This is a book for specialists, and patient ones at that. Nonetheless, Paul Lim's Mystery Unveiled represents an important and welcome contribution to what has correctly been recognized—thanks to the relatively recent work of Justin Champion, Philip Dixon, Sarah Mortimer, Martin Mulsow, Nigel Smith, Stephen Snobelen, and others—as a significant field of study. There have been forerunners of course. Writing in a partial hagiographic vein late nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century denominational histories—notably by the Unitarians Alexander Gordon, H. J. McLachlan and Earl Morse Wilbur—generally tended to legitimate the longevity, continuity, and indeed relative independence of English anti-Trinitarian thought by examining its antecedents and constructing a largely unbroken genealogy of their faith—one, moreover, perpetuated despite prolonged periods of religious persecution throughout the British Isles (punishments included imprisonment and even execution). Building on these foundations modern scholarship has focused on Continental influences, the ways in which Trinitarian controversies played out as theological disputations, and aspects of Socinian thought, especially its contribution to the natural law tradition, and the formulation of a doctrine of non-resistance. Perhaps understandably greater attention still has been reserved for the question of whether anti-Trinitarianism, or what Lim calls “nontrinitarian modes of discourse” (13), contributed to the “rise of secularism” and the emergence of Enlightenment rationalism (9, 18).

Here Lim brings a theologian's perspective not only to some well-known sources, but also to a handful of unfamiliar ones, particularly manuscript sermon notes and accounts of religious disputations. Presumably for reasons of space Lim makes no concessions to students new to early modern England, and only a few to those not already immersed in its culture of religious controversy. Rightly cautioning against adopting a simplistic narrative detailing the “decline of trinitarian orthodoxy” (319, 322), Lim insists that “not all the nontrinitarians of the mid-seventeenth century were precursors of Deists” (68), indeed that “Socinianism cannot, in good conscience, be seen as a mere precursor to Enlightenment rationalism or the emerging secularism” (38). “Whiggish inevitablism” should certainly be avoided (9). All the same, I find Lim's conclusion quite puzzling since so much of this book provides excellent evidence to the contrary—or at the very least, for the gradual development of an alternative more “rational,” reasonable form of Christianity. Thus despite widespread English Protestant hostility to the papacy, even identification of the pope with antichrist, Lim demonstrates how certain anti-Trinitarian writers—both during the English Revolution and after the Restoration —regarded belief in the Trinity as a superstition meant to buttress papal power. Besides this linkage between anti-Trinitarianism and anti-popery, Lim also illustrates how these same authors conjoined the Trinity with tradition and transubstantiation—likewise regarding transubstantiation as an “illogical and unscriptural” superstition (308). Add to this, first the evident anticlericalism of many anti-Trinitarians together with Thomas Hobbes's and others' hostility to priest craft, and second the close attention paid to early ecclesiastical history by Andrew Marvell and particularly Richard Baxter, who ransacked “the past for possible precedents of the persecutory behaviors of the Restoration bishops and their councils” (258), and John Toland's notorious attack on the supposed mysteries of Christianity—not to mention his Nazarenus—begins falling into place. Then there was the sustained assault on mystery itself—an anti-Trinitarian “shibboleth of popery” (2), ranging from Paul Best's Mysteries Discovered. Or . . . that night of generall Errour and Apostasie . . . so long misled with Romes hobgoblins (1647) to Jacques Souverain's meta-critique of the “Platonic Captivity” of the Primitive Church. Accepting Erasmus's initial excision of the Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7–8) from the canon, the specific objective of these anti-Trinitarian reformers was to divest the Johannine prologue (John 1:1–18) of its Platonist undertones, and more generally to demonstrate why literal readings of scripture were usually preferable to allegorical. Even so, this was not simply a reassertion of foundational Reformation dogma: sola Scriptura. For in this protracted struggle for interpretative authority the appeal to exegetical precedent was undoubtedly crucial. Accordingly, drawing on Jean-Louis Quantin's important work on patristic sources, Lim shows how advocates of anti-Trinitarian positions appropriated and privileged the writings of ante- and anti-Nicene church fathers in their contemporary polemical battles.

As Lim highlights, quoting two leading London Presbyterians, the most “‘dangerous and infectious’” of all heresies was denial of the Trinity since “the entire foundation and edifice of Christianity depended on it” (157). Consequently Trinitarians from across the English theological spectrum—Catholics, Laudians, Calvinists, even Arminians—arrived at similar conclusions from different premises: universal condemnation of what they regarded as John Biddle's anti-Trinitarian heresies. Indeed John Owen, then vice chancellor of Oxford University, was expressly commissioned by the Council of State to refute Biddle's Twofold Catechism (1654). These divergent reactions and the wider context are the focus of an illuminating discussion spanning two chapters. Another, regrettably the weakest, attempts to introduce the threat of anti-Trinitarianism into “the milieu of the world turning upside down” (122). Having duly acknowledged the problematic nature of polemic, Lim then proceeds by seemingly adopting, to a degree, the mind-set of Presbyterian heresiographers (themselves serial users and abusers of Patristic texts). Thus we read of “megalomaniacal” notions and messiahs, “inordinate spiritual navel gazing,” and, disconcertingly, the “lunatic fringe” (80, 81, 94, 95, 114). Unfortunately his chronology of manifestations of radical religious beliefs is sometimes erroneous (80, 81, 109), while elsewhere he takes questionable evidence at face value (85–87), even ostensibly discussing a fictitious personage as though she was real (114–15). Yet Lim is right to emphasize the pervasive fear of anti-Trinitarianism, observing that “the term Socinian had a multiple valence, almost as revelatory of the religious identity of the one hurling that epithet as much as that of the alleged Socinian” (277). Furthermore, although anti-Trinitarian doctrinal errors were not enumerated in the Blasphemy Act of August 1650 (unlike the Presbyterian-promoted legislation of May 1648), Lim notes that claims of divine, messianic or prophetic status could be construed by contemporaries as a “functional,” if not explicit, “rejection of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity” (118). Occasionally, and partly because the Act's strict wording limited the judiciary's room for manoeuvre, that was actually the case: John Robins's followers were indicted for maintaining blasphemous opinions against the Trinity, while the heresiarchs John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton were similarly tried for denying the Trinity. Add to this the unorthodox Trinitarian implications of “the Familist doctrine of being ‘Godded with God’” (88), the light within espoused by Quakers and their fellow travelers, or pantheistic speculation more broadly, and Lim has helped open up a fruitful area of research. So all in all there is a good deal in Mystery Unveiled to reward steadfast readers.