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The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State: Religious Controversy and the Making of the Postrevolutionary Church of England, 1687–1702

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2013

Brent S. Sirota
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Abstract

This article sets the wide-ranging controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity that erupted in late seventeenth-century England firmly within the political context of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. Against a voluminous historiography that confines the trinitarian controversy within the apolitical narrative of an incipient English enlightenment, this article considers the controversy as part of the broader political crisis that befell church and state in the final years of the century. The trinitarian controversy must be understood not simply as a doctrinal dispute but as a disciplinary crisis: a far-reaching debate over not only the content of orthodoxy but also the constitutional apportionment of responsibilities for its enforcement. As such, the controversy featured interventions from an unprecedented array of public authorities—Crown, Parliament, university, episcopate, and convocation—all claiming the preeminent custody of orthodoxy in an institutional landscape profoundly unsettled by revolutionary upheaval. This institutional dimension, long ignored by historians and theologians, placed the trinitarian controversy at the heart of civil and ecclesiastical politics during the reign of William and Mary. Indeed, the trinitarian controversy may be considered the defining event in church politics in the postrevolutionary era, exercising a prevailing influence on the content of Anglican ecclesiastical partisanship for much of the early eighteenth century. While recognizing the importance of these disputes to the emergence of an English enlightenment, this article insists that the trinitarian controversy is equally indispensable for understanding the rage of political parties in postrevolutionary England.

Keywords

Church of EnglandComprehensionConvocationEnlightenmentGlorious RevolutionHeterodoxyHigh ChurchLatitudinarianismLow ChurchPrayer Book CommissionRage of PartySocinianismTrinity
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 26 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013

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100 South, Robert, “Christianity Mysterious and the Wisdom of God in making it so prov'd in a Sermon Preached at Westminster-Abbey, April 29, 1694,” in Sermons Preached upon several occasions, 6 vols. (London, 1737), 3:212, 225, 227–28, 235, 242–44Google Scholar.

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104 Somewhat unfairly, it should be noted, as Sherlock was hardly a proponent of comprehension; see Sherlock, Apology for writing against Socinians.

105 South, Animadversions, i–v.

106 Ibid., 374–77.

107 Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes, 110, 135.

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113 South, “Christianity Mysterious,” 243.

114 Hickes, Some Discourses upon Dr. Burnet and Dr. Tillotson, 45–46; Leslie, The Charge of Socinianism, 31–32.

115 Henry Dodwell to Bp of Coventry & Lichfield, 15 Feb 1696, Add MS 4275, f. 192, BL.

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118 Arthur Charlett to Tanner, 25 November 1695, Tanner MS 24, f. 90, Bodleian Library; Reflections on the Poems made upon the Siege and Taking of Namur (London, 1696), 9–10Google Scholar.

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121 Abednego Seller to Arthur Charlett, 2 December [1695], Ballard MS 35, f. 38, Bodleian Library.

122 George Hickes to Arthur Charlett, 8 December 1695, Ballard MS 12, f. 109, Bodleian Library.

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