CHAD VAN DIXHOORN
INTRODUCTION
The Westminster Assembly, meeting from 1643 to 1653, offered a purpose-built arena for the mid-century theological contests of the English-speaking world. The assembly’s opening ceremonies were held on July 1, 1643, and from that point forward the gathering was celebrated or hated as the mastermind behind a revolution in the English church—but never ignored. Members of the assembly were paraded down London’s streets and feasted at banquets. People across Britain and Europe sought the assembly’s patronage and approval. Booksellers promoted the works of assembly members, and newspapers reported their activities or, in the absence of anything to say, simply made something up.
The assembly (what foreigners called the “Synod of London”) was in many ways a highpoint of the post-Reformation period, and its formulations carried enormous weight amongst the Reformed orthodox almost immediately upon publication. It also provided a venue for theologians to debate dogmatic formulations, including nuances unsuitable for the pulpit and even for the press. Among other topics, the assembly eagerly discussed the doctrine of the Trinity, and this chapter endeavours to use what we know about the Westminster Assembly’s debates and documents in order to provide a window into some post-Reformation Trinitarian perspectives, with a special focus on discussions about the eternal generation of the Son. This study bridges decades not discussed in Brannon Ellis’s learned narrative—which in its seventeenth-century discussions moves from the Synod of Dordt to the writings of Roell—and supplements his account of continental sources by noting texts and events of immediate importance to Scottish and English theologians.
While its most public contribution to Trinitarian theology was its brief statements on the doctrine, the assembly is most often remembered by historians for its opposition to anti-Trinitarian ideas. It thus needs to be said up front that this chapter is not another foray into complex dynamic between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. It goes without saying that any consideration of the nuances of anti-Trinitarian teaching requires careful reading of the writings of its advocates and not only its opponents. Orthodox Trinitarian scholars at the assembly read the works of their opposites—more than one member of the synod appears to have amassed an impressive collection of Socinian works.1 Nonetheless, orthodox divines were never sympathetic, and often not careful, readers of texts written by persons already distrusted for known theological aberrations. Anti-Trinitarians complained that their condemnation took no more than an ordinance from parliament or “decree of a councell, or Assembly of Divines, declaring such or such opinions to be Blasphemous, Heretical, or Schismatical.”2 It was certainly true that many theological judgments—then as now—were crowd-sourced, second hand, and peremptory. Second, in addition to these interpretive challenges, we can add that among the assembly’s contemporaries and among historians “the heresy debate had . . . become hopelessly entangled with the toleration controversy”—a generic observation about heterodoxies that applies especially to anti-Trinitarian polemic.3 Finally, opponents of orthodoxy were often discussed as a collective. This device allowed polemicists to highlight the most offensive statements on each doctrinal subtopic by any given errorist and to then permit the reader to attribute the error to the group, even if persons in that group do not hold to one or more of the charges leveled by the heresiographer. Although John Coffey and Paul Lim find some divines—among them, assembly members—who carefully delineated differences and degrees of heresy, such subtle considerations of heresy were uncommon.4 John Coffey observes that early modern critics of “orthodoxy” complained that the campaign against heresy was, among other things, “marred by an abundance of polemical vigor and an absence of intellectual rigor.”5 Lim notes the deliberate “blurring the distinction between religious heresies and political sedition,” mentioning the case of Obadiah Sedgwick, who “compared heresy to ‘a plain Gunpowder-plot, an error which blows up a fundamental truth.’ ”6 Thus a study of the writings of Westminster Assembly members will not advance our understanding of the shifting views of sub- or anti-Trinitarians. Nonetheless, even if the views of anti-Trinitarian opponents are not always fairly represented by all assembly members, polemical encounters involving assembly members at least help us to understand the opinions of the early modern narrator, and polemical texts can offer insights into the conviction of the author.
Unfortunately, the importance of the assembly’s determinations is matched only by the difficulty of accessing its deliberations. The Westminster Assembly’s discussions of the doctrine of the Trinity are among its least well-documented debates. Members of the synod wrote on the subject before, during, and after the assembly,7 and off stage the assembly’s members dealt with Trinitarian debate in other venues, such as the civil courts.8 Yet the assembly’s own discussions on the topic are complicated by lost minutes of some meetings and frustratingly brief accounts of others. This may explain, at least in part, why comments on this particular assembly’s debates are limited in number and depth.9 But this is not the whole story. It is also true that literature on seventeenth-century Trinitarian discussions, like discussions of theology generally, has often been more interested in the politics and personalities involved in the suppression of error than in the disputes themselves. There are exceptions to this general rule: Paul Lim rehabilitates the study of Trinitarian orthodoxy in a historiography more interested in heresy,10 and Sarah Mortimer gets into the theological weeds in order to debate how closely historians should situate Socinian thought vis-à-vis Protestant thought more generally.11 Nonetheless the center of this observation still holds.
Thankfully, not all it lost. Where official records of constructive Trinitarian deliberations are lacking, accounts or speeches by assembly members have survived, including some recently rediscovered material and one previously unidentified assembly text that discusses the Trinity (and other topics). It is with these tools, along with better-known texts of the assembly and its members, that this chapter examines three post-Reformation episodes linked to the Westminster Assembly. It proceeds by telling about a late-night visitor to a London home, by recalling the case of an imprisoned theologian, and by moralizing about a bad book endorsement.
Theos ek Theou: THOMAS GATAKER AND THE VISITOR IN THE NIGHT
Thomas Gataker (1574–1654) remembered that it was “at a very unseasonable houre” that he heard a knock at his door. A well-dressed man asked to speak with the lecturer of Lincoln’s Inn, and when Gataker let the visitor in, he handed his host “a little scrole, wherein were these words written, ‘Whether was the Godhead of Christ begotten of the Godhead of the Father from all eternity?’ ” The stranger then asked Gataker if the statement was in error.12
It was an unusual scene, even by the unusual standards of the time, and so rather than answer the man’s question, Gataker asked for a little context. The stranger replied that the statement in question came not from himself but from one who believed what was taught “in the Creed, God of God, light of light.” The Creed to which he referred is the one that Gataker called the “Creed of Constantinople” or, as he also put it, what is “commonly called the Nicene Creed.”13 Then the visitor persisted: Was it an error to speak of “the Godhead of Christ begotten of the Godhead of the Father from all eternity?” In what sense is the generation of the Son to be understood?
Gataker knew it was a setup. Someone had a reason for coming to him, and not, say, to George Walker (ca. bap. 1582–d. 1651), a fellow London minister who was sure that error lurked in every corner of the church and who ferreted out heretics almost as a hobby. Nonetheless, even if the man was not without guile, Gataker was still willing to play his game. He explained that the sentence (whosesoever it was!) was a poor paraphrase of the Creed, and that properly speaking, “the Godhead was not said, either to beget, or to be begotten.” For Gataker, generation did not refer to divinity but to sonship. But perhaps the intention of the person whose words were captured on the scroll meant that “Christ being God was begotten of the Father, who is likewise God from all eternity.” In that case the idea was sound, but the “speech” was still “improper.” The visitor was pleased with the comment and asked Gataker to write down what he had said and sign it. Gataker asked the man’s name. “He told me, I must excuse him for that.” Gataker, refusing on such terms to sign anything, “told him, he should likewise excuse me for this” as he showed him the door.14
The pieces only came together the following day when Gataker was walking through St. Paul’s Cathedral, the ministerial social center of London. He noticed that the Bishop of London was questioning Bartholomew Legate, an English Arian who only accepted “Christ as God by his office rather than his nature” and even then concluded that it was not appropriate to pray to or worship Christ.15 Gataker quickly surmised that it must have been a well-to-do friend of Legate who had called on him the evening before, equipped with a poorly framed quotation in hand from one of London’s less articulate ministers. The stranger was hoping that Gataker would condemn the statement in the scroll in order to show that even orthodox divines sometimes made sloppy statements that were a rough equivalent to Legate’s own anti-Trinitarian formulations. But when Gataker refused to categorically denounce the questionable quotation, his visitor realized that Gataker’s nuanced answer and generous spirit might nonetheless somehow serve Legate’s cause just as well.
From the perspective of the late-night visitor, the doctrine of eternal generation offered a conveniently weak latch in the ancient fortress of Trinitarian formulation, and thus an entry point for skeptics to doubt the divinity of Christ. It was no accident that the stranger in the night wished to discuss the phrases “God of God, and light of light.” The man was playing off John Calvin’s contention, best explained by Brannon Ellis, that a defense of the classical, orthodox doctrine of divine simplicity required a revision of the classical, orthodox doctrine of divine processions.16 In making this argument Calvin addressed what he saw as lingering vestiges of subordinationism in articulations of Trinitarian theology, and his arguments in turn shaped both post-Reformation discussions of eternal generation and understandings of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.
Significant church fathers and almost all medieval theologians, some of them without sufficient qualification, had argued that the Father alone was the first principle of the divine essence and that he communicated this essence to the Son and the Spirit. The intention of these formulations was to ensure the unity of the Trinity, with each person essentially united to the Father, and to insist on real distinctions between the persons of the Trinity. Calvin, while affirming unity and distinction in the Trinity, was concerned that this construction undermined the simplicity of God. It predicated something of the Father that was not true, in the same manner, for the Son and the Holy Spirit. Significantly, Calvin’s concern for the simplicity of God also entailed a more robust emphasis on the aseity of Christ. Classic statements of the eternal generation of Christ, asserting as they were the generation of divine essence from Father to Son, had promoted an eternal ontological subordination of the Son to the Father.17 Calvin, in B. B. Warfield’s words, moved for the “ascription of ‘self-existence’ (aseity, autoousia) to the Son,” Christ as God a se ipso in and of himself.18 Almost incidentally, Calvin demurred from dogmatic assertions that the eternal generation of the Son was a continuous process. Although those who defended the idea did not conceive of it as entailing anything incomplete in God, Calvin thought it an indemonstrable assertion.
Ellis mentions in passing Calvin’s one-time “strained relationship with the Nicene creed.” Even later in life Calvin would refer to its “Deum de Deo” or “Theos ek Theou” phrase as “a difficult expression.”19 In English the phrase “God of God” reads like an intensive: really God. In Latin and Greek it is more obviously capable of being read as a derivative: from God. Calvin’s resolution of the difficulty was to insist that the Nicene Creed’s “God of God” phrase meant only that the person of the Son was (eternally) generated by the Father; only in this sense is the Son from the Father. Calvin allowed that the Father was the first principle, that the “Son exists from the Father,” even that “the beginning of his person is God himself” (referring to the Father).20 Nonetheless, he insisted that the divine person of the Son was generated from the Father and that the Son’s divine essence was not.
As Ellis observes, this idea has some patristic testimony, but it would be difficult to find anyone prior to Calvin who believed that the Nicene Creed meant only that. Calvin, on the other hand, “refused to allow any relative or comparative predication concerning the divine essence per se, even if it meant taking such clear traditional language in an improper way.” Not an “unintelligible or disingenuous” way, but an “unnatural” one given its original historic context.21 So contrary was this to the common reading of the creed that Calvin was taken to be critical of its substance. Calvin’s opponents coined a term for his Christology, Christ as autotheos, and they criticized the Reformer for undermining the doctrine of the Trinity—particularly with reference to his insistence that the divine essence was “natively” in each person of the Trinity and not principally located in the Father alone.22
Calvin could certainly cite church fathers for robust assertions of the aseity of Christ; he cited Augustine and Cyril.23 Richard Muller sees Calvin swimming in one of two streams of Trinitarianism that wended their way through the medieval period. Tradition A, teaching the kind of theology that Calvin would oppose, held that the doctrine of the Trinity was dependent upon the doctrine of the “eternal generation” of the essence of the Father to the Son. The Father alone was autotheos; he was the principium, the first principle, and through “eternal generation” the Father communicated his divine essence to the Son. In this tradition, the eternal generation itself was either understood to be a reality that was true of the Father–Son relationship from eternity or, in the writings of John of Damascus, a continuous eternal process. The proponents of Tradition A (such as Gilbert de la Porrée and Joachim de Fiore) held that the essence or divinity of the Godhead needed to reside in one of the persons of the Trinity (the Father) because if it did not, then it became a fourth thing in which all the persons of the Trinity participated and resulted in a kind of quaternity, three persons and divinity. This was the older and more dominant tradition in the church.
Muller’s Tradition B (with Lombard, the Fourth Lateran Council, and Durandus of Sancto Porciano), on the other hand, held that “any one of the three persons is that Being (res), namely, substance, essence or divine nature” but denied a quaternity.24 Their concern appears to be that a denial of aseity to the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity left them less than equal persons in the Godhead, perhaps even less divine than the Father. This was Calvin’s concern too.
Muller argues that Calvin’s thought reflected an existing tradition. Ellis argues for a sharper contrast between Calvin and his predecessors. At the very least, Calvin heightened awareness of subordinationist tendencies still residing in the dominant stream of Trinitarian theology. And yet regardless of the level of continuity and discontinuity between Calvin and the prior tradition, it is obvious from reading in the later tradition of Trinitarian thought that Calvin single-handedly changed the conversation that followed. In subsequent discussions of eternal generation—or even of the Trinity more broadly—Calvin himself was often mentioned, and friends and foes alike put their own constructions on his statements with widely varying levels of faithfulness to his actual views and concerns. The substance of the discussion might not be as interested in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed as was Thomas Gataker’s visitor, but Calvin’s concerns are evident.25
From the perspective of Gataker, his late-night guest was interesting because it illustrated the care that needed to be taken in conversations about the Trinity. He had told the story in part, he explained, because “it is the humour of old men (such as Mr Walker and my selfe) to be now and then telling of tales.”26 He also thought it important because “a man had need to be wary, how he condemne a man of error, of heresie much more, upon a bare relation of words, before he understood what his meaning was.”27 He then illustrated his point with another story! This time it was a story about an uneducated preacher, imprisoned at Newgate, who was asked “whether Christs Deity assumed the person of man or no.” The poor man gave confident affirmation to the defective formulation and Gataker’s friend, who had posed the question, told the troublemaker that what he had affirmed “was grosse heresie.” But as Gataker later recalled, the two ministers did not “hold the silly fellow to be an heretik; no more than those that beare the name of Nestorians in the Eastern parts, are deemed so this day.”28
Gataker’s starting place in debates about eternal generation—or in doctrinal debate generally—was the assumption that people often, accidentally, get it wrong. In his day, there were zealous, uneducated Christians with muddled Christology, as well as orthodox ministers, who offered unhelpful articulations of Trinitarian theology. This made him careful to try as best as possible to understand the meaning and intentions of people’s words, and to place the best constructions on them. As it happened, Gataker’s late-night visitor was actually devious: he was unsuccessfully attempting to use a record of his conversation to help Legate, who was later burned to death for teaching a form of Arianism. Gataker’s visitor was also trying to make hay out of the infelicitous constructions of an unknowing minister who had muddled his explanations of Trinitarian doctrine.
Nonetheless, it almost goes without saying that the incident illustrates how patristic formulations continued to be major reference points in Trinitarian theology. After being assaulted by Arius the church could not return to the innocence of her earliest formulations on the Trinity; she would never feel safe simply by hearing assertions that a preacher believed what the Bible taught. Whatever people in the pews understood, public teachers would be tested through the use of shibboleths that needed to be pronounced correctly. Most of these came from the ancient creeds, for they remained the touchstones of historic orthodoxy as much after the Reformation as they had been before it.
Thomas Gataker was no man’s fool. He understood these things, and by 1600 he was already recognized as a notable scholar and controversialist. And as he modestly put it, he could “make a reasonable good sermon.”29 He was also an independent thinker, and in a day when unconventional theological systems were all the rage, Gataker’s door was an obvious place to knock if one was desperate for a comment that might reveal diversity in the Reformed ranks. By the 1640s Gataker considered himself (and George Walker) to be men of such vintage that they resorted too quickly to telling stories. But he was no doddering old man, and he would become an obvious candidate for the Westminster Assembly. By then one of the oldest members, he would distinguish himself by articulating the most eccentric theological positions held at the gathering, excluding those of Peter Sterry (1613–1672), one of the assembly’s youngest members.
Autotheos: DANIEL FEATLEY AND THE PRISON LETTERS
It was not from the story-telling Gataker that the reading public received its first information about the Westminster Assembly’s own Trinitarian debates, which began in 1643. The English parliament that had summoned the assembly required secrecy from the assembly’s members. No one was permitted to divulge, except to parliament, what the assembly discussed. But when some members of parliament contrived to frame one of the Westminster Assembly’s members for treason, he defended himself by publishing his letters from prison—letters that contained his most important assembly speeches (the texts of which were only slight improvements over the words that he actually spoke).30
The last of the great post-Reformation synods was meeting during a bloody civil war, and while the English Parliament had told 120 ministers that they must attend the assembly, King Charles I had told them they must not. Dr. Daniel Featley (1582–1645) was a king’s man, but since he lived in an area controlled by Parliament, he thought it the better part of prudence to attend. But he had enemies in the House of Commons, and a contractor for the parliamentary army was covertly enlisted to convince Featley that the king was angry with his decision. Feigning friendship, the man told Featley that if he just sent a few of his speeches to the royalist camp, the King would understand why he had disobeyed a royal order. But when Featley surrendered his speeches, they were somehow “intercepted,” and the unfortunate theologian was promptly jailed for communicating with the enemy, his property was seized, and his membership in the Westminster Assembly was terminated. It was a dirty trick, and Featley, in a futile attempt to show that his correspondence was completely innocent, printed his assembly speeches in an anonymous defense of his own conduct.31
From Featley’s perspective, the original purpose of his speeches in the synod was to ensure that there would be no deviance from Nicene orthodoxy in the assembly. The gathering had been commanded by parliament to examine the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles in order to see if they needed any revisions. Featley’s speeches confirmed that debate over the first of the Thirty-Nine Articles, on the doctrine of God, sparked a debate about permissible understandings of the eternal generation of the Son, and debate over the eighth of the Thirty-nine articles, which “heartily recommends the three creeds,” triggered a debate about whether the “God of God” phrase from the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed deserved hearty recommendation or careful qualification.
His spirited offerings quickly zeroed in on the issues of the day. Calvin and his contemporaries were quoted, and Featley, like Calvin, announced that the issue was “easy.” Of course it was not. Featley contradicted himself in his two speeches, and he exposed the different lenses through which his fellow members read the debate and the varying positions they held. Some saw the value of Calvin’s concerns and queried subordinationist readings ascribed to the “God of God phrase.” Others, like Featley, appreciated Calvin’s insights but saw no conflict with the creeds. Still others held to traditional formulations and made no reference to Calvin’s concerns either because they did not share them or because creedal insistence that the Father and the Son were homoousion was sufficient to offset any apprehension about subordination.
Featley’s printed speeches have yet to receive the attention they deserve. One study failed to notice the speeches and concluded that the assembly rejected the concept of eternal generation.32 Another study failed to notice the speeches and concluded that the assembly did not consider the issue.33 Yet another study noticed the speeches, but not the difference between Featley’s own formulations and the quotations that Featley employs. This lack of a careful reading led to a misunderstanding of this aspect of the debate entirely.34
On the first day of debate Featley argued that from the idea of God being of God, it does not follow that the “deity” or divinity “of the Sonne is of the deity of the Father.” Featley understood the creed to be stating that the Son is of the Father, and since the Father is God, and the Son is God, it is appropriate to say that God is of God. It is a point that Featley would make more than once and it reflected Calvin’s views (or Tradition B) closely.35 Nonetheless, Featley’s two speeches on the subject reveal a remarkable inconsistency. As Featley explained (in Latin), one cannot argue from the concrete (by which he means the persons of the Trinity) to the abstract (by which he refers to the deity of those persons), and he offers two examples. The fact that God (i.e., God the Son) suffered does not mean that the deity suffered. Analogously, the fact that Mary is the mother of God (i.e., God the Son) does not entail that she is the mother of deity.36
The persons in the assembly to whom he was speaking must have been quoting Calvin, for Featley next states that it is “easie” to reconcile what he just said with Calvin and his insistence that the Son is autotheos, God of himself. Like an immigrant who intermittently reverts to his native tongue when speaking with friends, Featley explained to his fellow assembly members in a running mix of English and Latin phrases that, as he saw it, “Christ is God of himself, with respect to his essence, but God of God with respect to his person.” But as simple as that solution was to announce, everyone at the assembly knew, and Featley himself admitted, that many theologians (before and after Calvin) considered Christ’s divinity to be generated “per productionem essentiae” or “per communicationem essentiae.”37
“Production” or “creation” of a divine essence in Christ was hospitable to Arian readings. So far as I can tell from my reading thus far, among the assembly’s theologians only Peter Sterry ever used such language. But Sterry was not an ordinary member; he was the only member in the assembly to be so unclear about the nature of justification that the assembly, alarmed, required him to explain himself.38 He was the only member to drift towards an increasingly eloquent, mystical, and incomprehensible theology.39 (Unfortunately, he was also the only member to find himself at a complete loss of words when a woman rushed his pulpit in the middle of a sermon only to expose herself before the congregation.)40
Featley himself focused only on the idea of the communication of divine essence, admitting that Beza and others were willing to speak of Christ’s divinity “conveyed” or “communicated” to him by the Father. This view was not uncommon. Elsewhere the assembly patriarch William Gouge defined the generation of the Son as “the Father . . . communicating his essence to him” (Muller’s Tradition A).41 Mark Jones argues persuasively that Thomas Goodwin holds a similar view (although he is wrong in thinking Featley entirely opposed it).42 Jones also asserts that this is a dominant position amongst the post-Reformation orthodox, even at the assembly. This would be difficult to demonstrate because the record of the debate is scanty and most members, at least in their published works, usually did not attempt to comment on the eternal generation of the Son at all. John Arrowsmith, in his book Theanthropos, attempts an analogy to eternal generation, arguing that John 1 is discussing eternal generation and offering practical reflections on the doctrine.43 But Arrowsmith is unusual.
That is not to say that the meaning of eternal generation is never discussed in any depth. Featley’s speeches indicate that theologians at the assembly held strong opinions on the subject who had not published on the topic. And assembly members like William Strong (d. 1654) offer clearly articulated stands on the subject of eternal generation. As it happened, Strong strongly opposed the idea of a communicated divine essence from the Father to the Son. He also offers an indirect case in point for the importance of withholding judgments on someone’s opinion based on a passing comment. At one point he ambiguously declared, “God doth in the mystery of his eternal generation communicate himself unto his son.”44 But later he clarified what he meant:
I conceive, that it were dangerous to say, that as he is God, so he lives by the Father, though I often find that Divines writing of the eternal generation of the Son, do speak of the Fathers begetting of the Son by the communication of the same Essence, that he is God of God, &c. But surely he that is God, must be without cause, he must have his Being from himself, he must be the first and the last; he that hath his essence from another must have his sufficiency from another, and he that is from another must be unto another; for he that is the first cause, he must also be the last end, Rom. 11.36. For of him, and to him, and through him are all things, &c. and therefore he that is not God of himself, is not God at all. I dare not therefore say, that he hath the Divine Essence communicated by eternal generation, but rather he is à seipso Deus, à Patre filius, essentia ejus principio caret, personae verò principium est ipse Deus: it’s spoken of Christ, therefore not as he lives in himself, as he is God, but as he is Mediator made by the Father the fountain of life unto us.45
This was a robust restatement of Calvin’s own position and perhaps, with his frank acknowledgement that other divines “often” disagreed, an acknowledgement that Calvin’s position was by no means mainstream. Indeed others, perhaps most others, wanted their Calvin and their creeds too. Featley initially denied that the communication of divine essence from Father to Son was entailed by the confession that the Son was “God of God.” “It is sufficient” to say “that his person is generated of the Father” and “safer to say that hee hath communum cum patre, then communicatum”—divinity in common with the Father, not communicated from the father.46 (Featley is right to flag the ambiguities in the word communion—in can mean either conveying or sharing and it is not always clear which meaning divines actually intended.)
And yet on the second day of debate Featley appears to say something different, even contradictory. He argues that the Son was not “essentiated, or natured from the Father”—the standard salvo against Arian and Socinians. But then Featley approves of quotations by Theodore Beza and Josiah Semler: the one arguing for a pre-Calvinian understanding of the communication of essence, and the other arguing that through the begetting of the person of the Son there is an ontologically derivative communication (as in a conveying) of divine essence—what we might call a “Tradition C,” expressed in the Irish Articles decades before the debates of the 1640s. Curiously, Featley asserts that these statements suggesting an indirect conveying of essence are equivalent to Calvin’s own thought, which they are surely not.47
Featley’s perspective on eternal generation is useful because it captures (among other things) what I call the polemical irenicism that characterized much of post-Reformation Trinitarian debate: within the Reformed world, theologians perhaps argued most vigorously with colleagues unwilling to harmonize variant views on eternal generation or the “God of God” clause. But while peacemaking in the assembly, Featley tips his hand when he comments that Calvin’s views are verissime and sanctissime.48 What he means is that Calvin passes the muster of patristic orthodoxy and is therefore most true and most right. What Featley refused to understand was that there were some in the assembly who saw Calvin as their standard, and they required the creeds and church fathers to pass Reformational muster.
Featley held that “the Articles of Religion” and their hearty recommendation of the three creeds “need no alterations at all, but onely an Orthodox explication in some ambiguous phrases, and a vindication against false aspersions.”49 Perhaps this was the case, but by his second speech the debate in the assembly had reached the point where Featley thought it better to flatly reject even idea that the creeds contained “ambiguous phrases,” an idea that he allowed elsewhere.50 Of course there were also those outside the camp; errorists who deliberately sabotage doctrine, and they too feature in Featley’s addresses to the assembly. To his opponents’ objection that creedal “phrases . . . may be taken in an ill sense,” Featley retorted that “so may all the Articles of the Creed . . .; nay so may the whole Scripture, as St Peter teacheth us,” when he says that “the ignorant & unstable pervert” them. “What then,” Featley asks, “must we weed up all the flowers of Paradise, because hereticks, like spiders, suck such juice out of them which they turn into poyson?”51
A NATURAL SON: FRANCIS CHEYNELL AND THE HASTY BOOK PUFF
The assembly debated definitions of the doctrine of the Trinity many times during its meetings, with conversations over the wording of its two Catechisms in 1647 bookending the debates begun over the Thirty-Nine Articles. Along the way, the assembly had dealt repeatedly with unorthodox understandings of the doctrine of God.
Lim raises the possibility that the assembly suspected the Arminian theologian Henry Hammond (1605–1660) of anti-Trinitarianism after the publication of his Practical Catechism.52 In November 1645, Francis Cheynell (bap. 1608–d. 1665) was one of the members asked to investigate the work. He was alarmed that Hammond avoided discussion of the Trinity and the deity of Christ on the grounds that it was a speculative mystery.53 The choice of Cheynell to check the work for heresy suggests that the assembly itself was strongly suspicious of Hammond. Cheynell was an inflexible theologian: in 1638 he was suspended for not bowing to the altar, and in 1640 he was refused a Bachelor of Divinity degree for attacking Arminianism.54 Infamously, in 1644 Cheynell had held a burial service not only for a suspected Socinian, William Chillingworth (1602–1644), but also for Chillingworth’s best-known book, The Religion of Protestants. At the internment, Cheynell commended the “rotten booke” to the grave, expressing his hope that it would “rot with thy Author, and see corruption.”55 Chillingworth, like Hammond, had pulled up short of a commendation of Trinitarian doctrine, which reticence smelled of heterodoxy. This was distressing in itself, but as Lim points out, it was also problematic because anti-Trinitarianism had rationalist foundations and resulted in an arid piety.56
But Hammond and Chillingworth represented the more nuanced cases. There were others that required less discernment. In the autumn of 1644, members reported on Thomas Webb (b. 1624 or 1626) and his blasphemies, one of which seemed to deny the existence of the Holy Spirit, another to minimize the reality of the incarnation.57 From June 1645 to June 1646, the assembly dealt with Paul Best (1590–1657)—or as the scribe liked to write, Paul “Beast”—an anti-Trinitarian preacher and polemicist from northeast England.58 In September of that same year, a committee comprised of assembly members was required by the House of Commons to examine John Biddle (1615/16–1662).59 Biddle held to a mono-personalist construction of the Trinity, and his affirmations of Christ’s divinity were open to the productionem of essence. He asserted as early as May 1644, “I believe that our Saviour Jesus Christ is truly God, by being truly, really and properly united to the only Person of the Infinite and Almighty Essence.”60
The assembly itself offered no advice concerning Biddle in 1646 or thereafter. No doubt the gathering was content with the attention that the House of Commons and the London Provincial Assembly were already giving to his case.61 However, in early 1648, assembly member Cheynell issued a complaint about two books, including a 1647 translation of selections from a 1565 work by Jacobus Acontius (ca. 1520–1566/7). To deal with Acontius, the Westminster Assembly collected a committee, and Cheynell, who thought the book to be “more fit for the fire than for the press” and who was by now considered to be a local expert in Socinianism, was appointed chair.62 What was so awkward was that fellow member John Dury (1596–1680) had endorsed the offending publication. Dury’s anti-Socinian credentials were firmly established by the 1630s and known to many members of the assembly, but as shocking as this may sound, Dury had not read the book carefully prior to puffing it publicly.63
Some of the assembly’s best minds were appointed to the committee, and four days later, on March 3, four more men were added. Wisely, the assembly also appointed to the committee the thoroughly embarrassed Dury, who, in Cheynell’s words, “saw that he had given too faire a testimony” to the book.64 The account that Cheynell gives of the situation agrees substantially with that of the minutes, save that, if anything, he downplayed his own leadership on the committee and the warmth with which the assembly responded to his work.
The committee returned with a report to which Cheynell spoke at some length. Acontius had attempted a rapprochement between the Reformed and the Socinians through a minimalistic statement of faith. He didn’t mention the divinity of the Son or the Holy Spirit, he acknowledged Christ to be the Son of God but not the “natural Son” of God, and he “cautelously decline[d] the orthodox expressions of the ancient church, in the foure first general synods; and doth deliver his creed in such general expressions, that as we conceive the Socinians may subscribe it.”65
The assembly accepted Dury’s offer of a public retraction, condemned the book, and told Cheynell that if he or another member of his committee were to write against Acontius’s errors, it would be acceptable to the body.66 Cheynell responded two years later with a five-hundred-page tome, The Divine Trinunity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The new term didn’t stick.
Philip Dixon judges The Divine Trinunity “a remarkable book. It is balanced, clear and still very readable.”67 In fact, Dixon says elsewhere, “The book is so unlike Cheynell’s previous works—scholarly, fair, balanced, clear, well written, and so lacking in splenetic polemic—that I suspect it may well be the work of an academic ‘ghost-writer’ at the university.”68 (There is no real doubt, despite Dixon’s conjecture, that Cheynell is in fact the book’s author.) Both Lim and Dixon emphasize the significance for Cheynell of the soteriological and sanctifying dimensions of a correct Trinitarian theology.69 Dixon also notes Cheynell’s special emphasis (and optimism!) about grammar: that with the right terms and distinctions the challenges of explaining the fundamental mystery of the Trinity are much reduced.70 Nonetheless, the book requires careful reading, not least on account of the flexible and often creative vocabulary Cheynell deploys. For example, he equates the “divine life” with the nature or essence of God.71 He also equates “divine being” with divine subsisting or subsistence,72 or perhaps “subsisting life,”73 but he insists that “subsistence” is not “essence”; indeed, “peculiar subsistences” are divine “persons.”74
Cheynell often makes his best observations in his extensive Latin notes that run along the margins, the foot, and sometimes the head of the page. Cheynell’s doctrine of the Trinity almost offers, as an explanation of Trinitarian unity and distinction, a doctrine that promises something like perichoresis, circumincessio, or co-inherence. For he says that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “mutually subsist in one another.” But Cheynell’s full understanding is that they “mutually subsist in one another and all of them subsist in the same glorious Godhead.”75 He also puts it the other way but with the same effect, for instance, “the Godhead subsisting in the Holy Ghost as well as in the Father and the Son.”76
Some of his creative proposals may well have struck his mainstream readership as awkward. Cheynell speaks of the distinction between persons as not “absolute, but relative only,”77 or “respective, & modalis.”78 Cheynell makes it very clear elsewhere that he believes in a real distinction between person in the Trinity.79 But with the rise of Socinianism and the radical distinctions between persons of the Trinity, modalism seemed a distant and theoretical threat. This perhaps explains the willingness of some early modern divines to permit Trinitarian language or attempt Trinitarian analogies which are manifestly modalistic.
In discussing the Second Person of the Trinity, Cheynell insists, against Acontius and against the Socinians, that the Son is not God by grace but by “nature.”80 That is to say, “the Son is not begotten of the Fathers seed, or any material substance, because God is a single and pure Act, who doth beget a Son within himself essentially one with himself, and therefore his Sonne doth not subsist out of himself.”81 What he means is that the will of the Father did not precede and produce the Godhead in the Son: “natura divina in filio est incausata.”82 In other words, the divinity of the Son is “native” to the doctrine of the Trinity; there was no decision, no decree that initiates the Son into the fullness of the Triune being. Continuing his anti-Arian argument, “the Son is autotheos, God of himself, and not God by participation, not a different God from the Father, but the same God with the Father, and therefore an Independent, Eternall God, who did not begin to be God.”83 The Divine essence of the Son is not begotten, caused, or produced any more than the essence of the Father.84 It is a point that he asserts often, and at length.
In spite of his insistent language, Cheynell protests not against the idea of communicationem but against the heresy of productionem. He opposes an explicit form of subordinationism, concluding that this is also Calvin’s concern.
Calvin and Beza did not deny that the Godhead was from all eternity communicated to the Son by the Father; onely they say, 1. That the Godhead which is communicated is in it self, of it self truly, properly, essentially divine. . . . 2. Because the Godhead which is communicated, is not begotten; the unbegotten Godhead is communicated to the only begotten Son by an eternal generation. 3. Because the Godhead which is communicated, is not caused, produced, created by the Father.85
But he holds what may be unusual reasons for insisting that the Son is divine by nature. Cheynell thought the production of essence would suggest change (and perhaps temporality) in the Son and in the Father. The begetting of the Son, however, requires no change in the Father: it is a begetting “as eternal as the divine nature it self,” and as mysterious as the doctrine of the Trinity.86 The astonishing fact is that “the Father did beget his Son without change or motion” in himself.87 Contrary to the Socinians, the assertion of the Son’s divinity does not in any way take away from the divinity of the Father. Cheynell is adamant: “We deny that there is an active power in the Father, and a passive power in the Son in respect of generation.”88
Save for a focus on the Father rather than the Son, the concern that there is no active power involved in generation may be the early modern equivalent to the patristic insistence that the Son does not owe his existence to his Father’s will (an assertion that focuses primarily on the Son). Why is this lack of change in the Father so important to Cheynell? Because it is the primacy of the Father that Cheynell is anxious to privilege. Only “the self-subsistence of the Father is Incommunicable, it is proper and peculiar to the First Person to have subsistence from none but himself, and to be the first personal principle which gives subsistence to the other two coessential and coequall persons.”89 Since Cheynell usually uses the language of “subsisting-life,” but not “subsistence,” to refer to the essence of God, his statement here is not completely clear. But there can hardly be any doubt about his assertion that “the Father did from all eternity communicate the living Essence of God to the Son” and did so “by eternal generation,”90 or in his explanation that “the Father doth communicate that selfe same divine and entire essence . . . by begetting the personal subsistence of the Son.”91 In other words, while the divine essence is not begotten, the divine person is begotten, and through the generation of the divine person, the divine essence is communicated. It is an indirect communication: “the divine essence is communicated to the Son, but it is not begotten by the Father.”92 This is similar to Tradition C, also stated in the 1615 Irish Articles.93
Cheynell’s perspective on eternal generation was in essence (if that word may be used in this context) polemical. Elsewhere he complained of Muslims and converts to Islam who denied eternal generation.94 But as most Muslim contacts with Englishmen were pirates and not imams, Cheynell’s main opponents were Socinians. Indeed, this is the key to understanding Cheynell. A case can be made that Cheynell remolds Calvin because Cheynell harbors hope of persuading Socinians that some level of subordination of a divine Son only adds to the glory of the God the Father. Indeed, it appears that Cheynell sees himself scoring an important apologetic point as he indirectly roots the Son’s divinity in the Father. The eternal generation of the Son magnifies the glory of the Father, for the Father communicates divine essence without changing in his own essence—which is itself a glorious miracle, if one can misuse the term to make a point.95
Cheynell insists that we confess the Son and the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father.96 As he puts it, the Father is the “first personal principle subsisting of himself, and by himself; for he received not his subsistence from any other, and he gives subsistence unto two glorious persons equall with himself.”97 The Father’s ability to convey divinity without diminution to his being or glory is reason enough, in Cheynell’s mind, for those who wish to exalt the Father to also adopt the doctrine of the Trinity.
SAME AND EQUAL: THE ASSEMBLY’S TEXTS
What is so striking is that this polemical perspective and these intricate arguments are entirely missing from the Westminster Assembly’s texts. Statements of faith are like military convoys. Some are open-top Jeeps—like the Apostle’s Creed, which openly displays a doctrine but makes no effort to defend it. Some are armored cars, sturdy vehicles for conveying concepts that sacrifice elegance in favor of protecting the truths most often targeted by the enemy. The Chalcedonian Definition and Athanasian Creed come to mind: negations outrank assertions; strong adverbs are marched around in squads of four. Other confessions are elegant limousines with protective glass. The Westminster Confession of Faith, and this may be a stretch, is one of these. It contains dignified statements of doctrine, but it is not impregnable. It has some protection from predictable errors, and yet there is no attempt to make its statements as bulletproof as they could be.
The Revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1643)
The assembly’s seven statements on the Trinity contain careful nuance. But in every case the main effort is to state the doctrine of the Trinity simply and clearly with classic phraseology and without overt polemical comment. The 1643 debate featuring Featley actually left the relevant portions of the Thirty-Nine Articles untouched, save for the addition of proof texts in its support.98 In the seven statements, we hear an emphasis on unity and the Nicene insistence on the unity of divine substance in the Trinity. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions, of infinite power; wisdom; and goodnesse; the maker and preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity, the Father, the Sonne, & the Holy Ghost.”99
There is perhaps an emphasis on the One more than the Three in the Thirty-Nine Articles, with the reference to “unity” and the language of “one substance.” The assembly, however, was left unresolved about what to do about the eighth article commending the creeds. Indeed, the assembly’s debate over the eighth article was the longest running disagreement in the history of the assembly.100
The “Shorter Confession” (1645)
The next opportunity to discuss the Trinity came in 1645 when the assembly determined what people needed to believe in order to become communicant members of the church. This statement is particularly important because it is intended to be minimalist rather than maximalist. It states only what someone must know in order for an eldership to reckon that person a Christian worthy of the LORD’s table. Here, in what I call the assembly’s “Shorter Confession,” the assembly emphasized only the equality between the persons as it declared, in the simplest of terms, that “this God is but one, yet three distinct persons, the father Sonne & Holy Ghost, all equally God.”101
The Draft Catechism (1646)
In 1646 the assembly debated a draft catechism, which dealt extensively with the doctrine of God. Perhaps affirming Calvin’s concerns about subordination, but avoiding any finer distinctions, it affirms generation and procession “from all eternity” and has separate questions confessing that Son and the Spirit are “true God equall with the Father.”
Ordered: 7 “Q: Are ther many Gods, or is ther but one God?
A: ‘Ther is but one God.’ ”Ordered: 8 “Q: How many persons are ther in the Godhead?
A: Ther are three persons in the Godhead: the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are but one God.”Ordered: 9 “Q: Is the sonne equall with the Father in the Godhead?
A: The sonne of God who is ‘the only begotten of the Father’ from all eternity, is true God equall with the Father.”Ordered: 10 “Q: Is the Holy Ghost also God, equall with the Father and the sonne?
A: The Holy Ghost who from all eternity proceeds from the Father and the sonne is also true God, equall with the father and the sonne.”Resolved upon the Q.: ther shall be severall Questions upon the severall Attributes.102
The Confession of Faith, Chapter 2 and Chapter 8 (1646)
The assembly’s fourth and best-known statement, polished and delivered later in the same year, reflects two additional debates. Chapter 8 of the 1646 Confession of Faith discusses the person of the Son simply, but it carefully deploys the language of begottenness, unity of substance, and equality.
8.1 It pleased God, in His eternal purpose, to choose and ordain the LORD Jesus, His only begotten Son, to be the Mediator between God and man. . . .
8.2 The Son of God, the second person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance and equal with the Father, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon Him man’s nature. . . .
Chapter 2 of the confession inserts language redolent of the Father as the principium of the Godhead, but without the specific details that, say, the Irish Articles provide. Readers are told that “the Father is of none”—a statement that is not applied to the other members of the Trinity. And yet with the insistence on unity of substance, the sentence as a whole is hardly a statement of eternal ontological subordination, especially as it does not clarify if the begetting of the “essence” or of “person” is in view, and probably implies the latter: “In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost: the Father is of none, neither begotten, nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.”
The Larger Catechism (1647)
In the following year, the assembly issued its Larger Catechism under the leadership of Anthony Tuckney. As is sometimes the case when the 1647 Larger Catechism and the 1646 Confession are compared, the Larger Catechism offers a slightly revised doctrinal statement. Questions 8–11 subsume eternal generation and procession under “personal properties.” If there was an earlier allowance for the idea that the Father could be the fountain or source of the Godhead, it is gone, and as in the Shorter Confession, the equality between the persons is once again stressed. Equality is not merely asserted, but defended in question eleven.
Q. 8. Are there more Gods than one?
A. There is but one only, the living and true God.
Q. 9. How many persons are there in the Godhead?
A. There be three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one true, eternal God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory; although distinguished by their personal properties.
Q. 10. What are the personal properties of the three persons in the Godhead?
A. It is proper to the Father to beget the Son, and to the Son to be begotten of the Father, and to the Holy Ghost to proceed from the Father and the Son, from all eternity.
Q. 11. How doth it appear that the Son and the Holy Ghost are God equal with the Father?
A. The Scriptures manifest that the Son and the Holy Ghost are God equal with the Father, ascribing unto them such names, attributes, works, and worship, as are proper to God only.
The Shorter Catechism (1647)
Finally, the 1647 Shorter Catechism offered a simple sentence, a reduced form of the corresponding Larger Catechism question: “There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.”
It was almost as brief a statement as that in the “Shorter Confession.” Cheynell had argued that the words “same” and “equal” were important. “Same” emphasized unity, and “equal,” in order to be intelligible, assumed diversity: “We do usually say that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are equall in power, to note a distinction of persons; but when we speak strictly, we do not say that the power of the persons is equall, but we say the power of the persons is the same, to note the unity of their essence.”103 The use of these terms, both here and in the Larger Catechism, and the insistence on unity of substance created a crisp (now classic) Trinitarian summary.
CONCLUSIONS
In these assembly formulations, we have in microcosm the conundrum of post-Reformation Trinitarian theology, reflected even in this preliminary survey. In the first place, these documents contain one main message that is entirely orthodox, helpful, and in a couple of places even elegant, but with little consistency of expression. Positively, this leaves the impression that there is more than one way to get the doctrine of the Trinity right. Negatively, there is no clear trajectory of development in doctrinal expression.
Second, echoes of Calvin’s voice are heard clearly in post-Reformation conversations about the Trinity. Courtesy of Calvin, concerns about aseity and about the eternal subordination of the Son became a standard feature of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conversations about the Trinity. This study of Westminster Assembly–related discussion indicates that Calvin’s thoughts could not be ignored but that his considerations were not simply accepted as the gold standard. This supports Ellis’s contention that Calvin’s understanding of Trinitarian procession and the Son’s aseity became a minority report in the post-Reformation period. According to Ellis, it was rare to find a theologian who followed Calvin’s Trinitarian theology closely.104 Evidence from the Westminster Assembly and its members would tend to corroborate Ellis’s sweeping assertion that “by the end of the seventeenth century there were multiple divergent approaches to advocating the Son’s aseity among the Reformed. Remarkably, Calvin’s own approach to, and conclusions drawn from, autothean language were represented relatively rarely.”105 The Gataker incident shows that there was a broad awareness of the issues among the learned and among those with a vested interest in opposing the doctrine of the Trinity. But the attempts of a Strong or a Tuckney to defend Calvin’s understanding of Christ’s aseity—mentioned in passing above—are matched by Featley’s or Cheynell’s interest in modifying it. As it happens, the published works of most divines who were part of the assembly simply mentioned eternal generation in passing, often as a cause for praise, or to distinguish Christ’s sonship from that of Christians,106 or to distinguish Christ’s eternal sonship from the sonship of his incarnation.107 Sometimes the doctrine is mentioned merely as part of a catalogue of the great mysteries of the faith,108 or simply as a synonym for Christ’s deity.109 But rarely is something more precise is intended, such as an argument that the Father and Son must be of the same substance,110 or that Christ is divine by communication of the divine essence from the Father.111 Further research is needed to shed more light on what individual divines might mean in their passing references to generation and communication.
Third, in considering the insistence of many theologians that Calvin be harmonized with the best of patristic Trinitarian theology, one cannot help but notice that Featley’s polemical irenicism is not a success. Frankly, Featley’s speeches are better than his quotations. His efforts to make his heroes, past and present, speak in unison ultimately lead to a presentation of ideas that is not faithful to any of the figures he admires. Nor is this unique. More than once in this study we encounter a torturous formulation that is intended to conform to both patristic and “Calvinian” statements on eternal generation and results in hair-splitting exercises that, nonetheless, drift toward one of three main positions held in the early modern period. First, the ancient assertion that the Father communicated his divine essence through eternal generation (Tradition A). Second, the contrary insistence, following Calvin, that the divine essence is native to the Son and not communicated at all (Tradition B). And third, the mediating position, seemingly so common in the post-Reformation period, that only the person of the Son is begotten of the Father, but because the person is begotten, the divine essence is thereby communicated (Tradition C).
Herein lies the irony. Statements like the Irish articles have been thought to be closer to Calvin because they discuss the details of communicatio, while actually, these, like the statements of Beza and Semler, or Featley and Cheynell, subvert the Reformer’s concerns. Oddly enough, in its inability or unwillingness to adjudicate between the three main traditions that appear to have been represented in its debating chamber, the Westminster Assembly’s own formulations actually accommodate a broad range of Reformation and post-Reformation Trinitarian perspectives on the meaning and function of the eternal generation of the Son.
1. See H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 132–34.
2. Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 63.
3. J. Coffey, “A Ticklish Business: Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution,” in Heresy, Literature and Politics, ed. D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 112.
4. Coffey, “A Ticklish Business,” 115–17; Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 231.
5. Coffey, “A Ticklish Business,” 110.
6. Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 23.
7. Prior to and during the assembly most writings touching on the doctrine of the Trinity are polemical. Most positive treatments of the subject were authored after the assembly completed its work. For example, see John Arrowsmith, Theanthropos; or God-Man: being an exposition upon the first eighteen verses of the first chapter of the Gospel according to St John (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley and William Wilson, 1660); Samuel Rutherford, Examen Arminianismi (Utrecht: Ex Officina Antonii Smytegelt, 1668), ch. 2; Anthony Tuckney, Praelectiones Theologicae (Amsterdam: Ex Officina Stephani Swart, 1679), lect. on John 17:3 in sec. 1, and ques. 2 and 39 in sec. 2.
8. Lim mentions a March 1646 case where Francis Woodcock denounced Thomas Hawes before two justices of the peace for his views on the doctrine of God. Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 5–6.
9. See Alexander F. Mitchell, The Westminster Assembly: Its History and Standards (London: J. Nisbet, 1883), 148; B. B. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 279n137; Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 338–41; C. B. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: The Westminster Assembly and Theological Debate, 1643–1652” (PhD Diss., University of Cambridge, 2005), 1:240–49; Robert Letham, The Westminster Assembly: Reading Its Theology in Historical Context (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009), 168; J. V. Fesko, The Theology of the Westminster Standards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 173–74.
10. Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 7–15.
11. Sarah Mortimer places Socinianism within Protestantism in Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14. It was, in the sense that it was against Catholicism. Nonetheless, in disagreeing with most Protestants about the nature of God, in asserting an ethical rather than a redemptive soteriology, and in redrawing Protestant lines between revelation and reason, it is not entirely obvious that what Socinus and other anti-Trinitarians had to offer was not a tertium quid.
12. Gataker, An answer to Mr. George Walkers vindication, or rather fresh accusation . . . (London: E.G., 1642), 39.
13. Ibid., 38.
14. Ibid., 38–39.
15. Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 40.
16. Brannon Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–102.
17. The best brief historical-theological treatments of Calvin’s thought are provided by Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993), 197–211 and Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 4:324–26 (hereafter PRRD). See also Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998), 149–52; and for the fullest account, B. B. Warfield, Calvin and Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 189–284.
18. Warfield, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” 233. For Warfield this was the main object of Calvin’s development of Trinitarian theology; for Ellis this is an important byproduct of Calvin’s defense of divine simplicity.
19. Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son, 57; see also 141–42.
20. Inst. 1.13.25.
21. Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son, 47; see also 33.
22. Calvin’s theological position is found throughout his commentaries, extant sermons, and polemical statements, but especially in his 1559 Institutes, which contains his latest debate with Gentilis and reserves more than five times the space for the doctrine of the Trinity than his 1536 Institutes (see the discussion in Warfield, Calvin and Calvinism, 218–24).
23. T. F. Torrance asserts but does not substantiate that Calvin was heavily dependent on Gregory Nazianzen: “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity in Gregory Nazianzen and John Calvin,” in Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994) and Muller’s contrary view in PRRD, 4:326.
24. For the medieval background to the debate see Muller, PRRD, 4:17–58, esp. 36, 51, and 58.
25. See for example assembly member Anthony Tuckney’s Praelectiones Theologicae, 1–19, 270–79. On p. 14, he argues that his formulation is absolved from alleged quaternity problems.
26. Gataker, An Answer to Mr. George Walkers Vindication, 38.
27. Ibid., 39.
28. Ibid., 40.
29. Brett Usher, “Gataker, Thomas (1574–1654),” in The Oxford Dictionaryof National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
30. Working with incomplete copies of both sources, S. W. Carruthers errs in thinking that neither the minutes nor Lightfoot mention Featley’s speeches. S. W. Carruthers, The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1943), 106–7; curiously, even in discussing Featley’s speeches Carruthers does not mention the assembly’s autotheos controversy.
31. See Daniel Featley, Sacra Nemesis, the Levites Scourge, or, Mercurius Britan. Civicus disciplin’d (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1644); Featley, The gentle lash, or, The vindication of Dr. Featley, a knowne champion of the protestant religion (n.p., 1644); and Arnold Hunt, “Featley, Daniel (1582–1645),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
32. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 338–41.
33. Letham, The Westminster Assembly, 168.
34. Fesko, The Theology of the Westminster Standards, 173–74.
35. Featley, Sacra Nemesis, 15, 17.
36. Ibid., 15.
37. Ibid., 15.
38. C. B. Van Dixhoorn, ed., Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2:189 (Oct. 11, 1643; Sess. 72); hereafter MPWA.
39. In the earliest reference to eternal generation that I can find in Sterry’s work, he writes that “the love that the Father hath to Jesus Christ, is that very love by which he brings out Jesus Christ as the second person in the Trinity,” but clarifies that “the eternal generation of the LORD Jesus . . . is the same from eternity to eternity.” Peter Sterry, Free Grace Exalted (London, 1670), 8. Five years later he refers to “the first Birth and Production, the eternal Generation of the Son from the Father in the Trinity.” Peter Sterry, A Discourse of the freedom of the will (London: At the Miter near Temple-Bar, in Fleetstreet, 1675), 43. Eight years later Sterry compares “the Eternal Generation in Heaven” to “the Creation in Paradise,” “Regeneration,” and other “Love-Births, Love-Unions” in The rise, race and royalty of the kingdom of God in the Soul of man (London: Thomas Cockerill, 1683), 310.
40. [David Brown], The Naked Woman, or a rare epistle sent to Mr. Peter Sterry (London: At the Angle in Paul’s Church-yard, 1652), 8.
41. William Gouge, A learned and very useful commentary on the whole epistle to the Hebrews (London: A. M., T. W., and S. G., 1655), 1:33 (sect. 43).
42. Mark Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth: The Christology of the Puritan Reformed Orthodox Theologian, Thomas Goodwin, 1600–1680 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 276n114.
43. Arrowsmith, Theanthropos, 17, 21, 23–24.
44. William Strong, A discourse of the two covenants: wherein the nature, differences, and effects of the covenant of works and of grace are distinctly, rationally, spiritually and practically discussed (London: J. M., 1678), 182.
45. Strong, A discourse of the two covenants, 328.
46. Featley, Sacra Nemesis, 15.
47. This reading perhaps betrays that Featley is here following Robert Bellarmine’s benevolent conflation of Beza and Semler with Calvin, through which the cardinal deduces that Calvin’s Trinitarian theology is not heretical. For a discussion of Bellarmine’s reading of Calvin on this point, see Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son, 109–12.
48. Featley, Sacra nemesis, 18.
49. Featley, The gentle lash, 24.
50. Ibid., 31.
51. Featley, Sacra Nemesis, 18.
52. Arminius affirms communication of divine essence, affirming that the Son is God himself but not God of himself. See Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son, 113–20. “While the Remonstrants were heirs to Arminius’s theology, their rejection of autothean language reflects a much deeper inclination towards subordinationism” (p. 120); cf. his discussion of Episcopius, 120–27.
53. See MPWA 3:705 (Nov. 11, 1645; Sess. 532) and Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 175–76.
54. Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 174.
55. Cheynell, Chillingworthi Novissima (London: At the Brazen Serpent in Paul’s Church-yard, 1644), sig., E3.
56. Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 172–216.
57. MPWA 3:467 (Nov. 22, 1644; Sess. 328).
58. MPWA 1:63; for the first mention of Best, 3:614; for the final mention, 4:38–42. The most sympathetic account of Best’s beliefs and his trial can be found in McLachlan, Socinianism. According to McLachlan, while Best affirmed the Trinity, he denied that it was “of three co-equall persons” and “that the Godhead of Jesus Christ is co-equal, co-eternal, and co-existent with the Godhead of the Father.” McLachlan, Socinianism, 154, 158. See also Nigel Smith, “ ‘And if God was one of us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and anti-Trinitarian heresy in seventeenth-century England,” in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2006), 160–84.
59. MPWA 4:302 (Sept. 28, 1646; Sess. 719).
60. McLachlan, Socinianism, 170. By 1646 he denied the deity of the Holy Spirit, ranking him third after the Father and the Son. McLachlan, Socinianism, 172–73.
61. For the assembly’s interest in Biddle and the allegation, see Lim, Mystery Unveiled, 39–40. There is no evidence that the assembly responded to John Biddle’s publications with an attempt to see him executed.
62. MPWA 4:737 (Feb 28, 1648; Sess. 1020); Cheynell, The Divine Trinunity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (London: T.R. and E.M, 1650), 443; Cheynell, The Rise, growth and danger of Socinianism (London: At the Brazen Serpant in Paul’s Church-yard, 1643).
63. For Dury’s views on Socinianism, see Mortimer, Reason and Religion, 54.
64. MPWA 4:739 (March 3, 1648; Sess. 1024).
65. Cheynell, Divine Trinunity, [453]–455.
66. MPWA 4:741 (March 8, 1648; Sess. 1027); Cheynell, Divine Trinunity, 445, [453]-457.
67. Philip Dixon, “Nice and Hot Disputes”: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2006), 60.
68. Ibid., 55.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 56, 60.
71. He speaks of the “Son of God, who hath the same divine life, nature, essence with the Father” (Cheynell, Divine Trinunity, 194). Nonetheless, when Cheynell writes that “The Son hath life in himself, is life it self, hath life essentially,” he only means that the Son is able to give life himself, and that according to John 5:26 he has the ability to pass on life (ibid., 56, 189).
72. Cheynell, Divine Trinunity, 54, 55.
73. Ibid., 57, 58.
74. Ibid., 231.
75. Ibid., 60.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 59–60.
78. Ibid., 59, note g.
79. Ibid., 183–84.
80. Ibid., 231.
81. Ibid., 195.
82. Ibid., 231n57.
83. Ibid., 158.
84. Ibid., 231.
85. Ibid., 232.
86. Ibid., 55.
87. Ibid., 195. Elsewhere Cheynell explains, “The Son receives nothing from the Father as from an external cause but as from an intrinsecall principle rather than the cause, for the Son doth not depend upon the Father as an effect upon its cause” (p. 189–90).
88. Ibid., 157. Cf. p. 179, where he explains that this is because the generation of the Son is eternal.
89. Ibid., 230. Elsewhere: “I call the Father an Intrinsicall principle of the Sons subsistence, because the Father doth beget the Son of, and in himself in the unity of the same Godhead” (ibid., 190). For the Father as “first principle,” see ibid., 56, 61, 62, 179.
90. Ibid., 189: “The Son hath life in himself, is life it self, hath life essentially.”
91. Ibid., 231.
92. Ibid., 231.
93. “The essence of the Father does not beget the essence of the Son; but the person of the Father begetteth the person of the Son, by communicating His whole essence to the person begotten from eternity.” James T. Dennison Jr., ed., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2014), 4:92 (Art. 9).
94. Cheynell, The rise, growth, and danger of Socinianisme, 31.
95. Cheynell, Divine Trinunity, 56; cf. a similar comment about Son and Spirit on p. 58.
96. Ibid., 56.
97. Ibid. See also “first personal principle” (p. 61) and “first personal principle of subsisting life” (p. 62, 179).
98. “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions, of infinite power; wisdom; and goodnesse; the maker and preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity, the Father, the Sonne, & the Holy Ghost.” MPWA 5:324 (Doc. 122).
99. MPWA 5:324 (Doc. 122).
100. Chad B. Van Dixhoorn, “New Taxonomies of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–52: The Creedal Controversy as Case Study,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 6, no. 1 (2004): 82–106.
101. MPWA 5:189 (Doc. 67).
102. MPWA 4:280, 282 (Sept. 15, 1646; Sess. 708).
103. Cheynell, Divine Trinunity, 183.
104. Ellis, Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son, 103–68.
105. Ibid., 3.
106. See William Bridge, The Works of William Bridge (London: Peter Cole, 1649), 75; Jeremiah Burroughs, Gospel-conversation (London: Peter Cole, 1650), 89; Anthony Burgess, CXLV expository sermons upon the whole 17th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John (London: A. Miller, 1656), 264, 293, 584–85; Burgess, A treatise of original sin (London, 1659), 198, 389; Burroughs, Gospel-revelation in three treatises (London: Printed for Nath. Brook . . ., 1660), 107; Edmund Calamy, A Compleat collection of farewel sermons (London, 1663), 54; Joseph Caryl, An exposition with practical observations upon the three first chapters of the book of Iob (London: G. Miller, 1643), 80; (repr., London, 1647), 462; Francis Cheynell, An account given to the Parliament by the ministers sent by them to Oxford (London: F. K., 1647), 48; Cheynell, The rise, growth, and danger of Socinianisme, 31; Daniel Featley, Clavis mystica: a key opening divers difficult and mysterious texts of Holy Scripture (London: R. Y., 1636), 455, 475; Featley, The dippers dipt, or, The anabaptists duck’d and plung’d over head and eares, at a disputation in Southwark (London: N. Bourne and R. Royston, 1645), 3; William Gouge, A guide to goe to God (London: G. M., 1626), 10; Gouge, A learned and very useful commentary on the whole epistle to the Hebrews, 1:13 (sect. 15), 1:35 (sect. 47), etc.; Gouge, Of domesticall duties (London: John Haviland, 1622), 124–25; William Greenhill, An exposition continued upon the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth chapters of the prophet Ezekiel (London: M. S., 1651), 5; Greenhill, Sermons of Christ, his last discovery of himself (London: R. I., 1656), 23; John Lightfoot, A commentary upon the Acts of the Apostles . . . from the beginning of the Booke, to the end of the twelfth chapter (London: R. C., 1645), 125; Lightfoot, The works of the Reverend and learned John Lightfoot (London: W. R., 1684), 1:672; Edward Reynolds, Three treatises of the vanity of the creature (London: W. Hunt, 1631), 452; Lazarus Seaman, The diatribe proved to be paradiatribe (London: T. R. & E. M., 1647), 7; Obadiah Sedgwick, The bowels of tender mercy sealed in the everlasting covenant (London: E. Mottershed, 1661), 197–98. Frequently comments are associated with Isa 53:8 or Acts 8:33.
107. See G. Walker, The key of saving knovvledge (London: Tho. Badger, 1641), 69–70.
108. Lightfoot, The works of the Reverend and learned John Lightfoot, 1:576.
109. This is especially true with Anthony Burgess in his anti-Socinian writings. See Anthony Burgess, An expository comment, doctrinal, controversal, and practical upon the whole first chapter to the second epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (London: A. M., 1661), 136–37; and Burgess, A treatise of original sin, 389.
110. William Gouge, An exposition on the vvhole fifth chapter of S. Iohns Gospell (London: [H. Lownes, R. Young; and J. Beale], 1630), 24 and perhaps John Wallis, Three sermons concerning the sacred Trinity (London: Tho. Parkhurst, 1691), 22.
111. Gouge, Hebrews, 1:33 (sect. 43).