Brian Walton and the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta

A polyglot Bible is a Bible with the same text (the New Testament, for example) printed in more than one language and arranged for easy reference. Fifty years ago it was common for Catholic and Protestant seminarians to have a New Testament in their desk sets with facing Latin and Greek texts. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discovery of new manuscripts gave exuberant incentive to publish polyglot texts of Scripture.Footnote ³ Reigning over all physical artifacts of the book trade across Europe were the four great polyglot editions of the entire Bible.Footnote ⁴

A small body of secondary literature discusses the polyglot phenomenon. In an excellent article, Peter N. Miller summarizes the circumstances:

Studies by Richard Kroll and especially David Katz have also valuably shown the importance of Walton's work, although Kroll's remarks about a reliable, common text need further thought on his part. Indeed, Walton was certain that establishing a common, reliable text in each of the languages represented would express Christianity's intellectual strength, not any weakness. Evidence of the same content in different language versions would testify to the universality of the Christian revelation.Footnote ⁶

The ecclesial turmoil of the 1640s and 1650s, far from hampering the London polyglot, made it possible. The majority of its editors, including Walton, had been ousted from their livings, or academic posts, for being Anglicans, in Walton's case a high and vocal Anglican.Footnote ⁷ The few Presbyterian editors had gained their leisure by distancing themselves from the Independent radicals in power. Henry J. Todd gives valuable information about the out-of-work editors and their specialties: each editor contributed his own wherewithal, both in the knowledge of language, as well as in the sharing and supervision of old and new typefaces.Footnote ⁸ The New Testament books were printed, in parallel columns, in their different “translations”: Hebrew, Samaritan, Greek, Chaldean, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopian, Persian, and the Latin Vulgate. The Old Testament books were printed likewise in the languages in which they were available. One of the paradoxes of the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta is that, although Walton was the general editor, no single editor, including himself, appears to have had sufficient knowledge to read and thus to edit the whole. Walton was a good businessman, however; later folios were not printed until the earlier ones were sold, and in one of the first such ventures in England, subscriptions were taken. Moreover, the production values set were both attractive and affordable.

Walton's polyglot is commonly praised as exhibiting an especially fine “critical sense”—praise which, given most modern scholars’ far more limited knowledge of language, needs definition. Presumably, it involves at least two scholarly virtues. First, Walton found space for information that helped the knowledgeable reader make decisions: notes, for example, that direct the reader to prefer this to that “reading.” Some—language versions existed in rare, others in more plentiful texts, each perhaps with variations through which Walton and his editors helped the reader navigate. Second, Walton supplied Latin prolegomena that addressed both general topics and the particular history of each language version. Never published in English, these prolegomena gave current scholarly fact as well as some of the philological and theological suppositions within which Walton worked. I give their kernel in the next few paragraphs, from prolegomenon 6, “De Variis in Scriptura Lectionibus,” and 7, “De Textuum. Originariorum Integritate.”Footnote ⁹

By the mid-seventeenth century, Scripture study had correctly distinguished different texts by degree of importance—for example, and first of all, the autographa, or written originals of a book or books of Scripture. These originals, inspired texts, existed no longer. From the autographa translations were made, or versions, in various languages; Walton gives nine possible versions for the New Testament. But these versions themselves existed in various manuscripts and codices: there may be scores of Latin or Greek copies, written at different times and places, with hundreds of discrepancies among them. With the seventeenth-century discovery of more and more codices, the job of a textual critic became more important. The critic sought not so much to construct copies of the original autographa as to construct a reasonable version of what the Scriptures might have been in the early Church.

Walton branches out, practically and theoretically. Theoretically, it is impossible that God would set Scripture up to reveal himself and then allow it to become corrupt in any essential matter; his Providence protects Scripture from corruption in essentials.Footnote ¹⁰ This doctrine of providential protection, already mixing theology with the empirical data available, would dominate theological discourse as a mixed proof, from science and from faith, for a hundred years. Thus the discrepancies in the codices, whether real variants or simply mistakes, cannot concern any essential item in the divine plan. Mistakes occur only in the adiaphora, matters inessential to God's plan and our salvation.Footnote ¹¹ Walton quotes one of his favorite authors, Ludovicus Capellus (1585–1658), and gives a list of some essentials: the history of creation, of divine providence, of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and so on. Contemporary Anglicans rarely make the list so specific, fearful perhaps of leaving an essential out. Likewise, the shorter the list, the fewer arguments caused. Capellus, like Walton, assures us that the whole design of God is so plainly revealed in Scripture that no erroneous details have corrupted it. The distinction between essential and inessential becomes a primary constituent of Anglican apologetics from 1660 on, like the doctrine of providential preservation of the Scripture text.

Practically, Walton gives rules to direct the choice of the better codex and better variant reading. Walton makes it clear that the search for a better reading will never produce more than “moral certainty,” not mathematical certainty. This distinction too would become a mainstay of Anglican hermeneutics, though it applied across a much wider area than Scripture interpretation. Walton disagrees with those who say that listing variants in codices, and even in versions, will weaken the divine authority of Scripture. Rather, variants may help us find truer readings. No one can deny the existence of variants: to ignore them proclaims our willful ignorance and strengthens the hands of the enemies of the Church.

Walton prefers the Hebrew to all other versions, both on philological and philosophical grounds.Footnote ¹² He feels that Jewish reverence for the Word makes it very unlikely that through history Jews would alter it; indeed, scholars have found that differences between the Hebrew and other versions are not significant.Footnote ¹³ Most of all, Walton repeats again and again the central theme of God's providence:

Later in the Restoration these assurances would be repeated frequently, especially as the empirical evidence that essentials had been corrupted would be heard more prominently. Walton insists that the Scripture remains pure because God has preserved it and because empirical studies of the text confirm it. In the hundred or so years following Walton's Biblia Polyglotta, the battle about efficacious proofs centered on these issues.

John Owen and Self-Authenticating Scripture

John Owen (1616–1683), New Model army chaplain, adviser to Cromwell, Independent, country parson, and prolific author of theological books and tracts, wrote almost simultaneously with and in opposition to Walton in his Divine Originall… Footnote ¹⁵ Walton's prolegomena and the Divine Originall offer differing views on the relationship of learning to Scripture, the existential situation of the reader, how to assess variant readings, the use of translations, miracles, and inspiration.

Since at least the Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century, most theologians, with intervals of dissent, were Christian humanists: they believed that secular learning greatly assisted in understanding the Bible. Walton's texts and prolegomena follow this tradition and, indeed, reconstitute it for a new age. In the humanist tradition, especially in the seventeenth century, knowledge of the authors of Scripture, their milieu, scriptural contexts, and, of course, languages rendered religious belief more defensible. Most Anglican writings of this time dealt with rational support for the truth of Scripture and rationally attacked opposition. These writings need not have convinced atheists, as they sometimes claimed to do, but they provided serviceable support to those who were prone to believe. Sometimes, as in the cases of Walton's Biblia, the published version of the Boyle Lecture, and other folio sets of orthodoxy, conviction possibly came more from the physical heft of the volumes than from their intellectual evidence. Simple possession of these formidable volumes and the assurance that a member of the communion had sorted out technical problems sufficed to encourage trust that Anglicanism had it right. In the late seventeenth century the English were proud of both Walton's work and the beauty of the Authorized Version of 1611 but not necessarily on a critical basis.

Owen honors the scholarly work of Walton's editors and, in his comments on Greek and Hebrew versions, gives evidence of his own competence.Footnote ¹⁶ But the existential situation of Owen's reader is radically different from that of Walton's. In this situation, only the Bible and the reader figure, along with the Holy Spirit, who makes this simple encounter dynamic. The Scriptures “abundantly and uncontrollably manifest themselves to be the Word of the living God.”Footnote ¹⁷ This encounter does not need knowledge of ancient languages and customs, nor will it fail if arguments about essential or nonessential matters cannot be heard. These things can be useful somewhere or other but miss the central point of the absolute need for a divine force to stir the reader to a living knowledge of the Word. This is what Scripture does and only Scripture can do. It demands no university degree to be understood: it is self-authenticating and self-evidencing. For the believer, the glorious experience results in a reassuring and irrefutable faith. The experience of nonbelievers is at base more moral than intellectual: “I leave the Word with them; and if it evidence not it selfe unto their consciences, it is because they are blinded by the God of this World.”Footnote ¹⁸ Those who believe on the word of others, moreover, “perhaps never had sense of any real transaction between God and their souls, who scarce never perused the Word seriously in their lives.”Footnote ¹⁹

Lists of variant readings, especially Walton's, infuriate Owen, who notes that “the collection of them makes up a book bigger than the New Testament it selfe.”Footnote ²⁰ Christian believers should not be spending their time building up objections to faith; such collecting is unbecoming to a “Christian, Protestant Divine.”Footnote ²¹ Besides, many lectiones variae (variant readings) are not that at all, but obvious mistakes by a copyist that any sensible person can dismiss. Putting such mistakes in a list of equally valid readings scandalously misleads about providence's role in the state of the text of Scripture. “The voluminous bulke of various lections, so nakedly exhibited, seemes sufficient to beget scruples and doubts in the minds of men, about the truth of what had been hitherto by many pretended concerning the preservation of the Scripture through the care and Providence of God.”Footnote ²² Here and there we glimpse Owen's conviction that uneducated readers will be harmed by Walton's work, for they will gauge problems with Scripture by the size of a list, not by the power of the Spirit. As scholars debate such lists, “atheists” misuse them.Footnote ²³ Most importantly, “we have enough of them [lists] to frighten poor unstable soules into the armes of the pretended infallible guide.”Footnote ²⁴ The work of Walton and his fellows will undo the Reformation: “We went from Rome under the conduct of the purity of the originals,” writes Owen wittily. “I wish none have a mind to return thither again, under the pretence of their corruption.”Footnote ²⁵

In standard Anglican Restoration theology, miracles performed by the authors of Scripture (for example, Moses, David, Paul, and the apostles) authenticated their writings. But such miracles, for Owen, nevertheless beg the question: the believing reader still needs the authentic action of the Spirit as he or she reads to make Scripture the Word of God.Footnote ²⁶ In regard to authorship, Owen puts forward a strict version of inspiration: authors of Scripture, under inspiration, may not have understood what they were writing or perhaps understood with “only a passive concurrence of their rational faculties.”Footnote ²⁷ Consistent with his whole sense of Scripture, inspiration either is there or it is not, and debating places and persons responds improperly to the generous gift of God's Word. The whole revelation of God's plan comes entire and uncorrupted. Lastly, while Owen praises translation for making the Word of God available, he encourages translation from an original of sufficient antiquity. He, of course, asks that translators be people of integrity and faith.Footnote ²⁸

Interim to 1680

During the early 1660s, the promise of ecclesial peace faded under the direction of a Royalist Parliament. The irenic Declaration of Breda became the misnamed Clarendon Code, which controlled ordination, parish governance, liturgy, use of the Prayer Book, and fidelity to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Between 1660 and 1663, John Spurr tells us that 1,760 clergymen were ejected or voluntarily left their positions.Footnote ²⁹ One result of these harsh measures was a tightening of church discipline, especially through the universities, of scriptural interpretation, learning, and preaching. Regardless of the future perils planted, these changes created a strong, unified, and self-defining identity that would be called “Anglican.”

Among many examples, a sermon of Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699) indicates the Anglican temper of the Restoration. On 15 March 1685, at a public ordination, Stillingfleet preached on 1 Tim 5:22, “Lay hands suddenly on no man.”Footnote ³⁰ Though Stillingfleet does not offer a high view of ordination, avoiding most sacramental references, he certainly has a formed view of apostolic succession and priestly authority as well as a firm sense of who should be interpreting Scripture. He apologizes for what may have been his own earlier mistakes concerning church latitude. He contrasts the priesthood of Aaron and that of the New Testament; he criticizes both insipid preaching as well as “far-fetched allusions” that offer “corrupt and seditious doctrine”; he asserts that Timothy was truly ordained, not simply pulled out of the congregation and he insists that the laying on of hands gives real authority, though different from that of civil government.

From the late 1650s, which saw Brian Walton's prolegomena, through the 1680s, Anglican Scripture theory depended on a blend of hard and soft reason, on linguistic proof as well as historical speculation informed by church tradition. Religious commitment gave the benefit of the doubt to moral certainty. But even by 1670 there were signs that this synthesis was breaking up, especially outside the Anglican establishment. In chapter thirty-three of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) questioned the origins of the canon of the New and Old Testaments. In keeping with his theme, he notes that only the magistrate authorizes what books are or are not canonical. He also moves through the books of the Bible and notes passages that had to have been written after their alleged authors lived. He concludes that the single authors said to have written the books which bear their names could not have written those books. Hobbes's methodology merely contrasts contents with traditional dates: his analysis is historical and rarely linguistic.Footnote ³¹

A more sophisticated critique is offered by Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) in his Latin treatise Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.Footnote ³² Although Spinoza refines and expands the historical critique, his real strength lies in the theoretical basis he gives for a new way of reading Scripture. His chapter seven, “Of the Interpretation of Scripture,” offers sufficient material to form an outline of instruction for the scholar: to interpret properly, the reader must 1) know Hebrew, the language of the originals; 2) be aware of the tension between the sense of the words and the doctrinal matter and not let the latter change the former; 3) concentrate on the doctrine clearly and everywhere expressed; 4) know as much as possible about the authors; 5) know “the fortune of every book,” that is, its textual history and the difference between perpetual and temporary doctrine; 6) realize that errors have crept in.Footnote ³³ This outline shows how much of radical thought on Scripture Spinoza summarizes or predicts.

The third great radical reader of Scripture of the later seventeenth century was Richard Simon (1638–1712), a sometime member of the French Oratory and author of Histoire critique du Vieux Testament.Footnote ³⁴ I discuss Simon in the next section; his work complements Spinoza's in that he supplies the massive linguistic detail that hammers home Spinoza's somewhat more general discussion. Simon's work appears to destroy the single-authorship theory.

Dryden and Simon

In 1682, when John Dryden (1631–1700) wrote “Religio Laici,” he had reached the peak of his facility at arguing in verse. He faithfully renders the content of his theological sources in a verse that is much livelier than their prose plain style, yet honors its own constraints of rhyme, meter, and the balance of sentence and couplet structure. At times the exposition is drawn out, at others accurately compressed.

To paraphrase: Greek and other pagan writers support, by parallel accounts, the biblical narrative. The teachers of biblical doctrine (Moses, David, Paul, etc.) perform miracles that accredit them as agents of God: these miracles show God condescending to the human way of learning through the senses, ruled always by common sense. As Phillip Harth has shown, the doctrine of “Religio Laici” is Anglican doctrine through and through.Footnote ³⁶

The stimulus for the composition of over half of “Religio Laici” was Richard Simon's Critical History of the Old Testament, published in French in 1678 and translated in 1682, perhaps by a young acquaintance of Dryden. A fine textual critic, Simon knew the languages of the Old Testament versions (Hebrew, Greek, Latin and a number of Near Eastern languages) so well that he could criticize editions of them with a credibility that stands up well today. The finely produced 1682 quarto has three parts: an analysis of the Mosaic authorship, offering the theory that no single individual was responsible for writing the Pentateuch; a second book, on various translations of the Old Testament, with their virtues and faults; and a third, on interpreters of Scripture from the rabbis through Augustine and Origen with a long, final treatment of Brian Walton's prolegomena.

Because Dryden deals mostly with the problems of Anglicans, secondary writing on the nexus between “Religio Laici” and the Critical History frequently has dealt with those questions about the text and authorship that may have been posed for Anglican defenders of scriptural faith. In the main, such questioning might be thought to destabilize the primary Anglican norm for belief in the truth of Scripture, that its authors were approved by God, an approval shown by their miracles. Instead, Simon, on textual evidence, hypothesizes that a college of scribes, now nameless, were the real authors of the first five books. In addition, the Critical History adopts a method of inquiry without denominational bias. All is empirical. Dryden derides such evidence as “brushwood-helps.” While such a method may or may not impinge on Anglican belief, its novelty seemed threatening: “What Safety from such brushwood-helps as these?” Dryden asks.Footnote ³⁷ By “Safety” he means both the integrity of the text and the salvation the gospel promises. Are these based on false and weak evidences?

Moreover, Simon noted that, the present work finished, he would write a critical history of the New Testament.Footnote ³⁸ The saving mysteries, Dryden and others might have felt, had been enshrined for centuries without the help of critical method. Sympathetic readers of Simon understood that he had brought forward a great deal of critical evidence to support the position that the Bible must be read like any other book, a position that Spinoza had crafted in the 1670s. From this point of view, the state of the text, one's knowledge of language and genre, and the interrelationship of parts guided one's understanding of what Scripture said; the theory of providential preservation of a miracle worker's words was utterly absent. Surely any thoughtful Anglican would be concerned if such a methodology were applied to the New Testament.

One contrast brings out the extraordinary difference between Simon and the divines about what questions one might ask of a disputed biblical text. That is, how do we tell a strong version, translation, or manuscript from a weak one? I will later examine the answers that Edward Stillingfleet gave to this question in a sermon of 1691 and also those of Benjamin Ibbot in his 1713–1714 Boyle Lectures. Simon's Critical History looks for entirely different evidence than they do. Instead of exploring the tradition of the church fathers and the possibility of purposeful error, for example, Simon requires irrefutable, material witness.

Simon wants to know the history of the manuscript, codex, or book. Did a wealthy person own it? For the books of the wealthy, as they were more costly to produce, tended to be safer copies. Likewise codices used in public worship tended to be more accurate than those in private use, especially with regard to the pointing of their Hebrew. Individuals “took greater liberty in the copying out of the books they intended for their private use.”Footnote ³⁹ Simon asked: where and how were these artifacts used? Furthermore, he concluded that when the writing characters are plain, properly made, and with no extraordinary flourishes, we may trust the entirety of a manuscript; likewise, we assign credibility if the manuscript is made from choice animal skins, since the Jews only allowed the skin of clean animals in the synagogue. Editors should watch for bad habits: “The Writers, who are negligent in transcribing of their copies, sometimes leave out whole periods, especially when they meet with two words a little distance from one another, they take the latter, and leave out the sense betwixt.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Lastly, whole numbers are left out of chronologies, which we must assign “to the transcriber's imagination.”Footnote ⁴¹ The divines list none of these norms in their questions about manuscripts. Simon many times honors the holiness of Scripture but outweighs such theological support with his disciplined, empirical inquiry.

Simon's search for evidence seems to exist in a later age and time from that of Dryden and the Anglican sources of “Religio Laici.” Nevertheless, Dryden does a fine job of getting all on the same plane and in the same time frame and asking a few large questions. The heart of the debate in “Religio Laici”Footnote ⁴² supposes, for the sake of argument, that Scripture is disorganized and corrupted by past editors and readers. The internal objector of the poem says that tradition is needed to get at Scripture's meaning with any certainty. Dryden answers that we would need an omniscient agent of tradition, and, thus, providential care of essential doctrine makes for a more reasonable solution to the problem. A second objection raised is the key question: what if some essential points are obscure? That is, suppose that the passages asserting the divinity of Jesus should be missing from or should be faulty in the best manuscripts? Having brought up the problem honestly, Dryden does not answer in quite the same manner. He wanders off into a discussion of his own freedom, the plight of the unlettered Christian, and oral tradition.Footnote ⁴³ Given the great writing skill “Religio Laici” everywhere shows, one has to assume that Dryden did not accidentally meander into this cul-de-sac. In fact, empirically, his argument is at a dead end; he must, philosophically, change the subject to prevent empirical questions from intruding on essential Christian doctrine, those that might get lost when Simon turns to the New Testament. The poem is both honest and evasive. The argument ends but does not conclude.

Unitarian Pamphlets and Anglican Response

In the second half of the seventeenth century in England, visitors and documents from eastern Europe as well as from the Low Countries made quiet progress in forming a “Socinian” community. In the term's primary sense, a “Socinian” finds the Trinity and a few other core Christian doctrines untenable; in a wider sense, Socinian can mean rational or rationalistic, liberal minded, or tolerant, especially if the source has anti-Trinitarian or Unitarian sympathies itself.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some Anglicans, like John Tillotson (1633–1694), were attacked for both holding Socinian and anti-Socinian views. Most major Anglican and even Independent divines became involved, one way or another, in Socinian controversy. Controversy especially flared when, for reasons usually unassociated with Socinians, censorship relaxed and gave anti-Trinitarians license to spread their own gospel.

With freedom to print, Socinian writers began to use the text of Scripture in ways that Dryden had predicted in 1682.

• We hold, and say we prove from Scripture plain,

• That Christ is GOD; the bold Socinian

• From the same Scripture urges he's but MAN.Footnote ⁴⁵

The campaign to advertize Socinian ideas appears principally in England in three sets of poorly printed pamphlets in octavo: The Faith of One God, published in 1691; A Second Collection of Tracts, published in 1693 (but no date was given in the publication); and A Third Collection of Tracts, published in 1695.Footnote ⁴⁶ In all, thirty-three tracts were published, with the second collection especially discreet about date and place of publication. Denying the Trinity in the 1690s could bring an author harassment or even a term in jail, no matter what the licensing law allowed.

The textbook Socinianism of these pamphlets denies the Trinity on two main grounds: first, to maintain the three-in-one is logically absurd, and God would never require belief in an absurdity; and second, the Scripture passages that allegedly support the Trinity cannot mean what they say. The strategies used to support the second argument involve disputes over the meaning of words. In a work printed in 1648, and again in the first collection, John Biddle, in a preface to “A Confession of Faith Touching the Holy Trinity,” gives six standard Socinian objections to the Doctrine: 1) it introduces three Gods; 2) it hinders us from praying the way the Gospel wants; 3) it prevents us from loving God as we ought; 4) it thwarts the common notion of God; 5) it prevents Jews from entering the Christian church; and 6) it defies accomplishment of Zech 14:9 (“and the Lord shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one Lord, and his name one”).Footnote ⁴⁷ By the 1690s, the objection to three Gods as disagreeing with common notions of humankind take the foreground of dispute. The second and third collections often answer objections raised to the first set. These later collections begin to broaden the grounds for argument, however, for they show the pamphlet writers finding and studying Richard Simon, and perhaps even Brian Walton.

A finite number of Trinitarian texts exist that can be used to argue the divinity of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit. From the beginning, Socinian writers argued about these texts. The following quotations are from the authorized version of 1611:

And, of course: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Before the 1690s, Socinians argued that we misunderstand a text if it seems to require belief in an impossibility, such as three is one, and also that we misunderstand the meaning of allegedly Trinitarian passages of Scripture. After about 1692, they argued that the passages quoted above had been corrupted in manuscript. Socinians had learned to examine manuscripts, now reprinted in Walton-like commentaries, to see if a case for scribal error, or faulty originals, which Christian priests have sanitized, could be made. The proof for the truth of Scripture had shifted from logical consistency to textual consensus.

For example, in a second collection pamphlet arguing with the Trinitarian Luke Milbourne, the author attacks, on manuscript grounds, accepted Trinitarian readings of the manuscript occurrences of 1 Tim 3:16, of Matt 28:19 (“baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” which allegedly crept into the gospel from the baptismal rite) and of several other key Johannine and Pauline texts.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the third collection, the author of the essay “Consideration on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity” especially criticizes Trinitarian readings of Col 1:16 and 1 John 5:7. He charges that the English translation is from a corrupt Greek text, that most Trinitarian texts are absent in the most ancient copies of the New Testament, and that 1 John 5:7 was only in one manuscript in England at the time of the New Testament of Erasmus (1516). The author calls for “an Honest Edition of the Bible.” Moreover, he argues that “[t]he texts alleged by the Unitarians are all of uncontested and of undoubted Verity; both as to the Reading, and the Translation of them.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This claim, which is doubtful, assumes categories that did not commonly exist before the 1690s.

By no means do all of the essays use textual evidence to make their case; some rest on standard rationalist argument. But the authors complicate the proofs, already mixed enough, for the truth of important scriptural passages. They add philology to philosophy and history as evidence for a judgment. They move the argument closer to empiricism, always in a tense relationship with religious faith.

It is likely that once the pamphlets began to appear, prominent divines such as Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), by then Bishop of Salisbury, Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699), Bishop of Worcester, and John Tillotson (1630–1694), Archbishop of Canterbury, met to discuss how to respond. I assume such a meeting because the divines’ responses are so similar that only face-to-face discussions can explain them. Tillotson published some sermons given earlier, at Christmas in 1679 and 1680; Stillingfleet and Burnet wrote new treatments, Stillingfleet a sermon, Burnet an address to the clergy of Salisbury. Robert South (1634–1716), canon of Westminster Abbey and Christ Church, joined the campaign, even though his church politics were higher and drier than those of the three bishops. These bishops and their responses represent the high tide of latitudinarian theology.Footnote ⁵⁰

I find Stillingfleet's theological treatment of the Trinity more profound than that of much latitudinarian writing. Tillotson had been accused of Socinian sympathies, perhaps more because of his friendships than his doctrine. With subtle comradery, Stillingfleet delivered his sermon “The Mysteries of the Christian Faith, Asserted and Defended,” on 7 April 1691 in St. Lawrence Jewry, which had been Tillotson's parish in the 1670s and 1680s.Footnote ⁵¹ Stillingfleet chose as his text 1 Tim 3:16, one that especially galled Socinian writers who tried to interpret or to edit away its significance. Like his fellow divines, Stillingfleet avoided on such occasions deep penetration of textual questions and, perhaps wisely, did not argue about manuscripts. He, of course, supported clerical education as well as the university system that preserved a home for teaching oriental or ancient languages. It was up to church leaders like himself, with pastoral training, to reassure churchgoers that Christian belief can cope even with misuse of sponsored scholarship. He offered an informed pastoral view, not written for scholars yet informed by scholarly argument.

Stillingfleet lists four general directions for reading disputed passages in the Bible, concentrating the orthodox wisdom of his era into a page or so. The reader should choose:

1. 1) the plainest sense of the disputed passage and, if possible, avoid forced, intricate, or metaphorical senses;

2. 2) the sense that best suits the scope and design of its location and of the whole New Testament—which is always to depress man and magnify God (this argument repeats a standard appeal to “the analogy of Scripture”);

3. 3) the sense that was first delivered to the Church and defended through the ages by it;

4. 4) the sense that agrees with the characters of Jesus Christ and the Apostles (including Paul), for “if their authority be lost, our Religion is gone.”Footnote ⁵²

The last caveat refers to the argument from miracles: each essential piece of the gospel must be associated, for its authenticity, with a writer of good character, who also performed miracles.

Most of the sermon explores 1 Tim 3:16 as a guide to Christian life. Although Stillingfleet quotes the Socinian tracts, he does not assess variant readings in any detail. He asserts, simply: “after the strictest examination of copies, those will be found the best, which have that reading on which our translation is grounded.”Footnote ⁵³

In his anticipatory sermons delivered over ten years before, Tillotson stressed what would become a constant theme: he set the view of the Socinians against the “general received interpretation of this passage”; that is, John 1:14.Footnote ⁵⁴ He used the Hebrew background to establish the context of the Johannine prologue, complained that Socinians quibble at words and phrases rather than take the larger view, and insisted that any “sober and considerate man” would choose his own view.Footnote ⁵⁵ Since, by the time of the sermons’ publication, Tillotson was Archbishop of Canterbury, and since the Socinian pamphlets, often without ascription and poorly printed, looked like they had been passed through grubby hands, Tillotson's argument, repeated by other divines, does not seem quite fair. The sober and considerate man might easily be led, or misled, by the archepiscopal source rather than be convinced by the contents of theological argument.

Gilbert Burnet's essay parallels Stillingfleet's,Footnote ⁵⁶ but Robert South's, written briskly and alive with metaphor, enriches the Trinitarian argument. The Socinian pamphlets repeatedly say that the gospel holds no mysteries, that is, doctrines that we cannot understand. Rather, the whole purpose of the gospel is to dispel mystery and to reveal God without complication. No priest should be needed to understand the New Testament. Reading the treatments of the three bishops—Burnet, Stillingfleet, and Tillotson—one senses that their staunch defense of gospel-mystery might be reluctant: they wish that mysteries did not exist, but, loyal to what they discern, they write clear defenses of the Trinity and the incarnation.

South reverses this position. In a sermon on 1 Cor 2:7 delivered on 29 April 1694 at Westminster Abbey, where he was a canon South stresses the positive effects of a religion whose major tenets are mysteries. Such a situation helps to preserve reverence, as other mystery religions confirm, and it humbles our pride and encourages us to greater searching into the meaning of the gospel.Footnote ⁵⁷ Although South elsewhere insists on the importance of reason in a sound religion, the 1694 sermon, mildly Calvinistic, is hard on human nature. South differs primarily from the bishops in that, for him, mystery is a value, not an embarrassment.

Here, and elsewhere, South derides religions based on sudden “light”: “And for all those boastings of new Lights, inbeamings, and inspirations; that man that follows his reason, both in the choice and defence of his religion, will find himself better led and directed by this one guide, than by an hundred directories.”Footnote ⁵⁸ South praises a learned clergy and distinguishes Roman from English practice in the matter of paying obedience to church authority.Footnote ⁵⁹ At one point he ventures into a rare textual criticism, insisting that the Johannine comma (1 John 5:7) is warranted by “the most ancient, genuine, and unexceptionable records or copies of the New Testament” and “by most of the Fathers of the Church.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Since he is probably wrong in this, it is fortunate for his side that he and others did not often explore empirical evidence.

Most Anglican divines avoided such criticism, for, as middlemen between scholarly work and the pulpit, they did not have their specialty. Anglicans consciously participated in a hierarchy of interpretation consisting of textual scholars, commentators, translators, and preachers who brought the previous to churchgoers, learned hearers, and those without learning. Indeed, too often scholars read the divines without understanding their own view that they wrote and spoke in a community. Each did not have to perform every task or to defend every doctrine on his own. They were pastors. This is the primary reason, perhaps, why the divines avoid textual criticism. They knew others of their own communion had better skills at this occupation.

Thus, the divines often refused to enter into an argument over the value of individual readings. As already noted, their position was pastoral, not critical. In other contexts and genres, South and Stillingfleet could argue philosophically with great exactness but also with some tediousness. Their strength was a pulpit strength. Accordingly, Stillingfleet kept his four rules for the choice of readings general and even a little vague; he avoided pinning himself down in a field where he was unsteady; he skirted intellectual, linguistic stands where facts or discoveries (like new manuscripts) might prove him wrong; and he relied on the tradition, diversity, and strength of his church.

The Boyle Lecture

As Robert Boyle (1627–1691), lay leader of the Restoration Church and state, neared death, he sought to perpetuate the values that had ruled his life. Accordingly, his will provided an annual set of lectures to be given on challenges to the Christian religion, barring argument between Christian denominations.Footnote ⁶¹ The board governing the selection of speakers and financing, composed of Anglicans at the heart of the English establishment, like the Archbishop of Canterbury and others of the stature of the prominent John Evelyn (1620–1706), would pick responsible theologians to defend the Church of England and would use latitudinarian methods in doing so. The results of the first forty-plus years of the Lecture were published in three folio volumes in 1739, entitled A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion.Footnote ⁶² The speakers were not shy in their defenses, for the whole amounts to about one and a half million words.

For over one hundred years, the Protestant wing of the Church of England had sponsored various “Lectures,” that is, series of sermons in the local church that would provide instruction on styles or topics not handled by the local priest. Paid for by subscription or by the generosity of a few parishioners, the Lecture kept Presbyterian or Independent theology alive without a formal break from the established church. After the Restoration, advanced Anglicans established similar Lectures on their side of the fence, such as the Tuesday Lecture at St. Lawrence Jewry, the Lecture at the Rolls Chapel, and, later, the Boyle Lecture, to advance their ideas and methods. Stillingfleet and Tillotson were among the prime participants. This movement lacks a historian; it seems to have promoted new ideas of science, reason, and commerce that were explored in a plain prose also refurbished for the so-called progressive age. Such a church movement, called “latitudinarian,” existed for decades both before and after the year 1700.

For the intellectual historian, the Boyle Lecture, given continuously over forty years, contains a lode of ideas, personalities, interests, and invitations to make connections with all areas of study. The task of the Boyle appointee, who gave eight weighty lectures in as many months, was formidable. We call these monthly exercises “lectures,” though most are, in fact, lengthy sermons. Yet few historians have ventured deeply into them. Writers who seek to make Isaac Newton an epochal figure in theology and politics, as well as in science, explore the relatively few mentions of Newton in the lectures.Footnote ⁶³ A prejudice may exist against interest in theology as theology; an inability to adopt a theological point of view, or an insistence that it be politicized, may construct a hermeneutic that blocks understanding of much of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English writing.

With a prose work as large as A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion, the reader must construct a hermeneutic that, while advancing knowledge, regrettably excludes at least some alternate fields of inquiry. My interest in the Boyle Lecture lies in how each used Scripture, how each reaffirmed or altered latitudinarian methods of the authors we have discussed, and how each lecture copes with the revolutions in interpretation started by Simon and others. I trust that this scope of interpretation reveals much more than it excludes.

The great theme of the Boyle Lecture is the relationship of Scripture, or revelation, to reason in an intelligent person's religion. But some of the twenty-odd series meditate on Scripture in a more detailed way, or in reaction to the criticism of the 1680s and 1690s, as we have discussed it. These series are: Richard Kidder (1633–1703), “A Demonstration of the Messias” (1694); John Williams (1636–1709), “The Possibility and Necessity of Divine Revelation” (1695); Offspring Blackall (1654–1716), “The Sufficiency of a Standing Revelation” (1700); William Whiston (1667–1752), “The Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecies” (1707); and Benjamin Ibbot (1680–1725), “Free-thinking in Matters of Religion” (1713). No obvious biographical pattern emerges from the committee's choices of these speakers. Kidder was allied with nonconformism, and Blackall was a high Tory and anti-Whig. Williams assembled arguments against Roman Catholics, and Ibbot, an ally of Thomas Tenison (1636–1715), Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote against Anthony Collins's “Essay on Freethinking” (1713). Boyle had founded the Lecture precisely so that trusted churchmen could be enlisted to answer someone like Anthony Collins. Succeeding Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Whiston flirted with Arianism and millenarianism and became the model for Charles Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield.Footnote ⁶⁴ The evidence suggests that talent rather than politics determined the choice of a year's lecturer.

When viewed from the developments in reading Scripture since the 1650s, three themes emerge from these lectures:

1. 1) Latitudinarian arguments remain the foundation of the truth of Scripture but gain in depth and specificity. The plain sense of Scripture, delineation of types of certainty (and what kind not to expect from scriptural history), theories of inspiration, and the Analogy of Faith are all developed informatively, sometimes at considerable length, in these lectures. Williams, for example, writes an essay of great clarity on types of certainty and also on the plain sense.Footnote ⁶⁵ Blackall writes on authorship, expanding latitudinarian doctrine, as several of these authors do on this point.Footnote ⁶⁶

2. 2) A growth in confidence in the compatibility of Scripture and free inquiry accompanies traditional ideas. “I think Truth should be defended by nothing but Truth,” writes Whiston, and if we have trouble with a passage, we should turn for help to those who are better qualified to interpret. Whiston discovers Scripture foundations “too firm and well grounded to be shaken by the utmost efforts of human reason, or the utmost exactness of the most critical examination.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Ibbot writes: “truth can never be hurt by any good cause, but the more truth we know, the more will any good cause be promoted by it.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The clearer a doctrine in the plain sense, writes Williams, the more worthy it is of belief.Footnote ⁶⁹ The nervous posture, if that is what it was, of Dryden's questions in “Religio Laici” has been transformed into confident assertion that the Scripture that we have evidences integrity and that further research will confirm this orthodox position.

3. 3) As the above remarks on truth show, the Christian humanism of Brian Walton has returned as a fundamental, guiding principle. Most singular in this respect is Ibbot, who turns an argument on its head and pleads for more and more variant readings from the manuscripts. Though he believes in providential care of Scripture through the ages, the “real text,” he writes, has long been lost, no copy of Scripture is perfectly intact, only “tolerably intact” and mistakes in copying were inevitable.Footnote ⁷⁰ He is optimistic about the present state of the text: the collation of more and more copies “might fix the true reading and explain the meaning of difficult passages … might possibly bring up our present Bibles almost to an equality with the originals themselves…. the copies we now have are in the main, and in all necessary Points, true transcripts of the first autographa.”Footnote ⁷¹ Ibbot gives six norms for assessing transmission that helpfully augment Stillingfleet's four general rules: 1) no copy of Scripture is perfectly intact; 2) mistakes in transmission were inevitable; 3) the “real text itself” has been lost; 4) the more copies, and the more collated variants, the better; 5) the New Testament has suffered less from time's ravages than other books; and 6) the widespread number of copies has foiled any plot to tamper, to abolish, or to corrupt.Footnote ⁷²

Showing himself aware of Socinian controversy and of Richard Simon's thought, Kidder uses conflicting manuscripts for an exegesis of Matt 19:17.Footnote ⁷³ Let Blackall have the final word as he invokes the Analogy of Faith: our trust in the Christian mysteries rests secure, “there being no point that is of substance either of the history or Doctrine of Christianity, that is grounded upon any text, of which there are in different copies various readings, but which may be proved by some other texts, in the reading whereof all copies do agree.”Footnote ⁷⁴