Socinianism

The turn to rationalism started long before the Wars of Religion, when the Italian Anabaptists Lelio Socinus and his nephew Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) assumed leadership of the Polish Brethren. The Brethren were a non-magisterial Protestant sect who later became known as Socinians. Lelio and Faustus disavowed belief in the eternal divinity of Christ and in the Trinity on the grounds that these traditional articles of faith cannot clearly be reasoned out of Scripture. By 1601 Faustus’ ideas were enshrined in the Racovian Catechism, which states that reason ‘is ... of great service, since without it we would neither perceive with certainty the authority of the sacred writings, understand their contents ... nor apply them to any practical purpose. When ... I stated that the Holy Scriptures were sufficient for our salvation ... I certainly assumed its presence [the presence of reason]’. The Socinians were Protestants who took the sola Scriptura principle to a logical conclusion. In so doing, they replaced faith with ‘what can be reasoned out of Scripture’. What had hitherto been termed, variously, the rule of faith, the light of faith and the articles of faith now for the first time was equated with what a rational individual can get out of a literal perusal of the Bible. Socinianism was identified with Unitarianism, that is, anti-Trinitarian theism. But the core of it is rationalist Bible-literalism. Anglican apologists attempted to put paid to Unitarianism with the weapons of reason and the Bible.

So Socinianism influenced the Established Church of England. Disputing Catholic claims that one needs the faith of the Church to recognize Scripture as divine revelation, the Anglican archbishop William Laud (1573-1645) argued that reason can by its own lights recognize the divine origin of Scripture: ‘for though this truth, that Scripture is the word of God, is not so demonstratively evident a priori, as to enforce assent; yet it is strengthened so abundantly with probable arguments, both from the light of nature itself and human testimony, that he must be very wilful and self-conceited that shall dare to suspect it.’^[1] Laud affirmed that ‘[t]his assent is called faith’ which agrees to what reason can find in or deduce from Scripture about human salvation. Faith is assenting to what reason can get from the Bible, says Laud. But what exactly can be seen in or deduced from Scripture? Is the Trinity in Scripture? The divinity of Christ? The fall of Adam? Original sin? Anglicans had inadvertently set themselves the task of demonstrating the Trinity out of Scripture read without the light of the Holy Spirit, and without the perspectives of ecclesial faith.

• [1] 4Relation of the Conference, quoted in Jason E. Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making andRemaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 44. 5A Dialogue between a New Catholic Convert and a Protestant, cited in Dixon, ‘Nice and Hot Disputes',