From Unitarianism to Deism: Matthew Tindal, John Toland, and the Trinitarian Controversy

Abstract

The Trinitarian controversy in late seventeenth-century England saw the confrontation of Unitarian theologians, who drew on Socinianism and other theological traditions in denying the Trinity, and Trinitarian divines, who provided different justifications of the Trinitarian dogma, mainly through metaphysical speculation. The Trinitarian controversy also gave some deist thinkers, such as Matthew Tindal and John Toland, the opportunity to express even more heterodox views than the ideas of Unitarians like Stephen Nye, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, but still affirmed the divine authority of Scripture and the saving power of Christian revelation. Some historiography has described Tindal’s Letter to the Reverend the Clergy (1694) and Reflections on […] the Doctrine of the Trinity (1695), and Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) as essentially Unitarian books, indebted to Socinianism and Locke’s way of ideas. However, in their works of the mid-1690s, Tindal and Toland employed historical, critical, and philological methods that subjected Scripture to the criteria of unprejudiced reason and scholarship. Thus, they rejected the possibility of “truths above reason”, and reduced revelation to merely a “means of information”. In these writings, both Tindal and Toland actually adapted Locke’s way of ideas to their respective views and purposes. Tindal’s tracts on the Trinity prefigured the religion of nature that he later explained in Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), whereas Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious was significantly influenced by Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics. Briefly, Tindal’s and Toland’s works of the mid-1690s were already deistic in essence.