‘To us there is but one God, the Father’: Antitrinitarian Textual Criticism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England

Biblical criticism was central to early modern antitrinitarian theology from the very beginning. From its emergence a few short years after the commencement of the Reformation, antitrinitarianism was marked by both a fervent primitivism and a thoroughgoing biblicism. Although doctrinal primitivism and biblicism played important roles in Trinitarian Protestantism as well, the antitrinitarians pushed these dynamics much further. In early modern antitrinitarianism we see a passionate belief that Christianity had become corrupt in late antiquity combined with a powerful rejection of Church tradition, authority and the ecumenical creeds. This radical theological primitivism was a shaping force of their religious ethos, as they sought to retrieve from the original text of the Bible the pure teaching of monotheism, namely, the oneness and unipersonality of God. This doctrine, they believed, had been taught to the Israelites by Moses and reaffirmed in the New Testament by the Apostles and the Son of God himself.