“Of all the controversies we can touch upon at present,” warned Edward Wettenhall, bishop of Cork and Ross in 1691, “this of the trinity is the most unreasonable, the most dangerous, and so the most unseasonable.” Adopting the style of a “melancholy stander-by,” Bishop Wettenhall watched with mounting despair as the controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity roiled the peace of the Church of England in the final decade of the seventeenth century. In the two years since the clergy of the established church had undertaken in earnest the public refutation of resurgent antitrinitarianism, the champions of orthodoxy had bitterly fallen out among themselves, and their manifold and increasingly incompatible apologetics had thus far failed to still the pens of the heterodox. Wettenhall advised his brethren to “forbear these controversies,” to resist the urge to contribute additional publications to the already protracted debate. For not even the most learned tract would bring the intractable dispute to a conclusion. “An answer will only breed a reply,” he warned, “that a rejoinder, that a triplication, and so in infinitum.” Meanwhile, ceaseless doctrinal controversy, he feared, would only serve to polarize the established church and erode the integrity of public worship. The trinitarian controversy, Wettenhall asserted, would be resolved not by witty pamphlets or novel explications of doctrine but by recourse to public authority. For, “when we have moved every stone” in the dispute over orthodoxy, “authority must define it.”Footnote ¹ Wettenhall put his faith in the constitution in church and state, supremely confident that orthodoxy would be secured not by disputatious clergy but by civil and ecclesiastical law. He could not foresee that the interventions of public authority, far from arresting the controversy, would only become fresh ground for contention.

The trinitarian controversy of the 1690s was never simply a contest over the doctrine of the Church of England. The theological imperative to vindicate trinitarian orthodoxy was from the beginning embedded in what might be thought of as a disciplinary crisis, a series of constitutional and ecclesiological controversies over precisely which civil and religious institutions bore responsibility for undertaking such vindications. The trinitarian controversy was distinctive for the sheer variety of public authorities involved. No less than five sitting bishops participated in the controversy alongside a host of lay and clerical writers. The matter was taken up by the convocation of the province of Canterbury and elicited two separate condemnations from Oxford University convocations, a royal directive to the episcopate, and a parliamentary statute within the space of a decade.Footnote ² For all the attention paid to the controversy as a crisis in English theology and epistemology, this institutional dimension has largely gone unstudied. This neglect, in turn, has reinforced the sense that the trinitarian controversy was for all intents and purposes a mere paper war—“a pamphlet skirmish” or “a stream of worthless pamphlets”—largely confined within a nascent public sphere hospitable to a wide variety of critical-rational discourses.Footnote ³ Such a perspective tends to displace the controversy from the unsettled institutional landscape of postrevolutionary England into the rarefied air of the European enlightenment. Moreover, this perspective often leads scholars to trace the legacy of the trinitarian controversy almost exclusively to subsequent theological and philosophical debates in England and elsewhere, to the general disregard of its impact on the volatile politics of the reign of William and Mary. As a result, the trinitarian controversy of the 1690s has loomed remarkably large in the historiography of an incipient English enlightenment, while remaining curiously peripheral to the historiography of postrevolutionary politics. Simply put, the trinitarian controversy is still widely considered “the major non-political controversy of these years in England.”Footnote ⁴ The artificial separation of the doctrinal dispute from the disciplinary crisis in which it was embedded has effectively banished the controversy from the historiography of the Glorious Revolution.

The trinitarian controversy of the 1690s was, in point of fact, fraught with “revolution politics.” The considerable scale and duration of the controversy must be attributed in large measure to the perceived inadequacy of postrevolutionary political and ecclesiastical institutions to manage the dispute to any general satisfaction. The result was a theological controversy routinely punctuated by disciplinary interventions of decidedly limited effectiveness, which in turn triggered subsidiary disputes over the proper methods of enforcing orthodoxy. Doctrinal controversy continually provoked disciplinary interventions by one public authority or another, which in turn generated further contention. For instance, the Oxford condemnation of the trinitarian theology of the clergyman Joseph Bingham in 1695 arguably generated less printed controversy concerning Bingham's orthodoxy than it did concerning the right of the university to issue such pronouncements. Throughout the trinitarian controversy of the 1690s, doctrinal dispute routinely opened up onto constitutional conflict as a variety of civil and ecclesiastical authorities claimed a (rarely uncontested) right to intervene. This institutional dimension of the dispute, touching as it did the constitutional apportionment and effective application of disciplinary powers, could not but shade into the civil and ecclesiastical politics of the 1690s.

Anglican ecclesiastical politics, in particular, assumed its recognizable postrevolutionary cast in the crucible of the trinitarian controversy. While the revolution settlement had already fractured the remarkable unity exhibited by churchmen under James II, it was in the trinitarian controversy that the church parties forged their competing programs of ecclesiastical governance. A “new high church party” markedly distinct from that of the Caroline episcopate coalesced around the campaign to restore the traditional disciplinary apparatus of the established church, the ability of ecclesiastical institutions such as the universities, the spiritual courts, and the provincial assembly of convocation to police and punish both heresy and immorality. Meanwhile, the Williamite bishops and clergy, assuming the mantle of an increasingly courtly and Erastian “Church whiggery,” came to rely ever more directly on the royal supremacy to govern the church and curb the lower clergy's pretensions of independence.Footnote ⁵ The trinitarian controversy did not, in fact, cleave the established church into warring theological camps, but rather into proponents of two distinct political ecclesiologies, that is, two competing apprehensions of the functional relationship between church and state. The polarity between clerical and Erastian disciplinary programs, based respectively on ecclesiastical institutions and the royal supremacy, was among the most enduring legacies of the controversy, comprising the framework of ecclesiastical politics well into the reign of George I.Footnote ⁶ The coalescence and persistence of these competing programs is certainly no less crucial to understanding the postrevolutionary Church of England than the succession of heterodoxies by which the Anglican establishment was periodically beset.

The successive assaults on Christian orthodoxy that ensued in the wake of the trinitarian controversy of the 1690s have long preoccupied scholars of the English enlightenment and, indeed, have reinforced the historical reputation of the final decade of the seventeenth century as a watershed in the modernization of English Christianity. Mark Pattison located in the trinitarian controversy and cognate debates over deism and creedal minimalism the origins of what he called the “seculum rationalisticum” of the eighteenth century, the moment at which “the rationalizing method possessed itself absolutely of the whole field of theology.”Footnote ⁷ Following Pattison, Leslie Stephen credited the antitrinitarian writings of this decade with initiating a process by which “Christianity is being gradually transmuted by larger infusions of rationalism.”Footnote ⁸ Contemporary scholars mostly concurred with their Victorian forebears. The trinitarian controversy was, in John Redwood's estimation, “the great testing ground for Christianity,” in which orthodoxy was tried by reason and found wanting.Footnote ⁹ The philosopher Frederick Beiser likewise deems the theological controversies of the 1690s, “the beginning of the enlightenment in early modern England,” the point at which reason, long the handmaiden of theology, effectively became “critical of faith.”Footnote ¹⁰ Other historians have suggested the commencement of a peculiarly “clerical enlightenment” in these debates, a process by which English churchmen accommodated rationalist theology and liberal antidogmatism within the framework of the Anglican establishment.Footnote ¹¹ The theologian William Babcock, however, is unequivocal about the secularizing implications of the trinitarian controversy, crediting it with beginning the wholesale abandonment of the Christian God.Footnote ¹² The historical theologian Philip Dixon traces a “fading of trinitarian imagination” in the later seventeenth century, citing the disputes at century's end as the culmination of “the emptying of the devotional and emotional appeal of the doctrine” of the Trinity.Footnote ¹³ Even historians who tend to doubt the modernizing imperatives of late seventeenth-century antitrinitarianism, viewing it instead as the recrudescence of an older strain of radical biblicist or humanist critique, concede its inadvertent contribution to an English enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁴ Stephen Hampton's recent study of the trinitarian controversy, it should be noted, deliberately eschews the enlightenment context, situating these debates instead amid a broadly European confrontation between reformed theology and its Arminian critics. Yet even Hampton posits “the flourishing intellectual culture of rational inquiry” in the late seventeenth century as the basic ecology of these debates.Footnote ¹⁵ Even accounting for variations in emphasis and interpretation, it seems that the preferred context for assessing the historical significance of the trinitarian controversy has largely been the forward sweep of religious and philosophical enlightenment.

The enlightenment context has proven quite illuminating for understanding the religious and intellectual ferment of the age. But there is a significant danger in wholly consigning the trinitarian controversy of the late seventeenth century to a narrative of inexorable rationalization. Such an approach makes little allowance for what are among the most politically significant developments in the trinitarian controversy: the waning confidence among churchmen of all stripes in the ability of reason to successfully carry the day and the concomitant turn toward public authority to resolve the dispute. The historian Justin Champion has perhaps most effectively situated the trinitarian and cognate controversies of the 1690s within a broader crisis of public authority, which he deems “the politics of knowledge.” For Champion, the significance of the controversy lay primarily in the radical and antitrinitarian assault on the politically demarcated parameters of true faith; their critique threatened to devolve authority “away from public institutions into the private epistemological world of the individual conscience.” The problem, however, in positing the fault line exclusively between “conscience and authority” is that such a view tends to homogenize ecclesiastical and civil power in the postrevolutionary period, investing the Anglican establishment with a public authority that seems more coherent, monolithic, and uncontroversial than was actually the case. Moreover, it fails to account for the various ways in which the clear-cut enlightenment “politics of knowledge” signally failed to align with the far murkier “revolution politics” of church and state in the 1690s.Footnote ¹⁶

The trinitarian controversy repeatedly exposed the absence of any Anglican consensus on the methods and instruments of enforcing orthodoxy, whether through the universities, Parliament, or convocation. The very real revolt against ecclesiastical authority that Champion describes must not be allowed to eclipse the equally serious crisis occurring within ecclesiastical authority. The latter came to the fore in the final years of the reign of William III, as the trinitarian controversy gave way to the great convocation controversy, the campaign to revive the dormant provincial synods of the established church. The convocation controversy, a wide-ranging debate that addressed not simply the constitutional status of the synods but the respective disciplinary powers of the clergy, the bishops, Parliament, and the Crown, defined the terms of ecclesiastical (and indeed, political) partisanship for at least a generation. It is vital then to trace this alternate path out of the trinitarian controversy of the 1690s, for it leads not to the politeness and antidogmatism of the seculum rationalisticum but toward the bitterness, invective, and instability of the early eighteenth-century “rage of party.”

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A minor trinitarian controversy occurred in England during the reign of James II. Though the dispute involved many of the same participants as that of the subsequent reign, the points in contention were dissimilar. The debate over the doctrine of the Trinity in the mid-1680s was but a subsidiary of the far broader “rule of faith” controversy between Anglican churchmen and English defenders of Roman Catholicism.Footnote ¹⁷ Court-sponsored Catholic writers routinely sought to expose the inadequacies of the Anglican rule of faith, which championed the instrumentality of human reason in discovering the validity and soteriological sufficiency of scripture. Reason, charged Catholic controversialists, was an unstable element that must be contained by authority and tradition. Otherwise, it threatened not only to denude revelation of mystery but also to atomize orthodoxy to the judgment of individuals.Footnote ¹⁸ All Protestantism, it was charged, tended toward “Socinianism”—or at the very least, the modes of rationalist scriptural hermeneutics that had in late seventeenth-century England come to be branded “Socinian” for their critical treatment of trinitarian orthodoxy or religious mystery more broadly.Footnote ¹⁹ The doctrine of the Trinity featured prominently in these exchanges, not as a point of substantive disagreement between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, but as an acid test of the rule of faith. The Anglican rule of faith, it was claimed, could not comprehend the doctrine of the Trinity, which neither comported to reason nor rested on incontrovertible biblical foundations, while simultaneously excluding the equally mysterious Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. As one Catholic writer argued, “'tis as equally unreasonable, and as seemingly repugnant to say one is three, as it is to say a body is not what it appears.” As mysteries impervious to human reason and only figuratively adumbrated in scripture, the doctrines of the Trinity and transubstantiation seemed to stand or fall together. “Both doctrines will be at a loss, and both equally require the authority of the Church to support them.”Footnote ²⁰

The defense of Anglican orthodoxy during the rule of faith controversies largely fell to the dynamic preaching clergy of the great metropolitan parishes of London and Westminster. The London divines began assembling, often at the residence of William Sherlock, master of the Temple, to strategize their defense against the vigorous Romanizing of the court of James II.Footnote ²¹ Their efforts during the three years of James's reign produced over two hundred volumes against popery, in which the defense of the Trinity comprised something of a leitmotif.Footnote ²² This clerical vanguard in London has, of course, long been associated with the “latitudinarian” wing of the Church of England. Recent scholarship has, it must be noted, questioned the coherence and utility of the concept of latitudinarianism, denying both its putative liberalism and any substantive theological or ecclesiological divergences from the mainstream of Restoration Anglicanism.Footnote ²³ However, the term is quite indispensible for the purposes of this article. It served late seventeenth-century contemporaries as a virtual by-word (and often a term of obloquy) for the prominent London divines who opposed James II and received advancement under his successors, William and Mary. Moreover, the term conveyed their conspicuous championship of the anti-Calvinist “Anglican rationalist” tradition evident in their critique of both Roman Catholicism and Protestant nonconformity. The Anglican rationalist tradition of the later seventeenth century broadly defended the reasonableness of scripture and the general availability of its fundamental, saving truths to the plain sense of all readers. This tradition, as Gerard Reedy rightly emphasizes, did not hold reason to be the primary arbiter of doctrine, nor did it reduce the whole of Christianity to clear and distinct ideas. Indeed, many of the London controversialists both before and after the revolution of 1688–1689 made generous allowances for the presence of mystery in religion. Their objective was to ensure that the persistence of mystery in revelation did not compromise the accessibility of saving truths to the general reader nor invite the routine doctrinal determinations of ecclesiastical authority.Footnote ²⁴

One of the primary obligations of the Anglican campaign against Roman Catholicism was the defense of a vital, yet circumscribed rationalism capable of distinguishing the mysterious truth of the Trinity from the error of transubstantiation.Footnote ²⁵ William Sherlock particularly resented the Catholic claims of epistemological equivalence between the doctrines of the Trinity and transubstantiation; he sardonically accused Catholics of holding the former doctrine, “for no other reason, but to justify the absurdities and contradictions of transubstantiation.”Footnote ²⁶ Edward Stillingfleet, dean of St. Paul's, took up the problem directly in his 1687 dialogue, The Doctrine of the Trinity and Transubstantiation Compared. The papist in the dean's dialogue echoes the prevailing English Catholic line in the rule of faith controversy: “Do you believe that there are any mysteries in the Christian doctrine above reason or not?” the papist character asks his Protestant interlocutor. “If not, you must reject the trinity; if you do, you have no ground for rejecting transubstantiation, because it is above reason.” Stillingfleet's Protestant responds by distinguishing “our not apprehending the manner of how a thing is” from “the apprehending the impossibility of the thing itself.” The claims to rationalism in the Anglican rule of faith were predicated on the frequently reiterated “distinction of things above our reason, and [those] contrary to our reason.”Footnote ²⁷ This critical differentiation absolved Anglican churchmen of the obligation to render all mysteries intelligible, without impairing their ability to effectively declaim against error and contradiction. The latter capacity was obviously vital in the controversy with the resurgent Catholicism of the court of James II. The former, Stillingfleet's Protestant noted in something of an aside, gave the Church of England an “advantage in point of reason” against “the anti-trinitarians themselves.”Footnote ²⁸

Roman Catholic and Anglican conjuring with the names and notions of Socinianism elicited a genuinely antitrinitarian intervention by the Hertfordshire clergyman Stephen Nye in 1687. Though Nye's tract, A Brief History of the Unitarians, called also Socinians, is widely credited with initiating the great trinitarian controversy of the final decade of the seventeenth century, it was more likely a contribution to a dispute already in progress. Nye's Brief History was an avowedly Protestant entrant in the rule of faith controversy, though one that echoed a number of the premises of contemporary Catholic works. Unlike the London Anglican controversialists, Nye conceded the point made by Catholic controversialists that the doctrine of the Trinity was rationally and biblically indefensible. The Catholic apologists seemed to be justified in attributing the prevalence of the doctrine solely to the authority of the Church. And indeed, they were quite correct to adjudicate the doctrines of the Trinity and transubstantiation by identical epistemological standards. Of course, Nye proceeded from these premises to radically antithetical conclusions. The Brief History argued that a theology that subordinated the Son to the Father was more agreeable to reason, scripture, and the beliefs of the earliest Christians. Trinitarian Christianity was, wrote Nye, “absurd, and contrary both to reason and to itself.” The doctrine had been historically imposed by ecclesiastical authority, buttressed by persecution and violence, and “established by so many terrible, penal laws.” The doctrine of the Trinity was, like that of transubstantiation, a relic of popery. Abandoning the hedged rationalism of the London Anglicans, Nye argued “that interpretation of Scripture can never be true, which holds forth a doctrine or a consequence that is absurd, or contradictory and impossible.” As a contribution to the rule of faith controversy, Nye's Brief History was a work of retrenchment, abandoning to popery the indefensible doctrine of the Trinity, the better to hold the Protestant line. The appended letter by the antitrinitarian laymen Henry Hedworth of Huntingdon made this point explicitly, excoriating those trinitarians who would “join hands with papists in contradiction to Protestant doctrine.”Footnote ²⁹

The circumstances that prompted Stephen Nye to pen his anonymous Brief History of the Unitarians remain a matter of conjecture. The publication of the Brief History coincided with James II's issuing of his first Declaration of Indulgence in 1687, which summarily suspended all penal laws against Protestant and Catholic nonconformists. Given the tract's broad-minded embrace of religious toleration and its conspicuous deviance from the standards of orthodoxy embraced by the Anglican opposition in London, it is tempting to view the tract as the work of one of James's so-called Whig collaborators, the diverse group of Protestant religious and political radicals who supported the king's ecclesiastical policies in the final two years of his reign.Footnote ³⁰ However, the involvement of the prominent London mercer and philanthropist Thomas Firmin in the commissioning and publication of Nye's antitrinitarian pamphlets makes this reading extremely unlikely. Firmin not only directed the publication of the work but also was mistaken by some for its author.Footnote ³¹ His patronage would likely tell against any collaboration with the court. Though his own antitrinitarian leanings were well known, Firmin was an intimate of the prominent London clergy, the so-called latitudinarians who comprised the vanguard of opposition to James II's ecclesiastical policies, most notably John Tillotson, Edward Fowler, “and others of the same leaven.” Like them, Firmin was a “principal encourager and promoter” of the campaign against the Declaration of Indulgence.Footnote ³² Firmin's collaborations with the London clergy and his philanthropic activity on behalf of Protestants abroad suggest that Nye's Brief History is perhaps best understood as a work of Protestant ecumenism.Footnote ³³ Nye gave his antitrinitarianism a conspicuously respectable pedigree, claiming as sympathizers Desiderius Erasmus and Dutch Remonstrants such as Hugo Grotius and Simon Episcopius, theologians likely to find favor with the largely Arminian London clergy.Footnote ³⁴ Hedworth's appendix urged trinitarians “to own unitarians for Christian brethren.”Footnote ³⁵ The irenic tone of the Brief History, its fidelity to the language of scripture and the “law of common reason,” its trenchant anti-Catholicism, and the patronage of the ecumenical Thomas Firmin all place the work among the growing number of calls and proposals for Protestant union issued in the aftermath of James II's Declaration of Indulgence.Footnote ³⁶ Stephen Nye's Brief History, it seems, was born not of an incipient enlightenment but of the deepening crisis of English Protestantism.

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The revolution of 1688–1689 catalyzed the great trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. While scholars such as Philip Dixon, Stephen Hampton, and Sarah Mortimer have done commendable service in tracing the national and international genealogies of the theological ideas in contention, it is still important to understand the ways in which these debates were shaped by the dramatically altered political and religious environment of postrevolutionary England. Indeed, what these and other scholars have affirmed as the relatively shopworn character of the competing arguments makes the severity and scope of the controversy at the end of the seventeenth century that much more puzzling.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, the unprecedented array of public authorities involved further distinguishes the controversy from antecedent debates. Given the extent and diversity of civil and ecclesiastical institutions involved, it seems fair to consider the dispute over the doctrine of the Trinity as much a theological controversy as a full-blown “crisis in Church and state.”Footnote ³⁸

The trinitarian controversy erupted amid a religious and political landscape significantly reconfigured by the revolution of 1688–1689 and the ensuing settlement in church and state. The revolution had propelled the stalwarts of the Anglican opposition in London overwhelmingly into the highest offices in the Church of England. Of the sixteen men William and Mary raised to the episcopal bench in the first two years of their reign, eleven (including Gilbert Burnet, a popular preacher at the Rolls Chapel prior to his exile under James II) previously held livings in the metropolis. Many of the new bishops were veterans of the anti-Catholic controversies of the 1680s, as was William Sherlock, who succeeded John Tillotson as dean of St. Paul's after a temporary refusal to accept the new monarchs. Even if the term “latitudinarian” is no longer considered quite apposite to describe the bulk of the Williamite episcopate, there can be no doubt that many of these men identified rather strongly with the Anglican rationalist tradition and had been among the most forward in courting the support of nonconformists during the previous two reigns. The revolution had also effectively reignited the argument over ecclesiastical comprehension, the program of reforming Anglican liturgy and discipline to permit nonconformists to return to the communion of the established church. Suddenly, there was a genuine opportunity to institutionalize the professions of Protestant solidarity that had characterized the last years of the reign of James II.Footnote ³⁹ The renovation of the Anglican episcopate and the imperatives of Protestant union placed the prospect of substantive church reform on the agenda for the first time since the later 1670s.Footnote ⁴⁰

Controversy erupted amid the attempted settlement of the Church of England in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the vicissitudes of which are quite well known.Footnote ⁴¹ The revolution created a genuine opportunity for ecclesiastical comprehension, while simultaneously alleviating the pressures of Catholic absolutism that had made Protestant reconciliation seem so urgent. Churchmen and dissenters alike emerged from the revolution crisis with less incentive to affect some meaningful comprehension. Conservative churchmen, still coming to terms with their new Dutch presbyterian monarch, the possible deprivation of their nonjuring brethren, and the wreck of their battered political theology, were wary of new concessions.Footnote ⁴² Nonconformists, for their part, found the likely prospect of legislative toleration for their congregations (and the less likely prospect of repealing the Test Act) more appealing than the compromises with episcopacy that comprehension would entail. Thus, the two bills for comprehension and toleration drawn up by the new secretary of state, Daniel Finch, earl of Nottingham, in consultation with the leading London divines, met two very different fates. The bill for religious toleration proceeded through Parliament with minimal controversy, while the comprehension scheme stalled. Many members grumbled that the church had not been formally consulted in measures that would alter the terms of its communion. The long dormant assembly of convocation was thought the proper forum for such an undertaking.Footnote ⁴³ On 13 April 1689, a committee of the House of Commons submitted an address to the king, requesting that he issue writs for the calling of convocation “according to the ancient practice and usage of this kingdom in time of Parliament.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The king responded to the address by pledging to summon convocation and urging the Parliament to proceed with the indulgence for Protestant nonconformists.Footnote ⁴⁵ A bargain seems to have been struck.Footnote ⁴⁶ The indulgence, widely known as the Toleration Act, received royal assent on 24 May 1689. The issue of comprehension was dropped in Parliament and reserved for the convocation as “a due respect to the Church.”Footnote ⁴⁷

In addition to issuing writs for convocation to meet and transact business for the first time since 1664, King William gave the assembly a substantial mandate for ecclesiastical reform. To that end, the king commissioned ten bishops and twenty divines to prepare the agenda for this momentous synod. The ascendant London clergy who had overseen previous comprehension schemes predominated. Their influence over the ecclesiastical commission only grew as the conservative appointees either absented themselves entirely or withdrew early on in the proceedings. The conservatives’ withdrawal left the commission subject to the virtually unchecked influence of a largely London-based core of Williamites, nearly all of whom would be elevated to the episcopal bench by William and Mary.Footnote ⁴⁸

Reactions to the composition of the new ecclesiastical commission were decidedly mixed. Thomas Tenison depicted his fellow commissioners as the heroes of the Glorious Revolution: “[T]hese very men with true Christian courage hazarded all that was dear to them in this world, in order to support the Church and the true religion professed by it.”Footnote ⁴⁹ But others seized on the ideological and geographical bias of the commission, which was dominated by “city divines” and “ministers of the great town.” Critics further resented the court favor bestowed on the leading commissioners, men who were “known to be latitudinarians indeed, and have monopolized Church-preferments.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The withdrawn commissioner William Jane, regius professor of divinity at Oxford, impugned both the orthodoxy and the motives of the rump of the commission as men possessed of “tenderness and moderation enough to part with anything but their Church preferments.”Footnote ⁵¹ The commissioners, then, set about forging a program for comprehension amid an ecclesiastical environment characterized by resentment and reaction, and increasingly wary of change.

The ecclesiastical commissioners effectively reignited the debate over the Trinity when they considered the status of the Athanasian Creed in the liturgy of the established church. At the 23 October 1689 session, the commissioners debated the provenance and authenticity of this lengthy statement of trinitarian orthodoxy, erroneously attributed to the third-century bishop of Alexandria. Gilbert Burnet ventured that the creed was “not very ancient” and its inclusion therefore violated the council of Ephesus's prohibition on new formulations. Stillingfleet suggested leaving the creed in the liturgy, but including a rubric mitigating the anathemas that declared salvation conditional upon true and firm belief in the content of the creed, including its firm recognition of the equality of the three persons of the Trinity. The commission thus drew up a rubric that applied these so-called damnatory clauses “only to those who obstinately deny the substance of the Christian faith,” rather than the exact letter of trinitarian orthodoxy outlined in the creed.Footnote ⁵² On 1 November, Edward Fowler, having surveyed several Anglican and nonconformist ministers around London about their use of the creed, moved that the question of the Athanasian Creed be reopened. Many Anglican “men of eminence,” he found, “had not read it in many years.” The nonconformists he interviewed disliked all creeds not “conceived in Scripture expressions.” Fowler suggested that the revised prayer book leave ministers at liberty to dispense with the creed entirely. The commission overruled him, thinking such a drastic alteration best left to the consideration of the full convocation.Footnote ⁵³ The commissioners, it must be emphasized, were not impugning trinitarian orthodoxy, merely the soteriological indispensability of assenting to the exposition of it contained in the Athanasian Creed.

As clerical opinion in advance of the convocation seemed to harden against comprehension, the commissioners and their allies took to print to defend their proposals for reform. In A Letter from a Minister in the Country to a Member of the Convocation, which Timothy Fawcett has persuasively attributed to Gilbert Burnet, the anonymous author depicts the work of the commission as necessary for the established church, regardless of the prospect of comprehension. The commission would alleviate all misgivings about controversial matters such as the status of the Apocrypha, the translation of the Psalms, and the Athanasian Creed.Footnote ⁵⁴ The archdeacon of Suffolk, Humphrey Prideaux, similarly defended the commission's mitigation of the creed, asking, “must we always be necessitated to pronounce all damned that do believe every tittle of Athanasius's Creed, which so few do understand?”Footnote ⁵⁵ Another pamphlet concurred with the revisions to the creed, stating, “[W]e think it no more becomes us to damn folks in the Church, and at divine service, than in the streets and in common discourse.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Omission or qualification of the creed, noted the London clergyman William Basset, would remove a formidable obstacle to comprehension.Footnote ⁵⁷

This well-publicized relinquishing of the Athanasian Creed presented Stephen Nye and Thomas Firmin with an opportunity to resume their antitrinitarian agitation. Nye clearly designed his Brief Notes on the Creed of St. Athanasius to capitalize on what appeared to be a mellowing of trinitarian orthodoxy among the ascendant London clergy and their allies. Echoing the commission's mitigation of the damnatory clauses, Nye asserted that “a right belief in these points that have always been controverted in the Churches of God, is in no degree necessary, much less necessary before all things.” The Athanasian Creed, he claimed, “has damned the whole world,” for it demands affirmation of what is unintelligible and therefore cannot elicit rational assent. The suspension of reason mandated by the creed as the condition of salvation was the very hallmark of “Roman bondage,” as he saw it, and therefore unfit “to be retained in any Christian, much less a Protestant and reformed Church.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Nye shrewdly positioned his radical theological notions on a continuum with those of the prominent London Anglicans with whom his patron Thomas Firmin associated. Just as he had pushed their vindication of “right reason” during the rule of faith controversy into a thoroughgoing theological rationalism, he was now pressing their relaxation of the Athanasian Creed into a repudiation of trinitarian Christianity.

The continuities between the ecclesiastical commission's members and antitrinitarianism's proponents were by no means lost on the enemies of comprehension. The Devonshire clergyman Thomas Long, a proctor to the new convocation, denounced the commissioners’ objections to the Athanasian Creed and demanded that they “consider what occasion it hath given to the anti-trinitarians to proclaim their blasphemies against the Blessed Trinity, and consequently against the Christian Religion.” Such heresies were implicated in the very project of comprehension, for the enemies of the church designed “to improve the objections of dissenters into very dangerous and destructive errors.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Another critic of the ecclesiastical commission explicitly associated the mischief of “the latitude principle” with the proliferation of antitrinitarian writings, reporting that he was “credibly informed, that the author of the Notes on Athanasius's Creed and of the History of the Unitarians” was a divine of the Church of the England. “If you would know who I mean, you must ask honest T. F. [Thomas Firmin].”Footnote ⁶⁰ Firmin's association with antitrinitarian writings, on the one hand, and prominent members of the ecclesiastical commission, on the other, seemed to implicate them all in a common heterodoxy.Footnote ⁶¹ Henry Maurice, Archbishop William Sancroft's domestic chaplain, bid the commissioners “send for T. F. [Thomas Firmin] and the Socinians” and inform Firmin “how for his sake you have either taken away the Athanasian Creed or pulled out the sting of it.” Maurice predicted that Firmin and his ilk would not be satisfied until the Nicene Creed, “the spring of all the doctrines, which makes up your mystery and their abomination,” was similarly struck out.Footnote ⁶²

The fault lines exposed in the controversy surrounding the ecclesiastical commission reappeared at the commencement of convocation in November 1689. On 21 November, John Tillotson's bid to become prolocutor of the lower house was overwhelmingly defeated in favor of that of the withdrawn commissioner William Jane, one of the sharpest critics of comprehension.Footnote ⁶³ Bishop Compton, acting president of the convocation during the suspension of Archbishop Sancroft, reportedly “made a learned speech upon the topic of uniting,” but its sentiments were drowned out by the mounting conservatism among the clergy, given voice by Jane as well as Henry Aldrich, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, who “harangued mightily about the beauty of the present settlement of religion.” Upon being presented by Compton, Jane applied the cry of “Nolumus leges Angliae mutari” to the ecclesiastical constitution. It was an unsubtle dig at the bishop of London, for these had been the very words emblazoned on his standard when he appeared in arms at Oxford for the prince of Orange the previous year.Footnote ⁶⁴

Given the mood of obstinacy among the clergy, it was perhaps not surprising that the comprehension scheme painstakingly devised by the ecclesiastical commission over the preceding eight weeks failed to reach the floor of convocation. The proctors in the lower house instead set about the refurbishing of the disciplinary powers of the clergy, the better to contain the fallout from the controversy surrounding the work of the ecclesiastical commission. On 11 December, the lower house requested that the prolocutor bring to the attention of the bishops in the upper house “several books of very dangerous consequence to the Christian religion, and the Church of England particularly.” The first book named was Stephen Nye's Brief Notes upon the Creed of St. Athanasius. It was cited alongside the “two letters relating to the present Convocation,” the defenses of the ecclesiastical commission attributed to Gilbert Burnet and Humphrey Prideaux. The clergy of the lower house inquired of the bishops “in what way, and how far . . . the convocation may proceed” in suppressing such books and censuring their authors. On 13 December, Bishop Compton, his growing wariness of Tillotson and Burnet seemingly outweighing his active collaboration with the commission, concurred with the clergy regarding the “ill consequence of those books.” Upon investigation, however, Compton remained uncertain, “how far the convocation might proceed in that affair.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The same day, the convocation was adjourned to 24 January 1690 and soon after dissolved with the convention Parliament without any tangible accomplishments.

The aftershock of the controversy surrounding comprehension struck Oxford in the spring, when Arthur Bury, rector of Exeter College, published The Naked Gospel, a work of creedal minimalism that castigated the “metaphysics” of “modern theology” and reduced the whole of the Gospel to “repentance and faith.” Bury allowed that mysteries such as the doctrine of the Trinity persisted in religion, but he contended their comprehension was “needless to saving faith.” As such, Bury could only agree with the ecclesiastical commissioners who sought to mitigate the force of the Athanasian Creed, disputing not its content but only “those rigid sentences, which denounce everlasting destruction to those who believe them not.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In a subsequent edition of The Naked Gospel, Bury claimed that he had intended the book as a contribution to the project of Protestant reconciliation, “the great affair which convocation was to meet about.” Like Nye, Bury rather cleverly enlisted his tract in the comprehension debates. The objective of The Naked Gospel, he claimed, was to inspire “a more comprehensive charity than many have attained to.” Of course, The Naked Gospel appeared months too late to be of any use to the convocation, the dissolution of which Bury attributed exclusively to “the temper of the lower house of convocation.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Though Bury's book did not revive the moribund project of comprehension, it did not go unnoticed. Indeed, the Naked Gospel's heterodoxy became another item added to the growing list of the rector's alleged offenses, including incontinence, selling of offices, and negligence of duty, all of which soon attracted the attention of the ordinary Bishop Jonathan Trelawny of Exeter.Footnote ⁶⁸ Bury resorted to physical force to impede the bishop's visitation, barring him on one occasion from entering the college chapel, and on a subsequent occasion shutting the college gates against him. These tactics only succeeded in delaying Trelawny's visitation and, on 26 July 1690, Bury was ejected from his rectory. On 19 August, a convocation of the university issued a judgment and decree against The Naked Gospel as containing “impious and heretical” propositions and charged that the book “destroys the foundations of the primitive faith.” The book was forbidden to be read by students of the university and ordered to be “burnt by an infamous hand” in the area of the schools.Footnote ⁶⁹

Though steeped in local college politics, the Bury affair exhibited broad continuities with the earlier comprehension debates in London. Bury was hounded not only by Bishop Trelawny but also by the two deans William Jane and Henry Aldrich, who engineered the condemnation of The Naked Gospel.Footnote ⁷⁰ All three had previously refused to serve on the ecclesiastical commission, and the latter two led the opposition to comprehension in the lower house of convocation. Moreover, Thomas Long, a predendary at Trelawny's cathedral at Exeter and the author of the popular anticomprehension tract Vox cleri, returned to print in 1691 to excoriate “the charitable heresy of the latitudinarians” exemplified in the irenicism of Bury's Naked Gospel.Footnote ⁷¹ There seemed to be a palpable sense of relief that Bishop Trelawny and the university had acted resolutely in orthodoxy's defense where the convocation at Westminster had failed. The archdeacon of Wiltshire, Robert Woodward, congratulated Arthur Charlett on the condemnation.Footnote ⁷² The nonjuring dean of Worcester, George Hickes, was similarly elated at the courageous display of “public censure.”Footnote ⁷³ George Smalridge of Christ Church, Oxford wondered whether the university might have gone farther than merely condemning the work and inquired whether the statutes permitted “punishing the authors of heretical books.”Footnote ⁷⁴

While many churchmen cheered the enforcement of orthodoxy, others saw in the Oxford condemnation ominous signs of resurgent clerical authority. Arthur Bury's defenders railed against the university as men who would “set up among themselves a Holy Inquisition.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The fiery Whig schoolmaster James Parkinson similarly insisted that “the University are not the proper judges of heresy; that they have no statute (as I can hear of) for burning of books.”Footnote ⁷⁶ When Thomas Firmin republished a large collection of antitrinitarian tracts in 1691, a new essay titled “An Exhortation to a Free and impartial Enquiry into the Doctrines of Religion” served as its preface.Footnote ⁷⁷ As the prospects of Protestant reconciliation dimmed, the pretense that antitrinitarian writers were contributing to a discourse of comprehension was largely abandoned. The Oxford condemnation and the chorus of Anglican churchmen demanding a more strenuous exercise of discipline threatened to transform the controversy into a referendum on ecclesiastical authority.

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The trinitarian controversy exploded just as the likelihood of further alterations to the ecclesiastical constitution diminished. The first stirrings of the controversy coincided with the revolutionary crisis in church and state and the ensuing period of political and ecclesiastical reconstruction. By 1691, however, the church had been effectively settled: comprehension was a dead issue, convocation was in abeyance, and in practice, “King William's toleration” proved a good deal more capacious than the narrow indulgence passed by Parliament in May 1689.Footnote ⁷⁸ The episcopal vacancies left by death and deprivation had been filled up, for the most part, with reliable Williamite divines drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the London controversialists. Bishop Wettenhall's judgment on the value of further controversy seems even more sensible in hindsight: the establishment was safe, the articles and liturgy unaltered, and toleration a fact of law. Doctrinal dispute simply risked “unsettling the whole superstructure.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Curiously enough, the new Williamite governors of the established church played no small part in keeping the trinitarian controversy alive, though many of its excesses had seemingly already redounded to their discredit. Over the next four years, the revolution bishops Edward Stillingfleet, Edward Fowler, John Tillotson, Gilbert Burnet, and John Williams, all men of the London ascendancy and leading figures in the ecclesiastical commission, weighed in on the dispute. As conscientious prelates, these men were no doubt mindful of the obligations of their new offices. Their ally, the London clergyman and future metropolitan William Wake, was certainly conscious of “the danger we shall run of being thought to desert the Church after having got her preferments, i.e. if the Socinians be not attacked.”Footnote ⁸⁰ It is not inconceivable that the bishops also wished to deflect the subtle charges of heterodoxy incurred for their alleged latitudinarianism, their earlier compromises on the force of the Athanasian Creed, or their conspicuous friendship with the likes of Thomas Firmin and John Locke.Footnote ⁸¹ Most important, the new bishops, befitting clergymen long inured to the cut and thrust of religious controversy, betrayed an almost naïve faith in the power of public disputation to vindicate orthodoxy. On the whole, their performances hewed fairly closely to the Anglican rationalist line, defending the use of reason in religion while making necessary allowance for the persistence of mysteries.Footnote ⁸² Stephen Nye mockingly responded to the collective output of the bishops, holding their claims to the Anglican rationalist tradition against them. “I thought the whole pretense of these men,” wrote Nye, “had been only this, to free religion from all uncouth, odd and absurd notions, to make it easy, intelligible and rational.”Footnote ⁸³

The caution exhibited by the Anglican rationalists in their allowance of mystery was famously eschewed by their erstwhile colleague William Sherlock. Sherlock was the prodigal son of the London Anglicans. A product of Interregnum Cambridge and a leading voice in the controversy with Roman Catholics during the reign of James II, he was among the ten London clergymen recommended for promotion to William of Orange by Gilbert Burnet at the end of 1688.Footnote ⁸⁴ Sherlock, however, refused to take the oaths to the new sovereigns and was deprived of the mastership of the Temple. Sherlock's position on the oaths softened over the course of 1690, and he finally took them in August, mere weeks after the Jacobite defeat on the Boyne River in Ireland. For his newfound allegiance, Sherlock was allowed to share in the court favor bestowed upon the other London Anglicans; he was restored to the Temple, resumed his royal chaplaincy, and in June 1691 was named dean of St. Paul's.Footnote ⁸⁵ Coinciding with his acceptance of the new regime in church and state, Sherlock's contribution to the trinitarian controversy, A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity, signaled the return of a forceful expositor of the Anglican rationalist tradition.Footnote ⁸⁶ Unlike his colleagues, Sherlock did not depend upon the concept of mystery to limit the scope of human reason and defend the doctrine of the Trinity from critics. The preface to his work audaciously promised a “very easy and intelligible notion of a trinity in unity.”Footnote ⁸⁷

The orthodox Christian, Sherlock explained, must fulfill two requirements in explicating the doctrine of the holy Trinity: the maintenance of three distinct persons in the Godhead and the affirmation of a single undivided substance. “The difficulty,” Sherlock explains, “is how three distinct substantial persons can subsist in one numerical essence.” To meet the challenge, Sherlock articulated a theory of divine personhood based upon a language of consciousness redolent of René Descartes and the Cambridge Platonists.Footnote ⁸⁸ A divine person is an “infinite mind” possessed of “self-consciousness,” that is, the intimacy of a mind with its own workings. Thus, the Trinity could be said to comprise “three distinct and infinite minds,” distinguished from one another by “self-consciousness” of their own respective operations. Yet this trinity of infinite minds comprised a unity in that the persons are “united by a mutual consciousness to each other,” that is, possessed of the same intimacy with the other minds as with their own. Sherlock's novel and ingenious reconceptualization of trinitarian theology certainly delivered, as he had promised, “a plain and intelligible account of this great and venerable mystery,” one that seemingly eliminated the alleged contradictions targeted by antitrinitarians.Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, the work was initially hailed by many as a masterpiece of theological reasoning, which significantly advanced the frontier of the Anglican rationalist tradition well into territory traditionally hedged off by mystery.Footnote ⁹⁰ Even Thomas Firmin was reportedly informed that Sherlock's book would surely “reclaim him from his heresy.”Footnote ⁹¹

The initial favorable receptions of Sherlock's Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity soon gave way to what one contemporary described as a “most terrible after-clap.”Footnote ⁹² The dean's conception of “three infinite minds” was branded “polytheism, or plurality of gods.” His theory of “mutual consciousness,” it was charged, did not unify the divine persons into a single God; on the contrary, it ratified their mutual alterity.Footnote ⁹³ Stephen Nye lambasted Sherlock's “cabal or senate of Gods.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Another antitrinitarian rather shrewdly predicted that Sherlock, in spite of his vigorous trinitarianism, would soon find himself ranked among the Socinians and rationalists as another “destroyer of mysteries” for rendering the doctrine of the Trinity “a plain and easy truth.”Footnote ⁹⁵ This remark proved prescient, for the conservative Anglican response to Sherlock was predicated on the wholesale vindication of the place of mystery in religion.

Canon of Christ Church, Oxford and prebendary of Westminster Robert South eviscerated his former friend's scholarship and theological reasoning in the vituperative Animadversions upon Dr. Sherlock's book. Moreover, he did so with a robust deference to both authority and tradition. The Trinity, South wrote, “is one of the greatest mysteries, if not absolutely the greatest in our religion.” South used the notion of mystery not as a bar to further speculation but as the grounds of deference to tradition. In the twelve centuries since the first council at Nicaea, the Catholic Church has “not only held the same notion of a trinity, but expressed [it] in the same way and words.” South took such intellectual and terminological constancy as evidence that the church had proceeded as far in the matter “as the reason of man could, or can, go.” South then deployed the traditional scholastic doctrine of the Trinity in place of a “new, mushroom, unheard of notion, set up by one confident man preferring himself before all antiquity.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Sherlock erred in identifying the three persons of the Trinity with “three distinct, infinite minds or spirits,” which necessarily entailed three gods, a “perfect tritheism.”Footnote ⁹⁷ On the contrary, South argues, God is but “one and the same infinite mind,” distinguished by three different modes of subsisting. The persons of the Trinity were not themselves modes; they were simply differentiated by their respective modes of relating to one another. The Father is characterized by “generation” of the Son; the Son by “filiation” from the Father. Father and Son are characterized by “spiration” of the Holy Ghost; the Holy Ghost by “procession” from Father and Son. South would not elaborate upon what such relational processes consisted of: “Since such mysteries exceed the comprehension of humane reason, I am not in the least ashamed, most readily to own my ignorance thereof.”Footnote ⁹⁸

South's intervention in the trinitarian controversy provided a standard around which the conservative clergy could rally, less for its scholastic exposition of trinitarian orthodoxy than for its full-throated affirmation of the centrality of mystery in religion. Mystery, for South, did not function simply as the horizon of theological knowledge, as it did for the so-called latitudinarian bishops who reluctantly conceded the limits of human reason.Footnote ⁹⁹ Rather, it deeply informed his conceptions of both piety and polity. God, preached South at Westminster Abbey in April 1694, has “hedged [religion] in with a sacred and majestic obscurity.” Mysteries were not matters for speculation, over which honest men and orthodox churches could disagree; they were credenda, things to be believed. Their incomprehensibility served “to keep the soul low and humble.” Moreover, such mysteries heightened the dependence of men upon authority, “the judging of the whole church in general and of their respective teachers and spiritual guides in particular.” Mystery, for South, comprised one root of the clericalism that was rapidly becoming the central conceit of a new postrevolutionary strain of Anglican high churchmanship.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Echoes of South's repudiation of rationalism were soon commonplace among the writings of the men who came to dominate the postrevolutionary High Church movement.Footnote ¹⁰¹

South couched his intervention in the trinitarian controversy in unmistakably partisan terms.Footnote ¹⁰² He was, he claimed, defending “the old doctrine of the trinity, against the sentiments of those new dons, who perhaps for fashion-sake, own a trinity and some such other articles of the Church of England.”Footnote ¹⁰³ South opened his initial critique of William Sherlock with a broader assault on the clergy of the London ascendancy, their advocacy of comprehension, and the consequent proliferation of heterodoxy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ “When providence took the work of destroying the Church of England out of the papists’ hands,” South mused, it might well have been delivered into the custody of those who “would have been contented with her preferments, without either attempting to give up her rights and liturgy, or deserting her doctrine.” It has, he lamented, “proved much otherwise.” The revolution, South implied, was at once responsible for the theological climate that bred Sherlock's heresies and the disciplinary lassitude that permitted them to go “without any public control.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Sherlock's Vindication, he noted, was “fitter to be censured by Convocation” than himself. Footnote ¹⁰⁶

If, as Philip Dixon claims, the overweening rationalism of Sherlock's Vindication marked the theological turning point in the trinitarian controversy, then surely South's devastating and aggressively political ripostes constituted a political turning point.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In South's wake came a number of partisan pamphlets, many from nonjurors, which attributed the entire trinitarian controversy to the revolutionary ascendancy of men of “latitudinarian principles” in the established church and their supposedly cherished projects for comprehending dissenters and antitrinitarian heretics within its communion. The Church of England, proclaimed the Irish nonjuror Charles Leslie, had been delivered over to “the Devil and his Socinian-Latitudinarian ministers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The deprived dean of Worcester, George Hickes, bemoaned the state of the postrevolutionary English clergy, as “latitude in projects and opinions, loosesness in discipline, and departing in practice from their principles have made them the scorn and contempt of the world.” He accused the advocates of comprehension of seeking to dispense with the Sabbath, infant baptism, the two sacraments, and the holy Trinity in pursuit of a “union yet more glorious and comprehensive,” which would include Anabaptists, Quakers, and Socinians.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Leslie famously accused Archbishop Tillotson of Socinianism for his doctrines of the atonement, the Trinity, and punishment of sins. “O God,” exclaimed Leslie, “in what a condition is this poor Church, these miserable misled people of England, when such doctrine is taught from the Throne of Canterbury!” And from that great height, Tillotson promoted only, “those of his own principles, the latitudinarians; and by this means, he may bid fair to pervert the whole nation.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The cumulative sense was that of revolution politics threatening to overwhelm the theological dimensions of the trinitarian controversy. “‘Tis expedient,” the Whig parliamentarian Sir Robert Howard dryly observed in 1696, “that all Williamites should be represented as Socinians.”Footnote ¹¹¹ An anonymous defender of Tillotson considered such charges nothing less than a full-scale assault on the postrevolution Church of England, “that every bishop and presbyter of the Church of England that have owned Dr. Tillotson to be Archbishop of Canterbury may be esteemed not only as betrayers of the Church's rights, but also as betrayers of the Christian religion itself.”Footnote ¹¹²

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In the April 1694 sermon that has come to be known as “Christianity Mysterious and the Wisdom of God in making it so,” Robert South argued that the persistence of mystery in religion justified the exercise of ecclesiastical authority. In service of his robust clericalism, South quoted Malachi 2:7, that “the priests lips should preserve knowledge,” and quipped that such a remark would have the prophet branded a “a man of heat, or a high-church-man, nowadays.”Footnote ¹¹³ For a growing number of men so labeled, the trinitarian controversy was not a theological problem but a problem of ecclesiastical discipline.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The sense among High Church men, as the conservative clergy were increasingly known in the latter 1690s, was that the Williamite bishops and divines had mismanaged the controversy, refuting error rather than suppressing heresy. As the nonjuring historian Henry Dodwell advised Bishop William Lloyd, the new governors of the established church would never best “your new adversaries, the Socinians” unless they warmed to the vigorous exercise of ecclesiastical discipline. The security of the whole faith, Dodwell wrote, depends upon the “power of rejecting and stopping the mouths of heretics, and rebutting them with all authority.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The abeyance of discipline contributed to the growing sense among high churchmen that the Church of England was not well served by its new fathers who, out of regard to tender consciences, deference to the civil power, or perhaps some secret sympathy with heretics, had failed to act decisively in the maintenance of orthodoxy.

Given the dormancy of convocation and the suspicion of the Williamite episcopate, Anglican high churchmen sought to exercise discipline with the instruments they had at their disposal. In 1695, Robert South reportedly upbraided the divines of Oxford “as being afraid to condemn heresy, deism, Socinianism, tritheism, lest they should fall from ecclesiastical grace, and the door of preferment should be shut against them.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ South was widely thought to be the animating spirit behind the university's condemnation of the young clergyman Joseph Bingham for a sermon preached at St. Peter-in-the-East on 28 October 1695. Bingham's meditation on the doctrine of the Trinity, in which he spoke of “three minds or spirits in the unity of the Godhead,” seemed to veer dangerously close to the formulations of William Sherlock.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The university convened at South's prompting on 25 November, at which time Vice-Chancellor Fitzherbert Adams and the heads of the colleges and halls formally condemned the notion that “there are three infinite distinct minds and substances in the Trinity” as “false, impious and heretical.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The published version was careful to point out that “the propositions above-mentioned are Dr. Sherlock's.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Indeed, rumors circulated about the town that the sermon itself was but a “contrivance and a juggle,” a setup engineered solely to gratify South's desire to see Sherlock formally condemned.Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet many cheered the condemnation of Bingham as they had that of Arthur Bury. The nonjuror Abednego Seller congratulated Arthur Charlett on the decree: “May all the other heresies of the present age fall under the same just condemnation.”Footnote ¹²¹ George Hickes similarly praised the judgment from his Bagshot redoubt, hoping that it signaled a new offensive against heretical books on the part of the church. “We should begin from [Thomas Hobbes's] Leviathan to the present day,” he pronounced; “it is not yet too late.”Footnote ¹²²

There were, however, many who questioned the legality of the Oxford decree, and in their contestations lay the origins of the broader convocation controversy. Sherlock predictably excoriated the university for arrogating “the authority of declaring and making heresy.”Footnote ¹²³ But university members denied that the decree constituted an adjudication of heresy. The decree, wrote the principal of Jesus College, Jonathan Edwards, “was made with a particular regard to members of their own body.” It was aimed at Joseph Bingham, rather than Sherlock. “If Dr. Sherlock be of the same mind with that other person,” wrote the Savilian Professor of Geometry John Wallis, somewhat disingenuously, “that is not our fault.”Footnote ¹²⁴ The university, Edwards explained, was merely observing the “strict and sacred obligation to prevent as far as in them lies, the growth of any pernicious doctrines in religion.”Footnote ¹²⁵ The Tory lawyer Sir Bartholomew Shower reminded Sherlock that the decree was not a judicial proceeding at all, “but a declaration rather of their opinion by way of caution to the members of the university under their care.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tenison, disagreed, informing Vice-Chancellor Adams on 24 December 1695 that jurists had been consulted and they found the proceedings “a high usurpation upon his Majesty's prerogative and a manifest violation of the laws of this realm.” Adams reassured the archbishop that he and his brethren were only acting “to put a stop to some novel opinions about the greatest article of our Christian faith.”Footnote ¹²⁷

In marked contrast to the tactics of his predecessor and brethren of the London ascendancy, Archbishop Tenison responded to the persistent doctrinal disputes not with theological engagement but with political action. In February 1696, he prevailed upon William to issue a set of directions to the episcopate “for preserving the unity of the church and the purity of the Christian faith, concerning the Holy Trinity.”Footnote ¹²⁸ In what seemed to be a vindication of orthodoxy, the directions mandated that the doctrine of the Trinity taught must be agreeable to scripture, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the three creeds. Furthermore, they forbade the use of new terms in explication of the doctrine. However, the prohibition of any “public opposition between preachers” seemed to tar all the disputants with the same brush, regardless of the soundness of their doctrine. The demand that the clergy “abstain from all bitter invectives and scurrilous language” would likely have been perceived as a shot at Robert South and the nonjurors, whose disparaging pamphlets routinely breeched standards of clerical decorum.Footnote ¹²⁹ The Directions rather vaguely directed bishops (with the assistance of judges and magistrates) to restrain those who dispute or publish “against the Christian faith concerning the doctrine of the blessed trinity,” but they by no means recommended the reconstruction of ecclesiastical discipline for which high churchmen clamored.Footnote ¹³⁰

The genius of Francis Atterbury's epochal Letter to a Convocation-Man, which appeared in late 1696, was its ability to channel Anglican discontent stemming from the trinitarian controversy into a movement for restoring convocation as the keystone of ecclesiastical discipline.Footnote ¹³¹ A product of the Christ Church, Oxford setting of Robert South, William Jane, and Henry Aldrich, and a client of Bishop Trelawny, under whom he had served during the deprivation of Arthur Bury, Francis Atterbury conceived of the Letter in collaboration with a veteran of the Bingham affair, Sir Bartholomew Shower.Footnote ¹³² The Letter proclaimed “a universal conspiracy of deists, Socinians, latitudinarians, deniers of mysteries and pretended explainers of them, to undermine and overthrow the Catholic faith,” singling out as evidence William Sherlock's Vindication of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity and Gilbert Burnet's Four Discourses alongside the more notorious works of John Toland and John Locke. “If ever there was need of convocation, since Christianity was established in this kingdom,” Atterbury pled, “there is need of one now.” Much of the Letter reads like other tracts from the debate surrounding the condemnation of Bingham, examining the respective rights and powers of the variety of instruments available for the suppression of heterodoxy. After considering the limited powers of the bishops, the universities, and the House of Commons, Atterbury concluded that only the convocation, the “highest ecclesiastical court or assembly,” was the proper forum for such a crisis, numbering among its responsibilities “the preventing or suppressing of heresies and schisms.”Footnote ¹³³

“Now the controversy about the trinity being pretty much cooled,” observed the future bishop of London Edmund Gibson in April 1697, “the dispute about Convocation is like to succeed it.”Footnote ¹³⁴ The controversies were in fact largely perceived as continuous, and many of Atterbury's respondents accused him and his allies of simply renewing their campaign against William Sherlock. The recorder of Oxford William Wright thought the Letter another instance of “the uncharitable fury which hath pursued” the dean of St. Paul's and which had “wounded religion more than any inferences which can be forced from his works.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The movement to restore convocation among “our high Church-men,” the freethinker Matthew Tindal reasoned, was the result of “the government's depriving them of the power of persecuting their brethren.”Footnote ¹³⁶ William Wake thought Atterbury's whole case for the convocation was “to have that learned body join hands with the Animadverter,” Robert South, to pronounce against Sherlock's explication of the Trinity. Wake blackly joked that the dean must be thankful that the old writ de haeretico comburendo had been long put away, lest “his next motion be from his own chapter-house into Smithfield.”Footnote ¹³⁷

Commissioned by Archbishop Tenison, Wake's massive rejoinder to Atterbury, The Authority of Christian Princes over their ecclesiastical synods, was a monument of Erastianism, snuffing out every High Church pretension to the independent exercise of ecclesiastical discipline.Footnote ¹³⁸ It ridiculed the spectacle of a church synod assembling “to declare to all the world that it believes in our Savior's divinity; and holds a trinity of persons in the unity of the Godhead,” as well as the notion that the current controversies could somehow be attributed to the failure to do so. Worse, he found Atterbury's vision of a “convocation empowered to determine what they please to be heretical” downright troubling. Heresy, Wake argued, was a matter for the law; a timely reinstatement of the licensing regime that had lapsed in 1695 would do more for the maintenance of orthodoxy “than ten thousand canons made by the convocation, though an anathema were added to every one of them.”Footnote ¹³⁹ The Blasphemy Act passed by Parliament in the midst of the convocation controversy threatened loss of office or imprisonment to those who would “deny any one of the persons in the holy trinity to be God or shall assert or maintain there are more Gods than one.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Designed in some measure to remedy the end of censorship, the rather ineffectual act was further evidence of a willingness to confer the custody of orthodoxy to the state. The Williamite divines who supported such legislation and denied the necessity of recalling convocation, it seems safe to conclude, palpably feared the prospects of independent clerical authority a great deal more than the circulation of heterodoxy.

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By the last years of the reign of William III, ecclesiastical politics had assumed the form that it would retain for the next two decades. The Williamite bishops and clergy ossified into something of a court party under Archbishop Tenison. The dynamic reformism of the London ascendancy of the late Restoration mellowed into a sober church whiggery, deeply Erastian in ecclesiology and somewhat less convinced of the sufficiency of reason to arrive at orthodoxy unaided. They found themselves increasingly dependent on the use of the royal supremacy to defend the revolution settlement and govern a fractious church. The obloquy of “latitudinarian” gave way to that of “Low Church,” bestowed upon divines insufficiently zealous for the rights and privileges of the established church.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Anglican high churchmanship, meanwhile, coalesced from a vague disaffection with the revolution settlement and religious toleration into an organized movement for the refurbishing of ecclesiastical discipline, one that for all its effusions on behalf of episcopacy and monarchy routinely found itself at odds with the bishops and the Crown.Footnote ¹⁴² Anglican ecclesiastical parties at the turn of the eighteenth century were not distinct theological camps so much as distinct ecclesiological camps, differentiated primarily by their divergent concepts of public authority and its role in maintaining the integrity of the national faith.

If the revolution settlement was the primary catalyst of ecclesiastical polarization in the postrevolutionary period, the trinitarian controversy was in fact broadly determinative of the competing ecclesiastical programs espoused. The Church of England was no doubt divided prior to the onset of the controversy, but the latter channeled antipathies into concrete political ecclesiologies. The Williamite bishops could not govern the established church as “latitudinarian” controversialists in the public sphere, nor could they simply devolve disciplinary power to the body of lesser clergy broadly suspicious of both their orthodoxy and their legitimacy. Increasingly, they relied upon the state to protect a revolution settlement arguably more threatened by High Church reaction than radical heterodoxy. For its part, the High Church movement was forced to repent of some of its cherished hierarchalism, seeking to refurbish the independent disciplinary capacity of the clergy in the teeth of obstruction from both Crown and episcopate. Perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment on this score was the restoration of convocation in 1701, which would serve as the platform for an ambitious High Church program of Anglican renewal and the preeminent forum for the embittered ecclesiastical politics of the next two decades.Footnote ¹⁴³ Even after William was succeeded by the vastly more sympathetic Queen Anne, high churchmen by no means reverted to their traditional courtly orientation; they continued to press for independent powers of deliberation and discipline, which the queen was often quite reluctant to grant them. In the wake of the trinitarian controversy, Anglican high churchmen had been rather dramatically disabused of their faith in the state.

The politics of enlightenment, then, must not be simply elided with “revolution politics.” Church and state were not rocked by a controversy over the competing claims of private conscience and public authority, reason and orthodoxy, but rather by divergent iterations of public authority, both of which belonged to a world substantially remade by revolution. Setting the trinitarian controversy of the 1690s in its revolutionary context makes manifest its affinities with other more overtly politicized theological controversies such as the rule of faith disputes during the reign of James II or the convocation controversy at the turn of the eighteenth century. From this perspective, it becomes possible to understand disputes over the doctrine of the Trinity as part of a broader complex of institutional crises befalling a Church of England unsettled in turn by Catholic absolutism and revolutionary upheaval. These connections are in no way intended to replace the well-established continuities with mid-seventeenth-century theological controversies, debates in foreign Protestant churches, or the subsequent trinitarian heterodoxies of William Whiston and Samuel Clarke. Nor do they require that the controversy be considered as a mere cipher for partisan politics. There was indeed a very real debate on the doctrine of the Trinity afoot in postrevolutionary England. However, it was largely as a disciplinary crisis that the trinitarian controversy served as a determinant of ecclesiastical polarization at the end of the seventeenth century.