops, no theological good came out of it. Such a reading of the conciliar past was becoming rather fashionable, especially in early- to mid-eighteenth-century criticisms of the historical validity and veracity of the Trinity doctrine. Conal Condren has convincingly demonstrated Hobbes’s theologico-political treatises as “curtailing the office of the priest.” Similarly, Baxter’s church historical writings of the late 1670s and 1680s can be interpreted in that light.152 Among Baxter’s writings, his church historical writings, written mostly around the late 1670s and early 1680s, have not received much scholarly attention. The popularity of Baxter’s Church-History of . . . Councils can be seen in the three print runs in two years. It was first printed in 1680 with two print runs that year.153 Due to its popular demand, Thomas Simmons did another print run in 1681; it is the 1681 edition of Church-History of . . . Councils that Locke had an annotated copy of, which is now kept at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. In fact, this is one of the few notable Baxter works owned by Locke.154 For this section, we look at Baxter’s anti-episcopal sentiments, which were, for justifiable reasons, construed as being incendiary and anticlerical in the midst of much cacophony over the Exclusion Crisis and fear of popery. Then we will look at the specific way he interpreted the place and legacy of the early ecumenical councils, particularly Nicaea and Ephesus. He began his ChurchHistory of . . . Councils by declaring himself to be a hater of false history, and, to arrive at a more objective historiography, he went and gathered his sources, not from the Magdeburg Centuriators or from Melanchthon, but primarily from Cesare Baronius’s Annales Eccleastici, which was a refutation of the Magdeburg Centuries and Binnius’s Collection of the Councils, and sometimes from the Belgian Franciscan Peter Crabbe’s Concilia Omnia as well.155 We might judge such precaution and optimism a bit dated and naïve, but Baxter did want to ensure that his sources, if not his conclusions, would be palatable to his Restoration Anglican interlocutors as well. On this, Baxter was certainly naïve, for he would be hereticated along with Hobbes on that fateful day in July 1683 and be imprisoned after the humiliating trial by Lord Judge Jeffreys after his publication of The Paraphrase of the New Testament (1685).

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The fi rst point Baxter sought to get across in his Church-History of . . . Councils was that the “Church for above 300 years had no power of the Sword, that is, forcibly to meddle with and hurt mens Bodies or Estates,” thereby likely identifying the sanctioning of Christianity by Constantine or the Council of Nicaea as the point of rupture of the primitive simplicity of the Church.156 Bishops had “set up the old exploded question, which of them should be the chief or greatest,” and Baxter further argued that with the official sanctioning of Christianity by Constantine, the structural makeup of the civil and ecclesiastical governments increasingly overlapped so much that “the rest of the Bishops strove much for precedency, and got as large Territories as they could, and as numerous Flocks and many Parishes.”157 After he reported that Constantine made laws “that none should compel Christians to answer in any Court of Justice, save before their own Bishops, and so Bishops were made almost the sole Governours of the Christians,” Baxter lamented the loss of order and purity in the post-Constantinian church, which was ironically brought about by a large scale of “converts” to Christianity. They were, Baxter lamented, frankly seeking an easier “yoke of law” to bear: §37. By this means it is no wonder if multitudes of wicked flock’d into the Church and defiled and dishonoured it: For the Murderer that was to be hanged if he were no Christian, was but to kept from the Sacrament if he were a Christian, and do some confessing penance; which was little to hanging or other death; And so proportionably of other Crimes. Bad Christians by this device were multiplyed. The Emperour also being a Christian, worldly men are mostly of the Religion of the Prince or highest powers.158 Then Baxter continued that this preferential treatment and imperial exaltation of bishops inexorably led to recruiting the very opposite type of men: “Christ telleth us, how hardly Rich men are good and come to Heaven. Therefore when Bishops must be all Great and Rich, either Christ must be deceived, or it must be as hard for them to be honest Christian bishop as for a Camel to go through the Needles eye. And thus Venenum funditur in Ecclesiam.”159 So Venenum funditur in Ecclesiam! Th is explosive comment, that thus poison is poured into the Church, was not going to escape the notice of Baxter’s Restoration episcopal opponents. Baxter continued to offer his incisive critique of the further vitiation of the moral fiber of the Church by highlighting the clash between Emperor Valentinian and the bishops in which Valentinian sought to recall “the Judicial Power of the Bishops in all

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Causes” with the exception in areas of faith and spiritual governance of their episcopates, “unless the parties contending voluntarily chose them [bishops] for the Judges.” For Baxter, the writing was nearly on the wall, in the same way Hobbes had chronicled in his Historia Ecclesiastica the collapse of caesaropapism.160 In an article dealing with the sociopolitical status of Christian bishops in late antiquity, Claudia Rapp corroborated the incendiary conclusion reached by Baxter: “Once the majority of inhabitants of a city had become Christian, the bishop’s religious authority over his flock and his pastoral care for their wellbeing effectively translated into his participation in civic matters. Theodosius’s legislation on the treatment of the heretics and pagans as enemies of the state had equated adherence to Christian orthodoxy with citizenship in the empire.”161 Thus Baxter lamented the hegemonic struggle between bishops and emperors: “if they have not the Civil power, and be not Magistrates or Lords of all, the Church is wronged. This Clergy-pride is it that hath set the World on fire, and will not consent that it be quenched.”162 In this area of heaping lacerating rebukes on priestcraft, power-mongering bishops, and their cabals known as “ecumenical councils,” Baxter and Hobbes do meet as strange, if reluctant, allies.163 Moreover, just as he would bifurcate the Anglican bishops between the Grindal and Abbot type in one camp and the Laudians on the other, he did the same with the bishops of the fourth and fift h centuries, lest he tarnish all bishops with the same brush. So Baxter extolled “Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory Nyssen, Basil, Chrysostom, Augustine, Hillary, Prosper, Fulgentius, &c.” who made a mental inward separation “from the Councils and Communion of the prevailing turbulent sort of the Prelates, to signifie their disowning of their sins.”164 Here in Baxter’s description, moderate Puritans of his own type found their forebears in the Cappadocians and Augustine.165 Thus, with the bishops of Cappadocian and Augustinian sensibilities, true piety flourished. Conversely, with the avaricious bishops only in name, “hereticating was in fashion.”166 In other words, Baxter identified pastoral care of souls as the AugustinianGrindalian episcopal blueprint. For the ravenous heresy-hunting bishops, however, their bellicosity, combined with their limitless ambition, gave rise to innumerable councils and the papacy itself. This ironic juxtaposition would continue throughout Church-History of . . . Councils and The True History of Councils Enlarged and Defended, indeed through his last publication, Against the Revolt to a Foreign Jurisdiction (1691).167 Baxter even went so far as to say that the word war over “HARD or AMBIGUOUS WORDS” fought at general councils often cloaked the deeper, real issue at stake: bishops’ hunger for greater episcopal sees and power.168

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IX

The “Meer Christian,” Council of Nicaea, and Creedal Minimalism The label “meer Catholick” or “mere Christianity,” as we have seen, was chockfull of polemical valence. The basis of Baxter’s mere Christianity was scriptural simplicity and primitive purity, the latter of which was encapsulated in the so-called Vincentian Canon, taken from Vincent of Lérin’s Commonitorium, “that which is believed everywhere, by everyone, in all times” was true orthodoxy. Baxter was on this elusive quest. For high Calvinists of Owen’s sort, this adherence to “mere Christianity” was recipe for Socinian proliferation. Thus, caught between the Scylla of Owen’s high Calvinism and the Charybdis of the Restoration Church, Baxter had a very small margin for doctrinal error. Yet delicate theological moves, he was never known to be familiar with. Therefore, we find Baxter making yet another improbable statement arguing that there are many sincere mere Christians who are now in the eternal city of God, who had been hereticated while on earth. And it is not to be contemned, that much piety was kept up among great number of Christians, who (for some mistake) the rest reviled and condemned as Schismaticks or Hereticks. Little know we how many holy souls were among those that are in Epiphanius Catalogue. Of the Audians and some others he seemeth to confess as much himself.169 The Novatians were tolerated in almost all the Empire, and had their Churches and Bishops, having the testimony of the Orthodox that they were usually of sound faith and upright lives, and stricter than other Christians were.170 This was an extremely illuminating comment from Baxter, which helps us see that in the contested priority between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, Baxter would give right living the nod every time, thus prompting the ire of his high Calvinist opponents and being labeled a Socinian, much for his religious sensibilities, which placed ethics over dogmatics. Here is another area of convergence between Biddle and Baxter, Socinians and the Arminian-leaning Reformed pastor. G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes has differentiated between the disciplina and the dogma type among the Christians in early modern Europe. The former were the Erasmians, who felt that ethical renewal and pursuit of holiness was of paramount significance. Thus, “by emphasizing ethics above doctrine,” the Arminians and Socinians—and in this regard, Baxter and Hobbes, as well—“they questioned the very primacy of faith.”171 The foregoing quote from Baxter deserves a closer scrutiny. First of all, he was certain that

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some “Schismaticks or Hereticks” were labeled as such “for some mistake,” thus problematizing the validity of the conciliar decisions and decrees. Second, he specifically mentioned one of the earliest comprehensive heresiographies: Epiphanius’s Panarion (lit., “Medicine chest,” cataloguing all the heresies up to the mid-fourth century). In a scheme that saw the validating evidence of true justification in a life of “laborious holiness,” it was hardly surprising that Baxter would seek to exculpate the Audians, solely based on their life of piety, with little to no regard for the content of their putative heresy. Similarly, Baxter made a statement that encapsulated the “mere Christian” sensibilities. He averred that even though one might be wrong about the Christological specifics, so long as one is “sincerely addicted to his service,” God would pardon their mistake, perhaps even the Arians!172 Again, this was not lost on Baxter’s polemical opponents, who accused Baxter of leading a whole generation of moderate Puritans and Anglicans, particularly Latitudinarians such as John Tillotson, astray by putting practice above doctrine.173 Baxter’s renunciation of the errors of Arius, which was a bona fide litmus test of one’s trinitarian orthodoxy, both then in Nicaea and now in mid- to late-seventeenth-century England, was surprisingly more defensive, arguing that the Socinian error was of graver concern than that of the Arians. He summarized it in this syllogistic logic: he who denies the deity of Christ, denies that which is essential to Christ, and he who denies the essence of Christ denies Christ, thus no Christian. However, Baxter follows the foregoing statement immediately by noting that: the Samosatenians, the Photinians, and our late Socinians, are far more perniciously Heretical than the Arians. For the Arians maintained, that Tres sunt hypostases, Pater, Filius & Spiritus Sanctus; and that God did ante sempiterna tempora unigenitum filium gignere, per quem & saecula & reliqua procreavit omnia. . . . They thought that before God made the rest of the creatures, he made one super-angelical perfect Spirit, by which he made all the rest, and that this is Christ; and that he received no other soul but a body only at his Incarnation, and this super-angelical spirit was his soul. This was the dangerous heresie of Arius.174 For our purposes, surprisingly, Baxter offered a taxonomy of different shades of the heretical gray. He asserted that the Arians acknowledged the three hypostases (tres . . . hypostases) of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, and that before the creation of time, Father begot the Son, through whom all things were made. This was definitely an attenuated reading of the Arian heresy. Therefore, his tantalizing conclusion was that the our “late Socinians” were far more “perniciously heretical” than the Arians.

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Then in the next paragraph (§5, p. 48) Baxter definitely broke ranks with the Calvinist orthodoxy of his Dissenting brethren. He turned to cite approvingly the treatise on the Trinity by the Jesuit Dionysius Petavius, who would become the sworn enemy of George Bull (1634–1710) in his several defenses of Nicene orthodoxy. Petavius’s view had become a “thorn in the side” for many orthodox defenders of the trinitarian doctrine who, for various reasons, feared to acknowledge the validity of the development theory of Christian doctrine. In other words, Petavius insisted that the early church knew and regarded as sufficient that “Jesus Christ is Lord” and did not regard the question of Trinity in any way significant, certainly not a requirement for church membership nor salvation. However, in the second and third centuries, the idea of Christ as the “very God of very God,” and “God of God” became further developed; this was not a departure from the faith of the early church but certainly a more developed expression of the primitive faith. So Baxter cited Petavius, who asserted that the advantage of Arius was that a number of pre-Nicene Fathers had described the ontological identity and economy of the Son in similar terms since the “Controversie being not then well considered.”175 Petavius cited from Lucian, Justin Martyr, and a plethora of other writers whose sense of the identity of Christ bore striking resemblance to that of Arius. Yet the Petavian legacy was far subtler and more complex than how Baxter in his polemical heat portrayed him to be. For Petavius, the fact that Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, Philo, and other non-Christian writers spoke of the divine triad or the Word as the distinct yet inseparable entity within God was no threat to the doctrine of the Trinity. In fact, this confirmed the ancient pedigree of the idea of God as triune. The other aspect was that Petavius did speak slightly ambiguously about the nature of the trinitarian doctrine before Nicaea. While he would not say that the ante-Nicene fathers were anti-Nicene—as had Biddle—yet since Petavius did affirm the view that the specific linguistic mode of homoousion was unknown to them, he provided the perfect grist for the antitrinitarian mill. This is probably what Baxter is referring to as he cites from Dionysius of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, and Lucian. He regards all these ante-Nicene Fathers to have been imperfect and infelicitous in expressing the sublime mystery of the Trinity.176 Yet it seems that was another example of selective quotation from an author without taking the overall authorial thrust seriously. Discussing the complex relationship between Scripture, tradition, and the Trinity, Petavius argued in his “Praefatio” to De Trinitate: For we desire to demonstrate this: how in the advance [viz., the development of the doctrine] of the Trinity that must be affirmed, “let us run back to the source, that is to the Apostolic tradition; and thence let us direct

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ourselves on the passageway in our times.” Thus I may make use of the words of Augustine, writing thusly after Cyprian. Although up to the time of the Council of Nicaea it is sufficient for us to continue the succession of tradition; because from that time it was without interruption unanimous among the Catholics, and without dispute. This declaration [of the Trinity] poured forth not at that time in channels, and streams; rather it inundated the entire Church in torrents and rivers. Therefore since tradition, as has been demonstrated up above, either it derives its very substance without the written text of Christian doctrine, as thus I would say, or it shows the means of justifying it from the Scriptures, in this latterly fashion the confession of the Trinity has been propagated, and guided through this narrow path, which in the beginning of his work Hilary tell us at the beginning of his work—a point which he reiterates—that he had often thought about and held fast, since only gradually he had matured from paganism into the perfection of Christian doctrine, and most of all the profession of the Trinity.177 To be sure, Petavius emphasized the organic role played by tradition in delivering up the doctrine of the Trinity in Nicaea. Yet it was hard to see whether either in this quote or throughout his De Trinitate Petavius taught a radical disjunction between the ante-Nicene tradition and Nicene trinitarian doctrine. In fact, Petavius anchored the seeds of the Nicene “flower” to have been embedded in Scripture, so that it was more of an organic growth, not a terrible deviation from scriptural teaching. What I believe to be a conclusive statement about Baxter’s “Baxterian sensibilities,” which eventually gave rise to Unitarianism among eighteenth-century English Presbyterians, was this. After citing the misdirected pre-Nicene attempts at speaking faithfully about the mystery of the Incarnation, Baxter wrote the following revealing statement, which read rather prophetically: But it is enough to think charitably, that they were saved, without going so far to say, they were without all fault. For Christianity is the same thing before such Controversies and after: And it’s hard to think how he can be a Christian, that denyeth Christs Essence: But God is merciful, and requireth not knowledge alike in all, that have not equal means of knowledge. Which charity must be extended to others as well as to these Fathers.178 Just as some of these pre-Nicene Fathers might have been wrong about the exact ontology and economy of the Trinity and yet were saved by our triune God who “is merciful” and does not require all equal knowledge for all Christians, those who, out of their sincere desire to honor God, somehow denied “Christs

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Essence,” namely, the deity of Christ, might still receive God’s saving mercies. Perhaps Baxter recalled his parochial ministry in Kidderminster all too well, where his taxonomy of the parishioners far exceeded the typical Puritan bifurcation of the godly and the ungodly. He had divided his parishioners into twelve groups, ranging from the truly sanctified to those who thought the Son was the “Sunne, that shineth in the firmament,” and the Holy Spirit was the moon, and whose knowledge of God was as bankrupt as that of the “veryest heathen in America.”179 Then a lingering question was: “Does Baxter think that Arius was a heretic or not?” It would thus seem that for Baxter, even though Arius was a heretic, God’s saving mercy was sufficient for him, especially judging from the rhetorical force of the last sentence, that “charity must be extended . . . to these Fathers,” whose linguistic infelicity and theological error paled into insignificance, vis-à-vis their love for God. Yet such charitable hermeneutic was what eluded Baxter’s interpretation of the motives and acts of the bishops who were bent on hereticating and self-aggrandizing. John Spurr has judiciously noted that history was an invaluable “handmaiden of religion in seventeenth-century England,” and the alleged purges of conformists and nonconformists during the Civil War and the Restoration gave rise to a steady flow of polemically oriented histories. Moreover, among histories, as we have already seen with Hobbes’s and Baxter’s preoccupation with ecclesiastical history, the “primitive church was at a premium” as the site for polemical arsenal building.180 The most problematic part of the primitive church’s council, for Baxter, was at Ephesus, where Cyril the thuggish bishop held court. X

Baxter and the Trouble with Cyril and the Council of Ephesus Desire for political domination, Baxter noted, was the main impetus behind a plethora of these “dividing engines,” called Councils.181 In chapter 5 of Church History of . . . Councils, Baxter provided in detail his relentless indictment of Cyril’s episcopate, which was allegedly marked by absence of holiness and abundance of violence. One of the first stories with which he launched the career of Cyril the thuggish bishop was the infamous murder of Hypatia. Basing his source on Socrates Scholasticus’s Historia Ecclesiastica (book 7, chapters 13–15), Baxter described the retaliatory murder and expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria by Cyril, which prompted the ire of the governor, Orestes, who interpreted Cyril’s act as an ecclesiastical intrusion into civic jurisdiction. The monks of Mount Nitria sided with Cyril vis-à-vis Orestes, stirred up a riot, and caused a nonfatal head injury to the governor. The Alexandrians warded off the monks, killing the one who threw the stone at Orestes. With tension

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already thick, the people noticed that Orestes often talked with Hypatia, the celebrated pagan teacher of philosophy and mathematics. Misconstruing that she was the cause for the tension between Cyril and Orestes, they “laid hold of her; drew her into a Church, stript her stark naked; rase the skin, and tare the flesh off her body with sharp shells till she dyed: they quarter her body and burn them to ashes: which turned to the great dishonour of Cyril.”182 Baxter did not seek to exonerate Cyril of the guilt by association, and this vignette became the basis of the Deist John Toland’s anti-Catholic tract, Hypatia: Or the history of a most beautiful, most vertuous, most learned, and every way accomplish’d lady; who was torn to pieces by the clergy of Alexandria, to gratify the pride, emulation, and cruelty of their archbishop, commonly but undeservedly stil’d St. Cyril, published in 1720.183 Baxter’s polemical strategy against the Council of Ephesus and its hero, Cyril, was, once again, by identifying the less-than-sanctified acts of pride and persecution. With Cyril, it was not hard to do. Cyril’s defense of orthodox Christology, especially over against the teaching of Nestorius, was well-known. Perhaps equally famous was Cyril’s tempestuous character. In his Treatise of Episcopacy (1681), Baxter further accused Cyril of being the first bishop to use the sword to quell the furor of the heretical rabble, for invading a kind of “secular Magistracy,” for plundering the Novatians of their churches, and robbing “Bishop Theopompus of all his fortunes.”184 Why was Baxter so uncharitable in hounding Cyril’s cruelty? Aside from Cyril’s behavior, the other surprising emphasis in Baxter’s description of the Council of Ephesus was the alleged similarity of the doctrinal position between Nestorius and Cyril. Baxter’s description of the polemical divide is worth quoting at length, for it revealed as much of Baxter’s own theological method as it did of the real issue between Cyril and Nestorius. And what was really the Controversie between them? Some accuse Nestorius as asserting two persons in Christ as well as two natures, which he still denyed: Others accuse Cyril as denying two Natures: But his words about this were many, but he affirmed two Natures before the Union, (and so did the Eutychians) but one after: David Derodon a most learned Frenchman hath written a Treatise De Supposito, in which he copiously laboureth to prove that Nestorius was Orthodox, holding two Natures in one Person, and that Cyril and his Council were Hereticks, holding one Nature only after Union, and that he was a true Eutychian . . . and the Council of Chalcedon condemned Nestorius and established his Doctrine, and extolled Cyril and condemned his Doctrine. But for my part I make no doubt that, de re, they were both fully of one mind, and differed only about the aptitude of a phrase: Whether it were an apt Speech to call Mary the Parent of God,

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and to say that God was two months old, God hungered, God dyed and rose, &c. which Nestorius denyed, and Cyril and the Council with him affirmed. And what hath the World suffered by this Word Warr. But which was in the right? . . . They both meant that Mary was the Mother of Christ who was God, and of the Union of the Natures. . . . So that one speaking de concreto, and the other de abstracto, one materially and the other formally, in that heat of Contention they hereticated each other and kindled a flame not quenched to this day, about a word while both were of one mind.185 This quote illustrates the theological method and principle, which Baxter had already proposed in his Catholick Theologie in which he juxtaposed two contradictory positions A and B, and offered a third conciliating alternative. Thus, in the Cyril-Nestorius debate, what Baxter saw was that the substance of the debate was on semantic misunderstanding of the polemical other. With that broad sweep, Baxter was effectively declaring that neither Cyril nor Nestorius understood the polemical maneuver of the other, and more indicting yet, neither did the Council of Ephesus when it espoused the Cyrillian view of theotokos (lit., Mary as God-bearer) and hereticated Nestorius. Baxter’s enthusiastic support for Nestorius, via the controversial French theologian David Derodon, was going to reap a whirlwind as the Restoration polemicists cast aspersions on Baxter’s own Christological and trinitarian errors. This preferential treatment toward Nestorian Christology would pay off in Baxter’s further encomium of Job Ludolphus’s New History of Ethiopia (1682), in his own The True History of Councils Enlarged (1682). Ludolphus, a Lutheran polyglot who had been in the diplomatic service for the Duke of SaxeGotha from 1652 until 1678, wrote the ground-breaking history of Ethiopia. It was groundbreaking at least in two ways: it was the first book about the life, customs, and religion of Ethiopia; second, by speaking of the piety of the Coptic Orthodox Christians and by divulging the Jesuit scheme in Ethiopia, Baxter showed that it was the Cyrillian orthodox Christology group, namely, the Jesuits, whose diabolical deeds were far more reprehensible than this putatively inferior Nestorian Christology of the Ethiopians.186 Another vindicating piece of evidence that Cyril’s impetuous hereticating of Nestorius was wrong after all was to be found, at least for Baxter, in the current shape of the Nestorian churches, as reported in Edward Brerewood’s Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions through the chiefe parts of the world. First published in 1614 and republished in 1622, 1635, and 1674 (Baxter used the 1635 edition), Brerewood’s travelogue spoke in positive terms about the witness of these hereticated Nestorians. After describing the considerable geographical spread of the Nestorians, ranging from “Babylon, Assyria, Mesopotamia,” to “Cataya . . . India,” Brerewood was also sympathetic

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to the view that “they are falsely accused still to hold two Persons in Christ: They say as Nestorius himself said, You may say that Christ’s Mother is the Parent of God, if you will expound it well, but it is improper and dangerous.”187 Thus perhaps for Brerewood and certainly for Baxter, all of these real and/or verbal differences were not worth the price of splitting the Church.188 It seems clear that Baxter’s historical method was to ransack the past for possible precedents of the persecutory behaviors of the Restoration bishops and their councils. But why the councils? It might well be because Baxter genuinely feared that the potential rapprochement between the Anglicans and the Gallicans, the French Catholics who were equally opposed to Rome, thus endorsing the authority of councils as the way of peace, was about to happen with the accession of an openly Catholic monarch, James II.189 XI

Baxter the Troubler of General Councils? Scrupulous in its attention to the patristic and medieval ecclesiastical histories, albeit not as au courant as Henry Maurice would regard sufficient for a patristic text critic, clearly anti-prelatical in its orientation, and firmly anchored in the defense of the suffering nonconformists, Baxter’s Church-History . . . of Councils was bound to elicit vituperative responses from the Restoration divines. It immediately drew angry remonstrations. Indeed, Baxter shot himself in the foot when he averred: “I dare boldly say no Christian hath hitherto spoke trulier and plainer of the Unity of Christs Person in two Natures, than Nestorius.”190 In the same year that Church-History . . . of Councils was published, two vitriolic responses were quickly published. The anonymous author of A Just Reproof to Mr. Richard Baxter castigated Baxter for his “most Wicked Attempt to bring an Odium upon . . . that most Reverend Bishop” Cyril. It is clear that “historiographical telescoping,” or being clearly anachronistic about the past so as to re-live the past in the present was not the fault merely of Baxter. For the anonymous defender of the Restoration Church, Cyril was a “Bishop” fi rst and foremost, and it was out of the sanctity of that office that Cyril defended orthodoxy vis-à-vis the renegade heretic, Nestorius.191 Thus both Cyril and Cyprian were inspiration for the resurgent bishops of John Fell’s type, for whom the flowering of patristic scholarship had an intrinsic self-fashioning element. However, as the author continued to upbraid Baxter, the greater culpability lay with his toppling over of all conciliar authority, especially those of the fi rst four: “it was your most sinful SELFCONCEITEDNESS that prompted you to such an Endeavor to Defame not

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only the Council of Ephesus and Saint Cyril, but also the Th ree other most Celebrated General Councils.”192 Taking issue with Baxter’s censure of the “shamefully militant” Council of Nicaea, the author of Just Reproof insisted that, though militant, it did not follow that the Nicene Creed was false or written upon a “Principle of Envy, and Malice.” He saw through Baxter’s polemical strategy. Implicit throughout Baxter’s critique of councils was that the prevalence of thuggish bishops was likely to compromise the credibility of their trinitarian doctrine (Council of Nicaea) or the two-nature Christology (Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon), rendering them ultimately untenable. What was implicit in Baxter’s critique would become the explicit reason for the Unitarians’, such as Joseph Priestley’s, disavowal of the Trinity. Finding Baxter’s collapse of logic in declaring “Cyril, Eutyches, and Dioscorus” all of one mind in their respective Christologies completely fatuous, the author of Just Reproof invoked the judgment of God for having insulted “Saint Cyril” since Baxter charged him of being “entangled in the like Self-contradiction.”193 Edmund Elys’s short reply to both Lewis Du Moulin and Richard Baxter was the second published attack on Church History . . . of Councils. Deeply deferential toward Cyril, scrupulous in his analysis of the Nestorian controversy, and unrelenting in exposing Baxter’s utter hypocrisy for peace, Elys’s Seasonable Words to . . . Baxter was a trenchant defense of the indispensable nature of episcopacy and the Prayer Book.194 In an effective simile, Elys likened Baxter’s besmirching of the episcopal authority of Cyril to the antitrinitarian critics of Athanasius and his creed: both were guilty of fanning the antitrinitarian flame. Baxter’s protestation otherwise, Elys’s and Maurice’s polemical salvo would prove perhaps prophetic: We grant that there are in this very Kingdom a sort of People no less Angry with St Athanasius, than you are with St Cyril, yea such as plainly deny the Deity of our Saviour. We boldly Aver that those that would lessen that Authority of Bishops, are Instrumental to the Grand Design of the Devil, and his Principal Agents to destroy those Ecclesiastical Constitutions, whereby we uphold the Solemn Profession of the Fundamental Truths pertaining to Life and Godliness.195 In addition to the muddled thinking on Baxter’s part, the apologists for Restoration episcopacy were convinced that he epitomized the pretended peacemakers who would not conform all the way to adopt Prayer Book religion. Such resistance was used as a polemical weapon by the Anglicans to assert that all Dissenters were potential or already poisoned antitrinitarians. Unsurprisingly, both the author of Just Reproof and Elys, not to mention

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Maurice, were convinced that the liturgical accoutrements of the Church of England were sine qua non as defense against antitrinitarian heresies and fostered a true piety. Such was a continuation of the position espoused by the extruded Laudian bishops and priests such as Herbert Thorndike, Peter Gunning, Godfrey Goodman, Edmund Porter, Henry Hammond, Brian Duppa, and John Cosin, inter alia, thereby confirming the need to see the 1650s and the 1670s as far more tightly connected, as William Lamont and JeanLouis Quantin had maintained. To the extent Baxter was not actively endorsing Prayer Book religion—the Prayer Book containing the “very Extract and Quintessence of the . . . Fervent Devotion of the Ancient Fathers”—it was proof that he was less than sanguine about what those who lived “Five Hundred Years after the Sun of Righteousness” had brought to the world, including Cyril, the great defender of orthodox Christology against Nestorius.196 Louis Du Pin, an ultra-Gallican ecclesiastical historian who wrote the massively erudite New History of Ecclesiastical Writers, also offered a countervailing evidence vis-à-vis Baxter’s view by demonstrating that Cyril did not have much to do with the murder of Hypatia and by buttressing Cyril’s orthodoxy over against the heresy of Nestorius.197 William Wotton, the translator of Du Pin’s Bibliothèque des Auteurs Ecclésiastique, was not only a noted polylingual but also a High Church divine, with two Archbishops of Canterbury, William Wake, and Thomas Tenison as his patrons. Thus Wotton was likely to be an ardent defender of the apostolic origin of episcopacy and the sanctity of bishops, over against the Dissenters such as Baxter.198 Thus it seems, directly and indirectly, efforts were made to withstand the spread of this particular Baxterian mode of re-telling the church’s past. XII

Calling Baxter’s Historical Bluff: Henry Maurice’s Attack on Church-History of . . . Councils The most vicious and erudite critique of Baxter’s perspective on ecclesiastical history came from Henry Maurice (1648–1691), a leading Oxford patristic scholar who was no less learned than committed to the defense of the Restoration church. Maurice was also regarded as an avowed defender of Oxford Tory royalism, along with Thomas Long, George Hickes, Samuel Parker, and Thomas Sprat.199 Maurice had repudiated the Roman claims of papal infallibility, cracked down on toleration and other venues of clandestine Dissent spirituality, endorsed the new oaths of allegiance to William and Mary, and galvanized the momentum for a new convocation, inter alia.200 Yet the most acrimonious battle Maurice had to wage dealt with the legitimacy of

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episcopacy and the allegedly sordid history of the councils led by bishops. This is where Baxter came into the picture.201 Maurice’s chief patron was the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and judging from both the enormity of the charge Baxter leveled against the Restoration episcopacy in Church-History of . . . Councils and its popularity, it was likely that Maurice was asked to use his patristic skills to respond to this “Presbyterian Impudence.” Several leading apologists of the Restoration church, such as Samuel Parker and Henry Dodwell, were calling for a swift rebuttal.202 Vindication of the Primitive Church and Diocesan Episcopacy: In Answer to Mr. Baxter’s Church of Bishops and their Councils Abridged (1682) was deemed to be the definitive defense of both bishops and their councils. Maurice indicted Baxter’s grand theory of the irretrievable loss of the Church’s innocence as too reductionistic a view for serious historical scholarship and too analogous to the Socinian view of ecclesiastical history for orthodoxy. Both Baxter and Maurice instinctively knew that it was a “matter of salvation before it was a question of scholarship,” a matter of faith before it was a matter of fact. Indeed, it is arguably the case that historical “facts” marshaled for confessional historiographical polemics were already immersed in the waters of faith, to render markedly divergent interpretations of facts.203 Yet feigning history to launch vitriolic attacks on dead bishops, as Maurice accused Baxter of indulging in, had far graver consequences than merely besmirching the reputation of a few prelates behaving badly.204 Maurice noticed in Baxter’s simultaneous attack on Athanasius and Cyril and defense of Nestorius, Peter Abelard, even Arius a deeply disturbing crypto-Socinian tendency.205 So he sarcastically notes that since Baxter was so much given to use of “Figures,” he could not tell whether he was serious in calling Arianism a “dangerous Heresie” or speaking only “Ironically.” Yet, Maurice was absolutely certain that what followed on in Church-History of . . . Councils (p. 48, § 4.) was “very much to the disadvantage of the Doctrine of the Trinity.”206 The other key contested area of dispute was whether emperors or bishops were more culpable for some of the undeniably disastrous handling of ecclesiastical councils, which Maurice himself acknowledged. Unsurprisingly, Baxter had squarely fi xed the culpability on the bishops, as Maurice defended the Church in this way: The rest of the Councils, to the end of this Chapter, must be confes’d not to be much to the Honour of the Church; yet the evil Effects and Consequences of them, are rather to be charged upon the Arrian Emperour than the Bishops. This was the time of the Arrian Inquisition, and this was the miserable choice, to subscribe, or to suffer Imprisonment, and scourging, and Banishment, and Sequestration . . . that it was neither the Bishop, nor the

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Christian, but the Man, and the infirmity of Humane Nature, was to be charged with these Compliances.207 In other words, the real culpability lay not with the bishop but to be attributed to the extreme exigencies of the politics of persecution. It could be the emperor’s fault, but Maurice’s sacerdotalistic commitment prevented him from affi xing any particular blame, aside from the insipid comment that it is in the “infirmity of Humane Nature,” on bishops, for to do so would play into Baxter’s polemical hands. Moreover, all too acutely aware of the increased intensity of critique of priestcraft in late-seventeenth-century England, Maurice expressed no interest in throwing the bishops under the cart. That was Hobbes’s job, Marvell’s delight, and Baxter’s sworn duty. Baxter and Hobbes were not the only ones who went on attacking episcopal bishops and their cabals. This critique of priestcraft and conciliar decrees was carried out by one possessed of sharper wit and no less theological acumen than they: Andrew Marvell (1621–1678). We shall discuss his Mr. Smirke and A Short Historical Essay in their Restoration polemical context in the last section. To Marvell, we shall turn. XIII

Marvell, Mr. Smirke, and Heresy, or How the Church Lost Its Virgin Purity? Let us begin with a question: “What influence, if any, did the early Church and ecclesiastical councils have on Marvell’s writings?” Aside from finding Annabel Patterson’s helpful comment that “it is easy to forget how much research he did into the opinions of the medieval Church fathers and early ecclesiastical historians,” answers are, surprisingly, not easy to find.208 One obvious answer could be that as part of the Renaissance habitus and proliferation of patristic scholarship in post-Restoration England, and as his main antagonists, Samuel Parker and Francis Turner, were steeped in patristics, to beat them in their game, Marvell had to marshal his rhetorical evidence from that vast pool of doctrinal wranglings and episcopal disputes from this exciting period of ecclesiastical hegemonic struggle.209 For some, the first four centuries of the Christian Church, particularly after the closing of the so-called apostolic period, c. 100 ce—thus roughly from 110–500 ce—were marked by simultaneous preservation of primitive orthodoxy and refinement of the Church’s kerygma and theologia, thereby affirming a sense of continuity. Thus, there was a relative straight line connecting the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 17) and the Council of Nicaea (325 ce). This

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historical sensibility was to be found among the “magisterial Reformers” in the sixteenth century and among the majority of Presbyterians and Episcopalians in England. For others, there was a radical rupture between the scriptural simplicity of the first-century church and the Hellenism-laden dogmatic complexity of the second, third, and fourth centuries. Most Anabaptists, Quakers, Familists, and various millenarian groups held this view. Under this consideration, the goal of the present-day church was to restore (ergo the term restorationist) to the primitive (ergo primitivist, primitivism) purity of the apostolic church. For them, the path between the Council of Jerusalem in first-century Christianity and the Council of Nicaea was crooked, unclear, and marked by deviations. As Hans Hillerbrand has argued recently, however, the English Deists and other radical early Enlightenment thinkers, such as Charles Blount, Jean Le Clerc, Jacques Souverain, and John Toland, also adopted this historical perspective.210 Thus, to properly situate the intellectual zeitgeist of Marvell’s anticlerical and anticonciliar writings, a robust understanding of how the patristic past was influencing the “first Restoration crisis” is necessary.211 We have seen already that the present-day political and religious affairs inexorably provided the requisite lens through which the fourth-century conciliar decrees and the aftermaths of the fallout between the homoousians and the Arians were read.212 In what follows, Marvell’s perspective on ecclesiastical councils, its impact on the nature of orthodoxy, and the long-term effect on the quest for religious settlement in the 1670s and 1680s are analyzed. Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) was a leading poet, satirist, MP, and ardent defender of Dissent vis-à-vis the persecutory rhetoric and legislation instigated by the avowed protectors of the Restoration church, such as Samuel Parker. He is memorialized for calling the 1670 Conventicle Act “the quintessence of arbitrary malice.”213 In his Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), often known as the “Cabal’s literary memorial,” Marvell threw back as many low blows as Samuel Parker himself had hurled, and his Mr. Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode (1676) was an attack on Francis Turner, a High Church Tory and Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who himself had attacked Bishop Herbert Croft’s Naked Truth (1675).214 Marvell’s significance as a key figure in the Restoration literary culture of persuasion, politics of religion, discourse of Dissent, anti-popery, and toleration has been well noted.215 Yet aside from a penetrating analysis of Marvell’s religion by William Lamont twenty years ago, there has been surprisingly little scholarly interest in Marvell’s engagement with this crucial theme.216 This section analyzes two Marvell texts, Mr. Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode and A Short Historical Essay, touching General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions, in Matters of Religion, which were published together in May 1676, with particular attention given

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to what I would call Marvell’s “creedal minimalism,” juxtaposing it with the strikingly similar perspectives of Hobbes and Baxter. In doing so, I hope to extend Lamont’s template of situating Marvell and Baxter as two co-pugilists with overlapping perspectives: (1) anti-prelatical sensibilities, which therefore looked back at the Council of Nicaea as a place of episcopal hunger for power, often veiled behind the creation of hereticating creeds; and (2) anti-Calvinism, which, as Lamont, and N. H. Keeble more recently, noted, was manifested in the support both Baxter and Marvell offered to John Howe, a moderate Calvinist. Howe’s perspective on predestination was an effort to blunt the sharp edges of Calvinism, which, Howe feared, could well make God the author of sin.217 Yet this softening of Calvinism was seen by his High Calvinist opponents, especially Thomas Danson, as a dangerous capitulation to Arminianism, which was putatively just one stop before the final destination, Socinianism. Marvell came to the defense of Howe by publishing an anonymous pamphlet, Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse writ by one T.D. &c, in 1678. Baxter’s middle way between Arminius and Calvin, which was the way taken by the English delegates at the Synod of Dort, was a helpful theological blueprint for Howe. As we will see later, Marvell’s anti-Calvinistic sentiments were already present in his 1676 Mr. Smirke and quite possibly earlier. In April 1675, Herbert Croft (1603–1691), bishop of Hereford and an erstwhile Jesuit, wrote The Naked Truth, and this mere sixty-five-page pamphlet caused a consternation among the priests, prelates, and MPs. Croft was known for his pastoral sensitivities and a desire to comprehend Dissenters, rather than punitively browbeat them into submission. To achieve that, he collaborated with Sir Robert Atkins and Colonel John Birch to effect Comprehension in 1667 by introducing a bill in the Commons. It proved to be a nonstarter, after all. Moreover, he unsuccessfully opposed the more draconian Conventicle Act of 1670, as he collaborated with Sir Edward Harley for this failed attempt.218 Croft’s basic message was surprisingly simplistic, particularly unseemly for a bishop. Timing was not to be for Croft’s desired distribution of The Naked Truth among the MPs. On June 9, 1675, Charles II prorogued the parliament, just as Croft was hoping to distribute the new tract, brimming with palliative insights to bringing the wounded factions within English Protestantism together by following the liturgical and theological paradigm of the “Primitive Church.” Since Croft seemingly intended The Naked Truth to be an intra-Parliamentary reading, to be discussed within that context first, he ordered the printer to stop the print run. That order was willfully spurned, as the pirated edition was selling well by early autumn 1675. Between the authorized and pirated editions, Croft’s debut as a controversialist was a smashing success.219 Alarmed by The Naked Truth, the Restoration Church moved with alacrity. Francis Turner’s (1637–1700) anonymously published Animadversions upon a

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Late Pamphlet was the answer.220 Turner was a Gunning protégé, chaplain to the duke of York, and master of St. John’s College, Cambridge; thus this publication was eagerly encouraged, even expedited, by the ecclesiastical upper echelon.221 Turner’s patron Peter Gunning, bishop of Ely, was fulminating from the pulpit; the possible kernel of the sermons were published as Lex Talionis: Or the Author of Naked Truth Stript Naked (1676).222 So what was so frightening and infuriating about The Naked Truth? Two themes woven throughout were (1) Croft’s adherence to sola scriptura—and non-imposition of extrabiblical creeds and confessions—as a means to ecclesiastical peace and (2) Croft’s insistence that the Council of Nicaea, and other councils, committed an egregious error by resorting to draconian enforcement of orthodoxy, not infrequently with violent means. In other words, there was a considerable overlap between Croft and Marvell. Starting with Nicaea, Croft argued: Nothing has caused more mischief in the Church than the establishing new and many Articles of Faith, and requiring all to assent unto them. I am willing to believe that zealous men endeavoured this with pious intentions to promote that which they conceived Truth; but by imposing it on the dissenters, caused furious Warrs, and lamentable Blood-shed among Christians, Brother Fighting against Brother, and Murthering each other.223 The use of the word dissenters to describe the Arians, semi-Arians, and others deemed to be heterodox was intentional, and this was interpreted by Turner as a clear sign that Naked Truth was dripping with Socinian lies and mad “Hobbist divinity.” The very first salvo out of Croft’s arsenal, however, was that as soon as one departs from the Protestant maxim of sola scriptura, then dividing engines galore and hereticating schemes in abundance were in store. Desisting the nearly ubiquitous impulse within Christendom to come up with more proximate creeds, Croft averred that the Apostles’ Creed was the one true universal symbol of Christian Catholicity and unity: not because the apostles wrote it (highly unlikely, he said), but rather because all “that is in that Creed is evident in Scripture.”224 Put differently, Croft was adamant that we have no safe way to speak truthfully concerning divine matters, save for scriptural language, “ipsissimis verbis,” for human words simply were inadequate to encapsulate “Divine and high mysteries.”225 Reflecting likely his own Jesuit experience, Croft wrote that once we stop cleaving to Scripture, by which he meant scriptural expressions, and leaned on human doctrines, however holy, learned, and even Nicene, then “we shall soon be wheedled into the papists religion.”226 Not only was Croft adamant that the Apostles’ Creed was sufficient as a litmus test but also he was equally certain that the basis of the Ethiopian

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treasurer’s baptism (as in Acts 8:26–40) was his belief that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” Both these things that Croft enjoins as a test of orthodoxy— sola scriptura and the confession of Christ’s Sonship and Messiahship—and which Marvell would call “very Christian, very Rational,” were regarded as an unequivocally clear sign that one was Socinian-leaning.227 Such was precisely how Baxter earned that unfortunate sobriquet of being a potential Socinian in late autumn 1654 in London. That Baxter was soft not only on justification by faith alone but also believed the Apostles Creed, the Decalogue, and the Lord’s Prayer to be sufficient test of orthodoxy was proof sufficient for Baxter’s Socinian proclivities, as his High Calvinist interlocutors worried. Turner’s response, Animadversions upon a Late Pamphlet entitled the Naked Truth, was equal in length yet, in terms of vitriol, surpassed The Naked Truth by a mile. It is in this context that Marvell came to Croft’s rescue by publishing Mr. Smirke, as he mercilessly ridiculed the illogicality of Turner’s Animadversions. Just as The Naked Truth was a sensation, so was Mr. Smirke a bomb detonated in the episcopal playground. By May 8, 1676, the warden of the Stationers’ Company sent men hunting for the copies of Mr. Smirke. Nathaniel Ponder, the London bookseller responsible for publishing Mr. Smirke, was incarcerated; the legality of committing Ponder to prison was hotly debated by the MPs, including the Lord Privy Seal Arthur Annesley, who was also a patron of Marvell.228 As Beth Lynch argues persuasively, publishing Mr. Smirke demonstrated the subterranean presence of Dissenting booksellers and writers and the sense of threat brought about by this cause célèbre.229 Marvell’s Mr. Smirke offered a near point-by-point refutation of Turner’s Animadversions, in terms of biblical exegesis and theological reasoning, and then the most crucial part of historical argument was deferred and appended to it as A Short Historical Essay. Marvell’s threefold, intertwined commitments were (1) creedal minimalism; (2) episcopal, conciliar impositions of creeds as a clear deviation from the command of Christ; and (3) pace Turner’s perspective, anti-popery could never equal pro-conciliarism, especially in light of the French Gallicanism that was beckoning their Anglican would-be siblings to an alliance to withstand Roman pretensions. First, let us consider Marvell’s creedal minimalism. Marvell’s creedal minimalism ran consistently through Mr. Smirke and A Short Historical Essay. Perceiving Croft’s insistence that the baptized Ethiopian only knew that Jesus is the Christ as a Socinian-leaning error, Turner had argued instead that Philip had baptized him using a trinitarian formula. Gross anachronism was what Marvell charged Turner with, and he continued, dripping with sarcasm, that in fact Philip probably knew the Constantinopolitan Creed (with its infamous language of “one baptism for the remission of sins”), and the Ethiopian was likely baptized in the “Lake of Geneva,” as he must have been catechized by a “whole Calvinistical Systeme of Divinity”!230 Thus, for

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Marvell, any deviation from creedal minimalism ended up in the cul-de-sac of Calvinistic maximalism, something he regarded as hardly better than popery or Laudianism. In other words, what he found most odious was the “gibberish of their imposing,” whether in fourth-century Nicaea or seventeenth-century Westminster.231 Although Turner was not likely a hard-core Calvinist, the rhetorical value was clear. In A Short Historical Essay, Marvell was equally unrelenting in his critique of additional creeds that have sprung up, even including the Nicene Creed. If Jesus sincerely believed, Marvell wrote, that “if any Creed had been Necessary . . . our Saviour himself would not have left his Church destitute,” but no such thing did Christ leave behind, not even a letter. Moreover, he called Nicaea “an Ecclesiastical Cock-pit.”232 The trend which began at Nicaea was to neatly align orthodoxy and heresy by making new creeds. Thus for Marvell, the language of the Athanasian Creed, particularly that imprecatory clause “without Believing which . . . no Man else can be saved,” was robbing all people of Christian charity. This type of imposition, as Marvell indefatigably stressed, was both dangerous and “unwarrantable by Reason or Scripture.”233 Moreover, Marvell pungently noted that since truth has become subjugated to power, any move to create a new creed or confession apart from scriptural language was deemed to be a thinly veiled power-mongering move. So he insisted that what “makes it very suspicious is, that in Ecclesiastical History, the Ring-leader of any Heresie is for the most part accused of having a mind to be a Bishop.”234 In fact, as Jon Parkin argues convincingly, Marvell’s “sketch of clerical absolutism gone mad,” the theme of Rehearsal Transpros’d, was also balanced by his remonstration with Charles II to utilize his “power to put the clergymen in their place and exercise his prudence in desisting from persecution.”235 Seen from this vantage point, there was a clear ideological overlap between Hobbes and Marvell. For Marvell, once the church lost its primitive moorings by departing from sola scriptura, it left itself open for the imposition of creeds by bishops and their councils, the perfect hothouse for clerical absolutism to germinate and bear fruit, a point argued similarly and with equal vigor by Hobbes. For Marvell, the aftermath of the Council of Nicaea was marked by “Imposition of Contrary Creeds,” and in case its efforts were thwarted, persecutions erupted, often equal to those under heathen emperors. Such was the price to pay for leaving the primitive simplicity of Christ’s gospel.236 Capturing the doleful sense of the tragic departure from Christ the center was, as Marvell quoted from Hilary of Poitiers, that “we do nothing but write Creeds.”237 Such was precisely the sentiment of Baxter and Hobbes. The other aspect of Marvell’s thought with considerable resemblance to that of Baxter was their elusive pursuit of doctrinal via media. After mentioning a Baxterian dictum that although truth is mostly located in the middle, people’s strange penchant

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leads them to seek it “in the extremities,” Marvell offered a most indicting statement: Nor can I wonder that those ages were so fertile in what they called Heresies, when being given to meddling with the mysteries of Religion, further than humane apprehension, or divine revelation did or could lead them . . . that there being moreover a good fat Bishoprick to boot in the case, it is rather admirable to me how all the Clergy from one end to the other, could escape from being or being accounted Hereticks.238 Within two months of the publication of Mr. Smirke, Bishop Croft sent a letter expressing his gratitude for Marvell’s defense of Naked Truth, after it had been “bespotted with the dirty language of foule mouthed beasts.”239 Not all thought so highly of Marvell or of his smear tactics in Mr. Smirke. Roger North upbraided Marvell for writing with “Malice and Defiance against . . . the Symbols of our Holy Faith” by mocking the “Nicene Fathers.”240 For a rabid Tory writer, Laurence Echard, Marvell possessed “pestilent Wits,” made much “Noise in the World,” and was noted, along with Marchamont Nedham, as “dangerous Incendiaries.”241 Marvell sought to deflate the hereticating zeal with which some Englishmen seemed to be uniquely gifted in his political career as well. In March 1677, he was added to the committee to re-draft a bill to abolish the heresy writ, De Haeretico Comburendo. After its initial motion, it became stillborn in May 1675.242 The last point concerning Marvell’s attack on general councils was that since they were all conveniently cloaked power plays of avaricious bishops, they were never truly general, or universal, since there were “Representatio totius nominis Christiani,” or representative of all those called Christians. More fundamentally, Marvell threw down his gauntlet and asked Turner: “which are those General Councils? How shall we know them?”243 Furthermore, Marvell seemed to be reflecting the fear of popery so prevalent in the 1670s, as he made the pungent point that those who were ostensibly espousing anti-popery were running from one form, centered on the Roman papacy, to yet another, centered around general councils. Dissenters and their spokesmen such as Marvell believed that England was mired in yet another version—more surreptitious—of the popish plot, and the Restoration divines, especially those who were in dalliance with the French Catholics, were equally mistaken. J. H. M. Salmon saw the shared historical and ecclesial sensibilities between French Gallicanism and Anglicanism, evinced in their common preoccupation with their historical, apostolical, identity which bypassed the Bishop of Rome as the head. Both churches endeavored to create a partially mythical and partially historical account that “initially suited its needs but, once established, proved incapable of adaptation.” Thus, there was a

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constant need to draw on “the lore of the primitive church, the ancient councils, and the Caesaro-papism of the early Christian emperors.”244 For Marvell, behind all the recriminations of these bishops behaving badly stood a picture of Constantine and the Constantinian emperors who were duped, which echoed Hobbes’s critique perfectly. So when comparing Constantine to both Alexander and Arius, Marvell declared: “how discreet, how Christian-like, I never read any thing of that nature equal to it.”245 XIV

Conclusion Marvell’s Mr. Smirke and A Short Historical Essay provided a short respite, if fleeting comic relief, at the expense of the hereticating bishops then and now. The inversely perverse logic of the Dissenters was that while they would long for the lifting of persecution, it was persecution itself which served as the very vindicatory proof that they were indeed of the elect. As we bring this chapter to its close, perhaps it is helpful to take a longer look at Gibbon. J. G. A. Pocock’s leitmotiv in his analysis of Gibbon’s “Enlightenments” has been to point out that the best way to arrive at a sympathetic and synthetic understanding of the Enlightenment is through religion, not away from it.246 Gibbon’s tour de force analyzed religious factors, and in the quote that follows, he sought to make sense of the variety of religious experiences and opinions in the second and third centuries, up to the Council of Nicaea. It is not hard to see the whispers of Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell, who, in their own unique and common ways, demonstrated that there was a heft y price to be paid when (1) scriptural simplicity is forsaken for Hellenizing creed-making; (2) episcopal authority “usurps” the religious prerogative of the civil sovereign, which is the beginning of the end; (3) creeds and other non-biblical rules of faith are imposed on the Christians; and (4) simply put, bishops become persecutors. To argue that the anti-conciliar and anti-episcopal mentalité of Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell singlehandedly ushered in the Deist and Enlightenment critique of the Trinity and its conciliar history would be claiming too much. Yet Gibbon opined: It has been remarked with more ingenuity than truth, that the virgin purity of the church was never violated by schism or heresy before the reign of Trajan or Hadrian, about one hundred years after the death of Christ.247 We may observe with much more propriety, that, during that period, the disciples of the Messiah were indulged in a freer latitude both of faith and practice, that has ever been allowed in succeeding ages. As the terms of communion were insensibly narrowed, and the spiritual authority of the

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prevailing party was exercised with increasing severity, many of its most respectable adherents, who were called upon to renounce, were provoked to assert their private opinions . . . and openly to erect the standard of rebellion against the unity of the church.248 Exactly, how much “freer latitude” did the first- and second-century Christians enjoy, if, as Gibbon insists, they were freer indeed? In the next chapter, we discuss the culture of polemic in seventeenth-century trinitarian theology, surrounding a New Testament book that was allegedly written to rein in the freer latitude concerning the identity of Christ and the shape of the Christian life, worship, and mission: the Gospel of John. As we shall see, no other biblical book was more frequently cited by both antitrinitarians and trinitarians than John; numerous Puritan preachers found this Gospel to be a crucial text for fostering a trinitarian piety which could withstand the ever-prevalent threat of Socinianism. Baxter, Hobbes, and Marvell might decry the excesses of logic chopping at Nicaea, and yet with the Fourth Gospel, they all affirmed its simple sublimity and profound clarity in presenting Christ the Messiah to them. Yet as we shall see, it was to John’s Gospel that more “logic-chopping” theologians at Nicaea and beyond turned for light in their journey.

6

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

. . . none of the objected and above cited Texts, are by Trinitarians themselves thought to be true and demonstrative Proofs either of the Trinity, or of the Divinity of the Son or Spirit. Every one of these Texts, but John 1. 1, &c. is given up to the Socinians, as incompetent and unconcluding Proof, by some . . . of the most learned Criticks and Interpreters of the Protestant Party.1 I

Introduction In the foregoing quote, Stephen Nye, in A Brief History of the Unitarians, made a tantalizing statement. After scrutinizing, in nearly 120 pages, all the biblical texts which had been adduced to “prove” the deity of Christ and the Trinity, Nye argued that all but John 1:1 have been claimed by the Socinians as endorsing their antitrinitarian perspectives. Published in 1687, Nye’s text raised two crucial questions worthy of further investigation. First, in what sense did the trinitarians still manage to hold on to John 1:1, not giving it “up to the Socinians”? Second, since more than a fi ft h of all the controversial biblical texts Nye analyzed came from the Gospel of John (twenty-six pages in all), why was this Gospel, among all the New Testament books, regarded as so crucial, simultaneously for the defense of and attack on the Trinity? The Gospel of John played a formative role in the Christological controversies of both the patristic and the Reformation periods; thus, it comes as

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little surprise that considerable scholarly attention has been given to its Wirkungsgeschichte.2 Gerhard Ebeling observed that an integral part of ecclesiastical history deals with the way Scripture has been interpreted in doctrinal formulations, which has sparked steady growth in the scholarly subfield of history of biblical exegesis. This methodological commitment has been employed with salutary effect to Renaissance and Reformation history.3 However, this narrative of reception history tends to skip over the seventeenth century.4 Whereas the emphasis on the history of biblical exegesis has paid off in Continental Reformation and post-Reformation studies, the same has not been true in the historiography of England’s long Reformation. And that is quite ironic. Given the impact of the Geneva Bible and King James Bible on British cultures, there has been little sustained scholarly attention given to the history of biblical exegesis for this period.5 In contemporary historiography of early modern English religious culture, relatively little attention has been given to the issue surrounding the Bible in shaping English Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, that is, until recently. Furthermore, if the Gospel of John was as important as Nye wrote in the intense exegetical battles over the Trinity in early modern England, this lacuna is all the more curious. To be sure, there have been a bevy of books in the last two decades that map out with clarity the contour of the biblical culture in England. In the last two decades, more scholarly work on the cultural, political, and religious impact of the Bible in England has been published: Christopher Hill’s The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993),6 David S. Katz’s God’s Last Words (2004),7 and Lori Anne Ferrell’s The Bible and the People (2008) stand out among others for their lucid exposition of the Bible’s role in shaping the culture of early modern English Christianity, and how it was also influenced by reading habits and patterns of piety, creating for the English an “essential unity and coherence of meaning,” both textually and existentially.8 Most directly germane to this chapter, however, is Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England (2006). With essays as wide-ranging as the cultural impact of the story of Jephthah’s daughter and the so-called Johannine Comma, this collection of essays seeks to fill the lacuna in the way intellectual historians have appropriated biblical exegeses and their surrounding polemical contexts and to signal a new direction in the historiography.9 This chapter tells the story of how the Gospel of John and its interpretive traditions and trajectories functioned in the culture of polemic surrounding the Trinity, particularly how exegeses of specific texts were contested, and became a liminal space where multivalent notions of orthodoxy and heresy were formed and controlled. Knowing how both the antitrinitarian and trinitarian writers appropriated the various biblical corpora, especially the Gospel of John, can help us provide a thicker description of the zeitgeist of this

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transitional period. Here, J. G. A. Pocock’s warning against assuming a secular mind-set was already in place in mid- to late-seventeenth-century England is entirely salutary: We should not overemphasize, but can never cease from emphasizing, the extent to which all discourse on toleration, liberty, and enlightenment was a polemic against the orthodox theology of Christ’s divinity, against the Trinity and . . . the Gospel according to St. John and the doctrine of the Word made Flesh.10 Noteworthy here is how Pocock specifies the “Gospel according to St. John” as the single biblical book which became the key epicenter of the polemical exchange and the various ways in which the notion of orthodoxy and its seemingly ever-porous membrane was contested and re-negotiated during this period. In what follows, then, we analyze the exegetical and theological disputes surrounding the Gospel of John in early modern Europe, with particular attention to the way these debates further shaped the culture of English Christianity. We analyze the politics of translation in which disputes over the Geneva Bible glosses, the Douay-Rheims New Testament, and a number of Annotations on the Gospel of John simultaneously clarified and clouded the issues surrounding trinitarian orthodoxy. After a detailed analysis of a few key trinitarian treatments of the Gospel of John, we devote the last three sections of the chapter to the various interpretive trajectories of the antitrinitarian Johannine exegesis, both Continental and English. At the end of the antitrinitarian Johannine exegesis section, we will see how a Huguenot pastor in London, Jacques Souverain, managed to synthesize previously radical ideas that saw the Gospel of John itself as a departure from primitive Christianity and how the influence of the putatively Platonizing divinity, which he saw as an unbridled abuse of allegorical hermeneutics, further corrupted Christianity. II

“Nose of Wax”? Politics of Translations and Annotations from the Rhemists to Theodore Haak It is a near truism to argue that the twin key ingredients for the success of the Reformation were the proliferation of print culture and the translation of vernacular Bibles.11 In England alone, Bibles such as the Tyndale New Testament (1526, 1534), the Coverdale Bible (1535), the Great Bible (1539), and the Bishops’ Bible (1568) on the Protestant side and the Douay-Rheims (1582 for the New

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Testament and 1610 for the Old Testament) on the Catholic side shaped the pattern of piety. The two most influential English Bibles, however, were the Geneva Bible and the King James Bible. To translate the biblical text was one thing; to agree on textual authenticity, let alone its interpretation, was another matter entirely. For every proof-text from the Fourth Gospel adduced to convincingly show the deity of Christ and the Trinity, an equally compelling argument was made by the antitrinitarians from the very same text to show a diametrically opposite conclusion. The elusive quest for the pure text of Scripture and equally pristine interpretation often belied the futility of imposing an “univocal orthodoxy of opinion.” Words such as popery, Pelagianism, Socinianism, Arianism, Arminianism, and atheism were often used simultaneously as symbolic markers and as real conceptual limits. Yet the problem lay not with the terms themselves, but with the protean valence of how these terms functioned within polemical contexts, including biblical translations and annotations. As Peter Lake and Anthony Milton have argued, the “precise meaning” of these polemical labels were “up for grabs, almost infinitely glossable and contestable.”12 To borrow a seventeenth-century expression, Scripture could easily become a “Nose of wax” in the interpretive hands of a figural and allegorical exegete: Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise. John Biddle’s fear was that the pursuit of mystical meaning of Scripture, which he noted was more prevalent in Johannine exegesis than in any other New Testament texts, was the perfect way to slide down to a radical hermeneutical morass.13 One of the reasons the Gospel of John became a veritable minefield for both antitrinitarian and trinitarian exegesis was that this Gospel, more than any other New Testament book, affirmed—often within the same pericope, if not in the same verse(s)— the Son’s subordinate ontological and economic status and his equal status vis-à-vis the Father. Rather than producing clarity sufficient to convince the polemical interlocutor, it seems, as John Morrill recently noted, that these exegetical skirmishes often inexorably led to a “Babel of voices reading discrepant texts.”14 Far be it for us, however, to conclude that English Protestants began to cast aspersions tout court on the truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture. However, to see the rise of critical biblical scholarship as a discrete intellectual development, hermetically sealed from, and thus without any due regard for, the culture of polemic between the warring factions of the trinitarian divide, would be to miss the point. In this section, we highlight three polemical episodes in early modern England with the two common elements of Johannine exegesis and the politics of annotations/translations: (1) the charge “Arianism” given by the Douay-Rheims translators on Calvin, and William Fulke’s defense of thereof; (2) John Howson’s charge that the Geneva Bible was liable of being “Socinian,” especially in its failure to more overtly

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connect John 1:1 and Genesis 1:1; and (3) the various ways the translation of John 1:1 revealed more of the theological a priori of the exegete than the textcritical issues themselves. So we have Catholics, Calvin, a Tudor Puritan, a proto-Laudian, and a few members of “International Calvinism”—Giovanni Diodati, Theodore Haak, and John Downame—all indefatigably parrying the charges of heresy and lunging forward with countercharges, with the Gospel of John as a key part of their arsenal.15 William Fulke (1537–1589) was a leading Elizabethan Puritan, a well-known Hebraist, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, from 1578 until his death, and a redoubtable defender of the Protestant cause against Catholicism. He published twenty-one treatises starting in 1558 against the leading Catholic polemicists, such as William Allen, Edmund Campion, Gregory Martin, Robert Persons, Nicholas Sander, and Thomas Stapleton.16 In a Hampton Court sermon, given in November 1570, Fulke unequivocally identified Rome to be the whore of Babylon and the “metropolitical” seat of Antichrist.17 Continuing on in his defense of the ecclesial validity of English Protestantism, Fulke excoriated Gregory Martin in A Defense of the Sincere and True Translations (1582), as he relentlessly attacked the textual corruption of Jerome’s Vulgate, which was the basis for the Douay-Rheims New Testament, and fiercely defended the theological perspectives of the Reformation, particularly that of Luther and Calvin.18 In The Text of the New Testament . . . with a Confutation of All Such Arguments, Glosses, and Annotations, as Conteine Manifest impietie, of heresie . . . against the Catholike Church (1589), Fulke produced an exhaustive refutation of the text-critical, lexical, and theological errors allegedly replete in the Rheims New Testament. More specifically, he produced a matching counter-annotation for every textual annotation published in the Douay-Rheims New Testament (1582).19 One of the key areas of Calvin’s Christology under attack, with clear implications for trinitarian theology, was his belief on Christ being autotheos. Traditional orthodoxy asserted that the Son subsists in relation to the Father by being begotten eternally, but qua God, Jesus participates in the divine perfections such as self-existence, namely, aseitas. Since the divine “essence” is not divided equally in three parts in God, Calvin—in the Institutes 1.13.19, for instance—insisted that each person of the Trinity was equally God. Calvin had to parry the blows of Chaponneau, Courtois, and Caroli who had accused him of heresy for espousing autotheos concerning the Son. Calvin’s response was that whereas in the divine economy, there was subordination—the Son’s generation and the Spirit’s procession, and the Son being sent by the Father; the Spirit being sent by the Father and Son—in divine essence, there was a fully shared divinity.20 If, as Calvin averred, Christ’s deity was not derived from the Father, but had it intrinsic to himself, then it does obviate the errors of both

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Servetus and Socinus by preserving the deity of Christ. Yet it seemed to be a move away from the patristic tradition, or so argued the Rhemists. In their annotation of 1:1 “ . . . the Word was with God,” the Rhemists offer a sweeping indictment of heresies regarding the Son of God, thus the Trinity: Secondly, he giueth us to understand, that the WORD hath his proper subsistence or personalitie distinct from God the Father, whereby Sabellius the old Heretike is refuted. Thirdly, here is insinuated the order of these two persons, one towards the other, to witte, that the Sonne is with and of the Father, and not the Father of the Sonne. Fourthly, you may confute here the blasphemie of Caluin, holding the second Person to be God, not as of God the Father, but as of himselfe. And yet such are the bookes that our youth nowe reade commonly in England, and that by commandment.21 The preposition with denoted personal distinction between the Son and the Father, a point both Fulke and the Rhemists would agree, over against the Sabellians. Here, the Rhemists argued, following a number of patristic authors who asserted that the Father was the fountain of divinity (fons divinitatis) of the Trinity, it meant that while all persons of the Trinity were equally fully divine, the logical and economic priority was with the Father: thus the language “Sonne is with and of the Father.” Therefore, the Rhemists unflinchingly called Calvin’s view of Christ being autotheos blasphemous. Fulke defended Calvin’s view, taken from the Institutes, I.xiii.23 and 25, ironically by affirming the convergence on the deity of Christ between Calvin and the Catholic position, and by painstakingly pointing out that all three Persons share in the “one and most singular” Godhead. Only by doing so, argued Fulke, could trinitarians, both Catholic and Calvinistic, obviate the heresies of the “Arrians, Sabellians, and Tritheists of our age.” Lest he be seen as obsequious or giving away too much polemical ground, Fulke’s Parthian shot was to note acerbically that the Rhemists “neuer once opposed themselves against” the modernday antitrinitarians. In the Annotation of John 10:19 “ . . . that which he gaue me,” the Rhemists took another shot at Calvin’s “heresy” affirming Christ to be autotheos. This time, Hilary (De Trin. lib. 7), Ambrose (De Spiritu Sanctu, lib. 3, cap. 18), Augustine’s forty-eighth Tractate of John, and Cyril of Alexandria (Commentary on John, lib. 7, cap. 10) were adduced as proof that “Christ had his essence and nature of the Father,” against which Calvin rebelled, espousing that “Christ tooke his person of the Father, but not his substance.”22 Fulke’s intriguing response was that, while the Latin Fathers’ authority—he conveniently puts Cyril on the Latin side—might be invoked to support the view that the Son’s deity was derived from, indeed, dependent on, that of the Father,

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neither the “originall text” nor “any of the Greeke fathers” supported this view. Gregory Nazianzen, for instance, in Oration 37 on the Holy Ghost called the Holy Spirit “auj t okuv rioV” which was tantamount to calling him “aujt ov q eoV”; he did not repudiate the Spirit’s “proceeding from the Father and the Sonne.” Similarly, insisted Fulke, Calvin’s view of autotheos was, rather than a deviation from patristic wisdom, simply following the theo-logic laid out by this leading Cappadocian, thus making Calvin to be more “Catholic” than the Catholic polemicists themselves. In other words, while this Johannine text seemed to support the view that the Father was fons divinitatis of both the Son and the Spirit, Fulke argued that the Son’s status as autotheos did not preclude the possibility of his eternal generation, which his Catholic detractors saw as mutually exclusive. This discussion might seem highly esoteric and of little value in shedding light on the polemical contexts on the Trinity in early modern England. But as we shall see in our discussion of Anthony Wotton, the significance of his casting aspersion on Calvin and invalidating autotheos might have brought him unanticipated trouble. If the pugilists involved in the first episode were confessionally divided, Catholic and Protestant, in this next one, we find Protestants, one admittedly of a hotter sort than the other. Bishop John Howson (1557–1632) was, along with Richard Neile, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Buckeridge, regarded as “the progenitors of the Laudian program” and was both vice-chancellor of Oxford (1602–1603) and bishop thereof (1619–1628), then transferred to the bishopric at Durham (1628–1632).23 Howson was an avowed anti-Calvinist, known as a theological agent provocateur, and often at loggerheads with Oxford Calvinists in the 1610s.24 Nicholas Tyacke mentions the episode of Howson fulminating against the marginalia of the Geneva Bible for undermining the deity of Christ, thus the Trinity as well “by glossing away the Old Testament proofs of both.”25 I hope to shed further light on the themes in tension between the allegorical/ spiritual exegesis of the Old Testament, which Howson fastidiously defended, and its impact on Johannine exegesis by juxtaposing Howson’s exegesis of Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 and that of the Geneva Bible’s marginal notes.26 We hope to see that the term Socinian had a multiple valence, almost as revelatory of the religious identity of the one hurling that epithet as much as that of the alleged Socinian, in this case the Puritan glossers of the Geneva Bible. As Christopher Hill has noted, the “main offence of the Geneva Bible lay in its notes.”27 Thus it was not merely John Howson who had carped at the less than maximalistic Messianic exegesis of the Geneva marginal notes. So did King James, against whose “Authorized Version” the Geneva Bible would be competing, as he thundered at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 that some marginal notes of the Geneva Bible were “very partiall, vntrue, seditious, and sauouring too much, of daungerous, and trayterous conceites,”

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thus prompting James to decide that “no marginall notes should be added.”28 Indeed, it is arguably true that the Geneva Bible was, ironically, the key etiological link in the birthing of the King James Bible.29 From the outset of the sermon, preached in September 1612 as a university sermon at St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, Howson went on to establish the parameters for the defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, which the Puritans, with their Geneva Bible, were failing miserably, and in fact, were assiduously building the Socinian sand castle. His sermon was an overt anti-Calvinist diatribe, citing from the contemporary Continental Lutherans, Nicolaus Hunnius and Konrad Schlusselburg, who were also avowed anti-Calvinists.30 Howson’s basic polemical syllogism was: the Trinity is a sacred Catholic doctrine which only heretics deny. The Geneva Bible’s gloss was suff used with comments that inexorably weaken trinitarian orthodoxy. Thus, the Puritans of the Geneva Bible were in danger of being heretics. Howson assumed a thematic, organic connection between the Old and New Testaments, since God remained the same between these two dispensations. Then the Trinity ought to be as discernible in the Old as in the New. So Howson argues, “y t ye holy Ghost proposeth ye mysterie of ye Trinitie, as ye title, or preface of ye old Testament, in ye very first wordes thereof. In principio creavit Elohim cælū & terrā.”31 In other words, since the Hebrew word Elohim implied plurality within the divine being, this taught the mystery of the Trinity, so argued Howson. And to the extent that the Geneva glosses on Genesis 1:1 shied away from affirming it, the doctrine of the Trinity was in precarious situation. The other text was the Gospel of John 1:1, which Howson regarded as the contrapuntal couplet of Genesis 1:1. Calling it “ye title or preface of ye new Testament,” Howson asseverated the place of honor this text had in buttressing the divinity of Christ: “In principio erat verbū, et verbū erat apud Deū &c.” Invoking the image of the two angels of God with “swords of fyre” guarding the “2 dores” of this sacred book, Genesis and John, Howson pointed out this hermeneutical mode to be the only viable one to defend the mystery of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Only then would no “impious Arians” dare “enter into it.”32 Perhaps, as a recent article suggests, the immediate sitz im leben of the Howson sermon was the infamous Wightman affair, the last antitrinitarian burned for heresy in 1612.33 That might indeed be so. Yet Howson’s homiletical diatribe illustrated the wider theological division, both constructed and real, between the proto-Laudians and the Genevan glosses. How did the Puritan glossers differ in their hermeneutical mode? As we shall see, the Geneva Bible offered—in far greater detail in the 1603 edition than in either the 1560 or the 1588 editions—an unflinching and unequivocal defense of the deity of Christ in John 1:1. Yet in Genesis 1:1, while it clearly affirmed both creatio ex nihilo by Yahweh, it did not enthusiastically affirm the

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Trinity from this text, as it was so patently obvious to Howson. It seems, compared to Howson and his Laudian colleagues, the Geneva Bible was far leerier of delving into mystical exegesis. In the glosses for Genesis 1:1 and 1:26 (“Let vs make man in our image according to our likenesse,” which Howson took to be a clear “proof” of the Trinity), we can see the purportedly “Arianizing” tendency. In the immediately foregoing comment, we saw that the gloss for 1:1 reads: “First of all, and before that any creature was, God made heauen and earth of nothing.”34 And in Genesis 1:26, the silence of expression in seeing, either a veiled reference to the Trinity or an explicit affirmation thereof, is nearly deafening: God commanded the water and the earth to bring forth other creatures: but of man he saith, Let vs make: signifying, that God taketh counsell with his wisedome and vertue purposing to make an excellent worke above all the rest of his creation.35 To be sure, this was not an explicit denial of the Trinity; the Genevan glossers simply did not think it was defensible or derivable from that text. The Puritans were more influenced by the Renaissance rise of grammatical-historical exegesis of Scripture than the sacramentarian proto-Laudians, thereby leaning away from allegorical exegesis while punctiliously holding on to typological exegesis. Thus what Howson was castigating the Puritans for as their exegetical insouciance was in fact a mark of their rigorous critical biblical exegesis. Then, as the Genevan glossers appeared to be spinning away from the patristic exegesis of the Alexandrian type, it is little wonder that Howson called them Arian. Here was a classic divergence: whether to read the Trinity out of the text of Genesis 1:26–27. Yet, one notes the language of “his wisdome and vertue,” an expression redolent of Irenaeus’s view in Adversus Haereses that God has always had God’s word and wisdom, the “two hands” with which God accomplished the work of creation.36 The irony of an avowed Arminian/ Laudian calling the Calvinistic Puritans as sharing “consanguinitie” with the Arians is hard to miss.37 Compared to Irenaeus, however, the Genevan gloss does not specifically link the “wisedome and vertue” with the Son and the Spirit. Howson’s fear was perhaps best reflected in the two comments by Protestant-turned-Catholic/Orthodox scholars: John Cardinal Newman and Jaroslav Pelikan. For Newman, the Church’s “most subtle and powerful method of proof” for the divinity of Jesus, “whether in ancient or modern times, is the mystical sense. . . . Now on turning to primitive controversy, we find this method of interpretation to be the very basis of the proof of the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Trinity.” The crucial role played by the mystical sense was such that Newman went on to claim that “it may be almost laid

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down as an historical fact, that the mystical interpretation and orthodoxy will stand or fall together.” In other words, the mystical interpretation of Genesis 1:26 would have sided with Howson, not the Geneva glossers, and by orthodoxy, Newman refers to the Trinity. Similarly, for Pelikan, the Old Testament’s canonical status was inextricably linked to “spiritual exegesis.” In fact, Pelikan averred that “there was no early Christian who simultaneously acknowledged the doctrinal authority of the Old Testament and interpreted it literally.”38 Yet in the glosses for John 1:1–18 (the Johannine Prologue), the Geneva Bible was incontrovertibly clear about affirming the divinity of Christ: The Sonne of God is of one, and the selfe same eternitie or everlastingnesse, and of one and the selfsame essence or nature, with the Father. . . . From the beginning . . . the Word began not to have his being, when God began to make all that was made: for the Word was even then when all things that were made, beganne to be made, and therefore he was before the beginning of all things.39 It hardly mattered to Howson that the Geneva glossers got the New Testament right to bolster the Trinity; if one ceded the hermeneutical “control” of the Hebrew Bible to the antitrinitarian literal-meaning mongers, then the loss of the Trinity was only a matter of time. Moreover, Howson made an astute cultural observation of the Geneva Bible type of Puritans: “I observed heretofore, y t ye Puritans symbolizing w th ye Arians, have refused ye, auncient Ecclesiasticall & Theologicall wordes oJmouvsian, trinita persona &c. as New Barbarous, Prophane; & endeavored to remove frō our Liturgie, ye Prayer to ye Trinitie, ye doxologie, or Gloria Patri; ye Nicene, & Athanasian Credes; & so made way to ye Arian heresie.”40 In other words, for Howson, the hesitation of the Puritans to appropriate non-biblical terms as part of the fundamental articles of faith, especially the Athanasian Creed, was what made the Arians and Puritans kindred spirits, irrespective of their radically divergent Johannine exegesis. Assuredly, not all Puritans were opposed to the language of homoousios, yet a number had issues with the fastidious adherence to Prayer Book religion. For Howson, it was one and the same. Surely, he and the Puritan glossers of the Geneva Bible converged on Johannine exegesis, yet they diverged on their Old Testament hermeneutic, or so he feared. While Howson—and King James—regarded the Geneva Bible as full of seditious ideas and even heretical leanings, it did not repudiate the Trinity. One of the key steps taken by the antitrinitarians had much to do with arguing from a better textual translation, or alleging that since their reading was purer, their theology is more apostolic. The controversial issue surrounding the identity of God and the Word in John 1:1 was much ado about grammatical and translational conflict.

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One of the key polemical issues surrounding the first verse of John 1 had to do with interpreting the word God in “the Word was God.” The controversial clause was kai; qeo;V hn oJ lov g oV (“and God was the word,” or “the Word was [a] God”). For the Arians and their subsequent co-religionists, the non-articular use of the word qeo; V meant that it was better to render it as “a god” rather than “the God,” thus denoting a subordinate nature of the Word vis-à-vis the true God, the Father, as we have seen with John Biddle in chapter 1 and Matthew Poole’s riposte to that in chapter 3. This issue did not suddenly emerge in early modern Europe. It had a much longer pedigree. John Chrysostom in his Fourth Homily on the Gospel of John (on 1:1) explicitly mentions the issue of the defi nite article before qeo;V as a contentious issue in antitrinitarian and trinitarian exegesis. Anticipating the Arian challenge, Chrysostom argued: “‘But see,’ you say, ‘the Father is spoken of with the article; the Son, without it.’ Then, what of the fact that the Apostle says: ‘Of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ,’ and again: ‘Who is over all things, God’? For, behold, in this text he has also referred to the Son without the article. But he does this also with reference to the Father.” Furthermore, Chrysostom adduced his exegetical “evidence” for the instances where God simpliciter was referred to without the article in Philippians 2:6; Romans 1:7, and John 4:24.41 In this sermon, Chrysostom was shadowboxing with the haunting specter of Origen, who, in his sermon on John 1:1, took a divergent interpretative path: The God, therefore, is the true God. The others are gods formed according to him as images of the prototype. But again, the archetypal image of the many images is the Word with the God, who was “in the beginning.” By being “with the God” he always continues to be “God.” But he would not have this if he were not with God, and he would not remain God if he did not continue in unceasing contemplation of the depth of the Father.42 Notice the beginning of pre-Arian fissure with regard to the distinction between “the God” and “God,” the former being the Father and the latter the Son. Also notice his expression of how God can “remain God,” which was through “unceasing contemplation of the depth of the Father.” In other words, the Son’s divinity was entirely dependent upon the Father. This lexical and text-critical issue surrounding the difference between “God” (oJ qeovV) and “a god” (qeovV) was intensely debated in France as well. As early as 1635, Jean Daillé argued vociferously for the rendering “The word was God” and not “God was the word.” The comment by Daillé highlighted the theological divergence in the way the first verse of the Fourth Gospel was interpreted

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between Daillé and his Huguenot coreligionists vis-à-vis the Louvain doctors and their new translation of the Bible: . . . in the second part Chap. 4.3. pag. 84. I produce the first verse of the Gospel of S. John, in these words, the word was God, and not as these Doctors have expounded it, God was the word, whereof the two constructs which these words are capable of, Deus erat verbum, they chuse to follow that which is less to purpose, and which . . . does manifestly overturn the words of the Greek text, Qeo;V h\n oJ lov goV, where the particle oJ shews that the word lov goV cannot of necessity, be the predicate, but the subject of the proposition, as these, who have any knowledge in the Laws and use of the Greek tongue, know well enough.”43 John Trapp, in his Commentary upon the Gospel of John, also weighed in on this grammatical battle. In his exegesis of John 1:1 (“And the Word was God”), Trapp wrote: “Qeo;V without an article: Hence the Arrians cavil, that the Son is not God co-equall, but a secondary God, inferiour to the Father. But Gal. 1.3. The Father is also called Qeo;V without an article; therefore this followes not.” Since the literary provenance of the Fourth Gospel was an irrefutable “demonstration of Christ’s Deity,” continued Trapp, the anarthrous use of the word Qeo;V by John could not be seen as deviating from the overall authorial intent.44 Similarly, John Howes was acutely aware of the grammatical-exegetical fray over the anarthrous nature of the way God was described in John 1:1. Howes’s answer was that in John 20:28 Jesus was called oJ qeovV, that is, with the definite article, whereas in Galatians 1:3, God the Father was described without the definite article.45 Putting it rather tersely, George Hutcheson noted that “the Greek word signifying God, without the Article, is taken essentially, for the Divine nature, signifying, that as the Son is distinct from the Father, so he is one God with him, in the same indivisible nature and essence.”46 Lexical and translational matters were of crucial importance in their quest for certainty. As Susan Schreiner has argued convincingly, this elusive quest for certitude at the political, philosophical, cultural, and religious levels provided the requisite impetus for and was also influenced by a seismic shift in this transitional period.47 Religious wars were not fought out merely on literal battlefields with gunpowder and cannons alone; they were waged with equal ferocity on printed pages of religious polemic, thereby often exacerbating the problem of incertitude and collapse of assurance. As we have already seen, Bible translations were often fraught with polemical agendas, and the best place to hide them was often on marginal glosses, thus James I’s fulmination against the Geneva Bible for being subversive. Nevertheless, annotations and glosses were designed to aid readers in their quest for the eternal City of God.

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We shall turn our attention briefly to three Annotations, two authored by foreigners—one by an Italian émigré in Geneva, Giovanni Diodati, the second by a German, Theodore Haak—and one by George Downame: Both Diodati’s and Haak’s received enthusiastic Parliamentary support, as these were the early years of the Civil War, and the work of the Westminster Assembly of Divines was well under way. Thus the need to inculcate sound Reformed faith was an absolute desideratum. John Diodati (1576—1649) was a minister in Geneva, a leading text critic who translated the Bible into Italian from the Hebrew and Greek texts, and renowned for his exegetical erudition and Reformed rigor.48 The other well-known foreign annotator was also a friend of John Milton and of Samuel Hartlib, Theodore Haak (1605—1690).49 Again, as Diodati, Downame, and Haak were all committed trinitarians, with equally similar Calvinistic perspectives, it was hardly surprising that their views converged on the exegesis of the following texts: 1:1 (the Word being with God, and being God), 1:3 (the Word as agent of creation), 1:14 (the incarnation of the Word), 5:17–30 (the Son being sent by, thus likely subordinate to, the Father, yet a dialectical tension of Son claiming to be equal with God), 8:58 (Jesus being I AM before Abraham), 10:30 (the Son and the Father are one), 14:28 (the Father is greater than I), 17:3 (eternal life is in knowing the one and true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent), and 20:28 (Thomas’s Christological confession: my Lord and my God). To be sure, there were other texts of the Gospel of John to consider. Yet on balance, the fi rst three verses (all from the Prologue) were equally disputed, and so it is hard to tell which side, pro- or anti-, they favored, whereas 5:17–30, 14:28, and 17:3 were often cited by antitrinitarian exegetes to claim victory for themselves, for they were clear proofs of the Son’s ontological subordination to the Father. Yet 8:58, 10:30, and 20:28 were regarded as favoring the trinitarian exegesis. In terms of the historical provenance of the Gospel, Diodati’s and Haak’s were most detailed. Prompted by the growth of heresy led by Ebion and Cerinthus, John the Apostle wrote his Gospel to show, therefore, the full divinity and humanity of Christ, for the two-nature doctrine was clearly needed to effectively dislodge the Cerinthian and Gnostic errors.50 Among the trinitarian exegetes, it was held that “whereas others are gathered together the most common doctrines of our Saviour, Saint John hath undertaken to unfold the most mysterious ones,” such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the mystical “union and communion, of all his beleevers with him.”51 On 1:1, Downame cited John Chrysostom’s second Homily on John to show that the phrase “in the beginning” meant nothing less than “from eternity” and “not temporal, determinate, or to be measured by time.”52 Numerous trinitarian exegetes interpreted John 1:3 as teaching that Jesus was the “principall

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efficient and co-agent with the Father, and the holy Ghost, through whom all things were made.”53 Edward Leigh succinctly summarized it: “all works ad extra are equall in the Trinity.”54 The key text of the Incarnation of Christ, John 1:14, was interpreted by Haak and Diodati as indicating no change or mixture, but an assumption of “human nature in unity of person.” For Henry Hammond, the incarnation of Christ was simultaneously the “greatest humbling . . . yet was it nevertheless the greatest manifestation of . . . Divine power and glory.”55 If, for Hammond, the Incarnation bespoke God’s power and glory most conspicuously, for George Hutcheson, the important aspect of 1:14 was that it confi rmed the Athanasian soteriological perspective of seeing of the work of Christ as “restoring the image of God in lost man.” He further asserted that the greatly effaced dignity of “Son-ship” could only be restored by “the natural Son of God . . . becoming the Son of man to suffer in our nature.”56 As Christ was the “express image of the Father,” and the one by whom all things were created, he was uniquely qualified for the task of the Incarnation. Quoting both Prosper of Aquitaine and John Chrysostom, Downame commented on participation in the life divine being a concrete proleptic actuality: “the Deity of the eternal Word, coequal with God the Father, became partaker of our mortality, that we might be made partakers of his holy spirit.”57 For a key text for the development of patristic trinitarian theology, John 10:30 (“I and the Father are one”), the Annotators were no exception. Many interpreters saw in this short verse twin theological support for the Trinity: an answer to both the Arians and the Sabellians. Edward Leigh observed that when Jesus claimed that he and the Father were one, it meant a consent of “will, essence, power, and dominion.” Intriguingly, Leigh did not distinguish between will and essence, perhaps for the reason that while the Socinians did not have a problem with agreeing with the Father and the Son having one will (namely, the son is always submissive to the will of the One who sent him), they would never countenance the idea that the Father and Son shared one divine essence. Thus for Leigh, the idea of “one” freed the Christian from “Arrius, who denyes the eternall Divinity of Christ,” whereas the reality contained in the word are freed the Christian from “Sabellius, who denyes the distinction of the persons in the Deitie.”58 For the last text, John 20:28 (My Lord and my God), all major annotators agreed on the fact that this was the first orthodox Christological confession regarding the deity of Jesus. In the exegesis of this verse, there were commentators and preachers who were willing to utilize the time and space to offer a type of practical divinity. Rather than a offering an ontological disquisition on the deity of Christ, Hutcheson’s comment on John 20:28—the high Christological

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confession by Thomas—lent a helpful insight into the way Puritan practical divinity intersected with trinitarian theology. 4. Christ being looked upon in his glory, and as God, it may and should allure hearts to close with and embrace him: and they who indeed consider him to be such a one, cannot but claim to an interest in him: Therefore Thomas calls him my God. 5. Such as finde the sweetnesse of an interest in Christ as their God, it will perswade their hearts to allow unto him a dominion and Lordship over them, to guide and dispose of them at his pleasure; for Thomas here conjoyneth these, My Lord, and my God.59 Citing Gregory Nazianzen’s comment that for “Thomas his doubting more advantageth our faith, than the faith of the believing disciples,” Downame encouraged those who were often pummeled with unbelief and doubts. Seeing the example of Thomas, Downame asserted, God can change the “pertinatious unbelief into saving faith.”60 It is crucial to remember that on this question of the deity of Christ, there was no substantial division between the Laudians and the Puritans. So we find a strident defender of the traditional Caroline Church of England liturgy and theology, Henry Hammond, paraphrasing Thomas’s confession of Christ: “I acknowledge that thou art my very Lord, and Master, and that is an evidence to me that thou art the omnipotent God of heaven.”61 The politics of translation and annotation of the Gospel of John often revealed the deep fissure of the theological a priori between the antitrinitarian and trinitarian, anti-Calvinists, Catholic, or a Puritan. In spite—or perhaps because—of the great numbers of translations and annotations available in early modern England, the intense debate on the ontological status of Christ as seen in the Gospel of John raged on. The next four sections seek to contextualize the variegated themes and trajectories of both these contenders for true Christianity. III

Sublime Mystery and Joy of Participation: Early Modern English Trinitarian Exegesis of the Gospel of John In “The Epistle to the Reader” to his published sermons on John 17, Anthony Burgess noted the distinct significance of the Gospel of John and issued an alarm regarding the spread of antitrinitarian distortion over this key Gospel. Whereas Matthew, Mark, and Luke “deliver ojikonomivan of Christ, the manner of his Humane Nativity,” John delivered the “qeologivan, the Divine Nature of Christ, although the Socinians have sacrilegiously perverted the

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beginning of that first Chapter of John to another sense, then of Christs Eternal Deity.”62 If, as Burgess maintained, the Gospel of John focused more on the divinity of Christ, it was hardly any wonder that the antitrinitarians would devote considerable intellectual energy to deny the Trinity from the very text. What follows here is a detailed analysis of the way the Gospel of John functioned in trinitarian polemic.63 To tell this story properly, however, we need to go back nearly a century before Burgess’s sermons to Bartholomew Traheron (1510—1558), a Marian exile, who had similar fears about England teeming with “Arrians.” Bartholomew Traheron’s An Exposition of a Parte of S. Iohannes Gospel (1557) was one of the first texts in the English Reformation to focus explicitly and entirely on the Prologue of John.64 In December 1549, Traheron was appointed Royal Librarian. Given his peregrinations to the epicenters of Reformed faith, Zürich (Bullinger) and Strasbourg (Bucer), and his commitment to Reformed theology, Traheron’s rise to the post was an apropos move, seeing that Edward and his privy council, along with Thomas Cranmer, were pushing the ecclesiastical fulcrum closer to its Züricher center.65 What sort of Arians were on Traheron’s mind? During the early 1550s, there had been a surge of antitrinitarian opinions, especially among the Dutch refugees in London and among those associated with the Strangers’ Church in Austin Friars. Having a redoubtably Reformed figure such as John à Lasco as the supervisor of the Stranger churches showed the extent to which Edward VI and Thomas Cranmer were concerned about stemming the spread of Anabaptism, which was, in the minds of popular piety and cheap print, interchangeable with Arianism.66 As Diarmaid MacCulloch suggests, there is reason to see the connection between the burning on May 2, 1550, of a recalcitrant Anabaptist, Joan Boucher, for her denial of the divinity of Jesus and his virgin birth, and the establishment of the Strangers’ Church in London.67 In less than a year after the burning of “Joan of Kent,” trouble blew up in London, this time among the foreign refugees. George van Parris, a Flemish surgeon, was declared guilty of heresy by the newly established Heresy Commission on April 6, 1551, under the joint auspices of Edward VI and Archbishop Cranmer. Less than twenty days after the sentencing, Parris was burned in Smithfield on April 24.68 In August 1551, Martin Micronius, a young protégé of Bullinger, wrote under much duress and was “attacked on every side” in that new errors “are rising up every day.” For Micronius, the most sinister heresy was assiduously espoused by the Arians, “who are now beginning to shake our churches with greater violence than ever.” The three major tenets of Arianism in London in the 1550s, to which Traheron sought to respond directly, were (1) the unity of God in both the Old and New Testaments necessitates a nontrinitarian

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doctrine of God and its corollary, that the term Trinity was a novel, nonscriptural invention; (2) Scriptures admitted of only one God, namely, God the “Father alone,” taking cues from John 17:3; and (3) Christ was “superior to any mankind,” although that superiority was a matter of degrees, not of kind.69 It seems quite likely that it is this slow yet steady spread of “Arian” teaching that Traheron was responding to with his publication of his lectures on the Johannine Prologue.70 Traheron repeated a number of ancient heresies to provide a historical pedigree of the re-emergent sixteenth-century Christological divergences. For instance, Cerinthus had argued that the “Lorde Iesus was a pure mā,” and Arius was wont to “blasphemously iangle” and “peuishlye bable” that Jesus was a mere creature, albeit the highest of all creatures. Traheron sought to dislodge the validity of both Cerinthus and Arius by arguing that the Word “was” from the beginning, for he who was from the beginning before any contingent universe came to be, cannot be a creature, but Creator.71 Traheron continued to argue that God had never been bereft of wisdom, and since “Goddes worde is his wisdome,” the Word’s eternal pre-existence was proven by the Johannine Prologue, citing Proverbs 8:22 as his proof-text, as Athanasius and Basil had both polemically utilized this text for their anti-Arian and pro-Nicene exegesis. Following the pro-Nicene patristic tradition in this matter, Traheron then concluded that since the wisdom and word of God “muste be all one,” the Word spoken of in John 1:1–18 could not be a creature.72 In the “second readyng,” Traheron sought to prove that the clauses “And the Word was wyth God” and the “word was God” bolstered the trinitarian doctrine of the Church. The language of John 1:1, “And the Word was wyth God,” connotes a “maner of difference betwene god, and the word.” From this verse, Traheron was convinced that both Sabellianism (denying the three persons in the Godhead) and Arianism (denying the consubstantial nature of the Son vis-à-vis the Father) could be obviated. Perhaps the greatest and most logical Arian counter-perspective to the idea of divine creation of all things by the Word was this: just as a master artisan makes a masterpiece by using an instrument—say, a chisel—God used the Word as God’s instrument. However, just like a chisel, its absolute indispensability notwithstanding, could never be equated with the master artisan, the Word could never be equal to God. To answer this riposte, Traheron utilized the similitude of “heate . . . wyth the fier” to show the inseparable nature of the Father and Son so much so that “the father worketh together equallie with the sonne, and the sonne equallye with the father, and that GOD vsed no mynyster in the makynge of the world.” 73 Then Traheron affi rmed the patristic maxim in trinitarian theology: God’s actions ad extra are distinguishable yet inseparable, combined in the one will among the three persons in

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carrying out the work of creation and redemption (“opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt”).74 In his understanding of the two natures of Christ, Traheron maintained a Chalcedonian perspective which affirmed the coexistence of the human and divine natures so that “without such a singular cōiunction, & vnion, that of both natures one person is made.” This hypostatic union was necessary for redemptive purposes: that is, only God could forgive and restore sins, thereby necessitating the divine nature of Christ, and only humans can substitute for and represent humanity, thus mandating the human nature of Christ to be present. For Traheron, this was precisely where Nestorius “the hæretike” went wrong, compromising therefore the mediatorial office of Christ, since he “must be partaker of both natures.”75 Thus, the patristic notion of the communicatio idiomatum, which was further articulated by Calvin, served as a key heuristic in Traheron’s understanding of the two natures of Christ. Using Acts 20:28 (“ . . . that God purchased his cōgregation with his blood”), he asserted that the suffering of Christ, endured by and experienced in his human nature, by the conjoining of the two natures, could be attributed to the divine nature, since they “vnspeakably together make one persō”76 One of the interesting emphases in Traheron’s doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum was that through the Incarnation, the depth of human participation in the life divine has become all the more intensified, thereby signaling the possibility for human participation in the life divine: “To returne to S. Io. In thes his wordes, the worde became flesh, we haue a sīgular consolation, in that I saie Goddes sonne hath takē flesh of our flefsh, & bones, of our bones.” The Incarnation not only bridged the moral chasm but also therefore provided the actual possibility of mending the ontological gap, and as well providing a Calvinistic practical divinity at its best: For so haue we a nigh affinities, & familiaritee with God. And so that, that was ours, is made Goddes, and that, that was Goddes, is made ours. And we cā not doubte but that he wil do al thīges for vs, who beinge God wold familiarly be ioigned to vs in our nature. In tētations, & wrastlinges of cōscience, let vs flie hereunto, & cōsidre this great goodness, & excedinge loue, & frēdlines, & we shal be relieued & preserued frō the baleful pit of despeare.77 The tradition of combining exegetical rigor with affective divinity was carried on by Anthony Wotton. Wotton (1561–1626) enjoyed a wide reputation as a leading London Puritan of considerable erudition, yet vied unsuccessfully for Regius Professorship of Divinity at Cambridge in 1595, losing eventually to John Overall.78 Wotton’s iconoclastic stance over clerical conformity was not

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the only area of edginess for him. In spite of his semi-iconic status among the London clergy, Wotton was subjected to the test of his life when a recent graduate of Cambridge, George Walker, came down to London looking for a clerical living in 1611. In Peter Lake’s “nail-biting” portraiture of the London “politics of the parish,” the Wotton-Walker controversy is given a near blow-by-blow commentary.79 As superb as this narrative is, Lake does not refer to Wotton’s Sermons upon . . . John, which is pivotal in seeing why Walker might not have been merely looking for a good theological fracas. Perhaps Wotton did reveal his doctrinal edginess or potential for an Arminianizing/Socinianizing tendency in his Sermons upon . . . Iohn. As we have seen in previous chapters as well, between the end of orthodoxy and the beginning of heterodoxy was a nebulous nexus of doctrinal gray, where managing conflicts was as much a function of personality as was one’s view on the eternal procession of the Son. It was often enough to display certain sensibilities similar to a position deemed heretical; as we will see, in three areas in his Sermons on John, Wotton diverged from what was regarded as the Calvinist consensus: (1) his rejection of the Augustinian psychological model of the Trinity, as applied in the Johannine Prologue; (2) his demurral on the mode of Messianic exegesis which “found” the second Person of the Trinity in “unwarranted” places in the Hebrew Bible; and (3) his penchant for doctrinal nonconformity, most conspicuously seen in his critique of Calvin’s view of autotheos. To be sure, the foregoing dissent from the majority view among the trinitarian Calvinists amounted to no more than 10 out of 472 pages of the entire book. In Wotton’s Sermons upon . . . John, we have an intriguing juxtaposition of certain jabs at the requisite constituent parts of trinitarian orthodoxy and a robust defense of the eternal deity of Christ, thus the Trinity. From the outset, Wotton followed the traditional trinitarian interpretive perspective on John’s Gospel when he asserted that the first verse (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”) taught the eternal nature of the Word and that this Word was God, although a mysterious distinction between the Word and God was maintained.80 Yet at this juncture, Wotton made a rather curious theological move. Just as Calvin was not genuflecting at the altar of patristic authorities simply because they were “Fathers of the Church,” Wotton refused to render doctrinal conformity simply because it was coming from the authority of Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, Athanasius, and Eusebius.81 Admittedly, Wotton made a subtle move, but in the context of intentional misreading of one’s polemical opponent, as in the Walker-Wotton case, it was just such a move that proved so treacherous. What was that subtle move? He reported that concerning the Son of God “the ancient, & later Diuines, that haue labored to shadow out that vnspeakable mysterie of the holy Trinitie,

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haue thought it fit to giue vs a little glimse of this dazling light, by comparing God the Father to our vnderstanding, God the Sonne to that, which inwardly our vnderstanding conceiueth.”82 Although he restrained himself from outrightly casting aspersion on this patristic “psychological model of the Trinity,” Wotton offered a less-than-oblique critique: “These things I confesse seeme to mee, somewhat curious, and subtill, that I can hardly perswade my selfe, they were intended by the Euangelist: neither would I haue aduentured to propound them to you.” Yet the only reason Wotton held back was the “reuerence of very many learned Diuines,” all of whom were patristic authors.83 What he clearly articulated was the interpretive distance between what the writer of the Fourth Gospel meant by 1:1–2 and the patristic trinitarian psychological model. In this regard, Wotton was novel, for among the trinitarians in early modern England, Augustine’s De Trinitate, including his “psychological model,” was held in the highest esteem, and many applied it to their own trinitarian theology.84 Yet Wotton displayed his doctrinal eclecticism when he followed Augustine in affirming the full deity of Christ. He interpreted the saying of Thomas in John 20:28 (“my Lord and my God”) in a traditional way of proving the deity of Jesus, and of Paul in Acts 20:28 and Romans 9:5 to demonstrate more than a mere commitment to the idea of communicatio idiomatum: “Who purchased the Church with his blood, but Iesus Christ? Him therefore doth the Apostle call God. And in another place he doubteth not boldly to affirme, that Christ is God ouer all, to be blessed for euer.” This discussion was found in his exegesis of John 1:3 (“By him were all things made”), which for Wotton inexorably led to the conclusion that Christ must be God, since only God could create, and the Word, which he interpreted, pace the Socinians, as the pre-Incarnate Christ, was involved in the act of creation. Then the Word, whose “personal” distinction had already been established in Wotton’s exposition of 1:1, must be God. Similarly, in his Third Sermon on John 1, Wotton offered a riposte to the Arian view concerning Christ being the agent of creation. Citing Augustine’s Tractatus in Evangelium Ioannis, Wotton argued that the Arian’s insistence that “our Sauiour did indeed create all things, yet not as a principall worker, but as an instrument” was a preposterous point. If Christ was less than God, which by definition would mean a creature, then a creature could not be adequately involved as a creator.85 Reflective of his sterling reputation as a learned Puritan preacher, Wotton applied this doctrine of Christ’s deity to the quotidian realities of a London parish, in which many who were convinced of Christ’s eternal deity were far less convinced of their eternal destiny: If Iesus Christ be God? Though the iustice of God will not bee corrupted, by feare, pity, bribery, or flattery: yet it will bee satisfied. If the wrath of God

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be infinite against my sinne, and infinite sacrifice may appease it. I haue nothing to pay. But he, that is God, is all-sufficient. . . . Now, the sufficiency of this worthy sacrifice, ariseth not from the bloud of man, though it be more excellent then that of buls or goates, but frõ the inuabluable worth of the person, whose blood is sacrificed.86 This was a key point of distinction: although Wotton might repudiate the doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, he would not budge on the satisfaction of Christ’s death as the sufficient payment for all of God’s elect. Rather than a cold and comfortless divinity, Wotton displays a deep commitment to practical divinity, while not shying away from discussions of Nicene orthodoxy and autotheos, among others. Perhaps the anti-Puritan vitriol that the excessive Puritan concern with their spiritual welfare would catapult the pilgrim to the realm of legal terror and despondency was not entirely groundless. John Stachniewsky has written of the “persecutory imagination” of the Puritans’ inordinate spiritual navel-gazing and how it became a more self-absorbing and guilt-engrossing type of spirituality.87 Wotton urged his parishioners and readers that now that one was settled in the belief that Christ the One who was sacrificed on their behalf is truly divine, then one was truly prepared “against the assaults of the diuell,” when the sins of the believer would be charged to their account. Wotton’s passionate espousal of practical divinity simply could not work, had Christ not been truly God. In essence, Wotton’s practical divinity was inescapably Johannine and trinitarian.88 Yet, not all was a straitlaced Calvinist practical divinity and trinitarian orthodoxy for Wotton. Another area of possible “dangerous tendency” within Wotton’s Johannine expositions was his reticence, not a refusal, to read the Old Testament Christologically. While he was not opposed to it in general, at least in this instance Wotton criticized Juan Maldonado’s Commentary on John (on 1:1–2), wherein he adduced the Chaldean Paraphrase’s translation of “Iehouah by this word Memra,” as a key indicator that even within the textual horizon of the Hebrew Bible, there were glimmers of the ambassador or conveyor of the will of Yahweh, thus denoting the possibility of the Second Person within the Jewish economy.89 Wotton rejected this view first on lexical grounds by saying “I am sure, he, that will compare the Originall Hebrew, and the Chalde Paraphrase together, shall not finde one place in 20. so translated, if any at all be.” After interacting with the exegetical and theological issues germane to Genesis 22:16, 28:15, and 31:24, as interpreted by Hebrews 6:13, Wotton concluded poignantly that “none of these places . . . need to be, or may be expounded of the 2. Person in the Trinity, our Sauiour Iesus Christ.”90 In a number of trinitarian exegeses, especially among Edmund Porter, John Owen, John Arrowsmith, Henry Hammond, and even Hugo Grotius, the Chaldean

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Paraphrase, especially in its appropriation of the memra as an proleptic allusion to the pre-Incarnate Christ as the agent accomplishing the will of Yahweh, was used. Yet, here was Wotton registering dissent and anticipating the radical rejection of the use of memra from the Chaldean Paraphrase in Souverain’s critique of the Trinity. The third intriguing exegesis of the Prologue and perhaps the most sinister theological misstep on Wotton’s part was to discuss the polemic between the Catholics against Calvin on the issue of autotheos, that is, the nature of Christ being self-same God, possessive of divine aseity even if Christ were to be considered apart from the Father. Calvin, concerned as he was that if the Son’s divinity was only fully derived from the Father, as fons divinitatis, then it was in danger of losing the deity of Christ to the Socinians, taught that the Son possessed being of himself (à se ipso), thus autotheos, God of God, which he took to be the teaching of the Nicene Creed.91 We have already seen that William Fulke’s defense of Calvin over against the trenchant critique of the Douay Rheims annotations was to preserve Calvin’s impeccable credentials as a trinitarian theologian. And Wotton’s insertion of this part in the published version was a deliberate registering of his polemical nonconformity. Once again, Wotton was not an outright denier of autotheos; he was perhaps too theologically nimble to be tripped by Walker or anyone else’s aspersions. Yet he wrote: The summe of that which Caluine holdes touching this point, is thus deliuered by Bellarmine: that our Sauiours diuine nature is so of himselfe, that if you remoue from the Son, all relation to the Father, there will remaine nothing, but the diuine essence, which is of it selfe. That is, in playne wordes, If you consider our Sauiour as GOD onely, not as the Sonne, hee is not the Father, but of himselfe. This is that daungerous heresie, for which our iudicious Rhemists haue giuen sentence against Caluine, as a blasphemer.92 Wotton indeed exculpated Calvin from the heresy hunters of the Catholic fold, but he nonetheless argued subsequently that the divinity of the Son was predicated on, indeed, derived from the Father, thereby complicating the question of Wotton’s Calvinistic credentials. Elsewhere, Wotton argued: “What if all things be made by the Sonne? We must learne thereby that the Sonne hath all that he hath from the Father, and not from himself,” and concluded: “this Doctrine [autotheos] cannot necessarily be gathered from this kind of phrase.”93 This denial of Christ being autotheos, and asserting the Father to be the fons divinitatis (“fount of divinity”) might not have been regarded as heresy of the Arian proportions, but in the age of polemical hypersensitivity, it was hardly shocking that Wotton’s views would be subjected to an

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eight-member ad hoc Judiciary Committee to determine his orthodoxy, at the behest of George Walker in 1614, as a desperate measure of damage control in intra-Puritan disputes.94 Although it was difficult to argue that a denial of autotheos itself would implicate one to be a Socinian, it helped provide another reason for Walker’s “calumniating” of Wotton as a Socinian “heretic.” In the ex post facto account of the controversy between Walker and Wotton, written by Thomas Gataker, an ally of Wotton, there was a fascinating anecdote that showed that the issue of autotheos might have been a not insignificant matter for the heresy trial of Bartholomew Legate, the antitrinitarian burned during the reign of James I, on March 18, 1612. It appears to have been on February 20, 1612, when an admirer of Legate came as a nocturnal visitor to Gataker while he was at Lincoln’s Inn. He desired to seek clarification from Gataker on the issue as to whether the godhead of Christ was “begotten of the Father from all eternity,” an expression from the Nicene Creed. Gataker narrated the account this way: I told him, that these were not the words there used: and that to speake properly, the Godhead was not said, either to beget, or to be begotten. If the parties meaning were, that Christ being God was begotten of the Father, who is likewise God from all eternity, the sense were sound, but the speech improper. . . . He requested me to give him that under my hand. I craved his name. He told me, I must excuse him for that. I told him, he should likewise excuse for this. And so we parted.95 Gataker learned of the connection between the anonymous nocturnal visitor’s query about autotheos and the cause célèbre surrounding Legate.96 The foregoing analysis of the Johannine exegesis of Anthony Wotton demonstrates the complex and slippery nature of polemical exchanges, even among those who were agreed on the nature of the Trinity. Wotton unequivocally affirmed the deity of Christ. Yet due to his less than forthright support for Christ being autotheos, particularly his unflinching opposition to the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, he was castigated as a Socinian by George Walker.97 Not only was the Gospel of John crucial in demonstrating the specifics of trinitarian theology but also for many early modern trinitarian exegetes, there was an inescapable sense of mystery, and precedence, indeed priority, of faith vis-à-vis reason in it as well. George Hutcheson, a fellow hotter sort of Protestant from Edinburgh, echoed the patristic apophaticism in his exegesis of John 1:1, exclaiming “how little able are we to comprehend this great mystery.”98 In a similar fashion, Edmund Porter, prebendary of Norwich Cathedral and former fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, during the Laudian era, invoked the authority of Augustine in the matter of faith and reason. In his Trin-Unus-

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Deus (1657), Augustine was the most frequently cited Church Father, and in his section on religious epistemology, Porter depended heavily on Augustine’s In Evangelium Ioannis Tractatus. Porter pointed out, in a fashion similar to Godfrey Goodman, that “in these Mysteries faith must lead to knowledge.” Then he cited from Augustine’s Tractatus XXIX: “Noli intelligere ut credus sed crede ut intelligas,” and from Tractatus XXXV: “Si potes Cape: Si non potes crede.”99 Porter, à la Augustine, enjoined his readers to believe so that true understanding could be obtained, and not pursue understanding as a precondition of belief. A key element in the Augustinian epistemology was: “Intellectus enim merces est fidei” (understanding is a gift of faith).100 In that way, most early modern trinitarians were following Augustine’s epistemology and his Johannine exegesis. An intriguing element in Trinitarian religious epistemology was this: for one to claim to understand God completely, “it is indeed to be God, and to make his understanding equall to that eternall Word, in the understanding of God.”101 For Porter, an over-reliance and confidence in reason was not a novelty among his Socinian contemporaries; it had a much longer pedigree in that the “Ancient Hereticks rejected the Doctrine of the Trinity, because they could not by reasoning comprehend it.”102 An interesting point of convergence about the foregoing texts that emphasized divine incomprehensibility and the corresponding need for exercising the divine gift of faith was that these points were raised within the context of their Johannine exegesis, since the Gospel of John brought to the fore the mystery of God the Word becoming fully human while not losing his divinity. Similarly for John Arrowsmith, no clearer text could be adduced to incontrovertibly establish the deity of Jesus and the mystery of the Trinity than John 1:1, “the Word was God.” Arrowsmith used Romans 9:5 and Titus 2:13 to further illuminate the meaning of John 1:1 in that Paul spoke of Jesus as “God blessed for ever” (Romans), and “the great God” (Titus).103 An important convergence of biblical exegesis and trinitarian spirituality emerged in Arrowsmith’s discussion of the Incarnation of Christ, especially in his exegesis of John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh.” Here we see a hitherto neglected theme of the Puritan perspective on the doctrine of participation. We have already seen Traheron taking the Athanasian perspectives of the incarnational imperative, with an Anselmian twist of the emphasis on satisfaction of God’s honor and justice as well. For Arrowsmith, he insisted that the Son of God assumed “our nature cloathed with infirmities, as after the fall,” so that “we might have accesse to him with boldness” and continue to participate in the life divine, as Christ’s resurrected flesh provided the blueprint for the shape of the eschatological human self.104 John Trapp similarly demonstrated the degree to which the so-called Eastern theology of the Cappadocians had

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become the staple diet of Puritan divinity by the mid-seventeenth century. In his comment on John 1:14, Trapp tersely commented, mentioning Gregory Nazianzen on the marginalia: “if he had not assumed our flesh, he has not saved us.” Trapp captured the essence of Gregory’s point that Jesus’s Incarnation was putting on a “lowsie leprous suit of ours . . . to heal us of our spiritual leprousie.” It would seem, then, that both Arrowsmith and Trapp acknowledged the assumption of full humanity by Jesus, in particular the fallen human flesh.105 Taking the expression of the Athanasian Creed, Arrowsmith concurred that the “Word was made flesh by taking the Manhood into God, not by converting the Godhead into Man,” consequently obviating any possibility of change in God.106 For Porter, Trapp, Goodman, and Arrowsmith, the Incarnation provided the link for theosis/participation. The mystery of the Incarnation reached further than merely allowing the possibility for participating in the divine nature, as great as that assuredly was. For Arrowsmith, the greater marvel was that the Incarnation allowed the possibility of God shedding blood for the sake of redemption, which, for many who were nurtured in the tradition of divine impassibility, would have been a sheer impossibility. So Arrowsmith expounded: God hath no blood, yet God is said to purchase the Church with his blood; because that Person which was God, had blood to shed, according to his human Nature; though it was sanguis humanus, yet it was sanguis Dei. It was human blood, yet the blood of that Person, which was God as well as Man. Now the ground of all this, is that personall union, The Word being made flesh.107 In another exposition of the theme of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, Arrowsmith in his own way spoke of the ineffable and invisible nature of the glory of God, “too dazzling for our weak eyes,” and yet when we behold the incarnate Christ, we were seeing nothing less than the true substance of God “in the veil of his flesh.”108 Yet contrary to the Socinians, Arrowsmith was insistent that the incarnated One was in no way less than or inferior to the One who had sent him. Then, similar to Edmund Porter and numerous other contemporaries who found their polemical ally in a fourth-century North African bishop, Augustine, Arrowsmith also resorted yet once more to him: “Therefore, it is good to take the counsel of Augustine; Vis tu disputare mecum? Potiùs admirare mecum: Wilt thou be disputing with me? Rather wonder with me, and cry, Oh Profunditas, Oh the depth!”109 What was regarded by the trinitarians as “Profunditas” was regarded by some as nothing but folly and legerdemain. What was for one a sign of true gracious mystery—how God could become human—which begot gratitude,

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was an unnecessary addition to the simple teachings of Scripture. It is to antitrinitarian Johannine exegesis we turn our attention now. IV

The Antitrinitarian Johannine Exegesis of Faustus Socinus and Johann Crell The stage is now set for an in-depth analysis of the antitrinitarian Johannine exegesis. As shown here, a number of texts from the Gospel of John were appropriated to buttress three major ideological commitments, shared by the leading antitrinitarians of early modern Europe: inter alia, Faustus Socinus, Ferenc David, Johann Crell, John Biddle, Stephen Nye, and Jacques Souverain. First, the task of the antitrinitarian exegete was to deconstruct the Gospel of John so that the layers of trinitarianism could be peeled away to reveal the hidden kernel of true Christianity, which knew nothing of the three persons within one God. Second, the Gospel of John itself was a departure from the pristine Gospel of Jesus Christ, as encapsulated in the Synoptic Gospels. Third, by equating the Son’s mission (being sent by the Father) as a clear proof of his inferiority vis-à-vis the Father, all antitrinitarian exegetes converged on their interpretation of John 1:1, “In the beginning . . . ” as referring to the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry, thereby denying his putative eternal coexistence with the Father. Most of the exegetical rumblings heard in England had their origin elsewhere: in Poland, to be more precise. Faustus Socinus’s (1539–1604) Opera Omnia was part of Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonarum quo Unitarios vocant (Irenopoli, 1656).110 Published in two volumes, Socinus’s Opera Omnia was composed of his “exegetical and didactic” works in the first volume, followed by his polemical works. The Sermon on the Mount— Matthew 5, 6, and 7—was given an interpretation which made this passage the central focus of New Testament Christianity, not the religion based on the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus, so that true Christianity was composed of following and imitating Jesus.111 In his “Explicationis Primae partis primi Capitis Johannis,” Socinus evinced his clear antitrinitarian sensibilities. In his exegesis of John 1:1, “In the beginning was the word,” Socinus asserted: In the beginning was the word. Those who in this place wish to have the word beginning designate the eternity of Christ stand convicted of the most egregious error (“manifestissimi erroris”) from the mere fact that their opinion is supported by no authority whether in the New Testament or the Old. As a matter of fact you will not find beginning used for eternity anywhere in

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Scriptures. On this account, we maintain that the word beginning in this passage refers not to eternity, but to the order of the thing which John is writing about Jesus Christ as the beloved son of God, in this matter imitating Moses who, writing his history, made this word beginning also the very opening of Genesis 1:1.112 For Socinus, then, the most glaringly obvious error made by the trinitarian exegesis of John 1:1 was its facile assumption that the beginning (“principio”) referred to the eternal existence of the Word. Instead, just as Genesis 1:1 spoke of God’s work of creation, the text of John 1:1 was describing the parallel reality of God’s work of new creation, with Christ as the agent of new creation. Thus, Socinus noted plainly that the “beginning” had to refer to the “beginning of the Gospel” in which John the Baptist, as his harbinger, began to call the people of Israel to the work of restoration of their relationship with Yahweh.113 Moreover, on the crucial part of 1:1, “Et Deus erat Verbum,” Socinus took the inversion of the order, a major philological volte-face, instantiated by Erasmus, and took matters further down the antitrinitarian trajectory. Whereas Erasmus assiduously maintained the divinity of Christ, manifestly derived from John 1:1, despite the philological change, Socinus adopted the view that this verse taught that God was the Word. Even if “the Word” referred to Christ at all, continued Socinus, it could only mean as a special authority, power and blessing through which God does all of God’s work, thus the Word was not a proper name denoting a separate personhood, as it had been maintained in the Nicene Creed. Thus Socinus’s repudiation of the eternal nature of the Word made incarnate in Christ was a truculent and complete rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity.114 Since Socinus took “in the beginning” as a reference to the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry, preceded by John the Baptist’s work, it was natural for him to render 1:3 as a reference to Christ’s work of new creation. To clinch this interpretation, Socinus quoted from 2 Corinthians 5:17, in which Paul used the language of new creation as the most apposite expression to describe the work of Christ.115 If Socinus’s Explicationis was exclusively concerned to capture this controversial text for the cause of antitrinitarians, De falsa et vera unius Dei Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti cognitione libri duo (1568) was one of the most systematic summaries of antitrinitarian exegesis, thus a sweeping indictment of the idolatry of the trinitarians, who were guilty of worshipping someone less than the one true God.116 Pirnát presented the historical significance of De falsa et vera this way: “Of all the 16th century antitrinitarian publications it was the one that contained a detailed historical-ecclesiastical survey and endeavoured to view the Unitarian movement within the framework of the by then 1500-year

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old history of Christianity and the 50 years of Protestantism.”117 Not only was there a deep historical erudition on display, particularly of the ante-Nicene Fathers, whose writings were presented in such a way as to show that they were unequivocally anti-Nicene, but there was also an equal demonstration of biblical exegesis to show that the language and logic of Trinity was simply absurd, an accretion of pagan and Platonic philosophy. In Book II, chapter 3, the issue of the word (“de Logo”) was discussed in considerable detail, with references both to John 1:1 and to a number of anteNicene patristic authors. From Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata (lib. I, cap. vi) and Augustine’s Tractatus in Evangelium Ioannis (tract. 1), the author of De falsa et vera argued that the Word was not a separate, distinct person, different from God. Furthermore, by citing from the fourth epistle of Ignatius of Antioch, the author argued that the word and spirit had always been agents of God, yet without giving them personal identities as the second and third persons within the triune Godhead. Yet, it was in Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses to which the author of De falsa et vera turned to clinch his argument for the non-personal nature of the Word, since Irenaeus had described the Word variously as “the disposition of God” (lib. II, cap. x), “virtue of God” (lib. II, cap. xviii), “disposition existent within God” (lib. II, cap. xlvii), and the wellknown passage of the word and the spirit being the hands of God (lib. I, cap. xiii).118 Equally ludicrous was the defense of the two natures of Christ based on the notion of communicatio idiomatum, a pivotal doctrine for the trinitarians which affirmed that through the communication of the divine and human natures in Christ, God could experience and participate in all the quotidian realities of the human existence, including death.119 Another key Johannine text in addition to the Prologue was 17:3, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” The author(s) of De falsa et vera devoted twenty-two pages (Book II, chap. v) to disabuse the flawed trinitarian notion that Christ’s deity could be proved from this verse. Asserting this text to be teaching the fundamental doctrine of our salvation and eternal life (“doctrinam de fundamento salutis nostrae & vita aeterna”), it argued unflinchingly for the existence of one God and the lordship of Christ.120 Thus, again, here was an exposition of the unique role assigned to Christ in the economy of salvation, while at the same time rejecting the notion of the one divine essence and three eternal persons by citing from John 6:45 “ . . . they shall all be taught of God . . . everyone who hears and has learned from my Father.”121 Since the term Father necessarily implied ontological superiority and chronological precedence, the Son could neither share nor participate in the divine essence. Intended to deliver the maximum degree of shock, De falsa et vera vociferously argued that to build the trinitarian sand castle with verbiage such as Trinity,

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Essence, and three persons, which was at once utterly foreign and repugnant to Scripture language and logic, was tantamount to worshipping “Baal, Moloch, Astharoth.” Instead, the true worship of God, which both the prophets and the apostles attested to, entailed loving the one “God the Father who has created us, one Jesus Christ the Son of God who has redeemed us, and the one Holy Spirit in whom we are sealed to life.”122 In Book II, chapter xi of De falsa et vera, Laelius Socinus’s—the uncle of Faustus—“Brevis Explicatio, in Primum Ioannis Caput” was reprinted, as the representative of the Johannine exegesis of the antitrinitarian movement itself.123 Two brief observations are in order before we launch into a discussion of Johann Crell’s antitrinitarian Johannine exegesis. First, Socinus argued, in an entirely typical fashion, that “in principio” had to be translated as the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Why? Here Socinus utilized the hermeneutical principle of analogia fidei: since the Gospels of Mark and Luke and also Acts all begin with some reference to the beginning, namely, “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1); “ . . . which from the beginning were eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:2); and “the former treatise . . . of all that Jesus began both to do and teach” (Acts 1:1), the beginning referred to in the Gospel of John also had to mean the same.124 Moreover, Laelius Socinus, while clearly affirming that Jesus was the Son of God, Lord, Christ, king, priest, head (of the Church), prophet, Messiah, servant, and Savior, maintained that to exalt Christ to be the second person of the Holy Trinity was equivalent to ditheism.125 This was part of his exegesis of “the Word was God” (“et sermo ille erat deus”), of John 1:1. In his exegesis of John 1:14, “And the Word was made flesh” (“et verbum caro factum est”), Socinus cleverly drove a wedge between the Catholic and Protestant trinitarians, prying it open with his tool of anti-popery. The notion of the putatively eternal Word taking on human flesh, as seen in John 1:14, was often used by Catholic exegetes to buttress their doctrine of transubstantiation. Not only was transubstantiation the perfect fodder for popery, so was the doctrine of the Trinity, which was predicated on the understanding of Christ’s two natures, which for Socinus was no different from having two Christs, a notion introduced by Antichrist, thus in desperate need of complete demolition.126 Thus, there was a consistent overlap in the way the Gospel of John was appropriated by the antitrinitarians in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, we will look at one Polish theologian, Johann Crell, and a Polish catechism, perhaps most emblematic of the antitrinitarian movement in early modern Europe, the Racovian Catechism. Johann Crell (1590–1633) had been a student at the Academy of Altdorf, near Nuremberg in Germany, until 1613, when, under the scrutiny of the authorities for his Socinian-leaning perspective, he fled for Rakow, Poland.

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Crell found Rakow a natural home and thrived intellectually, eventually serving as rector of the Socinian Academy. As Sarah Mortimer has shown, Crell’s eventual rejection of Lutheranism (along with that of his fellow students at Altdorf), which inexorably gave way to his rejection of the Trinity, was the “stale solefideism of the Lutherans,” especially contrasted with the Socinians’ ennobled pursuit of “virtue and good works.”127 Crell became known for his erudition, not only influencing the local Polish Socinian community but also reaching England and beyond.128 Crell had written a refutation of Grotius’s view on Christ’s death as satisfaction, Responsio ad Hugonis Grotii librum de Satisfactione (Rakow, 1623).129 He also published a number of commentaries on the New Testament and textcritical studies on the Gospels, often co-authoring with his colleague Jonas Schlichting (1592–1661). Crell’s two commentaries, one on Galatians and the other on Hebrews, were translated by Thomas Lushington into English, igniting a conflagration of hostile responses, both to Lushington and to Socinianism.130 His work on ethics, Ethices elementa Racoviae (1635), was recommended as an advanced text in ethics at Oxford by Thomas Barlow, who had been the librarian at the Bodleian (1642–1660), Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford (1660–1676), bishop of Lincoln (1675–1691), and an avowed defender of Calvinism.131 Yet the two works that epitomized his theological commitment to antitrinitarianism were Racovian Catechism (1614) and De Uno Deo Patre libri duo, initially published in Rakow in 1631, published also in Germany (1645), in England (1665, 1691 under a different title), and in Holland (1668), thereby indicating the degree of his influence.132 The Racovian Catechism, entitled initially in its first Latin edition as Catecheses Ecclesiarum quae in Regno Poloniae (Racoviae, 1614), was dedicated to James I, with the intent that this catechism would find favor with the monarch who evinced sufficient ecumenical sensibilities. However, perhaps due to his vitriolic opposition to Conrad Vorstius’s nomination for a professorial chair at Leiden University in April 1611, and to the all-too-recent burnings of Edward Wightman and Bartholomew Legate in the same year, James was in no position to broaden his ecumenical tent to receive this Polonian overture.133 Instead, he had the Catecheses Ecclesiarum . . . Poloniae burned. Although Crell was not one of the authors of the first edition of the Racovian Catechism—as Valentinus Smalcius, Jerome Moskorzowski, and Johannes Völkel had been— the updated 1680 edition of the Racovian Catechism had Crell’s imprint all over, as he worked with Jonas Schlinting, Martin Ruarus, and Andrew and Benedict Wissowatius.134 The Johannine exegesis of the Racovian Catechism formed an integral part of its antitrinitarian strategy. In its discussion on “Of the Knowledge of God,” three texts were adduced, as the trinitarians were wont to appropriate them to

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prove the “three Persons in one Deity”: Matthew 28:19, 1 Corinthians 12:4–6, and 1 John 5:7. In their analysis of 1 John 5:7, Racovian Catechism goes for the text-critical jugular and argued for the spurious nature of this locus classicus, following Erasmus on this.135 Their argument against the Trinity from this text was twofold: first, text-critical and, second, logical. The first text-critical argument was that “since it is known that in the more ancient Greek copies, and in the Syriack, and in the more antient Latin Versions, these words are not extant, as the chiefest of our Adversaries do shew, nothing certain can be concluded from them.” The second angle of refutation was logical: even if these words were found in the earliest extant manuscripts, they cannot thus prove the deity of Christ, for all they seek to do is demonstrate that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Moreover, simply because three entities were mentioned, “Father, Word, and the Holy Spirit,” that could not be “proven” as indicators of the tripersonal nature of God; rather, it was a “testimony and agreement, but not in essence” (“unum testimonio, non autem essentia”).136 The three key texts the trinitarians used to defend the eternal pre-existence of Christ were that “he was in the beginning with God, John 1.1. was in heaven, John 6.62. was before Abraham, John 8.58.”137 The Racovian Catechism devoted considerable space to disabuse the unsuspecting Christians of these trinitarian “snares.” First, John 1:1 indicated the “beginning of the Gospel,” as the beginnings of the Gospels of Mark and Luke were juxtaposed. From the second text, the catechists were clearly influenced by Faustus Socinus, who, in Tractatus de Deo, Christo, & Spiritu Sancto and in Christianae Religionis Brevissima Institutio, taught the “pre-ascension ascension” of Christ. So the Racovian Catechism contended that: Neither is here [John 6:62] any express mention made of his being from Eternity from this place, the Scripture testifieth that the Son of man, that is, Jesus Christ as man, (who it is certain could not possibly have been from Eternity, in that he was born at a certain time) had been sometimes in Heaven, namely when he ascended up thither to receive his message from God.138 Regarding the key text for the Incarnation of Christ, John 1:14, the Racovian catechists vehemently maintained that it cannot teach that “God was incarnated, or that the divine Nature assumed a humane.” The more natural translation of this text was to be “The Word was flesh,” since the verb e;gevvneto, used in 1:14, was also used in “verse 6. of this very chapter. There was [e;g evn eto]a man sent by God, his name John,” and as well from Luke 24:19, “Who was [e;g evn eto] a Prophet great in word and deed.” By rendering 1:14 this way, the Racovian Catechism obviated the exegetical possibility of a trinitarian conclusion: that

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God the Word took on human flesh with the advent of Christ.139 Thus, the Incarnation was taken as the advent of he “by whom God perfectly revealed his whole will, and who had been therefore by John called the Word, or Speech, was a man, of the same constitution with others, and subject to the same infirmity, afflictions and death.”140 In answering the question, “In what places of the Scripture is the word (God) attributed to Christ?” the catechists noted that only three texts explicitly refer to Christ as God: John 1:1, John 20:28, and Romans 9:5. The second text was the reportage of the post-resurrection encounter between Jesus and Thomas, in which the latter exclaimed, “My Lord, and my God” after seeing the nail marks and pierced sides of Jesus. The third text, Romans 9:5, affirmed that “Christ is a God over all to be blessed for evermore.” Yet this verse was immediately preceded by, as the Racovian catechists pointed out, the statement of his humanity: “who was of the Fathers according to the flesh.” Thus the exegetical strategy for the Racovian catechists was to show the logical absurdity and theological incongruity of the three key texts to buttress the deity of Christ. First, from 1:1, they argued that if the Word was indeed God, then “there are two Gods, whereof the one was with the other,” which would be theologically irresponsible, unless ditheism was now deemed acceptable orthodoxy. For John 20:28 and Romans 9:5, they maintained that to have the marks of physical wounds and to be a descendant of the patriarchs were quintessential marks pertaining to “a man, which that they should be ascribed to him that is God by Nature, is very absurd.” They quickly followed this by yet another firm repudiation of communicatio idiomatum, a doctrine designed to bolster the trinitarian claim that the human and divine in the incarnate Christ were distinct yet in union, so that he who was eternally one with God “the Father” could experience birth, physical pain, and death. They tersely noted that such a “distinction is not to be endured.”141 The other text they sought to wrest from the hands of the trinitarians was John 10:29–30, particularly 10:30. The question and answer in Racovian Catechism was as follows: Q. Where doth the Scripture teach that Christ is one with the Father? A. John 10.29, 30. Where the Lord saith, The Father that gave me the sheep is greater then all, and none can snatch them out of the Fathers hand. I and the Father are one.142 The unity evinced in verse 30, “I and the Father are one,” was not one of essence, but of purpose. As proof, they adduced John 17:11, in which Jesus prayed for oneness among the believers “as we are one,” that is, Father and Son. Yet just as the unity among the followers of Jesus was not one of essence, but rather of purpose, so was the oneness Jesus spoke of in both John 10:30 and 17:11. Moreover,

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since 10:29 unequivocally stated that “The Father is greater then all,” and as he repeated it in 14:28, there was no way that Christ’s putatively divine nature could be proven from these two texts. As T. E. Pollard demonstrated, the majority of patristic exegetes, with the exception of Origen, took John 10:30 as teaching the ontological unity between the Father and the Son. Both Tertullian (Adversus Praxean, 22) and Athanasius (Orationes contra Arianos, iii. 10–25, esp. ¶¶10, 16 17) had utilized this text against those who denied the divinity of Christ; so were Hippolytus and Alexander of Alexandria.143 Yet in the Reformation period, both Philip Melanchthon and John Calvin, who showed unswerving commitment to the doctrine of the Trinity, were not certain that this text could be appropriated as a proof of the deity of Christ.144 Melanchthon and Calvin took the “oneness” spoken of in this verse as one of purpose and will, which was ironically the view of Servetus, who was burned in Geneva in October 1553 for his antitrinitarianism, with Calvin’s approval. Calvin went so far to as excoriate the patristic writers for their exegetical overreach: “The ancients misappropriated this passage to prove that Christ is homoosion with the Father. For Christ does not quibble over the substantial unity.”145 The Racovian Catechism followed the same interpretive trajectory of Servetus and Calvin. This same trend of exploiting the Gospel of John to show the Son’s inferiority to and dependence on the Father continued in Johannis Crelli . . . de Uno Deo libri duo. In Two Books of Crell touching One God the Father, the first exegetical proof that there is but one God, the “Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” was John 17:3 (“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”), a text also often employed by the trinitarians to argue precisely for the opposite effect, to allegedly demonstrate the deity of Christ and the conjunctive nature of the mission of “God and his Christ.” Crell, on the other hand, vociferously argued that, grammatically speaking, the word only was predicate for “THE TRUE GOD, or the Most High God,” which therefore excluded the possibility that “Christ and holy Spirit” could be regarded as part of this true deity.146 The Gospel of John was the most frequently cited biblical text (52 times), more than twice the number of citations from the Synoptic Gospels put together (Matthew, 14 times; Mark, twice; Luke, 8 times); Romans was the closest second (21 times), and Hebrews was also cited (7 times). Thus Crell’s antitrinitarian exegesis was firmly anchored by reclaiming this crucial Gospel. Crell wove together the following antitrinitarian arguments from his Johannine exegesis, which can be summarized in five propositions: 1. Since Christ noted that “my teaching is not my own” (John 7:16–18), rather from the One who sent him, he cannot be the most high God (John 7:28–29).147

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2. Since Christ neither came to do his own will or work, nor “seek his own glory,” he cannot be the most high God. That is also the case since Christ located the origin and telos of all belief, not in himself, but on God the Father (John 5:19; 6:30; 8:50–54; 10:25; 12:44; 14:10, 16; 15:26).148 3. Since Christ prayed to the Father “for succor,” it shows the Son’s subordination to the Father, thus Christ is not the most high God. On this point, the trinitarians saw it as indicative of the depth of the communion between the Father and the Son, often in the bond of the Spirit (à la Augustine)149 (John 17). 4. Since all things were given to the Son by the Father, and since the Son was “exalted by God . . . or made Lord and Christ,” thus Christ is not the most high God (John 3:35; 5:22, 26; 6:29; 10:29; 13:3; 17:2, 5, 6, 7, 22, 24).150 5. Since Christ openly acknowledged that “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), nothing could be plainer in disproving Christ’s consubstantiality with the Father.151 The last criterion of Crell’s for criticizing Nicene trinitarianism was the idea of the Trinity as an ineffable mystery, which he regarded a simple logical contradiction, a legerdemain concocted by priestcraft, and a sign, not of sublime mystery, but rather of the Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity. Crell was adamant that Jesus’ sonship was derivable both from reason and a “plain reading” of Scripture. The “fact” of his mission (sent by the Father) and his death on behalf of humanity had to mean that he was only human, not God, and his resurrection all made rational sense and were based on the infallible authority of Scripture—but not his being the second Person of the Trinity, which, to Crell, was tantamount to making Christ “the most high God.”152 Here he heaped a lacerating rebuke on the Neoplatonic and patristic idea that Idea (God) had its perfect image, which was connected by love, thus the divine Trinity: These Mysteries do they open unto us concerning the production of two divine persons, it is wonderful with what deep silence of holy Scriptures kept secret, and how foreign from those things, which the same holy Scriptures do in most plain words deliver concerning the Generation of the Son by God. . . . Here they cry out, that Reason is blind in divine things, who would not that any may dispute from it against the Trinity. . . . But unless such things had been devised, they had not at this day had their Trinity. But it is wonderful how preposterously the Adversaries do here behave themselves.153

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Confronted by the “deep silence of holy Scriptures” and the preposterous behavior of the hereticating bishops, Crell’s critique of the Trinity as a paganphilosophical hijacking of primitive Christianity would provide the requisite grist for the mill of Hobbes, Marvell, and Baxter, as we have already seen in chapter 5. In the next two sections, we explore in greater detail how this idea of sublimating the simple Gospel, particularly in the Gospel of John and in its Prologue, was seen as a deleterious effect, wrought by the Platonism-laden philosopher-priests. For that we shall turn to John Biddle, Stephen Nye, and Jacques Souverain. V

John Biddle and Stephen Nye on the Gospel of John as the Antiprimitive Christianity In a short treatise attributed to Stephen Nye, An Impartial Account of the Word Mystery, As it is taken in the Holy Scripture (1691), an etiology of the demise of primitive Christianity was given. This was achieved by a surreptitious encroachment of Platonism through two agencies: the incessant invocation of the mantra “mystery” and the equally persistent reliance on the Gospel of John. Citing from Fontenelle’s History of Oracles (1688), Nye argued that “Plato, who is all over sublime and wonderful, became thereby a Philosopher in fashion among the learned Christians of the first Ages,” particularly in the promulgation of the Trinity.154 Nye landed a sardonic punch, not only on his interlocutors Luke Milbourne and William Sherlock but also on any trinitarians who would lean on the ineffability-mystery factor to protect the doctrine of the Trinity: “Mystery is a Supplement ready at hand, when we fall short of Reason. In a word, Mystery is a Salve for all Diseases.”155 Nye’s perspective on the incommensurability between mystery and reason, seen in the foregoing quote, was not a philosophical innovation on his part. We have already seen that Crell and Biddle also inveighed against the trinitarians who sought to create the putatively sublime mystery of the Trinity, in lieu of the simplicity of the primitive Gospel. For example, in his “Preface” to A Twofold Catechism, Biddle offered a tirade against the trinitarian deviation from the simplicity of Scripture language, opting, instead, for the language more apt for the philosophical schools of Plato than the catechetical school of Antioch. For Biddle, the nadir of the primitive church’s deviation “from the language of Scripture” regarding Christ, “calling him co-essential with the Father” was at the Council of Nicaea, which ended up eliminating the “chastity and simplicity” of scriptural Christianity so that “there hardly

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remained so much as one point thereof sound and entire.”156 Since the writing of A Twofold Catechism, the steady accumulation in the antitrinitarian arsenal focused on the systematic attack on the Gospel of John and the Platonic captivity of the simple Gospel, epitomized in Biddle’s citation of Justus Lipsius: “They . . . did in outward profession so put-on Christ, as that in heart they did not put-off Plato.”157 An important transition, however, occurred between Biddle’s antitrinitarianism of the 1650s and that of Stephen Nye and Jacques Souverain in the 1690s, although the seeds were already in Biddle’s writings as well. Whereas for Biddle, the corruption of Christianity took place after the completion of the New Testament, for Nye and Souverain, the fissure in the foundation of Christianity might have already existed in the New Testament writing itself, particularly in the highly reified notion of Christ’s deity, found in the Gospel of John. Biddle had already speculated the literary provenance of the Fourth Gospel was prompted by the early church’s desire to “avoid the scandal of worshipping a crucified Man” that they perforce added “another Nature in Christ.”158 In what is perhaps his best-known work, Brief History of the Unitarians, Called also Socinians (1687), Stephen Nye offered a detailed exegetical critique of the Trinity, starting with Genesis 1:26 and concluding with Revelation 22:21.159 In addition, Nye added the text-critical and historical authorities of Erasmus, Grotius, Dionysius Petavius, Simon Episcopius, and Christof Sand.160 Yet the overwhelming emphasis was on showing from Scripture how the idea of three Persons in one divine essence was a theological error of the profoundest sort. Of the 116 pages of this Socinian exegetical revisionism, 26 were from the Gospel of John (10 pages from the Johannine Prologue alone), which was nearly a fourth of the entire biblical analysis section, thereby illustrating the singular significance attached to this Gospel. After all, he had claimed that all the Scripture texts except for John 1:1 had been “given up to the Socinians.” In another publication by Nye, An Accurate Examination of the Principal Texts Usually alleged for the Divinity of our Saviour (1692), a critical rejoinder to Luke Milborne’s Mysteries in Religion Vindicated, published earlier in 1692, eleven of fift y-nine pages of text were devoted to his Socinian exegesis of the Johannine Prologue and five to the rest of the Gospel of John.161 Here again, nearly a fourth of the entire exegetical defense of Socinianism was devoted to the Fourth Gospel. Nye minced no words when he kicked off his exegesis of the Johannine Prologue: “The Trinitarian Exposition of this Chapter [John 1] is absurd, and contradictory.”162 First, Nye sought to establish a genealogy of the Socinian exegesis by asserting that the “Nazarens, and Cerinthus, and Ebion” propagated the teaching of radical monotheism, while exalting Christ to a place above every human being and above all angels, but not of the same essence

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with God. Alarmed by this heresy, the bishops and churches of Asia Minor “importuned St. John” to defend orthodoxy, expressly “concerning the Divinity of our Saviour.”163 However, Nye scoffed at the notion of the Word being the Son of God from any other place than John’s Gospel.164 Then, by adopting the interpretation of Origen, John Chrysostom, Maldonatus, Beza, Franciscus Gomarus, and Henry Hammond, he sought to show that when John calls the Messiah the “Word,” it is because the Messiah was the “Messenger of GladTidings,” not the perfect expression of God’s eternal mind, and certainly not as the second Person of the Trinity.165 In interpreting “The Word was with God,” Nye’s question was as simple as it was searing: if the trinitarians were right, then why is there no mention of the Holy Ghost, for is “not he too (according to the Trinitarians) God, or a God?”166 Then creating a catena of Johannine texts from 17:1–3; 12:49; 5:30, and 14:10, Nye argued that the Gospel of John, rather than refuting the Cerinthian heresy, rather supported it. Then Nye anticipated the frequent claim of the trinitarians: the “Proem, or first Verses of his Gospel,” which, even if all other verses were given over to the Socinians, proved Jesus to be divine, thus bolsters the doctrine of the Trinity.167 Nye’s answer was entirely typical of the age when philology was the leading edge of humanist learning, not theology: “if the Heavenly Words [of John] were but honestly translated,” then the truth of God vindicating the Socinians would emerge. Nye alleged that so many gems of antitrinitarian truths were lost, or intentionally left out, in the political decisions of the translators, be they the Geneva, King James, or the Polyglot Bible, for the putatively “Original” texts were already cleaned and “corrected to speak the Language of the Church,” which he simply called a “Fraud.”168 Undaunted, Nye offered his exegesis of John 1:1, “and the WORD was God.” In this instance, Nye argued that only if they had followed the grammatical pattern laid out in the text, whether the word for God (Qeo;V) was used with or without the article the (oJ), they would not bungle by arriving at the trinitarian reading of the text. So he argued: “Our Opposers themselves will not deny . . . that the original words should have been thus rendered, The WORD was with the God, and the WORD was a God,” a translation Nye believed was “absolutely necessary.” For Nye, oJ Qeo;V was always used to signify “the true God,” whereas Qeo;V simpliciter was used to refer to “Angels, to Kings, to Prophets,” and any such who would “represent the Person of . . . God.” Tantalizing here was that this was precisely how Hobbes in his Leviathan, in chapter 42, had rendered the doctrine of the Trinity, as Moses, Jesus, and the apostles represented God and carried out all causes divine.169 In his explanation for why, then, the “Messias” was said to have been “with the God,” Nye followed Faustus Socinus, who, as we noted earlier, had taught the pre-ascension ascension of Christ. It seemed this was the only grammatical conclusion

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warranted, if one was committed to the notion that there can only be one Person in the Godhead and that Christ was not it.170 One of the typical polemical principles shared among the Protestant antitrinitarians was to lump transubstantiation and Trinity together, both as illogical and unscriptural, as we have already seen in Johann Crell in The Two Books of Crellius, so that rather than relying on priestcraft and mystery, the laity ought assiduously to apply the principle of reason against them. The same sentiment was replicated in Nye. With great stylistic pungency, Nye divulged the inconsistency and illogicality of the Protestant trinitarians’ position to repudiate transubstantiation yet revere the Trinity: Our Opposers tell the People, they are not to believe the Transubstantiation, tho grounded on those express Words of Scripture, This is my Body: because that Doctrine implies several Contradictions to clear Reason: Why do they not keep to this Rule, to which they would oblige their People? Why do they not renounce the Errors of the Trinity and Incarnation, which imply so many more Contradictions to Reason, than can be pretended of the Transubstantiation? . . . Thus while they Argue against the Papists,’tis on Socinian Principles, that the Scripture must be interpreted in consistence with Evident Reason; which is a yielding all the Controverted Points to the Socinians.171 The irony was hard to miss. Nye argued that, at least as far as having literal hermeneutical support, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, based on the text “This is my Body,” had more support than the nonscriptural language used to buttress the Trinity. Thus, the Protestant trinitarian hypocrisy was such that while they were calling transubstantiation unscriptural, their own adherence to the Trinity on scriptural grounds was even more tendentious. Nye incisively pointed out the practice of inversion often in display in the Protestant trinitarians polemic: over against the Catholic idea of transubstantiation, they adhered to sola scriptura and validation of the text, not on conciliar grounds but rational grounds. Yet over against the Socinians, they maintained some reverence toward patristic writings and conciliar decisions, particular those of Nicaea, Ephesus I, and Constantinople I. As Gerard Reedy pointed out, in the nexus between the humanistic exegesis of the Bible and reason as the key vehicle of guiding the exegetical process lay much potential for mutual recriminations between the Socinians and the trinitarians in lateseventeenth-century England.172 We have seen that the seeds of the thesis of the Hellenization of Christianity were already sown much earlier, but with the work of Jacques Souverain, it came into full bloom, presaging the more popular and full-blown idea of Adolf

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von Harnack in the way he saw the history of Christianity itself as a process of Hellenization. VI

Jacques Souverain’s Meta-critique of the Platonic Captivity of Christianity and St. John’s Complicity Thereof The name of Jacques Souverain is obscure to most historians of early modern France or England. Yet his significance as a consolidator of critical historical scholarship has garnered interest recently, particularly with respect to the emerging “corruption thesis” of early Christianity and its ideological correlate, the Hellenization of Christianity, even before the Council of Nicaea.173 In a certain sense, Souverain’s work as a synthesizer of the ideas of Justus Lipsius, Daniel Zwicker, Thomas Hobbes, and even John Biddle provides a crucial arc for the critical scholarship of Adolf von Harnack. Scholars such as Walther Glawe, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, J. Z. Smith, Martin Mulsow, and, more recently, John Marshall have provided insightful perspectives on how Souverain’s ideas influenced the intellectual zeitgeist of the republic of letters and how his views contributed to the ongoing theological reconfiguration, particularly the notion of orthodoxy and the Trinity.174 According to Glawe, Souverain insisted that the “Church lost her virginity” (“die Kirche ihre Jungfrauschaft verlor”) in the second century ce, and he further excoriated the dominant philosopher-priests for Hellenizing “Christianity by mixing it with Platonic philosophy.” Souverain’s conclusion was that these teachers of the Church ought not be viewed as witnesses of apostolic Christianity, but rather as “half pagan.”175 Martin Mulsow’s analysis of Souverain, especially in his Moderne aus dem Untergrund, signaled Souverain’s main contribution as a key player in the dismantling of the philosophia perennis and his influence on the early phase of the German Idealism and Romanticism through his meta-critique of the previous understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Platonism in his Platonisme Dévoilé (1700), which exposed the canard of the Church Fathers, from the second century on.176 John Marshall has shown that Souverain influenced Locke’s religious ideas, particularly his Reasonableness of Christianity and paraphrases on the Pauline epistles, and helped reconfigure the essence of Christianity to be a confession of Christ as the Messiah, not the second person of the Trinity.177 As we will see, Souverain’s main point of contention, thus his relative novelty among his contemporary radical thinkers, was that the Gospel of John itself was unduly influenced, initially, by the “Jewish wisdom speculation,” then latterly consolidated by the ideological match of the allegorical hermeneutic of

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Alexandrian Neoplatonism.178 The two primary sources of Souverain for this analysis are Le Platonisme Dévoilé (1700), translated as Platonism Unveil’d in the same year as the French version, and his “Some General Reflections upon the Beginning of St. John’s Gospel.”179 Thus the idea of the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, argued Souverain, had never been taught by Jesus himself or the apostles, but rather by the Platonism-laden half-pagan, half-Christian preachers. This will complete our analysis of the function of the Gospel of John in the controversies over the Trinity. Consequently, we will revise the thesis of Glawe and Mulsow that it was in the second century that the pristine Gospel lost its purity. It might very well have happened with the writing of Gospel of John itself. The idea that Christianity—pure and pristine—was corrupted by Platonism, thereby adversely affecting the Council of Nicaea, became more au courant during the Renaissance-Reformation period. Michael Servetus took the lead in carping at the theological gymnastics employed by the trinitarians, which was no different from the “fictions of the Gentiles” (“gentilium fictionibus”), and excoriated the pomp and vainglory of the hardly Christian philosophy dabblers whose passion was in Platonizing. The upshot was multiplication of separate additional beings by giving personal hypostases to metaphors (“magna est eis gloria, res separatas multiplicando, Platonizare”). So came the birth of the Trinity from the womb of Platonism. Just as Mercury stood for word, Paris for feeling, and Minerva bravery, Servetus continued to flout the travesty of the Christian mimesis of Platonism, for thus the third being, the Holy Spirit, was interpreted as love, and the second, the Son, as knowledge/Word.180 Servetus’s view had more than an incidental influence on Souverain’s theory of the Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity. Similarly, Jean LeClerc, often regarded as one of the “leading lights of the Huguenot diaspora,” bitterly complained against Oxford University’s crackdown on Arthur Bury by burning his The Naked Gospel in August 1690 and charged their behavior to be strikingly redolent of the persecuting bishops who placed all “heretics” on the Procrustean bed of trinitarian orthodoxy and other latterly invented mysteries: “We may still plainly see, how the simple Primitive Christianity of the Gospel was defil’d with the Ceremonies, and the vain Philosophy of the Pagans: How Platonic Enthusiasm was impos’d upon the Word for Faith, Mystery, and Revelation by cloyster’d Ecclesiasticks.”181 As John Marshall has shown, the manuscript notes formerly attributed to John Locke, “Some General Reflections upon the Beginning of St. John’s Gospel,” is now known to be a copy of Jacques Souverain.182 From the outset, it was made clear that dismantling the “shield of the Trinitarians,” namely, the Johannine Prologue, was Souverain’s aim.183 Souverain’s text-critical perspectives were deeply influenced by the leading biblical scholar of his generation,

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Richard Simon.184 What was intriguing here was that both John Arrowsmith and Jacques Souverain dealt with the difference of style and substance between the Synoptic Gospels and John.185 Yet Arrowsmith sought to harmonize the divergent accounts among the four Gospels, and in that regard, his perspective was entirely in agreement with the majority opinion of biblical scholars of early modern Europe, who sought to harmonize rather than divulge the textual discrepancies and incommensurable differences, as was evidenced in the publication so many “Harmonies” of the Gospels.186 But for Souverain, there was no harmony to be found. John was “about to bring forth a strange and extraordinary Doctrine which before was unknown to the whole Church of God” and certainly not written in the “other Evangelists.” This was a “happy rashness” to discover a “new Mystery,” which was “never revealed by his Master.” With this last comment, Souverain clarified, as he would throughout his “Reflections upon St. John’s Gospel,” that Jesus knew nothing of the “proof” of the divinity of himself, as his allegedly beloved disciple wrote.187 The other key consideration surrounding the Gospel of John was the figure of Cerinthus, often lumped together with Ebion, and the Nazarenes as the leading heretics of the first and second centuries, since Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses identified them as two chief heretics.188 Traditionally, it was believed that Cerinthus repudiated the divinity of Christ by denying that he was “born of a Virgin” and instead was “the Son of Joseph & Mary,” yet possessed greater measures of “holiness and wisdom.” This constituted Cerinthus’s heresy, forming the sitz im leben for John’s writing the supplementary Gospel. Richard Simon, citing Jerome’s “Preface” to this Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, argued similarly.189 Souverain reversed Simon’s perspective on the provenance question of John, arguing instead that while John’s opposition to Cerinthus was correct, his specific theological methodology was not. In fact, John designed to oppose Cerinthus’ Heresy but that Heresy did not consist, as it is now a days, believed in the denyal of the Eternal Divinity of Christ. Tis quite the contrary; Cerinthus maintained the eternal Divinity and at the same time believed . . . that divinity, distinguished from the Father’s had created the world.190 Consequently, insisted Souverain, the Gospel of John could never have been intended to affirm the Trinity or the deity of Christ.191 Furthermore, arguing that Cerinthus believed in a second God, namely, Christ, who “was distinguished from the Father” and created the world, Souverain pointed out that this is precisely what the Valentinian Gnostics had argued: the Logos as the principal creator of the world. Souverain’s complete gerrymandering of the early Christian history of orthodoxy and heterodoxy reached this terse yet tremendous conclusion: “what

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the Valentinians believed concerning the Word” was what “Cerinthus believed the second principle, viz., that it had created the world.”192 There was an ambiguity in Souverain’s attitude toward the Gospel of John. On the one hand, purely out of his antitrinitarian self-defense, he had to claim John for his own cause, as he had in the previously cited text. Yet he displayed discontent in the way John went about defending Nazarene Christianity. Indeed, the Gospel of John itself was reappropriated by Souverain as a canonical example of the primitive Christianity being hijacked by the encroachment of Platonism in the form of “Jewish cabbala,” as he made that point clear in Platonism Unveil’d (figure 6.1).

Figure 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.

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Perhaps the most devastating critique of the Gospel of John as a text already negatively influenced by kabbalistic-allegorical excess is found in chapter 15 of Platonism Unveil’d, “The Sentiment of the Moralists among the Jews, concerning the Wisdom or the Word. St. John hath imitated them.” This rather short chapter (pp. 50–54) encapsulated the gist of Souverain’s critique of John. He started with the exegesis of passages such as Proverbs 8:22–23, which spoke of the eternal begetting of the Wisdom of God. Souverain lamented that “Wisdom” was interpreted among a small number of Jewish exegetes as referring to a hypostatized, personal agent of Yahweh who was involved in the act of creation. Psalms 45 and 110 were two other texts that were traditionally interpreted Messianically or Christologically. Yet for Souverain, to use Psalm 45 as a way of proving the eternal generation of Jesus Christ was simply a “ridiculous Interpretation.” Similarly, a Christological reading of Psalm 110 was equally flawed. For Souverain, reading texts in a Christological or typological manner was diving into the murky waters of allegory, thereby utterly drowning any possibility for a literal, thus true, reading of the text.193 Richard Muller, in an article outlining the transformation of the medieval quadriga into the Renaissance-Reformation typological exegesis, pointed out that typology, while allowing for the figural reading to remain, was a direct outcome of the literal sense, not a deviation from it, and its proponents, such as Calvin, had little patience for allegorical excesses. Typology was Christologically grounded, forming crucial building blocks for trinitarian theology; thus for Souverain and his antitrinitarian colleagues, typology and allegory were virtually indistinguishable. Consequently, their rejection of allegory obviated any possibility for a trinitarian reading of the Old Testament. 194 For Souverain, there was a longer pedigree to the theory of decline of the literal sense or to the history of allegory. He identified the “Jewish Moralists,” also known as the “Chaldee Paraphrasts,” to be the ideological tributary to the post-Apostolic Platonic captivity.195 They provided all the exegetical fodder for the folly, not merely of the Christian Platonists of the second century and beyond, but more crucially, of John himself. Early modern text critics such as Isaac Vossius, Juan Maldonado, Hugo Grotius, and Richard Simon maintained the significance of the Chaldean Paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible. Vossius, Maldonado, and Grotius noted that various Hebrew Scripture passages referring to the work of God ad extra were rendered by the Chaldean Paraphrasts with the addition of the word memra (‫)ממירא‬, thereby rendering them as “by my Word,” rather than “I” (Yahweh). The implication was that it implied that the Word of God was acting on God’s behalf, which might be taken as a lexical sign that the ancient Jews might have been aware of the plurality within the Godhead. The connection between the “Gospel of the Memra” and the Johannine Prologue was superbly explored in Daniel Boyarin’s article, which

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sided with the view of Souverain, Simon, and, as we have seen earlier, Anthony Wotton.196 Grotius’s Annotationes in Novum Testamentum discussed the significance of the memra in the Chaldean Paraphrase as a key interpretive clue for the Johannine Prologue. In his exegesis of “the Word,” in John 1:1, Grotius specifically cited the Chaldean Paraphrases: Because Moses had written, God said, “Let there be light,” and light was made, and so concerning the rest, it happened that the Hebrews call “Word” (dabar) the “power” or “emanation” or “radiance” (indeed, the ancient Christians employed these expressions in this matter) by which he created things out of nothing—and accomplished other rare and fine things—as one can see in Ps. 33.6, 148.8. . . . Not only in those passages, but also in many others, where the expression did not exist in Hebrew, the Chaldeans put mimra. There are innumerable examples of this, but the most pertinent occurs in Isaiah. In Hebrew, Isaiah 45.12 reads, I made the earth, and I created man upon it. In Chaldean, it is I made the earth by my Word, and I created men upon it. In Hebrew, Isaiah 48.13 reads, My hand established the earth; in Chaldean [it reads] By my Word I established the earth.197 Conversely, Souverain had nothing but scorn for the allegorical excesses of the Chaldean Paraphrasts. He pointed out that the “Chaldee Paraphrasts” were regarded as though “they had known the lovgoV of Plato.”198 He quickly launched a salvo by asserting that the Chaldean Paraphrases were suff used with “Fables and Impieties” and of a latter date than initially purported, and none of the ancient sources ever referred to them, thereby rendering more suspect their credibility. Richard Simon’s monumental work, Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament, was quoted to show that while the Chaldean Paraphrases were used to establish the putative veracity of the Messianic office fulfilled in Jesus, the specific passages cited were interpreted exclusively “in Allegories” and that it will be futile to seek to convince a Jew of the Messianic identity of Christ since one “cannot prove the Truth of . . . Mysteries invincibly by Allegories.”199 For Souverain, the Chaldean Paraphrases were “Rabbinick Frenzies, or rather of these Platonick Impostures.”200 This Jewish allegory was the immediate historical backdrop to the Gospel of John. Yet the irrepressible human penchant for more sublime mysteries simply did not allow for allegories to subside. So this Jewish allegory continued through the Gospel of John into the second century. Therefore, by the time one reached Nicaea, the kernel of Christianity of seeing Christ as the crucified Messiah was gone, leaving instead a dried husk of hypostatized divinity of the Platonic Trinity. Souverain identified The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas as two second-century examples of how quickly the pristine

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orthodoxy of the apostolic period eroded and the foundation of Christianity was corrupted. In the Epistle of Barnabas, the problem of kabbalah was discussed. Among other chapters, one particular instance would suffice: in the ninth chapter, an intriguing interpretation of the number of those circumcised with Abraham (318 in all). Souverain ridiculed Barnabas’s identification of a connection between the number of people and “the Name of Jesus, as also his Cross,” and concluded that “Science is pregnant with Inventions, it can find J.C. every where, as in an Arithmetick Number, 318.” Another example was the problem of an overwrought identification through an allegorical interpretation between Joshua and Jesus. When Epistle of Barnabas 12:8 rendered that “the Father hath shew’d us in Joshua every thing that may be said of his Son Jesus,” it was a figure of speech with absolutely no support from the literal sense of the text from the Book of Joshua.201 Yet the greatest culprits of allegorical exegesis were Origen and Clement, both of Alexandria, who carried on their “Platonic Studies with the Jewish Method,” so that the resultant doctrine of these philosopher-theologians, who “breathe nothing but Platonism,” was that their idea of God, especially the Trinity, was “not drawn from the Christian Religion.”202 As Basil Willey puts it, for Clement, “all Scripture is allegorical, even the Decalogue”; moreover, the “New Testament miracles he treats as if they were parables.”203 While Clement certainly did not deny the literal sense, it is intriguing to note, nonetheless, that the sensus literalis was certainly beneath the dignity of philosophy. This side-stepping of the literal meaning was what allowed the Alexandrians to build a completely “new oeconomy,” complete with two new persons (as Word and Wisdom have become hypostatized to receive “personal” identity as Son and Spirit) utterly alien to the Jewish economy of monotheism, as Souverain accused Clement and Origen to be guilty of. Souverain seemed convinced that the removal of the Alexandrian allegorical interpretation would usher in the Antiochene, antitrinitarian triumph of proto-monotheism, shorn of the trinitarian straitjacket. It seemed clear that the aspersion Richard Simon had cast upon the Alexandrian dalliance with allegories also cast a long shadow of influence upon Souverain.204 In particular, Souverain was influenced by the way Simon drew a line on the hermeneutical sand between the Antiochene and Alexandrian schools, accusing the latter ofhegemonic dominance over the dwindling influence of Antioch, which was the site for Eastern Orthodoxy. In other words, for Simon, Western biblical exegesis and theology was dominated by the rise of allegory through the Alexandrian hermeneutic. So Souverain summarizes Simon: And y t Theodore of Mopsuestia who kept to ye literal sense of ye Bible according to ye method of Diodorus his Master having avoided Mystical &

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Allegorical sense, was looked upon as a favourer of Judaisme by reason of his too literal Interpretation. . . . From whence I infer y t ye only reason why ye Nazarenes & Ebionites were accounted poor & simple in ye faith was because they rejected ye spiritual & Allegorical divinity of Platonick Xans or Gnosticks. . . . ‘Tis for ye same reason, so many great men have been lookd upon as half Jews because they would preserve ye real & literal sense of ye Scripture.205 It is fascinating how Simon and Souverain converged on identifying Antioch as the demonized party in the hegemonic struggle between the two polarized schools of hermeneutics. More tantalizing was how a perspective by John Henry Newman (1801–1890), an erstwhile Anglo-Catholic who eventually “came home to Rome,” confirmed the very sentiment, except for the inversion of whom he valorized and vilified. After arguing that the very defense of the Trinity and transubstantiation came about through the adherence to the mystical sense, which flowered in Alexandria, Newman went on to excoriate the Antiochene school of exegesis, calling it the seedbed of literal interpretation, “the very metropolis of heresy.” Newman continued to offer the same hermeneutical grid as the trinitarians against whom Simon and Souverain launched their salvoes: “The Jews clung to the literal sense of the Old Testament and rejected the Gospel; the Christian Apologists proved its divinity by means of the allegorical.”206 A French Huguenot’s worst nightmare was heralded as a great triumph by an English Cardinal! One of the interesting commentaries on patristic Christianity in general, à la Souverain, was the two-tier system in the Christian praxis of the second through fourth centuries. There were the contemplative and ascetic types of Christians who were endowed with and in pursuit of higher truths, consistently utilizing scriptural allegories to expound the mysteries of the faith, and the second class of Christians were the “ordinary Christians,” who were not obliged to enter the ascetic ranks of the illuminati. The author to buttress this patristic Christian praxis was none other than the Reformation heresiarch, Michael Servetus. He wrote: ‘Twas sufficient to Salvation to believe, that Jesus was the Christ or the Messias, the Son of God, the Saviour of the World. The common People were justified by this Faith alone, although they did not exactly know his Divinity. You therefore, pious Readers, who are not able to comprehend the manner of his Generation, nor the whole Fulness of his Divinity, always believe that he is the Messias, begotten of God, and thy Saviour. Th is is the only thing you should believe, that you may live by him.207

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In other words, what Souverain was ostensibly arguing from the Servetus quote was that this existence of the two-tier system allowed for the elevation of allegorical Christianity above the common, “plain and the revealed Christianity.” So the excessive adherence to the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Word, thus the Son, was neither a fundamental article of faith nor departure from it a sign of heresy, even though Nicaea had promulgated orthodoxy just along those lines. The audacity of Souverain was such that he had called all the “Saints of the Church” half-pagans and embraced the version of a burned heretic’s Christianity as true religion. Thus, Souverain breathed a sigh of relief: “Thanks be to God I can now take Breath: The Doctrine of God the Word is no more than secret (or mystical) Christianity, not necessary to the Vulgar, and serves only for Contemplation.”208 It seemed to be an unexpected conciliatory statement by Souverain, but he resumed his pugilistic crusade against Platonistic corruption of true Christianity by, once again, going after Origen: I know nothing but Jesus Christ crucified. Really one could not but with surprise hear so great a Doctor as Origen treating the Christian Religion, and the Theology of St. Paul so unworthily; if one did not know at the same time, his Fondness for Platonism. What! Shall this Contemplation be accounted the sublime Christianity, because it has found out Objects of it self without the help of Revelation? What then is that poor Faith that’s founded upon Objects revealed? Can it be any thing more or less than a carnal Christianity? . . . They who know nothing but a crucified Christ, do not pass even for Christians now; a deified Jesus, is the only Orthodoxy.209 By driving a wedge between the “Christ crucified” of Paul and the “Christ deified” of John, Souverain was arguing that the latter view was entirely attributable to the Platonizing tendencies of the earliest expressions of the Gospel. As Souverain had maintained elsewhere, there was tension within the texts of the New Testament itself; in other words, the Gospel of John was already much influenced by Platonistic perspectives. Furthermore, Souverain argued that there was a “prodigious difference” between the simplicity of the apostolic faith and the unduly elevated “Mystery of Platonism.” Even from the catechetical instructions from the lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem, Souverain pointed out a plethora of such “mystical” notions which were not part of the apostolic faith—the Trinity, eternal generation of the Son, the Incarnation, and transubstantiation—before one could be baptized. This was to make mandatory that which had only been optional before, and make the commentary of the articles as important as the articles themselves. “What a Drudgery is here” Souverain strongly argues “for the poor Novices! Incomprehensible Mystery, and a Labyrinth in Theology!”210 And as for

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Souverain, the corruption of this “Drudgery” divine was even “in the beginning” of this “spiritual gospel.” VII

Conclusion We started our journey in 1557, as we examined the writing of an English exile, Bartholomew Traheron, probably in Frankfurt, as he sought to defend the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ in An Exposition of a Parte of S. Iohannes Gospel, for he was convinced the Gospel of John to be the best text to utilize for such purposes. We have just ended our journey in 1700, as we examined the writings of another exile, this time a Huguenot pastor, Jacques Souverain, in London, as he sought to undo the allegorical damages done by trinitarians such as Traheron in Platonism Unveil’d and his notes on the Prologue of the Gospel of John. Two exiles longing for home, both earthly and heavenly, both claiming to be disciples of Christ through whom God revealed God’s purposes and person, yet no two interpretive trajectories could be more divergent. This chapter has demonstrated in detail the philological, metaphysical, ecclesiastical, and theological issues at stake as the foregoing writers sought to defend what they believed to be the way to instantiate the living reality of God, one or three Persons, through the Gospel of John. The multivalent nature of sources and perspectives has resisted a simple analysis in the end. Yet, such was perhaps precisely what was happening: what was so “obvious” to one side was not at all the case for one’s polemical other. The eternal divinity of Christ who was the Word, as seen in John 1:1, might have been an obvious theological datum for trinitarian exegetes. For antitrinitarian exegetes, on the other hand, no such facile and flawed conclusions could be drawn so hastily. How, then, did they seek to resolve this manifest theological quagmire? Previously, heresy trials awaited recalcitrant antitrinitarians, and often being hurled into a pyre was the way their confession of faith was greeted, at least on Earth. Yet in the seventeenth century, that option was becoming less frequently obtained, Bartholowe Legate, Edward Wightman, and Thomas Aikenhead’s examples notwithstanding. Assuredly, imprisonment and eviction from a ministerial living could be carried out. Furthermore, the Presbyterian and Independent campaigns in the 1640s and 1650s, and the Restoration Anglicans’ similarly oriented efforts, speak to the reality of threat posed by the antitrinitarian exegetes, and that they were temporary stopgap solutions. It is not clear, at least not to me, if anyone changed his mind after reading a brilliant Johannine exegesis of his polemical other. Perhaps the culture of religious polemic, as Ann

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Hughes and Peter Lake have reminded us, was prompted less by the prospect of winning converts than in hopes of reminding themselves of their orthodoxy and validity of positions?211 The commitment to sola scriptura, heralded among the Protestants in the Reformation as the cure-all as a methodological principle for all theological discourse, did not provide the requisite framework for solving even the exegetical debates over the Gospel of John. As Norman Sykes argued, sola scriptura became, not the harbinger of ecumenical peace, but the embodiment of religious conflict, albeit mostly confined to print vitriol. Perhaps we have seen that through the polemical kaleidoscope: the multifaceted debates on the Gospel of John, over translation, grammar, theology, and ecclesiology. Now the teaching magisterium, or whatever else would serve as the anchoring presence of authority, was jettisoned within Protestantism. Coupled instead with sola scriptura, it was, unfortunately, proving to be nearly impossible to adjudicate between competing individual exegeses. Moreover, in the context of the emergence of the sacrosanct nature of one’s individual conscience and liberty thereof, again, coupled with the antitrinitarian rejection of allegory as a way of reading texts, then the pressure to arrive at the plain and obvious meaning of Scripture, Johannine or otherwise, was all the greater. To begin with a trinitarian defensive and end with an antitrinitarian offensive is not to suggest a narrative of decline of trinitarian orthodoxy, although a key epistemological change did occur, especially toward the latter half of the seventeenth century. The idea of “mystery,” which was previously appropriated to safeguard the ineffable nature of the Trinity, was severely challenged, as many antitrinitarians were also committed to the notions of natural law and natural religion and thus were reluctant to see mysteries in religion as being open only for the elect or illuminati.

Conclusion

Since the Nicene Synod . . . we do nothing but write Creeds. . . . The first Decree commands, that Homoousion should not be mentioned: The next does again Decree and publish Homoousios. . . . We Decree every Year of the Lord, a new Creed concerning God: Nay, every Change of the Moon our Faith is alter’d. We repent of our Decrees, we defend those that repent of them; We anathematize those that we defended. . . . We are now all of us torn in pieces.

These poignant words found their way into Marvell’s most acerbic pen, as he wrote A Short Historical Essay touching General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Matters of Religion (1680). As has been discussed in chapter 5, Marvell’s anti-conciliar sensibilities were shared among a number of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Hobbes and Richard Baxter. Indeed, this particular quote was also utilized by John Locke and Edward Gibbon, especially as the latter systematically—albeit slightly ponderously—excoriated the Machiavellian ambitions of the bishops and the conciliar volte-faces in his History of the Decline and Fall of Rome. It may come as a slight surprise, however, for the reader that the foregoing quote was not Marvell’s own. They were taken from Hilary of Poitiers’s Ad Constantium Augustum liber secundus (c. 360).1 Perhaps better known for his De Trinitate, Hilary was a stalwart defender of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity yet was not without criticism of the proliferation of hereticating and counter-hereticating councils, decrees, and creeds. Without assenting to Hilary’s defense of the Trinity, Marvell, Locke, and Gibbon all found his jeremiad against the seemingly interminable monthly production of creeds as a perfect patristic witness to advance their own cause: to point out the inherent instability even within the so-called ecumenical councils. In fact, Gibbon’s rendition of the quote perhaps captured the sense of Hilary better: “Every year, nay every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries.”2 Describing the invisible divine mysteries in human words, for

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anyone, in the fourth or seventeenth century, was a truly daunting task. For many trinitarians, apophatic theology formed an integral part of their theology, as they regarded divine incomprehensibility as foundational; by doing so, they could continue to leave room for the mystery of the Trinity, while proffering proofs of the Trinity from patristic witnesses or from Scripture. For the antitrinitarians, however, such invocation of mystery was a clear sign of the illogicality and unscriptural nature of the Trinity. Furthermore, harking back to the witness of Nicene- and post-Nicene “dead bishops” was doomed from the start because they were infected by the viral presence of Platonism, which eviscerated from Christianity its true core, namely, nontrinitarian formulation of faith, putatively taught by Jesus, carried on by Cerinthus and Ebion, inter alia. Assuredly, the antitrinitarians were committed to the notion of sola scriptura, at least equaling the formal commitment that their trinitarian counterparts were demonstrating. Yet, as we have seen throughout the foregoing chapters, the mantra of sola scriptura did not get them to the hermeneutical paradise, whether it was trinitarian or antitrinitarian. In this regard, John Milbank—a contemporary theologian with Anglo-Catholic sensibilities—offers a helpful historical perspective: “It is the destiny of sola scriptura to be so deconstructed as to come to mean that we must believe the Scriptures because they are politically authorized.” Milbank’s dictum emerged in the course of discussing the hermeneutical trajectory of Spinoza and Hobbes.3 In the theater of trinitarian polemic in early modern England, the Protestant theological principle of sola scriptura was so deconstructed that the particular buttress for any interpretation of Scripture became allegedly valid, whether it was “politically authorized” or subjectively empowered by the Spirit. For this very reason, Catholic and Laudian pugilists indefatigably avowed that without anchoring the hermeneutical ships to the Church, all Protestant efforts were doomed to shipwreck. The preceding chapters have presented several crucial facets of the early modern English task of describing “invisible mysteries,” and for both antitrinitarians and trinitarians, the hegemonic struggle over orthodoxy in the early Church was not a distant memory on the far horizon. Whether it concerned the polemical appropriation of the literary provenance of the Gospel of John (which they took to have been written at the end of the first century ce), the allegorical excesses of Origen and Clement, “thuggish bishops” at the Councils of Nicaea I (325) and Ephesus I (431) and their conciliar decisions, or the hermeneutical amnesia of sensus literalis, these past historical issues were ever present on the forefront of their polemic. This book has interacted with, indeed, benefited from, H. J. McLachlan’s deservedly celebrated Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (1951). Yet the narrative presented here does not follow it all the way; instead, it has

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presented a more contested and far less inevitable account of the controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity by paying close attention to both antitrinitarian and trinitarian writers, their context and content. More specifically, I have presented, I hope, a thicker description of the way both these camps appropriated patristic writers, interpreted conciliar histories, and “proved” their doctrinal commitments from Scripture. The result is that it defies a simple decline of the Trinity thesis, nor does it suggest an unchanging orthodoxy from the days of Bartholomew Traheron to that of Jacques Souverain. In some sense, these chapters, especially juxtaposing chapters 1 and 2, and 5 and 6, may appear to be “incommensurable materials that do not share the same discursive genealogy,” as Debora Shuger wrote of the chapters in her own Renaissance Bible.4 Yet, I hope to have shown the indispensable simultaneity of critical historical theories (chapter 5) with specific paradigms and perspectives of biblical exegesis (chapter 6). Consequently, even antitrinitarian biblical exegesis was not an interpretation of the seventeenth-century English Socinian sans any dependence on or awareness of—albeit implicit—the previous interpretive communities and their output. Similarly, in the way the religious and political contexts of the Civil War until the Restoration have evolved, it was at least a historical accident (if not an ideological correlate) that the rationalistic biblicism of Best and Biddle (chapter 1) was scrutinized at the same time as the radical messianic self-fashioning of the proclaimers of human perfection (chapter 2). Both these groups, as David Como, John Coffey, Ann Hughes, Peter Lake, and Ariel Hessayon have similarly shown, were manifestations of the discontent or cul-de-sac of the religion of the hotter sort of Protestants.5 As T. D. Bozeman has convincingly argued, both the antitrinitarians and trinitarians covered in this book were certain they were living the “ancient lives” in that they—and not their polemical others—were instantiating the true primitive mode of interpreting and inhabiting the teachings of Christ.6 With the publication of Paul Best’s Mysteries Discovered and John Biddle’s several confessions and catechisms, along with his translations, the late 1640s and the 1650s created both a furor over the Socinian/antitrinitarian threat and a concerted effort on both sides to articulate why their opponents were on the wrong side of the trinitarian divide. Both Best and Biddle utilized the writings of the Church Fathers, mostly anti-Nicene Fathers, to bolster their claim that the idea of the Trinity was a post-Apostolic hijacking of primitive Christianity, which only knew Christ crucified and resurrected, as he was sent by and obedient to the will of God. In their efforts to parry the persistent blows of the trinitarians, Best, Biddle, and others developed a theory of religious decline, which inevitably included the way Platonism and other ancient religions seeped into the foundation of Christianity and ended up vitiating the fabric of the faith built upon the ancient Jewish economy, thereby disallowing the innovation

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of the trinitarians. This repudiation of the Trinity often took the form of antitypological hermeneutic, which saw no interpretive elbow room for Messianic exegesis to flourish in the way Christians read the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, by offering a close reading of the two hitherto unused manuscript sources related to the Paul Best–Roger Ley and John Biddle–Peter Gunning debates, we have gotten a better sense of how the rhetoric of the Trinity and its discontents was expressed in actual settings of debates and disputations. The rejection of the traditional Nicene Trinity was not limited to the “rationalistic” writers such as Best and Biddle, whose vociferous repudiation of the Trinity had far more to do with their literalist hermeneutic and their allergic reaction to anything smacking of Platonism than a sort of messianic self-fashioning. In other words, another key tributary to the attack on the Trinity was the radical religion among those who had “proclaimed perfection,” thanks to the immediacy of the power of the Spirit and the infallible presence of the living Christ. We have seen how the charismatic excesses—particularly in the 1640s and 1650s—or, as they were called, enthusiastic outbursts of the Christian’s inordinate identification with the living Christ often ended up blurring the Creator-creature distinction, which often led to the inexorable outcome of denying the Nicene formulation of the Trinity. In this narrative, the Ranters, Muggletonians, and Familists emerged as more than mere spiritist megalomaniacs.7 Their penchant, indeed, conviction, that through their work, true religion was restored and true God manifested led to a further confusion in the early modern English public sphere about the precise identity of the Trinity. In the midst of such cacophonous contesting over true religion and spirituality, we have also seen that Puritan spirituality in seventeenth-century England was intrinsically polemical, yet it was equally practical, since Francis Cheynell, John Owen, and their trinitarian coreligionists were acutely aware that genuine proof of their trinitarianism lay in the liturgical pudding. They were convinced that by fostering a trinitarian spirituality, their readers and they themselves would be brought to a more passionate worship of the triune God whose intra-trinitarian love was expressed not only in the act of creation but also, more crucially, in the act of redemption through Christ, who not only perfectly revealed the person(s) and purposes of God but also provided the infallible blueprint for human participation in the life divine. We have also noted an increased emphasis—particularly in Owen—on mystery and the depth of communion with the persons of the triune God, which incurred the wrath of a leading polemicist within the Restoration Church of England, William Sherlock, and a coterie of writers who wasted little time in identifying the spirituality of a number of Dissenters as nothing less than Enthusiasm, thereby lumping Owen and the Quakers as religious imposters cut from the same cloth.

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Debates over the Trinity involved not merely exegetical and hermeneutical divergences. While Biddle and others assiduously demonstrated that trinitarian exegesis and hermeneutic were woefully misguided, they were also keen to show from the history of the early church the quick pace with which primitive Christianity was hijacked by the Trojan horse of Greek myths and philosophy, under the catch-all term of Platonism. Yet we have also seen that this theory of declension, particularly under the guise of the bishops at the early ecumenical councils, was powerfully articulated by those who would not identify themselves as allies with Biddle: Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell. Although these three are not usually grouped together as kindred spirits, we have seen in chapter 5 that they converged in their meta-critique of priestcraft and insatiable hunger for self-aggrandizement among bishops, especially the Bishop of Rome, whose Machiavellian schemes were directly responsible for concocting the doctrines of the Trinity, transubstantiation, and tradition. Here Barbara Shapiro’s comment elucidates the nature of ecclesiastical historiography, as Hobbes, Baxter, and Marvell were engaging: “Historical argument increasingly turned on the examination of sources and the proper dating, translation, and understanding of documents. ‘Facts’ were marshaled against ‘facts’ and document against document.” All the claimants to historiographical impartiality—Baxter and Henry Maurice, in his Vindication of the Primitive Church (1682), for example—were accusing each other of “blandishments and falsities of rhetoric” and outright misrepresentations of the “matters of fact.”8 Therefore, this period of confessionalized historiographical battles produced dual consequences: a more assiduous production of “true” historical record, particularly of the early church, and an unanticipated sense of distrust of the putative nature of historiographical impartiality.9 The religion of Protestants was not Bible and Bible alone, at least not in the way polemical exchange over the Trinity was carried out and not even in their exegetical debates. In their exegeses of the Gospel of John, for instance, it was not merely the philological issues that were hotly debated; they had also incorporated the issue of which patristic exegetes were more faithful to the spirit of the Gospel, thus the issue of the reception history of the Johannine exegesis was brought to the fore as well. Moreover, for Grotius, Arrowsmith, Souverain, and innumerable others, the hermeneutical trajectory of second temple Judaism, especially the so-called Chaldean Paraphrase, clearly revealed the fissure within Protestantism itself: how to read the Hebrew Bible and their putatively Messianic texts. Furthermore, we have seen that it is simply impossible to limit the scope of our analysis to English pugilists alone; they were part of the larger republic of letters—international Calvinism or international Socinianism. Thus the Johannine exegesis of Fastus Socinus, De Falsa et Vera,

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and writings of Johann Crell were utilized to show the scope of antitrinitarian Johannine exegesis. Furthermore, we have seen the apotheosis of antitrinitarian scriptural and historical criticism embodied in Jacques Souverain’s Le Platonisme Dévoilé. His most trenchant critique and historical revisionism paved the way for the early Enlightenment thinkers’ attitude toward the text of Scripture, certainly the Gospel of John, and the way to think more critically, indeed, disdainfully, about Christianity and other ancient Greco-Roman religions. So where does this leave us?10 In the process of providing a more nuanced and certainly more contested narrative of the rise and inevitable triumph of antitrinitarianism in early modern and early Enlightenment England, we have continuously dealt with a key theme in patristic, medieval, indeed, early modern English spirituality and theology: the role of mystery. For Paul Best, true mystery was revealed in Jesus Christ who was true man, and no more. With the coming of Christ, the hitherto veiled identity of God was unveiled, thus no more mystery for the trinitarians to shield and veil. For the trinitarians, however, due to their dual commitment to apophatic theology and the corrupted nature of human reason, God continued to remain a mystery, thereby requiring a daily fine-tuning of the Christians’ spiritual lens. Let me leave with a final historical illustration, this one coming from a sermon preached on the Festival of St. Philip and St. James in 1673, although it was not published until 1692. Bernard Skelton’s Christus Deus assumed a homiletical dialogue between a “Socinian” and a “True Christian.” The following critique by the Socinian and the response by Skelton—who was the ventriloquist for the “True Christian”—help bring together the various strands of polemic that comprised the context and content of the controversies over the Trinity: But, saith carnal Reason, this is an hard Saying, who can bear it? What Hocus-Pocus Tricks have we here to make two one, and one two? What Legerdemain Divinity? What religious Non-sense is this? Can the Father be the Son, and the Son the Father? If the Son have the same Essence with the Father, how then can they differ? Can any thing differ from its own Essence? Can it differ from its self? Sure these are the Dreams of some superstitious Zealots, whose Devotion makes them with the Athenians, build Altars, ajgnwv stw qew:, to the Unknown God.11 These “superstitious Zealots” were toting the mysterious divinity of the Trinity, which—as Skelton’s Socinian sardonically notes—came as a result of the pact between them and the Athenians. The irony could not have been more apropos. As the trinitarians were worshipping an unknown deity (like the Athenians of

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Areopagus whom Paul confronts in Acts 17), the Socinian, with a Pauline zeal, was disabusing their misguided notions of mystery. Skelton weaved a Pauline text, 1 Corinthians 10:9, with Numbers 21:5 and Psalm 106:14 to show that the “God of Israel, which is interpreted by the Apostles in the New, to be meant of none but Christ.” Even though Skelton was an episcopal churchman, his exegetical sensibilities were identical to the Geneva Bible’s marginal gloss of 1 Corinthians 10:9.12 Over against the Socinian refusal to allow certain Old Testament texts to be read Christologically, Skelton saw that as a hermeneutical sine qua non in the defense of the trinitarian faith. The other hotly disputed issue had to do with the putative idolatry committed by Socinians in ascribing worship to Christ. As early as Bartholomew Traheron in the 1550s, continuing with John Owen in the 1650s, Skelton in the 1690s identified that as a sensitive nerve ending in Socinian theology that needed to be exploited.13 The third area of emphasis in Skelton’s Johannine exegesis, seen clearly in his sermon on John 14:9 (“he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father”) was supra-rational, mysterious nature of the nature of perichoresis (pericwv rhsiV), or the “In-dwelling of the Father and the Son,” in the Spirit. Tersely, Skelton confessed that he knew “not well how to render it,” for the sublimity intrinsic to the ineffable mystery of the Trinity must seem to “carnal Reason” to be “Hocus-Pocus Tricks,” “Legerdemain Divinity,” and “religious Non-sense.” Yet through the eyes of faith, though they were not able to comprehend completely, they were, nevertheless, comprehended in love by the Spirit of the Son who has “the same essence with the Father.”14 Then Skelton made a carefully calibrated—yet seemingly convoluted—philosophical move to tease out the relationship between reason and revelation. Skelton reversed the increasing trend, certainly conspicuous in Socinian theo-logic, to subjugate scriptural revelation to reason and argued that if anything was against reason, “it may be above Reason, as to the manner of explaining it,” yet Skelton did not go all the way to argue that therefore “it is contrary to right Reason.” Why? Adducing the examples from the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Tully, Skelton averred that God’s ways of ordering epistemic issues were not ultimately subject to human ken to understand. In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity may transcend human logic. Yet, intriguingly, Skelton turned his philosophical ship around and argued, from the historical example of the Platonists’ writings, that “there are three Hypostases or Persons in the Deity.” How did they figure this out? By pure human ratiocination? Possible. Here Skelton offered a two-source theory. Either the Platonists figured this out with reasoning alone, or the Platonist perspective was a knowledge parasitic to Mosaic wisdom. So he argued: “Either these Men found this out by the Light of Nature, and then how can it be contrary to Reason? Or else they had it by Tradition from the Jews,

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and then it seems the old Jews understood it. And certainly it is the Doctrine of the Old Testament as well as the New.”15 As we see here, Skelton displayed a tendency increasingly common among the hard-line defenders of the Trinity who were leery of going too quickly to appeal to tradition: the suprarational nature of divine mystery, especially the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity was regarded by the antitrinitarians as a “Legerdemain Divinity” yet as the height of the mystery of God’s self-revelation by their polemical interlocutors. One of the undergirding issues throughout the book needs to be spelled out more explicitly here. As we have seen, the simplistic, inevitabilist paradigm of the decline of trinitarian theology and the rise of secular modernity needs substantial revision. To be sure, the Enlightenment came. Indeed, as the preceding chapters have shown, the necessary ingredients were already in the mix of the Biddlean, Hobbesian, and Souverainean meta-critique. This mystery unveiled, in the person of Christ, and the surrounding controversy in early modern England ushered in a crisis of trinitarian theology. Since this was a crisis, there were stiff contestations and indefatigable endeavors of the trinitarians to defend it and of the antitrinitarians to disabuse the English public of this notion of Platonic priestcraft. Indeed, some believed that the decline of mystery meant that God might well be leaving England.16 Even though this book has offered a more nuanced reading of the crisis of trinitarian theology in early modern England, there is a sense in which the notion of mystery was dealt a hard blow. Equipped with a better sense of the quotidian orchestration of the universe God had created, abetted with a higher notion of the human’s moral potential and epistemic capacities, it was easy to disband the idea of mystery. The doctrine of the Trinity survived in the Enlightenment, even as the idea of the “ineffable mystery” that had undergirded the defense of the Trinity in the previous centuries had to be rephrased in different guises. It simply became a matter of evident truths from the sound reading of Scripture; then, the Trinity transposed itself, no longer a mystery that, even with the best of our exegetical and epistemic capacities, cannot be known without the gracious gift of revelation and illumination. On the contrary, the assumption behind the argument that the Trinity was derivable tout court from a careful reading of the Bible was that so long as one did one’s exegetical and epistemic best, God would not continue to veil Godself. This democratic impulse, combined with the sense of the disenchantment of the world, did greatly reduce the philosophical and theological elbow room for the notion of mystery, as captured well in Robert Boyle’s 1681 treatise, A Discourse of Things above Reason. Inquiring Whether a Philosopher should admit there are any such. Boyle offered a careful defense of the idea that there are things above reason, although that which was above reason was—especially after a careful exegesis of the special revelation of God,

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Scripture—never ultimately against reason. As we know, Boyle’s perspective was soon to become a minority report, although combined with the birth of the Great Awakening and the rise of Methodism, the Kingdom of the Spirit would survive, thereby managing the survival of the Trinity. Throughout this study, the “disenchantment of the world” and the eclipse of the magical world with the advent of the Reformation, further abetted by the rationalistic Socinian hermeneutic, has been challenged, and along with it the idea that antitrinitarianism inexorably ushered in the Enlightenment.17 As nearly 25 percent of the hymns of Charles Wesley—many of which fed into the liturgical and theological perspectives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglicanism and Methodism—were explicitly trinitarian, the idea that the Trinity quietly bowed out to the simpler Unitarian arithmetic is much harder to substantiate.18 Or at the least, it needs a substantial revision. The complex relationship between the Enlightenment and the religion of the Trinity would have to wait until the next book.

Notes

Introduction 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

For Erasmus, see James D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries (Berkeley, 1996); on his New Testament scholarship—particularly his rejection of the canonicity of the text of 1 John 5:7, the so-called Johannine Comma—and its contribution to antitrinitarian biblical exegesis, see Peter Bietenholz, Encounters with a Radical Erasmus: Erasmus’ Work as a Source of Radical Thought in Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2009); Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: The Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England (Toronto, 2009); Stephen D. Snobelen, “ ‘To us there is but one God, the Father’: Antitrinitarian Textual Criticism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 117–27, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136; Robert Illiffe, “Friendly Criticism: Richard Simon, John Locke, Isaac Newton and the Johannine Comma,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 140, 141, 143–45, 148–49, 156. Desiderius Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 76, Controversies, ed. Charles Trinkaus (Toronto, 1999), 10. Council of Chalcedon, “Definition of the Faith,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1990), 1:86; J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (San Francisco, 1978), 339–40. On Michael Servetus, see Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT, 2009), 217– 28; on Wightman, see Ian Atherton and David Como, “The Burning of Edward Wightman: Puritanism, Prelacy and the Politics of Heresy in Early Modern England,” EHR 120 (2005): 1215–50. Christine Helmer, The Trinity and Martin Luther: A Study on the Relationship between Genre, Language and the Trinity in Luther’s Works (1523–1546) (Mainz, 1999); and “Gott von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit: Luthers Trinitätsverständnis,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 44 (2002): 1–19. On the twofold notion of the knowledge of God, archetypal theology and ectypal theology, the former referring to God’s self-referential and intrinsic knowledge

330

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

Notes

and the latter referring to the human knowledge of God, see Richard A. Muller, PRRD, 1:225–38. Keith Thomas’s influential text, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century England (London, 1971), has been challenged, as numerous cultural, social, and intellectual historians demonstrated the resilience and ubiquitous nature of mystery, magic, and the supernatural in general. See, inter alia, Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999); Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997); and Allison Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the SeventeenthCentury: The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden, 1999). The notion of Erasmian malleability within the politics of religion in post-Reformation England is expounded superbly in Dodds’s Exploiting Erasmus. Matthieu Virel, A Learned and Excellent Treatise . . . set down by Conference (1594), 7, 8, 22. Virel’s Learned and Excellent Treatise was translated by Stephen Egerton and printed in 1594, 1595, 1597, 1603, 1607, 1609, 1612, 1615, 1620, 1626, 1633, and 1636. On Virel, see Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), 64–65, 310; Richard A. Muller, “ ‘Duplex cognitio dei’ in the Theology of Early Reformed Orthodoxy,” SCJ 10 (1979): 56, 59; and Mary Hampson Patterson, Domesticating the Reformation: Protestant Best Sellers, Private Devotion, and the Revolution of English Piety (Madison, 2007), 255–56. See, inter alia, Jan W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge, 1997); Frederick Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton, 1996); Gerard Reedy, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 1985); and John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660—1750 (Cambridge, MA, 1976). Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). J. F. McGregor, “The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy,” in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford, 1984), 40–41. David R. Adams, “The Secret Printing and Publishing Career of Richard Overton the Leveller, 1644–6,” The Library 11 (2010): 14, 20, 30, 52, 57–58, 68, 84, 88. According to Adams, Richard Overton saw the persecution and scorn heaped on Hawes as a Presbyterian tactic to besmirch the reputation of non-Presbyterians as mere Socinians-in-disguise (57–58). Thomas Edwards, The First and Second Part of Gangraena, 3rd ed. (1646), 2:130; Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, 63, 165, 170, 344, 345, 356; and Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, UK, 1997), 289–90, 302, 366 n. 57, 381–82. Thomas Hawes, A Christian Relation of a Christians Affliction (1646), A1v; PRO, KB 9/838/275; PRO, E 133/29, 12, 15; see also Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 289, 302.

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16. See Adams, “The Secret Printing and Publishing Career of Richard Overton the Leveller,” 14, 20, 30, 52, 57–58, 68, 84, 88; Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 290. In Afflicted Christian, Hawes explicitly calls Paul Best a “long time” friend; see The Afflicted Christian Justifyed (1646), 10. 17. Martin Mulsow, “The Trinity as Heresy: Socinian Counter-Histories of Simon Magus, Orpheus, and Cerinthus,” in Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, against and beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York, 2002), 161–70. 18. See note 1 for references on Erasmus’s view on 1 John 5:7. See also Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1994), 647–49. 19. Hawes, Christian Relation, A3r-A3v. See chapter 6 in this book for an extensive discussion of the role of the Gospel of John in the trinitarian polemic of seventeenth-century England. 20. Hawes, The Afflicted Christian, 4. 21. Arius in his Thalia—this text preserved in his archnemesis, Athanasius’s De Synodis, ii. cap. 15—maintained that “the Unbegun made the Son a beginning of things originated; and advanced Him as a Son to Himself by adoption. He has nothing proper to God in proper subsistence. For He is not equal, no, nor one in essence with Him,” thereby defending monotheism against Sabellianism while tilting to an adoptionist heresy. On Arius, see Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002); and Maurice F. Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford, 1996). 22. Hawes, A Christian Relation, A1v; Afflicted Christian, 4. 23. Hawes, A Christian Relation, A2r; Edwards, Gangraena, 2.130; Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 366 n. 57; The Journal of Thomas Juxon, 1644–1647 (Cambridge, 1999), fol. 66. 24. Hawes, A Christian Relation, A2v. 25. Hawes, A Christian Relation, A2v-A3r. On Theodotus of Byzantium, see Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, §54, in The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, vol. 2, Books II and III (Sects 47–80, De Fide), trans. Frank Williams (Leiden, 1987), 2, 72, 91; Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5.28.6. The late-seventeenth-century defender of Nicene orthodoxy vis-à-vis Petavius, George Bull (1634–1710), bishop of St. Davids, pointed out the heresy of Byzantium as a key second-century Christological heresy; see his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, Ex scriptis, quae extant, Catholicorum Doctorum, qui intra tria prima Ecclesiae Christianae secula floruerunt (Oxford, 1685), 91; Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, 1996), 34, 38–39, 111–12. 26. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 382; Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, 165. 27. T. J. Howell, Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1809–26), 5:43, cited in Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century (Oxford, 2006), 281. See Afflicted Christian, 2, where Hawes launches into a shrill anti-Presbyterian diatribe. 28. Hawes, A Christian Relation, A3r.

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29. Hawes, A Christian Relation, A3v. 30. For Francis Woodcock, see Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3:302–3; BL Add. MS 15,669, fol. 71. He was a lecturer of a prominent London congregation, St. Lawrence Jewry, in 1641 before becoming the parish minister of St. Olaves in Southwark on July 10, 1646; his sermons reveal him to be a zealous Puritan eager to stamp out doctrinal heresies as a way of completing the Reformation. See his The Two Witnesses, in several lectures at St. Laurence Jewry (1643); Christ’s Warning-piece, giving Notice to every one to watch and keep their Garments (1644); Lex Talionis: Or, God paying every Man in his own coin (1645); and Joseph parallel’d by the present Parliament in his Sufferings and Advancement (1646). See also William M. Hetherington, History of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1878), 106; Thomas Hawes, The Afflicted Christian Justifyed (1646), 8, 11. 31. Hawes, A Christian Relation, A3v. 32. Hawes, A Christian Relation, A3v. 33. Hawes, The Afflicted Christian, 8, 11. On p. 8, there is an intriguing reference in Hawes’s printed letter to Woodcock in which he refers “you took upon you to Chattechise [sic] me in the Word.” Could it have been that Hawes was a parishioner at St. Lawrence Jewry while Woodcock was ministering between 1641 and 1646? This possible connection is tantalizingly intriguing. 34. Hawes, The Afflicted Christian, 11. The text of Proverbs 8:22–23 reads: “The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.” 35. See Manlio Simonetti, “Sull’interpretazione patristica di Proverbi 8. 22,” in Studi sull’Arianesimo (Rome, 1965), 9–87; and Mark DelCogliano, “Basil of Caesarea on Proverbs 8:22 and the Source of Pro-Nicene Theology,” JTS 59 (2008): 183–90. 36. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Introduction,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, UK, 2000), xx. 37. H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1951), passim; Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010), 5. 38. Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2003), 1, 212. 39. William S. Babcock, “A Changing of the Christian God: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century,” Interpretation 45 (1991): 133–46; and Jason E. Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008). While both present learned discussions on the trinitarian controversy of the period, due to their sole focus on the 1690s as the period of the rupture of antitrinitarianism, one gets a skewed picture of this key century-long controversy. William C. Placher’s The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville, KY, 1996) presents an even more skewed picture, for he constructs a flawed dichotomy between Calvin versus Calvinists—following R. T. Kendall’s mostly discarded thesis in the same vein in Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979), where he argues that Perkins, in his adherence to Beza rather than Calvin,

Notes

40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

333

departed from true Calvinism—and presents the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Puritans as the culprits of the demise of the doctrine of the Trinity. See especially “The Marginalization of the Trinity” in Placher, Domestication of Transcendence, 164–78. Arthur Marotti and Ken Jackson, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism 46 (2004): 167–90. See also Debora K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley, 1990). John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays (London, 1993), 68. Among others, see Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy,” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001); David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, 2004). Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” AHR 108 (2003): 1061–80; and The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005); J. G. A. Pocock, “Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response 1660–1750, ed. Roger D. Lund (Cambridge, 1995), 33–53; and Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999); Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, 2006); and David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008). Pocock, “Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy,” 35. Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2009). UCLA Clark Library MS L6815 M3 C734, “A New Samosatenian.” I am deeply grateful to my former Vanderbilt colleague Isaac Stephens for bringing this MS to my attention. Otto Fock, Der Socinianismus: nach seiner Stellung in der Gesammtentwicklung des christlichen Geistes, nach seinem historischen Verlauf und nach seinem Lehrbegriff, 2 vols. (Kiel, Germany, 1847), 1:180. A slight variation of this Socinian maxim was uttered by J. A. Comenius, though he certainly regards this statement as diabolical. See Johan-Amos Comenio, De Irenico Irenicorum. Hoc est: Conditionibus Pacis à Socini Secta reliquo Christiano orbi oblatis, ad Omnes Christianos facta Admonitio (Amsterdam, 1660), 191. John Owen, The Principles of the Doctrine of Christ: Vnfolded in two short Catechismes (1645), 14, 57. Council of Trent, Session IV, decree 2, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Council, 2:664. Norman Sykes, “The Religion of Protestants,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge, 1963), 178; on Trent, see Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf. 2 vols. (London, 1957–61). Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640—1660 (Oxford, 1989).

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52. Jean Dietz Moss, “Godded with God”: Hendrik Niclaes and His Family of Love (Philadelphia, 1981). 53. UCLA Clark Library MS B8535 M3; I am most grateful to Professor Ann Hughes for sharing with me her own notes of this manuscript. 54. See Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden, 1993); and Bob Scribner, “Preconditions of Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (Cambridge, 1996), 40, 46; Justin Champion, “ ‘Religion’s Safe, with Priestcraft Is the War’: Augustan Anticlericalism and the Legacy of the English Revolution, 1660–1720,” The European Legacy 5 (2000): 547–61; J. F. Maclear, “Popular Anticlericalism in the Puritan Revolution,” JHI 17 (1956): 443–70. 55. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS. Français, coil. new acq. 4333, fols. 113–14, cited in Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago, 1992), 363–64, n. 38.

Chapter 1 1.

2. 3.

4.

John Biddle, The Testimonies of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatianus, Theophilus, Origen . . . As also, Of Arnobius, Lactantius, Eusebius, Hilary, and Brightman; concerning that One God, and the Persons of the Holy Trinity (1650), 84. Paul Best, Mysteries Discovered. Or, a Mercurial Picture pointing out the way from Babylon to the holy City (1647). [John Deacon], Nayler’s Blasphemies Discovered. Or, Several Queries to him Proposed. With His owne Answers thereunto (1657), 13. See also Thomas Hall, A practical and polemical commentary . . . upon the third and fourth chapters of the latter epistle of St. Paul to Timothy (1658), 60, where James Nayler, George Fox, John Biddle, and Paul Best are all listed as seditious heretics. Upon Nayler’s “triumphant entry” into the city of Bristol on horseback on October 24, 1656, his followers chanted, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabbath,” thus creating an unmistakable impression of messianic self-fashioning. For details of Deacon’s work as a harrier for heresy, see Leopold Damrosch, The Sorrows of Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 148–60. The Faith of One God, Who is only the Father; and of One Mediator between God and Men, who is only the Man Christ Jesus; and of one Holy Spirit, the Gift (and sent) of God (1691). In addition to the breviate of Biddle’s life, his XII Arguments drawn out of the Scripture . . . touching the Deity of the Holy Spirit (1647); A Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity (1648); The Testimonies of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatianus . . . (n.d.) are the first four entries in The Faith of One God. On Thomas Firmin (1632–1697), see [Stephen Nye], The life of Mr. Thomas Firmin . . . with a sermon on Luke X. 36, 37 preach’d on the occasion of his death (1698), 5–10; Joseph Cornish, The Life of Mr. Thomas Firmin, citizen of London (1780); John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006), 246–47, 283, 284, 285, 296; ODNB. Firmin’s Some Proposals for the Employment of the Poor . . . for the Prevention of Begging (1678) was regarded a crucial text for social reform in late-seventeenth-century London. See Steven

Notes

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

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Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550– 1750 (Oxford, 2004), 441–42. William Berriman, An Historical Account of the Controversies that have been in the Church, concerning the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever blessed Trinity (1725), 422–23, 426. For Berriman, D.D. (1688–1750), a polyglot rector of St. Andrews Undershaft in London, see ODNB. H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1951); Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment,” in The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (New York, 1968), 217. John Robertson, “Hugh Trevor-Roper, Intellectual History and ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment,’” EHR 124 (2009): 1–33, here 11–13. Robertson, “Hugh Trevor-Roper,”13. Nigel Smith, “‘And If God Was One of Us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and AntiTrinitarian Heresy in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006), 175. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2002), 31–33, 190–95, 275, 277. Jason E. Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008), 59 n. 66. John Calvin, Confession de la Foy, in OS, 1:418. William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville, KY, 1996), 164–78. For instance, aside from a few references in his work on John Milton, Christopher Hill, the doyen of Marxist historiography and the champion of the religious radicals—of whom Paul Best would certainly be one—had nothing to say about Best in, inter alia, The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1972), Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA, 1975), or The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 3 vols. (Amherst, MA, 1985–86). Cf. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), 225, 290–91, 294–95. There has been, however, interest from Unitarian historians—as both Wilbur and McLachlan were—on Best; see R. Brook Aspland, Paul Best, the Unitarian Confessor (1853). Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), 17, 159, 164–65, 259, 303, 345, 349; see also Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, UK, 1997), 290, 362. Nigel Smith, “‘Paul Best, John Biddle, and Anti-Trinitarian Heresy in SeventeenthCentury England,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, 160–84. Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010), 158–60, 163, 167, 171, 172, 174, 182, 183, 195 (on Best); 6, 12, 160–63, 165, 166, 167, 171, 172, 174, 183, 206, 210, 212, 221, 224–28, 229, 230, 232 (on Biddle). Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Division of Christendom: Christianity in the Sixteenth Century (Louisville, KY, 2007), 133.

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19. For Immanuel Tremellius, see Kenneth Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (c. 1510–1580) (Aldershot, UK, 2007); Stephen G. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564—1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 1996). 20. This revival of the school of “history of biblical exegesis” is a major contribution made by David Steinmetz, a doyen among American Reformation scholars in the last four decades. His “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” Theology Today 37 (1980): 27–38, set the trend of reinvigorating this type of inquiry: how the Bible was used in historical contexts and controversies. See also Susan Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives (Chicago, 1994); John L. Thompson, John Calvin and the Daughters of Sarah (Genève, 1992); John L. Thompson and Richard A. Muller, eds., Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation: Essays Presented to David C. Steinmetz in Honor of His Sixtieth Birthday (Grand Rapids, MI, 1996); G. Sujin Pak, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford, 2010); Philip Wengert, Philip Melanchthon’s Annotationes in Johannem in Relation to Its Predecessors and Contemporaries (Genève, 1987); Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2000). 21. BL Add. MS 24482, fol. 125. 22. McLachlan, Socinianism, 150. 23. A. B. Grosart’s article in the old DNB, 4:421, cited in McLachlan, Socinianism, 150. 24. UCLA Clark Memorial Library, MS L6815 M3 C734, “A New Samosatenian, namely that errour revived, discovered, and confuted in a disputation here set downe,” fols. 112v-145r (here 112v-113r). Hereafter cited as Best and Ley, “A New Samosatenian.” 25. BL Add. MS 24482, fol. 126. 26. Thomas Edwards reports in his Gangraena: “This Best with his Manuscripts were sent up last summer [1645], and is by the Parliament committed to the Gate-house.” See The First and Second Part of Gangraena, 3rd ed. (1646), 1:33. However, Best’s own broadsheet, To certaine noble and honorable persons of the Honorable House of Commons assembled in Parliament (1646), dated August 13, 1646, mentions that he has “suffered about 18 monthes imprisonment,” thereby making it around February 1645 as the possible time of his incarceration. On this phenomenon of the private circulation of theological manuscripts among Puritan ministers exploding into the wider public by publication, see Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’, and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001). 27. In ten sessions, the Westminster Assembly had heated discussions on Best’s intrepid challenge to trinitarian orthodoxy as a major threat to the Puritan social order; see Session 451 (vol. 3, fol. 73r, June 10, 1645), Session 460 (3:77r, July 2, 1645), Session 471 (3:80v, July 17, 1645), Session 501 (3:92r, September 11, 1645), Session 503 (3:92v, September 15, 1645), Session 555 (3:115r, December 16, 1645), Session 565 (3:117v, January 2, 1646), Session 612 (3:147r and 249r, March 30,

Notes

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

337

1646), and Session 613 (3:147r and 249 v, March 31, 1646); similarly, in nineteen separate sessions, the issue of Paul Best’s antitrinitarian heresy and, particularly, what course of action would be apropos was extensively discussed in Parliament. See CJ 4:170–71 (June 10, 1645), 4:284 (September 24, 1645), 4:420 (January 28, 1646), 4:447 (February 18, 1646), 4:460 (March 2, 1646), 4:469 (March 9, 1646), 4:489 (March 25, 1646), 4:493 (March 28, 1646), 4:500 (April 4, 1646), 4:506 (April 11, 1646), 4:510 (April 15, 1646), 4:515 (April 18, 1646), 4:518 (April 21, 1646), 4:524 (April 26, 1646), 4:527 (April 30, 1646), 4:540 (May 8, 1646), 4:556 (May 27, 1646), 4:563 (June 3, 1646), and 4:586 (June 24, 1646). Moreover, the Committee for Plundered Ministers discussed this cause célèbre a good deal also: BL Add. MS 15669, fols. 3v, 103r, 109r, 110r, 112v, 114r, 121r, 125r, 174r, 232v; BL Add. MS 15670, fols. 21r, 22r, 23r, 24r, 30v, 31v, 37r, 53v. I am most grateful to Joel Halcomb for providing the Westminster Assembly sessions references and discussions of the threat posed by Best’s heresy. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena, 3rd ed. (1646), 1:32–33. CJ 4:420 (Wednesday, January 28, 1646). The radical biblicism of Paul Best, however, was not an exclusively antitrinitarian predilection. Much as Best, Biddle, and others had rejected the Trinity on the grounds that the word Trinity never appeared in Scripture, so had Luther questioned the legitimacy of purgatory on the grounds that the word purgatory failed to emerge in the texts of Scripture. Yet Johann Eck’s riposte to Luther’s rejection of purgatory is incisive in that Eck averred that “neither was the Trinity” mentioned per se in Scripture. See Peter Marshall, Belief and the Dead in Reformation England (Cambridge, 2002), 53. CJ 4:493 (March 28, 1646). Best’s name and the controversy he symbolized were the topic of Parliamentary discussion on these dates: February16, 18; March 2, 9; April 18, 21; May 8, 27; and June 3, 24. See CJ, 4:444, 447, 460, 469, 514, 518, 540, 556, 563, 586. CJ 4:469 (March 9, 1646). James Cranford, “To the Reader,” in Haereseo-machia: or, The mischief which Heresies doe, and the means to prevent it (1646), sigs A3r-A4r. Cranford compared Arius and his antitrinitarian errors to a single spark which managed to “set the whole world on fire.” Ibid., 4; Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 362–63. Barbara Donagan, “Sedgwick, Obadiah.” ODNB. Obadiah Sedgwick, The Nature and Danger of Heresies, Opened in a Sermon before the Honourable House of Commons, Ianuary 27. 1646 (1647), 10. By the phrase “redemption by Christ,” Sedgwick meant that anyone who denies satisfaction by Christ in his atoning substitutionary death was a heretic. Se also pp. 10–11. John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (New York, 2000), 146. Paul Best, To certaine noble and honorable persons of the Honorable House of Commons assembled in Parliament (1646), t.p. Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1682), 263. One entry under July 24, 1647, reads: “Order to burn a Pamphlet of Paul Best’s, and the Printers to be punished.” Best, Mysteries Discovered, t.p.; Bodl. MS Tanner 59, fol. 526r. Bodl. MS Tanner 59, fol. 526r.

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41. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 5. 42. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes: In Fiue Bookes (1625), 622. The 1625 edition was a greatly expanded version of his 1613 first edition, Purchas his Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all ages. For Purchas, see ODNB; L. E. Pennington, The Purchas Handbook, 2 vols. (London, 1997); Joan Pau Rubiés, “Travel Writing and Ethnography,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge, 2002), 243, 244, 245, 248, 258; Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Cambridge, 1998), 16, 35, 74, 77, 91, 92, 122, 156, 163; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 59, 64, 66, 68, 81–3, 90, 98, 103, 104; for a slightly ahistorical analysis of Purchas, see Timothy Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (Oxford, 2007), 201–30. 43. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1485. 44. “Qui hoc loco principia nomine Christi aeternitatem designare volunt, manifestissimi erroris.” See Faustus Socinus, Opera Omnia in duos tomos distincta, 2 vols. (Irenopoli, 1656), 1:77. 45. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 3. For an excellent summary of patristic exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15:24–28, see Josephn T. Lienhard, “The Exegesis of 1 Cor 15, 24–8 from Marcellus of Ancyra to Theodoret of Cyrus,” Vigiliae Christianae 37 (1983): 340–59; Richard A. Muller, “Christ in the Eschaton: Calvin and Moltmann on the Duration of the Munus Regium,” HTR 74 (1981): 31–59; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI, 2000), 1232–33, 1238–39. On Johann Alsted (1588–1638) and his millenarian exegesis, see Howard Hotson, Paradise Postponed: Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism (Dordrecht, 2000); Jeff rey K. Jue, Heaven upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism (Dordrecht, 2006), 4, 12, 130–32, 212, 216, 225, 226, 228, 234, 236. 46. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 4–5. 47. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 4. 48. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 2. On Best’s use of Erasmus, see Peter G. Bietenholz, Encounters with a Radical Erasmus: Erasmus’ Work as a Source of Radical Thought in Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2009), 175–76, 178. 49. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 5. 50. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 6. For Johannes Buxtorf, see Stephen G. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 1996); Allison Coudert and Jeff rey S. Shoulson, eds. Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 2004), 94, 135, 150, 231, 309. For Johannes Drusius, see Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley, 1994), 15–17, 22, 25, 27, 34, 50–52. Drusius’s lexical and exegetical prowess was enshrined in the Critici Sacri: sive doctissimorum virorum in SS. Biblia Annotationes et Tractatus (1660), a great compendium of Renaissance biblical scholarship, edited by John Pearson, Bishop of Chester. See Critici Sacri, 6:xxxiii–xli. 51. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 6.

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52. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 7. 53. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 11–12. 54. Best, Roger Ley, and Joseph Mede were all contemporaries at Jesus College, Cambridge. Mede had been one of the key seventeenth-century English millenarian exegetes; his Clavis Apocalyptica (Cambridge, 1627) and The apostasy of the latter times (1642) were phenomenally popular, garnering a pan-European reputation for him, along with Johann Alsted, as leading apocalyptic interpreters of the Calvinistic sort. For Mede, see Jue, Heaven upon Earth; and Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000), 183, 206, 208. 55. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 11. In a book still au courant among scholars of religion, J. Z. Smith establishes a helpful genealogy of the alleged Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity thesis; he rightly identifies Jacques Souverain as a key point in this narrative arc, yet fails to mention Paul Best as a figure whose antiCatholic polemic certainly named, as we have seen, Platonism as the main culprit for causing the early church to lose its gospel-driven moorings, even though he does mention Biddle twice. In both these instances, Smith incorrectly calls him Joseph Biddle. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, 1990), 1–17 (Biddle’s wrongly attributed name on p. 15). On pp. 20–1, Smith asserts that John Corbet coins the term Pagano-papism in English—in A Discourse of the Religion of England (1667), p. 17—yet the text in question renders it “Pagano-Christianism.” 56. Best is wrong to assign 328 as the date of the first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea (325 ce); Best, Mysteries Discovered, 11. 57. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 12–13. 58. Best, Mysteries Discovered, 14. 59. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fols. 112v-145r (here 112v). 60. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 112v. 61. Best and Ley, “New Samosetanian,” fol. 120r. 62. Thomas Wilson, Theological Rules, to gvide vs in the vnderstanding and practice of holy Scriptures (1615), 105. 63. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 124v. 64. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 125r. 65. Best and Ley, “New Samosetanian,” fol. 117r. 66. Best and Ley, “New Samosetanian,” fol. 115v. 67. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 123v. 68. Best and Ley, “New Samosetanian,” fol. 123v. 69. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 124r. 70. On the issue of Christological interpretations of the Old Testament, see, inter alia, Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge, 1997), and Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity (Philadelphia, 1988). 71. Best and Ley, “New Samosetanian,” fol. 122v. On the significance of the messianic Psalms in the protrinitarian Protestant exegesis and, in particular, in Calvin, see G. Sujin Pak, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford, 2010).

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72. 73. 74. 75.

Best and Ley, “New Samosetanian,” fols. 118v-119r. Best and Ley, “New Samosetanian,” fol. 118v. Best and Ley, “New Samosetanian,” fol. 119r. Jerome Zanchi, De Opera Dei, pars. 3, lib. 2, cap. 1, as cited in Best and Ley, “A New Samosatenian,” fol. 126r. Analogia fidei (analogy of faith), refers to construction of appropriate analogies to explain the Christian faith by using the modes of language and logic of Scripture (and tradition). Analogia entis (analogy of being), on the other hand, refers to efforts of similar orientation by utilizing a wider variety of sources to articulate more proximately—by analogies—the being and acts of God. Augustine, De Fide et Symbolo, cap. 9, §17. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fols. 126r-v. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 126v. Ley continues his Augustinian trinitarian meditation: “The blessedness of mans minde is his knowledge, and his will, his knowledge upon an admirable object, with love and delight” (fol. 127r). For the interesting ideological proximity between Ariminians and Socinians, not merely signaling the invectives hurled by the Calvinists in their reductio ad absurdum mode of argumentation, but as a helpful heuristic to identify the real affi nity between the two groups, see Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls, eds., Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, and Cultural Exchange in SeventeenthCentury Europe (Leiden, 2005). Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 127r. See Hugh DeQuehen, “Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy,” Seventeenth Century 13 (1998): 69–84; Allen Brent, “The Ignatian Epistles and the Threefold Ecclesiastical Order,” JRH 17 (2007): 18–32. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 128v. See Augustine, De Haeresibus, in CCSL 46:294. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 128v. Best and Ley, “A New Samosatenian,” fol. 129r. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fols. 130 v-131r. Best and Ley, “A New Samosatenian,” fol. 130 v. Best and Ley, “New Samosatenian,” fol. 131r. McLachlan, Socinianism, 159. McLachlan, Socinianism, 162. The historical and biographical account of Best is heavily dependent upon both McLachlan, Socinianism, and Stephen D. Snobelen’s ODNB article. Robert Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography: or, Sketches of the Lives and Writings of Distinguished Antitrinitarians, 3 vols. (London, 1850), 3:162. G. R. Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates (Cambridge, 1992). Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven, 1997), 64–100. On the tombstone of Faustus Socinus are etched these words, which encapsulate the sense of eschatological optimism shared by the Socinians: “Tota licet Babylon destruxit tecta Lutherus, muros Calvinus, sed fundamenta Socinus.” It seems the religious sensibilities of the Socinians was such that just as Luther

76.

77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

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taught sola fide, and Calvin carried the same while furthering ecclesiastical and liturgical reform, the task of Socinus and his followers was seen as the logical terminus, or completing the third and fi nal phase of reform. See “Socinus,” in The Quarterly Journal of the American Unitarian Association 2 (1854): 1–17, here 16. 96. While Clark’s English Society is a model of erudition in many regards, the fact that Socinianism is seen as a unique problem within the Church of England seems too simplistic; see J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 2000). 97. The use of patristic writings and the legacy of Christian antiquity, especially their reception history in the Renaissance-Reformation period, has enjoyed its own ressourcement. See, among others, The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1996); Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth-Century (Oxford, 2009). 98. For an excellent biographical sketch of Biddle, see Stephen Snobelen’s ODNB article. 99. Anthony Wood calls Oxenbridge a “person then noted to be of no good principles,” in Ath. Oxon., 3:593. However, Gordon A. Kinder’s comment that “Oxenbridge had a demonstrable connexion with a number of Oxford Arians,” thereby indicating that it was perhaps as early as 1634 that Biddle began to imbibe from the fountain of Oxford rational antitrinitarian divinity, seems rather insubstantial. See Bibiotheca Dissidentium: Répertiore des non-conformistes religieux des seizième et dix-septième siècles, ed. André Séguenny, Tome 25 (Baden-Baden, Germany, 2006), 9. For a helpful summary of the life of Biddle, see Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, MA, 1945), 193–208. 100. John Biddle, Virgil’s Bucolicks Engished [sic]. Whereunto is added the Translation of the two first Satyrs of Ivvenal (1634). See also William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, 2 vols. (1834), 1:105; Robert Cummings, “Recent Studies in English Translation, c. 1590–c. 1660. Part i: General Studies and Translations from Greek and Latin,” English Literary Renaissance 39 (2009): 210. 101. “A Short Account of the Life of Biddle,” in The Faith of One God, Who is only the Father (1691), 4–5. [hereafter cited as Life of Biddle.] 102. Life of Biddle, 5; Kinder, Bibiotheca Dissidentium, 9–10. 103. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3:594. 104. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3:594; Joshua Toulmin, A Review of the Life, Character and Writings of the Rev. John Biddle (1789), 31. 105. CJ, v. 293 (September 6, 1647). 106. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3:595. 107. See chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of the complex issue of radical religion and trinitarian theology of the mid-seventeenth century. 108. Como, Blown by the Spirit; G. F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946), 7 and passim.

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109. A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, and to our Solemn League and Covenant (1648), 4. 110. Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, 6, citing from John Biddle, Twelve Arguments, 6, 7. 111. Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, 6, citing from Best, Mysteries Discovered, 4, 5. 112. Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, 7–8. 113. An Ordinance of the Lords & Commons . . . for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies (1648), 3–4; Life of Biddle, 5–6. 114. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), 293. 115. Charles R. Gillett, Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature, 2 vols. (New York, 1932), 1:322–27 (Best), 1:327–40 (Biddle). 116. Biddle’s own written works were Twelve Arguments drawn out of the Scripture, wherein the commonly received opinion touching the deity of the Holy Spirit, is clearly and fully refuted (1647); A Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity, according to the Scripture (1648); The testimonies of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatianus, Theophilus, Origen . . . As also, of Arnobius, Lactantius, Eusebius, Hilary, and Brightman; concerning that one God, and the person of the Holy Trinity (n.d.); A Twofold Catechism (1654); Two Letters of Mr. Iohn Biddle, late prisoner in Newgate, but now hurried away to some remote Island (1655). He translated the following: Virgil’s Bucolicks Englished. Whereunto is added the translation of the two first satyrs of Juvenal (1634); The Racovian Catechisme; wherein You have the substance of the Confession of those Churches, which in the Kingdom of Poland . . . do affirm (Amsterdam: Brooer Janz, 1652); The Life of that Incomparable Man, Faustus Socinus Senensis (1653); Dissertatio de Pace, &c. Or, A Discourse touching the Peace & Concord of the Church (1653). Biddle eked out a living by proofreading and copyediting the 1653 version of the LXX. See In Sacra Biblia Graeca ex Versione LXX. Interpretum Scholia (1653). 117. Biddle, Twelve Arguments, sig. A2v. 118. Biddle, Twelve Arguments, 6–13. 119. The twenty-page version was ESTC B2873, or Thomason E 472 (4); the sixty-page Confession of Faith was ESTC B2874. When The Apostolical and True Opinion concerning the Holy Trinity (1653) was published, it was the longer version that was printed after the Twelve Arguments. 120. Measured against the recent growing scholarly interest in prison literature in early modern England, it is a surprise that neither Best nor Biddle was mentioned in the 2009 special theme issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly. See especially Jerome De Groot, “Prison Writing, Writing Prison during the 1640s and 1650s,” HLQ 72 (2009): 193–215; for the significance of prison writings in general, see Thomas S. Freeman, “The Rise of Prison Literature,” HLQ 72 (2009): 133–46. 121. John Biddle, Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity (1648) [ESTC, B2873], 7, 9. 122. Biddle, Confession of Faith, 11. 123. Biddle, “The Preface,” Confession of Faith, sig. D4v. 124. Biddle, “The Preface,” Confession of Faith, sigs. D6r-v. 125. Biddle, “The Preface,” Confession of Faith, sig. D7r. 126. Biddle, “The Preface,” Confession of Faith, sig. E1v.

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127. Biddle, “The Preface,” Confession of Faith, sigs. E1v-E2r. 128. Biddle, Confession of Faith, sigs. E2r-v. Then Biddle chastised the trinitarians for endeavoring to “go about to kill me,” even though he was following the spirit of the Solemn League and Covenant. 129. Biddle, Confession of Faith, 6. 130. Biddle, Confession of Faith, 1, 9, 18–19, 44. 131. Biddle, Confession of Faith, 26. 132. Biddle, Confession of Faith, 34–5. 133. Biddle, Confession of Faith, 36. 134. Biddle, Confession of Faith, 38. 135. CJ, 7:86. 136. Carolyn Polizzotto, “The Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652,” JEH 38 (1987): 569–81; Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and Antitrinitarianism,” in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and Toleration (Oxford, 2007), 177– 79; CJ, 7:258–59. The full title was The Humble Proposals of Mr. Owen, Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Sympson, and other Ministers, who presented the Petition to the Parliament (1652). 137. [John Owen, et al.], Proposals for the furtherance and propagation of the gospel in this nation . . . As also, some principles of Christian religion, without the beliefe of which, the Scriptures doe plainly and clearly affirme, salvation is not to be obtained (1652), 13. 138. [John Owen, et al.], Proposals for the furtherance and propagation of the gospel, 15. See chapter 2 for a discussion of the variegated threat of the heralds of “perfection proclaimed.” 139. The full title was Conjectura Cabbalistica. Or, A Conjectural Essay of Interpreting the minde of Moses, according to a Threefold Cabbala: viz., Literal, Philosophical, Mystical, or, Divinely Moral (1653). 140. John Biddle, “Preface,” in Twofold Catechism: The One simply called A Scripture Catechism; The Other, A brief Scripture-Catechism for Children (1654), sigs. A5r-A 141. Biddle, “Preface,” in Twofold Catechism, sigs. A6v, A7r, a6r. 142. Henry More, “Preface to the Reader,” in Conjectura Cabbalistica, sig. A6v. 143. A. P. Coudert, “Newton and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” in Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, 1999), 35. See also Sarah Hutton, “Iconisms, Enthusiasm and Origen: Henry More Reads the Bible,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 201–7; and “Platonism and the Trinity: Anne Conway, Henry More and Christoph Sand,” in Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls (Leiden, 2005), 209–24. 144. Henry More, “Epistle Dedicatory,” in Conjectura Cabbalistica, sig. A4v. See also Hugh MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry (Toronto, 1986), 51. 145. Biddle, “Preface,” in Twofold Catechism, sigs. a1r-v; MacCullum, Milton and the Sons of God, 50–58.

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146. Biddle, “Preface,” in Twofold Catechism, sig. A5v. One such example, inter alia, in Conjectura Cabbalistica had to do with his “Christian cabbalistic” reading of Genesis 1:1, where More argues the following: “The Tri-une Godhead. The Hebrew words barah elohim do handsomely intimate a plurality, a singularity, the Noun being in the Plural, the Verb in the Singular Number. Whence I conceive there may be very well here included the Mysterie of the Trinity and Unity of the Godhead, or to; Qei o: n. . . . And that this was the Philosophick Cabbala of Moses and the Learned and Pious of the Jews, it is no small argment, because the Notion of the Trinity is so much insisted upon by the Platonists and Pythagoreans, whom all acknowledge (and I think I shall make it more plan then ever) to have got their Philosophy from Moses.” Conjectura Cabbalistica, 139; see also 135, 136, 141, 143, for similar confidence of More. 147. Biddle, “Preface,” in Twofold Catechism, sigs. a1r-v. 148. Biddle, “Preface,” in Twofold Catechism, sigs. a3r-a4r. 149. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 4. 150. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 6. 151. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 14–20. 152. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 28. 153. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 29–31. 154. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 32. 155. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 60–62. 156. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 82. 157. Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530– 1740 (Oxford, 1996). 158. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 84–105. 159. Biddle, Twofold Catechism, 134, 136–37; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 320, 322; D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago, 1964), 69. On Christian mortalism, see Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, MA, 1972). 160. On Richard Overton (1599–1664), see ODNB; Alum. Cantab., pt. 1, 3:289; for his mortalism and its connection with Milton, see Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1640—1660 (Oxford, 2003), 52, 54, 56; and “Ideas of Creation in the Writings of Richard Overton the Leveller and Paradise Lost,” JHI 66 (2005): 59–78. 161. CJ, 7:113–14; Dzelzainis, “Milton and Antitrinitarianism,” in Milton and Toleration, 181–82; N. H. Keeble, “‘Take heed of being too forward in imposinge on others’: Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Baxterian Tradition,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006), 284; Stephen B. Dobranski, “Licensing Milton’s Heresy,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge, 1998), 141–46, 150–52. 162. For international Calvinism, see International Calvinism, 1541—1715, ed. Menna Prestwich (Oxford, 1985); for the republic of letters, see Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in Modern West (Cambridge, 2009), 9–34; April Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters:

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Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY, 2007). 163. John Biddle, A Brief Scripture-Catechism for Children, 15–16. 164. John Biddle, trans., Virgil’s Bucolicks Engished [sic]. Whereunto is added the Translation of the two first Satyrs of Ivvenal (1634). 165. [John Biddle, ed.], In Sacra Biblia Graeca ex versione LXX interpretum scholia; simul et interpretum caeterorum Lectiones Variantes (1653); Ath. Oxon., 3:593– 603; McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 21. 166. Thomason, Catalogue, 1:823. 167. The Thomason number is: E. 1479 (2). 168. Ferenc Dávid, De falsa et vera unius Dei Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti cognitione libri duo, ed. Róbert Dán (Utrecht, 1988), 186–93. 169. The full title is Irenicum Irenicorum, seu, Reconciliatoris Christianorum hodiernorum Norma Triplex, Sana omnium hominum Ratio, Scriptura Sacra, & Traditiones (n.p., 1658). 170. Daniel Zwicker, Irenicum Irenicorum, 19–58. For a superb exposition of the career and significance of Zwicker, see Peter G. Bietenholz, Daniel Zwicker 1612–1678: Peace, Tolerance and God the One and Only (Firenze, 1997), here 64. 171. Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden, 2003), 106, 107. 172. Jean-Louis Quantin, “Un manuel anti-patristique: Contexte et signification du Traité de l’emploi des saints Pères de Jean Daillé (1632),” in Die Patristik in der Frühen Neuzeit: Die Relektüre der Kirchenväter in den Wissenschaften des 15. Bis 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Günter Frank (Stuttgart, 2006), 299–327; The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2009), 3, 7, 32–33, 74, 228–40, 247–51, 264–67, 331–40, 350–51, 361, 362, 372, 400, 403, 409; and “The Fathers in Seventeenth Century Anglican Theology,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1996), 2:992, 993, 998; Mario Turchetti, “Jean Daillé et son Traicté de l’employ des sanicts pères (1632). Aperçu sur les changements des critères d’appréciation des Pères de l’Eglist entre le XVIe et XVII siècles,” in Les Pères de l’Eglise au XVIIe siècle, ed. Emmanuel Bury and Bernard Meunier (Paris, 1993), 69–85; D. W. Dockrill, “The Authority of the Fathers in the Great Trinitarian Debates of the Sixteen Nineties,” in Studia Patristica, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone, XIII/4 (Leuven, 1990), 335–47. 173. The full title is A Treatise concerning the Right Vse of the Fathers, In the Decision of the Controversies that are at this day in Religion (1651). A variation of Traité was published in 1675 as Faith grounded upon the Holy Scriptures against the New Methodists (1675) [ESTC/D115] (hereafter cited as Daillé, Right Use of the Fathers). 174. Daillé, Right Use of the Fathers, 2, 8–11, 11–34. 175. The editio princeps of Irenaeus’s works was by Erasmus, published in Basel in 1526, and following another edition published in Basel (1534), the Paris edition marked the third publication of the Erasmian editorial work of Irenaeus. See William Smith, ed., Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 3 vols. (1844–49), 2:620.

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176. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.10.1, as cited in Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 2–3. Although the Paris edition that Biddle used has it as Adv. Haer. 1.2, I have followed the PG’s and ANF’s mode of citation. 177. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.22.1, as cited in Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 4–5. The function of the Word and Spirit as agents of creation is rendered as: “sed per Verbum & Spiritum suum omnia faciens, & disponens, & gubernans, & omnibus esse praestans.” 178. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.6.2. Emphasis added. 179. See M. C. Steenberg, Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic Christ and the Saga of Redemption (Leiden, 2008); Sean McDonough, Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine (Oxford, 2009), 239–43. 180. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 15–16. 181. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 16–17. 182. Thomas James to James Ussher, dated January 28, 1623, in The Life of the Most Reverend Father in God, James Usher, late Lord Archbishop of Armagh . . . with a Collection of Three Hundred Letters, ed. Richard Parr (1686), 304. James’s A treatise of the corruption of Scripture, councels, and fathers, by the prelates, pastors, and pillars of the Church or Rome, for maintenance of popery and irreligion (1611) was popular among the English Protestants whose ecclesial identity was marked by deep antipopery; it was republished in 1612 and 1688, right at the peak of the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis. 183. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 33–34, 237, 271, 273, 313, 320. 184. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 25–26. See also Thomas James, A manuduction, or introduction vnto diuinitie containing a confutation of papists by papists, throughout the important articles of our religion (1625). 185. See, inter alia, “the Father of the universe has a Son, who also being the first begotten Word of God, is even God” (First Apology, 63); “I wish to do in order to prove that Christ is called both God and Lord of hosts,” Dialogue with Trypho, 36, 37. Moreover, in Dialogue, Justin continued to develop the theme that Christ is God who appeared to the patriarchs (126); the anthropomorphic passages in the Hebrew Bible refer to the Logos (pre-Incarnate Christ) when the word “God” is used (127); Christ participates in the nature of God (128); and that plural pronouns designating God imply that Christ is part of the Godhead (129). See also Larry Hurtado, “‘Jesus’ as God’s Name, and Jesus as God’s Embodied Name in Justin Martyr,” in Justin Martyr and His Worlds, ed. Sara Parvis and Paul Foster (Minneapolis, 2007), 128–36; Craig D. Allert, Revelation, Truth, Canon, and Interpretation: Studies in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (Leiden, 2002), 175–86. 186. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 43–44. 187. Tertullian, Adversus Praxean, capita 5, cited in Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 45–46. 188. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 53. 189. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 55–56. 190. Biddle cites from capita 24, where Tertullian had argued that the Son was greater than the Paraclete, “for neither would the paraclete receive from Christ.” Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 57.

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191. See the rendering of a recent critical edition and translation: “so he received the dignity of eternal priesthood, the honour of supreme kingship, the power to judge and the name of God.” Lactantius, Divine Institutes, ed., and trans. Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey (Liverpool, 2003), IV.xvii.248. 192. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 76. 193. Lactantius, Divine Institutes, Lib. IV, cap. xxviii, §10, p. 278. 194. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 83–84. This notion of the loss of the purity of the gospel, or what I would call the “Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity” is the focus of chapter 6, as there is an extensive discussion of Huguenot refugee pastor Jacques Souverain’s Platonism Unveiled and its impact on Johannine exegesis of the early Enlightenment and on trinitarian theology in general. 195. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 76. 196. Biddle’s translations were Joachim Stegmann’s Brevis Disquisitio (March, 1653); Samuel Przypkowski’s Vita of Fausto Sozzini (June, 1653); and Przypkowski’s Dissertatio de Pace (October, 1653). 197. CJ, 7:400 (Tuesday, December 12, 1654). 198. CJ, 7:400 (Wednesday, December 13, 1654); McLachlan, Socinianism, 202–3. 199. Cottrell and Moone were incarcerated on December 19. See CJ, 7:404. George Thomason got his copy on December 7, 1653, thereby indicating that although it had gone unnoticed by the heresy harriers, within a year of its publication Dissertatio de Pace ended up in the hands, albeit mostly hostile—though certainly not all—hands of Parliamentarians. 200. CJ, 7:405 (Thursday, December 21, 1654); McLachlan, Socinianism, 204–5. 201. Dissertatio de Pace &c. Or, a Discourse touching the peace and concord of the Church (1653), 22 [hereafter cited as Dissertatio de Pace]. 202. Dissertatio de Pace, 22–30. 203. Dissertatio de Pace, 24–25. 204. Dissertatio de Pace, 24. 205. Dissertatio de Pace, 32. 206. Dissertatio de Pace, 36–39. 207. See chapter 5 for Baxter’s intriguing emphasis on “meer Christianity,” which required that one did one’s best to respond to the extent of revelation, special or natural, one was endowed with, thereby democratizing the politics of predestination greatly. The 1684 edition of Dissertatio de Pace was published by Thomas Malthus. On Malthus, see Henry P. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (Oxford, 1922), 196. 208. CSPD, 8:224 (July 3, 1655); W. Sparrow Simpson, S. Paul’s Cathedral and Old City Life (1894), 275, 277. 209. An Humble Advise to the Right Honorable Lord Mayor, the Recorder, And the rest of the Iustices of the Honorable Bench (1654), 2, 4. 210. For a helpful commentary on the historical development of Arianism at the Council of Ariminum, see John Henry Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century, 3rd ed. (1871), 358–61. 211. An Humble Advise, 5–6. 212. See John Jewel, A replie vnto M. Hardinges ansvveare by perusinge whereof the discrete, and diligent reader may easily see, the weake, and vnstable groundes

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of the Romaine religion, (1565), 287; George Abbot, The reasons which Doctour Hill hath brought, for the vpholding of papistry, which is falselie termed the Catholike religion (Oxford, 1604), 335, 355–56. See also Alexander Nowell, A reproufe, written by Alexander Nowell, of a booke entituled, A proufe of certayne articles in religion denied by M. Iuell, set furth by Thomas Dorman (1565), 72–75. 213. The Spirit of Persecution Again broken loose (1655), 4–5. 214. The Spirit of Persecution Again broken loose, 7, 8. 215. The Spirit of Persecution Again broken loose, 9. Emphasis added. 216. A True State of the Case of Liberty of Conscience (1655), 7. 217. A True State of the Case of Liberty of Conscience, 8–10. 218. CSPD, 8:262. 219. CSPD, 8:372, 374; 9:140. 220. John Biddle, Two Letters of Mr. Iohn Biddle, Late Prisoner in Newgate, But now hurried away to some remote Island. One to the Lord Protector. The other to the Lord President Laurence (1655). 221. CSPD, 8:393 (October 24, 1655). On Peyrère, see Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden, 1987); Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 204–13; Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1999), 52–59, 212. 222. William Poole, “Seventeenth-Century Preadamism, and an Anonymous English Preadamist,” Seventeenth Century 19 (2004): 1–35. 223. Dzelzainis, “Milton and Antitrinitarianism,” in Milton and Toleration, 176; Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. W. C. Abbott, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1937), 3:284. 224. Life of Biddle, 8; McLachlan, Socinianism, 213; Stephen D. Snobelen, “Biddle, John,” ODNB. 225. McLachlan, Socinianism, 214. 226. Smith, “Best, Biddle, and Anti-Trinitarian Heresy,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, 161, 175. 227. The term trinitas denudata is modified from Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s famous, Kabbala denudata seu Doctrina Hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theologica (Sulzbaci, 1677).

Chapter 2 1.

2.

On John Traske (c. 1585–1636), see ODNB; David R. Como, “The Kingdom of Christ, the Kingdom of England, and the Kingdom of Traske,” in Protestant Identities: Religion, Society and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England, ed. Muriel C. McClendon, Joseph P. Ward, and Michael MacDonald (Stanford, CA, 1999), 63–84; Nicholas McDowell, “The Stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England: Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and the Book of Sports Controversy,” Renaissance Studies 19 (2005): 348–63. [Anon.], A Catalogue of the severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nations. With a briefe Rehearsall of their false and dangerous Tenents (1647), t.p.

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3. The full title was A Discovery of the Most Dangerovs and Damnable Tenets that have been spread within this few years: By many Erronious, Heriticall and Mechanick spirits. By which the very foundation of Christian knowledge and practice is endeavoured to be overturned (1647). See figure 2.2. 4. On the notion of the public sphere in this period, see Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). 5. Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, MA, 1972). See also Bryan W. Ball, The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestly (Cambridge, 2008). 6. [Anon.], A Discovery of the Most Dangerovs and Damnable Tenets, 1. 7. With some caveats notwithstanding, as we have seen in chapter 1, I assume that Paul Best and John Biddle embodied the zeitgeist of mid-seventeenth-century Socinianism, English or Continental. 8. Como, Blown by the Spirit. 9. See William Babcock, “A Changing of the Christian God: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century,” Interpretation 45 (1991): 133–46; this “isolationist paradigm” is repeated in an otherwise solid monograph by Jason E. Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008). 10. R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (Oxford, 1950). For an updated treatment of the problem of enthusiasm in early modern and early Enlightenment England, see Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (San Marino, CA, 1998); Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 1995). 11. The same tendency manifests in Keith Thomas’s otherwise magnificent Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York, 1971). 12. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York, 1972), 65, 133, 141, 144, 15, 168, 296. 13. See Nigel Smith, “‘And if God was one of us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and AntiTrinitarian Heresy in Seventeenth-Century England,” in David Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds., Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 160–84; John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, UK, 2006); Ariel Hessayon, ‘Gold tried in the fire’: The Prophet Theaurau John Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot, UK, 2007); Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003). 14. John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1872); E. M. Wilbur, History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, MA, 1945). 15. H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1951). Equally curious in its omission of the radical nontrinitarians is George Hunston

350

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

Notes

Williams’s tour de force, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962), which, in terms of scope covered, is breathtaking and the depth of analysis impeccable. Susan Doran and Christopher Durston, Princes, Pastors and People: The Church and Religion in England 1529–1689 (London, 1991), 29. David Como and Peter Lake, “Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw and its Contexts,” JEH 50 (1999): 701. For a superb analysis of the politics of making heretics in early modern England and New England, see Michael Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, 2002). Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994); Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge; Como, Blown by the Spirit; see also Alistair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge, 1981). W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1933), 158. McLachlan, Socinianism, 31–33. At the same time, however, the policy of cracking down on heresy was not uniformly carried out in local contexts. For instance, in 1583, Richard Baker and his wife of Romford, Essex, had repudiated the traditional doctrine of Christ’s divinity, instead espousing Christ’s teaching that “My Father is greater than I.” Similarly, Richard Plate, a weaver from Romford, averred that the Son was inferior—both ontologically and functionally—to the Father. It is remarkable that Baker was asked to undergo only penance for this patently antitrinitarian view. See F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts, Mainly from Essex Archidiaconal Records (Chelmsford, UK, 1973), 110. For Matthew Hamont, see John Stow, Annales of England, faithfully collected out of the most autenticall Authors, Records, and other Monuments of Antiquitie (1592), 1173–74; John More, A table from the beginning of the world (1592), 225; William Burton, Davids evidence or the assurance of Gods love (1596), 125; Matthew Reynolds, Godly Reformers and Their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560–1643 (Rochester, 2005), 86. For Cole, Lewes, and Kett, see Burton, Davids evidence or the assurance of Gods love, 125; More, A table from the beginning of the world, 225. Kett’s eschatological selffashioning earned him the sobriquet, “Iewish Arrian” by John More, and such ideas are encapsulated in Kett, The glorious and beautifull garland of mans glorification (1585) and An epistle sent to divers papists in England proving the pope to bee the beast in the 13 of the Revelations (1585); Kett’s heretical statements are found in detail in Burton, Davids evidence or the assurance of Gods love, 125. For an excellent study on Kett’s context and his significance, see Dewey Wallace Jr., “From Eschatology to Arian Heresy: The Case of Francis Kett (d. 1589),” HTR 67 (1974): 459–73. Ian Atherton and David Como, “The Burning of Edward Wightman: Puritanism, Prelacy and the Politics of Heresy in Early Modern England,” EHR 120 (2005): 1215–50. Lincolnshire Archive Office, D & C Ciij/13/1/2/4, cited in Atherton and Como, “The Burning of Edward Wightman,” 1234. Atherton and Como, “The Burning of Edward Wightman,” 1235.

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26. CSPD, xiv. 455–56; Luke Owen Pike, A History of Crime in England: Illustrating the Changes of the Laws in the Progress of Civilisation, 2 vols. (1876), 2:125–26. 27. Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall; Treated upon by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York (1640), sigs. D3r-D4v, here D3v. The other two were: “For suppressing the growth of Popery” (sigs. C3v-D3r) and “Against Sectaries” (sigs. D4v-E1v). 28. Sammy Basu, “‘We are in strange hands, and things are come to a strange passe’: Argument and Rhetoric Against Heresy in Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena [1646],” in Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York, 2002), 10. 29. Aside from John Coffey’s brief survey of heresy, there has been a surprising dearth of work dealing with the issue of the politics of heresy and the theological parameters of heresy, as understood and espoused in early modern England. See John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (New York, 2000) and “A Ticklish Business: Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution,” in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006), 108–36. See also Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006). 30. Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004) and Hughes’s essay “Gangraena and Heresiological Traditions,” in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, 137–59; Kei Nasu, “Heresiography and the Idea of ‘Heresy’ in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Religious Culture” (D.Phil. diss., York University, 2000). 31. Obadiah Sedgwick, The Nature and Danger of Heresies (1647); Richad Vines, The Authours, Nature, and Danger of Haeresie (1647); Samuel Rutherford, A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649). See also James Cranford, Haereseo-machia (1646); Thomas Hodges, The Growth and Spreading of Haeresie (1647). 32. Kei Nasu, “Heresiography and the Idea of ‘Heresy,’” 56–57. 33. Patrick Simson, The historie of the Church since the dayes of our Saviour Iesus Christ, vntill this present age. Devided into foure bookes (1624), 447. “Heresis . . . est sentential humano sensu electa scripturae sacrae contraria, palam docta, pertinaciter desensa.” For Simson (1556–1618), a famed Presbyterian preacher of the strictest sort in Stirling, see ODNB and William Law Mathieson, Politics and Religion: A Study in Scottish History from the Reformation to the Revolution, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1902), 1:340–41. 34. See also Quaerimonia Europae diuisa in libros duos, quorum jam exit primus (1625), 70; Edward Bagshaw, The Necessity and Use of Heresies, or the Third and Last Part of the Great Question about indifferent things in Religious Worship (1662), 3; William Prynne, The second tome of an exact chronological vindication and historical demonstration of our . . . English kings supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction over all prelates (1665), 801. 35. John Godolphin, Repertorium canonicum (1678), 69. For Godolphin (1617–1678), a leading civil lawyer who sought to synthesize canon and civil laws of England, as evidenced in Repertorium, see ODNB.

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36. Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to the Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven, 2003), 227. 37. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1646), i.15–16. 38. Edwards, Gangraena, i.19. 39. Edwards, Gangraena, i.21. 40. On exitus-reditus theme of Aquinas’s theology of creation and redemption, see Nicholas Healy, Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life (Aldershot, UK, 2003), 82, 3, 86–87, 103, 118, 136. Creation signifies the going out from God to that which is not God (exitus), and redemption, all things will be led back to God, the source of all being (reditus). The editor for the Summa Theologiae volume on the “Resurrection of the Lord,” Thomas Moore, summarizes it well: “Theology as a science of God and his workings with mankind considers, first of all, God himself, then his production of creatures, and then the goal of this creation. Thus the classic theme is complete, a going-out and a return, exitus-reditus.” C. Thomas Moore’s “Introduction” to Summa Theologiae (Cambridge, 2006), vol. 55, par. 3a, qq. 53–9, p. xiii. 41. See Nigel Smith, ed., A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century (London, 1984). 42. Laurence Clarkson, A Single Eye. All Light, no Darkness; or Light and Darkness One (1650), 4. A more extensive discussion of Clarkson’s non-trinitarianism and A Single Eye will be found later in this chapter. 43. For the issue of unintended morbidity in Calvinistic divinity and puritan spirituality, see John Stachniewsky, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991). 44. See also Edwards, Gangraena, i.49–50, in which Baptists in “Bath and Bristall” were propounding a doctrine nearly identical to it. Letter dated October 27, 1646, from a certain “W. S.” 45. Edwards, Gangraena, i.21, 81. 46. Elsewhere, Edwards summarized the popular antitrinitarian view: “That God the Father did reign under the Law, God the Son under the Gospel, and now God the Father and God the Son are making over the Kingdom to God the holy Ghost, and he shall reign and be poured out upon all flesh.” Gangraena, i.35. 47. Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 2003). 48. See Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimd: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989); Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 2003). 49. Edwards, Gangraena, i.24. These notions are found in Laurence Clarkson, A Single Eye; Jacob Bauthumley, Light and Dark Sides of God (1650); Henry Denne’s The Man of Sin Discovered whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightnesse of his coming: the root and foundation of antichrist laid open in doctrine (1646); and the John Everard/Giles Randall translation of Nicholas of Cusa’s The Single Eye. 50. Edwards, Gangraena, i.22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 60. 51. Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 1306, “A Treatise on Original Sin.” I owe this reference and many conversations related to religio Sociniana to Sarah Mortimer.

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52. Edwards, Gangraena, iii.93. 53. For biographical details of Reeve and Muggleton, see ODNB; see also A. L. Morton, The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution (London, 1970), 138–42; William Lamont, Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652– 1979 (Aldershot, UK, 2006); Christopher Hill, Barry Reay, and William Lamont, The World of the Muggletonians (London, 1983). 54. David Brady, The Contribution of British Writers between 1560 and 1830 to the Interpretation of Revelation 13.16–18: (the Number of the Beast): A Study in the History of Exegesis (Tübingen, 1983), 144–45. 55. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass: Or, The third and last Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . Set forth for the Tryal of all sorts of supposed Spiritual Lights in the world, until the Ever-living true JESUS, the onely High and Mighty God personally appear in the Air, with his Saints and Angels (1656), 2, 36–40. 56. Reeve and Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass, 42. 57. Reeve and Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass, 43. 58. Reeve and Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass, 43–4. 59. Reeve and Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass, 45. 60. Robert Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biographies: Or Sketches of the Lives and Writings of Distinguished Antitrinitarians, 3 vols. (1850); McLachlan, Socinianism. 61. For a detailed analysis of the key role played by the Gospel of John in antitrinitarian and trinitarian exegesis, see chapter 6. 62. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass: or, The third and last Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ, Whose personal Residence is seated on his Throne of Eternal Glory in another world (1661 repr.), 36–38. 63. Reeve and Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass, 81. 64. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Architects of the Middle Ages, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1970), 292. 65. John Holland, The Smoke of the Bottomlesse Pit. Or, a More true and fuller Discovery of the Doctrine of those men which call themselves Ranters: Or, The Mad Crew (1651), 2. 66. For the significant phenomenon to split Jesus of history (historie) and Christ of faith, or redemptive history (geschichte), see Martin Kähler, Der sogenannte Historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblicsche Christus (Leipzig, 1892). Henning Graf Reventlow is unique in treating this issue raised by the Quakers in his The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (Philadelphia, 1985), 225–28. 67. Holland, Smoke of the Bottomlesse Pit, 2–3. 68. Holland, Smoke of the Bottomlesse Pit, 6. 69. Claudius Gilbert, A Soveraign Antidote against Sinful Errors, the Epidemical plague of these latter dayes (1658), 99–100. On Claudius Gilbert, the elder (d. 1696?), see Toby Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English government and Reform in Ireland 1649–1660 (Oxford, 1975), 136, 137, 139, 140, 141; Crawford Gribben, God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford, 2007), 34, 36, 41, 47, 56, 63, 88, 97, 117, 126–27, 135, 157, 176, 178, 181. 70. Gribben, God’s Irishmen, 117.

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71. Gilbert, Soveraign Antidote, 99. 72. Gilbert, Soveraign Antidote, 100. 73. The best work, to date, on the Westminster Assembly and its work is Chad Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652,” 7 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2005). 74. See Sir Thomas More, Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532), in The Complete Works of Sir Thomas More, vol. 8 (New Haven, 1977). 75. See especially “Preface,” in Robert Baillie, Anabaptism the Trve Fovntaine of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, Familisme, and the most of other Errours, which for the time doe trouble the Church of England, Vnsealed (1647), sigs. A4r-v. 76. Baillie, Anabaptism, “Dedicatory Epistle,” sig. *3v. 77. Baillie, Anabaptism, sig. A4v. Milton’s political poem of 1647, “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,” heaps a scorching rebuke on the Scottish straitjacket introduced by “meer A.S. and Rotherford” [Adam Stewart and Samuel Rutherford, two key Scottish theologians who vented their spleen against Independency in A.S., Some observations and Annotations upon the Apologetical Narration (1644), and Samuel Rutherford, The Due Right of Presbyteries (1644)] and names “Edwards,” that is, Thomas Edwards, as the English henchman of the draconian spirit from up North, eventually reaching the anticlimactic nadir in the wake of the dissolving of Episcopacy. Thus Milton ends this political poem with these words: “New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large.” This was eventually published in Milton’s Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions both English and Latin, &c. Composed at several times (1673), 69. 78. Baillie, Anabaptism, 94–95. 79. Baillie, Anabaptism, 93. 80. Baillie, Anabaptism, 97. 81. BL Add. MS. 15669, fols. 174, 238; MS. 15670, fol. 211; MS. 37344, fols. 37, 39, 45–6; MS. 31116, fols. 262–3; Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, UK, 1997), 290. 82. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, 349; Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), 86–87. 83. Baillie, Anabaptism, 98. For the London Baptist Confession of 1644, revised in 1646, see A Confession of Faith of seven Congregations or Churches of Christ in London, which are commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists, second edition (1646), B1r. 84. Confession of Faith of seven Congregations, B3r. 85. Barry H. Howson, Erroneous and Schismatical Opinions: The Question of Orthodoxy Regarding the Theology of Hanserd Knollys (c. 1599–1691) (Leiden, 2001), 235. Yet, as Howson shows, the 1677/89 Confession, the revised and updated version, is far more explicit, thus conforms to the trinitarian language au courant among the avowed defenders of the orthodoxy, vis-à-vis the Socinian conflagration. It reads [the 1677/89 additions in italics]: “In this divine and infinite Being there are three subsistencies, the Father, the Word (or Son), and the Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and Eternity, each having the whole Divine Essence, yet the Essence undivided. . . . ” Confession of Faith (1677/89), 2, 3; as cited in Howson, Errorneous and Schismatical Opinions, 235.

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86. Peter Lake, “‘A Charitable Christian Hatred’: The Godly and Their Enemies in the 1630s,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (New York, 1996), 145–83; Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006). 87. See especially Patrick Collinson, The Puritan Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture (Los Angeles, 1989). 88. Daniel Featley, The Dippers Dipt. Or, the Anabaptists dvck’d and plvng’d Over Head and Eares, at a Disputation in Southwark (1645), 3. 89. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999), 22, 24, 26, 27, 60–61. 90. Ann Hughes, Politics, Society, and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), 81, 308–10, 314–16, 326, 328. 91. Thomas Hall, The Pulpit Guarded with XVII Arguments proving the Unlawfulness, Sinfulness and Danger of suffering Private persons to take up on them Publike Preaching, and expounding the Scriptures without a Call (1651), sig. b1r. 92. Hall, The Pulpit Guarded, sig. b2r. 93. John Brinsley, An Antidote against the Poysonous Weeds of Heretical Blasphemies, Which during the deplorable interval of Church-Government have grown up in the Reforming Church of England (1650), 14. 94. Brinsley, Antidote against the Poysonous Weeds, 14–15. 95. Como, Blown by the Spirit, 39, 335, 347; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), 109; Jean Dietz Moss, “Godded with God”: Hendrik Niclaes and His Family of Love (Philadelphia, 1981). 96. Thomas Taylor, “Preface to the godly Reader,” in Regular Viae, The Rule of the Law under the Gospel (1635), sig. A5v, 135. On the significance of Taylor, see Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), 63, 140, 284, 285, 296–97; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 218; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 37, 51, 54, 69, 96, 105, 107, 125, 140, 174, 181, 193, 232, 273, 487; Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997), 21, 25, 71, 82, 96, 97, 125, 129, 133, 257, 315. 97. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 69. 98. David Como and Peter Lake, “Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw and Its Contexts,” JEH 50 (1999): 684– 715; Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977); Tai Liu, Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark, DE, 1986); Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London; Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge; Como, Blown by the Spirit. 99. [Anon], An Answer to a Book, Intituled, the Doctrine and Discourse of Divorce, or a Plea for Ladies and Gentlewomen, and all other Maried Women against Divorce (1644), 36. Milton’s infamous divorce tract was The doctrine and discipline of divorce: restor’d to the good of both sexes, from the bondage of canon law, and other mistakes, to Christian freedom, guided by the rule of charity (1643).

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100. See, inter alia, Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford, 2006); Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology, ed. Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov (Princeton, 2006); Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light (Oxford, 2008); Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeff rey A. Whittung (Madison, NJ, 2007). 101. Thanks to the Finnish Luther scholarship, led by Tuomo Mannermaa, there has been concerted efforts to see Luther’s understanding of salvation as justification and theosis. See, inter alia, Tuomo Mannerma, “Theosis as a Subject of Finnish Luther Research,” Pro Ecclesia 4 (Winter 1994): 37–48; Reinhard Flogaus, Theosis bei Palamas und Luther: ein Beitrag zum ökumenischen Gespräch (Göttingen, 1997). On Calvin and theosis, see J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford, 2007); Carl Mosser, “The Greatest Possible Blessing: Calvin and Deification,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002): 36–57; see also Jonathan Slater, “Salvation as Participation in the Humanity of the Mediator in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Reply to Carl Mosser,” Scottish Journal of Theology 58 (2005): 39–58. 102. John Turner, A Phisico-Theological Discourse upon the Divine Being, or first Cause of all Things (1698), 220. 103. Turner, Phisico-Theological Discourse, 220. 104. Turner, Phisico-Theological Discourse, 220–21. 105. On Rutherford, see ODNB; John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge, 1997). 106. Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist. Opening the secrets of Familisme and Antinomianisme in the Antichristian Doctrine of John Saltmarsh, and Will. Del, the pretended Preachers of the Army now in England, and of Robert Town, Tob. Crisp, H. Denne, Eaton, and others (1647), 183. On the New England problem with “Socinianism,” see Michael P. Winship, “Contesting Control of Orthodoxy among the Godly: William Pynchon Reexamined,” WMQ 54 (1997): 795–822. 107. Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620– 1660 (Middleton, CT, 1984), 282; Robert Baillie, Dissuasive, 145. 108. Rutherford, “A brotherly and free Epistle to the patrons and friends of pretended Liberty of Conscience,” in Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist, sig. A2v. 109. Rutherford, 123, 125–27, 226–27, 248–49. 110. Rutherford, Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist, 123, 126. 111. Rutherford, Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist, 226–27, 249. See John Saltmarsh, Sparkles of Glory, or, Some Beams of the Morning-Star (1647), 71–72. 112. The best intellectual biography of Samuel Rutherford remains Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 8–9, 82–97. 113. [Henry More], The Second Lash of Alazonomastix laid on in mercie upon that stubborn youth Eugenius Philalethes (Cambridge, 1651), 44. More’s first critique of Vaughan was Observations on Anthroposophia Theomagica and Anima Magica Abscondita (1650); Vaughan’s riposte was The Man-Mouse taken in a Trap and tortur’d to death for gnawing the margins of Eugenius Philalethes (1650). Vaughan’s

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final polemical salvo, The Second Wash, or the Moore scour’d once more (1651), was a response to More’s Second Lash. On the significance of the More-Vaughan debate, see Arlene Miller-Guinsburg, “Henry More, Thomas Vaughan and the Late Renaissance Magical Tradition,” Ambix 27 (1980): 36–58; Frances B. Brann, “The More-Vaughan Controversy: The Revolt against Philosophical Enthusiasm,” JHI 35 (1975): 33–49; Noel L. Brann, “The Conflict between Reason and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England: A Case Study of the Vaughan-More Debate,” HLQ 43 (1980): 103–26. 114. John Biddle, “Preface,” to Twofold Catechism (1654), sigs. A8v-a1r. 115. Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656), 299–300. To be sure, More cites also from Isaac Casaubon and, crucially, from Augustine to support his view of deification. 116. For Leigh (1603–1671), a Presbyterian MP with considerable theological interest, acuity, and output, see ODNB. 117. I have not been able to locate this statement by Gregory Nazianzen in any of his texts in TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) or in the early modern editions of Gregory’s Opera. However, it seems reasonable to deduce that this expression might have come from a pseudo-Gregory text or that Gregory Nazianzen stands as a sort of synecdoche for the Cappadocian theological tradition, especially with regard to theosis. I have learned a good deal from Patout Burns, Ryan Woods, Mark DelCogliano, and David Eastman on this issue. 118. Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity: Wherein the Fundamental and main Grounds of Religion are Opened . . . Most of the Controversies between Us, the Papists, Arminians, and Socinians Discussed and handled (1654), 485–89, here 487. 119. Leigh, Systeme or Body of Divinity, 487. 120. Leigh, Systeme or Body of Divinity, 488. 121. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, 298–303. 122. Anthony Burgess, The Scripture directory for church-officers and people (1659), 208; John Tombes qualifies his doctrine of participation in the likeness divine (through his exegesis of 2 Corinthians 3:18) by asserting that by our steady growth into conformity to Christ through the work of the Spirit, the believer shall “in a good sense . . . christed with Christ.” See Tombes, True old light exalted above pretended new light, or, Treatise of Jesus Christ (1660), 83; Thomas Manton, A practical commentary, or An exposition with notes on the Epistle of Jude (1658), 477. 123. Sir Henry Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, or, the Mysterie and Power of Godliness (1655), 422. 124. John Gauden, IJ era; Davkria, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Suspiria: The Tears, Sighs, Complaints, and Prayers of the Church of England (1659), 195–200, here 196. 125. For Harpius, see Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago, 1992), 291; for a superb intellectual biography on Teresa, focusing on her spirituality, see Rowan Williams, Teresa of Avila (London, 1991). 126. For Family of Love, see Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994); for Hendrik Niclaes, see Jean Dietz Moss,

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“Godded with God”: Hendrik Niclaes and His Family of Love (Philadelphia, 1981); Como, Blown by the Spirit, 4–9, 38–52, 169–73. For Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644), the famed alchemist who also dabbled seriously with mystical theology, and the work carried on by his son Francis, see Jan Baptist van Helmont, A ternary of paradoxes: The magnetick cure of wounds. Nativity of tartar in wine. Image of God in Man (1649), which was issued as a revised edition in 1650, and Johannis Baptistae van Helmont Opera omnia (Frankfurt, 1707). In An Account of Familism as it is revived and propagated by the Quakers shewing the dangerousness of their tenets, and their inconsistency with the principles of common reason and the declarations of Holy Scripture (1673), Henry Hallywell (d. 1703), a Restoration Anglican inveighed against the Quakers by connecting their immanentist Christology with the teaching of Hendrik Niclaes: “Every godly man partaker of the Being of God and Spirit of Love, is God incarnate, and Christ incarnate, and Christ is not any one man the Son of the Virgin Mary: but every man is Godded with God, and Christed with Christ,” 100. 127. Gauden, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Suspiria, 198. 128. While the majority of antinomians repudiated predestination, especially the variety espoused by English Calvinists, figures such as Tobias Crisp, John Everard, and, in particular, John Archer based their repudiation of the “laborious holiness,” which had become a hallmark of Jacobethan Puritanism, precisely on “justification from eternity,” which required theologically the Deity who would orchestrate all contingent affairs before they were actualized in timespace continuum. 129. Rufus M. Jones, Mysticism and Democracy in the English Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA, 1932), 4. 130. Jones, Mysticism and Democracy, 16, 63–65, 77–79, 86. 131. See David Como, Blown by the Spirit. 132. Jones, Mysticism and Democracy, 128–30. 133. Moss, Godded with God, 25. 134. Moss, Godded with God, 40–43. 135. Nancy Hudson, Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa (Washington, DC, 2007), 1; Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scotus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 84–89. 136. John Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids, MI, 2006). 137. Hudson, Becoming God, 5. 138. Hudson, Becoming God, 91. 139. [Nicholas of Cusa], The Single Eye, Entituled the Vision of God. Wherein is infolded the Mistery of Divine presence, trans. Giles Randall (1646), 7–8, 78–79 [hereafter cited as Cusanus, Vision of God]. 140. Hudson, Becoming God. 141. Cusanus, Vision of God, 104–5. 142. Cusanus, Vision of God, 105. 143. Cusanus, Vision of God, 109–10. 144. Cusanus, Vision of God, 123.

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145. Cusanus, Vision of God, 119–20. In another passage (p. 124), Cusanus explains even more succinctly: “And I see blessed Iesus, the son of man most Highly united to thy son, and that the son of man could not be united to thee God the Father, but by mediation of thy son, the absolute Mediator.” 146. Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), 130, 131, 133. 147. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 114–17, 120–21, 126, 128–29, 131, 138, 141. 148. For Como’s analysis of Everard as a key figure in the London antinomian underground, see Blown by the Spirit, 219–65, here 255. 149. See John Everard, The Gospel-Treasury Opened: Or, The Holyest of all Unvailing: Discovering yet more The Riches of Grace and Glory to the Vessels of Mercy, second edition (1659), i. 108. On this issue of the elusive balance of maintaining creation’s relative autonomy and creation bearing the divine imprint through christological coinherence, as witnessed to by the New Testament writers and a key cadre of ante-Nicene writers, see the groundbreaking monograph by Sean McDonough, Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine (Oxford, 2009). 150. Everard, Gospel-Treasury Opened, i.108. 151. Everard, Gospel-Treasury Opened, i.109. On Cusa’s significance in seventeenthcentury English divinity, see T. W. Hayes, “Nicholas of Cusa and Popular Literacy in Seventeenth-Century England,” Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 80–94; and “A Seventeenth-Century Translation of Nicholas of Cusa’s De Dato Patris Luminem,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 11 (1981): 113–36. 152. Everard, Gospel-Treasurey Opened, ii. 146–47, cited in Como, Blown by the Spirit, 227, n. 33. 153. Edwards, Gangraena, i.20. 154. J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986), 61. 155. Laurence Clarkson, A Single Eye. All Light, no Darkness; or Light and Darkness One: In which you have it purely Discussed, 1. The Original of Darkness. 2. What Darkness is. 3. Why is called Darkness. As also, What God is Within, and what Without; how he is said to be One, yet Two; when Two and not One, yet then One, and not Two (1650), sig. A2v. 156. Clarkson, A Single Eye, 2. 157. Clarkson, A Single Eye, 2. 158. Clarkson, A Single Eye, 3, 6, 7–8, 8. 159. Clarkson, A Single Eye, 9. 160. Clarkson, A Single Eye, 11. 161. Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 59–64, here 63. 162. Clarkson, A Single Eye, 2–3. 163. Mercurius Politicus (June 19, 1651), 863–64. 164. An Ordinance Presented to the Honourable house of Commons . . . Pretended for preventing, growing, and spreading of Heresies (1646), 2, 3. The fi nal text of the 1648 ordinance is found in C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 3 vols. (1911), 1:1133–36. On the parliamentary careers of Bacon and Zouch, see David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan

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Revolution (Oxford, 1971), 231, 251 n., 289 n., 345 (Bacon); 64, 127 n., 310 (Zouch). 165. For the details of the polemical skirmish over the issue of toleration of tender consciences that were not worthy of capital punishment, see John Coffey’s excellent monograph on John Goodwin, situating him within the polemical and political context of the Civil War period in London, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006), 141–47. 166. See Underdown, Pride’s Purge; Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America, 192. 167. An Ordinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies, with the several penalties therein expressed (1648), 6. 168. Ordinance for the punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies, 5. 169. The full title is: Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, Derogatory to the Honor of God, and destructive to Humane Society (1650). For the historiographical controversy surrounding the “quest for the historical Ranters,” see J. C. Davis’s opening salvo, Fear, Myth, and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986), and then “Fear, Myth and Furore: Reappraising the ‘Ranters,’” P&P 129 (1990): 79–103. Among other lacerating rebukes of Davis’s own anachronistic historiographical lens, distorting how he evaluated the Ranter phenomenon, see the special “Debate. Fear, Myth and Furore: Reappraising the ‘Ranters,’” P&P 140 (1993): 155–94, with contributions from J. F. McGregor, Bernard Capp, Nigel Smith, and B. J. Gibbons. See also Kathryn Gucer, “‘Not heretofore extant in print’: Where the Mad Ranters Are,” JHI 61 (2000): 75–95. 170. J. F. McGregor, “Debate: Fear, Myth and Furore: Reappraising the ‘Ranters,’” P&P 140 (1993): 155–64, here 158. 171. Act against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, 980. The Act decreed against the categorical inversion of the Ranters, for whom the acts of “Murther, Adultery, Incest, Fornication, Uncleanness, Sodomy, Drunkenness” were intrinsically as “Holy and Righteous,” thus pleasing unto God as duties of prayer, preaching or thanksgiving to God, or worse yet, practice of such deeds renders one “like unto God.” 172. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of Millennium (London, 1957), 321. 173. Berndt Gustafsson, The Five Dissenting Brethren: A Study on the Dutch Background of Their Independentism (Lund, 1955). 174. T. M. Lawrence, “Transmission and Transformation: Thomas Goodwin and the Puritan Project 1600–1704” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2002). I am indebted to my former Cambridge colleague Michael Lawrence for several insights that helped obviate a few key interpretive blunders. See The Works of Thomas Goodwin, D.D., sometime President of Magdalen College in Oxford, 5 vols. (1681–1704). For Hill’s misguided dating of Goodwin’s Works, see Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York, 1984), 179. 175. Thomas Goodwin, Of the Creatures, in Works, 2:1–2. 176. Thomas Goodwin, Knowledge of God the Father, and His Son Jesus Christ, in Works, 2:3, 13.

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177. On July 12, 1645, the House of Lords decreed that Archer’s Comfort for Beleevers be burned, and the Westminster Assembly to publish an official “Detestation of this Heresy.” See Journal of the House of Lords, 7:494. 178. Archer, Comfort for Beleevers, 36–37. 179. Archer, Comfort for Beleevers, 38. 180. Archer, Comfort for Beleevers, 38–39. 181. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, 2007), 240 n. 126. 182. [Zachary Mayne], The Snare Broken, or the Natural and Eternal Deity of the Son of God; As also of the Holy Ghost Asserted (1692), 5. For Mayne, see ODNB; T. M. Lawrence, “Transmission and Transformation,” 60–63. 183. Athenae Oxonienses, 4:412. 184. Lawrence, “Transmission and Transformation,” 62. 185. The Humble Proposals of Mr. Owen, Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Sympson, and other Ministers, who presented the Petition to the Parliament, and other Persons Febr. 11. under debate by a Committee this 31. of March 1652 for the furtherance and Propagation of the Gospel in this Nation (1652). 186. Carolyn Polizzotto, “The Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652,” JEH 38 (1987): 569–81; Jeff rey R. Collins, “The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell,” History 87 (2002): 18–40; David Parnham, “The Nurturing of Righteousness: Sir Henry Vane on Freedom and Discourse,” JBS 42 (2003): 1–34. See also [Henry Vane], Zeal Examined: or, A discourse for liberty of conscience in matters of religion (1652), which sparked off two anonymous pamphlets— one calumniating and the other defending Zeal Examined—The Examiner Examined. Certaine questions proposed to the author of Zeale examined concerning his principles (1652); The examiner defended, in a fair and sober answer to the two and twenty questions which lately examined the author of Zeal examined (1652). 187. See S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656, 4 vols. (London, 1903), 2:331–36. 188. For this conference to hammer out another list of fundamentals, see Paul C. H. Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Its Seventeenth-Century Context (Leiden, 2004), 166–77. 189. Lawrence, “Transmission and Transformation,” 170–75; Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, 241–43. 190. [John Owen, et al.], A New Confession of Faith, fol. B3v. 191. New Confession of Faith, fol. C2r.

Chapter 3 1.

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John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, A Divine Looking-Glass: or, the third and last Testimony of our Lord Jesus Christ, Whose personal Residence is seated on his Throne of Eternal Glory in another world (1661), 41. Remarks on the Life of Mr. Milton, As publish’d by J.T. with a Character of the Author and his Party (1699), “Postscript,” 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74. On p. 70, in fact, the author argues that “as to our English Socinians, they don’t adhere to Biddle’s

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

Notes

Confession and Catechism, no more than the Foreign Socinians do that of Racovia, which in the several Editions of it has had divers Important Alterations.” See Johannes Cloppenburg, Vindiciae pro deitate Spiritus sancti; adversus pneumatomachum Johannem Bidellum, Anglum (Franeker, 1652), “epist. ded.” For Cloppenburg’s contribution as a covenant theologian, see his Syntagma selectarum exercitationumn theologicarum (Franeker, 1645) and Exercitationes super locos communes theologicos (Franeker, 1653); and David N. J. Poole, The History of the Covenant Concept from the Bible to Johannes Cloppenburg (Lewiston, NY, 1995). Thus, I differ from Nigel Smith’s interpretation that Biddle’s prose style is “antirhetorical” and is a “very hard read.” To be sure, Smith correctly points out the wooden, methodical style of Biddle, yet in all of Biddle’s oeuvre, his syntax and structuring of sentences are not inordinately complex, for his primary aim was catechetical. See Nigel Smith, “‘And if God Was One of Us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and Anti-Trinitarian Heresy in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006), 161. Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010). See also Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 2003). G. R. Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates (Cambridge, 1992). Beverley C. Southgate, “Covetous of Truth”: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676 (Dordrecht, 1993), 7; Sylvester Jenks, A View of Mr. White’s Principles (1712), 47. Thomas White, “Preface,” to William Rushworth’s Dialogues. Or, The Judgment of common sence in the choyce of Religion (Paris, 1654), sig. **7r; for White’s fight against Pyrrhonism, see Beverley C. Southgate, “‘Cauterising the Tumour of Pyrrhonism’: Blackloism versus Skepticism,” JHI 53 (1992): 281–94; Jeff rey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), 90–91, 136, 139–40, 147, 178–80, 182, 194, 204. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (London, 1987), 166–230; Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2009), 188, 194, 196, 201, 209–27, 267–83, 287, 294; see also H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1951), 63–95. Thomas White, “Daillé’s Arts discover’d: or, his Right Use, prov’d a Downright Abuse of the Fathers,” in Apology for Rushworths Dialogues. Wherein The Exception of the Lords Falkland and Digby are answer’d: And The Arts of of their commended Daillé Discover’d (Paris, 1654), 179–261, 193–94, here 182. White, “Daillé’s Arts discover’d,” 183–84. For the cultural symbolic meaning of “blue apron” in early modern England, see Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities, 1550–1820 (2007). http://www. british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=58704. Nathan Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989) argues that one of the implicit keys in this democratization was the liberative

Notes

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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power of the Word, but especially as the hermeneutical authority was ceded to the laity. This was nowhere more acutely felt than in the revolutionary decades during and after the English Civil War. White, “Daillé’s Arts discover’d,” 197–99, 208–15. On the selective appropriation of patristic authorities among the Reformers, see Scott H. Hendrix, “Deparentifying the Fathers: The Reformers and Patristic Authority,” in Auctoritas Patrum: Zur Rezeption der Kirchenväter im 15 und 16 Jahrhundert, ed. Leif Grane (Mainz, 1993), 55–68; John C. English, “The Duration of the Primitive Church: An Issue for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Anglicans,” Anglican and Episcopal History 73 (2004): 35–51. Thomas White, Controversy-Logicke, Or The Methode to come to truth in debates on Religion (1659), 3, 5. White, Controversy-Logicke, 3. So White puts it: “there is nothing but meere willfulnesse to move any of the forementioned persons, to believe firmely any conclusion of faith and Religion, or to censure rationally any who hold the contrary opinions,” presaging that soon a theological will-to-power will predominate. See White, Controversy-Logicke, 4. White, Controversy-Logicke, 5, 6. White, Controversy-Logicke, 12–13. White, Controversy-Logicke, 9, 10. White, Controversy-Logicke, 8–9. White, Controversy-Logicke, 10. White, Controversy-Logicke, 93–95. So White continues, showing agreement with the Protestants: “In the Trinity, and in the Incarnation, Protestants do the like; acknowledging these Mysteries to be true, but withal professing them to be above their understanding” (94). For a lucid presentation and analysis of Boyle’s philosophical defense of the Trinity, see Jan W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge, 1997). Sir Kenelm Digby, A Discourse concerning Infallibility in religion written by Sir Kenelme Digby to the Lord George Digby (Paris, 1652), 199–228. On Digby, see Stefania Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (Aldershot, UK, 2008), 101–2; Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, 174, 175; Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 34, 61, 89, 91, 113, 136–39, 147, 178–79. Digby, Discourse concerning Infallibility, 190. Digby, Discourse concerning Infallibility, 191, 194. Digby, Discourse concerning Infallibility, 208. Digby, Discourse concerning Infallibility, 207. Valerian Magni, A Censure about the Rule of Beleefe Practised by the Protestants (Douai, 1634), 28–29; for Magni’s ecumenical efforts to usher in ecclesiastical union in eastern Europe, see Howard Louthan, “Mediating Confessions in Central Europe: The Ecumenical Activity of Valerian Magni, 1586–1661,” JEH 55 (2004): 681–99; and “From Rudolfine Prague to Vasa Poland: Valerian Magni and the Twilight of Irenicism in Central Europe,” in Conciliation and Confession: the Struggle for Unity in the Age of Reform, 1415–1648, ed. Howard P. Louthan and Randall C. Zachman (Notre Dame, IN, 2004), 199–227.

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31. Magni, Censure about the Rule of Beleefe, 29. 32. Digby, Discourse concerning Infallibility, 207. 33. I owe the term, “second generation Laudian” to Kenneth Fincham (personal correspondence, June 19, 2010). On Thorndike’s significance as an intransigent embodiment of the Laudian sensibilities, see Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c. 1700 (Oxford, 2007), 284, 285, 291–96, 304; Robert Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians, 1649–1662 (London, 1951), 17, 30, 35, 37, 38, 93, 122, 157–58, 160, 191; J. W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660: With Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester, 1969), 61, 187, 198. On Thorndike’s patristic scholarship and ecclesiology, see Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 306, 327, 331–44, 347, 352–65, 399. A more hagiographical portraiture of Thorndike is in A. W. Haddan, “Life of Herbert Thorndike,” in H. Thorndike, The Theological Works of Herbert Thorndike, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1844–1856), 6:153–266. 34. See P. Barwick, The Life of John Barwick (1724), 400; T. A. Lacey, Herbert Thorndike, 1598–1672 (London, 1929), 83–109. 35. The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham, 1650–1660, ed., Sir Gyles Isham (Northampton, UK, 1944), 24, n. 9. I owe this reference and other illuminating conversations dealing with Isham, Paul Best, and Roger Ley to my former Vanderbilt colleague Isaac Stephens. 36. DWL MS 59, “Baxter Letters,” iv. 69 (dated September 27, 1659). For Pierre Du Moulin, see ODNB; Vivienne Larminie, “The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the du Moulin Connection and the Location of the Church of England in the Later Seventeenth Century,” in The Religious Culture of the Huguenots, 1660–1750, ed. Anne Dunan-Page (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 55–68. For the history of the Grotian religion and Baxter’s deep-seated, though perhaps unfounded, fear that the Church of England was about to lose its independence due to the potential Gallican “take-over,” see G. F. Nuttall, “Richard Baxter and the Grotian Religion,” in Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c.1500–c.1750, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford, 1979), 245–50; Joseph Levine, “Matter of Fact in the English Revolution,” JHI 64 (2003): 327–28; Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity and Liberty, 191–223. 37. Herbert Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, Book II of An Epilogue of the Tragedy of the Church of England (1659), in Works of Herbert Thorndike, 3:12–13. 38. Michael McGiffert, “Herbert Thorndike and the Covenant of Grace,” JEH 58 (2007): 448. In this otherwise amiably argued essay of revisionistic history of mid-seventeenth-century Laudian divinity, focusing on the covenant theology of Herbert Thorndike, McGiffert rightly notes that the covenant of grace was a major—if not the—epicenter of Thorndike’s theology. However, McGiffert fails to note the extent to which Thorndike sought to defend the church from the encroachment of Socinianism. Although McGiffert does mention that Thorndike was concerned to defend the doctrinal purity of the Laudian Church of England from the encroachment of Socinianism, one gets no such impression that Of the Covenant of Grace devotes a substantial part, indeed almost half, to answering

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39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

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the Socinian antitrinitarian challenges. See McGiffert, “Herbert Thorndike and the Covenant of Grace,” 443. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 2–3. On the question of Protestantism and the intractably “democratic” impulse within it, see David Hempton, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion c. 1750–1900 (New York, 1996). On the Ciceronian influence, mediated through Erasmus, further consolidated by Melanchthon, and reaching its final precritical shape in Matthias Flaccius Illyricus’s Clavis Scripturae Sacrae (1567), see Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven, 1997), chapters 4–6. In this regard, Thorndike is similar to Sir Kenelm Digby, who had lumped the Socinians and Independents together for their ecclesiological error, which inexorably brought in more fundamental errors regarding the Trinity and satisfaction. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 3. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 5–6. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 11. Unsurprisingly, Thorndike indiscriminately lumps together, under the rubric of antinomians, “all our Anabaptists, all our Familists, all our Enthusiasts, and Quakers” (13). Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 13. John Morrill, “The Church in England, 1642–9,” in Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649, ed. John Morrill (New York, 1982), 93, 104–8; Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998); John Evelyn, Diary, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford, 1955), 3:150, 203–4. Edmund Porter, Trin-Unus-Deus. Or the Trinity, and the Unity of God (1657), 63–75. Porter, Trin-Unus-Deus, 64. Porter, Trin-Unus-Deus, 66, 67, 70. For the ecclesiastical squabbles in Norwich in the 1630s that involved Porter, as he had been installed as the prebend of the Norwich Cathedral in 1627, see Matthew Reynolds, “Predestination and Parochial Dispute in the 1630s: The Case of the Norwich Lectureships,” JEH 59 (2008), 421. The Episcopalian conviction that “Doxology” and Prayer Book religion was sine qua non in defending the doctrine of the Trinity against the steady encroachment of the rational religion of Socinianism continued in the Restoration period. Among others, the Restoration Scottish Episcopalian Robert Edward’s The Doxology Approven (Edinburgh, 1683) was a concise argument for the inseparable connection between lex orandi and lex credendi. The full title is The Doxology Approven, or, The Singing Glory to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the Worship of God, Its lawfulness and expediency proven from the Holy Scriptures, Councils and Fathers, and the Scruples of the Weak thereanent, cleared. On Edward, see Scottish Episcopal Clergy, 1689–2000, ed. David M. Bertie (Edinburgh, 2000), 38. Bodl. Rawlinson MS E. 21, Thomas Swadlin, “Whitsunday Sermon, June 26, 1646,” fols. 224r-239r. On Swadlin, see ODNB; Wood, Ath. Oxon. 3:887–89; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised, being a revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion, 1642–60 (Oxford, 1948), 59. In his letter dated November 8, 1658, Richard Baxter alerts William White of the divisive spirit among the Laudians, mentioning Thomas Swadlin (along with Peter

366

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

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Heylyn, Thomas Pierce, and Edward Hyde). DWL MS 59, “Baxter Letters,” Letters, 2:45. Bodl. Rawlinson MS E. 21, fol. 224v. For the filioque reference, as Swadlin is dependent on Thomas Aquinas, see fol. 235r. I owe the transcript of this key sermon by Swadlin to the generosity of Isaac Stephens. Swadlin’s polemical swipe was not limited to the Puritans. Characteristic among not a few Laudians, Swadlin attacks the papists for a spurious book called “The Gospell of Holie Ghost.” Bodl. Rawlinson MS E. 21, fol. 228v. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 7, 16–29. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 27. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 59–60. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 60–61. C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (London, 1966), 54, 61, 91, 96, 106–17, 132, 137, 138, 147, 150, 157, 158, 163, 179, 185–86, 189–90, 193, 194, 195, 198, 200. Allison’s caricature has also been roundly criticized by Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008). Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 61. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 64. Jean-Louis Quantin, “The Fathers in Seventeenth-Century Anglican Theology,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (Leiden, 1997), 2:987–1008; “Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity,” in History of Scholarship, ed. C. Ligotta and Jean-Louis Quantin (Oxford, 2006), 305–56; and The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2009), 327, 329, 336–37, 352–66; and Joseph M. Levine, The Autonomy of History: Truth and Method from Erasmus to Gibbon (Chicago, 1999). The ante-Nicene authors Thorndike cites in Covenant of Grace, 290–96, are identical—with the exception of Thomas Brightman, an Elizabethan millenarian exegete—with the list of pre-Nicene fathers listed on Biddle’s title page. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 299. See Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 288–89. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 291–94. He also cites from Tertullian’s Contra Hermogenem, cap. iii, in which he says: “nam nec Pater potuit esse ante Filium” (for neither could he be Father before the Son) in the same way that God could not be Judge before sin came into the world, thereby emphasizing a temporal reality, indeed, change, in God’s being as the Son came into being (290–91). Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 291; cf. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 42–44, 46–47. Ignatius, Epist. ad Ephes., cap. 18; Athanasius, De Synodis Armin. et Seleuc., cap. 47; Justin Martyr, Dial. cum Tryph., caps. 29, 61; cited in Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 295. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. Lib. II, cap. 48; Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, Lib. I, cap. 2; cited in Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 296. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 313.

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69. Thorndike, Covenant of Grace, 315. 70. E. M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, MA, 1945), 196. On Gunning’s pivotal role as a second-generation Laudian, see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 283, 284, 290, 291, 296–97, 306. I owe this reference and correspondence concerning the nature and trajectory of the “second-generation Laudians” to Kenneth Fincham. 71. Gunning’s efforts to be an apologist for the Laudian liturgy and the theology of the Church of England during the post–Civil War “exile” period for Anglicanism brought handsome rewards for him, including the Regius Professorship of Divinity, an equally prestigious mastership at St. John’s College, both at Cambridge in June 1661, and marking the zenith of his ecclesiastical career as the bishop, ad seriatim, of Chichester (1670–1675) and of Ely (1675–1684). For details on Gunning’s life and career, see ODNB and Alum. Cantab., s.v.; H. A. Lloyd Jukes, “Peter Gunning, 1613–84: Scholar, Churchman, Controversialist,” in Studies in Church History, vol. 1, ed. C. W. Dugmore and Charles Duggan (London, 1964), 222–32; Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 1660–1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and Their Diocese (Oxford, 2000), 43–44, 46–47, 54, 56; Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 274, 280, 386, 390. 72. See A Contention for Truth: In Two Several Publique Disputations. Before thousands of People, at Clement Dane Church . . . Betweene Mr Gunning on the one part, and Mr Denne on the other (1658). Henry Denne (1605–1666), a Cambridge-educated Baptist minister, had already been cited in Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena as a leading “Anabaptist, a great Antinomian, a desperate Arminian” sectary who was deluding the London laity with his “seditious” teaching, after he was rebaptized by a “mechanic.” He had been a member of Thomas Lamb’s Baptist congregation, which met in Bell Alley, on Coleman Street. See Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1648), Part i. 76, 181, 182; Part iii, 86, 87. On Denne’s peripatetic endeavors, see ODNB; Alum. Cantab., Pt. I, vol. ii, 32; Anne Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), 5, 6, 109, 153, 190, 200, 263, 283, 310; William Urwick, Nonconformity in Herts: Being Lectures upon the Nonconforming Worthies of St. Albans, and Memorials of Puritanism and Nonconformity in all the Parishes of the County of Hertford (1884), 664–66; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1972), 35, 56, 84, 91, 102, 133, 135, 244, 302; Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977), 77–78, 158, 189; Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed (Oxford, 1989), 313–15, 321, 323. 73. Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty, 200–2; for Baxter’s counterrefutation of Gunning, see Rel. Bax., Appendix I, 1–18. 74. See Schisme Unmask’t: Or, A late Conference betwixt Mr. Peter Gunning and Mr. John Pierson Ministers, on the one part, and two Disputants of the Roman Profession on the other (Paris, 1658), especially “The Preface” for the historical provenance of the debate and the literary origins; “Memoir of Bishop Pearson,” in The Minor Theological Works of John Pearson, D.D., ed. Edward Churton, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1844), 1:xxxiv–xxxv. 75. McLachlan, Socinianism, 187; Wilbur, History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America, 200–1. In 1656, Gunning began to minister in the chapel

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76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

Notes

of Exeter House on the Strand; as John Evelyn testifies in his diaries, Gunning’s ministry provided the liturgical and theological backbone for intransigent Anglicanism in the midst of the hegemonic struggle between the Independents and Presbyterians in Parliament and the city. See Evelyn, Diary, 3:150, 203–4. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 284. Tai Liu, Discord in Zion: The Puritan Divines and the Puritan Revolution 1640– 1660 (The Hague, 1973). G. Sujin Pak, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford, 2010), 4. Pak makes a helpful distinction between the magisterial Reformers’ hermeneutical commitment to prima scriptura, over against the Anabaptists’ sola scriptura; unsurprisingly, the same typology applies to Gunning (prima scriptura) and Biddle (sola scriptura). Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, “A Dispute between Mr John Biddle and Mr Peter Gunning. June 3, 1654,” fol. 8. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fols. 8–9. See Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986); Jonathan Sheehan, “Sacred and Profane: Idolatry, Antiquarianism, and the Polemics of Distinction in the Seventeenthcentury,” P&P 192 (2006): 35–66; and Brian Cummings, “Iconoclasm and Bibliophobia in the English Reformations, 1521–1558,” in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, ed. Jeremy Dimmock, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford, 2002), 185–206. See also Richard Kyle, “John Knox and the Purification of Religion: The Intellectual Aspects of His Crusade against Idolatry,” ARG 77 (1986): 265–80; Carina L. Johnson, “Idolatrous Cultures and the Practice of Religion,” JHI 67 (2006): 597–621; and “Stone Gods and CounterReformation Knowledges,” in Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago, 2007), 233–47. See John C. Godbey, “Socinus and Christ,” and G. H. Williams, “The Christological Issues between Francis Dávid and Faustus Socinus during the Disputation on the Invocation of Christ, 1578–1579,” both in Antitrinitarianism in the Second Half of the 16th Century, ed. Róbert Dán and Antal Pirnát (Leiden, 1982), 57–64, 287–322. The following account is largely dependent on Godbey and Williams. Ferenc Dávid averred: “Intercessore enim opus est, ubi est hostilitas. Ubi est amicitia, satis est amico significare, quid velis,” as cited in Socinus, De Jesu Christi Invocatione Disputatio, in Fausti Socini Senensis Opera Omnia in Duos Tomos Distincta, published as part of Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum quos Unitarios vocant (Irenopoli, 1656), 2.759. Socinus, De Jesu Christi Invocatione Disputatio, in Fausti Socini Senensis Opera Omnia in Duos Tomos Distincta (Irenopoli, 1656), 2.726, 742. In his De Jesu Christo Servatore, pt. 3, Socinus continues to argue that based on the exaltation of Christ, he now has a unique relationship, both with the Father and with the church. See De Jesu Christo Servatore (1594), pt. 3, 277, 278, 302. I owe this reference to Professor Alan Gomes. See also Alan Gomes, “The Rapture of the Christ: The ‘Pre-Ascension Ascension’ of Jesus in the Theology of Faustus Socinus (1539– 1604),” HTR 102 (2009): 75–99.

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85. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fols. 1–2. 86. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 2. 87. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 2. Biddle proceeded further to infuriate Gunning by arguing that Jesus Christ is “held forth to bee worshipped in the New Testament . . . as a Man” (fol. 3). 88. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 4. 89. See PRO, SP 16/193, fol. 157, cited in Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600—1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 311. 90. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 5. As we will see in chapter 5, diatribe against Roman idolatry was a shared polemical framework for Thomas Hobbes as well, especially in his Historia Ecclesiastica. 91. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 6. In the MS, the amanuensis wrongly rendered it as “Ps. 59:7.” The only text that fits the theme of the theological exegesis of Hebrews 1:6 is Psalm 97:7. Both the King James and Geneva versions rendered Psalm 97:7b as “worship him, all ye gods,” whereas the Douay-Rheims rendered it, apposite Gunning’s purposes, as “angels.” 92. In fact, Biddle was absolutely certain that Hebrews 1:6 showed the contrary of what Gunning had hoped it taught; that is, rather than proving the deity of Christ (as the “most high God”), it showed that Christ was a creature, though exalted he might have been, and in fact, angels were antecedent to Christ’s being begotten. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 7. 93. The recording of this disputation shows the raised temperature in the heat of the polemic. After Biddle threw down his gauntlet that Hebrews 1:6 nowhere taught the deity of Christ, Gunning retorted, “For God’s sake let me speake a little,” Biddle’s riposte to which was “Speake against this I say!” Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fols. 6–7. 94. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 7. Emphasis original. 95. Benjamin Needler, Notes with Practical Observations; towards the opening of the five first Chapters of the first Book of Moses called Genesis (1654), 249–50. 96. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians, 1.1; 18.2; 7.2, cited in J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (San Franciso, 1978), 143. See also Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), trans. John Bowden (New York, 1965), 453. 97. Tertullian, De Carne Christi, 5 (PL 2.761–2). It was in this chapter that Tertullian famously touted his “fideism” over against Marcion’s inordinate rationalism and declared that since the death of the Son of God seems most absurd, it must be believed, and since the resurrection of Christ is impossible, it is indeed certain (“et mortuus est Dei Filius; prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est: et sepultus, resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile”). 98. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 298, 300; Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God (Oxford, 2008), 129, 136. 99. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xiv.1, 2, italics added. 100. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fols. 11–12. Then Biddle followed with another polemical jab, which Gunning reluctantly granted, was forcible, although ultimately unconvincing: “I say, that the Comparison is between Christ & the Father, namely

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their Persons & if the Person of the Son be less then the Person of the Father, then the Son is not the Most high God” (fol. 12). 101. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 12. 102. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 13. 103. Athanasius, as cited in the “Exposition of Faith of the Third Council of Constantinople, 680–681,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, S.J., 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1990), 1:128. 104. Bodl. MS Rawlinson C 166, fol. 15. 105. For information on Nicholas Estwick, rector of Warkton, Northamptonshire between 1617 and 1658, see Northamptonshire Notes and Queries 6 (1896): 77. He had preached the funeral sermon for Robert Bolton, a leading Puritan divine of Northamptonshire—and author of the famed Some General Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God (1630)—on December 19, 1630, and thus was renowned for his impeccable standing among the godly. This sermon was published as A Learned and godly sermon preached on the XIX. day of December, anno Dom. MDCXXXI. at the funerall of Mr. Robert Bolton (1633). He published two key anti-Biddlean treatises in 1648 and 1655, respectively. See also Alum. Cantab. Part I, 2:82. 106. Nicholas Estwick, PNEUMATOLOGIA: Or, a Treatise of the Holy Ghost (1648), sigs. A3r-v [hereafter cited as Estwick, Pneumatologia]. 107. Estwick, Pneumatologia, sig. A4v. 108. Estwick, Pneumatologia, sig. A4r, 31. 109. Estwick, Pneumatologia, 2; this exegetical strategy would be followed by Matthew Poole, BLASFHMOKTONI vA: The Blasphemer Slaine with the Sword of the Spirit (1653), 12 [hereafter cited as Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), to distinguish it from the second edition]. 110. The eight positive arguments for the deity of the Holy Spirit are in Estwick, Pneumatologia, 1–32; his refutation of Biddle’s Twelve Arguments are on 33–99. 111. Estwick, Pneumatologia, 18–19. 112. Estwick, Pneumatologia, 38. See Peter Lombard, Sententiarum Quatuor Libri, in Opera Omnia S. Bonaventurae, 10 vols. (Quaracchi, 1882), I:62–6, Lib. 1, distinctio 3. The first chapter dealt with the theme: “De cognitione Creatoris per creaturas in quibus Trinitatis vestigium apparet,” followed by the image of the Trinity in the human soul in the second chapter, and the similitudes between the Trinity in God and that in the creature in the third. The de Mornay text that Estwick is referring to discusses the following issues: the unity-in-Trinity and the prisca theologica and its relationship with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. See Philippe de Mornay, De Veritate Religionis Christianae (Antwerp, 1583), 72–123. Elsewhere(Pneumatologia, 67), Estwick paraphrases from Hermes Trismegistus: “It’s a memorable expression used by Hermes Trismegistus, a Heathen, hee compare’s God to a perfect Sphere, whose centre is every-where, and circumference no where.” On the issue of vestigia trinitatis in England, see Dennis R. Klinck, “Vestigia Trinitatis in Man and His Works in the English Renaissance,” JHI 42 (1981): 13–27. 113. Estwick, Pneumatologia, 48.

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114. Therein lay precisely the dilemma for the trinitarians. On the one hand, they were forced to defend the salutarity of the Trinity with scriptural texts, undergirded by use of redeemed rational faculty, yet simultaneously they were acutely cognizant of the limits of human theologizing. Seen in that context, the protrinitarians’ frequent hearkening of apophatic theology seems a more sincere recognition of the fractured nature of all human discourse about God, while feeling all the more the urgency of proffering some “rational” defense of the Trinity. 115. Estwick, Pneumatologia, 69. 116. See Justin Martyr, First Apology, cap. 63; Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 3.6.2 (“And again, when the Son speaks to Moses, He says, I have come down to deliver this people. [Exodus 3:8] For it is He who descended and ascended for the salvation of men”). 117. Estwick, Pneumatologia, 71. 118. Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Exodum: That is, A Sixfold Commentary upon the second booke of Moses called Exodus, 2 vols. (1608), 33. Here Willet, a noted Puritan biblical scholar of his generation, follows the majority trinitarian exegetes and argues that the “Angel of the Lord” in verse 2 should be interpreted as “Christ himself, that appeared here in his person, though not his substance.” H. A[insworth], “Annotations upon the second Booke of Moses, called Exodus,” in his Annotations upon the five books of Moses and the booke of Psalms, 6 pts. (Amsterdam, 1622), pt. ii, fol. B2v. Here Ainsworth simply comments that “this was Christ, who in vers. 6 calleth himselfe the God of Abraham.” Similar Christological exegesis is seen in John Lightfoot, one of the leading Puritan biblical scholars, as he asserts that it was “Christ that spake to him out of the bush.” See Lightfoot, An handful of gleanings out of the book of Exodus (1643), 5, 8, and 45, 46 (for his typological exegesis). See also Christopher Cartwright, Electa Thargumico-Rabbinica: Sive Annotationes in Exodum (1653), 23–24, for a surprisingly minimalist reading of the text; Gervase Babington, Comfortable notes upon the bookes of Exodus and Leviticus (1604); cf. Francis Taylor, Targum Hierosolymitanum in quinque libros legis, e lingua chaldaica in latinam conversum (1649), 35. 119. Babington, Comfortable notes upon the bookes of Exodus and Leviticus, 32–33, 36–37. 120. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 56.4. See also 58.3, where Justin builds on his Logos Christology in which the preincarnate Logos serves as the mediator of revelation: “Moses states in Scripture that he who is termed God, and who appeared to the patriarchs, is also called Angel and Lord, in order that by these expressions you may recognize him as the minister of the Father of all things.” Cf. 59.1; 62.5. 121. As cited in Estwick, Pneumatologia, 93–94. 122. Estwick, Pneumatologia, 94; Franz Dünzl, A Brief History of the Doctrine of the Trinity in the Early Church, trans. John Bowden (London, 2007), 11–40. 123. For the Walker-Wotton affair, see Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2004), 221–57.

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124. Estwick, Pneumatologia, 97. On this point, Richard Muller’s historical perspective is helpful: “The Reformed doctrine of the Trinity . . . is characterized by a declaration of the aseity of Christ’s divinity: considered as God, the Second Person of the Trinity is a se ipso—he is autotheos. This had been a point of controversy with both antitrinitarians and with Rome since the time of Calvin, and in the course of the development of Reformed dogmatics in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century, it became not only the distinctive feature of Reformed trinitarianism but also a crucial point, defended against any and all opponents.” See Richard A. Muller, PRRD, 4:324; Hampton, Anti-Arminians, 166–89. 125. The full title is Mr. Bidle’s Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity, wherein His chiefe designe to overthrow that sacred mystery and the deity of our Blessed Saviour is Examined and Confuted (1656), sig. B1r [Hereafter cited as Estwick, Mr. Bidle’s Confession of Faith]. 126. Estwick, Mr. Bidle’s Confession of Faith, 318–417. 127. On Poole, see ODNB; Alum. Cantab., vol. III, pt. i, 378; McLachlan, Socinianism, 131, 136, 251, 252. 128. This corrects E. M. Wilbur’s mistaken notion that the first edition of Blasphemer Slaine was published in 1647. See A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, MA, 1945), 204. 129. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), sigs. A1r-A3r. 130. See Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985); Ole Peter Grell, Brethren in Christ: A Calvinist Network in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2011). 131. Johannes Hoornbeeck, Socinianismi Confutati tomus primus (Utrecht, 1650). 132. Samuel Maresius, Hydra Socinianismi expugnata (Groningen, 1651). 133. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), sigs. A3r, A5v. 134. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), sig. A9 v-A10r. Cf. 2–3 with Estwick, Pneumatologia, 1–5. 135. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), 11–17; Estwick, Pneumatologia, 6–10. 136. Poole’s Argument 7, “Actions of the Holy Spirit” overlaps a good deal with Estwick’s Argument 5, “Works of God is done by the Holy Spirit.” See Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), 37–46; Estwick, Pneumatologia, 18–23. 137. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), sigs. A3v-A4r. 138. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), 34. 139. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), 49, 52. 140. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine, 2nd ed. (1654), 41. In both these scriptural citations, Poole identifies incorrect references: Poole has Matthew 7:8 (should be 6:33) and 10:6 (should be 12:28). 141. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine, 2nd ed. (1654), 40–41. 142. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), 52; cf. Blasphemer Slaine, 2nd ed. (1654), 43. 143. Poole, Blasphemer Slaine (1653), 45–46; Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 219. 144. On Benjamin Needler, see E. C. Vernon’s excellent entry in ODNB, s.v. 145. See Rel. Bax., III, 94. 146. John Harper, “Breife notes taken from ye Sermons upon severall heads of Divinity preached by Mr. Ben. Needler minister of St Margt Moses Fryday str. Parish:

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begune Lord day ye 5th August 1655,” UCLA Clark Library, MS B8535 M3, 1625– 1665, fol. 1r [hereafter cited as John Harper, “Breife notes,” followed by the folio number]. I owe this reference and the notes thereof as well to the generosity of Professor Ann Hughes. John Calvin, Confession de la Foy, in OS, i. 418; Philip Melanchthon, Loci Theologici Recens Recogniti (Wittenberg, 1543), fos. A1r-A7v is where “De patefactione Dei” is presented, followed by a discussion of the Trinity; Wolfgang Musculus, Loci Communes in usus sacrae Theologiae candidatorum parati (Basel, 1560), 1–10 (De Deo), 10–11 (divinity of Christ), 11–13 (divinity of the Holy Spirit). 147. It is printed in The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, Now by Authority of Parliament sitting at Westminster, Concerning a Confession of Faith, with the Quotations and Texts of Scripture annexed (1647), 1–6. It is noteworthy that WCF anchors the authority of religion, not to Scripture itself, but rather to the Spirit speaking in Scripture, which is, again, very clearly Calvinian: “X. The Supreme Judge which all Controversies of Religion are to be determined, and all Decrees of Councels, Opinions of Ancient Writers, Doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined; and, in whose Sentence we are to rest; can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture” (6). 148. Harper, “Briefe notes,” fol. 3v. 149. Harper, “Briefe notes,” fol. 6r. 150. Harper, “Briefe notes,” fol. 39v. To be sure, Needler throws a jab at the seventeenth-century manifestation of Anabaptists, who had nothing but contempt for “lawful ministry,” spurned the “doctrine of repentance,” jumped in with great alacrity to the heresy of Ranterism, and quips memorably: “Thus Antinomian is a Ranter dignified.” See fols. 41r–42r. 151. Needler, “The Trinity Proved by Scripture,” 77–78. Such a polemical move to deflate the ability of human nature of arrive at adequate understanding of the Triune God led Needler to aver that when the heathens—especially the Platonists— sometimes had nearly identical views of the divine triad as the Christians, it was attributable to the Platonists borrowing from Moses, not by “the improvement of natural light,” and that the texts of Plato and Trismegistus that purportedly taught about the Trinity were “not writ by them, but foisted into their works by some that lived in after ages.” This stance, though not original with Needler at all, does encapsulate Needler’s conservative Calvinistic perspective, at least with regard to natural theology and light. See p. 79. 152. [Thomas Case], “The Introduction,” in The Morning Exercise Methodized: Or certain chief Heads and Points of the Christian Religion Opened and Improved in divers Sermons (1659), 23, 13. On the indefatigable efforts of the London Presbyterians toward catechizing and parish evangelism, see Elliot C. Vernon, “A Ministry of the Gospel: The Presbyterians during the English Revolution,” in Religion in Revolutionary England, ed. Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (Manchester, 2006), 115–36. 153. The fact that the London Presbyterians had this morning exercise does not seem, per se, particularly noteworthy. What is of considerable interest here is that they preached through the loci communes of systematic divinity. There were no comparable month-long series of sermons done by a number of pastors to elucidate

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the doctrinal truth starting with the being of God to the end of history, that is, following the “Commonplaces” format in all of Europe before and after this exercise in London. 154. Benjamin Needler, “The Trinity Proved by Scripture,” in Morning Exercise Methodized, 66–7. 155. On the controversy between Joachim of Fiore and Peter Lombard and the conciliar decision reached at the Fourth Lateran Council, see Eugène Honee, “Joachim of Fiore: His Early Conception of the Holy Trinity Three Trinitarian Figurae of the Calabrian Abbot Reconsidered,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 82 (2006): 103–37; Fiona Robb, “The Fourth Lateran Council’s Definition of Trinitarian Orthodoxy,” JEH 48 (1997): 22–43. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 hereticated Joachim in this manner: “Canon 2. We condemn, therefore, and reprobate the book or tract which Abbot Joachim published against Master Peter Lombard concerning the unity or essence of the Trinity, calling him heretical and insane because he said in his Sentences that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are some supreme entity in which there is no begetting, no begotten, and no proceeding. Whence he asserts that he (Peter Lombard) attributed to God not so much a trinity as a quaternity, namely, three Persons and that common essence as a fourth, clearly protesting that there is no entity that is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, neither is it essence or substance or nature, though he concedes that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one essence, one substance, and one nature.” See Decrees of the Ecumenical Council, 1:685. 156. Needler, “The Trinity Proved by Scripture,” 68. 157. Sebastian Rehnman, “Theistic Metaphysics and Biblical Exegesis: Francis Turretin on the Concept of God,” Religious Studies 38 (2001): 167–86. 158. Needler, “The Trinity Proved by Scripture,” 69. 159. Needler, “The Trinity Proved by Scripture,” 70. 160. Benjamin Needler, Notes with Practical Observations; towards the opening of the five first Chapters of the first Book of Moses called Genesis (1654), 244–45. 161. Needler, Notes with Practical Observations, 249–51. 162. Needler in his dedicatory epistle to his parishioners at St. Margaret Moyses, dated November 17, 1654. Notes with Practical Observations, sig. A2v. 163. See CJ, 7:399–400 for the parliamentary discussions and the order for burning Biddle’s books. In fact, on that day, Parliament examined the other recent Biddle publication, The Apostolical and True Opinion concerning the Holy Trinity, revived and asserted (1653) and determined it to be heretical as well, thus warranting the burning. On the burning of Biddle’s books, see Charles R. Gillett, Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature, 2 vols. (New York, 1932), 1:332–34. 164. So he would comment in another sermon (February 10, 1657) that Isaiah 6:3, “Holy, holy, holy . . . ” was interpreted by some to “represent the Trinity,” but there are “better texts” to show that from the Hebrew Bible. Or that while he was willing to argue that Genesis 1:26 teaches certain notions of divine plurality, Needler was not willing to go all the way to argue that this clinched the exegetical proof of the Trinity. Harper, “Briefe notes,” fol. 18r; Needler, “The Trinity Proved by Scripture,” 70.

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165. So was Calvin called a “Judaizer,” by Lutheran polemicists who certainly had substantial bones to pick with him, nearly fi ft y years after his death. See Sujin Pak’s excellent treatment of this theme in The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford, 2010). 166. Needler, “The Trinity Proved by Scripture,” 72. 167. That John Goodwin was an improbable hammer against Socinianism is seen in Sir Peter Pett’s description of the religious life in London during the Interregnum. Pett lists side by side Biddle’s London gathering and Goodwin’s gathered church “in our Metropolis.” See “The Preface to the Reader,” in The Happy Future State of England (1688), sig. E*r. 168. John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, UK, 2006). 169. The Life of Mr. Thomas Firmin, Late Citizen of London. Written by one of his intimate Acquaintances (1698), 5–10. In fact, according to Firmin’s biographer, it was Firmin who provided “Bed and Board” for Biddle until Oliver Cromwell had Biddle sent to the Isle of Scilly as an exile and successfully campaigned for a “yearly Pension of 100 Crowns” in addition to his own fi nancial contribution to the well-being of Biddle while in exile. See p. 10. 170. Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, 246, 249. 171. “The Publishers to the Ingenuous and Christian Reader,” in John Goodwin, Plh vrwma to; Pneumatikovn, or A Being Filled with the Spirit (1670), sig. A3v [hereafter cited as Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit]. See also Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, 246, n. 59, for further clues on dating Being Filled with the Spirit. 172. A Second beacon fired humbly presented to the Lord Protector and the Parliament by the publishers of the first (1654), 4. On this page were listed the heresies and “pernicious errors” contained in Dissertatio de Pace (a Biddle translation), Biddle’s Confession of Faith, Twofold Catechism, and William Dell’s Baptismon Didache, Or, The Doctrine of Baptisms (1652). Similarly, Francis Cheynell in his Divine Triunity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (1650) spent considerable time mulling over the heresies of Jacobus Acontius, whose Satans Stratagems was translated in 1647, with John Goodwin’s heavy involvement, if not in direct translation, then at least his commendatory epistle. Goodwin’s letter to the reader is in Satans Stratagems, or the Devils Cabinet-Counsel Discovered (1648), sigs. a4r-A1r. 173. John Goodwin, A Fresh Discovery of the High-Presbyterian Spirit, 45. 174. Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 143. 175. Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 143. 176. Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 183. 177. Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 179–80. The issue of “Indices Expurgatorii” was a prominent theme in Thomas James’s attack on the flawed textual apparati of Catholic patristic scholarship. See his A Treatise of the Corruptions of Scripture, Councils, and Fathers, by the Prelates, Pastors, and Pillars of the Church of Rome, rev. ed. (London, 1843), 113, 231, 233, 244, 245, 255, 256, 264, 315, 317, 319, 334. The first edition was published in 1611. See also his A manuduction, or introduction vnto diuinitie containing a confutation of papists by papists (1625). The history

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of the so-called Johannine comma in Renaissance and Reformation Europe is a complex narrative; nonetheless, the figure of Erasmus comes to the fore. Erasmus omitted this verse on the basis of its absence in any of the available Greek MS when he produced his first and second edition of the Greek New Testament. As the leading text critic of early modern Europe, Erasmus’s omission of 1 John 5:7 provided fuel for the Socinian fire, at least vis-à-vis casting aspersions on the authenticity of the Johannine comma. Most contemporary New Testament scholarship regards this to have been a considerably later interpolation. See Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (New York, 1971), 716–18; and B. F. Westcott, The Johannine Epistles (London, 1883), 202–29. See also Joseph M. Levine, “Philology and History: Erasmus and the Johannine Comma,” in his The Autonomy of History: Truth and Method from Erasmus to Gibbon (Chicago, 1999), 25–52; Rob Iliffe, “Friendly Criticism: Richard Simon, John Locke, Isaac Newton and the Johannine Comma,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 137–57. 178. Goodwin is referring to the marginal gloss that Beza added to his Latin New Testament in which he asserts that Hebrews 1:5–10 confirms the deity of Christ, the Word who was manifested in flesh (“verbum caro factum est”) and was superior to the angels, so that the Son could be called God indeed. See Theodore Beza, Iesu Christi Novum Testamentum, Theodore Beza interprete. Addite sunt summae breves doctrinae in Evangelistas, & Acta Apostolorum (1579 ed.), 348. On Beza’s influence on the English New Testament, see Irena Backus, The Reformed Roots of the English New Testament: The Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament (Pittsburgh, PA, 1980). Junius and Tremellius had collaborated to produce the Testamenti veteris Biblia sacra sive libri canonici, priscae Iudaeorum Ecclesiae a Deo traditi, Latini recens ex Hebraeo facti, brevibúsque scholiis illustrati ab Immanuele Tremellio & Francisco Junio (1581); in their annotation on Psalm 45:7 (that is, 45:6 in the Geneva and King James Versions), Tremellius and Junius maintained that this verse contains the majesty, justice, and divine glory of Christ. See “Bibliorum pars Tertia, id est, Quinque Libri Poëtici,” in Testamenti veteris Biblia sacra sive libri canonici, 93. For a good intellectual biography of Tremellius, see Kenneth Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writing of Immanuel Tremellius (c. 1510–1580) (Aldershot, UK, 2007). On Junius, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 1, Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Oxford, 1983), 375–76, 437–38. 179. Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 200. 180. Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 202–3. Later on, however, Goodwin offers a concise explanation: “The Reason is plain, because the Person and the Essence are not two things really distinct the one from the other, but in consideration only.” Similarly, Goodwin argues helpfully that the attributes of God belong not to specific persons, but to the essence, so he could say: divine attributes “do belong indeed to the person but only in consideration of the Essence whereof each Person participates” (208). 181. Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 219. 182. Goodwin, Being Filled with the Spirit, 380–81. Augustine, De Trinitate, 1.6.12. (PL 42.827).

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Chapter 4 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

[Peter Martyr Vermigli], A Treatise of the Cohabitacyon of the faithfull with the vnfaithfull (n.p., 1555), fol. 3r. For other anti-Nicodemite texts, see John Calvin, Certaine Homilies of m. Ioan Calvine conteining profitable and necessarie, admonition for this time (Rome, 1553) and Wolfgang Musculus, The Temporisour, that is to saye: the obseruer of time, or he that changeth with the time (Edinburgh, 1584). See M. A. Overell, “Vegerio’s Anti-Nicodemite Propaganda and England, 1547–1558,” JEH 51 (2000): 296–318. Patrick Collinson, “The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. O. P. Grell, Jonathan Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), 51–76. Rel. Bax., part 2, 199, §55. For Richard Baxter’s anti-Antinomianism, see Tim Cooper, Fear and Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter and Antinomianism (Aldershot, UK, 2001); Paul Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Its Seventeenth-Century Context (Leiden, 2004), 156–90. Peter Lake, “‘A Charitable Christian Hatred’: The Godly and Their Enemies in the 1630s,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (New York, 1996), 145–83. Richard A. Muller, “Reflections on Persistent Whiggism and Its Antidotes in the Study of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Intellectual History,” in Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame, IN, 2009), 134–53. For Quentin Skinner’s contextualism, see, inter alia, “Introduction: Seeing Things Their Way,” in his Visions of Politics, Vol. 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), 1–7; Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998); Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008). Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2003), 212. Owen studies has gone through a sort of renaissance recently. A plethora of monographs, dissertations, journal articles, and book chapters have helped to reassess his significance as a historical figure and suggested a greater need for more thoroughly contextualized studies. See Carl R. Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (Aldershot, UK, 2007); and “John Owen’s Dissertation on Divine Justice: An Exercise in Christocentric Scholasticism,” Calvin Theological Journal 33 (1998): 87–103; Kelly Kapic, Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007); Alan Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology (London, 2007); Sebastian Rehnman, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002); Henry Knapp, “Understanding the Mind of God: John Owen and SeventeenthCentury Exegetical Methodology” (Ph.D. diss., Calvin Theological Seminary, 2002); Paul Lim, “Adiaphora, Ecclesiology and Reformation: John Owen’s Theology of Religious Toleration in Context,” in Persecution and Pluralism: Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1700, ed. Richard Bonney and D. J. B. Trim (Frankfurt, 2006), 243–72; Tim Cooper, “Why Did Richard

378

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Notes

Baxter and John Owen Diverge? The Impact of the First Civil War,” JEH 61 (2010): 496–516. I adopt this expression from Peter Lake’s aforementioned article. See note 4. For Cheynell, see ODNB; for his patristic acumen, see Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2009), 260–63. G. C. Brodrick, Memorials of Merton College: With Biographical Notices of the Wardens and Fellows (Oxford, 1885), 285; Ian Roy and Dietrich Reinhart, “Civil War,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), 721; for Cheynell’s activities under Laud, see Kenneth Fincham, “Early Stuart Polity,” in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 209; and “William Laud and the Exercise of Caroline Ecclesiastical Patronage,” JEH 51 (2000): 79, 88. Francis Cheynell, The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianisme (1643); E. M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, MA, 1945), 188; McLachlan, SSCE, 96, 121, 130, 136. Nicholas Tyacke, “Religious Controversy,” in The History of the University of Oxford, 569, 589–90; MaLachlan, SSCE, 58–61, 85–86; Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Great Tew Circle,” in his Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (London, 1987), 166–230. See John Robertson’s article offering a corrigendum to Trevor-Roper’s dependence on Cheynell’s interpretation of the Great Tew, “Hugh Trevor-Roper, Intellectual History and ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment,’” EHR 124 (2009): 1401. See Pierre Des Maizeaux, The Life of William Chillingworth, Author of “The Religion of Protestants,” &c. (London, 1863), 312–49; Edward A. George, “Some Seventeenth Century Liberals: II.—William Chillingworth, 1602–1644,” The Outlook 57, no. 1 (September 4, 1897), 955–57. For the oft-excoriated text, see Francis Cheynell, Chillingworthi Novissima. Or, the Sicknesse, Heresy, Death and Buriall of William Chillingworth (1644), fol. E3r. The fi rst thesis maintained by Erbury was: “I. That all the fulnesse of the Godhead, the same fulnesse of the Godhead which is in Christ, dwells in the Saints in the same measure, though not in the same manifestation as it doth in Christ; and that the Godhead shall be manifested in the same manner and measure in the Saints, as it is in Christ,” the last clause likely referring to the eschatological mode of human existence, having achieved deification (theosis). See Truth Triumphing over Errour and Heresie. Or, A Relation of a Publike Disputation . . . between Master Cheynell . . . and Master Erbury the Seeker and Socinian (1646), 5. Th is radical teaching was confi rmed by Erbury’s ex post facto analysis, Nor Truth, nor Error, Nor Day, nor Night (1647), 8, where Erbury recounts his position: “But seeing that we are his Brethren, we have the same divine Nature, our Fathers Nature as full in us as he.” See also McLachlan, Socinianism, 227–31. On Erbury’s pneumatological emphasis and overrealized eschatology, see G. F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946), 12, 16, 29, 67–68, 99, 106, 120, 148, 183; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1977), 38, 57, 59, 61, 65, 67, 82–83, 149–50, 153–59, 226–27, 305–6, 322–23, 325; Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed:

Notes

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

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Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), 187, 191, 205, 231, 273, 281, 316. See Nor Truth, nor Error, 10; cf. Truth Triumphing over Errour and Heresie, 6; Tyacke, “Religious Controversy,” in The History of the University of Oxford, 596. See The Historical Register of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1888), 50, 198; W. C. Costin, The History of St. John’s College Oxford 1598–1860 (Oxford, 1958), 55, 105–12. For Cheynell’s jeremiad over the Laudian intransigence, see The Sworne Confederacy between the Convocation at Oxford, and the Tower of London (1647); Ian Roy and Dietrich Reinhart, “Civil War,” in The History of the University of Oxford, 731. See Henry Hammond, A Practical Catechism (Oxford, 1645), 1 (“Of Divinity”), 7–17 (“Of Names . . . and three offices of Christ”). A Copy of Some Papers past at Oxford, betwixt The Author of the Practical Catechisme, and Mr. Ch. (1647), 4, 5; cf. Hammond, Practical Catechism, 144. See also J. W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660: With Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester, 1969), 51–53; Tyacke, “Religious Controversy,” in The History of the University of Oxford, 592–93. A Copy of Some Papers, 11–12. Citing Bucer and Melanchthon with approbation, Cheynell warned that the new ecumenical sensibilities of Acontius and the English Acontians—whom he calls the “new Arians”—needed to pass the litmus test of their doctrinal adherence to the “faith received in the foure first general Councels.” Francis Cheynell, The Divine Trinity, 441–52 (here 452). Jacobus Acontius’s Satans stratagems, or The devils cabinet-councel discovered (1648) caused quite a stir when it was translated; Cheynell’s special report regarding Acontius’s heretical tendencies to the Westminster Assembly, made on March 8, 1648, was printed in Divine Triunity, 453–57. On Cheynell’s commitment to divine incomprehensibility, see 1–7. Francis Cheynell, The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianisme (1643), 21. Cheynell, Rise . . . of Socinianisme, 3, 5 (where Cheynell blasts the Socinians for being worse than the Nestorians), 7 (where a “more Rationall way of Divinity” became synonymous with chipping away the rough and irrational edges with the chisel of “Axioms of Philosophy”); Josua Stegmann, Controversia de spiritu sancto contra Photinianos (Leipzig, 1616), 3, 6, 21, 39. On Cheynell’s warning about the Familists in his letter to leading Parliamentarian Francis Rous (1579–1659), his collaborator as members of the Visitors at Oxford in 1647, see Divine Triunity, sig. B2r; on Rous’s perspective on toleration in the 1640s, see J. Sears McGee, “Francis Rous and ‘Scabby or Itchy Children’: The Problem of Toleration in 1645,” HLQ 67 (2004): 401–22. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 4. This metacritique of natural theology had already been adumbrated in Cheynell, Rise . . . of Socinianisme, 29. This notion of Plato as an Atticizing Moses, popularized by Numenius, was found in Justin Martyr (Second Apology); Tertullian (Apology, cap. 44); Eusebius (De Praeparatio Evangelica, IX.6.9, in which he cites Clement of Alexandria, “For what is Plato but Moses speaking in Attic Greek?” XI.10.14); Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, V.14. On Numenius, a second-century Middle Platonist

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

Notes

philosopher, see M. J. Edwards, “Atticizing Moses? Numenius, the Fathers and the Jews,” Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990): 64–75. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 5. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 6; Augustine, De Trinitate 7.4.7 (PL 42.939). Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 6–7. Muller, PRRD, 1:225–38. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 12. Yet Cheynell was not unaware of the tendency for individuals’ penchant for pontificating their own biblical interpretation, as he averred Socinianism to be the cul-de-sac of privileging private interpretation. Over against the Socinian clamor that the trinitarians were assiduously seeking answers from “the consent of Fathers and Councels,” contrary to their own practice of sola scriptura, Cheynell maintained sardonically that Socinians “set their own private spirit or judgment in the chaire, which is indeed to make every man a Pope.” Cheynell, Rise . . . of Socinianism, 26, 27. Cheynell, Rise . . . of Socinianism, 33. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 271. In the same vein, Cheynell makes explicit that chapters 4 and 5 (on “the divine Nature, Titles, Properties, works”) of the Trinity cannot be understood without chapter 9, or how dogmatic theology and practical theology were inextricably linked (323). Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 331–32. This problem of idolatry was a seemingly intractable problem among the Socinians, as Cheynell notes by citing the controversy between Faustus Socinus and Ferenc Dávid (422–44). Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 334–35. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 339–40. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 361. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 363–64. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 396–97, where he grounds the nature of effectual calling, justification, redemption, adoption, covenant of grace, indeed, that of the Church in the person and indivisible work of the Trinity. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 417–18, 438. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 439–40. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 424, 425–35. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 422–24; The Accuser Sham’d: or A pair of Bellows to Blow off that Dust cast upon John Fry (1648), 19. Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 437. See, for example, Vindiciae Veritatis. Or an Unanimous Attestation to Gods blessed Truth . . . by the Ministers . . . within the West-Riding of the Countie of York (1648); The Gloucester-shire ministers testimony to the truth of Jesus Christ and to the Solemn league and convent (1648); The Warwickshire ministers testimony to the trueth of Iesus Christ, and to the Solemn League and Covenant (1648). Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 468–69. Cheynell insisted that Augustine, in his Epistle 105.9 (PL 54.399–400), maintained that “toleration of Heretics in Doctrine, and Idolaters in worship made the world Antichristian.” See also Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica, 1.25, 2.22; Eusebius, Vita Constantini, 3.4; Cheynell, Divine Triunity, 469–70. Cheynell also cites from an improbable enforcer of curtailing civil/cultic liberties, John Cotton—vis-à-vis Roger Williams—to buttress the same point. John Cotton, The

Notes

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

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Bloody Tenent, Washed, and made white in the bloud of the Lambe (1647), pt. 1, 130–32; on the Cotton-Williams controversy, see James P. Byrd, The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violence Persecution, and the Bible (Macon, GA, 2002). Colin Davis, “Cromwell’s Religion,” in Cromwell and the Interregnum: The Essential Readings, ed. David L. Smith (Oxford, 2003), 160, 163. A Dialogue between the Pope and the Devil, about Owen and Baxter (1681), t.p. The Presbyterian Pater Noster, Creed, and Ten Commandments (1681), t.p. Ath. Oxon., 4:98; Robert Beddard, “Restoration Oxford,” in The History of the University of Oxford, 812. For Owen’s life, inter alia, see Richard Greaves, “John Owen,” in ODNB. John Owen, “Preface” to The duty of Pastors and People distinguished (1644), 1–2. His ecclesiology was in transition when he preached a fast sermon at the Commons, April 29, 1646, and it is clearly noted in the published version where he offers an apologia for congregational polity in A Vision of Unchangeable Free Mercy (1646). See BL Add. MS 37344, fols. 240r-v for Owen’s December 31, 1648, sermon to persuade Whitelocke. On Owen’s political career, see Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974), 68–69, 119, 122–23, 137–38, 195, 241– 42, 247, 293–94, 296, 302, 308, 315, 322, 326–27, 380. John Asty, ed., A Complete Collection of the Sermons of the Reverend and Learned John Owen, D.D. (1727), 270, 281–82. Worden, Rump Parliament, 69; Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (New York, 1968), 329, n. 2. CJ 7, June 8, 1649. [London Provincial Assembly], An exhortation to catechizing (1655); Christian concord, or, The agreement of the Associated Pastors and Churches of Worcestershire (1653); Jeff rey R. Collins, “The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell,” History 87 (2002): 18–40. Worden, Rump Parliament, 242. Owen’s Oxford career during the Interregnum is best described in Blair Worden, “Cromwellian Oxford,” in History of the University of Oxford, 738, 740–46, 748–53, 756–57, 759–61, 763–64, 768–70. Worden, Rump Parliament, 137. Worden is of the opinion that given the millenarian zeal common among so many Independents, the relative laissez faire ecclesiastical policy envisioned by Owen in the beginning of the Rump is attributable to that perspective (138). John Owen, “Christ’s Kingdom and the Magistrate’s Power,” in Asty, Sermons of John Owen, 437. CJ 7.86; [John Owen et al.], Proposals for the Furtherance and Propagation of the Gospel in this Nation (1652), 4; Carolyn Polizzotto, “The Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652,” JEH 38 (1987): 569–81; Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and Antitrinitarianism,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Cambridge, 2007), 176, 177–79, 184, 185. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, 2007), 247. Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, 254. For example, on the issue of the visit of Mennaseh Ben Israel, the readmission of the Jews, and Owen’s

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63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

Notes

role, see CSPD 1655–56, 23 (November 15, 1655); David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982), 205; Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the Affairs of England (1682), 618. CJ 7.111. CJ 7.114; the committee was comprised of Philip Nye, John Owen, Sydrach Simpson, William Strong, John Dury, William Bridge, William Greenhill, Adoniram Byfield, George Griffiths, and Thomas Harrison. Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen, Pastor, Educator, Theologian (Exeter, UK, 1971), 63–65. CSPD 1654, 2 (March 2, 1654). Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 7. Cf. Biddle, “The Preface” in Twofold Catechism (1654), sigs. A2r-A2v. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, lib. 1, cited in Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 23. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 23, 31. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 20, 23–24. Francisco Suarez, Metaphysicarum Disputationum, 2 vols. (Salamanca, 1597), II, disp. 30, § 3; Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, De Ente et Essentia (Venice, 1496), capita 2. Owen’s exposition of our knowledge of God “via remotionis” is dependent on Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, lib. 1, cap. 14, art. 2., as Thomas argued that “when considering the divine substance, the method of remotion must be utilized, since by his immensity, God exceeds all forms that our intellect puts together. Therefore, we are not able to know what it is, but what it is not.” “Via remotionis utendum est, in Dei consideratione: nam divina substantia sua immensitate excedit omnem formam, quam intellectus noster intelligit, understand ipsum non possumus exacte congnoscere quid sit, sed quid not sit.” Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 23. Roberta Bondi defines apophatic theology as applicable both in dogmatics and liturgics in that God—as described in the theology of the Cappadocians and further developed in Pseudo-Dionysius’s On Divine Names—cannot be circumscribed by lexical or logical boundaries; one has to look “beyond all created categories of sensation and thought.” During the Eunomian controversy, both Gregory Nyssa and Nazianzen argued for a radical incomprehensibility of God, vis-à-vis the Eunomian claim that they can know God better than God’s own knowledge per se. Thus, apophatic theology “moves towards God by asserting that he is not, in fact, any of the things he is called. This movement is from the physical creation through the intelligible to a union with God in the divine darkness which lies beyond concept.” See Roberta Bondi, “Apophatic Theology,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson and John Bowden (Philadelphia, 1983), 32. Vladimir Lossky writes of apophatic theology as making sense only within the context of the union with the Triune God: “Unknowability does not mean agnosticism or refusal to know God. Nevertheless, this knowledge will only be attained in the way which leads not to knowledge but to union—to deification.” As shown later, the foregoing comment by Lossky bears striking resemblance to Owen’s similarly oriented comments in Christologia (1679). See Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London, 1957), 43. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 157.

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74. See Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, UK, 1998), 151–226; and John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (Aldershot, UK, 2007), 50–52, 77–78. 75. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 158. On the adoptionist Christology of Biddle, 162–64. 76. See—among a plethora of critiques of Grotius—Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 182, 189, 206, 238, 243, 250, 256, 271, 275, 286, 297, 299–302, 307–9, 311, 318, 320, 323, 327, 328–35, 337, 339, 343–44, 347, 357 (a rare praise of Grotius for his Defensus fidei catholicae de satisfactione Christi [1636]), 521–56 (a major critique of Grotius’s exegesis of the messianic text nonpareil, Isaiah 53). 77. Henry Hammond, A Second Defence of the learned Hugo Grotius, or, A vindication of the Digression concerning him from some fresh Exceptions (1655), 7–8. 78. See Thomason, Catalogue, 2.112 (for Owen’s Vindiciae Evangelicae: Thomason E837 [1]); 2.125 (for Hammond’s A Second Defence: Thomason E852 [2]); 2.147 (for Owen’s Review of Annotations: Thomason E879 [1]). Hammond’s Continuation was not published until 1657, although his letter to his publisher, Richard Royston, was dated September 4, 1656. 79. The significance of the Johannine text in the trinitarian controversy in seventeenth-century England is discussed in detail in chapter 6. 80. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 211. 81. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 113, 205–12, contains Owen’s exegesis of the Johannine Prologue (here 207). 82. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 206; Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 3.11.3 (PG 7a.881) (“but others allege him [Christ] to be the Son of the Demiurge [“alii vero Demiurgi filium”]); Epiphanius, Panarion, lib. 1, heresies 27, 28, lib. 2, heresy 69; Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.27.1 (on Ebionites, who regarded Christ’s birth to have been occasioned by Mary’s intercourse with a man). 83. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 336. 84. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 188, 292–99, 420. 85. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 187, 293–94. 86. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 296, cf. 188. 87. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 349–50; Kapic, Communion with God, 144. 88. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, 350–51. 89. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, 7. Nuttall puts it in his characteristic simple eloquence: Owen’s “interest is primarily not dogmatic, at least not in any theoretic sense, it is experimental.” 90. John Owen, “The Preface to the Reader,” in his Vindiciae Evangelicae, 68–69. 91. Even in Of Communion with God, Owen excoriates the Socinian mishandling of the concept of Christ’s sacrifice and the human ability to keep the law as precondition for justification. See John Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Sonne, and Holy Ghost, East Person Distinctly; in Love, Grace, and Consolation (Oxford, 1657), 109, 173. 92. Owen, Of Communion with God, 2. 93. Owen, Of Communion with God, 2. His marginal biblical glosses were John 1:18 and Hebrews 10:19–21, both of which emphasize the singular revelatory significance of the work of Christ.

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94. Owen, Of Communion with God, 2–3. The interest in showing the Christological and typological connection between the Old and New Testaments formed an integral part of the Puritan hermeneutics in early modern England and in Colonial America, as voluminous literature attests to its significance, both in its Christian-Jewish polemic and in the Socinian-Trinitarian polemic. See William Guild, Moses Vnuailed: or Those Figures . . . pointing out the Messiah Christ Iesus, briefly explained (1620); John Weemes, The Christian Synagogue (1620); Thomas Taylor, Christ Revealed: Or the Old Testament Explained (1635); Samuel Mather, The Figures or Types of the Old Testament (Dublin, 1683). Owen’s typological exegesis is firmly anchored in this tradition, which had been established in the patristic messianic readings of the Old Testament as well. Typological exegesis in particular or interest in messianic exegesis of the Hebrew Bible was not limited to the Puritans; it continued on among the High Church Anglicans in the late seventeenth century also. See, for instance, William Owtram, De Sacrificiis Libri Duo (1677); John Turner, A Discourse concerning the Messias (1685); Richard Kidder, A Demonstration of the Messias, 3 parts (1684, 1699, 1700); and Richard Bentley, Of Revelation and the Messias (1696). On the significance of typology in trans-Atlantic Puritanism, see Sacvan Bercovitch, “Typology in New England: The Williams-Cotton Controversy Reassessed,” American Quarterly 19 (1967): 165–91; Mason Lowance, The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge, MA, 1980). 95. Owen, Of Communion with God, 4. On the marginal gloss, Owen cites “Cicer. De nat. D. lib. I,” but it seems that the text he has in mind (i.116) refers to the overall impossibility of the communion, similar to Aristotle, as Cicero asks: “Est enim pietas iustitia adversum deos; cum quibus quid potest nobis esse iuris, cum homini nulla cum deo sit communitas?” 96. Owen, Of Communion with God, 5. 97. A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and practiced in the Congregational Churches in England (1659), 7. This additional sentence, in its exact verbiage, was also reflected in the 1677 confession of the London Particular Baptists. See A Confession of Faith . . . of many . . . Christians (baptized upon Profession of their Faith) in London and the Country (1677), 12. 98. See Kapic, Communion with God, 156. 99. Owen, Of Communion with God, 10–11. 100. Owen, Of Communion with God, 1–15, here 14. 101. Owen, Of Communion with God, 12, 14. Or as he puts it slightly differently: Saving grace is “bestowed on us by the Father . . . purchased for us by the Son . . . and wrought in us by the Spirit” (16). 102. Owen, Of Communion with God, 30. 103. I borrow this phrase from Michael Winship’s illuminating article, “Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s,” CH 70 (2001): 462–81. 104. See John Stackniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991); this idea gets further developed in Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford,

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2002); pace Stachniewski, Jason Yiannikkou offered a substantial critique of excessive morbidity as the sole lens through which Puritan divinity is to be seen. See Jason Yiannikkou, “Protestantism, Puritanism, and Practical Divinity in England, c. 1570–c. 1620” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1999); see also Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford, 2002) and Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (Stanford, 1985). 105. Owen, Of Communion with God, 17. Such portraiture of God as full of wrath and anger was the very mode of polemical attack launched by the Arminians against the Calvinists. See the controversial tract by Samuel Hoard and Henry Mason, Gods love to mankind manifested, by dis-prooving his absolute decree for their damnation (1633), which prompted a fulminating response by John Davenant, Animadversions . . . upon a treatise intituled, Gods love to mankind (1641). It is significant to note that in his first publication, Qeomaci va Ajutexousiastich: Or, A Display of Arminianisme (1643), 59–66, Owen specifically refuted Hoard’s Arminian errors. On Hoard’s Arminianism, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 99 n., 184, 189 n., 191; Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge, 1994), 25; Anthony Milton, “The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach,” in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge, 2002), 163 n., 176, 181; Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), 160; and ODNB. 106. Owen, Of Communion with God, 21. Displaying the sensitivity of a minister, Owen lamented that rather than resting their souls in the love of the Father, most “live below it, in the troublesome Religion of hopes and feares, stormes and clouds,” and “fi x their thoughts only on his terrible Majesty, severity and Greatnesse, and so their Spirits are not endeared. Would a soule continually Eye his everlasting tendernesse and compassion. . . . Let then this be the Saints first notion of the Father, as one full of eternall free Love towards them: Let their hearts and thoughts be fi ll’d with breaking through all discouragements that lye in the way” (22, 32). Cf. Tertullian, Adversus Praxean, cap. 13; Gregory Nazianzen, Oration, xxviii.3. 107. Owen, Of Communion with God, 23, 31. 108. Owen was certain that despair, dissimulation, and eventual denial of God’s grace will inescapably lead to the soul’s death. Owen, Of Communion with God, 34–37. So he says: “I speak of Saints [who] judge him hard, austere, severe, almost implacable, and fierce . . . and think therein they doe well.” Owen emphatically called this notion “Soule-deceit from Sathan” (35). Giles Firmin, The Real Christian, or a Treatise of Effectual Calling (1670), sigs. B3v-B4v (Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Daniel Rogers, William Perkins), C1v (John Rogers), and passim. 109. Owen, Of Communion with God, 26. 110. Owen, Of Communion with God, 37. 111. See Owen, Of Communion with God, 39, 40. 112. Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, 2008); see also Michel de Certeau’s penetrating analysis of

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“corpus mysticum, or the missing body” in The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago, 1992), 79–101; John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” P&P 100 (1983): 29–61. 113. David Steinmetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” Theology Today 37 (1980): 27–38. 114. Among a plethora of works on medieval exegesis of the Song of Songs, see in particular: E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia, 1990); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1962); M. Casey, Athirst for God: Spiritual Desire in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song (Kalamazoo, MI, 1988); Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995); Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1990). 115. Turner, Eros and Allegory, 120–21. 116. See Theodore Beza, Master Bezaes Sermons upon the Three First Chapters of the Canticles of Canticles, trans. John Harmar (Oxford, 1587); published in the same year was Dudley Fenner’s posthumous, The Song of songs that is, the most excellent song which was Solomons (Middleburgh, 1587); see also George Gifford, Fifteene Sermons upon the Song of Solomon (1598); Henoch Clapham, Three Partes of Solomon his Song of Songs, expounded (1603); Sir Henry Finch, An Exposition of the Song of Solomon called Canticles, ed. William Gouge (1615); John Dove, The Conuersion of Salomon A direction to holinesse of life (1615); Henry Ainsworth, Solomon’s Song of songs In English metre (Amsterdam, 1623); Richard Sibbes, Bowels Opened: or a Discovery of the Neere and Deere Love, Union and Communion betwixt Christ and his Church (1639); George Sandys, A Paraphrase vpon the Song of Solomon (1641); John Cotton, A brief exposition of the whole book of Canticles (1642); Thomas Brightman, A Commentary on the Canticles (Amsterdam, 1644); John Collinges, The Spouses Hidden Glory, and Faithful Learning upon her Welbeloved (1648); Joshua Sprigg, Solace for saints in the saddest times (1648); John Robotham, An Exposition of the Whole of Booke of Solomons Song (1651); John Brayne, An exposition upon the Canticles (1651); Hanserd Knollys, An Exposition of the first Chapter of the Song of Solomon (1656); William Guild, Loves entercours between the Lamb & his bride (1658); Richard Turner, The Song of Solomon rendred in plain & familiar verse (1659); James Durham, Clavis Cantici: or an Exposition of the Song of Solomon (1668); Rowland Stedman, A Treatise of the Mystical Union of Believers with Christ (1668); Arthur Hildersham, The Canticles . . . paraphrased and explained (1672); Thomas Ager, A Paraphrase on the Canticles (1680). For the production of devotional literature associated with Song of Songs, see Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), 28–29; Lowance, The Language of Canaan, 41–54; Susan Hardman Moore, “Sexing the Soul: Gender and the Rhetoric of Puritan Piety,” in Gender and Christian Religion, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, UK, 1998), 178. 117. Hardman Moore, “Sexing the Soul: Gender and the Rhetoric of Puritan Piety,” 184, 185. The best discussion of the Puritan-Dissenter fascination with the Song of Songs is Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2004), 27–58, yet Owen’s exegesis of Song of Songs is surprisingly

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not discussed. See also Elizabeth Clarke, Political Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 2010), 148, 177, 178–81, 182–83, 194. 118. Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003), 191–99. Note that according to Achinstein’s survey, twenty-four commentaries and poetries related to the Canticles were by Puritans and merely four by Anglicans (191). 119. That is why, after all, Owen publishes a popular treatise on sanctification, Of the mortification of sinne in believers: the 1. Necessity 2. Nature, and 3. Meanes of it (Oxford, 1656; repr. 1658, 1668) as a concrete response to both the Quakers and the Antinomians. 120. Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, 192. 121. Owen, Of Communion with God, 48, 50. 122. John Owen, “To the Reader,” in James Durham, Clavis Cantici (Edinburgh, 1669 repr.), sigs. B1r-B2v. In this epistle to the reader, Owen extols Durham’s surefooted distinguishing between allegory and typology, no mean feat for any reader of the Hebrew Bible, particularly that of the Canticles. Cf. Erica Longfellow offers a deserved critique of Durham’s tendency—though not limited to Durham—to elide the literal meaning in favor of the ecclesial-Christological reading: “For many, the habit of reading the Song of Songs as an allegory of Christ and the Church had become so commonplace that the literal erotic meaning of the text disappeared.” Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, 7 (here), 168, 175. Owen’s comment to defend the spiritual reading also confirms Longfellow’s view: “It is pretended that the Descriptions given of Christ in this Book, are Allegorical, from whence nothing can be gathered or concluded. . . . The expressions he useth are figurative, and the whole nature of the Discourses unto its outward structure is Allegorical. But the things intended are real and substantial, and the Metaphors used in the expression of them are suited in a due Attendance unto the Analogy of Faith.” Owen, Christologia, or, a Declaration of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ, God and Man (1679), 193. 123. For references to the Trinity being involved in the beautification of the woman in the Canticles, see Durham, Clavis Cantici, 96–98 (here 98), 373. 124. Knollys, An Exposition of the first Chapter of the Song of Solomon, 2. On Knollys’s trans-Atlantic career, see Barry H. Howson, Erroneous and Schismatical Opinions: The Question of Orthodoxy Regarding the Theology of Hanserd Knollys (c. 1599– 1691) (Leiden, 2001); B. R. White, Hanserd Knollys and Radical Dissent in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1977). 125. Knollys, Song of Solomon, 8–9. 126. Knollys, Song of Solomon, 74–75. 127. Knollys, Song of Solomon, 57, 66, 77–78. 128. Knollys, Song of Solomon, 57, 60. 129. Knollys, Song of Solomon, 55–56. 130. Owen, Of Communion with God, 42. 131. Owen, Of Communion with God, 46. 132. Owen, Of Communion with God, 46–47. 133. Owen, Of Communion with God, 52–53. Perhaps it is no surprise that this exegesis gets ridiculed by Owen’s post-Restoration nemesis, William Sherlock. See

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Sherlock, A Discourse concerning the Knowledge of Jesus Christ, and Our Union and Communion with him, &c. (1674), 202, 284–85; Owen offered his rejoinder in A Vindication of Some Passages in a Discourse concerning Communion with God, from the Exceptions of William Sherlock (1674), 144–46, 204. It is crucial to note that this figural reading of Song of Songs continued to be operative in Owen’s hermeneutic until his very last publication. See Owen, Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ (1684), 236; Owen, Christologia, 130. 134. Owen, Of Communion with God, 53. 135. Athanasius, De Incarnatione, ix.1; ix.2. On Athanasius’s Christology, see Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London, 1999), 26–30. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote the words of the quote in his critique of Apollinaris; see Epistle 101 (NPNF, vii.440). On the significance of Gregory’s Epistle 101, see Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light (Oxford, 2008), 127, 128, 136, 138, 290, 392. Owen, reflecting both these sentiments, asserts that by the grace of union, Christ “fi lls up all the distance that was made by sinne, between God, and us. . . . Upon this account it was, that he had Roome enough in his breast to receive, and power enough in his spirit to beare all the wrath that was prepared for us. Sinne was infinite only in respect of the object, and punishment was infinite in respect of the subject. This arises from this Union.” Owen, Of Communion with God, 54, 74. Cf. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, chap. 7. 136. Owen, Of Communion with God, 53. 137. Owen, Of Communion with God, 132–33, 133. 138. Owen, Of Communion with God, 141. Owen continues to adopt the language of deep longing of love to describe the privilege accorded to the saints through the ministry of Christ, the “God-man,” in this way: “The Spouse manifests her delight in him, by her utmost impatience of his absence, with desires still of nearer communion with him, ch. 8.6. . . . Set me . . . as a seale upon thine heart . . . let me alwaies have a place in thine heart, let me haven an engraving, a mighty Impression of Love upon thine heart, that shall never be obliterated. The Soule is never satisfied with thoughts of Christs love to it. Oh that it were more, that it were more, that I were as a Seale on his heart, is its Language.” Owen, Of Communion with God, 142, 143, 144–49. 139. Owen, Of Communion with God, 146. 140. Owen, Of Communion with God, 145. 141. Owen, Of Communion with God, 148. Emphasis added. 142. The other reason that Sherlock, Clagett, and others were smoldering with anger to get back at Owen was his diatribe against the Laudian imposition in liturgy, which he calls all a “pretence of Glory, beauty, comlinesse, and conformity,” thus deriding the Spirit of God in prayer since the Prayer Book was enjoined as a prescribed manner of prayer. Moreover, gospel preaching was “despised,” sabbath observance “decried,” and holiness “stigmatized,” all because the bishops had been thrust in between the true husband (Christ) and his spouse (the Church), thereby prostituting the Church. The liturgy devised by the intruder bishops was “a ceremonious pompous, outward shew worship, drawne from Pagan, Judaicall and Antichristian observations,” of all of which there is absolutely no divinely

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sanctioned “title or iota in the whole booke of God.” With such expressions of ultimate impeachment, it was no surprise at all that Owen was marked as a polemical target. Owen, Of Communion with God, 170–71, 295–301. 143. Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII centuries (Oxford, 1950); Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 1995); J. G. A Pocock, “Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment,” HLQ 60 (1997): 7–28. 144. Rowan Williams, “The Deflections of Desire: Negative Theology in Trinitarian Disclosure,” in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, ed. Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge, 2002), 119. 145. Owen, Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, 83–84. 146. Owen, Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, 83–84. 147. Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010). 148. Owen, Of Communion with God, 184–85. On the covenant of works and its fulfillment in Christ as a condition for nullifying the human hope for self-justification, see 121–22, 185. 149. Owen, Of Communion with God, 185. See also 186–92, 207, where Owen launches into a trenchant critique of Socinian and the Baxterian emphasis on evangelical righteousness of works, in response to grace, and as a condition for our eschatological justification. At the same time, however, Owen seeks not to tilt the cart of Christian obedience too much in the antinomian direction; thus see his lengthy clarifying comments in 208–26. 150. Owen, Christologia, 157, 198–99. 151. Owen, Of Communion with God, 314. 152. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration on Holy Baptism, XL.41 (NPNF 7:375). 153. Mark Goldie, “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in From Persecution to Toleration, 331–68; Gary De Krey, “The First Restoration Crisis: Conscience and Coercion in London, 1667–73,” Albion 25 (1993): 565–80. 154. Stephen Hampton’s Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008) is an excellent contribution in current historiography of the nature of Anglican theology in the Restoration through the Glorious Revolution and moves beyond the “rise of moralism,” an inexorable slide down to Deism and the latitudinarianism type of older historiographical trend: thus pace C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (London, 1966). This controversy confirms, albeit in an indirect manner, the long-lasting impact of the historical memory and construction of one’s ecclesial identity based on the harrowing experience of the 1640s and 1650s among the “second-generation Laudians.” Although Sherlock would not count as such explicitly, his identity as a sworn enemy of Puritan Dissent and as a High Church Tory helps us locate him in the vicinity—though certainly not at the center—of the older generation of hard-line Episcopalians such as Heylyn, Gunning, and Sheldon. See Anthony Milton, “The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach,” in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, 162–84; and Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The

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Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007). See also John Spurr’s explicit identification of Sherlock’s Knowledge of Jesus Christ as a trailblazer of a “new theological tendency within the Church of England.” Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991), 311–12. 155. Kapic, Communion with God, 153. 156. William Sherlock, A Discourse concerning the Knowledge of Jesus Christ, and Our Union and Communion with him, &c. (1674), 44; cf. Thomas Danson, A FriendlyDebate between Satan and Sherlock: Containing a Discovery of the unsoundness of Mr. William Sherlock’s Principles (1676), 2. 157. Owen, Of the Mortification of Sinne in Believers, 163–65. Thus Owen was emphatic that we know God “rather by what he does, then by what he is,” but here, in good Calvinistic fashion, he circumscribed the extent of natural religion/revelation significantly, thereby obviating the Socinian conclusion (165–66). 158. Danson, Friendly-Debate, 2; Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 401, 402. 159. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, passim. 160. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 280–81. 161. J. G. A Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999), 22, 24, 26–27, 44, 56, 60–61. 162. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 142–95. 163. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 149–51. On the controversy over individual conscience and the reaction of the Restoration Church of England, see Gary De Krey, “Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667–1672,” HJ 38 (1995): 53–83; and London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), 100–116, 238–46. 164. John Fell was translator and general editor of Of the Unity of the Church . . . By Cyprian Bishop of Carthage and Martyr (Oxford, 1681) and Sancti Caecilii Cypriani Opera recognita & illustrata per Joannem Oxoniensem episcopum (Oxford, 1682), with its texts emended in the posthumous 1700 edition. Harry Graham Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1975), 113–16. For Cyprian’s importance for the Anglican ecclesiological identity, see Peter M. Doll, Revolution, Religion, and National Identity: Imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795 (Madison, NJ, 2000), 19–20, 23, 26, 161; for Cyprian in general, see J. Patout Burns Jr., Cyprian the Bishop (London, 2002). 165. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 152–53. 166. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 162–68. 167. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 50, 54; Owen, Of Communion with God, 110, 117. 168. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 54–55. 169. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 197; Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England, 50–54. 170. Thomas Jacombe, Several Sermons Preach’d on the whole Eighth Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans (1672), 44–45. Sherlock similarly mocked Thomas Watson, Christ’s Loveliness (p. 462), in which the vow between husband and wife was recited to describe the conjugal bond between Christ and the Christian. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 67.

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171. Jan W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge, 1997), 74–75. 172. Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to the Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven, 2003), 227. 173. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Introduction,” to Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Lake and Questier (Rochester, NY, 2000), xx. 174. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 338. Sherlock criticized, ironically, both Owen and Thomas Shepard. It was ironic in that Shepard had been roundly criticized for his inordinate preparationist/Arminian tendencies in Giles Firmin’s The Real Christian (1670). For Sherlock, both Owen and Shepard “place our justification before our sanctification.” Elsewhere, Sherlock made an explicit connection (citing Owen, Of Communion with God, 158) between Owen, Tobias Crisp, and John Saltmarsh (339, 402–3). 175. Wood, Ath. Oxon., 4:105. 176. John Owen, PNEUMATOLOGIA: Or, a Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit (1674). This is known to be the most comprehensive treatment of the Holy Spirit in early modern England. 177. The full title is William Clagett, A Discourse concerning the Operations of the Holy Spirit. Together with a Confutation of some part of Dr. Owen’s Book upon that Subject (1678). 178. See, inter alia, Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), and “The ‘Anglican Moment’? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s,” in Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition, ed. Stephen Platten (Norwich, UK, 2003), 90–121; pace Lake, see W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden, 1990); Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. W. J. Torrance Kirby (Dordrecht, 2003). 179. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1611), Bk. v, ¶56, p. 304; John Owen, A Vindication of some Passages in a Discourse concerning Communion with God, from the Exceptions of William Sherlock (1674), 13. 180. Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Bk. v, ¶56, p. 309; Owen, Vindication, 22, emphasis added. 181. Owen, Vindication, 13–25 (here 25). 182. Owen, Vindication, 25. 183. See, in particular, Arminius’s letter to Hippolytus à Collibus, in The Works of James Arminius, D.D., trans. James Nichols, 3 vols. (Auburn, NY, 1853), 2:474. 184. On Barlow, see Hampton, Anti-Arminians, esp. 129–61. 185. Owen, Vindication, 28–34. 186. Owen, Vindication, 39. 187. Owen, Vindication, 40–41; Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 44. 188. John Owen, Diatriba de Justitia Divina. Seu Iustitiae Vindicatricis Vindiciae (Oxford, 1653). 189. The best account of Owen’s own volte-face on the issue of divine justice, which precipitated the writing of Diatriba in the first place, is Carl R. Trueman, “John Owen’s Dissertation on Divine Justice: An Exercise in Christocentric Scholasticism,” Calvin Theological Journal 33 (1998): 87–103. Owen chastised not

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only the usual Socinian suspects but also William Twisse and Samuel Rutherford, two stalwarts of Reformed theology. 190. Owen, Vindication, 46–47; Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 46, 57–59. 191. Owen, Vindication, 87; Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 77. 192. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 201–2; Owen, Of Communion with God, 51–52. 193. Owen, Vindication, 136–41. 194. Owen, Vindication, 140–1. 195. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 210. 196. Owen, Vindication, 179–80. In fact, Owen threw down his gauntlet and declared that Sherlock’s exposition of the work of Christ, especially from John 1:16, was “almost Verbatim transcribed out of Schlictingius,” the leading Socinian exegete on the Continent, and his “woeful Subterfuge” was conspicuously similar to the Socinian evasion of the deity and satisfaction of Christ (196, 198). 197. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 315–19 (here 319); Owen, Vindication, 228–31. 198. Owen, Vindication, 230–31. See Commentarius in Epistolam Pauli ad Galatas ex praelectionibus J. Crelli conscriptus a Jon. Schlichting (Racov, 1628). 199. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 320–25 (here 320); Owen, Vindication, 232–33. 200. In addition to those discussed earlier, see Robert Ferguson, The Interest of Reason in religion (1675); Edward Polhill, An Answer to the discourse of Mr. William Sherlock, touching the knowledge of Christ (1675); Samuel Rolls, Justification justified . . . vindicated from the errors of Mr. William Sherlock (1674). 201. Samuel Rolls, Prodromus, or the Character of Mr. Sherlock’s Book: Called A Discourse of the Knowledge of Jesus Christ (1674), 1–2, 36–37 (in which Rolls mentions a letter from Sherlock, dated April 1, 1673); Henry Hickman, Speculum Sherlockianum (1674). 202. Rolls, Prodromus, 3. On Luther’s influence on seventeenth-century English divinity, see J. Wayne Baker, “Sola Fide, Sola Gratia: The Battle for Luther in Seventeenth-Century England,” SCJ 16 (1985): 115–33. 203. Rolls, Prodromus, 3, 11, 42. See also 17, 21, 23, 71–72, where Rolls picks up on Sherlock’s virulent antipathy toward the Nonconformists that might have been the impetus for publishing Knowledge of Jesus Christ. Charging Sherlock with innovation and departure from the tradition of the Church of England, Rolls called him a new type of Protestant, a “Socinian-Popish-Protestant” (31, 86, 89). 204. Hickman, Speculum Sherlockianum, 1. 205. Hickman, Speculum Sherlockianum, 24; cf. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 137. 206. Hickman, Speculum Sherlockianum, 42–43; cf. Sherlock, Knowledge of Jesus Christ, 243–44. 207. Danson, Friendly-Debate. See also his “Postscript to the Reader,” fols. E2v-E3r, where he cites from John Arrowsmith, Tactica Sacra, lib. 2, cap. 1, sect. iv, p. 102 (not lib. 2, c. 1, sect. 14, as Danson has it on t.p.), to argue that Socinianism is deservedly called a subtler form of Islam, “Hell and Irreligion open their mouths wide.” 208. “To the Reader,” in Friendly-Debate, sigs. A3v-A4r.

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209. Friendly-Debate, 1. 210. Danson, Friendly-Debate, 11. 211. Danson, Friendly-Debate, 16; Valentinus Smalcius, Refutatio Thesium Wolfg. Frantzii (Racov, 1614), 94, 136, 172. 212. Owen, Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, 154–55, 180–81, 244.

chapter 5 1.

Thomas Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica: Carmine Elegiaco Concinnata (1688), line 516, p. 24. 2. Edmund Elys’s angry charge to Richard Baxter. See [Edmund Elys], A Letter to Dr. du Moulin, containing a charitable reproof for his Schismatical Book. . . . To which are added Some Seasonable Words to Mr. Richard Baxter (1680), 10. 3. The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford Past in their Convocation July 21, 1683 (Oxford, 1683), 3, 4, 5, 7. For more information on the burning of Baxter’s Holy Commonwealth (1659) and Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan (1651), see Charles Gillett, Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature, 2 vols. (New York, 1932), 2.412; R. A. Beddard, “Tory Oxford,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), 892ff.; Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640– 1700 (Cambridge, 2007), 371–73. 4. Judgment and Decree, 2. I borrow this expression from John Spurr’s illuminating chapter, “‘A Special Kindness for Dead Bishops’: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, CA, 2006), 307–28. 5. “Introduction,” to Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, ed. William Lamont (Cambridge, 1994), ix. 6. William Assheton, Evangelium Armatum (1663), “To the Reader,” sig. A3v, 53 (for Hobbes), 12–19 (for Baxter). 7. Not only was Assheton’s Evangelium Armatum re-published in 1682, he also had unflinchingly fulminated against the Dissenters in Toleration Disapprov’d and Condemn’d by the Authority (1670), The Danger of Hypocrisie (1673), The Cases of Scandal and Persecution (1674), and A Seasonable Apology for the Honours and Revenues of the Clergy (1676). 8. Rel. Bax. 3:141, §259. 9. With two major contributions from Patricia Springborg and George Wright, the field of Hobbes studies, it seems, can get past the—ultimately futile—investigation of Hobbes’s personal religiosity and focus on his views on heresy and historiography. The most notable contribution by Patricia Springborg is the editorial directorship for the recent critical edition of Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica. See Thomas Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica: Critical edition, including text, translation, introduction, commentary and notes, ed. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson (Paris, 2008). For George Wright, see Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes (Dordrecht, 2006). 10. See, inter alia, William Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (London, 1979); J. William Black, “From Martin Bucer to Richard Baxter: ‘Discipline’ and

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11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Notes

Reformation in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England,” CH 70 (2001): 644–73; John F. Brouwer, “Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory: Context and Content” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2005); Alison Searle, “‘My Souls Anatomiste’: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart,” Early Modern Literary Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 1–26. N. H. Keeble, “‘Take Heed of Being Too Forward in Imposinge on Others’: Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Baxterian Tradition,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. Davie Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006), 282–305; John Coffey, “A Ticklish Business: Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics, ed. Loewenstein and Marshall, 108–36; Paul Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Its Seventeenth-Century Context (Leiden, 2004), 161–87. Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden, 2003), 390, 394. On Melanchthon, see Backus, Historical Method, 327–38, 339–48. On Baronius, see Backus, Historical Method, 375–82; Stefano Zen, Baronio Storico. Controriformia e crisi del metodo umanistico (Naples, 1994); Cyriac Pullapilly, Caesar Baronius, Counter-Reformation Historian (Notre Dame, 1975). On Flacius and the Magdeburg Centuries, see Ronald Diener, “The Magdeburg Centuries: A Bibliothecal and Historiographical Analysis” (Th.D. diss., Harvard University, 1978); Gregory B. Lyon, “Baudoin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries,” JHI 64 (2003): 253–72; for the influence of the Magdeburg Centuries upon the English Reformation, see Norman L. Jones, “Matthew Parker, John Bale, and the Magdeburg Centuriators,” SCJ 12 (1981): 35–49. On Scultetus and the Syntagma, see Backus, Historical Method, 218–27; Backus, “Irenaeus, Calvin, and Calvinist Orthodoxy: The Patristic Manual of Abraham Scultetus (1598),” Reformation and Renaissance Review 1 (1999): 41–53. Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, 1990). For instance, Henry Maurice (1647–1691), deservedly a leading patristic scholar in Restoration Oxford, scoffed at Baxter’s utter lack of competence in Greek and his similar lack of access to most current patristic editions and critical apparatus. Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA, 2001). Among others, see Patrick Collinson, “Truth, Lies, and Fiction in SixteenthCentury Protestant Historiography,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge, 1997), 37–68; D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and ‘The Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto, 1990). Collinson, “Truth, Lies, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Historiography,” 46. See also Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England, 35–44; and The Social Circulation of the Past (Oxford, 2003), 50; G. J. R. Parry, A Protestant Vision (Cambridge, 1987).

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18. On this ongoing polemical exchange, see Richard Bernard, Looke Beyond Luther: An answere to that question, so often and so insultingly proposed by our adversaries, asking us; where this our religion was before Luthers time? (1623); S. J. Barnett, “Where as your Church before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined,” CH 68 (1999): 14–41. On Richard Bernard, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge, 1995), 42, 100, 134, 321, 341, 345. 19. Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 2009). 20. In McLachlan’s Socinianism, the Council of Nicaea is mentioned once (158), the Council of Trent once (102), and the Socinian use of history untreated. Similarly, Wilburs’s otherwise erudite History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, MA, 1945) has one passing reference to the Council of Nicaea (16) and equally cursory treatment of the Nicene Creed (215, 238, 391). 21. Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 2003); Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010), 33, 75, 148. Mortimer does mention the crucial role played by the Council of Nicaea in the formulation of trinitarian orthodoxy, but it does not form an integral part of the narrative. An exception to this trend is Peter G. Bietenholz, Daniel Zwicker, 1612–1678: Peace, Tolerance, and God the One and Only (Firenze, 1997). See also Bietenholz, Encounters with a Radical Erasmus: Erasmus’ Work as a Source of Radical Thought in Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2009), 171–88 (especially 175–79). 22. Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, 1978), 213; Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford, 1965), 222; W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1932–1940), 3:343; cited in William Lamont, “The Religion of Andrew Marvell: Locating the ‘Bloody Horse,’” in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. Conan Condren and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot, UK, 1990), 140. 23. Alexandra Walsham, “Revising the Past,” History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 249. 24. [Gilbert Burnet], Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1833), 4:387. The immediate context of Burnet’s jeremiad was the spread of Socinianism in London. 25. Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Life and History of Thucydides,” in Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre (1629), sig. a2v; on Hobbes and ars historica, see J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), 35–38 (here 37). 26. For hostile reactions on Hobbes, see, inter alia, Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 326, 327, 333, 336–82, 441, 452, 470, 475, 476; Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan (Cambridge, 2007); Jeff rey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), 115–58. 27. This is precisely why Patricia Springborg is of the opinion that Hobbes indulged in an act of dissimulation, or “theological lying.” See Patricia Springborg, “Introduction,” to Historia Ecclesiastica: Critical edition, including text, translation, introduction, commentary and notes, ed. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson (Paris, 2008), “Hobbes and Theological Lying,” 224–34;

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28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

Notes

David Berman, “Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying,” in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, DE, 1987), 61–78; and “Disclaimers as Offence Mechanisms in Charles Blount and John Toland,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford, 1992), 255–72; Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1990). John Aubrey, “An Essay towards a Description of the North Division of Wiltshire,” Bodl. MS. Aubr. 3. f. 28. See also John Aubrey, Brief Lives, I, 394. C.J. viii. 636 (October 17, 1666); CSPD 1666–7, 209. The Commons Committee deliberating this bill received a further charge: “Ordered, That the Committee to which the Bill against Atheism and Profaneness is committed, be impowered to receive Information touching such Books as tend to Atheism, Blasphemy, or Profaneness, or against the Essence or Attributes of God; and, in particular . . . the Book of Mr. Hobbs, called The Leviathan; and to report the Matter, with their Opinions, to the House.” See also Philip Milton, “Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington,” History of Political Thought 14 (1993): 515; Johann Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (New York, 1992), xiv; Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford, 1989), 33. CSPD 1611–18, 121, 123, 124; A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. W. Cobbett et al., 32 vols. (London, 1809–24), 2:727–38; McLachlan, Socinianism, 32–33; for an illuminating study on the role of radical Puritanism in the Wightman affair, see Ian Atherton and David Como, “The Burning of Edward Wightman: Puritanism, Prelacy and the Politics of Heresy in Early Modern England,” EHR 120 (2005): 1215–50. Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes on Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorrell (Cambridge, 1996), 348. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 126, 189, 190, 192, 236, 263, 286. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 126, 282, 283. Henry Hammond to Matthew Wren, in “Illustrations of the State of the Church during the Great Rebellion,” The Theologian and Ecclesiastic 9 (1850): 294–95; J. W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660, with Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester, 1969), 179–80; Joseph Levine, “Matter of Fact in the English Revolution,” JHI 64 (2003): 322 n. 17. Springborg, “Hobbes on Religion,” 349. Thomas Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica. Critical edition, including text, translation, introduction, commentary and notes, trans. and ed. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein and Paul Wilson (Paris, 2008) [hereafter cited as Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, followed by line number(s)]. Unless otherwise noted, I will follow this critical edition for texts/translation). See George H. Wright, “The Protestant Hobbes” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1985), and its appendix, chapters 1, 2, and 3, contain his translation of the appendix to the Latin Leviathan of 1668. The 2006 version is a considerably updated version in terms of the critical apparatus and notes, thus I have used the new version throughout: George Wright, Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes (Dordrecht, 2006), 1–174.

Notes

397

38. §186, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 156; Richard Sherlock, “The Theology of Leviathan: Hobbes on Religion,” Interpretation 10 (1982): 50–51; Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia, 1985), 194–222; Wright, “Hobbes and the Economic Trinity,” in his Thomas Hobbes, 175–210. 39. Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 15. 40. George Wright, “The 1668 Appendix and Hobbes’s Theological Project,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge, 2007), 394. 41. Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 15–16. 42. §8, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 44. 43. §10, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 46. 44. §10, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 46. In §§18, 20, Hobbes again demonstrates his understanding of orthodox Christology. First, he interprets the Johannine Prologue, especially 1:1, 1:3, in a straightforward trinitarian fashion, highlighting this text as the locus classicus of “proving” the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. Second (p. 50), Hobbes asserts that the “Word” refers to Christ as the natural Son of God, who was “from everlasting.” 45. §26, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 52. 46. Thomas Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 828. 47. Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 267, 297, 301; and “Curley and Martinich in Dubious Battle,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 461–76, esp. 470–71. Wright succinctly shows that Hobbes’s metacritique of Greek “demonology” was not only the “characteristic outlines of the materialist attack upon Greek idealism but also an attack upon any philosophical theology, that is, any discussion of divine matters which claims to be positive rather than negative, apodictic rather than merely apophatic.” Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 267. Moreover, this apophatic tradition within Christian theology, not merely in the Cappadocian and Byzantine traditions, is too prominent to be dismissed as an aberration. Wright rightly identifies Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Lectures, 4.17 and 6.2, as the key beginnings of this tradition. In his Sixth Catechetical Lecture, Cyril instructed the catechumens that “For of God we speak not all we ought (for that is known to Him only), but so much as the capacity of human nature has received, and so much as our weakness can bear. For we explain not what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him. For in what concerns God to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge” (Catechetical Lectures, 6.2). This apophatic bent in theology is, pace the privileging of Eastern theological tradition, also present in Western theologians such as Nicholas of Cusa (De docta ignorantia) and, as Wright has shown, in Luther’s theology of the cross as well. On apophasis, see also Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture (New Haven, 1993), 36, 40–56, 94, 137–38, 197–98, 200–214; Henny Fiskå Hägg, Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism (Oxford, 2006); Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), 12–15, 17–22, 25, 30, 101. 48. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 829–30. 49. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 833–34.

398

Notes

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

§17, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 50. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 516. §124, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 102–4, emphasis added. §§131, 132, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 112. §134, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 114; for the text of Elizabethan Act of Supremacy to which Hobbes refers, see Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald Bray (Minneapolis, 1994), 327. §§14, 15, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 48, 50. Similarly, in §§31, 32, Hobbes precludes the possibility of rational explication of the distinction between the divine hypostases: “A. How then are the hypostases to be distinguished? B. Neither the Creed nor the Sacred Scripture distinguishes or names three hypostases.” Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 56. §82, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 84. §83, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 86. §§88–9, Appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 88. On Luther and Hobbes dialectic, see Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 23–25, 25–26, 30–33, 175–76, 284–86. For the similarity between Luther and Hobbes on the entangled nature of the human will, see Leopold Damrosch Jr., “Hobbes as Reformation Theologian: Implications of the Free-Will Controversy,” JHI 40 (1979): 339–52. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1646); Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography, or, A description of the hereticks and sectaries of these latter times (1645); Richard Vines, The Authors, Nature and Danger of Haeresie (1647). On a new cultural history of heresy in early modern England, see Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006). John Coffey, “Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution,” in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, 111. Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, and the Punishment thereof (1680), 3. Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 4. Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 4. Martyn Thompson’s comment helps further contextualize the radical nature of Hobbes’s view on heresy: “The Imperial will, and neither God nor the priesthood, authorized both uniformity in religion and the civil punishment of heresy. And uniformity and civil punishments were pursued, not in the interest of true religion, but instead in the interest of civil peace.” See Martyn Thompson, “Hobbes on Heresy,” in Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York, 2002), 81. J. A. I. Champion, “An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie: Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over ‘Heresy,’” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, 230. Champion, “Hobbes, Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over ‘Heresy,’” 232. Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 5–6. “Arius maintained, first, That Christ was inferiour to his Father; and afterwards, That he was no God, alledging the words of Christ, My Father is greater than I. The Bishop on the contrary alleding the words of St. John, And the Word was God,

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

Notes

71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

399

and the words of St. Thomas, My Lord and my God.” See Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 6. On the significance of the Gospel of John in the trinitarian controversy, see chapter 6. Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 7. Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 9. Lancelot Andrewes, “Concio in dicessu Palatini,” in Opuscula Quaedam Posthuma (1629), 91. “Nobis Canon unus in Scripta relates a Deo, Duo Testamenta, Tria Symbola, Quatuor Priora Concilia, Quinque saecula, Patrumque per ea series, trecentos ante Constantinum annos, ducentos a Constantino, regulam nobis Religionis figunt.” Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, 14. See Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes, Heresy, and the Historia Ecclesiastica,” JHI 55 (1994): 553–71 (here 558); and “Hobbes’s Theory of Civil Religion,” in Pluralismo e religione civile: Una prospettiva storica e filosofica, ed. Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo (Milano, 2004), 59–94. See Patricia Springborg, “Introduction,” to Historia Ecclesiastica, 27. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 162. See Champion, “Hobbes, Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over ‘Heresy,’” 232; De Cive, c. 17, §18 Lessay, “Hobbes and Sacred History,” 154. Champion, “Hobbes, Barlow, and the Restoration Debate over ‘Heresy,’” 225. Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263–339) was chief among patristic ecclesiastical historians, bishop of Caesarea, and a leader among the “homoiousians” at the Council of Nicaea, in addition to writing his celebrated Historia Ecclesiastica and Vita Constantini. For the presence of “Eusebians” at the Council of Nicaea, see Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford, 2004), 52–61; G. C. Stead, “Eusebius and the Council of Nicaea,” JTS 24 (1973): 85–100. Socrates’s (c. 379–440) Historia Ecclesiastica was a continuation of Eusebius’s work, and in the early modern editions in English, both Historia were bound together; see the 1577, 1585, 1607, 1619, 1636, 1663, 1683, and 1692 editions. See Theresa Urbainczyk, Socrates of Constantinople: Historian of Church and State (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997). For Sozomen Salaminius, Evagrius of Pontus, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, see Glenn F. Chesnut, The First Christian Histories: Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius (Macon, GA, 1986), 199–230; Theresa Urbainczyk, Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and the Holy Man (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002). See Patricia Springborg, “Introduction,” to Historia Ecclesiastica, 165. “Praefatio” to Historia Ecclesiastica, 601. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 19–20, 23–24, 46. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 55, 59–60. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 63–64. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 423–28, 432. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 435–36, 445–46, in which Hobbes avers that the priests were “repulsive men, austere in appearance, and their whole life was contrary to what they taught.” See also 583–84.

400

Notes

90. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 471–82. 91. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 495–96. 92. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 545–54; see also 365 n. 151; for the historical background to the violence in Alexandria, see Edward J. Watts, Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities (Berkeley, 2010). 93. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 631–34. 94. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 813, 815. 95. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 857–60; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992). 96. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 869–72. 97. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 881–82. 98. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 2043–48. 99. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 1991, 2005–6. 100. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 1081–90. 101. Cf. §90, appendix to LL, in Wright, Thomas Hobbes, 89–90. See also Hobbes, An Historical Narration concerning Heresie, and the Punishment thereof (1680), 13; Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, p. 437, n. 352. 102. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 1449–50. 103. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, 1532, 1539–40. 104. Charles Blount, letter to Hobbes, printed in Blount, The Oracles of Reason (1693), 99; also printed in Noel Malcolm, “Letter 201,” in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994), 759–63 (here 760). 105. Jean Daillé (1594–1670), as we have discussed in previous chapters, was a leading Huguenot theologian, whose Traité de l’employ des saints pères (1632) placed him as a luminary among the Protestants, especially those engaged in anti-Catholic polemic; his Traité was translated in 1651 as A Treatise concerning the Right Use of the Fathers, in the Decision of the Controversies that are at this day in Religion (1651). On Daillé, see Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 228–40, 247–51, 264–67, 275–76, 276–84, 331–40. 106. Blount, The Oracles of Reason (1693), 104; Malcolm, Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 762. The quote from Hales is from Of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, in Several Tracts by the Ever-memorable Mr. John Hales of Eton-College (1716), 61. 107. William Lamont, “The Religion of Andrew Marvell: Locating the ‘Bloody Horse,’” in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, 152. 108. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 290. On the Exclusion Crisis of politics and religion in the late 1670s and early 1680s, see Gary De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1656–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), 169–73, 188–201; Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge, 1994), 258–68; Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991). 109. N. H. Keeble, “‘Take Heed of Being Too Forward in Imposinge on Others’: Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Baxterian Tradition,” in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, 283. Baxter’s letter to Sir Edward Harley, dated September 15, 1656, in Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard

Notes

401

Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble and Geoff rey F. Nuttall, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1991), 1:223 (Letter 324). 110. Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae (Oxford, 1655), 23, 31. Finding Biddle’s self-designation as a mere Christian rather jejune, Owen writes: “Of what he [Biddle] rejects, as to our Doctrine about the Nature of God, the Trinity, Person of Christ, and the Holy Ghost, all of which he hath left us no more, then what the Turkes, and other Mahumetans, will freely acknowledge. And whether this be to be a mere Christian, or none at all, the pious Reader will judge.” 111. John Biddle, A Twofold Catechism (1654), t.p. 112. N. H. Keeble, “C. S. Lewis, Richard Baxter and ‘Mere Christianity,’” Christianity and Literature 30 (1981): 27–44; and “Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Baxterian Tradition,” 282–305. A sample of Baxter’s use of the term “meer Christian” as a self-designatory title, see Sacrilegious desertion of the holy ministry rebuked (1672), 21; Which is the true church? The whole Christian world, as headed only by Christ . . . or, the Pope of Rome and his subjects as such? (1679), 125; An apology for the nonconformists ministry (1681), 131; A Paraphrase on the New Testament with notes, doctrinal and practical (1685), n.p., paraphrase of Revelation 13:18; A Treatise of Knowledge and Love compared in two parts (1689), 82. 113. Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity and Liberty, 161–87. 114. Richard Baxter, “What History is Credible, and what not,” in Church-History of the Government of Bishops and Their Councils Abbreviated (1680), sig. b1r. 115. 1 Elizabeth I, c.1, cited in Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald Bray (Minneapolis, 1994), 326–27. 116. “Sed nunc nec ego Nicaenum, nec tu debes Ariminense tamquam praeiudicaturus proferre concilium. Nec ego huius auctoritate, nec tu illius detineris: Scripturarum auctoritatibus, non quorumque propriis, sed utrisque communibus testibus, res cum re, causa cum causa, ratio cum ratione concertet.” Augustine, Contra Maximinum Haereticum Arianorum Episcopum, 2.14.3 (PL 42.772). 117. Calvin, Institutes, IV.ix.8. 118. “The Translatour to the Christian Reader,” in Rudolf Gwalter, An hundred, threescore and fifteen homelyes or sermons, vpon the Actes of the Apostles . . . made by Radulpe Gualthere Tigurine (1572), sig. c1r. 119. John Jewel, A replie vnto M. Hardinges ansvveare (1565), esp. 285–87; William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, against the Papists (Cambridge, 1849), 535, 563, 698; Alexander Nowell, A reproufe, written by Alexander Nowell, of a booke entituled, A proufe of certayne articles in religion denied by M. Iuell, set furth by Thomas Dorman (1565), 72v. For the Catholic rejoinders, see Thomas Stapleton, A returne of vntruthes vpon M. Jewelles replie (Antwerp, 1566), 123, 134, 153–54; and A counterblast to M. Hornes vayne blaste against M. Frekenham (Louvain, 1567), fol. EE iiv; Thomas Harding, A Confvtatuion of the Booke Intitvled An Apologie of the Chvrch of England (Antwerp, 1565), sig. 14r. 120. Scott Hendrix, “Deparentifying the Fathers: The Reformers and Patristic Authority,” in Auctoritas Patrum: Contributions on the Reception of the Church Fathers in the 15th and 16th Century, ed. Leif Grane, Alfred Schindler, and Markus Wriedt (Mainz, 1993), 55–68.

402

Notes

121. On the significance of Cotton’s exegesis of Song of Songs, see Jesper Rosenmeier, “‘Eaters and Non-Eaters’: John Cotton’s A Brief Exposition of . . . Canticles (1642) in Light of Boston’s (Lincs.) Religious and Civil Conflicts, 1619–22,” Early American Literature 36 (2001): 149–81; Jeffrey A. Hammond, “The Bridge in Redemptive Time: John Cotton and the Canticles Controversy,” NEQ 56 (1983): 78–102. The best introduction to the life and work of Cotton remains Sargent Bush Jr.’s “Introduction” to The Correspondence of John Cotton (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 1–67. 122. For Brightman’s significance in the millenarian exegesis of Song of Songs among the Puritans, see Philip S. Alexander, The Targum of Canticles (London, 2003), 50. For Cotton’s millenarian exegesis, especially in its relationship with Joseph Mede, the leading seventeenth-century English exegete of apocalyptic texts, see Jue, Heaven upon Earth, 178–86. 123. John Cotton, A Brief Exposition of the whole Book of Canticles, or Song of Solomon; Lively describing the Estate of the Church in all the Ages thereof, both Jewish and Christian, to this day (1642), 139, 165. 124. Cotton, Exposition of Canticles, 144. 125. Cotton, Exposition of Canticles, 144–45, 148. 126. Cotton, Exposition of Canticles, 148. 127. In Session 8 (May 4, 1415), Wycliffe’s critique of transubstantiation was read out and condemned on February 22, 1418; see the conciliar decrees in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Washington, DC, 1990). On Jan Hus, see Matthew Spinka, John Hus: A Biography (Princeton, 1968); Phillip Haberken, “‘After Me There Will Come Braver Men’: Jan Hus and Reformation Polemics in the 1530s,” German History 27 (2009): 177–95. 128. Cotton, Exposition of Canticles, 159–60. 129. Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 31.4 (p. 54). 130. See especially chapter 4, “The Case of the Creeds,” in Chad van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2005), 211–69. 131. John Owen, XRISTOLOGIA, Or, a Declare of the Glorious Mystery of the Person of Christ, God and Man (1679), sig. C1r [hereafter cited as Christologia]. 132. Owen, Christologia, sig. C2r. 133. Owen, Christologia, sig. C2v. 134. Romans 12:3, “For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.” 135. Owen, Christologia, sig. c1r. 136. Edward Stillingfleet launched the first salvo in The Mischief of Separation (1680), buttressing it with patristic witnesses and Continental Reformed divines’ antiseparatist ecclesiology in The Unreasonableness of Separation (1681). The later prompted David Clarkson’s riposte: No Evidence for Diocesan Churches, or, any Bishops without the Choice or Consent of the People, in the Primitive Times (1681). For Clarkson’s defense of Baxter against Henry Maurice, see his Diocesan Churches not yet Discovered in the Primitive Times, or, A Defence of the Answer to Dr. Stillingfleets Allegations out of Antiquity (1682). 137. Baxter Letters, DWL MS 59, vi, fol. 89.

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403

138. Baxter Letters, DWL MS 59, iii, fol. 113v; for more information on Hone, see Correspondence of Richard Baxter, letter 343. See also Quantin, Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 265. For this Baxter-Hone exchange and other matters pertaining to patristic theology in early modern Europe, I am most grateful to Professor Jean-Louis Quantin for his e-mail correspondence. 139. Baxter Letters, DWL MS 59, iii, fols. 119r-120r. 140. Quantin, Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 266. 141. Richard Baxter, The Grotian Religion Discovered, at the Invitation of Mr. Thomas Pierce in his Vindication (1658). On its significance, see Geoff rey Nuttall, “Richard Baxter and The Grotian Religion,” in Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent, c. 1500—c. 1750, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford, 1979), 245–50; Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty, 195–212. The best sources for the tension and conflict between conciliarism and curialism remain Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300– 1870 (Oxford, 2003); Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism, rev. ed. (Leiden, 1998). 142. Peter Heylyn, Certamen epistolare, or, The letter-combate. Managed by Peter Heylyn, D.D. with 1. Mr. Baxter of Kederminster (1659); Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007), 149–50. See also Rel. Bax. II. 152, §33. 143. Richard Baxter, The True Catholick and the Catholick Church Described (1661), 162–65 (here 163). 144. Baxter, True Catholick, 168. 145. William Johnson, Novelty Represt, In a Reply to Mr. Baxters Answer to William Johnson. Wherein the oecumenical power of the four first General Councils is Vindicated (Paris, 1661). 146. Richard Baxter to Henry Hammond, letter dated c. August 1659, printed in Rel. Bax. II. 213, §66; Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 1:403 (Letter 592); Keeble, “Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Baxterian Tradition,” 282–305. 147. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago, 1992), 19. 148. Baxter, True Catholick, 164. 149. Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes, “Introduction,” in Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian, ed. Rivers and Wykes (Oxford, 2008), 7. 150. Alexander Gordon, Heads of English Unitarian History, with Appended Lectures on Baxter and Priestley (1895), 87–88, 92 (lecture on Baxter is from 56–101). The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 13 vols. (Edinburgh, 1908–26) follows Gordon’s taxonomy of seeing Baxter as a key precursor of Unitarianism in England, thereby signifying this “established” identification of Baxter as a Unitarian hero; see “Unitarianism,” 12:523. 151. Gordon, Heads of English Unitarian History, 115–16; for Priestley’s excoriation of the first four councils, see An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, 2 vols. (1793), 1:76–144. 152. Conal Condren, “Curtailing the Office of the Priest: Two Seventeenth-Century Views on the Causes and Function of Heresy,” in Ian Hunter, J. C. Laursen, and

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Cary J. Nederman, ed., Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, UK, 2005), 115–27. 153. On John Kidgell and Thomas Simmons, see Henry Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (Oxford, 1922), 179 (Kidgell); 270–71 (Simmons). 154. Bodl. Locke Collection, Shelfmark, Locke 10.64b. 155. Petrus Crabbe, Concilia Omnia, tam generalia, quam particularia (Cologne, 1538). 156. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 5. 157. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 12. 158. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 15. 159. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 15. 160. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 117. 161. Claudia Rapp, “The Elite Status of Bishops in Late Antiquity in Ecclesiastical, Spiritual, and Social Contexts,” Arethusa 33 (2000): 379–99 (here 382); this thesis is expanded in her Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley, 2005). 162. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 117. 163. However, Baxter and Hobbes do in fact differ on their perspective on how these “two swords” ought be kept; for Hobbes, both the sword of magistracy and ministry belonged to the Leviathan, the Prince, whereas for Baxter, they were to be kept separate. In an illuminating contrast—the story of Solomon displacing the high priest Abiathar—Hobbes sees that as a biblical precedent for the magistrate having priestly prerogative as well, whereas for Baxter, the Solomonic example is not to be a pattern. See Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 118. 164. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 16–17. 165. Patrick Collinson, “If Constantine, Then Also Theodosius: St Ambrose and the Integrity of the Elizabethan Ecclesia Anglicana,” JEH 30 (1979): 205–29. 166. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 72. 167. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 100. 168. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 203. 169. This is a key admission on Baxter’s and Epiphanius’s part. In Panarion, 70.1.1. See The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, trans. F. Williams, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1987), 2:402–18. See also Guy G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Evolution of Early Christianity (Tubingen, 1999), 261, where Epiphanius’s approval of the ethical stances of the Audians—à la Baxter—is confirmed. 170. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 17. 171. G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, “Protestant Irenicism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The End of Strife, ed. David Loades (Edinburgh, 1984), 88; The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden, 1972). 172. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 17. 173. C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (London, 1966); while Allison’s analysis of Baxter is mostly correct, the overall ideological framework out of which he weaves the declension narrative is dated and incorrect. The slide of the Restoration Church of England’s

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identity from Calvinism to Arminianism is too simplistic. To be sure, there were ardent Arminians who fit that bill. But combined with a Whiggish decline-ofreligion thesis, the transformation of theocentric Calvinism to anthropocentric Arminianism needs better contextualization. Pace Allison, see Stephen Hampton’s far more balanced treatment in his Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008), esp. 42–51. 174. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 48. 175. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 48. As was often the case for Baxter, his understanding of Petavius resembles that of the Socinian interpretation. To be sure, Petavius’s fellow Jesuits were assiduously defending what Petavius meant to say; that is, although the church certainly went through a developmental stage of articulating the Trinity doctrine, it was not the case that Scripture knew no such thing. All the embryonic elements were in Scripture, and with the aid of tradition, the Church’s dogmengeschichte allowed the doctrine to flower in due course, reaching the noon-day light at Nicaea (“Mittagslicht”), according to Franz Courth. See his Trinität. Von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg, 1996), 39. 176. Baxter is citing from Petavius, De Trinitate, in Dogmata Theologica Dionysii Petavii (Paris, 1865), vol. II, lib i, cap.3, §2, pp. 292–94. 177. “Hoc enim demonstrare volumus, quemadmodum in asserenda Trinitatis processione «ad fontem recurramus, id est ad apostolicam traditionem; et inde canalem in nostra tempora dirigamus,» ut Augustini verbis utar ex Cypriano ita scribentis. Tametsi ad Nicaeni concilii tempus traditionis seriem continuare sufficit nobis; quod ex eo tempore plena deinceps inter Catholicos, et extra controversiam posita fuit istius dogmatis assertio, nec jam canalibus, et rivis, sed torrentibus, et fluviis eff usa totam inundavit Ecclesiam. Cum igitur traditio, uti superius ostemsum est, aut ipsam sine scripto christiani dogmatis, ut sic loquar, substantiam derivet, aut ejus e Scripturis exculpendi, intelligendique modum doceat, posteriori hac via Trinitatis est propagata confessio, ac per eam directa semitam, quam operis initio sui informat Hilarius, quamque trivisse, ac tenuisse se refert, cum ex gentili paulatim ad perfectam Christianae doctrinae, maximeque Trinitatis professionem adolesceret.” Petavius, De Trinitate, in Dogmata Theologica Dionysii Petavii (Paris, 1865), vol. II, lib. I, “Praefatio,” cap. 1, §8, p. 257. 178. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 49. 179. Richard Baxter, Confirmation and Restauration the Necessary Means of Reformation and Reconciliation (1658), 157–65 (here 161, 162). 180. John Spurr, “‘A Special Kindness for Dead Bishops’: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, CA, 2006), 328, 308. 181. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 84. 182. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 84–85. 183. Baxter was relentless in exposing this Cyril-Hypatia connection; see also Baxter, Five Disputations of church-government and worship (1659), 309; The True and Only Way of Concord (1680), 187–89; A Treatise of Episcopacy (1681), 197–88; and The True History of Councils Enlarged and Defended (1682), 153. On the political turbulence in Alexandria, and on Hypatia and her significance in intellectual

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history, see Edward J. Watts, Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities (Berkeley, 2010); Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA, 1995). 184. Baxter, A Treatise of Episcopacy, 197. 185. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 89–90, 92. As far as I can tell, no other Englishmen had cited Derodon in their work of theology in the 1670s and 1680s. Baxter was known for his intellectual eclecticism; thus, this extensive use of Derodon is not surprising. David Derodon published anonymously Disputatio de Supposito (1645), and his neo-Nestorian Christology thereof was scrutinized by a Huguenot local colloquy and synod in 1657. See Registre du consistoire de l’Eglise réformée de Nîmes, vol. xvi (1654–63), fols. 158–65. On Derodon, see Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, 3rd ed. (Rotterdam, 1720), 3:2460–62; Michael Heyd, “Rationalist Theology to Cartesian Voluntarism: David Derodon and Jean-Robert Chouet,” JHI 40 (1979): 527–42. 186. Baxter, The True History of Councils Enlarged and Defended (1682), “Preface,” sig. A2r-c1r. 187. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 94–95; Edward Brerewood, Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions through the chiefe parts of the world (1635), 139–40. 188. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 103. 189. For a very similar sentiment, see Lewis Du Moulin, A Short and True Account of the Several Advances the Church of England Hath made towards Rome (1680). On James II’s reign, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, and the events leading up the Glorious Revolution, see Michael A. Mullett, James II and English Politics, 1678–1688 (London, 1994), 5–35; and Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009). 190. Baxter, Church-History of . . . Councils, 91. 191. A Just Reproof to Mr. Richard Baxter, for his Pride and Insolence in Calumniating the Great, and Most Orthodox Council of Ephesus, &c. (1680), 1. 192. Just Reproof, 1. 193. Just Reproof, 3. 194. Elys cites his précis of orthodox Nicene trinitarianism. See Elys, Amor Dei, Lux Animae. Tentamen Theologicum de Fidei Christianae Certitudine (1670), 6–7. 195. Elys, Seasonable Words to . . . Baxter, 11. 196. Elys, Seasonable Words to . . . Baxter, 14. 197. Louis Du Pin, A New History of Ecclesiastical Writers, 2nd ed., 13 vols. (1693), vol. III, pt. ii, 27. This was a translation by William Wotton from Bibliothèque des Auteurs Ecclésiastique (Paris, 1686). On Du Pin, see J. Grès-Gayer, “Un théologien gallican, témoin de son temps: Louis Ellies de Pin (1657–1719),” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 27 (1986), 70–83; Quantin, Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 321, n. 390. 198. On William Wotton (1666–1727) and the good fortune of his New History, see J. A. I. Champion, “‘To Know the Edition’: Erudition and Polemic in EighteenthCentury Clerical Culture,” in The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650–1750, ed. M. McCarthy and A. Simmonds (Dublin, 2004), 130–32; see also ODNB.

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199. R. A. Beddard, “Tory Oxford,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), 870. 200. Henry Maurice, Doubts concerning the Roman infallibility (1688); The Antithelemite, or an Answer to Certain Qaueres by the D of B (1685); The Lawfulness of Taking the New Oaths Asserted (1689); A Letter out of the Country to a Member of This Present Parliament (1689); Remarks from the Country; Upon the Two Letters Relating to the Convocation and Alterations in the Liturgy (1689). 201. Quantin, Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 314. 202. Letter from Samuel Parker to Henry Dodwell, November 13, 1680, Bodl. MS English Letters c. 28, fols. 3v-4r; see Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 316–17, for the wider context of this correspondence. On Parker’s inveterate hatred of Dissent, particularly of Baxter, see Baxter Letters, DWL MS 59, iii. fol. 206 (August 28, 1672) and v. fol. 146 (February 26, 1673), both from Robert Middleton of Langford, Wilts. Baxter identifies Parker as one of the authors charging Dissenters with “Heinous Schism”; see The Nonconformists Plea for Peace (1679), sigs. A4r-A4v; Rel. Bax. III. 188, §61. 203. Spurr, “History and Testimony in Protestantism,” 310; Patrick Collinson, “Truth, Lies, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Historiography,” 46; Joseph M. Levine, “Matter of Fact in the English Revolution,” JHI 64 (2003): 317–35; and “From Tradition to History: Chillingworth to Gibbon,” in Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley, ed. Anthony T. Grafton and J. H. M. Salmon (Rochester, 2001), 181–210. 204. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1673), 292, 580; J. Paul Hunter, “Protesting Fiction, Constructing History,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge, 1997), 306. 205. Maurice, Vindication of the Primitive Church, 106. 206. Maurice, Vindication of the Primitive Church, 115–16. 207. Maurice, Vindication of the Primitive Church, 127–28; George Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (Oxford, 1685). 208. Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, 1978), 176. 209. Derek Hirst, “Samuel Parker, Andrew Marvell, and Political Culture, 1667–73,” in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (Cambridge, 2000), 145–64; Gordon Schochet, “Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Roger D. Lund (Cambridge, 1995), 119–48. 210. Hans Hillerbrand, “The Decline and Fall of the True Church: The English Deist View,” Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte 60 (2008): 97–110; the standard work on Deism and its influence on the intellectual and religious culture of Augustan England remains J. A. I. Champion’s The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992); see also Robert Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, MA, 1982). 211. See Gary S. De Krey, “The First Restoration Crisis: Conscience and Coercion in London, 1667–1673,” Albion 25 (1993): 565–80; Annabel Patterson and Martin

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Dzelzainis, “Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading,” HJ 44 (2001): 703–26. 212. For an influential essay on identifying the Restoration Church of England as a persecuting institution, see Mark Goldie, “The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), 331–68. For the crucial role of Cyprian in the mind of the Restoration bishops and patristic scholars, see Of the Unity of the Church. . . . By Cyprian Bishop of Carthage and Martyr. Most usefull for allaying the present heats, and reconciling the differences among us (Oxford, 1681); Sancti Caecilii Cypriani Opera recognita & illustrata per Joannem Oxoniensem episcopum (Oxford, 1682). Both these works were carried out by the Bishop of Oxford, John Fell (1625–1686), the great patron of patristic studies at Oxford in the Restoration period. 213. Marvell to William Popple, March 21, 1670. See The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1927), 2:314. 214. John Spurr, England in the 1670s: “This Masquerading Age” (Oxford, 2000), 229. 215. See The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson, N. H. Keeble, Martin Dzelzainis, and Nicholas von Maltzahn, 2 vols. (New Haven, 2003); Nicholas von Maltzahn, Andrew Marvell Chronology (New York, 2005); Annabel Patterson, Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (New York, 2000); Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (New York, 1999); Martin Dzelzainis, “L’Estrange, Marvell and the Directions to a Painter: The Evidence of Bodleian Library, MS Gough London 14,” in Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, ed. Anne Dunan-Page and Bethy Lynch (Aldershot, UK, 2009), 53–66; and “Andrew Marvell and the Restoration Literary Underground: Printing the Painter Poems,” Seventeenth Century 22 (2007): 395–410; The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot, UK, 1990); A. B. Chambers, Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: SeventeenthCentury Praise and Restoration Satire (University Park, PA, 1991); Beth Lynch, “Mr. Smirke and ‘Mr. Filth’: A Bibliographic Case Study in Nonconformist Printing,” The Library, 7th ser. 1 (2000): 46–71. 216. William Lamont, “The Religion of Andrew Marvell: Locating the ‘Bloody Horse,’” in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, 135–56. 217. N. H. Keeble, “Introduction,” to Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse Writ by One T.D. &.c, in Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, 2:381–409. On Howe’s moderate Calvinism, see David P. Field, “Rigide Calvinisme in a Softer Dresse”: The Moderate Presbyterianism of John Howe (1630–1705) (Edinburgh, 2004). 218. Annabel Patterson, “Introduction,” in Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ii, 4; for details on Croft’s life and career, see ODNB; Ethyn W. Kirby, “‘The Naked Truth’: A Plan for Church Unity,” CH 7 (1935): 45–61. Baxter thought Croft worthy as a “reconciling bishop”—one of six named—and he wrote a dedicatory epistle to him; see Baxter, An Apology for the Nonconformists Ministry (1681), sigs. A2rA4v. 219. Annabel Patterson, “Introduction,” in Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ii, 5.

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220. [Francis Turner], Animadversions upon a Late Pamphlet entitled the Naked Truth, 2nd. ed. (1676); Gilbert Burnet, A Modest Survey o f . . . the Naked Truth (1676). 221. On Turner, see ODNB. 222. Annabel Patterson, “Introduction,” in Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ii, 5. 223. [Herbert Croft], The Naked Truth. Or, the True State of the Primitive Church (1675), 2. Marvell cites this with enthusiastic endorsement in Mr. Smirke, 18–19. 224. Naked Truth, 1. 225. Naked Truth, 5. 226. Naked Truth, 55. 227. Marvell, Mr. Smirke, 20. 228. Von Maltzahn, Andrew Marvell Chronology, 171; Annabel Patterson and Martin Dzelzainis, “Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading,” HJ 44 (2001): 703–26. 229. Beth Lynch, “Mr. Smirke and ‘Mr. Filth.’” 230. Marvell, Mr. Smirke, 24, 25. 231. Marvell, Mr. Smirke, 24; Marvell, A Short Historical Essay, touching General Councils, Creeds, and other Impositions in Matters of Religion (1680), 22. 232. Marvell, Short Historical Essay, 16. 233. Marvell, Mr. Smirke, 22. 234. Marvell, Short Historical Essay, 10. 235. Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007), 300–1; and “Liberty Transpros’d: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker,” in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (New York, 1999), 269–99. 236. Marvell, Short Historical Essay, 25. 237. Marvell, Short Historical Essay, 25–26. 238. Marvell, Short Historical Essay, 15. Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica, l. 1, c. 15 is cited. Similarly, Marvell thundered against the divines such as Turner, who “by their Dignities and Preferments plump’d up beyond Humane Proportion, do whether for their Pride or Ignorance, neither understand themselves, nor others . . . much less do they understand to speak of God,” for they usually indulge in a “few Villainous words” uttered with “a seared Reason.” Marvell, Mr. Smirke, 33. 239. Croft to Marvell, in The Complete Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. A. B. Grosart, 4 vols. (New York, 1966), 2:489–90. 240. Roger North, Examen: Or, an Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Complete History (1740), 142. 241. Laurence Echard, History of England: From the first entrance of Julius Caesar and the Romans to the end of the reign of King James I, 3 vols. (1707–18), 3:501, cited in Andrew Marvell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London, 1978), 91. 242. CJ, 9:406 (March 26, 1677). See also 9:409, 419 (March 30, 1677), where it reads: “Resolved, &c. That the Bill do pass: And that the Title be, An Act to take away the Writ De haeretico comburendo: And that Sir Trevor Williams do carry up the said Bill to the Lords for their Concurrence”; (April 13, 1677), where it reads: “The Amendments sent from the Lords, to the Bill for taking away the Writ De haeretico comburendo were twice read; and, upon the Question, agreed,” signifying that

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not all of Marvell’s endeavors were futile. Marvell was clearly plugged into the contemporary theological controversies, as he specifically alludes to the OwenSherlock row over the nature of the believer’s communion with Christ; see Marvell, Mr. Smirke, 18, 31, 32; for the details of the Owen-Sherlock controversy, see chapter 4 above. 243. Marvell, Mr. Smirke, 41. 244. J. H. M. Salmon, Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1987), 188; idem, “Clovis and Constantine: The Uses of History in Sixteenth-Century Gallicanism,” JEH 41 (1990): 584–605. 245. See Eusebius, Vita Constantini, c. 67. 246. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999). 247. Gibbon here cites Hegesippus, ap. Euseb. l. iii. 32. iv. 22. Clemens Alexandr. Stromat. vii. 17. 248. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols. (London, 1776–88), 1:457.

Chapter 6 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

Stephen Nye, A Brief History of the Unitarians, Called also Socinians. In Four Letters, Written to a Friend (1687), 160–61, emphasis added. See the literature covered in Tord Larsson, God in the Fourth Gospel: A Hermeneutical Study of the History of Interpretations (Stockholm, 2001), 1–21. Gerhard Ebeling, Kirchengeschichte als Geschichte der Auslegung der Heilingen Schrift (Tübingen, 1947). On Reformation biblical exegesis, see Timothy J. Wengert, Philip Melanchthon’s Annotationes in Johannem in Relation to Its Predecessors and Contemopraries (Genève, 1987); Albrecht Beutel, In dem Anfang war das Wort: Studien zu Luthers Sprachverständnis (Tübingen, 1991); Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2000); Craig S. Farmer, The Gospel of John in the Sixteenth Century: The Johannine Exegesis of Wolfgang Musculus (Oxford, 1997); and G. Sujin Pak, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford, 2010). See also Irena Backus, “Polemic, Exegetical Tradition and Ontology: Bucer’s Interpretation of John 6:52, 53, and 64 before and after the Wittenberg Concord,” in The Bible in the Sixteenth Century, ed. David C. Steinmetz (Durham, NC, 1990), 167–80. Séan P. Kealy, John’s Gospel and the History of Biblical Interpretation, Book 1 (Lewiston, NY, 2002), 276. On the text, history, and cultural impact of the King James Bible, see David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge, 2005); Alister E. McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture (New York, 2001); F. F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English: From the Earliest Versions (New York, 1978), 96–112. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London, 1993).

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7. David S. Katz, God’s Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven, 2004), 40–73. 8. Lori Anne Ferrell, The Bible and the People (New Haven, 2008), 56–94. See also Cameron A. MacKenzie, The Battle for the Bible in England, 1557–1582 (Frankfurt, 2002); and Patrick Collinson, “Biblical Rhetoric: The English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge, 1997), 15–45 (here 18). See also Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004); James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Noam Reisner, Milton and the Ineffable (Oxford, 2009), 75, 77–80, 86 for Milton’s use of the Gospel of John; Ira Clark, “Paradise Regained and the Gospel according to John,” Modern Philology 71 (1973): 1–15; and Stella P. Revard, “The Gospel of John and Paradise Regained: Jesus as ‘True Light,’” in Milton and Scriptural Tradition: The Bible into Poetry, ed. James H. Sims and Leland Ryken (Columbia, MO, 1984), 142–59. 9. See, in particular, Nicholas Keene, “‘A Two-Edged Sword’: Biblical Criticism and the New Testament Canon in Early Modern England”; Stephen D. Snobelen, “‘To Us There Is but One God, the Father’: Antitrinitarian Textual Criticism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England”; and Rob Iliffe, “Friendly Criticism: Richard Simon, John Locke, Isaac Newton,” all in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 94–115, 116–36, 137–57. 10. J. G. A. Pocock, “Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Roger D. Lund (Cambridge, 1995), 50. 11. Among the voluminous literature, see Bob Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movement in Reformation Germany (London, 1987); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991); Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000); and The Reformation and the Book, ed. Jean François Gilmont and Karin Maag (Aldershot, UK, 1998). 12. Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’, and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001), 240; and Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 4, 23, 42, 51–53, 55, 144, 173, 176, 230–31, 304, 406, 424, 441, 470. 13. John Biddle, “The Preface,” in A Twofold Catechism (1654), sig. A6v. He repeats the language of “nose of wax” in sigs. A7r, a6r. 14. John Morrill, “Afterword: The Word Became Flawed,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 248. 15. On international Calvinism, see Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1660–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford, 2000). 16. The best source for Fulke’s life and work remains Richard Bauckham, “The Career and Thought of Dr William Fulke (1537–1589)” (Ph.D. diss., University

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17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

Notes

of Cambridge, 1973); see also H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958), 115, 119–25, 127–31, 134, 143, 174, 187, 214, 391, 421, 428; Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), 27, 37, 48, 57–58, 70, 74, 76, 173, 219; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, 1967), 108, 235–37, 274, 298, 300, 342, 392. On Fulke’s Hebraism, see William McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists (Cambridge, 1989), 76–110. See also MacKenzie, The Battle for the Bible in England, 1557–1582, 211, 215–16. William Fulke, A Sermon Preached at Hampton Court (1570), fols. Bir-Biir (“I haue undertaken to proue, that Babylõ here spoken of, is Rome.”), Civ. See also fol. Diir where his numerological tabulation of lateinoV (or Roman, namely, the Pope) added up to 666. William Fulke, A Defense of the sincere and true Translations of the holie Scriptures into the English tong, against the manifolde cauils . . . of Gregorie Martin (1583), passim. Ferrell, The Bible and the People, 86–88. See Calvin, Institutes, I.xiii.17–19, 25; B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Calvin and Augustine (Philadelphia, 1956), 189–284; Muller, PRRD, 4:324. In the end of section 19, Calvin sought to strike a balance with this statement, which, in the zeitgeist of heated polemic, went unheeded: “Therefore, when we speak simply of the Son without regard to the Father, we well and properly declare him to be of himself; and for this reason we call him the sole beginning. But when we mark the relation that he has with the Father, we rightly make the Father the beginning of the Son.” Then he referred the readers to Augustine, De Trinitate, Book V. The New Testament of Iesvs Christ, Translated Faithfully into English, out of the authentical Latin . . . in the English College of Rhemes (Rhemes, 1582), 219 [hereafter cited as Douay-Rheims New Testament]; William Fulke, The Text of the New Testament of New Testament . . . with a Confutation of All Such Arguments, Glosses, and Annotations, as Conteine Manifest impietie, of heresie . . . against the Catholike Church (1589), 141v. Douay-Rheims New Testament, 250; Fulke, Text of the New Testament, 159 v. For Howson’s life and tempestuous career, see Nicholas W. S. Cranfield’s entry in ODNB and David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit (Stanford, 2004), 76. On Howson’s Arminianism/anti-Calvinism, see Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 19, 46, 47, 232–36, 247, 284, 291, 304; “John Howson’s Answers to Archbishop Abbot’s Accusations at His ‘Trial’ before James I at Greenwich, June 10, 1615,” ed. Nicholas Cranfield and Kenneth Fincham, in Camden Miscellany Vol. XXIX (London, 1987), 319–41. Ken Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c. 1700 (Oxford, 2007), 69, 86–89, 90, 122, 124–25, 144, 177; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987), 7, 60, 67–70, 108, 121, 184, here 69; A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 433. The text of the sermon is found in Bodl. Rawlinson MS D. 320, fols. 46–65.

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26. On the juxtaposition of Genesis 1:1 with John 1:1 for the purpose of the trinitarian apologetic, see Pierre Allix, The Judgment of the Ancient Jewish Church concerning the Trinity (1699), 123–24; Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the Five Bookes of Moses (1622), fol. A2r. 27. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London, 1993), 64. 28. William Barlow, The Svmme and Svbstance of the Conference . . . at Hampton Court (1604), 46–47. 29. See Ferrell, The Bible and the People, 88–92, for the provenance of the KJV as an “anti-Genevan Bible.” 30. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 442. 31. “Sermon Notes on John Howson,” in Bodl. Rawlinson MS D. 320, fol. 46v. 32. Bodl. Rawlinson MS D. 320, fol. 46v. 33. Ian Atherton and David Como, “The Burning of Edward Wightman: Puritanism, Prelacy, and the Politics of Heresy in Early Modern England,” EHR 120 (2005): 1246–47. 34. The Bible: That is, the Holy Scriptures conteined in the Old and New Testament (1603), 1r [hereafter cited as Geneva Bible (1603), followed by the folio number]. 35. Geneva Bible (1603), Genesis 1:1, 1v. Emphasis added. Cf. Ainsworth, Annotations upon the Five Bookes of Moses, fol. B1v, where he explicitly affirms the Trinity from the phrase “Let us,” citing 1 John 5:7 as a proof-text to boot. 36. Irenaeus argued against the Gnostics that “God needed none of these beings to make whatever he had foreordained to make, as if he did not have hands of his own. For always with him are his Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, through whom and in whom he made everything freely and independently.” Adv. Haer. 4.20.1. 37. Bodl. Rawlinson MS D. 320, fol. 47r. 38. John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, 1845), 323–24. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago, 1971), 81. 39. Geneva Bible (1603), John 1:1, 37r. 40. Bodl. Rawlinson MS D. 320, fol. 47v. 41. John Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist, Homilies 1–47, trans. T. A. Goggin (Washington, DC, 1957), 50–51; Anthony Wotton cites this Sermon to show that Romans 9:5 was used anarthrously, yet the deity of Christ was not in question. Wotton, Sermons on . . . John (1611), 75. 42. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel according to John Books 1–10, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC, 1989), 99 (lib. 2, §18). 43. Jean Daillé, “Advis au Lecteur,” in La Foy fondée sur les Saintes Escritures (Paris, 1661), 7–8. 44. John Trapp, A Brief Commentary or Exposition upon the Gospel according to St John (1646), 2. 45. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.6.1, cited in John Howes, Christ, God-Man, Set out in a Sermon . . . on Christmas-Day, 1656 (1657), 10.

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46. George Hutcheson, An Exposition of Gospel of Jesus Christ according to John (1657), 3. 47. Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (2010), chap. 3; and Mark Konnert, Early Modern Europe: The Age of Religious War, 1559–1715 (Toronto, 2008), 313–44. 48. William A. McComish, The Epigones: A Study of the Theology of the Genevan Academy at the Time of the Synod of Dort, with Special Reference to Giovanni Diodati (Allison Park, PA, 1989); and John Patrick Donnelly, “Italian Influences on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism,” SCJ 7 (1976):81–101, esp. 100. On Giovanni Diodati’s Pious Annotations upon the Holy Bible (1643), see Hill, The English Bible, 65, 166; John Milton had visited Diodati in Geneva in 1639. See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 2000), 9. 49. On Haak, see A. G. Keller, “Haak, Theodore,” ODNB; for his work on the Dutch Annotations, see Hill, The English Bible, 65; Katz, God’s Last Words, 77–78; for his academic eclecticism, see Stephen Pumfrey, “‘These 2 Hundred Years Not the Like Published as Gellibrand Has Done de Magnete’: The Hartlib Circle and Magnetic Philosophy,” in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge, 1994), 255, 257, 261, 263. 50. Theodore Haak, The Dutch Annotations upon the Whole Bible (1657), fol. P3v; and John Diodati, Pious Annotations upon the Holy Bible (1643), fol. H2v. 51. Diodati, Pious Annotations, fol. H2v. 52. John Downame, Annotations upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament (London, 1657), fol. Aaa2; Diodati, Pious Annotations, ad loc.; and Haak, Dutch Annotations, ad loc. See also Edward Leigh, Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650), 141; and Hutcheson, Exposition of . . . John, 2. 53. John Trapp, A Brief Commentary or Exposition upon the Gospel according to St John (1646), 2. See also Hutcheson, Exposition of . . . John, 4; Henry Hammond, A Paraphrase and Annotations upon all the Books of the New Testament (Oxford, 1659), 267; Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition of all the Books of the New Testament (1656), 428; Downame, Annotations, on John 1:3, fol. Aaa2. 54. Leigh, Annotations, 142. 55. Hammond, Paraphrase and Annotations, 270. 56. Hutcheson, Exposition of . . . John, 8. 57. Downame, Annotations, on John 1:14, fol. Aaa2. 58. Leigh, Annotations, 154. On the coalescence of the essence and will implied in the word one, see also Trapp, Commentary . . . of the New Testament, 474; Hutcheson, Exposition of . . . John, 205; Downame, Annotations, on John 10:30, fol. Ddd2. For this dual identity of Christ, Downame is dependent on Fulgentius, Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catechetical Lectures XI, and Hilary, De Trinitate, lib. 7. 59. Hutcheson, Exposition of . . . John, 405; Trapp, Commentary . . . of the New Testament, 520; Trapp, Brief Commentary . . . upon . . . John, 143. 60. Downame, Annotations, on John 20:28, fol. Fff 5. 61. Hammond, Paraphrase and Annotations, 325.

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62. Anthony Burgess, “The Epistle to the Reader,” in his CXLV Expository Sermons upon the whole 17th Chapter of the Gospel according to St John (1656), sig. A3v. On Burgess, see Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620– 1660 (Cambridge, 1987), 75, 134, 151, 306–7, 311, 326–8, 338; Tai Liu, Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark, DE, 1986), 73, 75, 77, 87, 117. 63. Burgess went so far to say—citing Luther—that “There was no other Gospel but that of John.” Burgess, CXLV Expository Sermons, sig. A5r. 64. For Traheron’s career as a Marian exile and the literary and historical provenance of his Exposition of . . . Iohannes Gospel, see John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1822), 3:543–44; Robert Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, 3 vols. (London: 1850), 1:30–31; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1998), 177, 184, 390, 392, 407; Carl R. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556 (Oxford, 1994), 215–18, 222, 223, 224, 241, 247, 250, 290. 65. Ernst Gerhardt, “‘No quyckar merchaundyce then lybray bokes’: John Bale’s Commodification of Manuscript Culture,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007), 418; James P. Carley, “The Royal Library under Henry VIII,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume III, 1400–1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), 277; Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward VI, 6 vols. (London, 1924–1929), 3:74–75; The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI, ed. W. K. Jordan (Ithaca, NY, 1966), 110–11. 66. Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI, 37, cited in C. J. Clement, Religious Radicalism in England, 1535–1565 (Edinburgh, 1997), 115. 67. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 424, 474–78; for a hagiographical portraiture of the heroism of Boucher, see J. Newton Brown, Memorials of Baptist Martyrs, with a Preliminary Historical Essay (Philadelphia, 1854), 281–85. For Boucher’s anticeremonialism, see Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 204, 214. 68. See Lambeth Palace Library, Cranmer’s Register, fols. 78r-79r; The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI, 58; E. M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, MA, 1945), 171. 69. Original Letters, Letter CCLXV, 574–75. 70. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism, 172. 71. Bartholomew Traheron, An Exposition of a Parte of S. Iohannes Gospel made in sondrie readinges in the English Congregation by Bartho. Traheron, and now published against the wicked enterprises of new sterte vp Arrians in Englande (n.p., 1557), fols. Ciiv-Ciiir. 72. Traheron, Exposition, fols. Ciiir, Eiiv. See Athanasius, Orationes contra Arianos, 2.24–82; judging from the sheer space Athanasius devotes to his theological exegesis of Proverbs 8:22, it is clear that this text was a locus classicus in the proNicene exegesis of both Athanasius and Basil. 73. Traheron, Exposition, fols. Diiiir-v. 74. Traheron, Exposition, fols. Diiiiv, Dviv. 75. Traheron, Exposition, fols. Giiir-v.

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76. Traheron, Exposition, fol. Giiiir. For Calvin’s perspective on the communicatio idiomatum, see Institutes, 2.14.1 (OS 3:459); 2.14.2 (OS 3:460); Comm. Acts 20:28. The classic study on Calvin’s Christology still remains E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-Called “Extra Calvinisticum” (Leiden, 1966). 77. Traheron, Exposition, fol. Hiv. 78. For Wotton’s nonconformity, see BL Harleian MS 750, fols. 91–101. 79. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 221–46; Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1997), 56–57, 91. 80. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 26–27. 81. See Anthony N. S. Lane, Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers (Edinburgh, 1999). 82. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 30–31. 83. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 31. 84. On Augustine’s reputation and the English translations of his works, see Mark Vessey, “English Translations of the Latin Fathers, 1517–1611,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West, ed. Irena Backus, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1997), 2:777–78, 794, 796, 798–802, 805, 810, 813. 85. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 68–69, 152–53. In his Tractatus in Evangelium Ioannis, 1, §11, Augustine maintains that the agent of creation, the Eternal Word, was unchangeable (“hoc verbum incommutabile”), and although changeable things are made by it, the Word itself is unchangeable (“quamvis mutabilia per Verbum fiant, ipsum incommutabile est”). (PL 35.1384). 86. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 82. 87. John Stachniewsky, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991); for a more nuanced reading of this Puritan preoccupation with melancholy generated by its commitment to practical syllogism, see Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford, 2002). See also chapter 4 on Owen’s practical divinity, which addresses a similar concern as Wotton. 88. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 85. 89. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 32–33. 90. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 32–33, 37. In the next section, Wotton actually interacts with Psalms 105:8; 119:25, 49, 65, 74, 76, and 130:5, where the word memra was to be translated as “word” without any possible reference to Christ (34). On this fascinating issue of the lexical and theological issues arising from memra and its implication in the Gospel of John, see Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John,” HTR 94 (2001): 243–84. 91. John Calvin, Expositio impietatis Valen. Gentilis, in Calvini Opera 9, col. 368. This was popularized in England by William Perkins’s A Golden Chaine, in The Whole Works of . . . Mr. William Perkins, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1631), 1:14–15. This debate on the aseity of the Son recurs in the Westminster Assembly; see Chad van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2005), 240–49. See also Mark

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Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth: The Christology of the Puritan Reformed Orthodox Theologian, Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) (Göttingen, 2010), 112–22. 92. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 55–56. 93. Wotton, Sermons upon . . . John, 110–11. 94. The following quote from Wotton further situates his uneasiness with Christ being autotheos, while clearly affirming his full deity: “Therefore are all 3 absolutely equall in all matters, appertaining to the nature of God: only there are 2 things, wherein the Father hath as it were some præeminence among the persons. The one I noted by the way before; that He is of himself: so is neither of the other, but both are of him [Father]. The other is, that the father is the first in order; &, in these respects, he is sometime called by Diuines the fountain of the Trinitie.” Sermons upon . . . John, 106. 95. The title of Gataker’s defense encapsulates the complex network of complicity in this Walker-Wotton affair, which was designed to contain, control, and create a unified godly network in London: An Answer to Mr George Walkers Vindication, or Rather Fresh Accusation: Wherein he chargeth Mr Wotton with Arianism; Mr Gataker with Socinianism; Dr Gouge, and Mr Downham, with a false Attestation; Dr Baylie, and Mr Stock, with Self-condemnation (1642), 38–39. 96. Gataker, An Answer to Mr George Walkers Vindication, 118, 121–22. See Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 237. 97. On Wotton’s controversial view on justification, see “Mr Anthony Wotton his judgmt of Justification. Decem. 11, 1611,” in Bodl. Rawlinson MS D. 1331, fol. 75r; see also Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 288, fols. 68–85. Other surviving contemporary evidence sheds further light on Wotton’s avant-garde pushing the envelope of orthodoxy: Ralph Cudworth—father of the better-known Cambridge Platonist—bitterly complained to James Ussher, in a letter dated January 17, 1617. Cudworth père reported that Wotton’s view on justification was causing consternation, as he had been teaching “strange doctrines of this kind, denying all imputation of Christ’s righteousness,” which “differs little from heresy.” Cudworth to Ussher, “Letter CCCXLIII,” in The Whole Works of . . . James Ussher, D.D., ed. C. R. Elrington, 16 vols. (Dublin, 1847), 16:347–48. 98. Hutcheson, Exposition of . . . John (1657), 3. On the culture of Scottish Protestantism, even of Puritanism, see Margo Todd, “The Problem of Scotland’s Puritans,” in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. John Coffey and Paul Lim (Cambridge, 2008), 174–88; and The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, 2002). 99. Edmund Porter, Trin-Unus-Deus. Or the Trinity, and the Unity of God (1657), 10; Augustine, In Evangelium Ioannis Tractatus (henceforth as Tractatus . . . Ioannis), XXIX.6 (PL 35.1630) and XXV.5 (PL 35.1659). Porter also cites from a sermon by Augustine (de Tem. Serm. 189): “Accepto baptism dicere solemus, fidelis factus sum, credo quod nescio,” which is “When we are baptized we used to say, now I am one of the faithful, for I believe that which I understand not.” 100. Augustine, Tractatus . . . Ioannis, XXIX.6 (PL 35.1630). For Augustine’s religious epistemology in De Trinitate, see Luigi Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate (Oxford, 2008); Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge, 2010), 142–73.

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101. Godfrey Goodman, Two Great Mysteries of Christian Religion, The Ineffable Trinity, the Wonderful Incarnation, Explicated (1653), 25. 102. Edmund Porter, Trin-Unus-Deus, 8. Emphasis added. 103. Arrowsmith, Theanthropos, 34. 104. Arrowsmith, Theanthropos, 208–9. 105. John Trapp, A Brief Commentary or Exposition upon the Gospel according to St John (1646), 6. See also his A Commentary or Exposition of all the Books of the New Testament (1656), 430. The quote from Gregory Nazianzen was part of his critique of Apollinarian anthropology. Gregory wrote: “For that which he has not assumed he has not cured, but that which is united to his deity is also saved.” Ep. 101 (PG 37.181). 106. Arrowsmith, Theanthropos, 210. 107. Arrowsmith, Theanthropos, 221–22. 108. Arrowsmith, Theanthropos, 236. 109. Arrowsmith, Theanthropos, 299. 110. In these hagiographical compendia of the Unitarian luminaries are included Operibus Omnibus of “Fausti Socini Senensis,” “Johannis Crellii Franci,” “Jonae Slichtingii à Bucowietz,” and “Johannis Lodovici Wolzogenii.” See Fausti Socini Senensis Opera omnia in duos tomos distincta, 2 vols., in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum quo Unitarios vocant (Irenopoli, 1656). 111. Fausti Socini, Concionis Christi, quae habetur capite quinto, sexton, & septimo, apud Matthaeum Euangelistam Explicatio, in Opera Omnia, I:1–73. 112. “In principio erat verbum. Qui hoc loco principia nomine Christi aeternitatem designare volunt, manifestissimi erroris, vel ex eo solo convincuntur, quod nulla seu Veteris, seu Novi Foedere auctoritate eorum opinio fulciatur. Etenim nusquam reperies in Sacris Literis, principium pro aeternitate usurpari. Qua propter nomen principia in his verbis, non aeternitatem, sed ordinem earum rerum respicere dicemus, quas Johannes de Jesu Christo dilectissimo Dei fi lio scripturus est, imitates hac in re Mosem, qui, Historiam suam describens, ab hoc nomine principii & ipse exordium sumpfit Gen. 1.1.” Fastus Socinus, Explicationis Primae partis primi Capitis Johannis, id est usque ad Vers. 15, in Opera Omnia, 1:77–78 [hereafter cited as Socinus, Explicationis . . . Johannis]. 113. Socinus, Explicationis . . . Johannis, 79. “In principio erat verbum, hoc est, Christus Dei fi lius, in principio Euangelii, eo nimurum tempore, quo Johannes Baptista, ad frugem Israëlitarum populum revocare caepit. . . . ” Emphasis added. See also Lelio Sozzini, Opere: Edizione Critica, ed. Antonio Rotondò (Firenze, 1986), 101– 28; Sand, Bibliotheca Anti-Trinitariorum (Freistad, 1684), 21–24, here 23. 114. Socinus, Explicationis . . . Johannis, 79. 115. Socinus, Explicationis . . . Johannis, 80. 116. Antal Pirnát, “Introduction,” in De falsa et vera unius Dei Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti cognotione libri duo (Albae Juliae) 1568 (Utrecht, 1988), lxvii–lxxvi. 117. Pirnát, “Introduction,” in De falsa et vera, xlvii. 118. De falsa et vera unius Dei Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti cognitione libri duo (1568), fols. DDir-DDiir. 119. De falsa et vera, fols. DDiiiv-DDiv r. 120. De falsae et vera, fol. EEiv v.

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121. “Erunt omnes docibiles Dei: & statim subiicit, omnis, qui audit à patre meo, & didicit.” De falsa et vera, fol. FFiiir. This was a slight variation of the Vulgate, favoring therefore the fact that Christ ceded the role of divine teaching to the Father entirely. 122. “sed omnia seruiunt vni Deo patri, quo nos creauit: & vni Iesu Christo fi lio Dei, qui nos redemit: & vni spiritui sancto, quo nos obsignamur ad vitam.” De falsa et vera, fol. FFiiiv. 123. Pace Pirnát’s doubt regarding the authorship of this tract, the editors of Lelio Sozzini’s Opere included “Brevis Explicatio” as an authentic part of Socinus’s works. See Pirnát, “Introduction,” in De falsa et vera, lxxvi; cf. Lelio Sozzini, Opere, 101–28. 124. De falsa et vera, fols. ZZiv-ZZiir. 125. “Hoc qui de Christo non sentit, & tamen illum à seipso Deum esse credit, duos Deos inducit, & patrem summa afficit contumelia.” De falsa et vera, fol. Aaiv. 126. “Certe in his verbis Iohannis I. capite nulla transubstantiatio asseritus . . . unde etiam duas naturas, aut potius duos Christos, introduxivt Antichristus.” De falsa et vera, fol. Bbiv r. 127. Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010), 24. For Crell’s life, in particular, the publication history of his works, see Sand, Bibliotheca Anti-Trinitariorum, 115–21; Wallace, Antrinitarian Biography, 2:407, 417, 431–33, 436, 442, 488, 494, 497, 499, 504, 514, 516, 521, 558–71, 579, 580, 588, 590; H. J. McLachlan, SSCE, 12, 18, 19, 21, 103, 111, 115, 116, 119, 121, 125–27, 129, 130, 132, 137, 139–40, 147, 192, 206, 288, 293, 309, 326, 327. 128. For Crell’s influence in Krakow, Danzig, and beyond, see Siegfried Wollgast, “Zur widerspiegelung des Sozinianismus in der Lutherischen theologie und schulmetaphysik im reich, Danzig und Preussen in der ersten hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Socinianism and Its Role in the Culture of XVIth to XVIIIth Centuries, ed. Lech Szczucki (Warsaw, 1983), 161, 162, 164; Lech Mokrzecki, “Sozinianismus in den Diskursen der Danziger Professoren im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Szczucki, Socinianism and Its Role, 184, 185, 187, 190; for his English followers, see Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America, 185, 201; Bietenholz, Encounters with a Radical Erasmus, 175; John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and the Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006), 173, 314, 324, 349, 471; (specifically on Crell’s protolerationist tract), 536, 539, 543, 544–45, 548–49, 555, 570–71, 594, 643, 647, 649, 651, 654. On his antitrinitarianism and influence on Locke and the early Enlightenment intellectual zeitgeist, see John Marshall’s sure-footed essay, “Locke, Socinianism, ‘Socinianism,’ and Unitarianism,” in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 2000), 118, 123, 124, 128, 134, 137, 146, 150–53, 155, 170, 171. 129. Crell, Responsio ad Hugonis Grotii librum de Satisfactione (Racoviae, 1623); Sand, Bibliotheca Anti-Trinitariorum, 116; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and the Early Enlightenment Culture, 349; Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 29–30, 81, 235. 130. McLachlan, Socinianism, 111, 115–17; Sand, Bibliotheca Anti-Trinitariorum, 117; their Commentarius in Epistolam ad Hebraeos (Racoviae, 1634) was translated by

420

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Lushington as The Expiation of a Sinner. In a Commentary upon the Epistle to the Hebrews (1646); Commentarius in Epistolam Pauli apostoli ad Galatas (Racoviae, 1628) was translated as Justification of a Sinner. Being the Maine Argument of the Epistle to the Galatians (1650). On Lushington, see Frank L. Huntley, “Dr. Thomas Lushington (1590–1661), Sir Thomas Browne’s Oxford Tutor,” Modern Philology 81 (1983): 14–23. 131. Thomas Barlow, “A Library for Younger Schollers”: Compiled by an English ScholarPriest about 1655, ed. Alma DeJordy and H. F. Fletcher (Urbana, IL, 1961), 2. It is noteworthy that while Barlow acknowledged Crell’s abilities as an ethicist, he listed Crell as a dangerous Socinian, naming his Liber de Deo ejus attributis; et libri duo de uno Deo Patre (Racoviae, 1630), in need of refutation (62, 66); Sand, Bibliotheca Anti-Trinitariorum, 115. On Thomas Barlow (1609–1691), see John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991), 87, 121– 22, 190, 212, 274, 313, 316, 317, 318, 327; on his Calvinism, see Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008), 10, 11, 37, 41, 77, 79–80, 87–91, 95–96, 99, 126. 132. For the publication history of the Racovian Catechism, see Thomas Rees’s excellent “Historical Introduction,” in The Racovian Catechism, with Notes and Illustrations, Translated from the Latin, trans. Thomas Rees (London, 1818), i–xcii. 133. On the Vorstius affair, see James I, His Maiesties Declaration concerning his Proceedings with the States Generall of the United Provinces of the Low Countreys, in the Cause of D. Conradus Vorstius (1612), which King James dedicates to the honor of Jesus Christ, “The Eternal Sonne of the Eternal Father, the Onely QEANQROPOS,” sig. A2v, and called Vorstius one of the “Disciples of Socinus (with whose doctrine he hath bene suckled in his childhood” (33) and a heretic “after the mould of . . . Arrius, and Paulus Samosatenus” (76–79, here 76). See also Frederick Shriver, “Orthodoxy and Diplomacy: James I and the Vorstius Affair,” EHR 85 (1970): 449–74; W. Nijenhuis, “Saravia and James I’s Moves against the Appointment of Vorstius,” in Nijenhuis, Ecclesia Reformata: Studies on the Reformation, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1994), 2:206–24; Atherton and Como, “The Burning of Edward Wightman,” EHR 120 (2005): 1241–44. 134. “Historical Introduction,” in The Racovian Catechism, lxxxxi–lxxxiv, xciii, civ. 135. See Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1968), 101–2; Joseph M. Levine, “Philology and History: Erasmus and the Johannine Comma,” in his The Autonomy of History: Truth and Method from Erasmus to Gibbon (Chicago, 1999), 25–51; H. J. de Jong, “Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56 (1980): 381–89; Stephen D. Snobelen, “To Us There Is But One God, the Father,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, 117–27, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136; Robert Illiffe, “Friendly Criticism: Richard Simon, John Locke, Isaac Newton and the Johannine Comma,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, 140, 141, 143–45, 148–49, 156. 136. Racovian Catechism, 23–24, 42. 137. Racovian Catechism, 30. 138. Racovian Catechism, 31. On the preascension ascension of Christ, as taught by Fastus Socinus, see Alan Gomes’s superb article, “The Rapture of Christ: The ‘Pre-

Notes

421

Ascension Ascension’ of Jesus in the Theology of Faustus Socinus (1539–1604),” HTR 102 (2009): 75–99 (here 75, 76). 139. Racovian Catechism, 52–53. 140. Racovian Catechism, 54. 141. Racovian Catechism, 57–58. See also Rowan A. Greer and James L. Kugel, Early Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia, 1986), 165; Greer, Anglican Approaches to Scripture: From the Reformation to the Present (New York, 2006). 142. Racovian Catechism, 58. 143. T. E. Pollard, “The Exegesis of John X. 30 in the Early Trinitarian Controversies,” New Testament Studies 3 (1957): 334–49. 144. David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2010), 211; Timothy Wengert, Philip Melanchthon’s Annotationes in Johannem in Relation to its Predecessors and Contemporaries (Genève, 1987). 145. John Calvin, In Evangelium secundum Johannem commentarius, in Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Wilhelm Baum, Edward Cunitz, and Edward Reuss, 59 vols. (Brunswick, Germany, 1863–1900), 47:250 (John 10:30). 146. Johann Crell, The Two Books of Johann Crellius Francus, touching One God the FATHER (Kosmoburg, 1665), 2. This was a translation of his 1631 publication, Johannis Crelli . . . de uno Deo libri duo (Racoviæ, 1631). It is not incidental that De uno Deo libri duo was republished yet again in the height of the trinitarian controversy in the 1690s, under a different title: The Unity of God. Asserted and Defended (1691). See also Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 37, 57, 77–78, 149–51, 154–56. 147. Crell, Two Books of Crellius, 65–68. 148. Crell, Two Books of Crellius, 68–71, 110–15. 149. Crell, Two Books of Crellius, 93–95. 150. Crell, Two Books of Crellius, 96–110 (here 98). 151. Crell, Two Books of Crellius, 84–88. 152. Crell, Two Books of Crellius, 145–59. 153. Crell, Two Books of Crellius, 269–70. 154. [Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle], The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688), 15–16; Stephen Nye, An Impartial Account of the Word Mystery, As it is taken in the Holy Scripture (1691), 19. 155. Nye, Impartial Account of . . . Mystery, 19. Both his Impartial Account of . . . Mystery and An Accurate Examination of the Principal Texts Usually alleged for the Divinity of Our Saviour (1692) were aimed at articulating clearly the English Socinian view on mystery, divinity of Christ, and the illogicality of the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, with Luke Milborne, William Sherlock, John Wallis, et al. in view. See Luke Milbourne, Mysteries in Religion Vindicated (1692), 332–39 for his defense of the mystery of the Trinity through Johannine exegesis. See also William Sherlock, A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity (1690), which was a riposte to Nye’s Brief History of the Unitarians (1687), and it precipitated a polemical avalanche, from both the antitrinitarians such as Nye and the trinitarians such as John Wallis and Robert South, who were convinced that Sherlock’s quasi-Cappadocian view of divine personhood amounted to tritheism, which they charged was mere Cartesian. Sherlock’s Vindication of the Doctrine of the . . . Trinity was

422

Notes

reprinted in 1691 and 1694. In 1693, forced by the furor the Vindication had created and the pressure to create a united front among protrinitarians, Sherlock published An Apology for Writing against Socinians, in Defence of the Doctrines of the Holy Trinity and Incarnation (1693). Nye’s contributions to the Sherlock controversy were Brief Observations upon the Vindication of the Trinity and Incarnation (1690); Considerations on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity, By Dr. Wallis, Dr. Sherlock, Dr. S__th, Dr. Cudworth, and Mr. Hooker (1693). See D. W. Dockrill, “The Authority of the Fathers in the Great Trinitarian Debates of the Sixteen Nineties,” in Studia Patristica, ed. E. A. Livingstone (Leuven, 1990), 335–47. 156. Biddle, “Preface,” sigs. a4v-a5r. 157. John Biddle, The Testimonies of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Novatianus, Theophilus, Origen (1650), 84. 158. Biddle, Testimonies of Irenaeus, 84–85. 159. Stephen Nye, A Brief History of the Unitarians, Called also Socinians. In Four Letters, Written to a Friend (1687), 42, 155–56. 160. According to Nye’s Brief History, Erasmus averred in his Scholia on the third volume of Jerome’s Epistles that Arians were not heretics (31) and that Grotius was “Socinian all over” and his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum was a “compleat System of Socinianism,” including his “Notes on John 1.1” (31–32). Petavius, according to Nye, noted in his historical analysis of the ante-Nicene fathers that they were in agreement with the “Nazarens or Socinians” (32–33) and that there was no way to prove the Trinity from Scripture alone, thereby needing tradition as coeval authority to buttress the doctrine of the Trinity (34); for Episcopius, the priority of the Father was axiomatic, and he denied that the “Lord Christ is the Son of God by substantial Generation” (34–35); and Sand also claimed the entire ante-Nicene to have been Arians (35–36). 161. Stephen Nye, An Accurate Examination of the Principal Texts Usually alleged for the Divinity of our Saviour (1692), 19–35. 162. Nye, Brief History, 80. 163. Nye, Accurate Examination, 20. 164. Nye, Brief History, 80–81; Nye, Accurate Examination, 24–25. Here, drawing an explicit comparison between Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1, Nye argued that just as Moses had written of the “beginning of the World,” John had written of the “beginning of the Gospel-state.” 165. Nye, Accurate Examination, 24. 166. Nye, Brief History, 81. 167. Nye, Accurate Examination, 22–23. 168. Nye, Accurate Examination, 23, 25. 169. Nye, Accurate Examination, 24; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), pt. III, cap. xlii, 267–68. 170. Nye, Accurate Examination, 25; for the origins of this Christological innovation, see Faustus Socinus, Christianae religionis brevissima institutio in Fausti Socini Senensis Opera omnia in duos tomos distinct, 2 vols. (Irenopoli, 1656), 1:675; and his Tractatus de Deo, Christo, & Spiritu Sancto in Fausti Socini Senensis Opera omnia in duos tomos distinct 1:813, both cited in Gomes, “The Rapture of the Christ,” 75 n. 1, 76 n. 2. In his Brief History, Nye continued to defend this view

Notes

423

of Christ’s “pre-ascension ascension.” In his exegesis of John 3:13, “No Man hath ascended up to Heaven, but he that came down from Heaven; even the Son of Man, who is in Heaven,” Nye argued that whereas the “most learned Orthodox [namely, Trinitarian] Interpreters” took the language of ascending and descending “only metaphorically,” the Socinians took it literally, so that “before our Lord entered upon his Office of Messias, he was taken up to be instructed in the Mind and Will of God,” like Moses in Exodus 24:1, 2, 12. Nye’s further proof-texts were John 6:38, 46, 51, 62; 8:40. See Nye, Brief History, 91–92. 171. Nye, Accurate Examination, 28–29. 172. Gerard Reedy, S.J., The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 1985), 119–41; see also John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660–1750 (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 164, 165, 171, for a brief discussion on Nye. 173. In German scholarship, Souverain’s name was in circulation even in the early part of the twentieth century. See Walther Glawe, Die Helleniserung des Christentums: in der Geschichte der Theologie von Luther bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin, 1912, repr. 1973), 115–32. 174. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Die philologische Zersetzung des christlichen Platonismus am Beispiel der Trinitätstheologie,” in Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beiträge zu Begriff und Problem frühneuzeitlicher »Philologie«, ed. Ralph Häfner (Tübingen, 2001), 294–301; Sébastian Drouin, “Patristique et Allégorisme. Du Protestantisme à la Littérature Philosophique Clandestine,” La Lettre Clandestine 13 (2004): 65–70; Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, 1990), 17–20; and Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA, 1959), 30. For Souverain’s ecclesial peregrinations and clandestine theological identity, see Eugène Haag and Émile Haag, La France Protestant, ou Vies des Protestants Français, 10 vols. (Paris, 1846–59), 9:294–95; Erich Haase, Einführung in die Literatur des Refuge (Berlin, 1959), 237–38. 175. Glawe, Die Helleniserung des Christentums, 121. 176. Martin Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland, 1680–1720 (Hamburg, 2002), 261–91 (here 261, 262); see also his thoroughgoing contextualization of the intellectual culture of Souverain, “Jacques Souverain, Samuel Crell et les cyprosociniens de Londres,” in Souverain, Lettre à Mr *** touchant l’apostasie, ed. Sylvain Matton (Paris, 2000), 49–63. 177. See especially Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, ‘Socinianism,’ and Unitarianism,” 115, 122, 125–30, 134, 136, 165–67, 178; and his John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 158, 183, 188–91, 484. 178. Smith, Drudgery Divine, 18. On the exegetical tradition and trajectory of Alexandria, especially on Clement, see Frances Young, “Allēgoria and theōria,” in Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge, 1997), 161–85; Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Vol. 1: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc (Edinburgh, 1998), 41, 45, 117– 22, 127, 138, 148. 179. Jacques Souverain, Le Platonisme Dévoilé, rev. ed., ed. Sylvain Matton (Paris, 2004); Platonism Unveil’d: Or, an Essay Concerning the Notions and Opinions of

424

Notes

Plato, and some Antient and Modern Divines his Followers (1700). For Souverain’s perspectives on toleration and liberty of conscience, see his Lettre à Mr *** touchant l’apostasie, ed. Sylvain Matton (Paris, 2000). 180. Michael Servetus, De Trinitatis erroribus libri septem (Hagenau, 1531; Frankfurt, 1965 repr.), II.4 (fol. 47b); cf. The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity, trans. E. M. Wilbur (Cambridge, MA, 1932), 75. 181. [Jean LeClerc], An Historical Vindication of the Naked Gospel, Recommended to the University of Oxford (1690), “The Preface to the Reader,” sig. A2r; Brian Young, “Theological Books from The Naked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (London, 2001), 82. 182. Marshall, “Locke, Socinianism, ‘Socinianism,’ and Unitarianism,” 115, 126. 183. [Jacques Souverain], “Some General Reflections upon the Beginning of St John’s Gospel.” Bodl. John Locke MS e. 17, fol. 175 [hereafter cited as Souverain, “Reflections upon . . . John”]. 184. This was Souverain’s interpretation of Simon’s view on the provenance of the Gospel of John. Cf. Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament wherein is firmly establish’d the truth of those acts on which the Foundation of Christian Religion is laid (1689), 113–25 (here 113–14). 185. Arrowsmith, Theanthropos; or God-Man, 37. 186. John Calvin, A Harmonie upon the three Evangelists Matthewe, Marke, and Luke (1584, 1610 repr.); Robert Rollock, Lectures, vpon the History of the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord Iesus Christ . . . containing a perfect harmonie of all the foure Euangelists (1616); Henry Garthwait, Monotessaron The Evangelicall Harmonie, reducing the foure Evangelists into one continued context (1634); John Lightfoot, The Harmony of the Foure Evangelists (1644, 1647, 1650 repr.); and his The Harmony, Chronicle and Order of the New Testament the Text of the Four Evangelists Methodized (1655). 187. Souverain, “Reflections upon . . . John,” fols. 177–78. 188. On Cerinthus, the Ebionites, and the Gnostics, especially their relationship to the Gospel of John, see Charles E. Hill, The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church (Oxford, 2004), 14, 28, 29, 42, 52, 99, 174–75, 352, 355, 369 (on Cerinthus); 99, 107, 114 (on the Ebionites); and 16, 17–19, 20, 21, 28–29, 60, 64–65, 191–92, 204, 205–6, 466, 473–74 (on the Gnostics); see also The Earliest Christian Heretics: Readings from Their Opponents, ed. Arland J. Hultgren and Steven A. Haggmark (Minneapolis, 1996), 34–37 (Cerinthus); 116–22 (Ebionites); and 37–48, 82–100 (on Valentinian Gnosticism). 189. Simon, Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, 114–15. 190. Souverain, “Reflections upon . . . John,” fol. 179. 191. Souverain, “Reflections upon . . . John,” fol. 181. 192. Souverain, “Reflections upon . . . John,” fols. 181, 185. 193. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 53. 194. See, inter alia, Richard Muller, “The Hermeneutic of Promise and Fulfi llment in Calvin’s Exegesis of Old Testament Prophecies of the Kingdom,” in The Bible in the Sixteenth Century, ed. David C. Steinmetz (Durham, NC, 1990), 68–82; David C. Steinmetz, “The Judaizing Calvin,” in his Calvin in Context (Oxford, 2010),

Notes

425

207–16; and G. Sujin Pak, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms (Oxford, 2010). On the complex historical issue of the literal meaning, see Brevard S. Childs, “The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern Problem,” in Beiträge zur Alttestamentlichen Theologie, ed. Hebert Donner, Robert Hanhart, and Rudolf Smend (Göttingen, 1977), 80–95. 195. In other contexts, Souverain calls it simply “Jewish Cabals.” Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 30–31. 196. Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John,” HTR 94 (2001): 243–84. 197. “Quia Moses scripserat, Dixit Deus, Fiat lux, et facta est lux, et ita de caeteris, hinc factum est, ut vim sive probolh n; aut a pj o vr jroJ ian (has enim voces hac in re Chrsitiani veteres usurpant) Dei illam qua res ex nihilo condit aliqaue rara et eximia efficit, Hebraei appellarent ‫[ דבר‬Verbum], ut videre est Ps. 33:6, 148:8. . . . Chaldaei non illis tantum locis sed et allis, ubi ea vox in Hebraeo non exstat, posuerunt ‫ממירא‬. Exempla sun innumera, sed ad rem maxime pertinet quod apud Esaism est. 45:12 in Hebraeo legitus, Ego feci terram, et hominem super eam ego creavi: in Chaldaeo est, Ego in Verbo meo faci terram, et hominess super eam creavi. 48:13 in Hebraeo legitur, Manus mea fundavit terram: in Chaldaeo, Verbo meo fundavi terram.” Hugo Grotius, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, Vol. 4: Continens Annotationes ad Iohannem (Gronigen, 1828), 6; and also 7, 8, 9, 18, where Grotius adduced further proof of Word being the agent of creation from the Chaldean Paraphrases. On the ambiguous legacy of Grotius’s Annotationes, see Kristine Louise Haugen, “Transformations of the Trinity Doctrine in English Scholarship: From the History of Beliefs to the History of Texts,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2001): 158–59. 198. Platonism Unveil’d, 54. On other trinitarian exegetes who appropriated “the Authority and Antiquity of the Chaldee Paraphrases,” see Allix, The Judgment of the Ancient Jewish Church concerning the Trinity, 84–99; Richard Kidder, “The Preface,” in his Demonstration of the Messias, Part III (1700), viii–xxvi. 199. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 56. 200. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 57. See also 18, 69 (Souverain ridiculed Chaldean Paraphrases—which he consistently called “antient Allegory”—by calling it “deprav’d Platonism, as absurd as the Theology of the Poets, and as unpolish’d as the Religion of the most superstitious Vulgar”); and his “Reflections upon . . . John,” fols. 216–18. 201. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 59; The Epistle of Barnabas, 9:6–7. 202. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 61, 63. For his trenchant critique of Clement and Origen, see also 4, 23, 26, 29, 61–62, 87, 89, 111–12; and his”Reflections upon . . . John,” fols. 181, 189, 202, 206, 208, 209. 203. Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (New York, 1967), 64. 204. Souverain, “Reflections upon . . . John,” fols. 207–8; see also his Platonism Unveil’d, 88–89. 205. Souverain, “Reflections upon . . . John,” fol. 208. On Richard Simon’s influence on Enlightenment biblical exegesis and intellectual culture, see Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 158, 397, 412, 416, 423, 482; Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and

Notes

426

J. P. Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951), 184; Benedetto Bravo, “Critice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and the Rise of the Notion of Historical Criticism,” in History of Scholarship, ed. C. R. Ligota and J.-L. Quantin (Oxford, 2006), 186–88; Levine, The Autonomy of History, 183–84, 188–91, 193, 195–96, 200–1, 212–13, 218; Patrick J. Lambe, “Biblical Criticism and Censorship in Ancien Régime France: The Case of Richard Simon,” HTR 78 (1985): 149–77; Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), 27, 40–41, 44–45, 103–4; and Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven, 2004), 235–36. 206. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, 1845), 324. 207. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 96; Michael Servetus, De Trinitate, lib. 2, p. 50. See also Platonism Unveil’d, 1–2, 9, 76, where allusions or citations from Servetus are found. 208. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 96. 209. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 97. 210. Souverain, Platonism Unveil’d, 97. 211. Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge.

Conclusion 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

Hilary of Poitiers, Ad Constantium, lib. ii, cap. 4 [PL 10.566], cited in Andrew Marvell, A Short Historical Essay touching General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Matters of Religion (1680), 25–26; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 4 vols. (New York, 1831), 1:446. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1:446. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford, 1991), 21. I owe this reference and conversations surrounding the dilemma of sola scriptura for Protestants to Jonathan Warren. Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley, 1994), 192. David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit (Stanford, 2004); John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (Woodbridge, UK, 2006); Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge (Stanford, 2004); Ariel Hessayon, ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’. The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot, UK, 2007). T. D. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988). On the spiritist backlash within transatlantic Puritanism, see Como, Blown by the Spirit; Michael Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, 2002); and T. D. Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). See also Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989). Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 187, 62; in general, 34–62, 168–99. I owe this reference to Jonathan Warren. On this question of the “matter of fact” in English historiography, see Joseph M. Levine, “Matter of Fact in the English Revolution,” JHI 64 (2003): 317–35.

Notes

427

10. Due to space limitations, I am postponing a thorough analysis of the “Trinitarian Controversy” of the 1690s. In the earlier version of this book, there was a chapter devoted to Stephen Nye, the doyen among the antitrinitarians of the late seventeenth century, particularly with regard to his culture of biblical exegesis; the specific contours, contexts, and content of antitrinitarianism; and the legacy he bequeathed to Enlightenment intellectual culture. This will be the basis of my next monograph, provisionally titled The Problem of God in English Enlightenment: The Strange Case of Stephen Nye, Antitrinitarian and Augustinian. 11. Bernard Skelton, Christus Deus. The Divinity of Our Savior Asserted and Vindicated, from the Exceptions of the Socinians and others (1692), 12. 12. Skelton, Christus Deus, 9. For Skelton, who held a living at Cantley, Norfolk (1663–1690), and was a friend of Samuel Pepys, see Alum. Cantab. Pt. I, vol. iv, 82; Notes and Queries, vol. 8 (November 18, 1863), 413. For the Genevan gloss, see The Bible translated according to the Ebrew and Greeke, and conferred with the best translations in diuers languages; with most profitable annotations vpon all the hard places, and other things of great importance (1599 ed.), 514, col. 1. 13. Skelton, Christus Deus, 9–10. 14. Skelton, Christus Deus, 11, 12. For a helpful exposition of the patristic theme of perichoresis, see T. F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh, 1996), 102, 168–74, 175–79, 180–95. 15. Skelton, Christus Deus, 14. On this theme of Plato as “Moses Atticus” and its fate in seventeenth-century English intellectual zeitgeist, see Sarah Hutton, “Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More, and the Decline of Moses Atticus: A Note on Seventeenth-Century Anglican Apologetics,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, ed. Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), 68–84; and Martin Mulsow, “The ‘New Socinians’: Intertextuality and Cultural Exchange in Late Socinianism,” in Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, and Cultural Exchange in SeventeenthCentury Europe, ed. Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls (Leiden, 2005), 56. 16. See Regina Schwartz’s insightful contribution to this disenchantment thesis of early modern England in her Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, 2008). 17. See, inter alia, Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton, 1997); and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971). Pace Gauchet, Thomas, and Schwartz, see Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion 1250–1750 (Oxford, 2010); Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, 2006); and more recently, Alexandra Walsham, “Invisible Helpers: Angelic Intervention in Post-Reformation England,” P&P 208 (2010): 77–130. 18. I owe this point about Wesley’s hymns and their trinitarian elements to John Coffey.

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UCLA Clark Library, Los Angeles, CA MS B8535 M3 MS L6815 M3 C734

Sermon notes by John Harper Paul Best versus Roger Ley disputation, “A New Samosatenian”

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Index

Abbot, George, 64, 250 Abelard, Peter, 117, 261 Achinstein, Sharon, 194, 195 Acontius, Jacob, 176, 375n.172 adamites, 69 Adams, Mary, 114 Adolphus, Gustavus, 22 adoptionism, 5, 26 Aikenhead, Thomas, 318 Ainsworth, Henry, 154 Alciatus, Andreas, 124 Alexander of Alexandria, 233–236, 269, 303 Allen, William, 275 Allison, C.F., 139, 405n.173 Alsted, Johann, 25 Ambrose of Milan, 53, 57, 206, 276, 289 anabaptists polemical category, 5, 69, 73, 76, 79–80, 88–94, 97, 109, 122, 133, 263 religious sect, 36, 90, 229, 242–243, 286 analogy of being, 5, 131, 169 Andrewes, Lancelot, 234, 277 Anselm of Canterbury, 121, 294–295 anti-Calvinists, anti-Calvinism, 39, 52, 72, 135, 264, 277, 278, 285 antinomians, antinomianism, 46, 52, ch. 2, passim, 139, 173, 191, 193, 198, 201, 204, 207, 208, 210, 247 anti-popery, 2, 20, 23, 25, 28–29, 36, 39, 58, 81, 112, 120, 146, 174, 204, 225, 230, 248, 263, 266–268, 274, 299

apocalypse, 27, 28 Apollinaris, Apollinarianism, 198 apophaticism, 2, 34, 62, 105, 141, 153, 169– 171, 173, 177, 184, 200–203, 205, 208, 227, 233, 235, 293, 321, 325, 371n.114, 382n.72 apostles, 12, 50, 55, 128, 220, 226, 229, 231, 232, 236, 265, 299, 307, 310, 326 Apostles’ Creed, 52, 104, 265–266 Aquinas, Thomas, 80, 81, 120, 184, 352n.40 Archer, John, 117–118, 358n.128 Arians, Arianism, 6, 32, 65, 76, 78, 84–87, 91, 104, 132, 137, 147, 150, 151, 168, 177, 180, 198, 229, 241, 244, 252, 261, 263, 265, 274, 278–281, 284, 286–287, 290, 292, 303 Aristotle, 189, 226, 326 Arminians, Arminianism, 39, 52, 69, 72, 90, 94, 97, 107, 117, 125, 127, 135, 139, 143, 166, 169, 170, 171, 174–176, 178, 184, 188, 190–192, 197, 205, 209, 210, 212, 214, 240, 247, 251, 264, 274, 279, 289 Arminius, Jacobus, 117, 264 Arnobius of Sicca, 11, 54, 59, 156 Arrowsmith, John, 291, 294–295, 311, 324 Artemon of Rome, 35 Assheton, William, 218–219 Athanasian Creed, 29, 42, 84, 267, 280, 295 Athanasius of Alexandria, 23, 34, 36, 53, 124, 141, 151, 179, 198, 233, 259, 261, 287, 289, 303

476

Athenagoras of Athens, 54, 245 Atkins, Sir Robert, 264 atonement generally, 110, 112, 121 limited atonement, 70 satisfaction, See Jesus Christ substitutionary atonement, 83, 121, 197, 296 Aubrey, John, 224 Augustine of Hippo, 11, 23, 34, 35, 53, 110, 117, 128, 150, 152, 154, 169, 170, 177, 181, 186, 230, 241, 242, 250, 254, 276, 289, 290, 293–295, 298 Babington, Gervase, 154–155 Backus, Irena, 54, 220, 222 Bacon, Nathaniel, 113 Baillie, Robert, 75, 78, 88–94, 97, 101–102 Bancroft, Richard, 57 baptism, 25, 26, 77, 90–94, 103, 113, 121, 122, 135, 138–139, 142, 176, 203, 266 Baptists general, 64, 94, 97, 142 Calvinistic/particular, 94, 120, 196 religious sect, 3, 75, 90–94 Barlow, Thomas, 181, 210, 215, 300 Baronius, Cesar, 12, 220, 248 Barwick, John, 134 Basil of Caesarea, 36, 95, 250, 287 Basu, Sammy, 77 Bauthumley, Jacob, 80, 103, 104, 123 Baxter, Richard, 10, 11, 14, 21, 29, 62, 63, 81, 87, 120, 134, 142, 173, 181, 187, 192, 198, 204, 216, 217–219, 221–223, 232, 235, 239–262, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269, 270, 305, 320, 324, 404n.163 Bear, Matthew, 5 Behmen, Jacob, 102 Behmenists, Behmenism, 100 Bellarmine, Robert, 12, 127, 230, 292 Bernard of Clairvaux, 117 Berriman, William, 17 Best, James, 22 Best, Paul, 4, 10, 11, 13, 16–41, 51, 67, 72–75, 80–82, 86–87, 89, 90, 103, 113, 114, 122, 138, 186, 219, 322–323, 325

Index

Beza, Theodore, 160, 168, 170, 194, 307 Bible, books of Acts, 1, 26–27, 32, 63, 138, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155, 168, 190, 211, 242, 262, 266, 288, 290, 299, 326 Colossians, 30, 44, 87 1 Corinthians, 25, 26, 51, 100, 148, 150, 152, 190, 206, 301, 326 2 Corinthians, 52, 186, 297 Daniel, 197 Deuteronomy, 77, 180 Ephesians, 141, 195 Exodus, 32, 51, 154 Galatians, 212, 282, 300 Genesis, 26, 84, 85, 111, 148, 153, 154, 163, 185, 195, 211, 214, 245, 275, 277– 280, 291, 297, 306 Hebrews, 4, 6, 30, 87, 146, 147, 158, 163, 168, 245, 291, 300, 303, 314 Hosea, 154 Isaiah, 26, 30, 31, 43, 49, 59, 144–146, 152, 154, 165, 168, 197, 314 Job, 153 1 John, 4, 6, 25, 158, 161–163, 168, 211, 301 John, Gospel of, 4–6, 14, 25–27, 30–31, 35–36, 43–44, 51, 60, 76, 77, 84, 85, 87, 92, 108, 148, 150, 151, 158, 164, 185, 211, 233, 241, 270, ch. 6, passim, 321, 324–326 Joshua, 48, 315 Leviticus, 152, 167 Luke, 150, 285, 299, 301, 303 Malachi, 77, 154 Mark, 148, 285, 299, 301, 303 Matthew, 43, 51, 121, 145, 148, 155, 158, 164, 197, 285, 296, 301, 303, 311 Numbers, 326 2 Peter, 100 Philippians, 27, 30, 147, 160, 185, 201, 281 Proverbs, 6, 287, 313 Psalms, 31, 146, 147, 168, 313, 326 Revelation, 25, 27, 83, 197, 242, 306 Romans, 27, 43, 44, 51, 144, 170, 180, 244, 281, 290, 294, 302, 303

Index

Song of Songs, 174, 193–200, 242–243 1 Timothy, 4, 25, 44, 164 Titus, 111, 294 Zechariah, 180 Bible, characters named in Abraham, 27, 30, 31, 32, 51, 56, 58, 154, 283, 301, 315 Adam, 66, 82, 160, 161, 214 Demetrius the Silversmith, 63 Eve, 214 Isaac, 31, 32, 56, 154 Jacob, 31, 32, 56, 58, 154 Jephthah’s Daughter, 272 John the Baptist, 77, 297 Joshua, 48, 315 Mary, 35, 148–149, 256–257, 260, 311 Moses, 25, 31, 48, 49, 56, 58, 148, 154, 163, 177, 225, 297, 307, 314 Paul, 28, 30, 54, 121, 143, 144, 149, 150, 152, 195, 290, 294, 297, 317, 326 Satan, 160, 213 Thomas, 27, 285, 290, 302 Bible, translations Bishop’s Bible, 273 Coverdale, 273 Douay-Rheims, 146, 273–275, 292 Geneva, 14, 147, 272–274, 277–280, 282, 307, 326 Great Bible, 273 King James, 14, 272, 274, 277–278, 280, 307 Polyglot Bible, 307 Septuagint, 41, 53, 185 Tyndale, 273 Vulgate, 13, 20, 275 Biblical exegesis allegorical/spiritual, 126, 193, 194, 198, 273–274, 277, 279–280, 309, 313–319, 321 grammatical-historical, 2 quadriga, 193, 313 typological/messianic, 11, 19, 25–26, 29–32, 34, 37, 43, 46, 49, 58–59, 77, 126, 143, 144, 158, 165, 168, 195, 229, 277, 279, 289, 313, 314, 323, 324 sensus literalis, 126, 153, 193, 315, 321

477

Biddle, John, 4, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16–22, 36–44, 46–68, 72–76, 80–82, 86–87, 99, 100, 103, 112–114, 116, 118, 122–123, ch. 3, passim, 173, 180, 183–187, 190, 194, 198, 202–203, 215, 219, 221, 240, 245, 251, 253, 274, 281, 296, 305–309, 322–324, 327 Birch, Colonel John, 264 Blackloists, 127, 133 Blandrata, George, 19, 46, 124 Blount, Charles, 239, 263 Boehme, Jacob, 105–106 Boethius, 230 Boniface III, 36 Book of Common Prayer, 137, 181 Boucher, Joan, 286 Boyarin, Daniel, 313 Boyle, Robert, 131, 208, 327–328 Bozeman, T.D., 322 Bramhall, John, 224, 228 Brerewood, Edward, 257–258 Bridges, John, 242 Brightman, Thomas, 54, 242 Brinsley, John, 94 Brownists, Brownism, 88 Bucer, Martin, 286 Buckeridge, John, 277 Bull, George, 253 Bullinger, Heinrich, 246, 286 Burgess, Anthony, 100, 116, 285–286 Burnet, Gilbert, 223 Bury, Arthur, 310 Buxtorf, Johann, the Elder, 21, 26 Cajetan, Thomas de Vio, 184 Calvin, John, 12, 17, 19, 21, 28, 30, 31, 37, 54, 95, 97, 121, 127, 128, 136, 145, 149–150, 156, 159–160, 164–165, 173, 181, 190, 207, 224, 239, 242, 246, 264, 274–277, 288, 289, 292, 303, 313, 332n.39 Calvinists, Calvinism, 14–15, 18–19, 25, 35, 39, 48, 51–52, 55, 67, 72, 82, 87, 90, 94, 103, 107, 120, 125, 127, 128–129, 135, 137, 145, 152, 157, 159–160, 163, 170, 173, 174–175, 177, 179, 179, 186, 188,

478

Calvinists, Calvinism, (Cont.) 190–192, 198–199, 203, 205, 208–214, 215, 220, 240, 247, 251, 253, 264, 266–267, 275–277, 279, 283, 288–289, 291–292, 300, 324, 332n.39 Cambridge Platonists, 36, 48–49, 98–99, 104, 112 Cambridge University Clare College, 142 Emmanuel College, 156 Generally, 95, 288, 289 Jesus College, 11, 22, 29, 67, 339n.54, 367n.71 Pembroke College, 275 St. John’s College, 137, 263, 265, 293 Campion, Edmund, 275 Canons of Sardica, 129 Cappadocians, 53, 95, 98, 250, 294 Caroli, Pierre, 275 Carpenter, Thomas, 61 Cary, Lucius/Lord Falkland, 127 Casaubon, Isaac, 21 Celsus, 143 Cerinthus, 35, 283, 287, 306, 311–312, 321 Certeau, Michel de, 14, 247 Chalcedon, Council of, 2, 21, 28, 43, 57, 198, 221, 234–235, 239, 244, 246, 256, 259, 288 Chaldean paraphrases, 291–292, 313–314, 324 Chamier, Daniel, 130 Chaponneau, Jean, 275 Charlemagne, 237 Charles I, 138, 182 Charles II, 204, 219, 224, 264, 267 Cheynell, Francis, 2, 10, 13, 63, 101, 112, 120, 125, 140, 157, 171, ch. 4, passim, 323 Chillingworth, William, 127, 129, 174–176 Cicero, 183, 189, 326 circumcellians, 101 Clagett, William, 14, 199, 209, 215 Clark, J.C.D., 38 Clarkson, David, 244, 248 Clarkson, Laurence, 40, 45, 80, 82, 85, 89, 103–112, 115–117, 122–123

Index

Clement of Alexandria, 141, 221, 245, 298, 315, 321 Clement of Rome, 54 Cloppenburg, Johannes, 125, 157 Coffey, John, 74, 166, 170, 231, 322 Cohn, Norman, 115 Cole, Peter, 76 Collins, Jeffrey, 225, 234 Collinson, Patrick, 91, 172, 220 Committee of Plundered Ministers, 23, 39, 180 Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel, 44, 182 Como, David, 39, 72, 75, 107, 322 Compton, Sir Francis, 142 Condren, Conal, 248 Constance, Council of, 63, 243 Constantine, Emperor, 50, 128, 224, 227, 233–234, 237, 242, 245, 249, 269 Constantinople, First Council of, 28, 152, 157, 221, 235, 244, 308 Constantinople, Third Council of, 151 Conventicle Act, 263–264 conventicles, 67, 72, 89, 165 Cooke, Cornelius, 5–6 Cooper, John, 104 Cotton, John, 242–243, 248 Cottrell, John, 61 Coudert, A.P., 48 Courtois, Jean, 275 covenant, 61, 116, 125, 134–136, 140, 142, 147, 154–155, 176, 187, 190, 193, 196– 198, 201, 206, 212 Coverte, Robert, 24 Crabbe, Petrus, 248 Cranford, James, 23, 157 Cranmer, Thomas, 286 creator-creature Distinction, 45, 73, 97, 98, 100–102, 111, 115–116, 121, 323 Crellius, Johannes, 124, 211–212, 308 Crisp, Tobias, 115 Croft, Herbert, 263–266, 268 Cromwell, Oliver, 50, 61, 63–66, 112, 115–116, 119–120, 125, 137–138, 171, 181–183, 245 Cromwell, Richard, 235

Index

Cudworth, Ralph, 48, 104 Cyprian of Carthage, 35, 57, 206, 254, 258 Cyril of Alexandria, 23, 53, 179, 186, 217, 244, 255–261, 276 Cyril of Jerusalem, 317 Daillé, Jean, 55, 60, 128–130, 239, 245, 281–282 Dancy, Philip, 61 Daniel, John, 61 Daniel, Roger, 53 Danson, Thomas, 205, 213–214, 264 Dávid, Ferenc, 19, 53–54, 145, 296 Davies, Michael, 191 Davis, J.C., 109, 111 Deacon, John, 16 deists, deism, 10, 68, 223, 239, 256, 263, 269, 300 Denne, Henry, 89, 142 Derodon, David, 256–257, 406n.185 Descartes, René, 48 Digby, Kenelm, 125–134, 170–171 diggers, 66 Diodati, Giovanni, 275, 283–284 Dioscorus of Alexandria, 256 disenchantment, 193, 327–328 Dixhoorn, Chad van, 243 Dixon, Philip, 8, 82, 222 Dodwell, Henry, 261 Donation of Constantine, 20 Donatists, Donatism, 89, 91, 101, 204 Doran, Susan, 74 Downame, John, 275, 283–285 Downes, Colonel John, 180 Draconick Ordinance, 39–40, 224 Drusius, Johannes, 26 Du Moulin, Lewis, 259 Du Moulin, Pierre, the Elder, 27–28, 134 Du Pin, Louis, 260 Duppa, Brian, 260 Durham, James, 195 Durston, Christopher, 74 Dutch Republic, 19 Dzelzainis, Martin, 66

479

Ebeling, Gerhard, 272 Ebion, Ebionites, 35, 283, 306, 311, 316, 321 Echard, Laurence, 268 Eck, Johann, 127 Eckhart, Meister, 104 Edward VI, 213, 286 Edwards, Thomas, 3–5, 7, 20, 22, 63, 73, 78–91, 97, 101–102, 109, 112–113, 121, 231 Eire, Carlos, 144 Elys, Edmund, 259 enthusiasts, enthusiasm, 14, 40, 73–74, 79, 96, 98, 101, 108, 199, 203–204, 206, 208–210, 215, 248, 310, 323 Ephesus, Council of, 179, 219, 221, 235, 242, 244, 248, 255–259, 308, 321 Epiphanius of Cyprus, 152, 185, 230, 235, 251–252 Episcopius, Simon, 306 Erasmus, Desiderius, 1–2, 4, 14, 20, 26, 55, 117, 136, 177, 297, 301, 306 erastianism, 23, 63, 112, 133, 224–225, 228, 230, 237 Erbury, William, 175 Estwick, Nicholas, 13, 125, 127, 145, 152–157, 168, 171, 221 eucharist, as communion, 196 and bodily ubiquity of Christ, 149 and disenchantment, 193 as Lord’s Supper, 113, 193, 199 as mystery, 131 as ordinance, 135, 196 theology of, 12, 245 transubstantiation, 2, 12, 28, 37, 65, 100, 112, 116, 126, 131, 145, 193, 221, 233, 243, 299, 308, 316–317, 324 Eunomius, 203, 222, 243 Eusebius of Caesaria, 11, 54, 185, 235, 289 Eusebius of Nicomedia, 35 Evagrius of Pontus, 235 Evans, G.R., 126 Everard, John, 75, 81, 103–105, 107–109, 123

480

Evelyn, John, 137 Eversden, Henry, 166 exclusion crisis, 216, 241, 248 familists, familism, 13, 69, 75, 88, 95–98, 100, 102–104, 177, 180, 263, 323 Fawne, Luke, 167 Featley, Daniel, 75, 91–94 Felbinger, Jeremias, 54 Ferrell, Anne, 272 Ficino, Marsilio, 177 Fifth Monarchists, 119 Firmin, Giles, 192–193 Firmin, Thomas, 16, 66, 166 Flacius, Matthias, 220 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 305 Fox, George, 209 Foxe, John, 220 Fry, John, 100, 180 Fulgentius of Ruspe, 250 Fulke, William, 274–277, 292 Fuller, Thomas, 134 Gallicans, Gallicanism, 134, 246, 258, 260, 266, 268 Gassendi, Pierre, 48 Gataker, Thomas, 293 Gauden, John, 101–102 Gellibrand, Samuel, 167 Gentilis, Valentinus, 124, 156 Gibbon, Edward, 269–270, 320 Gilbert, Claudius, 87–88, 223 Glawe, Walther, 309–310 Glorius Revolution, 9, 93 Glynn, John, 66 gnosis esoterica, 48 Gnostics, Gnosticism, 56, 101, 185, 283, 311, 316 Godolphin, John, 78 Gomarus, Franciscus, 307 Goodman, Godfrey, 2, 260, 294–295 Goodwin, John, 40, 97, 113, 125, 127, 166–170 Goodwin, Thomas, 112, 115–122, 170–171, 181–182 Gordon, Alexander, 247

Index

Gorton, Samuel, 97 Great Tew Circle, 8, 127, 174 Green, Ian, 52 Greenwood, Daniel, 183 Gregory the Great, 57, 128 Gregory Nazianzen, 36, 95, 99, 149, 198, 202–203, 250, 277, 285, 289, 295 Gregory of Nyssa, 95, 149, 154 Griffin, John, 63 Grindal, Edmund, 250 Grosart, A.B., 22 Grosseteste, Robert, 78 Grotius, Hugo, 14, 21, 46, 175, 184–185, 212, 291, 300, 306, 313–314, 324 Gunning, Peter, 13, 51, 125, 127, 134, 142–152, 165, 168, 246, 260, 265, 323 Gura, Philip, 97 Gwalter, Rudolf, 242 Haak, Theodore, 273, 275, 283–284 Hales, John, 239 Hall, Thomas, 93–94 Hamilton, William, 125 Hammond, Henry, 134, 143, 175–176, 184–185, 225, 245, 247, 260, 284–285, 291, 307 Hamont, Matthew, 76 Hampton, Stephen, 204 Hampton Court, 275 Hampton Court Conference, 277 Harding, Thomas, 220 Harley, Sir Edward, 264 Harnack, Adolf von, 309 Harper, John, 13, 159, 163 Harpsfield, Nicholas, 220 Harris, Tim, 204 Hartlib, Samuel, 283 Hawes, Thomas, 3–6 Helmer, Christine, 2 Helmont, Jan Baptist van, 102 Hendrix, Scott, 242 Hermes Trismegistus, 36, 103, 105, 177, 253 Hessayon, Ariel, 74, 105, 322 Heyd, Michael, 199

Index

Heylyn, Peter, 204, 213, 246 Hickes, George, 260 Hickman, Henry, 134, 212–213 Hilary of Poitiers, 53–54, 154, 170, 254, 267, 276, 289, 320 Hill, Christopher, 17, 70, 73–74, 109, 115, 272, 277 Hillerbrand, Hans, 21, 263 Hinde, Thomas, 94 Hippolytus of Rome, 303 Hoard, Samuel, 214 Hobbes, Thomas, 10–11, 14, 29, 48, 127– 134, 216, ch. 5, passim, 305, 307, 309, 320–321, 324, 327 Hobson, Paul, 89–90 Holland, Cornelius, 180 Holland, John, 85–87 Holy Spirit as agent in creation, 26, 42, 56 as attribute of God, 160 deity of, 34, 39, 41–42, 61, 76, 92, 125, 138, 143, 152–153, 156–157, 162, 169– 170, 180, 182, 187, 189, 209, 252, 255, 277, 284 generally, 1, 12, 26, 43, 53, 55–56, 58–61, 77, 81, 90, 93, 113, 114, 116, 132, 137, 165, 167–168, 299, 301, 303, 310 illumination of, 133 as minister of God, 43 modalist view of, 82, 84–85 as person, 2, 5, 25, 43, 84–85, 90, 167, 243, 315, See Also, Trinity. as power, 25, 40, 152, 157, 160, 243, See Also, Macedonians, Macedonianism sin against the Spirit, 1, 84 subordination to the Father, 92, 155, 160, 163, 275, See Also, Jesus Christ Hone, Thomas, 245 Hooker, Richard, 209–210 Hooker, Thomas, 192 Hotchkiss, Thomas, 215 Houghton, Robert, 5 Howes, John, 282 Howson, Barry, 90 Howson, John, 277–280

481

Hudson, Nancy, 105–106 Hughes, Ann, 3–4, 20, 319, 322 Hunnius, Nicolaus, 278 Hus, Jan, 63, 239, 243 Hutcheson, George, 282, 284, 293 Hypatia, 255–256, 260 Iamblichus, 277 Ignatius of Antioch, 35, 53–54, 148, 170, 298 Independents, Independency, 3, 67, 79, 88, 91, 114–115, 119–120, 132–133, 137, 166, 171, 180–182, 190, 192, 204, 207, 215, 224, 228, 318 Irenaeus of Lyons, 11, 35, 53–57, 59–60, 129, 131, 140–141, 155–156, 169–170, 185, 221, 245, 279, 298, 311 Isham, Sir Justinian, 134 Jackson, Arthur, 157 Jacombe, Thomas, 207–208, 213 James I, 277–278, 280, 282, 293, 300 James II, 258 James, Thomas, 57–58 Jenkyn, William, 207 Jerome, 20, 170, 180, 275, 311 Jerome of Prague, 63, 243 Jerusalem, Council of, 262–263 Jesus Christ ascension of, 76, 122, 146, 301, 307 autotheos, 156, 275–277, 289, 291–293 communicatio idiomatum, 28, 32–33, 62, 143, 148–150, 165, 211, 288, 290, 298, 302 deity of, 4–6, 14, 16, 26–27, 30–33, 36–37, 39–41, 51, 58, 61, 82, 84–85, 94, 108, 112–113, 116, 118, 140, 146, 149, 152, 156, 160, 163–165, 169, 176, 179–180, 182, 184–187, 197, 227–230, 252, 255, 259, 271, 274–278, 282, 284–286, 289–290, 292–294, 298, 301–303, 306, 311 eternal generation of, 5, 33, 42, 50, 58, 81–82, 141, 150, 161–162, 226, 230, 275, 277, 304, 313, 316–317

482

exaltation of, 145–146, 179, 184 as exemplar, 46, 51, 72 generally, 5, 36, 39, 43, 51, 82–84, 86, 89, 106, 114, 120–122, 138, 185, 189–190, 192, 202, 204–205, 210–214, 226, 253, 266–267, 275, 281–284, 302–304, 315, 317, 321 as homoousios or consubstantial with the Father, 12, 24, 32, 34, 64, 84, 104, 129, 147, 160, 191, 195–196, 228, 237, 241, 280, 287, 304, 320 as human only, 35, 41, 180, 325 hypostatic union, 28, 42, 50, 58, 100, 186, 288 as image of God, 44, 104, 281, 284, 304 incarnation of, 5, 30, 42, 49, 54, 80, 85, 92, 106, 116, 142, 148, 150, 160, 179, 184, 186, 200–201, 226, 230, 252, 254, 283–284, 288, 294–295, 301–302, 308, 317–318 as judge, 30, 52, 59, 154 as mediator between God and humanity, 45–46, 88, 107, 121, 145–147, 151, 164, 186, 190, 202, 208, 211–212, 288 as messiah, 25–26, 32, 43, 77, 144, 229, 266, 269–270, 299, 307, 309, 314, 316 preexistence of, 54, 154–155 as ransom, 46, 121 resurrection of, 26–27, 35, 44, 51, 76, 80, 92, 122, 148, 150, 164, 179, 184, 201, 226, 302, 304 satisfactory work of, 6, 14, 18, 46, 50, 70–71, 87, 90, 110, 112, 118, 121, 130, 136–137, 177, 182, 187, 197, 211, 240, 291, 294, 300 as Son of God, 5–6, 26, 36, 40, 43, 55, 61, 64, 73, 81–83, 87, 94, 118, 147–148, 153, 155–156, 164, 184, 195, 201, 229, 230, 266, 276, 284, 289, 294, 297, 299, 301, 307, 316 as Son of Man, 284, 301 subordination to the Father, 44, 59, 147–148, 150, 178 two natures of, 33, 42–43, 56–58, 143, 148, 149–152, 165, 168, 185, 198, 207, 211,

Index

215, 243, 246–248, 256, 258, 288, 298–299 worship of, 1, 32, 40–43, 51, 57, 60, 87, 145–147, 157, 178, 190, 306, 326 Jewel, John, 35, 64, 127, 221, 242 John Chrysostom, 206, 250, 281, 283–284, 307 John of the Cross, 199–200 John Foxe Project, 222 Johnson, William, 246 Jones, Rufus, 103 Jordan, William K., 223 Junius, Franciscus, 168, 376n.178 Justin Martyr, 11, 32, 35, 53–54, 57–58, 141, 143, 154–156, 170, 245, 253 Juvenal, 38 Kabbalah/Cabbala, 2, 48, 103, 312, 315 Kapic, Kelly, 205 Katz, David, 272 Keeble, Neil, 219, 240, 264 Kempis, Thomas à, 102 Kerby, Thomas, 114 Kett, Francis, 76 Kiffin, William, 64, 91–92 Kirton, Joshua, 167 Knewstub, John, 104 Knollys, Hanserd, 90, 196 Knott, Edward, 127 Knox, Ronald, 199 Krey, Gary de, 204 Lactantius, 11, 54, 59, 170, 245 Lake, Peter, 6, 75, 91, 156, 173, 208, 274, 289, 319, 322 Lamb, Thomas, 89, 87 Lamont, William, 218, 239, 260, 263–264 Lasco, John à, 286 Laud, William, 77, 115 Laudians, Laudianism, 2, 10, 13, 39, 58, 77, 89, 101–102, 125, 127, 134–152, 170–171, 174–175, 213, 220, 224, 240, 245–246, 250, 260, 267, 275, 277–279, 285, 293, 321 Lawrence, Michael, 115, 119 Leclerc, Jean, 310

Index

Legate, Bartholomew, 23, 77, 224, 293, 300, 318 Legouis, Pierre, 223 Leigh, Edward, 99–100, 284 Leo III, Pope, 237 Lessay, Franck, 235 Lessing, Gottfried, 233 Levellers, 4, 41, 52, 74, 124, 182 Levine, Joseph, 140 Lewes, John, 76 Ley, Roger, 11, 22, 29–38, 67, 323 lex orandi, lex credendi, 171, 173 libertines, 69, 79–80, 115, 137, 180 Lindley, Keith, 4 Lipsius, Justus, 60, 306, 309 Locke, John, 62, 248, 309–310, 320 Loewenstein, David, 77 Lollards, 238 Lombard, Peter, 153, 162, 224, 230 London Baptist Confession, 90 London Provincial Assembly, 39–40, 159 Long, Thomas, 260 Love, Christopher, 5–6 Lucian of Samosata, 183, 240, 253 Ludolphus, Job, 257 Lushington, Thomas, 67, 300 Luther, Martin, 1–2, 11–12, 28, 37, 95, 98–99, 117, 127, 133, 136, 213, 221, 224, 230, 238–239, 245–246, 275 Lutherans, Lutheranism, 100, 133, 149, 186, 220, 230, 236, 257, 278, 300 Lynch, Beth, 266 Macculloch, Diarmaid, 286 Macedonians, 152, 157, 160, 243 Magni, Valerian, 132–133 Maimonides, Moses, 48 Malcolm, Noel, 225 Maldonado, Juan, 291, 313 Maltby, Judith, 137 Manicheans, Manicheanism, 101 Manton, Thomas, 100 Marcion, 148, 189 Maresius, Samuel, 157 Marotti, Arthur, 8

483

Marsh, Christopher, 75 Marshall, John, 77, 309–310 Martin, Gregory, 275 Marvell, Andrew, 10–11, 14, 29, 217, 219, 221–223, 246, 262–270, 305, 320, 324 Maurice, Henry, 258–262, 324 Maximin the Arian, 241 Mayne, Zachary, 118–119, 166 McDowell, Nicholas, 74 McGiffert, Michael, 135 McGregor, J.F., 113–114 McLachlan, H. John, 7–8, 18–20, 22, 67, 74, 85, 126, 143, 222, 321 Mede, Joseph, 28 Melanchthon, Philip, 159, 161, 220, 248, 303 Meyjes, G.H.M. Posthumus, 251 Micronius, Martin, 286 Milbank, John, 321 Milbourne, Luke, 305 Milton, Anthony, 58, 221, 274 Milton, John, 52, 89, 95, 124–125, 182, 217, 219, 283 Modalists, Modalism, 40, 82, 85 Mohammed/Mahomet, 16, 89, 211, 213–214 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 220 Monarchians, Monarchianism, 59 Montagu, Richard, 95 Montanists, Montanism, 58, 101 Moone, Richard, 61 Moore, Susan Hardman, 194 More, Henry, 48–49, 98–99, 104 More, Sir Thomas, 88 Mornay, Philippe de, 153 Morrill, John, 9, 137, 274 mortalists, mortalism, 46, 52, 69, 72, 74, 94, 113 Mortimer, Sarah, 8, 11, 20, 126, 201, 222, 300 Morton, A.L., 73, 109 Moskorzowski, Jerome, 300 Moss, Jean Dietz, 95 Müntzer, Thomas, 97 Muggleton, Lodowick, 83–85, 124

Index

484

Muggletonians, 66, 73–74, 79–88, 103, 113, 323 Muller, Richard, 21, 173, 177, 313 Mulsow, Martin, 309–310 Musculus, Wolfgang, 159, 161 Napier, John, 27–28 Nasu, Kei, 78 Natural Theology, 131, 141, 153, 161 Nayler, James, 16 Nazarenes, 50, 306, 311–312, 316 Nedham, Marchamont, 112, 268 Needler, Benjamin, 13, 125, 127, 148, 156, 159–165 Neile, Richard, 77, 277 Neoplatonism, 96, 98, 103–105, 107–108, 111, 126, 304, 310 Nestorius, 164–165, 222, 243–244, 256– 261, 288 Newman, John Henry, 279–280, 316 Nicaea, First Council of, 12, 21, 27–28, 33, 36, 50, 54–55, 57, 63–64, 69, 82, 102, 129–130, 140, 152, 155, 171, 216, 219, 221, 223–224, 227–229, 233, 235–236, 241–242, 244–246, 248–249, 251–255, 259, 262–265, 267, 269, 305, 308–310, 314, 317, 321 Nicene Creed, 34, 219, 225–227, 230, 233, 237, 259, 267, 292–293, 297 Nicholas of Cusa, 75, 103–104, 107, 109, 123 Niclaes, Hendrik, 95, 97, 102, 104–106, 180 Nicodemites, Nicodemism, 172 North, Roger, 268 Novatian, 11, 53–54, 156, 251, 256 Nowell, Alexander, 213, 242 Nuttall, Geoffrey, 39, 186, 209 Nye, Philip, 120, 182 Nye, Stephen, 17, 62, 271–272, 296, 305–309 Oakes, Henry, 94 Overall, John, 288 Overton, Richard, 4, 41, 52, 74

Origen, 11, 53–54, 96, 102, 143, 156, 281, 303, 307, 315, 317, 321 original sin, 50, 69, 82–83, 94, 103, 109, 160, 182, 191, 224, 240 Owen, John, 2, 8, 10, 12–14, 44, 46, 63, 101, 112, 119, 120, 122, 140, 145, 171, ch. 4, passim, 217, 240, 243–244, 248, 251, 291, 323, 326 Oxenbridge, John, 38 Oxford University All Souls College, 125 Balliol College, 174 Bodelian Library, 57, 143, 248 Brasenose College, 219 Christ Church, 183, 211 generally, 46, 53, 57, 125, 138, 142, 171, 173, 175–176, 181, 183, 206, 210, 213, 217–218, 247, 260, 277, 300, 310 Magdalen College, 38, 115, 118, 213 Queen’s College, 181 St. Mary’s Church, 278 Pagitt, Ephraim, 89, 91, 121, 231 Pak, G. Sujin, 21, 143 Palmer, Thomas, 93 Parker, Samuel, 260–263 Parkin, Jon, 225, 267 Parris, George van, 286 Patterson, Annabel, 262 Paul of Samosata, 36 Pearson, John, 142 Pelagius, 117 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 79, 208, 279–280 perfectionism, 13, 52, 68, 72, 82, 86, 88, 94, 99, 101, 107, 109–110, 112–113, 122, 182, 322–323 Perkins, William, 19, 95, 117 Perron, Jacques, 140 Persons, Robert, 275 Petavius, Dionysius, 12, 140, 253–254, 306 Peyrere, Isaac de la, 66 Philo, 48, 102, 253 Photinians, 252 Pierce, Thomas, 143 Placher, William, 19

Index

Plato, 28, 36, 49, 60, 98, 177, 253, 305–306, 314, 326 Platonism, 11, 28, 36, 49, 50, 68, 104, 305, 309–310, 312–313, 315, 317–318, 321–324 Pneumatomachians, Pneumatomachianism, 125, 152 Pocock, J.G.A., 9–10, 93, 199, 206, 269, 273 Polizzotto, Carolyn, 119 Pollard, T.E., 303 Polycarp of Smyrna, 53–54 Ponder, Nathaniel, 266 Ponet, John, 213 Poole, Matthew, 10, 13, 125, 127, 140, 145, 156–158, 281 Poole, William, 66 popery, See anti-popery Popish Plot, 268 Porter, Edmund, 2, 14, 125, 134, 137–138, 170, 260, 291, 293–295 practical divinity, 52, 170, 173–174, 176, 179, 186–188, 191, 198, 219, 284–285, 288, 291 Presbyterians, Presbyterianism, 3, 5–7, 13, 20, 23, 28, 38–42, 64–67, 79, 88–90, 93, 97, 99, 102, 112–113, 119–120, 125, 134, 137–138, 142, 148, 156–157, 161, 167, 174–175, 181, 190, 204, 219, 224, 231, 254, 261, 263, 318 Priestley, Joseph, 14, 247, 259 Prosper of Aquitaine, 250, 284 Przipkowski/Przipcovius, Samuel, 61–62, 65, 124 Pseudo-Dionysius, 81, 103–104 Purchas, Samuel, 24 Quakers, Quakerism, 15–16, 46, 50, 86–87, 102–103, 122, 124, 132, 159, 167, 182, 186, 199, 206, 209, 263, 323 Quantin, Jean-Louis, 10, 55, 127, 140, 221–222, 240, 245, 260 Questier, Michael, 6, 208 Racovian Catechism, 19, 44–45, 52, 87, 119, 157, 182, 185, 211, 299–303 Randall, Giles, 81, 103, 105

485

Ranters, Ranterism, 13, 45–46, 48, 66, 73–77, 80–81, 85–88, 100, 102–104, 109, 111–114, 116, 118–119, 121–123, 124, 159, 182, 186–187, 206, 323 Rapp, Claudia, 250 Reedy, Gerard, 308 Reeve, John, 83–85, 124 Rivers, Isabel, 247 Robertson, John, 18 Robins, John, 114 Rogers, Daniel, 192 Rogers, Humfrey, 94 Rogers, John, 192 Rolls, Samuel, 212–213 Roman Catholicism, 21, 28, 35, 37, 39, 43, 50, 55, 57, 64, 78–79, 91, 102, 116, 125–134, 138–139, 142, 144–146, 168, 170, 184, 193, 206, 220–221, 224, 229, 241–242, 246, 254, 258, 272, 274–278, 285, 292, 299, 308, 321 Ross, Alexander, 224 Rothwell, John, 157, 167 Ruarus, Martinus, 124, 300 Rushworth, William, 127 Rutherford, Samuel, 78, 91, 97–98, 101–102, 217 Rye House Plot, 217 Sabellians, Sabellianism, 82, 87, 131, 225, 276, 284, 287 Sadoleto, Jacopo, 127 Salmon, J.H.M., 268 Saltmarsh, John, 89, 98 Samosetians, 36, 62, 252 Sancroft, William, 261 Sand, Christof, 306 Sander, Nicholas, 275 Savoy, Conference of, 190, 204 Schlichtingius, Jonas, 124, 212, 300 Schlusselberg, Konrad, 278 Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm, 309 Schreiner, Susan, 21, 282 Schwartz, Regina, 193 Scultetus, Abraham, 220 Sedgwick, Obadiah, 23, 78 Seekers, 46, 69, 73, 97, 102–103, 124, 179

486

Servetus, Michael, 2, 16–17, 30, 32, 46, 48, 54, 90, 124, 149, 157, 211, 276, 303, 310, 316–317 Shapiro, Barbara, 324 Shaw, Jane, 9 Shaw, Peter, 75 Sheehan, Jonathan, 9 Shepard, Thomas, 192 Shepherd of Hermas, 54, 314 Shepherd, Thomas, 207 Sherlock, William, 14, 174, 184, 199, 203–215, 305, 323 Shirley, Sir Robert, 142 Shuger, Deborah, 322 Shwenckfeld, Caspar, 97 Sibylline Oracles, 36 Simmons, Thomas, 248 Simon, Richard, 311, 313–315 Simson, Patrick, 78 Simson, Sydrach, 120 Skelton, Bernard, 325–326 Skinner, Quentin, 173 Smalcius, Valentinus, 124, 214, 300 Smith, J.Z., 309 Smith, Nigel, 11, 13, 18, 20, 67, 74, 105, 107 Smith, Ralph, 161 Society of Jesus/Jesuits, 140, 253, 257, 264–265 Socinians, Socinianism, 3–15, 17–30, 37–40, 42, 45–46, 48, 50–52, 60–68, 69, 72, 74–75, 77–83, 85, 87, 94, 97, 118–120, 124–126, 128, 130–131, 133– 142, 145, 149–153, 156–163, 166–167, 169–171, 174–180, 182–184, 186, 188, 190–192, 195–198, 201–203, 205, 209–210, 212–213, 215, 221–222, 226, 229, 240, 246–247, 251–252, 261–262, 264–266, 270, 271, 274, 277–278, 284–285, 289–290, 292–296, 299–300, 306–308, 321–322, 324–326, 328 Socinus, Faustus, 11–12, 14, 19, 21, 25, 28, 60, 87, 124, 135–138, 141, 145, 157, 160, 167, 176–177, 190, 211, 213, 276, 296–305, 307, 324 Socinus, Laelius, 19, 87, 299 Socrates Scholasticus, 235, 255

Index

sola scriptura, 2, 12–13, 20–21, 25, 32, 42, 126, 130, 132, 136, 139–140, 224, 230–231, 236, 238, 246, 265–267, 308, 319, 321 Solemn League and Covenant, 39, 42 solifidianism, 137, 179 Sorkin, David, 9 soul-sleep, 69, 113 Souverain, Jacques, 11, 60, 102, 263, 273, 292, 296, 305–306, 308–318, 322, 324–325, 327 Sozomen Salaminius, 235 Sprat, Thomas, 260 Springborg, Patricia, 225 Spurr, John, 204, 255 Stachniewski, John, 191, 291 Stapleton, Thomas, 127, 220, 275 Steinmetz, David, 21, 193 Stillingfleet, Edward, 244 Suarez, Francisco, 184 Swadlin, Thomas, 125, 127, 138 Sykes, Norman, 12, 319 Synod of Dort, 239, 264 Taylor, Charles, 38 Taylor, Thomas, 95, 134 Tate, Zouch, 113 Teresa of Avila, 102 Tertullian, 11, 53–54, 58–59, 140, 148–149, 155–156, 170, 221, 245, 303 Theodotus of Byzantium, 5 Theognis of Nicaea, 36 theologia archetypa, 178, 329n.6 theologia ectypa, 178, 329n.6 Theophilus of Antioch, 245 theosis, 81, 88, 94–96, 98–99, 103–107, 116, 209, 295 Thirty-Nine Articles, 92, 247 Thomas, Keith, 73–74 Thomason, George, 41, 64, 120 Thompson, John, 21 Thorndike, Herbert, 58, 125, 127, 134–143, 170–171, 206, 221, 260 Thucydides, 223, 235 Tidford, Thomas, 114 Toland, John, 256, 263

Index

Tombes, John, 100 Traheron, Bartholomew, 14, 286–288, 294, 318, 322, 326 Trapp, John, 282, 294–295 Traske, John, 69 Traskites, 69 Tremellius, Immanuel, 21 Trendall, John, 77 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 18, 38, 67, 127 Triers and Ejectors, 119 Trinity circumincession/perichoresis, 50, 326 consubstantiality of Father and Son, see Jesus Christ economy of salvation, 43, 56, 118, 155, 163, 186, 189, 253–254, 298 essence of, 5, 39–40, 51, 61–62, 64, 81, 85–86, 92, 94, 96, 102, 110–111, 115– 116, 155, 158, 160, 162, 168–169, 182, 184, 205, 229, 275–276, 282, 284, 292, 298–299, 302, 306, 325–326 Father as fons divinitatis and fons deitatis, 58–59, 150, 156, 163, 190– 192, 276, 277, 292 incomprehensibility of, 141, 153, 169, 176–177, 183–184, 203, 205, 207–208, 227, 230, 294, 317, 321 mystery of, 2–3, 7, 12, 17, 25, 27, 33, 35, 46, 61–62, 78, 107, 112, 136, 169, 171, 193, 202–203, 208, 222, 228, 253, 278, 294, 304–305, 319, 321, 323, 326–327 persons of, 1, 4–5, 16, 25, 33–34, 39, 41–43, 52–53, 59–60, 76, 82, 84–86, 92, 114, 124, 144, 152, 159, 162–163, 166, 190, 195, 202, 205, 238, 275–276, 280, 284, 287, 296, 298–299, 301, 323 substance of, 34, 36, 87, 147, 229, 276, 295 vestigia trinitatis, 33, 153 Tuckney, Anthony, 157 Tulloch, John, 74 Turchetti, Mario, 55 Turner, Denys, 194 Turner, Francis, 262–268 Turner, John, 96 Tyacke, Nicholas, 277

487

Underhill, Thomas, 65–66, 167 Unitarians, Unitarianism, 16–17, 22, 54, 74, 85, 222, 247–248, 254, 259, 271, 297, 306, 328 Ussher, James, 39, 57 Valentinus, Valentinians, 101, 311–312 Valla, Lorenzo, 20, 177 Vane, Sir Henry, 100–101, 119 Vanlop, Mary, 114 Vaughan, Thomas, 98 Vermigli, Peter Martyr, 161, 172 Vessey, Mark, 222 Vickers, Jason, 19 Vincentian Canon, 232, 251 Vines, Richard, 78, 231 Virel, Matthieu, 2 Virgil, 38 Völkel, Johannes, 300 Vorstius, Conrad, 300 Wake, William, 260 Waldensians, 238 Walker, George, 156, 289, 292–293 Wallace, Robert, 37, 85 Wallington, Nehemiah, 163 Wallis, John, 112 Walsham, Alexandra, 91, 223 Walwyn, William, 74 Warmestry, Thomas, 142 Watson, Thomas, 207, 213 Webb, Nathaniel, 65–66, 167 Wengert, Philip, 21 Wesley, Charles, 328 Westminster Assembly, 4, 22, 39–40, 63, 78, 88, 90, 97, 115, 174–175, 243, 283 Westminster Confession of Faith, 19, 159, 187, 190, 243 Whichcote, Benjamin, 48, 104 Whitaker, William, 242 White, Thomas, 125–134, 170–171 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 181 Wightman, Edward, 2, 76–77, 224, 278, 300, 318 Wilbur, E.M., 20, 74, 126, 143, 222 Willet, Andrew, 154

Index

488

Willey, Basil, 315 Williams, Lawrence, 93 Williams, Roger, 97 Williams, Rowan, 200 Wilson, Thomas, 30 Winstanley, Gerard, 74, 88, 113 Wissowatius, Andrew, 300 Wissowatius, Benedict, 300 Wojcik, Jan, 208 Wood, Anthony, 39, 174, 181, 208 Woodcock, Francis, 6

Worden, Blair, 118–119, 182 Wotton, Anthony, 38, 156, 277, 288–293, 314 Wotton, William, 260 Wren, Matthew, 225 Wright, George, 225–227, 230, 236 Wycliffe, John, 238–239, 243 Wykes, David, 247 Zanchi, Jerome, 33–34 Zwicker, Daniel, 11, 54, 309