Trinity Education

In 1685, John Spencer, the Cambridge Hebraist, published De legibus Hebraeorun ritualibus, a massively learned work in which he attempted to show that ancient Hebrew worship had Egyptian antecedents. This has tempted scholars to see in Spencer an early comparatist undermining the absolute historical primacy of the Bible.

Fausto Parente contests this: Spencer’s agenda was theological, not historical, and the reflection of Egyptian rites in Hebrew ones, the function of which was to wean the Jews, homeopathically, as it were, from idolatrous practices, was for him an effect of divine condescension, not of human wisdom, with the human agent, Moses, acting solely as God’s instrument. On this view, the question of historical derivation has no meaning. Parente also suggests that the way Spencer plays down what he terms the ‘secondary purpose’ of Mosaic ritual, the typological adumbration of the New Testament, points to Socinian sympathies.

Henry Dodwell was a formidable scholar with a theological agenda. He studied Christian antiquity in order to buttress the claims of the Church of England in so far as it laid claim to an episcopalian descent. Several of his theories were used by Toland and other freethinkers. Was it an instance of orthodoxy becoming the source of disbelief? Jean-Louis Quantin’s re-examination of Dodwell’s career and work shows that—although Dodwell’s scholarly interests were in many respects typical of Restoration Oxford, and he was for years a prominent member of that milieu—his beliefs departed on several key issues from official Anglican formularies. His case suggests that relations between orthodoxy and scholarship in the seventeenth century should not be reduced to one-way dependence—as if the latter had simply been in the service of the former. What was at stake in Dodwell’s learned exploration of the first centuries was the very definition, or redefinition, of orthodoxy.

The doctrine of the Trinity was the core of orthodoxy, as defined by the major confessions. The appeal to historical evidence, especially as to the doctrine of the primitive Church, played a key role in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century controversies on the Trinity. Martin Mulsow reconstructs the idiosyncratic position of Johann Georg Wachter, who claimed to have recovered a secret, Spinozistic, religious tradition which allegedly ran from ancient Egypt to the ante-Nicene Fathers via the cabbala. Wachter used scholarly works, in most cases by English authors (Cudworth, Bull, Spencer), which he interpreted so as
to make them serve his own system. Mulsow documents an instructive example of the intersection of scholarship and ideology.

For more info about education and learning, visit instant degrees and service learning