Baptist Unitarianism in the
17th and
18th Centuries In Britain and
America.
This paper shall begin with a short introduction of Unitarianism in
Europe and Great Britain before 1650 to form a historical background and a
broad theological context for explaining why Unitarianism infected the
Baptists in England and America from about 1675-1815. Unitarianism
heresy particularly affllicted the General Baptists in England and those
Baptists affected by the related heresy of Universalism in Colonial America.
This study will doubtlessly contain many unfilled gaps, important unseen
historical connections, and inadequate theological analyses of the issues, but
the writer does hope to sketch at least a few solid markers for future in-
depth studies in the primary sources as well as secondary sources. Since
this is a seminary term paper, it is realized that it will be hardly impressive
to scholars acquainted with 17th, 18th, and 19th century primary sources
and to those who have actually visited important historic sites and have
immediately perceived their connection to the historic milestones of the
Unitarian controversies among the Baptists. But we pledge to do our best
and let the reader decide for himself.
I. Early Unitarianism Until 1600.
In the history of Christianity erroneous attempts have been made to
have a religion " of Jesus " without having a religion " about Jesus ". This
really an old heresy card which has been played many times in the march of
Christ's Church through time. The history of Unitarianism certainly has
exemplified this tendency repeatedly. Jack W. Traylor, distinguished
professor of history at William J. Bryan College in Tennessee, succinctly
introduces the main points of historic Unitarianism. So we begin with his
analysis of the Unitarian movement prior to the Protestant Reformation:
Unitarians. A monotheistic religion born within Christianity which recognizes
the existence of a transcendent God, but denies the deity of Jesus Christ and the
Holy Spirit. The term "Unitarian" refers to belief in God as one Person in a unified
Godhead rather than three Persons or a Trinity in the Godhead. The Unitarian
conception of Christ's Atonement is that it was not a literal vicarious substitute to
pay for human sins but rather was a moral act by a man chosen by God that was
designed to bring unity between God and man. Arius (d. 336), a priest in Alexandria , Egypt, may have been the first to
pop-ularize the antitrinitarian views that came to characterize later Unitarians.
His teaching that Christ was a created being rather than coequal and coeternal
with God the Father led to the Arian controversy whose doctrines the Council of
Niceacondemned in A.D. 325. Arianism nearly extinguished Western orthodoxy
when it was championed by rulers in the 330s and 340s.1
1
2
The famed Yale historian of Christianity, Kenneth S. Latourette,
observed this about Unitarianism of the Renaissance and Reformation era: "
Others, usually humanists, made much of the rational approach to
Christianity, emphasized the ethical aspect of New Testament teaching, and
were inclined to be anti-Trinitarian and to regard Christ as an example and a
leader to be followed rather than the divine-human redeemer. "2 There were
Endnotes
1"Unitarians," In J.D. Douglas, ed., New 20th-Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (Second Edition; Grand Rapids, Michigan: 1991), pp. 841-842. Perhaps the best brief article written prior to 1960 on Unitarianism is that contained in F. E. Mayer's compendium, The Religious Bodies of America. Revised by Arthur C. Piepkorn. (4th Edition; St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1961), Pt. X, pp. 511-519. A more secular analysis of Unitarianism as a philosophical viewpoint is covered in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2nd Edition; New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1989). B.K. Kuiper in his classic book, The Church In History ( Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans / Christian Schools International Publications, 1964), Ch. 35, pp. 280-283 also has a clear short historical description of modern Unitarianism / Socinianism. 2A History of Christianity (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), chapter xxxv, p. 788. Cf. also his comments on pp. 792-795 and passim. 3See the article on "Unitarianism" in F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd Edition; London and New York: 1990), pp. 1408-1409. We have obtained supplemental information from The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XV; New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. Cf. also the online Edition, 1999 by Kevin Knight at www.newadvent.org. In the article from the Oxford Dictionary above it is noted that George Blandrata, a Piedmontese physician, became the leader of a small group of Unitarians in Poland in 1558. By 1565 this group had grown, but was now excluded from the Reformed Church and held its own synod as the "Minor Church" (Ibid.) Perhaps the most famous and definitely the most scholarly works is E.M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism : Socianism and its Antecedents (2 Vols: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
3
perhaps a few ardent "unitarians" between the fourth and the sixteenth
centuries, but for the most part, heresy had moved in different directions
within European Christian thought in the Middle Ages. This is to say, that
other than the Gnostic type heresies of the Cathari and the Paulicians, most
of the non-Trinitarians were outside of the Christian faith altogether, i.e.,
unbelieving Jews and Muslims. However, merely because a stream of
University Press, 1945-1952). Earlier, the account of Joseph Henry Allen, An Historical Sketch of the Unitarian Movement Since the Reformation, Vol. 2 in the American Church History Series (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1894) is also a worthy tome, despite its pro-Unitarian bias. In chapters I-V, Allen, like Wilbur later, has a thorough survey of the Valdes and Bernard Ochino in Northern Italy, Servetus and his martyrdom in Geneva, the Unitarianism of Faustus Socinus, the spread and development of Unitarianism in Poland, and finally, its survival in the seventeenth century in Transylvania, pp. 1-120. The weakest aspect of both Allen and Wilbur's accounts are certain facts they deliberately leave out and their appeals to emotion in respect to Servetus' martyrdom. Two examples from Allen may suffice here. For instance, Allen hearty defense Ochino's view of Justification (Cantu, vol. ii., p. 380-381) on p. 15 against the " Lutheran assertion of a faith wholly independent of works" is a glaring instance of refusing to note the context here of forensic justification before God and the balance of the doctrine in the Lutheran confessions which teaches clearly that saving faith is never without good works, inspired by the Spirit (Augsburg Confession, XX, Melancthon's Apology to the Augsburg Confession, Luther's Large Catechism, Pt. I, The Ten Commandments, etc.). More serious, however, is Allen's attempt to draw sympathy for anti-Trinitarianism from the youthful Philip Melancthon's Loci Communes, first published in 1521, about which work Allen implies that Melancthon did not seek "metaphysical grounds of the doctrine then deemed orthodox" (i.e, a reference to the Trinitarian model of belief) (p. 27). Yet, all of Allen's attempts in the text and footnotes of the next several pages to show or imply that Melancthon sympathized with a non-Trinitarian interpretation of the Bible can hardly be substantiated in light of his Reformation work with Luther, his sermons at Wittenberg , his work on the Augsburg Confession of 1530, nor his very own words in The Apology 0f 1531, where he plainly states that his Catholic opponents approved of his Article I on " God. " There, he says plainly " This asserts our faith and teaching that there is one undivided divine essence, and that there are nevertheless three distinct and coeternal persons of the same divine essence, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We have always taught and defended this doctrine and we believe that the Holy Scriptures testify to it firmly, surely, and irrefutably. We steadfastly maintain that those who believe otherwise do not belong to the church of Christ but are idolaters and blasphemers. " (Louis Tappert, ed., The Book of Concord. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959, p. 100). While Melancthon himself labored diligently to work out a more simple, logical, and Scriptural statement of the Trinity (and rejected much Medieval speculation), he never held with rationalistic or heretical reductions of the Godhead to man's rational capacity and he fervently held to the early creeds (Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian) as sound expositions of God's revelation of Himself. To suggest that because Melancthon pursued the immediate and practical purposes of reconciling Protestants and Catholics on this key doctrine that he had a "disturbing consciousness" when it came to Servetus' attacks on this (p. 29) is ridiculous. Undoubtly, he would have agreed with Oeclampadius, who urged against
4
thought goes underground, it does not mean it is obliterated - for old
heresies have often reappeared in new outlets since Reformation times.
Thus, an incipient unitarianism, which stressed the impersonality of God,
became a fixed notion in the minds of certain radical critics of the Church.
One of these was a pupil of Johann Reuchlin, Martin Cellarius (1499-1564),
who was perhaps the first explicit exponent of Unitarian views in his De
Servetus that he really did not accept a true Incarnation: " You do not admit, then, that the Son of God was to be a man, but [hold] that a man was to be the Son of God. " (Cited on p. 30, Allen). Later, both Calvin and Melancthon endeavored to win Servetus from his errors and the soul-damning propositions of his De Trinitatus Erroribus (Hagenau, 1531), but Servetus blindly and insanely pursued his human rationalism against all Biblical and theological evidence to the contrary. We do accept, however, the characterization of Professor Harold O.J. Brown: " A different fate [from Menno Simons] awaited one of the most brilliant and eccentric advocates of a heavenly-flesh doctrine, the Spanish physician Michael Servetus (1511-1553). Servetus has gone down in church and secular history as a martyr to Calvinistic intolerance; his execution in Geneva represents a stain that Reformed Protestantism has never quite been able to efface. " (Heresies: Heresy and Orthodoxy in the History of the Church. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrikson Publishers, 1988, ch. 16, p.330. See further, pp. 331-352). 4"Unitarians," in J.D. Douglas, Op. Cit.. Actually, the first "Unitarians" in Christian history may have been the "Monarchists" of the early 3rd century. Here we think of the "Dynamic Monarchism" of the Ebionites, Theodotius of Byzantium, and Paul of Samosata (bishop of Antioch, A.D. 260). Generally, these "unitarians" believed that Jesus Christ was a special man (some accepted his Virgin Birth) who received the "Christ Spirit" either at his Baptism or in His Resurrection, or that he was an ordinary man endowed with Divine powers. In either case, Deity was not naturally the possession of Jesus, but something bestowed on him in some sense or degree. The other form of "primitive Unitariansim" or Socinianism was exhibited by the "Modalists" (also a form of Monarchism) by Noetus of Rome , Praxeas, and later Sabellius who envisioned the Father , Son, and Spirit merely as"modes" or historical manifestations of the One Deity in various guises. Some of these tendencies reappeared in sixteenth century Socianism and in the Unitarianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fausus Socinius, for example, was a theology student at Basel, when his uncle's unpublished manuscript came into his hands. His conversion to this view was a crucial historical step. See Bengt Hagglund, History of Theology, translated by Gene J. Lund ( 3rd edition; St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1968). More recently Harold O.J. Brown has explored these historical connections in his lively study: Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present (Doubleday 1984), chapters 3-5. 5See the references in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church and The Catholic Encyclopedia above, Ibid. See also list of Latin collections by L. Wolzogen, F.S. Bock, and F. Trecshsel in the bibliography in the first reference. One key work in German is that of Otto Fock, Der Socinianismus nach seiner Stellung in der Gesammtenwickelung des christlichen Geistes (2 Vols.; Kiel, 1847). 6Mayer (Piepkorn), Religious Bodies in America, Pt. X, Section 1, " Unitarian-Universalist Association, " p. 511-12. In a footnote on the same page, Dr. Mayer
5
Operibus Dei published in Strassburg in 1527. Other early Unitarians
included J. Valdes, Michael Servetus, and Bernardo Ochino who were
actively influential in fostering Unitarianism as a sectarian community
within European Christendom. Excepting Servetus, their story finds its life
adds, " There were several Unitarians prior to Socinus, such as the German Anabaptists Denk and Hetzer, the Dutch mystic Campanus, the Italian free-thinkers Blandrata, Garibaldo, and Gentile (executed in Bern, 1556). "7In J.D. Douglas, New 20th-Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Op. Cit. It should be recalled that Faustus Socinus had been somewhat more discreet about his anti-Trinitarianism, possibly realizing that it was definitely against the mainstream of Christian tradition and Biblical exegesis. He had outwardly conformed to the Roman dogma and forms of worship while he was a secretary in the court of the Medici in Florence. Then, eventually , he revealed his sentiments when he lived in more tolerant Basel, where he wrote his notorious treatise, De Jesus Christo Salvatore which explicitly denied the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, God's Son, for sin. Rather, Socinus believed, man must be his own savior by imitating the perfect life that Jesus lived and his pattern of the way of salvation. Later, he would take his anti-Trinitarianism and moralistic Gospel to Transylvania, and finally to Poland, where he died in 1604. See the comments of Kenneth Latourette on the later Polish Socinians' heretical missionary activity and the Socianism of the racial Transylvanian Cossacks, the "Szeklers"in A History of Christianity , chapter xxxv, pp. 793-795. See also Earl M. Wilber, editor and trans., Stanislas Kot, Socianism in Poland: The Social and Political Ideas of the Polish Anti-Trinitarianians in the Sixteenth Century (Boston: Starr King Press, 1957).8See Latourette, Op Cit., p. 793 and Spitz, The Renaissance and ReformationMovements. Vol. II, The Reformation. (Revised Edition; St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1987), pp. pp. 396, 405, 437-438. 9"Unitarianism", The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, pp. 1408-1409.10 This is especially seen by reading carefully the citations from the respective confessions in the text and elsewhere. The three Ecumenical Creeds, which also the Catholic and the Greek Orthodox accept are the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. These come from the second, early fourth and late fourth centuries, respectively. 11See also Lewis W.Spitz, The Renaissance and Reformation Movements. Vol. II, The Reformation. (Revised Edition; St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1987), pp. 374, 396. One who does justice to the civic concerns of the unorthodox while recognizing the value of Protestant Orthodoxy is the late Quaker scholar of Yale, Roland H. Bainton, in his work, The Travail of Religious Liberty ( Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1951). A sympathetic account, based on fairly extensive research, can be found in E.M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism: Socianism and its Antecedents (2 Vols: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1945-1952). 12It is probable that the new Unitarian impulse in England ca. 1650 and after came as much from the influence of Deism as the direct contact with traditions of Socianism in Continental Europe. Although this writer does not presently have access to them, there are some bibliographical collections at Harvard and Andover
6
setting in the small Unitarian communities which were established for a time
in Hungary, Poland, Transylvania and England.3
One form of Unitarianism known as Socinianism was a particular
Reformation phenomenon, a reaction to Biblical Protestant thought as much
as Roman Catholic. Two Italians, Laelius Socinus and his nephew, Faustus,
were the key figures. Although Laelius outwardly conformed to the Catholic
Newton Theological Seminary which have leads into the remote history of European Unitarianism from the Reformation to ca. 1700. But Cf. Earl Morse Wilber, A Bibliography of the Pioneers of the Socinian-Unitarian Movement in Modern Christianity, in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland (Sussidi eruditi Vol. 1; Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1950); Christoph Sand, Biblotheca antitrinitariorum, 1684 (Reprint, Instytut Filozofiii Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Biblioteka prisarzy reforma-cyjnynch, 6. Varsoviae [Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967]); Robert Wallace, AntiTrinitarian Biography (3 Vols.; London: E.T. Whitefield, 1850). 13One mayconsult the article on " Socianism" by Robert G. Clouse in J.D. Douglas, New 20th-Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge,, p. 912. The best books on the overall topic may be E.M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England, and America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), and H.J. MacLachlan, Socianism in 17th Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957. Originally published : Oxford University Press, 1951), Cf. especially chaps. I-III, pp. 1-44. See, moreover, George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962). The most detailed account of various individuals in England during the 1600s who partially or wholly embraced is found in Earl Morse Wilbur, Our Unitarian Heritage. Boston: Beacon Press, 1925, Pt. V., Chapters XXVII and XXVIII.14See the accounts in The Science of Theology, edited by Gillian R. Evans, Alister E. McGrath, and Alland D. Galloway in Paul Avis theological series, The History of Christian Theology (Basingstoke, U.K.: Marshall Pickering/ Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1986), Vol. I, pp. 280-284. There is trenchantly observed, " In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards had already exercised a powerful transforming influence on Calvinism. In reconciling it with rationalism and Newtonian science, he had changed its ethos. He integrated into it the revivalist emphasis on emotion and personal decision. This weakened the doctrine of predestination " (p. 282). In more general terms, the degeneration of the Reformation/Puritan ethos is discussed in Marshall and Manuel, The Light and the Glory, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Fleming H. Revell, 1977), pp. 277-278; 345-353; and in Latourette, A History of Christianity , pp. 1035-1046. 15"Unitarianism, " The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Ibid. But at least ten years previous to this ( and in respect to social roots, probably the whole previous generation of forty years) Reverend Samuel Langford, then President of Harvard College, had prophesied, " We have rebelled against God. We have lost the true spirit of Christianity, though we retain the outward profession and form of it. We have neglected and set light by the glorious Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and His holy commands and institutions. The worship of many is but mere compliment to the Deity, while their hearts are far from Him. By many the Gospel is corrupted into a superficial system of moral philosophy, little better than ancient Platonism." Sermon reprinted in Plumstead, ed., The Wall and the Garden, Selected
7
Church, he taught his nephew and others a doctrine which thoroughly
contradicted basic truths which it held. Laelius had been a student of law,
but he turned to theology and from 1550-1551 he lived in Wittenberg, where
he was acquainted with Philip Melancthon. During his early life, the tragedy
of Michael Servetus' death in Geneva moved him to reconsider both the
doctrine of the Trinity and the Reformation view of Christ's redemption,
Massachusetts Election Sermons, 1670-1775 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968), cited in Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory, chapter 15, pp. 277-278. 16"Unitarianism, "Op. Cit. Kenneth S. Latourette in his chapter xliv, " Repudiation and Revival, A.D. 1750-A.D. 1815, " discusses in some detail how the effect of Rationalist "Pietism" ( e.g., Christian Wolff of Halle, 1679-1754 ) opened up the way for Deism and Unitarianism among Evangelical Protestants. Much more damaging , of course, was the more extreme Deist and Rationalist views of Herman Samuel Reimarus of Hamburg (1694-1768) and the famous dramatic critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) who tended to argue that religion "evolved" and that Deism/Unitarianism was the natural state of civilization in an Enlightened Age (Cf. p. 1005). We have already mentioned the receptive mood of England to new notions. There were some Unitarians among the Scots as well, and the General (Arminian) Baptists of England tended in this direction. It was with this latter group that Joseph Priestly eventually ministered. 17"Unitarians," in J.D. Douglas, New 20th-Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, pp.841-842. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, the highly regarded authority on American Religion at Yale, in an earlier essay had stated, " Just as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams stand in their own right as flowerings of the Enlightenment comparable to any men of their age, in the same manner a long train of American theologians play important roles in the history of Christian thought even though their predicament often makes their work too American in its focus to allow wide international assimilation of it. Cited in " Theology In America: A Historical Survey, " in James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison, eds., The Shaping of American Religion (Volume I, "Religion In American Life"; Princeton Studies in American Civilization, No. 5; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 318. But see also pp. 183, 323, 341-343, 350, 351-352, 353, 357, 359, 403, etc. See also the revealing quotations in Nelson Manfred Blake, A History of American Life and Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), chapter 14, pp. 189-202, and passim . On Thomas Jefferson's animosity to confessional, historic Christianity, see my essay, " A Historical and Philosophical Critique of Thomas Jefferson's View of Christianity, " Graduate Paper at Stephen F. Austin State University, Fall, 1997. Generally speaking, Peter Marshall and David Manuel's last three or four chapters in The Light and the Glory, Op. Cit., adopt a similar stance on the incipient Unitarianism of some of our American Founding Fathers. 18"Unitarians," in J.D. Douglas, New 20th-Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Ibid. See also David Robinson, The Unitarians and the Univeralists in Henry W. Bowden, General Editor, Denominations in America, Vol. I (Westport, Connecticutt: Greenwood Press, 1985), Ch. 2, " American Unitarians Origins, " pp. 21-23. 19Essentially, the writer has paraphrased Ahlstrom's account in " Theology In America, " , Op. Cit., pp. 251-252. The direct quote is from p. 252. Ahlstrom himself
8
though he did not publish his real beliefs openly for fear of persecution.
Thus, in his teaching and circle of influence, he attempted to undermine
confidence in the historic teaching of the Church without directly attacking
the Creeds as such. Dr. Traylor describes then the second phase of the
Unitarian phenomena which began in the later part of the sixteenth century.
cites the authoritative source of Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). See also Latourette, Op Cit., p. 794-5 and in his chapter xliv, "Repudiation and Revival, A.D. 1750-A.D. 1815, " who discusses in some detail how the effect of Rationalist "Pietism" (e.g., Christian Wolff of Halle, 1679-1754 ) opened up the way for Deism and Unitarianism among Evangelical Protestants. Much more damaging , of course, was the extreme Deist and Rationalist views of Herman Samuel Reimarus of Hamburg (1694-1768) and the famous dramatic critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) who tended to argue that religion "evolved" and that Deism/Unitarianism was the natural state of civilization in an Enlightened Age (Cf. p. 1005). We have already mentioned the receptive mood of England to new notions. There were some Unitarians among the Scots as well, and the General (Arminian) Baptists of England tended in this direction. It was with this latter group that Joseph Priestly eventually ministered. 20H.J. Maclachlan, Op. Cit. has a quite detailed discussion of the growth of heresy among Anglicans, Puritan Non-Conformists, and others in his Socinianism In Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 30--38. There he mentions such individuals as Matthew Hamont, John Lewes, Peter Cole, George von Parris, Justius Velsius, Francis Kett, Bartholomew Legate, William Sayer, and others in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century. He also notes the powerful influence among Anabaptists and some Non-conformists of the Racovian Catechism and the English translation of Konrad Vorst' De Deo and Apologetica exegesis pro tractatu de Deo by the autumn of 1611(!).21Maclachan, Socinianism In Seventeenth-Century England, p. 32. Another man, Edward Wightman, was burned at Lichfield in 1612. The manuscript of his trial (dated December 5, 1611) is in the Bodleian library in Oxford (Ashmole Manuscript, No. 1521, vii). According to McLachlan, he had wrote a small folio book of 18 pages which he dedicated to King James. According to MacLachlan, " he held ' that Jesus Christ is only mann and a mere Creature, and not both God and man in one person. ' He began to hold new views about the Trinity in 1609. " (Ibid.)22McLachlan, Ibid., pp. 38-39. This correspondence is contained in the historical work by B. Evans, Early English Baptists, 2 Vols.; London, 1862-64, Vol. II, pp. 21-51. Despite McLachlan and other pro-Unitarian historians protests about the "Biblicism" of the early Socinians/Unitarians, it is clear that such loose "tolerance" obviously ignores the statements of Jesus himself about his coinherence ("remaining in")and eternal unity with the Father (Cf. Johns 5: 24-40; 7:28-29; 8:14ff.; 8:27-29, 58; 10:25-38; 14:9-11, 14:15-19; 15:26ff.; 16:25ff.; 17:1-5, etc.). It also totally ignores scores of other statements about Christ's equal deity with the Father and Spirit in the New Testament epistles which are too numerous to enumerate here. Anti-Trinitarianism is not the result of unprejudiced exegesis, but rather a reluctance of human sinners to acknowledge Christ's absolute perfect Godhood and manhood. It is sinful rationalism.
9
He picks up the story with the main player, Faustus Socinus (1539-1604),
Laelus' more famous nephew:
. . . Faustus Paulus Socinus, 16th-century Italian antitrinarian theologian, is often regarded as the first "modern" Unitarian. He was forced to flee Italy frequently because of the charges of heresy lodged against him as a result of the expression of his position. After 1579 he spent much of his time working among the infant Unitarian societies then forming in Poland, although he encountered considerable opposition there also. Because of his influence in the development of the doctrine, Unitarians in Europe are often referred to as Socinians.4
23Ibid. See Leon Macbeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness. ( Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press,1987), Ch. 5, pp. 154-158. 24A History of the English Baptists (3rd edition; London: The Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, 1961), pp. 54-55. The first quotation is from Philip Schaff, ed. , The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1908), Vol. I, p. 161, and the citation from Ernest Troletsch is from the English translation of his Die Sozallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1902), The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. 2 Vols. (London: Herder and Herder, 1931), p. 708.25Socinianism In Seventeenth Century England, pp. 39-43. He further comments, " For example, in 1639, at the suggestion of the English Ambassador the States of Holland were warned of the probable arrival of some Socinianism from Poland, after their expulsion from Rakow, and were exhorted ( ' tout de bon ') to anticipate the evils that might arise by suitable decrees." In Holland itself in 1653 the States General at the instance of the National Synod issued a very stringent edict against Socinianism. But this only temporarily affected the spread of this theological infection. (JR)26Mclachan, Ibid. 27H.L. McLachlan, whom we have already cited frequently, discusses several issues related to the cultural and social milieu of English Unitarianism and these include (1) the dissolution of high Calvinism and the genesis of Liberal theology; (2) the school of "rational theologians " at Oxford; (3) the growth and development of "Cambridge Liberals" in the pre-Enlightenment age; (4) the Socinianizing teaching of John Webberly and Thomas Lushington in thelater seventeenth century; (5) the immense distribution and currency of Socinian books and tract literature; (6) the Socinian missionary "evangelism" of Paul Best (1590 ? - 1657); (7) and finally, the work of John Bidle himself (1616- 1662), who is considered to be the father of English Unitarianism. For the details of these important simultaneous events in the historical context, cf. Socinianism In Seventeenth-Century England, chaps. IV-X, pp. 45-218. 28Cf. F. Cheynell, The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianism (London, 1643), p. 17, cited in McLachlan, Op. Cit, p. 120. Another famous Anglican treatise against the evil propaganda of Socinianism/Unitarianism was that of Samuel Maresius, Hydra Socinianismi expugnata (1651-1662) who described this heresy as " a venomous poison, a monstrous hydra, and a murderous weapon of Satan. " In light the destructive effect on the Christian faith and the moral life of America in the last three and one-half centuries, and the bizzare sycretism of twentieth-century Unitariansim with the New Age, Wiccan witchcraft, and modern Paganism, it appears to me that the judgment of those like Maresius and Cheynell were both theologically correct and indeed prophetic.
10
One other bit of interesting historical lore concerns George Blandrata,
a Piedmontese physician who had led a Unitarian sect in 1558 (eventually
settling in Poland until 1565), spent some time in Hungary in 1563 and
incited an anti-Trinitarian movement there in which even the King himself,
John Sigismund, was converted. But this sect of gypsy Unitarians was
severely persecuted after the King's death in 1570, and they had no
recognized religious status until 1638 when they brought forward a common
confession and were recognized as form of Protestantism.5 Closely
paralleling the Hungarian heretics were those led by Franciscus Davidus
(1510-1579), who is called a "non-adorationist" because, unlike the more
reverent Blandrata, he and his followers refused to worship Jesus Christ,
God's Son, in any meaningful sense. Davidus' group spread in a limited
number of hamlets in Transylvania after 1568, and it is said that there are
still about 170 churches there until this day.6
29McLachlan , Socinianism In Seventeenth Century England, pp. 208-211. McLachlan further notes that about 1655 Jeremy Ives with a group of Baptists circulated a petition asking that the Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 " be declared null and void" and that Bidle be set at liberty. This petition was presented to the Lord Protector on September 28 of that year. Essentially, the petition stated that Bidle was a man of good conscience and should not be punished merely for his unorthodox opinions. (Ibid.) 30Cf. Mecurius Politicus, 28 Sept. 1655 and also Masson, Life of Milton, v.65-66 in the Clarke Papers, edited by C.H. Firth (London: Camden Socinians N.S. 61, 1899), iii, 53 cited by McLachlan, Op. Cit., p. 210. Cromwell did intervene with the Parliament so that Biddle was taken out of Newgate by special warrant and sent to wile away for over three years his exile in the dungeon of St. Mary's castle on the Isle of Scilly. While there he was allowed books and visitors and given ten shillings per week by the authorities. This also doubtlessly saved him from execution.31McLachlan, Ibid., pp. 212-217. It appears to me that John Bidle was not a martyr for Christ and the Gospel, but that he was only (possibly) an honorable man with his own erroneous convictions.
11
This early modern form of Unitarianism was also paralleled in the
career of that infamous and tragic heretic, Michael Servetus (1511-1553).
Professor Traylor continues:
Michael Servetus was another prominent Unitarian proponent of the 16th cen-tury. Although he did not form a national Unitarian body as Socinus, he spread anti-trinitarian ideas throughout the Continent. A renowned Spanish medical doctor, Servetus had gained prominence as a Unitarian thinker in a 1531 article he published in which he questioned the Trinity and denied original sin. Denounced throughout Europe for his views, Servetus fled from one city to another support-ing himself through the practice of medicine. While living in Vienna in 1553 he published Christianismi resttutio, a complete denial of all Christian orthodoxy. Con-demned to death by the Roman Catholic authorities, he was burned as a heretic inGeneva later that year.7
There seems to be no doubt among Christian historians that Servetus'
faith was deep and personal, but his overall sanity seems to be debatable.
Despite Servetus' piety, he was not above deception, maliciousness, and
outright antisocial behavior (somewhat reminiscent of the later Quakers and
Spiritualists, or even modern cultist leaders in the twentieth century). He
was a radical who, on the basis of his own opinions, denied what all other
Christians, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and even the Anabaptists
affirmed. He was a rabid controversialist, and everywhere that he went, he
got into trouble with the authorities. When he fled to Calvin's Geneva in
1553, he already knew that Calvin, no more than the Romanist authorities of
Vienna, would support his attacks on established Christian belief. Moreover,
because he allied himself with Calvin's political enemies in Geneva, he
threatened to undo the ongoing Reformation in that city. Finally, when this
12
heretical "foreigner" demanded that Calvin himself be arrested as a false
accuser (a trumped up charge) and his house and goods be given to him, this
was simply too much for even gentle Jean Calvin to endure. Latourette
remarks sadly:
Servetus was condemned by the civil authorities on the charge that he denied theTrinity and rejected baptism, offenses punishable by death under the Justinian Code. In spite of Calvin's pleas for a more merciful form of ex-ecution, Servetus was burned at the stake (October 27, 1553), crying through the flames: " O Jesus, thou Son of the God, have pity on me."8
The most ironic thing here, other than the uselessness of burning
heretics, is that when the circumstances (or stakes, if you will) are perilous,
men seem to exhibit both a high Christology and sense of the value of the
great transaction of Calvary. Still, the tragic death of Servetus moved others
in the direction of doctrinal "latitudinarism" and civil tolerance of religious
dissent. In this case, Sebastion Castellio (1515-1563), a professor of Greek in
Basel, was so incensed at Calvin and Geneva that he wrote his now
influential book, On Heretics, Whether They Ought To Be Persecuted, in
which he maintained that since no one group of Christians has a monopoly
on truth, punishment of "heretics" is premature and unjustified. While this
had less influence during the Reformation era, its key ideas were picked up
by Enlightenment rationalists like John Locke and Deist writers in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Liberal and modernist
theologians usually bring these things up when criticizing Protestant
Orthodoxy and the Reformation. 9
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the Reformation leaders like
Luther and Calvin were righteously anxious to protect the rediscovery of the
Gospel and the glory of Christology from spurious attacks by those indulging
in a humanist hermeneutic. And thus Calvin and the Geneva Reformers,
13
much like the Lutherans, felt an urgent need to define confessional Christian
orthodoxy, both irenically in respect to other Protestants and polemically in
respect to positions they viewed as less than Biblical. Thus, the Helvetic
Confessions and the Heidelberg Confessions condemn
Socianism/Unitarianism as do the Lutheran Augsburg Confession ( Articles I
& III), and Formula of Concord (Epitome , Article XII, "Errors of the New
Arians"; Solid Declaration, Article XII, 1.2). Even though the Lutherans and
Calvinists had lengthy and hot debates over the details of the relationship of
Christ's two natures in His one indivisible person, especially in respect to
the Lord's Supper, both fully agreed that Jesus Christ was true God and true
man in accord with ancient Ecumenical Creeds.10
The Socianian and Unitarian "sects" of the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries (often referred to collectively as the "Anti-
Trinitarians" or the "New Arians") had a curious history. The followers of
Lelio Socino (Sozzini) and his nephew Faustus (1539-1604) moved from
northern Italy to Transylvania to Poland, but nowhere warmly welcomed by
the majority of devout Christians. Eventually, they settled in Racow, Poland
where they formed their own church school and published their own non-
Trinitarian catechism and confession of faith (The Racovian Catechism of
1605). But as the Polish Socinian movement gained attention, they became
strongly opposed by the middle the seventeenth century, and Jesuit
authorities caused the Unitarian college at Racow to be suppressed and by
1658 all Socinians were expelled from Poland. All of the disciples of Socinius
were driven out of predominantly Roman Catholic Poland, itself nervously
14
caught between the Orthodox Russians to the East and the Lutheran
Prussians of the emerging Empire to the West.11
II. Unitarianism Among British & American Protestants ca.
1675-1815.
Yet, the modern chapters on the history of Unitarianism do not really
focus so much on the waning impact of the movement in Continental Europe
as its spread to England in the late 1500s and to Colonial America in the late
1700s and afterward. After being driven out Poland, bands of Socinians
found refuge at times back in Transylvanian Carpathia, the Netherlands, the
Rhenish Palatine, and finally in England. Actually, for about a century pure
Socinians were rare, but Socinian ideas sometimes found a home among the
more radical Arminians (Remonstrants) and Mennonites.12
Let us now return to the article by Professor Traylor. He does not
discuss how the Unitarianism began in England (where and when), but he
picks up the historical strain in 1774 when the former Anglican priest
Theophilius Lindsey organized the first distinctly Unitarian congregation in
Essex Chapel, London. Yet, long before this, John Biddle (1615-1662) is
actually reckoned as the "father" of English Unitarianism since he published
numerous anti-Trinitarian/Socinian tracts from 1658-62, and had held
evangelistic conventicles in London from 1658-1662. Obviously, Unitarianian
ideas and traditions must have existed in the previous generations before
1700. Previously, scholars had been left primarily with the speculation that
perhaps a few eccentric individuals held to this doctrine due to Radical
Remonstrant and Latitudinarian strains in the English Reformation in the
15
previous two centuries. But recent evidence in the twentieth century (re-
evaluating some 19th century sources) has shown that there was a definite
historical link between Poland and England and Scotland in matters of
heretical Christian ideas.13 During this period one may also consider the
direct or indirect impact of Herbert of Cherbury's "natural religion" (De
Veritate, 1625); John Tilliston's "Latitudinarianism" (1630-1694), John
Locke's "Rational Christianity" (The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1693);
John Toland's notorious religious historiography (Christianity Not
Mysterious, 1696); and most certainly, the nearly full blown Deism of
Matthew Tindal (Christianity As Old As Creation, 1730). From here it really
is a short leap historically and philosophically to Voltaire's anti-Christian
sentiments, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, and Thomas Paine's vitriolic
anti-Christian tract, Age of Reason (1794).14 Yet, ironically, it was the
devout scientist and cleric, Joseph Priestley, who first publicly defended
Unitarian principles in widespread debate, following his publication of
Appeal to Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (1770).
Meanwhile in the British colonies, the Puritan epoch in American
history probably ended sometime between 1702 and 1726, or roughly
between the time that Cotton Mather published his significant historical
tome, the Magnalia Christi Americana and the celebrated printing of Samuel
Willard's articulate summation of Puritan theology in The Compleat Body of
Divinity. At this point then came the Scientific Revolution of Sir Isaac
Newton (Cf. his Principia Mathematica, 1686) and the new Political
Philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704) caught on (see his Essay on Human
Understanding, 1690 ; his Treatise on Government, etc.). But not long
16
afterward, for a period of at least two if not three decades, American
religion experienced the traumatic effects of the Great Awakening with the
preaching of Jonathan Edwards in Connecticut, the American tour of George
Whitefield, and the rapid growth of Presbyterian and Reformed churches in
the Middle and Southern Colonies. In one sense, Edwards' preaching was
itself a reaction to the loss or dilution of Puritanism in the "Half-Way
Covenant", but it was also an attempt at modifying the pure stalwart
predestinarian Calvinism of the original Puritan divines. Hence, with
Edwards we have the "New Divinity" and the foundations of Princeton
University and Seminary as fiery mission outpost for Congregationalism and
Presbyterianism. Yet, at the same time, not all is well.15
It is sometime then, during the early to mid-eighteenth century, that
Unitarianism is formally introduced into the American Colonial scene. Most
scholars would view the life and work of Charles Chauncy, minister of the
First Church in Boston from 1727-1787, as the first crucial turning point.
Reverend Chauncy was to become the leading figure in the liberal or
"Arminian" party of Bostonian congregationalism, and his Arminianism was
itself far removed from the original Reformed ideas of the Dutch
Remonstrant theologian, Jacob Arminius, who had lived in the first half of
the previous century in Holland. Though his family heritage had been that of
conservative Puritanism, Chauncy moved to what he viewed as a much more
enlightened position on Christianity for his times. He not only was an
outspoken critic of the "Great Awakening" in the early decades of the
century, but he also was a most thoroughgoing opponent of the intellectual
and spiritual thrust of Jonathan Edwards. In his person he reveals the steady
17
if barely perceptible transformation of New England Christianity toward
"Arianism", "Universalism", and "Arminianism" ( i.e., a much more
optimistic view of human nature).16
Thus in America (and the later early United States), Unitarian
sentiments seemed to grow with the demise of Puritan and Reformed
Biblicism, suffering the attacks of Deism from abroad and at home. And, as
Traylor correctly states, there were numerous Unitarians in late eighteenth
century America. He marks as the official beginning of organized
Unitarianism with the 1785 congregational meeting at King's Chapel,
Boston.17 This a particularly interesting situation, because in 1782 the
Episcopalian proprieters of the Chapel had invited the youthful James
Freeman, a recent Harvard graduate to serve as liturgical reader. But then,
in deference to Freeman's Unitarian scruples, they had eliminated all
references to the Trinity from the liturgy and omitted the reading of the
Athanasian and Nicene creeds. Thus, the first Unitarian congregation was
formed. Traylor explains the perhaps second most important set of events in
the next decade:
. . . English minister and chemist Joseph Priestly was the most prominent Uni-
tarian of that period, arriving in 1794 from England where his support of theFrench Revolution had stirred hatred. A follower of Lindsey, he continued to pursue his two-faceted career of medical research and the preaching of Uni-tarian doctrines until his death in 1804. 18
Two of the most famous Unitarians in the early American Republic
were, of course, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both U.S. Presidents.
Adams was the more "evangelical" (i.e., Bible and Gospel based) of the two.
18
There was also Benjamin Franklin, statesman and philosopher, who fits in
somewhere along the Unitarian to Deist spectrum. 19
III. Unitarianism Among British Baptists, ca. 1650-
1815.
632A.C. Underwood suggests that the General Baptists, though professing a purely derived Biblicism, were nevertheless the victims of their own "old ways" (i.e., traditions) which included " some of the Sect-type ideas which they had inherited from the Mennonites or derived from their biblicism." Cf. A History of the English Baptists, ch. VI, " Toleration and Decline, " pp. 126-127. Leon McBeth, moreover, emphasizes the negative influence on General Baptist theology by the Quakers (e.g., George Fox), who had a tendency " to put more emphasis upon the ' mystery ' (the inner, mystical elements of faith) to the neglect of the ' history ' (the written Scriptures) [which] could only undermine Baptist views. " See The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness, Ch. 5, pp. 154-155. McLachlan observed that from the time of Elias Tookey's friends in the Baptist Church at Spitalfield's, London some were not sound on the matter of the Trinity. And he follows other modern researchers in asserting that from this point onward " ' Socinian influences were making themselves felt. ' " Op. Cit., p. 218. 833McLachlan, Socinianism In Seventeenth Century England, p. 219. A.C. Underwood , describing the decline of the General Baptists, states: " But, above all, their vitality was drained away when their body was prevaded by Socinianism. Their belief in a universal redemption had made them earnest in preaching the Gospel to all. Their Messengers were travelling evangelists, but now they either died out or ceased to itinerate. In spite of their connexional organization, ruin came when they gradually adopted Arian and Socinian views of the Person of Christ. " A History of the English Baptists, Op. Cit.34History of the English General Baptists (2 Vols.; London: Thomas Bore, 1818), Part I, 2, p. 1, cited in McLachlan, Op. Cit. , p. 219. 935See the accounts of McLachlan and Underwood, Op. Cit., pp. 219ff. and 126-127, respectively. On Caffyn's early Socinian musings at Oxford, see Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 375. The closest the author to come to a primary source on Caffyn, was Thomas Crosby, The History of the English Baptists From the Reformation To the Beginning of the Reign of King George I (4 Vols.; London: John Robinson Bookseller, 1740), IV, pp. 328-342. 136Cf. History of the English General Baptists, Op. Cit., Vol. I., p. 464. 37Socinianism In Seventeenth Century England , pp. 219-220 and A.C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, p. 127.Melchior Hoffmann (ca. 1498-1543/4) was an Anabaptist whose Christology was Valentinian, as he regarded the human nature of Jesus a direct creation of God.38A.C.Underwood, Ibid. See also W.T. Whitley, Minutes of the General Assembly of the General Baptist Churches in England (2 Vols; London: Kingsgate Press, 1909), Vol. I, p. ix.139See Macbeth, The Baptist Heritage, p. 157-8. See also W.T. Whitely, ed., Minutes of the General Assembly of the General Baptist Churches in England, Op. Cit., Vol. I: 84. McLachlan summarizes his main views: " In 1653 he adopted a very
19
But now we turn from the Introduction to our main topic, the growth
of Unitarianism among the Baptists in Great Britain and in America during
the later seventeenth century and through the eighteenth. The significance
of these developments, of course, spill over into the early nineteenth
century, which will be sketched out briefly in the conclusion of this paper.
anthromorphic view of the body of Christ, and from 1661 on he maintained that God is ' in the shape of man or some such kind of form or shape '. This anthromorphism is not unlike that found among the early English Socinians, but says Gordon, ' with Socinians Caffyn had no sympathetic relations, and did his best to convert them to his own point of view '. " Socinianism In Seventeenth-Century England, p. 220. The article by Arthur Gordon on Matthew Caffyn is found in Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917, 1954), Vol. III.140Socinianism In Seventeenth-Century England, Ibid. McLachlan also records that he was the cause of a riot in Newport Pagnell and that " ' For setting up a conventicle ' and absenting himself from ' the public thanksgiving service for the victory at Naseby ', he was arrested and imprisoned by the governor of the garrison. "(Ibid.).141McLachlan, p. 221. 142Ibid. This writing was titled Innocency, Though under a Cloud, Cleared. By P.H. a poor Prisnoner, when almost sunk under pretended Friends Censures in the day of his Sufferings, And also, A Discovery of the Comforts that attend Innocency in a Prison (1664). In what is stated immediately afterward, much is draw from page 23 as cited by McLachlan.143McLachlan, Ibid., p. 222. 144McLachlan, Ibid. Hobson's exegesis is loose and free and it ignores the context entirely. The plain meaning of the Old Testament Hebrew and the New Testament Greek is that Jesus was God's unique Son ( ho uios and ho monogenes uios). The Socinian objections to the literal and grammatical-historical interpretation of the multitude of Christological passages in New Testament are not based on biblicism but rationalism. Furthermore, a leading patristics scholar such as J.N.D. Kelly can assert that despite the lack of the word "Trinity"in the New Testament, there are scores of passages in the New Testament that are "triune" in structure. In the first through third centuries the orthodox fathers bound by both the radical monotheism of the Old Testament and the undeniable revelation of the Deity of Christ and the personality of the Divine Spirit, simply expressed that truth in the most obvious way. Cf. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (Revised Edition; London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), chaps. I-III.45His interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:19,20, etc. On the positive side was Arminianism with the note of God's free grace, yet it was radical and Socinian in that it was based purely on a moral theory of the Atonement. Thomas Edwards in his Gangraena, Part I, 2, p. 33 draws out a phrase from Hobson's sermons, " Christ is the effect not the cause of the love of God. " In other popular literature circulated at the time, it was said: " ' Yea, Christ came not to reconcile God to men, but men to God. For though Christ do hold forth love and life, yet he did not purchase it, but was purchased by it. . . . ' " Cited in McLachlan, Ibid.
20
According to historians favorable to Unitarianism (McLachlan,
Robinson, Wilbur, etc.) the growth of anti-Trinitarianism in England was not
a direct result of Dutch Anabaptist influences, but they do acknowledge that
Dutch influences were not neglible in mediating Socinian (Unitarian)
beliefs.20 These developments antedated the heretical work of John Bidle,
previously mentioned, more than fifty years. During the early reign of James
I, Bartholomew Legate was burned at the stake in Smithfield and his brother
Thomas perished at Newgate prison in 1607. They were reckoned by the
Anglican authorities as Anabaptists of anti-Trinitarian sentiments.21 H.L.
McLachlan furthermore explains the important influence of Dutch sectarians
and the more radical English Separatists on the development of Socinianism
among the early Baptists:
Early in 1624 a certain Elias Tookey led a small secession (seventeen in all) of
people out of the first Baptist church in London, originally founded by Thomas
Helwys and John Murton on their return from Amsterdam in 1613 [ or (1611? )
writer's note!]. Before long this small small group meeting at Southwark, feel-
ing isolated, sought to be received into communion by the Waterlander Baptist
Church at Amsterdam, a liberal wing of the Mennonite Baptists which based its
doctrines on the Scripture and in general was opposed to the use of creeds and
2
46McLachlan, Ibid., p. 223. By 1660 Hobson was classified with Paul Best and John Bidle as a heretic. This is why that when he returned from Holland in 1661 that the Baptist churches gave him a cold and hostile reception.247This account is generally a paraphrase of the facts given in Arthur Gordon's article on John Gale in Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917, 1954), Vol. VII [?], p. 721 [?]. Because of his distinction in learning he became known to William Whiston and through him and possibly Barrington Shute (late Viscount Barrington), he came to know influential people like the Whig bishop Hoadly and Bishop Bradford of Rochester. Like Saul of old, he was a tall, handsome young man with the distinctiveness of genius and a dynamic gift for speaking and writing.
21
formularies. Apparently, some members of Tookey's church held rather unorth-
odox ideas on the deity of Christ, and felt that the Waterlanders, with their tol-
erant attitude towards differences in doctrinal matters, were the group of Christians most nearly kin to them in spirit. Correspondence still extant in the archives of the Amsterdam Mennonites shows that though none ofnone of Tookey's congregation explicitly denied the deity of Christ, never-theless on this subject there were ‘two or three who have a somewhat dif-ferent opinion than we maintain in general, though we think that after allit comes to the same end'. Several letters passed between London and Am-sterdam, and the Waterlanders put the question how they were to under-stand the words of their English colleagues, viz., ' We do not compel one to believe of Christ what we do, but bear with each other. ' They wished toed to know whether this was said only of the origin of Christ's body, or whether it covers covers the article of the deity of Christ'. To this pointed inquiry Elias Tookey ' and sincere friends 18 in number living in London, March 17, 1625 ', replied. They admitted differences of opinion, but said that they could ' bear with each other in peace ', for ' Christian tolerance ' was a better preservative against discord in the Church than ' minute ex-aminations, limitations, censures, and condemnations only for opinion '. They claimed that they held the same belief as the Mennonites upon the deity of Christ, ' unless you would compel us to believe three different per-sons in the Deity which manner of speaking is not found in the Scriptures '.22
McLachlan further notes that the incipient Socinianism here with its
criticism of the doctrine of the Trinity is not that of Bidle and his followers in
the mid-sixteenth century. While he views it as merely a rejection of the
categories of Medieval scholastic theology, he yet tacitly acknowledges that
the little circle in Tookey's congregation and their Mennonite
correspondents were promoting " a kind of Modalism. "23 Unfortunately,
some of the early General Baptists imitated what they believed to be
"Biblical" among the Dutch Anabaptists and Quakers such as not taking
oaths, pacifism, civil non-involvement , etc. And along with these less
harmful sectarian tendencies also absorbed some of other weaknesses of the
more radical Anabaptists in theology. A.C. Underwood offers both a caution
and a clarification here :
248Cf. A.C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, p. 137. Thomas Crosby, The History of the English Baptists, Op.Cit. has a long litany of praise for his spiritual integrity and pastoral virtues, Vol. IV, pp. 366-373. Evidentally, his preformance as an expositor was excellent and he displayed a high moral character.
22
. . . On the other hand, that weakness on the question of the Incarnation,
which afflicted the General Baptists, and the way in which Matthew Caffyn absorbed certain points of the Hoffmannite Christology, seem to be due to persistent Mennonite influences . . . .
Where there are so many probabilities to be weighed, it is not wise to be
too dogmatic. One point which must never be forgotten is that " there were
were two kinds of Anabaptists, the sober and the fanatical. Failure to make
this distinction has done mischief and caused modern Baptists to deny their
connection to the Reformation, whereas they are the lineal descendents of
the sober kind and have no reason to be ashamed of their predecessors. " This distinction was evidently in the mind of Troletsch when he
suggested that the counterpart in England of more extreme continental Anabaptists
isthe confused medley of radical sects, which sprang to life during the
Com-monwealth and caused Cromwell so much trouble. The General Baptist
re-presented the the more moderate form of the Anabaptist Movement, with characteristic differences due to a different milieu. In England the sober
va-riety appeared before the more extreme, because the common man had
to wait a hundred years before got a real chance of taking his share in the
Re-formation Movement. . . .24
Again, McLachlan observes that throughout both of the reigns of the
first two Stuarts (James I and Charles I), many English students resorted to
Dutch Universities where they picked up both Arminian and Socinian ideas,
especially at Leiden. This steady influx of new and often heretical views soon
moved Archbishop Laud (not a friend to either Separatists or Baptists) to
pass censures on émigré religious literature and by 1640 to begin to pass his
Canons against the Socinian heresy. This understandable but desperate
measure was frustrated by the widespread general dissent against the
Established Church, however.25 About the same time (in 1639) a certain Dr.
Samuel Johnson, chaplain to the Queen of Bohemia at the Hague was
23
accused of commending and propagating the writings of known Socinians.
This Dr. Johnson (not the later famous English literary critic) complained
that he had been misrepresented, but McLachlan's research indicates he
was quite sympathetic to the new heresy.26
The story of the development and growth of the Socinian/Unitarian
heresy among the Anglicans, Presbyterians, and the Independents is an
interesting one, but the focus here is on those English and later American
Baptists who were already influenced by the trends which have been
discussed.27 It is said that during the Commonwealth era (ca. 1638-1660)
that Baptists like Paul Hobson became acquainted with Socinian literature,
and sympathized with its insistence on a purely Scriptural basis for theology,
and liberal rationalism.28 Later, the writer shall raise serious doubts about
the first rationale, and shall show that the second one is the abandonment of
God's revealed authority and truth.
During the period of John Bidle's arrest and trial for making a public
denial of the deity of Jesus Christ in 1648, some Baptists who had suffered
for their particular Christian beliefs, began to perceive that the official
suppression of Socinianism was another example of persecution of those
desiring religious liberty. But the controversy of William Kiffin with the
Anglican authorities over Infant Baptism was really an internicene
controversy among Christians over a less absolutely vital doctrine of the
Gospel. John Bidle's Socinian propaganda which denied Christ's deity and
the Incarnation, was undercutting the foundation of Christian society and
believing culture itself. Yet, the harshness and frequent hypocrisy of the
English State and Church in persecuting and punishing Bidle in Newgate
24
prison (already infamous for being the residence of many Non-conformists
and Baptists), moved some previously orthodox Baptists to identify
Trinitarian belief with oppression and to strongly protest against the State
forcing people to believe or confess against their will.29 Yet, many Baptists
(and other genuine Christians) in the twentieth century might be more
sympathetic to the theologically seasoned wisdom of Oliver Cromwell whose
ears were burned by the petition and who sternly lectured the protestors
about rightful restraint of unbelievers.30 And three years exile and
restriction of liberties (which was merciful for the time), Bidle was granted a
writ of habeas corpus by the King's Bench at Westminster and he was set at
liberty in 1658. But in 1662, after preaching and teaching his Socinianism in
London, and winning the support of philanthropists like Thomas Firmin and
barristers such as John Farrington, Restoration authorities (undoubtably
pressed by Presbyterians in the Parliament) brought about his last arrest at
small meeting in London. Bidle later died from stark and unsanitary
conditions in the notorious Newgate in September, 1662. To his Socinian
disciples, and probably to some Baptists, he appeared to be a Christian
martyr.31 And the influence of his circle and his religious publications
affected many English sects and would some be the immediate catalyst of
the cancer of Socinianism within the General Baptists.
Early Baptists (like early Quakers) with their aversions to creeds,
early Church Councils, and especially to eccesiastical powers wedded to the
State, may have been setting themselves a treacherous loophole for
unorthodox beliefs.32 According to McLachan, there were Baptists in Bath
and Bristol in 1644 who held unorthodox Christology. This claim is based on
25
a letter reprinted in Thomas Edwards' Gangraena: or a Catalogue of Many of
the Errours, Heresies, and Pernicous Practices of the Secretaries of this
Time (London, 1646), who was an Anglican critic of the Baptists, who may
have lacked objectivity here (as he reckoned Anabaptists and Baptists
virtually the same). Supposedly, however, ' a minister in the Army ' had
reported the rise of "'two new Opinions . . . . among the Anabaptists there,
viz. ' 1. That Christ's humane nature is defiled with Original sin, as well as
ours. 2. That there is but one person in the Divine nature. "33 Some even
maintained that the absence of the word "Trinity" in the 1660 Baptist
Confession of Faith, gave standing room to anti-Trinitarianism, but this
charge nineteenth century Baptist historian Adam Taylor vehemently
denied. However, Taylor did admit that there were some individual Baptists
in Kent and Sussex " who early begin to puzzle themselves with attempting
to explain the mysteries of the incarnation."34 And it is here we turn to the
case of Matthew Caffyn and his followers.
Matthew Caffyn (1628-1714) was born and raised in Sussex, but we
do not know a great deal about his early life as a youth. Probably, as a young
man he shewed promise in learning, for we find him as a student at Oxford
in the 1640s (during the Interregnum). Then in 1645, after being expelled
from Oxford for his doctrinal views, he joined the General Baptist Church at
Horsham and became, for some years, a Messenger in Southern England.
Yet, even while at Oxford this very young man employed his intellect in
puzzling over imponderable and inexplicable matters about God and Christ,
which would soon lead him into the realms of Socinian and Arian heresy.35
Soon, according to Adam Taylor, this young Baptist preacher concluded to
26
his own satisfaction that the doctrine of the Trinity must not be correct.36 In
the later 1640s, Caffyn became the pastor of the Baptist Church at Horsham
in Sussex; there he began to preach and teach his new understanding of
Christology. He also began to openly publish his views in the 1650s and
later. He was definitely opposed to the classic Athanasian Creed, and in
Taylor's estimation, he was " a rational skeptic ". McLachlan observes that
he " possibly adopted several of Melchior Hoffman's views " which had
already been deemed highly heretical.37 It seems that at first he doubted
Christ's deity, then later he flatly denied it. In his later life, he was happy to
adopt the prespective of the Socinians that Christ was merely a very good
man. Underwood's summary is apt: " [He] passed from denying the reality of
Our Lord's Human Nature to a denial of His Deity ".38 His views twice split
the General Assembly in the 17th and 18th centuries. As early as 1686
Caffyn's deviant theological views were challenged by Joseph Wright, the
pastor at Maidstone (who was, for a time, a close personal friend). He
brought charges against him before the General Assembly, accused him of
the double heresy of denying both the humanity and the deity of Christ, and
asked for his expulsion. Yet Caffyn made an eloquent verbal defense of
himself and was exonerated, while brother Wright was censured for a " want
of charity. " This led Caffyn to proclaim his heretical views ever more
broadly and openly. Then in 1693, heresy charges were again brought
against Caffyn, but once more the General Assembly refused to deal with
situation. This led to the first split of the General Baptists. The more
orthodox splinter group at that time published their manifesto as " The
Reasons of our Separation from the General Assembly ".39 Finally, we shall
27
see that from 1693 until 1731, the two General Baptist denominations co-
existed (not always peacefully!) until an effort was made to re-unite on the
basis of the Six Principles of Hebrews 6:1-2 some twenty years after Caffyn's
death. The second "split" (or reordering) came as a result of the Salter's Hall
Controversy in 1719 with the two sides being known as the Subscribers
(Trinitarian) and the Nonsubscribers (Non-Trinitarians [mostly]).
Besides Matthew Caffyn, the other important advocate of Socinianist
notions was Paul Hobson, a General Baptist, whose work flourished between
1646-1666, the year of his death. The writer has not been able to determine
his exact birth day and information about his youth and education is beyond
sketchy. Thomas Edwards described Hobson as a "chirchugeon" in London,
and he was associated with the establishment of a Baptist Church at
Crutched Friars in 1639 (which doubtlessly means he was born ca. 1620 or
earlier). He also signed the First London (Baptist) Confession in 1644.
According to McLachlan, he had moved his way up through the ranks of the
Parliamentary army and attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, and that he
preached in various places in the countryside as his regiment moved.40
Eventually, he left the army and settled down at Sacristan, near Chester-le-
Street as a retired gentleman. During Oliver Cromwell's later Protectorate,
he was connected to the Northumberland and Durham Baptists, and held a
fellowship and chaplaincy at Eton from 1654-1660, though he was often
absent doing evangelism. When the Restoration came, he was to suffer
several arrests in connexion with conspiracies against the government, and
thus, he was eventually imprisoned in August, 1663, first in the London
Tower and later Chepstow. Then, finally, he was released in April 1665, on
28
the condition he migrate to the Carolina Colony. Little more is heard of him,
but he probably died before immigrating as his will was probated in the
Prerogative Court of Cantebury on June 13, 1666.41
Paul Hobson's writings reveal both a kind of evangelical fervor and
yet a strongly rationalistic strain. One of his early tracts is entitled Practical
Divinity: or, a Helpe through the blessing of God to lead men to look within
themselves (1646) which reveals the practical mysticism of Hobson. His
diary and autobiography, written during the period of his last imprisonment,
was printed in 1664 and it contains many details of his life. Apparently, he
had spent some time with Socinian friends in France and then with others in
Newcastle and Durham. He had also, according to his own testimony,
travelled over the Sea to Holland.42 However, when he returned from
Holland, he was not admitted to the Durham Baptist meeting for worship,
because he had begun to question the validity of ' Gospel Ordinances '. His
views on prayer, though an aside from his Christology, are interesting; he
believed that prayer was a duty, but that it does not change or alter God, but
only changes the Christian so that we fit God's will. He said, " So prayer is
the Language of God in us, not to alter God, but us. "43 This writer cannot
accept McLachlan's judgment that " Hobson's Christology is purely
Scriptural, " but his gist of Hobson's Socinian views is correct as follows:
. . . The relationship of Christ to God is described by him quite simply as ' a
bond of nature in the highest degree; for he was his Son (Psalm ii.7, Heb. V.5),
his only Son; they were united in Affection, see upon God's side in Matt. iii.17 –
" This is my beloved Son ". So on Christ's -- " his Father's Will was his Will . . . .
" & c.' Christ stood related to God ' as the chiefest and eminestest object of His
29
Delight ' . Here we find no discussion of the two natures of Christ, no mention
of the Trinity, no references to the existing schemes of theology. Christ is God's
Son and the relationship is, accordingly, natural and non-metaphysical. The Holy
Holy Spirit is, accordingly, not a Person of the Trinity but God's activity in the
world.44
Hobson's Baptist contemporaries and others, unlike himself, saw his
teachings as unorthodox, and his Socinian view on the Atonement was
likewise disturbing. He accepted only Christ's death as the Reconciliation of
the sinful world to the Father, but he denied there was satisfaction for sin.45
His failure to take the Scriptures grammatically and literally led him to
affirm Universal Salvation but also to posit the Immortality of the Soul as
demanded by both the Bible and Natural Reason. McLachlan admits that
Hobson was entirely oblivious to the fact that his views were held by
dreadful heretics, and that his own Baptist colleagues responded to him in
severest criticism. He notes that " in 1654 letters passed between Newcastle
and Hexham over his unconverted state, and the Hexham minister warning
the Newcastle Baptists against their fellow-communicant. "46 Hobson was an
eccentric figure among the seventeenth-century Baptists, what some call a
"rare bird" (rara avis) indeed, who was totally unorthodox in his
understanding of justification and redemption and who was strictly
subordinationist and non-Trinitarian in his Christology. In the eighteenth
century, his ilk was multiplied in large numbers among the General Baptists.
One key link between the strongly incipient Socinianism of the
seventeenth century and the brashly triumphant Socinianism (Unitarianism)
of the eighteenth century runs through an elite circle of urban English
30
Baptists and their political and philosophical supporters. Here the reference
is to John Gale (1680-1721), James Foster (1697-1753), and the polymath
William Whiston (1667-1752). Although there were a number of lesser
figures in among the General Baptists in the late seventeenth century (and
early eighteenth), and a number of equally significant figures among the
Anglicans, Independents, and Presbyterians, these three men were a core of
"evangelical" Baptists who were deceived by the intellectual allurements of
Socinianizing theology.
John Gale was son of a General Baptist minister in London, born on
May 26, 1680. His father, Nathaniel Gale, was a propertied gentleman who
had holdings in the West Indies. This situation allowed him to receive a first-
rate education, first in the better preparatory schools of Britain and then as
young man at the University of Leiden in the winter of 1697. He was already
proficient in the Greek and Latin classics and had learned Hebrew as a
youth. By the July 3, 1699, his gifts had made it possible for him to receive
both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, a phenomenal achievement. After
graduation from Leiden, he spent time in Amsterdam in the company of the
Arminian scientists Limborch and Le Clerc. Returning to London in ca. 1700,
he continued to pursue his studies in private, focusing especially on Biblical
exegesis and Patristics. His accomplishments were such that his alma mater
in Holland offered to bestow on him the honor of the Doctor of Divinity in
1703, but he declined because of his preference for a moderate Arminianism
and his dislike for the hard Calvinism of the Synod of Dort. While at Leiden,
or shortly after he had already published his four tomes of Inquisitio
Philosophica Inauguralis de Lapide Solis (1699), and before age twenty-
31
seven he had written his second major work, Reflections on Mr. Wall's
History of Infant Baptism (1706), a manuscript which he had seen, five years
before its publication (1711). Gale was a precocious linguist and logical
theologian, and his elite mental acumen drew him into the orbits of those
like William Whiston, Sir Isaac Newton, and others. Yet, he was,
nevertheless, a Dissenter, and the son of a Baptist.47 Eventually, too, he was
named as the chairman of Whiston's " Society for Promoting Primitive
Christianity ", and as we shall see, became identified in the Salter's Hall
controversy, as a "non-subscriber."48
The next important link for understanding the development of the
Socinian heresy among Baptists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century
is Reverend James Foster (1697-1753). His work also supplies a connection
between the non-Subscribers at the Salters’ Hall controversy, Baptist
Unitarians, and the later English Deists. Foster was born on September 16.
1697 in Exeter, the son of minister of Kettering, Northamptonshire. He was
well-educated , having attented the free school at Exeter and later the
academy there by Joseph Hallet. He began to preach at age twenty-one and
his entrance into the work of ministry coincided with the spread of Arianism
among the dissenters in the western counties. This was in 1718, and only
one year later, these dissenters among the Baptists, Congegationalists,
Independents, and Presbyterians, desiring to make a declaration of their
biblical “orthodoxy” lead to the Salters’ Hall conference. This led to
expulsion two friends of Foster, James Peirce and Joseph Hallet (d. 1722),
from their Exeter congregations.49 When the latter challenge came, Foster
readily took the side of the non-Subscribers. Foster’s congregation at Exeter
32
(much to their credit, we think!) found his doctrinal opinions offensive, and
thus he soon accepted a call from the congregation at Milbourne Port in
Somersetshire. Yet this church also proved to be too orthodox for him, so he
moved into the house of a certain Nicholas Billingsley, a sympathizer, who
lived at Ashwick, under the Mendip Hills. From there he preached for two
small congregations at Colesford and Wokey, near Wells, for a minuscle
salary of 15l per year. After being here at short time, he moved on to
Trowbridge, Wiltshire, where he roomed in a glover’s quarters and pastored
a congregation of fifteen to twenty persons. Foster did preach strongly on
the Resurrection of Christ in 1720 and he published one sermon on this
topic. Later the same year he published an Essay on Fundamentals in which
he argued that the doctrine of the Trinity should not be regarded as
essential to Christianity. In the appendix to this book, he is believed by most
to prove his Arian leanings. Around the same time, he was baptized by John
Gale in London and became a Baptist. For a time, because his means were
so limited, he considered becoming a glover, but in about 1722, Mr. Robert
Houlton, chose Foster as his domestic chaplain. Finally, in 1724, he was
chosed as a colleague of Joseph Burroughs to serve at the Barbican Chapel,
following John Gale (mentioned previously) and Isaac Kimber (1692-1755).
A.C. Underwood remarks on his pastoral and theological commitments at
this time:
. . . He wrote against the Deists but was himself a rationalistic Socinian. He was
accounted the best preacher in London. The wits, free-thinkers, clergy, and per-
sons of quality went to hear him. It was a proverbial saying that “ those who had not heard Farinelli sing and Foster preach, were not qualified to appear
in genteel society. ” [Later, N.B.] The Marischal College, Aberdeen, made him
a
33
Doctor of Divinity. When he had Socinianised the Barbican Church, it was said
that Gale “ had labored” and Foster had “entered into his labours.” After these
these remarkable doctrinal fluctuations the church was dissolved in 1768.50
Being something of a man ahead of his time (in a good sense), Foster
frequently gave Sunday evening lectures at the old Jewry, and was an
eloquent preacher. But both his lectures and preaching were highly
controversial. As already observed, he did write against the Deists, for
example, he made a famous reply to Matthew Tindal’s essay, Christianity as
Old as the Creation in 1731. This essay, entitled The Usefulness, Truth, and
Excellency of the Christian Religion defended against Matthew Tindal ,
however, allowed many of the premises of Deism to be accepted as valid.
Later in 1735, he wrote replies to two “Letters” by Henry Stebbing in which
he maintained that intellectual errors about God are essentially “innocent”.
Foster’s career and fame continued to prosper in a worldly fashion and in
1744 he was called from the Barbican Church to the pastorate of the
General Baptist Church at Pinners’ Hall. Foster also visited the condemned
Lord Kilmarnock in the Tower in 1746 and administered the Lord’s Supper
to him previous to his execution. Shortly afterward he published an account
of their discussion and showed himself to be sympathetic to the rebellious
noble. For this indiscretion he was severely attacked by orthodox Baptist
pastors and others who suggested that he was willing to accept the
Pretended in order to get rid of the Test Act, as some non-Conformists in
earlier days had been willing to submit to James II. This attack was unfair,
and made by people who really had other motives for disapproving of
Foster’s ministerial actions. Foster was prodigious writer of sermons and
34
essays and his sermons were published in four volumes from 1744 to 1752
(Collected Sermons) and went through five editions. He also published two
volumes of controversial theology or apologetics from his Socinian (Baptist)
perspective entitled Discourses on all the Principal Branches of Natural
Religion and Social Virtue (in 1749 and 1752), which sold at least two
thousand copies. Foster’s health was bad, and the strain of controversy
brought on a stroke in April 1750 and then a second one in July 1753. He
then died from his bodily frailties on November 5, 1753.51
One more comment about Foster must be made. It is said of James
Foster that he was a man of generosity and stout moral character, and that
he even refused on principle a generous offer of an Irish church from Bishop
Rundle. Yet, as a Baptist, Foster had moved far beyond Biblical Christianity
and had embraced rationalism, although he viewed it religiously. And
though he debated with Tindal and the other hard Deists, he himself
accepted much of the Deist approach to religion. Sir Leslie Stephen, as he
concludes his fine article on Foster which has been amply cited remarks : “
In his sermons (volume of 1733, i. 175) occurs a characteristic phrase
quoted by Bolingbroke and Savage (Gentleman's Magazine, v. 213): ‘ Where
mystery begins, religion ends. ’ ” 52
Previous to the eighteenth century theological work of William
Whiston and Samuel Clark, there were many strands which led to the
Salters’ Hall Controversy. The Baptist Socinians were only part of it, yet
they were an important and dynamic part. Below is a classified list of some
crucial anti-Trinitarian thinkers:
Thinker Location Church Affliation Date
35
1. Gilbert Clerke, Northampshire. Anglican, Non-conformist.
Late 17th Cent.
(Mathematician)
2. Noval of Tydd. St. Giles near Wisbech. Independent.
Late 17th Cent. (Pastor)
3. Thomas Firmin, publisher. London. Sabellian, Non-conformist.
Late 17th Cent.
4. William Freke. London. Arian.
Late 17th Cent.
5. John Smith. St. Augustine's, London. Socinian.
Late 17th Cent. (philomath
6. Henry Hedworth. London. Socinian. Late
17th Century.
249The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. VII, pp. 494-495, passim. Cf. also A.C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, Op. Cit., p. 138.250A History of the English Baptists, Ibid. See also William L. Whitley, The Baptists of London (London: The Kingsgate Press, 1928 ), p. 14. Most of the key facts are drawn from the DNB article above in footnote 49. Another ironic and historically significant connection is that it was James Foster who in 1647 baptized the eccentric William Whiston, who had been an Anglican clergyman, and who also became so noteworthy as a translator of the works of Flavius Josephus and as representative of eighteenth century Arianism and Socinianism. 51The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. VII, Ibid.52The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. VII, p. 495. Sir Leslie Stephen also notes that Foster was sharply upbraided by conservative Particular Baptists like John Brine for his “free-thinking tendencies” (Ibid.). Long before the middle of the eighteenth century, perceptive Biblical Baptists realized that hard Unitarianism followed Socinianism and that it led to Deism and, ultimately, to unbelief in Christ and His Word.253From The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (18 Vols; London: Cambridge University Press, 1907-1921), Vol. X. , Pt. XVI. 7 cited in http: //www. bartleby.com /220/1607.html. 254The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Ibid. cited from the net address above.255The material facts here are taken from the article on Whiston in The Dictionary of National Biography , Vol. XXII, and the internet article on "William Whiston" at http.: //www.gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/ ~history/Mathematicians/Whiston.html. Other material is found in Edmund Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, Op. Cit., pp. 250, 305, 350, 438, 442, 523-4, and 528; and also in Roland N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), particularly Chap. IV, " Arians and Socinians, " pp. 34-51.256See W.B. Selbie, Non-Conformity: Its Origin and Progress In Herbert Fisher, Gilbert Murray, et al., eds., Home University Library of Modern Knowledge (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), chapters viii and ix, " The Revolution, " and "Reaction and Decline, " pp. 134-171. Most of Edmund Calamy's convulted volume, Op. Cit. [footnote 55 above] is concerned with this period and written in almost sensationalistic journal fashion.
36
- disciple of
John Biddle.
7. William Manning. Peasenhall. Independent. (1630-
1711).53
When the Toleration Act of 1689 was passed, the leavening effects of
almost a century of anti-Trinitarianism began to publicly manifest itself
among the churches of England, beginning with the Anglicans themselves,
257W.B. Selbie, Non-Conformity: Its Origin and Progress, pp. 162-163. Cf. also The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (18 Vols; London: Cambridge University Press, 1907-1921), Vol. X. , Pt. XVI. 8 cited in http: //www.bartleby.com/220/1607.html. This source, as others, also mentions the role of Joseph Hallett, the date of the second Exeter assembly as May, 1719. The actual Subscription controversy seems to have occurred in July, 1719. John Shute Barrington (afterwards Viscount Barrington) is identified as the leader of the Presbyterians, who as has been noted, resisted formal imposition of the a creed. The minority of subscribers later formed their own distinct minority under Bradbury's direction, while the non-subscribers issued a dispatch (or manifesto ?) letter to Exeter, stating their virtues and convictions in not subscribing. Ironically, the Unitarians of the later eighteenth and nineteenth century would look on this as their charter of freedom from "dogmatism." See further the minute coverage of the events in Roger Thomas, " The Non-Subscription Controversy, " in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 4, No. 2 (July-October, 1953): 162-163. 358Class notes from Professor John Y. Briggs, Regents Park College, Oxford which were kindly lent to this author with permission to cite them in this paper. The facts are, however, substantiated in the various histories: Thomas Crosby, Edmund Calamy, McBeth, Selbie, and Underwood and elsewhere.359Class Notes from Professor Briggs' course in Modern Church History, Regents Park College, cited with permission. These figures differ slightly from those given in some handbooks and general histories as well those in our class notes from Professor Macmullen's class on Baptist History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. But the effect of the slight numerical variations is neglible. The main point is that most of the key General Baptist leaders were influenced in the direction of non-Subscription (and eventually toward Unitarianism), while a few General Baptists and most Particular Baptists remained orthodox at this time. (JR).360Class Notes, Ibid., p. 5. See also the detailed survey of the intellectual movements of the time in Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth Century England, pp. 34-39 and W.B. Selbie, Non-Conformity: Its Origin and Progress, pp. 164-171. An excellent contemporary survey of the whole period is found in Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 in The Pelican History of the Church (London: Pelican/ Penguin Books, 1988), Vol. 4, pp. 117-140.361Non-Conformity: Its Origin and Progress, p. 164. Progress, pp. 164-171. An excellent contemporary survey of the whole period is found in Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 in The Pelican History of the Church (London: Pelican/ Penguin Books, 1988), Vol. 4, pp. 117-140.62 Cf. G.R. Cragg, Op. Cit., p. 136 and see K.S. Latournette, A History of Christianity (cited in footnote 2), Pt. VII, chap. xxxvi, p. 827, and Selbie, Op. Cit., pp. 164-65.363See Sromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth Century England, pp. 95, 113, and 116 and the standard histories of the time. Edmund Calamy's work An
37
then with the Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians. As early as 1690,
Arthur Bury, a Latitudinarian minister, lost his rectorship at Lincoln College,
Oxford for his Socinian tract, the Naked Gospel. Soon this was followed by
steady stream of theological pamphlets on both sides (John Wallis, William
Jones, etc.). Eventually, this development lead to the publication of the
Historical Account of My Own Life, Vol. II, chaps. IX and X, minutely details both the political-social developments and the religious events of this time (pp. 233-535). 370Leon Mcbeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness, pp. 161-170 and 289-295; and see A.C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, 152-159.
371A History of the English Baptists, pp. 155-56. Unitarians would, doubtlessly, from their more rationalistic perspective have a different perspective on this. It must be recalled for historical completeness that Dan Taylor left Birchcliff at Wadsworth in ca. 1773 to become pastor at Halifax, where he remained until 1785. Then in 1785, accepting a new a wider call, he loaded his family (with nine children) and his belongings on a wagon borrowed from a friend and journeying to London. There he became the assistant to John Brittain at Church Lane, Whitechapel, and after Brittain's death, was the sole pastor there until 1815. 72The Baptist Heritage, p. 164. Later on Mcbeth writes, "As its Unitarianism became more pronounced, its adherence to outworn methods more intransigent, the old General Baptists . . . . ' subsided into insignificance.' Meanwhile, the New Connexion prospered, though its growth leveled off somewhat from its early days. In 1811, the New Connection assembly registered 81 delegates from 58 churches, and reported a total membership of 5, 471 with 339 baptisms in that year." The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness, p. 294. See Underwood, Op. Cit., pp. 156-159.73A History of the English Baptists, p. 155. In addition to home and foreign missions, the New Connection sponsored several printing efforts, and these included the Baptist Repository, the Missionary Observer, a new hymnal, and an evangelical tract society. There was a sharp and heated controversy among the pastors and others about maintaining the headquarters in Leicestershire rather than move it to London. So, the New Connection came to its centenary celebration in 1870 with 153 churches and 20,488, mostly in the English Midlands. Cf. McBeth, The Baptist Heritage, pp. 294-5.74These events, which include the launching of the modern Missionary Movement with William Carey and Joshua Marshman in 1793, are discussed in intricate detail in Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, Chap. vii, " Revival," pp. 153-200 and in McBeth, Op. Cit., pp. 163-170 and pp. 285-307. 75References are from the papers of James Relly in the John Murray Papers at the New York Historical Society and the Judith Murray Papers at the Andover Harvard Theological Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts as cited by Andrew Hill in his article, "James Relly," at http: //www. uua.org/uuhs /duub/articles/jamesrelly.html. Hill has promised to update the information available on Relly in Alexander Gordon's article in The Dictionary of National Biography in a new essay coming in the New Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming, 2004).
38
Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity briefly Explained by Jones. About the same
time William Sherlock, a rationalist theologian, published his Vindication of
the Holy and ever Blessed Trinity. Then the controversy led to yet another
attack from Robert South with his Animadversions upon Dr. Sherlock's
Vindication. Then another strain of controversialists entered into the fray
and the collection was published as The Faith of one God Who is only the
76Andrew Hill, " James Relly," at http: //www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/jamesrelly.html., pp. 2-3. 77Ibid., p. 2. This writer has not checked on any references concerning Relly in either Wesley's or Whitefield's Journals at the present time, but plans to do so in the near future. 78Naturally, the account of this "coversion experience" (to heresy!) is found on the Unitarian website. See "The Conversion of John Murray," from The Life of Murray cited at http://www.uua.org/uucf/jmur-con.htm (3 pages). The full title of Murray's biography is entitled, Life of Rev. John Murray . . . written by himself (London, 1816). 79According to David Robinson in The Unitarians and Universalists (Westport, Connecticut: The Greenwood Press, 1985), Chap. 5, " American Universalist Origins, " pp. 47-59. In this same place he remarks, " The Baptist movement in particular in particular was a seedbed for early Universalism, and a good many Universalists leaers and their followers, including Caleb Rich and Elhanan Winchester, arrived at their views by way of Baptist evangelicalism. " (p. 48). George de Benneville, Benjamin Rush, and Elhanan Winchester, because of their distaste for the doctrine of eternal damnation of the lost, were also inclined to this persuasion. 80David Robinson in The Unitarians and Universalists, p. 49. A popular account of this Universalist legend can be found as " The Story of Thomas Potter and John Murray, " at http.//www.murraygrove.org/heritage/pottermurray.html. As extra-Scriptural revelation of man's native goodness and God the Father's supposed prior reconciliation of each and every unrepentant and unregenerate sinner is so appealing to human reason and is so close to the actual Gospel (John 3:16-17; Romans 3: 21-25; 2 Corinthians 5:17-21), it is easy to understand its intrinsic power to convince. Anne Lee Bressler in her essay, " Calvinism Improved, " in The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880 , in Harry S. Stout, ed., Religion In America (Series) (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 9-30 even goes so far to say that Universalism ". . . reflected the legacy of Edwardsean Calvinism, " and Universalists were simply preachers of "Rational Election", a determined effort to improve Calvinism. This unbelievable essay may be found on line at http://www. oup__usa. org/ sd 0195129865 __01.pdf. It is a diabolically clever and sophisticated prevarication !81Although it has not been included in the bibliography, Cf. Rev. John Murray, Letters and Sketches of Sermons. 3 Vols. (Boston: Universalist Society, 1812-1813) and Record s of the Life of the Rev. John Murray . . . Written by Himself . . . to Which Is Added a Brief Continuation . . . Edited by Mrs. Judith Sargent Murray (Boston, 1816).364Perhaps a hint of this hidden working of Arianism/Socinianism can even be found, ironically, in the letter of Isaac Watts to Reverend Cotton Mather in Boston written on February 11, 1720, contained in his Collected Works, 6 Vols. (London, 1810-11),
39
Father (1691). As the controversy deepened it dissolved the fraternal bonds
of good-will among the Independents (Congregationalists) and the
Presbyterians and it began to manifest itself in several places among the
General Baptists, particularly with Matthew Caffyn, the pastor at Horsham,
Sussex, who was accused for a second time before the "Baptist General
Assembly" of denying Christ's deity in 1693. As the vote was on whether or
ii, p. 414 (contained also in the Massachusetts Historical Society Collection), cited in Thomas Rogers, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 4, No. 2 (July - October, 1953), p. 182.65Selbie, Non-Conformity: Its Origin and Progress, p. 165, for instance. Thomas Monk (Jr)'s quotation is from the minutes of the 1699 General Assembly, cited by Arnold H.J. Baines in his fine old article in The Baptist Quarterly (London: The Baptist Historical Society), Vol. 17 (1957-58): 41 (See context, pp. 35-42; 74-86; 122-128; 170-178). In Professor (Rev.) Bainesls footnote # 20 he comments: " For evidence that Caffyn's followers still denied God's omnipresence see A second Address to the Anabaptists (1702), p. 22, citing The Vail turn'd aside, which I have not seen." 66Cf. Selbie, Non-Conformity: Its Origin and Progress, pp. 165-171, but he has some qualifications on pp. 169-170 (e.g., the "Northern Education Society, " and the Heckmondwicke Academy). The few solidly Biblical Baptist academies like those at Bristol continued and the later Stepney Academy (f. 1796) which became Regent Park College, Oxford. 67See Adam Taylor, The History of the General Baptists (London, 1818), Vol. I, pp. 464-480, cited by Leon Mcbeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness, pp. 156-158. See also Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 300 and 375 which reviews the Trinitarian controversy from the Caffynite crisis until after the Salters' Hall debacle. 68Leon Mcbeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness, Ibid. Macbeth's citations come from Adam Taylor's history, Op. Cit., Vol. I, p. 480 and W.T. Whitley, A History of the British Baptists (London: Charles Griffin & Company, 1923), p. 174. 69The Baptist Heritage, p. 158. Mcbeth's description of the General Baptists between 1720 and 1770 rings true: " They fell victim to extreme liberalism. They had no gospel to preach, and they preached no gospel. " Later, in the 1760s, Daniel Taylor, having attended the General Assembly in London with disillusionment and shock stated: " They degraded Jesus Christ, and He degraded them ", cited from A.C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, 152. 382An important link between John Murray and later American Unitarian-Universalism was Hosea Ballou (1771-1852), who was the dominant figure in American Universalism for the first half of the nineteenth century. Ballou, unlike Murray and Elhanan Winchester, who were Trinitarian Calvinists of a heretical stripe, was an avowed opponent of the Calvinist-Reformed system of theology and the whole notion of Christ's satisfactory Atonement. His most famous writing, A Treaise on the Atonement was a radical Arminian (Congregationalist) attack on the traditional teaching of the Church and it was a concerted effort to make reason the final arbiter of the interpretation of Christ's work. His position was known as "Ultra-universalism", and although purportedly based upon an exegesis of the Bible, it was
40
not to expel Caffyn, a secession of many of the more orthodox and
evangelically Biblical Baptists produced the " General Baptist Association. "
In the same year a second huge anthology of anti-Trinitarian essays
appeared as a Second Collection of Tracts proving the God, and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, the only True God. Then, in 1694, John Howe, a
Presbyterian, entered the fight with his tract, Calm and Sober Inquiry
largely a total re-interpretation of Scripture according a philosophic notion of God's benevolence. Ballou was " utterly convinced that a loving God would not condemn humankind to eternal punishment. For Ballou, the consequences of sin were the spiritual, psychological, and physical harm to the sinner, not the punishment of an angry God. " See David Robinson, The Unitarians and Universalists, Chap. 6, pp. 61-73 and pp. 215-216 (biographical article). 483Much of this material is drawn directly from David Robinson, The Unitarians and Universalists, pp. 51-59 and an article by David Johnson, "Elhanan Winchester, Junior - Fire for the Gospel, Universalism,"pp. 1-8, an article taken from the Internet in October from one of the Unitarian web-sites for which the writer has presently lost the address.484David Johnson, " Elhanan Winchester, Junior ", p. 3.485David Johnson, Ibid. and see David Robinson, Op. Cit., 57.486See David Robinson, Op. Cit. and David Johnson, " Elhanan Winchester, Junior, " pp. 3-4. Much detail is being deliberately left out for the sake of space and time (JR). On Hosea Ballou, see footnote # 82 above. The writer also apologizes for not having time to tract down the bibliographical references on either Stonehouse or Paul Siegvolck's Everlasting Gospel (a good task for further research, no doubt !).87David Johnson, Op. Cit., p. 4. One may be tempted to imagine some psychical or physiological connection between Winchester's Gospel of universal salvation and his serial polygamy, but the writer does not wish to judge the motives of a man who lived over two hundred years ago on mere secondary sources. Still, maybe Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were not the first to have the idea. 488David Johnson, Ibid. 489These are the words of David Johnson himself, a Unitarian-Universalist from Brookline, Massachusetts where Winchester had his original church home. Johnson's article, which we have used frequently for the last couple of pages was a personal research on Winchester done between 1999-2001. The actual citation is taken from p. 6. 490From article by Andrew Hill, " William Vidler, " at http://www .uua.org/ uuhs/ duub/ articles/ williamvidler.html., p. 1.91Andrew Hill, " William Vidler, " Ibid. See also David Johnson, "Elhanan Winchester, Junior," pp. 6-7. There Johnson comments: " Battle Baptist built a new building in 1789, though it took a couple of generations to pay for, and by 1792, Vidler was a Universal Baptist, like Winchester. Vidler described Winchester as of "amiable" character and said that his "conversation " was "cheerful and instructing." He also noted that he exhibited a "watchfulness over his tongue such as [he] had never witnessed before." Later, Vidler and Winchester frequently exchanged pulpits at Christmastime, leading the Battle Church to the Universalist (and ultimately) Unitarian persuasion.
41
against the tenth (and last) tract of the collection just noted. The struggle
had become triangular and circular and, mostly, vicious and hot !54
Yet, this first phase of the Trinitarian (or more properly, Socinian)
controversy came to a logical end in 1708, having received its principle
deathblow in 1698 by an act of the crown which aimed to suppress
blasphemy and profaness (and this legal restraint remained on the English
92Andrew Hill, " William Vidler, " Ibid. Hill also comments that after announcing his new belief, " a minority of his church withdrew, but the majority loyally remained. Vidler and his universalist congregation were expelled from the local Particular Baptist association in 1793. "493While Vidler did occasionally preach and maintained a part-time ministry with the Battle Church until 1796, his focus now became wider and more urban, as he envisioned a Unitarian London and beyond. Here we add a final brief note on Winchester's life until his passing in 1797. He left London to return to Boston, chiefly it seems, on account of his wife's quarrelsome nature and violent abuse (at least that is his side of the story). For the remaining years he preached in Boston, Brookline, and New York. He also became the mediator of the General Convention of Universalists meeting in Oxford, Massachusetts. On a number of occasions he preached in Joseph Priestley's Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. In his last months, he felt compelled to travel up and down the Atlantic coasts, irratically proclaiming the " Universal Gospel. " At last he settled down on a farm in Connecticutt, still forebearing his hot-tempered wife, and here he died on April 18, 1797. 94After 1805, The Universalists' Miscellany was renamed The Monthly Repository. It was this event, the General Assembly's decision to accept William Vidler and his Parliament Court congregation which caused Daniel Taylor to resign in disgust. Cf. Andrew Hill, " William Vidler, " p. 2. and cf. again Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage, p. 164. 95Cf. Earl M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism. 2 Vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Pressm 1952),Vol. II, Chap. XXXIII, " English Unitarianism in the Nineteenth Century. " 96Cf. Andrew Hill, " William Vidler, " Ibid. 497Andrew Hill, "William Vidler, " Ibid. The Scriptural citation is from 1 Peter 5:8b, KJV.498See the citation of John MacLachlan in Rara Avis: A Memoir of Richard Wright (Sheffield: Unitarian-Universalist Press, 1998), p. 11 cited by David Johnson in " Elhanan Winchester, Junior, " p. 7. Johnson also records that Parliament Court chose William Johnson Fox as Vidler's successor in 1816, and it was under his leadership that the congregation moved to South Place Chapel in Finsbury and evolved into the "South Place Ethical Society." Truly, it had become a church body without the Father, Son, or the Holy Spirit and a humanist organization without the Gospel of salvation. Socinianism had issued ultimately in secular naturalism and man's own "religion" of his "good works."(JR)99A History of the English Baptists, p. 156. (He himself cites as evidence: Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society, Vol. IV, p. 191. )5100Cf. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, p. 138. He himself refers to the compendium of William T. Whitley, The Baptists of London 1612-1928 (London: The Kingsgate Press, 1928), p. 14.
42
statute books until 1813). It is possible that both John Locke and Sir Isaac
Newton contributed to the anti-Trinitarian tracts as anonymous authors.
Newton together with William Whiston and others was either a Semi-Arian
or full-fledged Socinian according to some scholars. Before 1710, no official
representatives of either the Anglicans or the Non-Conformist Churches had
endorsed either side of the issue. Yet, the circumstances of the era and
continued agitation from "famous" preachers and learned men brought in
the various denominations with the Baptists, Congregationalists, and
Presbyterians right at the heart of the struggle. Theological trials were
beginning: Matthew Caffyn's case divided the Baptists in 1693; in Dublin,
Ireland, Thomas Emlyn was tried by the Presbyterians for Arianism. There
was only an eerie pause before the storm . . . .
101See W.T. Whitley, above, Op. Cit., p133.102W.T Whitley, The Baptists of London, p. 131.103See R. Philip Roberts, Continuity And Change, London Calvinistic Baptists and the Evangelical Revival, 1760-1820. (Wheaton, Illinois: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers, 1989), pp. 15-16 and 183-185. Professor Roberts also shows how Calvinistic Baptists, touched by the dynamic of an evangelical revival, Scripturally and theologically responded to the onset of Socinian/Unitarian heresy. The Calvinistic and Particular Baptists, however, were never infected with anything like the degree of General Baptists. 5104The Baptists of London, p. 97. He further comments: " Baptist evangelists and statesmen had appeared by 1862, which indeed wasa summit year; the gross total was about 330, the net about 260. After 1870 the pace slackened, and the sixth half-century brought the net total just over 400. A graph shows actual decline from the Restoration to the death of George II, and the most remarkable progress under Victoria. His explanation for the decline among Baptists in the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century was mainly " doctrinal rivalry and unintelligent conservatism. " But this writer would suggest the growth of secular rationalism and the competition of the Unitarian-Universalist societies which seem to count numbers in the hundreds of thousands officially. And, one might safely wager that in the turn of the millennium (ca. 2000 A.D.) that of Englishmen that are "religious" at all, several million are unofficially "Unitarian" and "Universalist". It looks like England went neither to the Anglicans nor the Presbyterians, nor to the Baptists - it looks as though in many quarters, with a few notable exceptions, that England has been won by atheism and or unbelief. Is this fair ? Is it true ? Is it the last word ? 5105The Baptist Heritage, Chap. 13, p. 507.
43
Then in 1710, the tempest came, and the fierce winds blew. The Arian
Controversy proper had come to England and it would led to Salters' Hall in
1719 and beyond. It would nearly destroy the General Baptists until they
were saved by the Methodist revival and Daniel Taylor and the "New
Connexion" in 1770. The new phase opened with the steady blast of William
Whiston's Historical Preface (1710) which was soon prefixed to volumes on
Primitive Christianity (1711, 4 Volumes). Later, Reverend Samuel Clarke
would publish his bombshell, The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity in 1712.
Still, before discussing these developments further, it is time to more closely
look at William Whiston himself, who became the third center of feverish
inflammation of the Baptists infected with the Socinian disease.
It would seem on the surface of things that for creating the greatest
controversy over heresy among eighteenth century Baptists there never was
more of an unlikely candidate than William Whiston. Yet, Whiston brought
the local controversies of Caffyn, Gale, and Foster into the consciousness of
English Baptists over the land because of his important connections to
Cambridge University and because of his important role in English science
and politics in the early eighteenth century.
Who was William Whiston ? Whiston was a brilliant Englishman
whose dates span the latter half of the seventeenth century and the better
half of the eighteenth (1667-1752). He was born at Norton near Twycross,
Leicestershire. He was the son of an Anglican minister and was home-
schooled by his father (a competent teacher, apparently) until he was nearly
seventeen. Then he spent a short time at Tamworth Grammar School. Then
in 1686, he was admitted to Clare Hall, Cambridge where he qualified for
44
the B.A. in 1690 and earned his M.A. by 1693, after being elected as a
Fellow in 1691. About this same time he was encouraged by a friend, David
Gregory, to study Isaac Newton's Principia and to pursue mathematics. He
intended to return to Cambridge as a don and to accept mathematics pupils,
but frail health made him give up teaching at this time. William Lloyd
ordained Whiston at Lichfield in 1695, and then in 1699 he married Ruth
Antrobus. During this same period he was active both as a chaplain to the
bishop of Norwich from 1694-1698 and he worked as an astronomer and
natural scientist. In 1696 he published his first major work, A New Theory of
the Earth. Although a fairly devout Bible believer, he nevertheless
maintained that the Biblical accounts of Creation, the Flood, and so on could
be scientifically explained in Newtonian terms with scientific descriptions of
events with historical bases (most Christians at this time would not have
necessarily objected to this per se). His theory about the Flood was a little
quirky, as he claimed that a comet smashed into the Earth in a catastrophic
way. In 1698 Whiston obtained his first vicarage at Lowenstoft-with-
Kissingland in Suffolk. But his scientific genius was recognized, and his early
publications and essays were read by Sir Isaac Newton with keen interest.
Later, however, he and Newton would have a falling out over their differing
interpretations of Biblical chronology. Also, Whiston's cosmology left more
room than Newton's for direct (and miraculous) intervention by God. But, in
1701, Whiston resigned his vicarage and took up his appointment as
Newton's assistant professor at Cambridge. There he published on
mathematics and physics, producing a usable edition of Euclid for his
45
students. He also continued to publish on cosmology and Bible
interpretation.
In 1703, following Newton's graceful resignation from Cambridge, he
succeeded his illustrious mentor as the Lucasian professor of Mathematics
and Natural Philosophy. Together with Roger Cotes, who was the Plumian
professor from 1706, Whiston conducted important joint research along
Newtonian lines and created some brilliant scientific hypotheses of his own.
Yet more and more, his searching mind was drawn back to questions of God
and the Holy Scripture. His reason was puzzled with the doctrine of the
Trinity, and like Caffyn, Gale, and Foster, he begin to follow an Arian and a
Socinian path of thought. When it became known to the Cambridge
authorities that he publicly questioned the Trinity, he was deprived of his
professorial chair in 1710. In the next few years he was in London where a
court was being set up and his trial by the Lord Chancellor was expected.
But foreign wars and the death of Queen Anne in 1714 brought the end of
the legal proceedings against him. Not one to remain mentally or physically
inactive, Whiston became instrumental in establishing the Board of
Longitude in England and for the next forty years he spent considerable time
in study of this problem while giving occasional public lectures and courses
on astronomy, physics, and , as has been noted, engaging in many
theological controversies.
Chiefly important, as previously observed, was his Historical Preface
and his Primitive Christianity Revived (4 Vols., 1711). Ironically, while
Whiston was quite a classical scholar as well as a scientist, his whole basis
for his major theological was more his own anti-Trinitarian prejudice than
46
rigorous historical research. His Primitive Christianity was based on the
Apostolical Constitutions, an ancient writing which Whiston believed to have
been published in the late first century, but was actually a late compilation
of various Eastern Church fathers in ca. 340-380. But , heretic or no,
Whiston was a man of integrity, and he believed that he had rediscovered a
"primitive" Unitarian Christianity predating the Council of Nicea in 325 and
the "corruption" of Roman Catholic Christianity. From 1710 until the 1740s
he remained virtually poor and lived off a small income from a little farm
near Newmarket together with his lecture fees. He lectured mostly in the
coffee-houses of London and sometimes conducted scientific experiments
which astounding his audience, much as Joseph Priestley and Michael
Faraday would do later. While he never solved the problem of longitude, he
did complete a famous translation of Josephus used until the late twentieth
century.
While William Whiston remained a believer in supernaturalism and
the inspiration of the Bible, he was definitely heretical about the Trinity and
remained either a Semi-Arian or Socinian until his death. However, in 1747,
after much deliberation, he left the Anglican Church and was baptized by
James Foster into the Baptist fold. It remains a lively historical question
whether the Baptists gained or lost with his endorsement of "believer's
baptism" since neither Whiston nor Foster represented the Trinitarian
commitments of the early Baptist confessions in the seventeenth century.55
The larger background of the Salters' Hall controversy involves
matters which cannot be entered into here like the struggle of the Anglican
High Church officials and the Tory party against the various Non-
47
Conformists and the Whigs. Controversies were at once economic, political,
social and theological and it would be difficult to do justice to all the
significant developments in the historical background of the era of
Toleration after 1689 until the time of the Hanoverian dynasty of George II
in 1727.56 Selbie, discussing the decline and compromising lethargy of the
Non-Conformists in the early eighteenth century, asserts that coming of a
new wave of Socinianism and Unitarianism contributed to low spiritual ebb
of the time. His account leaves out much that was covered above, but he
does explore the immediate factors leading into Salters' Hall and provides
the essential details about it. He writes as follows:
But there was yet another cause which contributed to the same result. In 1712
one Thomas Emlyn, a minister in Dublin, wrote a book confessing a very mild
type of Unitarianism. He was prosecuted, fined a thousand pounds, and impris-
oned till the fine should be paid. The case excited some attention and was the be-
ginning of the renewal of the Unitarian controversy. The trouble began in Exeter,
where one James Pierce, a man of great ability and influence, with two or three
other Presbyterian ministers, was suspected of Arianism. After discussions in the
Assembly of Devon and Cornwall, the matter was referred to seven ministers,
who, on the advice of some of their brethren in London, drew up a kind of ultima-
tum for the direction of the managers of the Exeter churches. Meanwhile the ques-
tion was being discussed in London. A meeting of the general body of Dissenters
was held in Salter's Hall, at which it appeared that there were many London mini-
sters who were in sympathy with the Exeter heretics. When at a further meeting,
an attempt was made to obtain the assent of those present to a declaration of belief
belief in Doctrines of the Trinity and Divinity of our Lord, the company at once
divided into subscribers and non-subscribers. Each then constituted their own
48
assembly, the large majority of the nonsubscribers being Presbyterians, while
the subscribing assembly consisted mainly of Congregationalists and Baptists under the leadership of Thomas Bradbury. This division marked a real
doctrin-al rupture between Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The non-
subscribers repudiated Arianism, but many of them later became Unitarians and were the founders of the Unitarian denomination, while eighteen or twenty of them,
un-der some curious process of reaction, signed the Thirty-Nine Articles and
joined the Church of England.57
It is not really an exaggeration to state that the Salters' Hall
controversy severely affected Baptists and other dissenting (evangelical)
groups for the next seventy-five years. Indeed, in the larger context of
modern British and American Unitarianism, it was one the historic
milestones of the last three centuries. From the writer's view, the total effect
has been negative and devastating in many quarters of the Christian world,
a preview of the disastrous things to come such as French and British
Deism, Darwinian Evolution, the Higher Criticism of the Bible, and modern
Skeptical Atheism. But for the Baptists (as with other evangelical Christians
such as the Congregationalists and Presbyterians), the remainder of the
eighteenth century and even much of the later nineteenth century proved to
be a theological challenge, and the passion for the historic Gospel and
evangelical missions would require several mighty revivals of God and
selfless defense and propagation of Christianity by many faithful soldiers of
Christ. But it was a fight both within and without the institutional churches
thereafter and even in the contemporary times we are still struggling
against the same forces of humanistic rationalism and unbelief disguised as
"religious philosophy".
49
Immediately after the Subscription controversy, the General Baptists
were internally divided and many Baptists were eventually lost to
Unitarianism. James Foster, for example, became a Congregationalist with
growing Unitarian sentiments. In 1735-7 he had previously noted
controversy with a Rev. Henry Stebbing, in which he asserted essentially
that differing opinions on the Trinity and Christology were "innocent".
Finally, Foster found life too hot among the few believing General Baptists
and went over to the Independents (Congregationalists), becoming in 1744
the pastor of the Independent Church at Pinner's Hall. And while Foster
denounced Deism and "infidelity", he had left Biblical and Baptist
confession far behind. The same was true of William Whiston. The "Happy
Union" of the Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians which had
seemed so promising in 1690 and the beginning of the eighteenth century
was a thing of the past and these churches were divided both externally
from each other and internally among themselves on the issues of the
Trinity, subscription, and the growing Calvinism-Arminianism debate.58 What
some saw as an issue of Christian liberty was at its heart an issue about
Biblical revelation and the Triune God. Yet, the two issues of required
subscription to creeds and the matter of orthodox belief were awkwardly
entangled and the distinctions did not become clear to many people until the
formal emergence of the Unitarian denomination toward the end of the
century. But at Salters Hall, the results were prophetic: out of about 150
ministers and other Christian leaders, there were 73 non-Subscribers of
which 47 were Presbyterians, 14 were General Baptists, 2 were Particular
Baptists and 10 were Congregationalists. By contrast, there were 78
50
Subscribers of which 29 were Presbyterians, 15 Baptists, 28
Congregationalists, and 6 who could either be Independent
(Congregationalist) or Presbyterian. About these, Professor John Y. Briggs of
Regents Park College, Oxford, comments : " The orthodoxy of the 78 is clear,
but not all of the 73 were necessarily heterodox. "59 And, Professor Briggs
adds some additional provocative words:
. . . General Baptists suffered a division between the General Association who
roughly corresponded to those General Baptists who had a Lollard origin, who liv-
ed in the inland counties of Buckinghamshire, Northhamsphire, and Cambridge-
shire, who remained orthodox, and those churches in Kent and Sussex particularly,
most influenced by the Dutch Mennonites, who, under the leadership of one Mat-
thew Caffyn, adopted the heterodox Christology of Melchoir Hoffman which de
facto denied the reality of the Incarnation. These were the churches that first adopt-
ed Arianism and then full-blooded Unitarianism, thus to be lost to the Baptist cause.
Indeed when Methodism came to offer a more attractive Evangelical Arminianism,
many ministers and members transferred their affections, and many General Baptist
congregations simply died out. The record is of preachers traveling to appointments
to find zero congregations with the consequence that General Baptist congregations
began to issue prohibitions to their members attending Methodist meetings. 60
W.B. Selbie furthermore observes that already in the early eighteenth
century the skeptical, rationalistic spirit of Deism had been felt in Non-
Conformist pulpits and had contributed to the spiritual barrenness of many
of England's churches. He tersely comments: " The older Independent
theologians had written and spoken more as prophets than as philosophers.
They were entrusted with a word from the Lord and they gave utterance to it
in no uncertain grounds. But in the period we have now reached preachers
51
attempted to argue for its acceptance on philosophical grounds. "61 Even
those among the fervent believers were to a degree affected by this
rationalism. Noteworthy examples here were Philip Doddridge (1702-1751)
and Isaac Watts (1674-1748), theological writers and composers of
hymnody. Doddridge, a minister among the Congationalists, was the author
of many famous evangelical hymns and the author of The Rise and Progress
of Religion in the Soul, was also a noted tutor and lecturer on theological
subjects. Many of his comprehensive essays and theological lectures were
published after his death and reveal a true Christian piety but at the same
time scattered elements of Arminianism and Socinianism.62 Unlike
Doddridge, Isaac Watts, is reckoned to be "the father of English hymnody"
and together with Charles Wesley (1707-1788) supplied many of the
powerful evangelical hymns of the English Evangelical Revival from 1730-
1756. Yet, like Doddridge, Watts suffered from a rationalistic element in his
dissent and was suspicious of the new "enthusiastic" revivalism and the
newly emerging Methodism of the Wesleys. Unlike Doddridge, Watts was a
more thorough-going Calvinist, but while not in any respect an Arian, he was
theologically aberrant in some of his Christological speculations and infected
with the rationalism of his age.63 And, in the two generations after Salters'
Hall, the General Baptists were affected both by the intellectual theological
speculation and even popular hymnody in subtle ways. Thus, despite the fact
that between 1720 and 1740 there was a deadness on the surface of the
church life of English Non-Conformists and a lethargic spirit of
"indifferentism" to Christian doctrine, the hidden viral infection of anti-
Trinitarianism was incessantly at work, and this stage was merely a dormant
52
period between the controversial Arianism of 1720 and the later full-blown
Unitarianism.64
The writer of this article cannot agree with W.B. Selbie and others
(e.g., H.J. MacLachlan, Roger Thomas, Roland N. Stromberg, et al.) that the
decline of creedalism, subscription to theological confessions, was such a
good thing. For if one looks at the controversy just among the Baptists going
back to its roots with the doctrinal conflict between Matthew Caffyn and
those like the rustically educated Thomas Monk of Bierton (and Aylesbury)
and Messenger Joseph Wright of Maidstone, it is clear that the essentials of
Christianity were on the line. The son of Thomas Monk (Thomas Monk,
Jr. ?) prophetically commented on an encyclical letter issued by the General
Baptist Association in 1699: " In vain it is for you to separate from such as
err about the subjects and manner of baptism; if at the same time, you
maintain communion with heretics and idolaters; as those must needs be
who deny the Deity of the Son of God, and the immensity and omnipresence
of the Divine Essence. "65 But as stated the previous paragraph, this
indifferentism affected the mass of Non-conformists and in light of later
developments can be seen to have undermined the foundations of the
General Baptist churches in southern and southeastern England as well as
their fledgling Christian educational efforts in their academies.66 Professor
Leon McBeth soberly observed that the General Baptists chose
denominational unity at the expense of doctrinal agreement and that in time
liberalism gained the ascendancy in that body in the later eighteenth
century.67 He further bitterly laments:
. . . Not many General Baptists were left who remember the old doctrines of
53
the full humanity and the full deity of Christ and the vicarious atonement of the
cross. Thus was laid the basis for the New Connection schism a generation later.
According to W.T. Whitley, this debilitating controversy "destroyed the chance
of General Baptists exerting any influence, and when in 1731 the two rival As-
semblies did unite, . . . their attention was drawn too much to the past in which
they forgot its finest ideals, which to the new needs of the new age, they proved
blind. "68
Then has been strongly emphasized by this writer's instructor (Dr.
McMullen) for most of the remaining eighteenth century General Baptists
focused on minor issues and moralistic trivialities rather than core issues of
the Gospel. Thus, as it has been satyrically noted: " They debated whether
Christians could sing as part of worship, and if so whether standing or
sitting; they condemned fox hunting, a sport of the wealthy which few if any
of their members could participate; they repeatedly condemned marriage
outside the faith; and published weighty tomes on whether to eat blood. "69
Meanwhile, their pastors grew old, preaching and theology languished, and
congregations losing a purpose for evangelism grew more worldly and more
and more spiritually attune with the Enlightenment Age and less and less
with ancient New Testament message.
Two outstanding Baptists preachers and theologians must be
acknowledged in this period of the latter eighteenth century and in the
opening decades of the nineteenth century. For they represent on the one
hand what became of the genuinely evangelical General Baptist movement,
and on the other hand, what a catastrophic spiritual metamorphosis - indeed
a fall from Divine grace and truth - occurred with Socinian and liberal
majority of the English General Baptists. In the first case, the writer is
54
referring to Daniel Taylor (1738-1816) and the "New Connection" movement
which he initiated among the more Arminian Baptists. This subject will
complete this rather lengthy third section of this study. For the last part of
the paper, William Vidler (1758-1816) and his work will be examined. For it
was primarily Vidler's leadership after the deaths of William Whiston and
James Foster which shepherded such a large part of the General Baptist fold
into unabashed and full-bodied Unitarianism in the nineteenth century,
contributed to the "Downgrade Controversy" in the latter part of it, and
issued in the contemporary modernistic Unitarian-Universalism. Also in the
last and concluding part of our paper we shall briefly survey the heretical
theological additive of British and American "universalism" with provided
nineteenth century Unitarianism (i.e., Liberalism) with its ultimate lure and
weapon to damn human souls.
So, enters the life and work of Daniel Taylor. Baptists (and other Bible
Christians too !) believe that God works in wonderful and ironic ways in
history. One of those wonderful "coincidences" was the spiritual awakening
in Great Britain brought on by the preaching of the Methodists John and
Charles Wesley and, perhaps even more from the Calvinistic perspective, the
preaching of George Whitefield. It was indeed from contact with the
Wesleyan-Methodist revival in England that young Dan Taylor came to know
his Lord about 1753. A few years later, ca. 1761, Taylor began to preach
among the Leicester Evangelicals; then in 1762, after reading the elder Dr.
Robert Hall's History of Infant Baptism, he was led to embrace for himself
"believer's baptism". Then, in 1763, he and a pastor friend, John Slater, after
a long and strenuous search, met with Reverend Gilbert Boyce, a
55
Lincolnshire General Baptist, and received baptism by immersion in a river
near Gamston, Nottinghamshire. It should also be recalled that Daniel
Taylor had been born in Northowwram, near Halifax and as a youth had
worked with his father in the mines. Then, as a teenager he had walked
miles through the moors at Haworth to hear the preaching of the Wesleys,
George Whitefield, and the lesser known William Grimshaw. He had also
been largely self-educated, teaching himself Greek, Hebrew, and Latin,
while working in the mines. He was an extraordinary young man with an
intense devotion to Jesus Christ and to the propagation of the Gospel of
salvation for sinners.70
Taylor, with the help of friends and the Gamston Baptists formed a
little congregation and built a little Baptist Chapel called Birchcliff where
Reverend Taylor himself was ordained on July 30, 1763. Soon, Taylor and
his church sought affiliation with the Lincolnshire Evangelicals, but their
lack of fervent worship and interest in dynamic evangelism left him cold (the
influence of Socinianism and, perhaps, hyper-Calvinism as well ?). For a time
he longed for his fellows among the Leicestershire Evangelicals, but then
when that group refused to join with the Lincolnshire Association, Dan
Taylor met with a handful of like-minded ministers in Whitechapel, London
to form what was then called " The New Connection of General Baptists. "
Strangely enough, even after forming this group, he continued to attend the
annual sessions of the "old" General Baptists, even chairing some of their
committees until 1803 when Socinian Universalist William Vidler was
brought into their fellowship. At this point, Taylor could endure the
compromise and heresy no longer. Baptists scholars speculate about why he
56
did this, but A.C. Underwood has suggested that it was due to his wanting to
use his influence to bring back erring churches into the Assembly, and
ultimately, to the New Connection.71 Under the Scriptural and fervent
leadership of Taylor, the New Connection grew steadily in disciples and
mightily in spiritual influence in the turn of the new century. Leon McBeth
and A.C. Underwood both indicate that the New Connection began in 1770
with 7/8 churches and less than 1,000 members. Yet, from the official
Minutes of the Association of General Baptists at Leicester, 1786 we already
hear of at least 31 churches and 2,357 members.72 Then, according to A.C.
Underwood, by 1817 (the year after Daniel Taylor's death), the New
Connexion could claim 6,846 members in more than 70 churches. 73
Taylor was no conformist to tradition, but he was wholeheartedly loyal
to the Divine inspiration of Scripture and the Divinity and Lordship of Jesus
Christ. It is not surprising either, that opposition to his New Connection
emphases came from Lincolnshire leaders and others (especially in London)
which lacked his vision and zeal, but more importantly, were seriously
infected with Arianism and Socinianism. Neither is it a coincidence that
those who minimized the centrality of Christ's vicarious atonement for
sinners would find it difficult to tolerate a fiery evangelical such as a Taylor
or his followers. McBeth underscores that he came into greater and greater
conflict with older General Baptists as he not only embraced a fully orthodox
Christology but also abandoned many "traditions": the laying on of hands on
new believers ready for membership, the lack of congregational singing
(especially women) in worship, and a non-interest in evangelism. Thus the
stage was set for the confrontations with the "Unitarian" baptists of the
57
early nineteenth century, and for the later nineteenth developments which
would provide opportunity for John Clifford (1816-1923) and his ecumenical
efforts leading to the 1891 merger of the New Connection into the Baptist
Union which Charles H. Spurgeon would oppose. But that is another story . .
. .74
IV. Unitarianism & Universalism Among British Baptists, ca.
1725--1820.
In this final section the writer wishes to briefly summarize the
highlights of the Unitarianism which grew out of the Socinian advances at
Salters' Hall in 1719 and afterwards with the coming of William Vidler in
1803 to the General Assembly with a even briefer sketch of the overall
consequences for the English General Baptists until ca. 1820. This kind of
conclusion is tentative as one's mind naturally then interpolates from
1818/1820 until the "Downgrade Controversy" of the latter nineteenth
century and beyond. Yet, in an effort to limit the size of this paper (already
too large!), the writer shall only focus on the key historical and theological
milestones of the subject until 1820 and add some lose final remarks as to
how Socinianism/Unitarianism affected the General Baptists of England
thereafter in the century.
Universalism was the new component in William Vidler's theological
teaching in the early 1800s, but it was not originally a part of even the
Socinian General Baptists before the late eighteenth century. Roughly
58
speaking, it appears to have its roots in in Wales and in Colonial America
previous to its formal arrival among the General Baptist Assembly in 1803.
James Relly (1722-1788) was converted as a young man under the
preaching of John Wesley and George Whitefield, caught up in the revival
sweeping over wide areas of Great Britain in the mid-eighteenth century.
Together with his greater (and much more orthodox) mentor, Wesley, Relly
was early on inclined to Arminianism. Later, he would move beyond
evangelical Arminianism to the Universalist heresy. His influence then would
convert the reluctant John Murray (1741-1815) and effectually influence the
teaching of the Americans, Elhanan Winchester (1751-1797) and Hosea
Ballou (1771-1852) who would strongly affect the path of Unitarian-
Universalism in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Relly was born in Saunderfoot, an English-speaking area of
Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales, educated at the local grammar school
and as a young man employed as " a cow-farrier. " About 1740 he was
converted under the preaching of George Whitefield (for whom he would
have a life-long admiration) and became an ardent Calvinist Methodist
preacher in the areas of Rhyddlangwraig, Narbeth, and Pembrokeshire in
the early 1740s. Then, after 1746, he made evangelistic tours through the
West and Midlands of England (including Bristol, Portsmouth, Exeter, Bath,
Bromsgrove, Birmingham, and Tewkesbury). Like many other evangelists
Relly faced significant persecution and hostile opposition, but what made
Relly receive rebuke from even the Methodists was his new doctrine of
"universal salvation." Responding to this new heresy, Whitefield's lieutenant
(supervisor) in charge, Howel Harris, dismissed Relly at the peak of his
59
career in 1746 while he was evangelizing at the London Tabernacle in
Moorfields. Then, in 1751, Relly returned to Wales where he created an even
more serious disruption " respecting Freeness, and the extent of Grace. "
Although Relly himself avowed that as an evangelist he was not promoting a
universalist message, few others doubted it. The logic was simple and
beautiful (if one is not bothered by thorny Biblical details here or there):
" . . . if all had sinned in Adam, then all were saved in Christ. "75 Then,
throughout the later 1750s and 1760s, Relly preached his new Gospel also in
Ireland.
Relly's most important theological treatise (which would mold Vidler's
thinking) was his book Union: or a treatise of consanguinity and affinity
between Christ and his Church (London, 1759). He also wrote a universalist
hymnal and several lesser popular tracts on the nature of salvation, the
nature of "Spirits", the anti-Christ, the life of Christ, Christian baptism,
Sadduceeism (legalism), Christian liberty, and angels (1753-1780). One of
his most famous writings was a poem which was dedicated to Whitefield, an
elegy, written in 1770, following the great evangelist's death. Relly himself
died in 1778 and was buried in the Maze Pond Baptist Burial Ground in
Southwark, London, but the tiny congregation he established at Windmill
Street survived until the 1820s. Then, for a few decades there some small
and highly eccentric Rellyean Universalist societies in Dorset and Wiltshire
as well as Plymouth.76
Perhaps Relly's greatest impact on both Baptists and on the
Unitarians in America came as a result of his preaching to the congregation
at Coachmaker's Hall (Addle Street) in London from 1757-1764. There,
60
according to the words of John Murray's autobiography, Relly was was
drawing the wrath of his former Wesleyean and Methodist colleagues,
because he was, according to the citation of James Hill, " a man black with
crimes; an atrocious offender, both in principle and practice. "77 It was when
Relly was preaching here, that young John Murray was captured by the
appealing presentation of a pretty young woman who was one of Relly's
disciples, who according to Unitarian legend, confounded him with her
theological insight and logical acumen.78 In reading the actual account,
however, one is more inclined to think of a lonely college student or
seminarian confronted by the seductive inticements of a gorgeous Jehovah's
Witness or a Unitarian wench in a secluded chapel. The logic consists purely
in the equivocation of terms about faith and failure to observe the forensic
character of the Biblical presentation of Christ's death on behalf of sinful
man.
But now let the reader turn his attention briefly to John Murray
himself, who would soon leave the sorrows of old England and go to new
circumstances in America in 1770. The encyclopedias and handbooks
provide little in the way of Murray's early biography, but that he was born
somewhere near London in 1741 is certain. We do know that he was
converted in his youth by the preaching of the Methodists and that he was
trained in Anglican Calvinism. We also know from his autobiography that as
a brash young preacher he was taken in by the witness of a female
universalist ca. 1760. From his on account we also know that in 1769-1770
as he turned toward America, he had faced a series of personal tragedies,
including an arrest for debt and the loss of his wife and son. This made his
61
voyage desirable, but his coming to America was not itself without
tribulation. An Alantic storm forced his boat to make an unplanned landing
at Good-Luck Point on the coast of New Jersey. While there he happened
upon a group of congregational people and also a sympathetic audience of
baptist Quakers, especially Thomas Potter, who already had Universalist
sympathies from contact with some extreme dissenting Baptist sects in
Rhode Island.79 The events of their meeting and Murray's first sermon at the
Potter meeting-house has all the ear-marks of a "just so" story or sectarian
hagiography, but it is historically certain that John Murray preached there
on September 30, 1770 and this event marks perhaps the earliest conscious
efforts to promote Universalism in America.80
From this time onward until his death in 1815, Murray became one of
the leading itinerant evangelists of Universalism in New England as well as
New Jersey and New York, becoming for several years the pastor of the first
universalist church in America at Gloucester, Massachusetts (The
Independent Church of Christ, 1779). His work was significant enough that
General George Washington appointed him as chaplain for the Continential
troops of Rhode Island. Eventually, he was called to the pastorate of the
Universalist Society of Boston in 1793. Toward the end of his life, Murray's
journals and sermons were collected by his wife, Mrs. Judith Sargent Murray
and published by the Universalist Society.81 During his career, Murray
preached to some Baptist groups in America, and his ideas found a
harmonious chord among many of the General Baptists cum Unitarians who
followed William Vidler.82
62
The last link to William Vidler and the ultimate demise of the General
Baptists of Britain was the American minister Elhanan Winchester, Jr. (1751-
1797). Winchester was the sixth generation descendent of Sir Henry Vane,
the fourth Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And like his father,
the elder Elhanan, the son had been a member of the Congregational
Church of Christ at Brookline, a liberal Calvinist body. The father himself,
however, had made a spiritual journey through many religious commitments,
from Separatist to Baptist, and even to Shaker (in Mother Ann Lee's
community in Harvard). The father had also been affected by the enthusiasm
of the Great Awakening in the 1740s. The son was a chip off the old block
and he was a child prodigy, largely self-taught, but a brilliant, inquistive
serious youth. When he was about nineteen years old, he was converted
under the ministry of a Joseph Jackson, a moderate evangelical Calvinist.
Afterwards, his denominational experience resembled his father's, and after
being for a time a Separatist (Puritan) type, he accepted the Baptist
teaching, and soon began to preach. Incidentally, one should mention that
though he only lived to be forty-six years old, he was married five times and
all of his unions were less than happy.83
Since Winchester through William Vidler had such a powerful effect
on the mature formation of both the American and British Unitarian-
Universalists and a definite connection to the General Baptists, his life shall
be examined in some level of detail. Elhanan began to preach almost
immediately after his conversion and about the same time (1769-1770), he
married his first wife, Alice Rogers of Rowley, Massachusetts. Together they
set out for his first pastorate in Virginia, where for a few years he was a
63
successful Baptist preacher, holding to a moderate Calvinistic theological
viewpoint. Also, during this early period (ca. 1772-1773), Winchester
embraced the convictions of the open communion Baptists, and was himself
baptized by immersion in Canturbury, Connecticutt. Through these years, he
and his wife had four children, but either personal or religious quarrels
strained their marital bliss. Also sometime in this early period he returned to
Massachusetts, where he established a new Baptist church at Rehoboth and
during the same time became friends with Ezra Stiles, the President of Yale
College (who came to characterize him as " a loquacious and flaming
preacher "). He was also, for a short time devoted to the Particular Calvinist
Baptists and an avid reader of the London theologian, John Gill. During this
time he dismissed evangelism and appeals to the lost as foolish and
irreverent activities; this attitude, of course, prevented the New England
Baptists from ordaining Winchester as a Baptist evangelist. Then within two
years (1774-1776) he went from Rehoboth to Bellingham, then from there to
Grafton, and then to Hull, Massachusetts.84
In late 1774, Winchester was called to be the minister at the
Particular Baptist Church in a small town on the Pec Pec River in South
Carolina, where his first wife, Alice, died. He was only there for a few
months before returning to Boston, where he married his second wife, Sarah
Peck (from Rehoboth) in 1776. Then he went back for a couple of years to
his former church in Carolina where he began a practice of evangelizing the
Black slaves, something which was suspect in that culture. Winchester
himself, had strong convictions about the evils of slavery and he relentlessly
attacked the institution. His second wife, Sarah, died in 1778. Soon after,
64
Winchester married a third time, attracting a local lady, Sarah Luke.
Strangely, Sarah herself lived for less than a year (?). During this period
(until 1781) Winchester was caught up in the American Revolution, and was
an energetic supporter of political and religious freedom, even publishing on
behalf of the Charlestown Baptist Association a bold manifesto for religious
liberty in 1779. Then, in the same year, he returned to Boston, where he
preached under the auspices of Dr. Reverend Stillman and in his home
church of Brookline. At this time he even made a positive impression on
Isaac Backus, the great New England Baptist evangelist and recorder who is
said to have highly praised his efforts. Eventually, the Baptist Church of
Philadelphia called Winchester as their minister in 1780. Though his work
there was brief, due to his growing public pronouncements on universalism,
he did not terminate his work at the First Baptist Church until 1781.85
It was from his reading during these years of the works of a Robert
Stonehouse (an American follower of Murray ?) and even more importantly,
the works of Paul Siegvolck (pseudonym for George Klein-Nicholai), an
Eastern European Socinian and universalist, that the imminent Winchester
was finally won to the universalist heresy. Things came to a head in
Philadelphia in 1781 when Winchester's preaching and teaching had led to
his dismissal from the First Baptist congregation. Then, incidentally,
Winchester married a fourth time to Mary Morgan (what became of Sarah
Luke ?). After being expelled from the Baptists, he held services in the hall
of the University of Philadelphia until 1784, and then his congregation built
a new meeting house on Lombard Street. During the next few years he met
John Murray, the British Universalist, now pastor at Gloucester,
65
Massachusetts. Then, in 1785, Winchester, having completely renounced his
Calvinism and his evangelical Baptist heritage, supervised the establishment
of the first Universalist Meeting House for the Society of Universal Baptists
in Philadelphia. He also attended the first convention of Universalists in
Oxford, Massachusetts in the same year where he met Hosea Ballou, whose
work is mentioned in the footnotes.86 Winchester's influence was such at this
time that he received immense praise from Unitarians such as Drs. Benjamin
Rush and Richard Price, noteworthy ex-Congregationalists. Furthermore, by
1788, Winchester had published his famous (or infamous) treatise, The
Universal Restoration: Exhibited in a Series of Dialogues (London, 1778).
Winchester continued his preaching and lectures in Philadelphia from
1784-1787, and then he traveled to England, according to his own reliable
testimony, to where God had called him. Curiously, he lost his fourth wife,
Mary Morgan, somewhere along the way and, arrived in Liverpool with his
latest (fifth) wife, Mary Knowles, whom is reported to have been his most
miserable and tragic alliance. Here it is too that our journeyman universalist
apostle met William Vidler, a General Baptist pastor, and convinced this
younger man that God had given him a message to deliver there.87
Winchester preached first before the Universalist Society in Liverpool in
1787 and then occasionally in the General Baptist churches in Blackfields
and Moorfields, but after a short time these congregations were alerted to
his universalist doctrine and closed their doors to him. Even at this late time,
not all General Baptists, even Socinizing ones, had given up the traditional
understanding of Christ's atoning death and the reality of God's wrath on the
unsaved. Naturally, the Particular Calvinist Baptists scorned and denounced
66
both Winchester and Vidler for their views. However, Joshua Toulmin, a
Unitarian pastor of some fame, invited Elhanan Winchester to preach in the
Chapel in Southwark on Worship Street ; and so he preached there and in
any nearby hall where people would listen to his message. Soon, he also
proceeded to London and established there a congregation which became
quite large (400-500) and had to move to new quarters, becoming
Parliament Court Chapel on Artillery Lane in Bishopgate.88 One should note
in passing that Winchester not only had influence among the heretical
General Baptists who would became Unitarians, he made significant
contacts with other famous Unitarians such as Joseph Priestley, who
preached at the Gravel Pit Church in Hackney and who later immigrated to
Philadelphia in America to spread the message of "evangelical
Unitarianism" (something of a theological oxymoron, one thinks). Winchester
also was strongly supported by Dr. Richard Price, a famous British
intellectual ex-Presbyterian who ministered at both Newington Green and
the Gravel Pit churches as well as being instrumental in helping establish
two dissenting Academies, the most importment being at Warringon, which
led to the foundation of Manchester New College at Oxford. Winchester by
his connection to Price, became more intimate with George Washington,
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Such connections
helped to establish his fame and win sympathy to his cause which
undoubtably impressed many wavering British and American Baptists, who
might have otherwise been alarmed at his Universalism and eventual
Unitarianism. But that much of spirit of Universalism was self-serving praise
67
and humanistic rationalism is clear from the words of a contemporary
Bostonian admirer of Winchester :
It is important at this juncture to recognize what was so frightening about
the Gospel as understood by the Universalists. Why did so many more ortho-
dox bodies and believers go to such extremes to condemn Universalists, urge
the boycott of universalist persons and businesses, to flee from their theology
as from the devil ? [?!!, N.B.] Orthodoxy, particularly in its narrower Calvin-
ist forms, declared that those who did not believe in " an eternity of hell tor-
ments " for sinners had no reason to seek virture and avoid evil. They had no
no motivation to act justly, honorably, honestly. They could not be trusted in
any office or appointment. Since they had no motivation for rectitude they
should be excluded from all public trust and public life. Indeed it was but a
short step to seeing them as minions of the devil, Satan’s own troops, malig-
nant, dissipate, capable of every form of viciousness and dishonesty. It was
not easy to be a professed universalist. The American Universalist movement
generally responded with great good humor - how else could they embody the Gospel of Eternal Love and not fall into bitterness ? They loved to
speak of the Calvinist's "Glad Tidings of Endless Damnation." Calvinism was
the ultimate blasphemy against God to Universalists, with its God of double
pre-destination and eternal vengeance. This was not Jesus' Gospel, they
declared, and it was not theirs ! 88
Much of the paragraph above is trumphed up resentment and self-
serving balderdash, weak in both philosophical logic and theological self-
consistency. But chiefly, it ignores that fact that it was Jesus Christ himself
in the Gospels, speaking to his intimate group of disciples and his enemies
among the unbelieving Jews (e.g. the Pharisees and Sadducees), who spoke
more than 80 % of what the New Testament teaches on hell. He clearly
68
warned many people that they were in danger of it. The Apostle Paul in
Romans and his other Epistles merely connected the danger of eternal
damnation to Adam's original sin. But Unitarian-Universalists have always
ignored careful exegesis of these majority texts and focused on rather
slanted and rationalistic interpretations of obscure passages out of context.
So, the "God" of Robert Relly, John Murray, Elhanan Winchester, and
William Vidler tends to be mild-mannered deity of limited holiness and
mushy compassion without much way of either glory or righteousness. He is
certainly not the God of the Bible, the holy Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and God whom the original Baptists trusted in.
But now, it is necessary to hurry to see the role of Winchester on
William Vidler and how this set the stage for the first half of the nineteenth
century for orthodox Baptists (like the New Connection of Daniel Taylor and
the Particular Baptists represented by Robert Hall and Charles Spurgeon)
and their conflict with those who really had ceased to be true Baptists and
became full-bodies Unitarians. For by 1803, at the latest, most of the Old
General Baptist body had been totally metastasized by the cancer of
Socinianism, and with the new element of the Universalist heresy, the
spiritual transformation into the Unitarian-Universalist "Association" was
tragically completed.
Who was William Vidler? According to the Dictionary of Unitarian &
Universalist Biography which is found on the main British Unitarian-
Universalist website, " William Vidler (1758-1816), a British Universalist and
Unitarian preacher and publisher, was a disciple and colleague of Elhanan
Winchester. Together with Unitarian missionary Richard Wright, Vidler
69
played a significant role in establishing institutional features British
Unitarians continue to use."90
Vidler was born at Battle in Sussex, in southern England, inland from
Hastings, the youngest of ten children. His father, John Vidler, was a
stonemason, and from a young age the lad was apprenticed to him in the
trade despite the fact that he was somewhat weakly and asthmatic. William
Vidler, like some other dissenters of the eighteenth century, was a self-
educated and studious young person. In 1776, when William was eighteen
years old, he heard George Gilbert preach a revival at Battle and he was
challenged to accept Christ and be converted. After this, the young Vidler
joined an independent Calvinist Church which was newly organized. Within
the next year, he himself began preaching to others. Around 1780, he
William became convinced of believer's baptism and was immersed in a
nearby river by Thomas Purdy, a Baptist minister at Rye. Because they were
impressed by his sincerity and zeal, the Battle church re-organized as a
Particular Baptist Church and called Vidler as their minister. Although
untrained at college or seminary, the young Vidler had taught himself to be
fluent in both Greek and Latin, and he had read much in the literature of the
Dissenters. During the time that Vidler pastored at Battle, he continued his
trade as a stonemason; nevertheless, the membership increased from 15 to
150 in a few years. Needing more space the congregation bought and pulled
down a decrepit Presbyterian chapel and erected a new building which left
them with a significant debt for the time, L 160.91
From 1791 until 1794 Vidler traveled afield to collect funds to help
pay off his congregation's debt. It was either before or perhaps during this
70
time that he began to solemnly ponder over " serious thoughts of the
Godhead of Christ and the eternity of hell torments." Probably, he had begun
to consider these issues as early as 1784, but his initial doubts about the
orthodox doctrines grew conscious and strong after he read Winchester's
Dialogues on The Universal Restoration, published in 1788. And even though
he had a friendly encounter with Andrew Fuller at Northampton when he
attended the Baptist Missionary Society conference there, he was not
entirely enthralled with the latter's moderate Calvinism. But over a period of
weeks or months, Fuller lost patience with Vidler because of his hastily
growing radical views on theology. Furthermore, as Vidler made his journey
through Lincolnshire, he encounted followers of Elhanan Winchester among
the General Baptists in Fleet and Luton. So, by the time he made his first
circuit back to the Battle Church, he was thoroughly convinced of the
universal restoration of all humankind to God. Thus he wrote in his journal
for August 22, 1792: “ It is long since I wrote anything of the state of my
soul . . . . I have lately been much stirred up again by reading R. Winchester
on the final restoration of all things, which doctrine . . . I am constrained to
say I believe. " 92
During 1792-1794 Vidler strengthed his theological and personal ties
with Winchester. Previously, he had preached many times for Winchester at
Parliament Court Church, and in 1794 he actually became Winchester's
assistant at this Universalist Chapel in Artillery Lane, London. (In the latter
nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth the Parliament Court
became Sandys Row Synagogue). In 1795 Winchester decided to return to
America, and Vidler became his chosen successor there. His influential
71
ministry at Parliament Court Chapel was to last twenty years and it would
carry the congregation there as well as several other General Baptists, into
the Unitarian fold.93 Working with John Teulon, Vidler also opened a London
book shop in the Stand in 1796, where he distributed Universalist literature.
The two friends also cooperated from 1797 onward to publish a periodical,
The Universalists' Miscellany, which became an important turning point for
the later Unitarian missionary, Richard Wright (1764-1836). Wright had
been a pastor for the ancient General Baptist Church at Wisbech, and
Vidler's publications led Wright to embrace the universalist message.
Conversely, Wright's friendship with Vidler moved the latter in the direction
of Unitarianism.
This new development divided the Parliament Court congregation
and by 1801-1803, the majority had embraced Unitarian-Universalism. It
was the trauma of this unresolved division was extended to the General
Baptist Assembly which the Parliament Court congregation formally joined
in 1803.94 Later, in 1806 both William Vidler and Richard Wright became
ardent supporters of the Unitarian Fund. As a result of these early
nineteenth century efforts British Universalists (many whom had begun as
either Baptist or Presbyterians) became absorbed and eclipsed by the British
Unitarians.95
Thus, by 1798-1800 Vidler had become an enthusiastic propagandist
of both Unitarian and Universalist doctrines, and he helped to foster in the
opening years of the nineteenth century new Unitarian-Universalist societies
in a large number of English counties and cities: Northiam, Rye, Steyning in
Sussex, Reading in Berkshire, (old) Boston, and several of the North
72
Marches of Lincolnshire. With the assistance of Richard Wright he also
founded The Unitarian Evangelical Society in 1804, as related above, the
Unitarian Fund in 1806, and wrote many Unitarian publications. From these
humble beginnings, came the amalgamation of the British and Foreign
Unitarian Association in 1825, and this prepared for the General Assembly of
the Unitarian and Free Christian Churches which was to be established in
5106L.G. Champion, " Baptist Church Life in the Twentieth Century: Some Personal Reflections, " in Clements, p. 4, cited in The Baptist Heritage, Ibid.107See McBeth, The Baptist Heritage, p. 303. A.C. Underwood in A History of The English Baptists, pp. 229-233 views this differently, as Underwood more or less sides with the sentiments of John Clifford (1836-1923). 5108The Miscellaneous Works and Remains of the Rev. Robert Hall with A Memoir of His Life. Edited by Olinthius Gregory, LL.D. and with A Critical Estimate of his Character and Writings by John Foster (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), p. 21. See also his insightful remarks on Socinians and Unitarians in his "Review of Gregory's Letters, " pp. 539-540.5
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6Written by Joseph David Rhodes for Baptist History (HT 3110) taught by Dr. Michael McMuellen, M.A., M.Div., Ph.D. (Aberdeen University). A course in the M. Divinity program taken at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in the Spring of 2003. ( This was the major term paper for the course and I
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1928. This latter organization still exists as the major Socinian/Unitarian
body in the British world today.96
Again, the ironic processes of history seemed to have transpired with
Vidler's own congregation. Having already moved from a moderate Calvinist
Baptist position to extreme Arminianism and then to Universalism and
Unitarianism, the Parliament Court Church itself eventually moved beyond
any semblance of Biblical Christianity. First, under the leadership of Vidler,
it moved to Unitarian-Universalism in the first two decades of the nineteenth
century. Then, in 1824 the Church facilities were physically relocated from
Artillery Lane to South Place Chapel, Finsbury (near present-day Liverpool
Street Station). But, more significantly, in the later part of the century what
remained of the congregation changed their affliation name to " The South
Place Ethical Society." Finally, this society relocated once more in 1927 to
Conway Hall, Red Lion Square. If spiritual symbolism has any meaning,
Vidler's church, becoming Unitarian in the beginning of the century, became
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flagrantly anti-Christian at the end of the 1800s. Another way of saying this
is that those who were once followers of the Lamb, and the Lion of Judah, in
time became followers of His adversary, " the Devil, who as a roaring lion,
walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. "97
Vidler wrote and published two tracts which were quite significant in
the literature of Unitarianism. The first is entitled, In God's Love to His
Creatures (published in London, 1799), and he taught in this book that God's
redemptive love extends even to animals (New Agers who are animal right's
advocates and radical enviromentalists love this one!). In his Letters to Mr.
Fuller on the Universal Restoration (London, 1803), Vidler recorded his side
of the controversy with the moderate Calvinists concerning universal
salvation. He also edited and published a new edition of Paul Siegvolk's
treatise, The Everlasting Gospel (1795) and his master Elhanan Winchester's
Dialogues on the Universal Restoration with a Memoir of its author (1799).
In support of his new anti-Trinitarianism, he published Nathaniel Scarlett's A
translation of the New Testament from the original Greek (1798).
It should be noted, finally that both William Vidler and Richard
Wright, who had begun their careers as General Baptist preachers of rather
humble origins, became the only official and paid Unitarian evangelists to
scour the entire country for the cause of Unitarian-Universalism. This is
especially true of Wright, who spread the New Gospel of Unitarian-
Universalism [?] from " Land's End to John o' Groats " or from the
southeastern tip of Britain to the northeastern tip of Scotland in his
evangelistic mission efforts.98
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*************
A.C. Underwood, a sensible commentator, has correctly described the
demise of the Old "General Baptists" in these terms:
. . . Thereafter [after 1803], the two General Baptists bodies followed widely di-
verging paths. The old Assembly may now drop out of our story, having virtually
Unitarian. It still meets regularly and retains its old title for legal purposes, but it
has no connexion with present-day Baptists. At various dates the churches in mem-
bership with it relinquished baptism by immersion. Thus, for example, the ancient
Baptist Church at Horsham, now called "Free Christian," has a baptistry which was
last used about 1849. For a short time admission to church-membership was effect-
ed by imposition of hands, but that rite is no longer used.99
Two other great examples of once-splendid and spiritually dynamic
General Baptist churches which died because of the infection of Socinianism
(Unitarianism) are the Barbican Church in Paul's Alley, once wealthy and
center of Baptist life and the Pinner's Hall in London. After the non-
subscription of Joseph Burroughs and James Foster at Salters' Hall in 1719,
the Barbican Church lasted only about a generation, for after some
remarkable doctrinal flucuations, it dissolved in 1768. Likewise, Pinner's
Hall, originally built by a refugee family of Calvinistic Hugenots in the reign
of Elizabeth I and refurbished and redecorated by the pious Hollis family in
the early seventeenth century - once a center for zealous and Scriptural
Baptists, became after passing into the Socinian orbit (also influenced by
Rev. Foster) weak and ineffectual. The congregation disbanded in 1778,
following the expiration of the lease.100
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Another Baptist church existed at Bermondsey from about 1733 in the
Snowfields. Originally, it had been a Methodist chapel, but in 1772 it
became an open communion church under Baptist pastor, Rev. John Hughes
(d. 1774). Yet, Rippon ceased to mention it after 1794. Then from 1796-
1800 it was led by Samuel Mansell, an Arian Baptist. It became extinct in
1814.101 There was another Baptist church in Bermondsey, built by John
Dolman at Gainsford Street, Blackfields in 1754, also an open-communion
body. It was reorganized by John Langford in 1766-1777. Then in 1778 until
1820, it became Pedobaptist under the guidance of Michael Brown.
Afterwards, it became Unitarian.102
We have already seen how under the leadership of Vidler, the Baptist
Church at Battle (originally Particular Baptist) became Unitarian, and how
from the work of Richard Wright of Wisbech that General Baptist Church
became an outpost of the same heresy. Numerous other places, Stone
Chapel, the Gravel Pit Church, the Eagle Street Church, Grafton Street
Church, and so many others were troubled by Socinianism and Unitarianism
and some that succumbed to it.103
At this point in the research of this writer there has not been time to
run down all of the historically significant General Baptist churches which
turned Socinian or Unitarian-Universalist eventually. Certainly many old
smaller General Baptist (and for that matter, Particular Baptist) churches in
England died of the "natural causes" of demographic change and simple
numerical decline from either lack of evangelical zeal, overwhelming
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secularism or both. For instance, W.T. Whitley wrote in 1928 of 856 Baptist
churches being founded in the London area since 1612, but in 1928 or
immediately thereafter there only 416 which he lists in the following
categories:
A. 228 Churches in the London Baptist Association .
B. 50 Churches in the Metropolitan Association of
Strict Baptists.
C. 27 Churches with the Gospel Standard Societies.
D. 56 Churches in the Home Counties Association.
E. 13 Churches in the Old Baptist Union.
F. 8 Churches in Essex.
G. 12 Churches in the Herts.
H. 7 Churches in Kent and Sussex.
I. 16 Isolated Churches. 104
Some of the most shocking statistics about Baptist decline have come
in the last twenty-five to thirty years. According to Leon Mc Beth, " One of
the most persistent and puzzling problems facing English Baptists in the
twentieth century has been their steady numerical decline, which since 1906
has been consistent and sometimes dramatic. "105 He also cites some
disturbing statistics which place Dr. Whitley's roster of London churches in
1928 in larger perspective:
In 1921 there were 3068 churches in the Baptist Union with a total member-
ship of 442, 000; in 1981 there were 2058 churches with a total membership of
170,000. A 57 % decline in membership. In 1921 our Sunday Schools had 518,
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000 scholars; in 1981, 157,000, a decline of 70 %106
As this paper is brought finally to a conclusion, this writer cannot help
but believe that between 1870 and 1928, something drastic happened to
both the remainder of the General Baptists and the Particular Baptists as
represented in the Baptist Union in England. Much transpired between the
emergence of full-blown Unitarian-Universalism in the early nineteenth
century and the decline of overall Baptist influence in Britain after the first
quarter of the twentieth century. At the present time, this writer's theory is
that "Downgrade Controversy" among the Baptists in the 1880s and 1890s
which was symbolically represented in the personalities of Charles H.
Spurgeon and John Clifford was linked to the earlier Socinian/Unitarian
controversies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The writer also
tends to agree with the conservative view that the seeds of the controversy
began in the 1870s when doctrinal indifference began to affect the Baptist
Union. One speculates over the effects of ideas which may have indeed had
their source among Unitarian-Universalists and Liberals which subtly
infected even the more orthodox Baptists. Charles H. Spurgeon, who
certainly was no fool and an astute observer of Baptists, charged that many
Baptist pastors in the British Baptist Union held Socinian views of Christ,
Universalistic ideas of salvation, and infidel views of the inspiration of
Scripture.107 And, again, in light of what this writer has read about the
Darwinian revolution after 1859, the rise of naturalistic and negative Biblical
criticism of the Bible from 1750-1950, and the numerous philosophical
attacks on Christianity and the Bible for the last hundred and seventy-five
years, Spurgeon looks quite visionary in his stubborness. Some of his
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rhetoric and his particular suspicions may have been wrong, but in light of
the destructive precedent of Socinianism among the Baptists in the two
centuries before, his general premises appear to be totally valid. Simply put,
when one begins to doubt matters such as the verbal inspiration of
Scripture, the doctrines of the deity and humanity of Christ, or the penal
subsitutionary atonement of our Lord, Christianity gets replaced by a new
Gospel and an anti-Christian system of thought. Jesus and His true Apostles
seemed to have predicted it long ago in sundry places in the New Testament
(Matthew 24; 2 Corinthians 11: 3-15; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12; 2 Timothy 3:1-
17; 2 Peter 3:1-18; 1 John 4:2,3; Jude 3-4; Revelation 2:1-7).
Faithful Baptists, who are first faithful Christians (as Thomas Monk,
Jr. would plead for) must make the defense of their Lord's person and work
their chief concern, even while loving the souls of those lost in modern
infidelity and cultism. One is reminded of how that illustrious champion of
Biblical Christian orthodoxy, the Reverend John Hall, Jr. (1764-1831) once
answered a Socinian well-wisher who mistook his kind remarks for the
character and integrity of Dr. Joseph Priestley as an endorsement of his
theological errors:
On one of these occasions, Mr. Hall having, in his usual terms, panegyrized
Dr. Priestley, a gentleman who held the Doctor's theological opinions, tapping
Mr. Hall upon the shoulder with an indelicate freedom from which he recoiled,
said, " Ah, sir, we shall have you among us soon, I see. " Mr. Hall, startled and
offended by the rude tone of exultation in which this was uttered, hastily re-plied, "Me amongst you, sir! Me amongst you ! Why, if that were ever the
case, I should deserve to be tied to the tail of the great red dragon, and whipped
round
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the nethermost regions [of hell] to all eternity. "108
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