The Trinity is not a mystery that demands silent assent, but rather, as Paul C. H. Lim argues in his book Mystery Unveiled, a doctrine that promotes and provokes discussion. Lim’s claim is a welcome contribution to my field of systematic theology. For theologians, doctrine tends to be assumed as normative and given, not produced in the messiness of society and politics. Furthermore, theologians prefer to think of the Trinity in terms of divine revelation as the word of God, not articulated in the struggle to understand the meaning and referent of terms. Lim’s detailed and masterful study of the public debates on the Trinity in early modern England demonstrates from historical perspective that doctrine is to be understood as the spirit of a living religious tradition. When theologians and lay people search for appropriate terminology that refers in some way to the mystery eluding linguistic grasp, when they attempt to understand a mathematical formula (1 + 1 + 1 = 3) that transcends human reason, then doctrine comes alive. History does not lead to doctrine’s absorption into culture as some theologians might think, but is the context in which it emerges.

Lim begins his account of robust Trinitarian discussion in the 1640s, a particularly exciting epoch in England’s religious history. This is a post-Reformation age anticipating the British Civil War and teeming with religious pluralism. Protestantism is committed to the Bible as an authoritative source for faith and morals, yet it is precisely the sola scriptura principle that, as Lim argues, opens up the Pandora’s box of anti-Trinitarianism. The anti-Trinitarians, also called Socinians, are Protestants who contest Nicene Trinitarianism as semantically identical with the God of the Christian Bible. They consider themselves faithful to the Bible’s literal sense, yet by applying historical and philological tools to scripture, they raise questions concerning its silence on Trinitarian matters, the historical gap between Bible and Nicene technical terms, and the doctrine’s unintelligibility. The “word” becomes a two-edged sword, though not in the usual Lutheran sense of law and gospel, but as a dual criticism of Trinitarian orthodoxy and Catholicism. As Lim thematizes in chapter 3, the anti-Trinitarian movement arises in complex relation to both Catholic and Protestant Trinitarians, who themselves try to sort out fundamental differences between a Roman Catholic doctrinal identity and a Protestant advocacy of the Trinity that simultaneously relinquishes other Catholic doctrines, such as transubstantiation.

Chapter 1 looks in detail at the two figures behind the crisis, John Biddle and Paul Best. Biddle’s case against the Trinity was discussed in the coffeehouse culture of the day and taken all the way up to the British Parliament. Lim’s argument is that the Trinity was not kept in the confines of private religious belief, but was of intense public and political interest. Chapter 2 considers a special group of Trinitarian adherents who held the belief that they were “godded with God,” to cite Lim on page 95, meaning they felt themselves to be actual members of the Trinity. This chapter’s interweaving of doctrine with pious, mystical, and spiritual sensibilities is also treated in chapter 4, while chapter 5, with the neat title “Bishops Behaving Badly?” shows how the anti-Trinitarians pointed to Acts, rather than to the early church bishops, as models for Christian life (and thereby upset the Anglican authority of the day). This chapter also provides extensive material on philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s ideas on religion. In chapter 6, Stephen Nye is mentioned in the context of a turn to patristic texts in the anti-Trinitarian effort to lift up an authentic biblical Christianity from its Platonized falsification.

The narrative is rife with intrigue and politics, heresy trials and book burnings. Nevertheless Lim’s encyclopedic prose makes reading tough going. The reader finds herself longing for verbs that would create a path through the dense forest of nouns. On page 121, the text should be corrected to read that Aquinas places the section on God (de deo uno) before, not after, the Trinity (de deo trino) in his Summa Theologicae. Perhaps the contemporary crisis of the Trinity can be alleviated by allowing Lim’s book to both challenge theological assumptions about doctrine and to inspire a conversation about how doctrine is truly related to historical and divine reality.