In the second edition of his book A practical view of the prevailing religious system of professed Christians (1797), William Wilberforce noted that since the appearance of the first edition he had read Andrew Fuller's The Calvinistic and Socinian systems examined and compared as to their moral tendency (1793). Wilberforce congratulated the author for ‘his masterly defence of the doctrine of Christianity, and his acute refutation of the opposite errors’. The orthodoxy that Fuller represented was the Evangelical faith that he shared with Wilberforce; the ‘opposite errors’ were those canvassed in the late eighteenth century by the Socinians who preferred to call themselves Unitarians. Fuller's book is the one under review here. Andrew Fuller was the minister of the Particular Baptist church at Kettering from 1782 until his death in 1815. Apart from serving as the first secretary of the pioneering Baptist Missionary Society, founded in 1792, Fuller was the ablest and most influential Evangelical Nonconformist theologian of his generation. He was already known as the author of The gospel worthy of all acceptation (1785), a restatement of Calvinism in the version developed in America by Jonathan Edwards. This book urged that all had a duty to believe the Gospel since belief or unbelief was not imposed by the Creator but was part of the moral responsibility of each individual. That was the theological rationale for the expansive form of Calvinistic Protestantism outside the Church of England that, alongside Methodism, swept Britain during the subsequent half century. Its intellectual rival, the Unitarian system increasingly espoused by the rational Dissenters, was the object of Fuller's critique in 1793. That text has now been republished for the first time in a critical edition edited by Tom Nettles, Michael Haykin and Baiyu Andrew Song, all associated with the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. They are in warm sympathy with the convictions of Fuller but maintain a proper scholarly detachment.

The text opens with a repudiation of a principle culled from Joseph Priestley, the leading exponent of Unitarian opinions. Priestley remained the chief opponent in Fuller's sights, although, surprisingly, the most substantial of his works, The history of the corruptions of Christianity (1782), is never targeted. Priestley's lesser writings, together with those of the like-minded Theophilus Lindsey, Thomas Belsham and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, are subjected to merciless dissection in a series of fifteen letters to ‘Christian brethren’. In an introductory letter Fuller explains that he is unwilling to concede the title of ‘Unitarians’ to his opponents since he too believes in the unity of the Godhead and so calls them ‘Socinians’. He then sets out his case based on the relative effects of the two forms of belief. How successful, he asks, are they in winning various types of convert? How powerful are they in fostering moral behaviour? And how calculated are they to advance piety? He includes a letter on the question of which one better promotes happiness and ends with a letter devoted to the pointed contention that Socinianism is close to infidelity. The editions of 1802 and 1810 add a postscript replying to the defences of Unitarianism mounted by its champions against Fuller. This critical edition also includes a more substantial, separately published reply to Joshua Toulmin and John Kentish, the chief Unitarian protagonists, and a further short letter responding to another, Thomas Belsham. The letters and the additional items contain a considerable quantity of repetition, but the reasoning is tight and forensic. Although the argument is professedly about the outcomes of the different belief systems, Fuller's method allows copious appeals to Scripture. He maintains as his central contention that the Bible teaches that Christ is God and redeemed humanity by his cross: ‘take away the deity and atonement of Christ’, Fuller writes, and ‘the gospel is annihilated’ (p. 196). Perhaps what is most striking to the historian is that Fuller is clearly deeply immersed in the categories of thought of the Enlightenment. He commends ‘the plainest dictates of reason’ (p. 237), urges ‘free enquiry’ (p. 267) and, following Edwards, applauds ‘benevolence towards being in general’ (p. 325). His whole method, the examination of ‘the moral tendency’ (p. 47) of the contrasting bodies of theology, is designed to assess them in terms of their utility. Here are some of the building blocks of Enlightenment thinking. The entire work provides solid evidence (against many older commentators) of the compatibility of religious orthodoxy with the progressive ideas of the age.

The editors have added an introduction and footnotes to Fuller's text. The introduction sets out salient features of Fuller's case, helpfully adding a comment on the editions published during the author's lifetime but not locating his argument in relation to the views of other contemporary opponents of Socinianism such as John Jamieson (though he is discussed on p. 285) and John Pye Smith (though he is mentioned on p. 39). The footnotes reprint those incorporated by Fuller himself, carefully distinguished from those added by the editors. The editorial footnotes concentrate on identifying differences between the versions of the book issued between 1793 and 1810, differences which are rarely significant but do include the point that after the first edition Fuller changed the title of the last letter so that it attacked not Deism (the traditional enemy of orthodoxy) but infidelity (the new bugbear). The fresh footnotes also identify the sources of Fuller's quotations from his opponents and the individuals named in the text, usually citing biographical references, though never the Oxford dictionary of national biography. Capitalisation, italicisation and punctuation, say the editors, have been modernised, a policy which will not have altered the sense but may have risked modifying Fuller's emphases. One mistake is the suggestion that Richard Price ‘taught Arianism and Socinianism’ (p. 164 n. 791), whereas he was a stout Arian, disputing Priestley's Socinianism. But the commentary is otherwise reliable and the text is presented attractively. This is one of the earlier items in a projected multi-volume edition of Fuller's writings with Michael Haykin, one of those responsible for this book, as its general editor. That valuable enterprise is making available the intellectual foundations of nineteenth-century Evangelical Nonconformity.