Socinian

(28) This language clearly separated Baptists from their Socinian and Unitarian compatriots, but even that does not explain the whole story.

His 'liberty' from tradition, reading the Bible in his own way, led him to be a Socinian a non-Trinitarian, a modalist, a Sabellian --as the authors relate.

Encountering this kind of specious reasoning in attempts by opponents to prove that he was a Socinian, Locke ridiculed it in his Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1697).

The paper, which retains a hypothetical character, argues that Spinoza's propositions referring to God (or involving the use of the name "God," essentially in the Ethics), can be read in a fruitful manner apart from any pre- established hypothesis concerning his own "theological preferences," as definite descriptions of three "ideas of God" which have the same logical status: one (akin to Jewish Monotheism) which identifies the idea of God with the idea of the Law, one (akin to a heretic "Socinian" version of Christianity) which identifies it with the idea of Human Love, and one (akin to a form of Cosmotheism, rather than "Pantheism") which identifies it with Nature.

Bradley issues a well-informed challenge to the paradigmatic secularist reading of eighteenth-century English thought--first framed by Leslie Stephen--that traces an intellectual pilgrimage from "unenlightened belief" to "enlightened unbelief." Stephen and his secularist successors have held that only in the voices of heterodoxy--Latitudinarian, Unitarian, Socinian, and freethinking--do we see the hallmark virtues of modern society: innovation, toleration, liberty, and enlightenment.

Today I would like to attempt to bring some of the ways in which Leibniz's scientific, philosophical and theological views were bound up with each other by briefly examining his roles within two apparently different disputes in the late 17th and early 18th centuries: first his dispute with Newton over the nature of space and time; and next his dispute with the "Socinian" followers of Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), (a religious movement that later came to be called "Unitarianism"), over the doctrine of the trinity.

Chapter one does an excellent job of detailing Socinian theology and chapter 'two discusses English engagement with Socinian thought in the years prior to the outbreak of the Civil Wars.

This book delivers: 1) a summary of the historical development of the doctrine of the Trinity from the Patristic era to the present; 2) current appropriations of the doctrine with respect to both metaphysical and social relationality; 3) responses to classical objections to the Trinity, such as the Arian, the Socinian, and some feminists; 4) the bearing which the doctrine has on the Christian understanding of God and the nature of the church; and 5) the relation between the economic Trinity (God's life for us) and immanent Trinity (God's own life as such) and the role of the Trinity in divine agency.

Chapter 4, 'Faith', concerns Norris' uncompelling defense of orthodoxy during the Socinian Controversy initiated by the publication of John Toland's Lockean Christianity Not Mysterious (1696).