Abstract
Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012; 448 pp.: 9780195339468, £47.99/$74.00 (hbk)
Lim’s study of Trinitarian debates in seventeenth-century England offers a close reading of a wide range of often obscure texts, including unpublished manuscripts, by a plethora of writers, including Paul Best, John Biddle, radicals and antinomians, Francis Cheynell, John Owen, Thomas Hobbes, Richard Baxter and Andrew Marvell – and responses (some anonymous) to all of these – some of whom held anti-Trinitarian views and some of whom defended the traditional position. The range of works considered enables Lim to make a convincing case that those who held anti-Trinitarian positions did so for a variety of reasons: at this period anti-Trinitarianism was as likely to arise out of a strong adherence to the principle of sola scriptura, which failed to find the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity in a careful reading of Scripture, as it was to be rooted in a strongly rationalist approach. Consequently it is misleading to understand anti-Trinitarian simply as a precursor to Deism. Moreover, the opponents of anti-Trinitarianism were quite capable of lumping a range of views together under this label, including those of groups such as Baptists, who in fact took an orthodox position on the Trinity but were unorthodox in their approach to the sacraments. Lim also argues for the on-going importance of mystery and mysticism in these arguments, with the intention of countering (surely now largely outdated?) historiographical claims for the ‘“disenchantment of the world” and the eclipse of the magical world with the advent of the Reformation’ (p. 328). Lim’s main interest, as becomes clear in his conclusion, is to present these debates as a background to the thought of the Enlightenment and the development of Deism, while showing the complex relationship between anti-Trinitarian arguments and the spread of Socinianism and unitarianism.
Lim’s study focuses on the seventeenth century, surely one of the most turbulent periods of English history. However, it pays remarkably little attention to the context. Indeed, Lim assumes detailed knowledge of the political and ecclesiastical events of the period, and does little to position the authors under consideration. The writing is in many places turgid, and Lim has not been served well by his Oxford University Press copy-editors, particularly in the placing of commas, which is frequently so erratic as to obscure his meaning. Overall, the style and the detail of this work are probably such as to make Lim’s book inaccessible to all but the dedicated specialist.