Optics, Controversy, and Theology

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It was not long before Newton's innovations came to the notice of the wider intellectual world. The Royal Society of London had learned that Newton had constructed the first working reflecting telescope. When Barrow brought a specially made copy of this telescope to a Society meeting in late 1671, it was an immediate sensation. Encouraged by this success, Newton sent a paper on his optical discoveries to the Society's secretary Henry Oldenburg (c. 1618–1677). This now-celebrated paper on colors graced the pages of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1672. But Newton soon found himself embroiled in a controversy when the Royal Society's Robert Hooke made his skepticism known, and continental readers complained that they could not replicate the paper's experiments. Around the time that this controversy was driving him back into the safety of the cloisters of Cambridge, Newton commenced a more dangerous revolution.

As one of the requirements of his Trinity fellowship, Newton was obligated to take holy orders by 1675. This may help explain the sudden explosion of theological studies in the early 1670s. Whether or not the pending ordination deadline was a factor, Newton's thorough research of early church doctrine and history led him to conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity was not a part of the primitive Christian faith. As an anti-Trinitarian heretic, Newton could not become an Anglican clergyman in good faith. Expressing the reasons for this was out of the question, and he had resolved to resign his fellowship quietly when a special dispensation came in 1675 from Charles II permitting Lucasian Professors to retain their College fellowships without ordination. Newton thus continued on at Cambridge as a secret heretic.

Newton's most important theological discovery was that the Bible taught that only the Father was God in an absolute sense. Christ, although not "very God" in the Nicene formulation, was nevertheless central to Newton's eschatology and view of the atonement. Although a precise categorization of his beliefs would be artificial, it can be said that he arrived at a Christology similar to Arianism. Newton concluded that the Athanasian or homoousian party of the fourth century had corrupted the church by imposing on it the Trinity—a doctrine Newton believed to be post-biblical and inspired by Greek metaphysics. Denial of the Trinity was illegal in Newton's day and for a long time afterward. Thus, for more than half a century, he confined his heresy to the private sphere, while outwardly conforming to the Anglican Church. Newton's theological explorations were not limited to doctrine. Taking one of his leads from the Cambridge prophetic exegete Joseph Mede, Newton adopted a premillenarian eschatology, writing his first manuscript treatise on the Apocalypse in the 1670s. Even in his prophetic views, he differed from the mainstream. Although retaining the standard Protestant opinion that the "whore" of Revelation was the Roman Church, Newton added as the chief sin of the Catholics the introduction of the Trinitarian dogma, thus bringing his heresy and prophetic interpretation together.

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