Friday, August 22, 2025

It is the 22nd of August 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Listen. Sometimes rules are made to be broken.

My general rule on this show is that when we start getting into Nicene Christology- the stuff from the 300s that most people agree on with regards to the person of Christ- when that’s denied, I’ll tend to wish them well and tell the stories of those in the church- even if they are churches I myself not be a member of.

William Whiston could be written off as an Arian- check out our last two Weekend Editions- that’s something that puts you beyond the pale of even a very generous orthodoxy. But he was ordained (not that ordained folk can’t be beyond the pale), and he was a onetime friend and then successor of Isaac Newton and took very seriously the veracity of the Bible and made a strange, but then-compelling argument for the origin of Noah’s Flood.  

Back to the beginning. William Whiston was born in Leicestershire in 1667, the son of Katherine and Josiah. Josiah was a Presbyterian minister, and William decided to follow in his father's path. He went to Clare College, Cambridge, and sat in lectures by Isaac Newton. After first being baffled by him, he came to understand him, became a tutor for others, and a friend to Newton himself. He received his BA in 1690, became a fellow of the college the following year, and then earned his MA and was ordained- not in his father's church, but in the Church of England.

When he married Ruth Antrobus, he was given a farm by his father-in-law, which was useful, as William would often find himself out of work. He gave up his fellowship to get married, and his ill health left him incapable of teaching for a period.

He served as a chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich in the 1690s when he published the first book to make him a name in intellectual and theological circles. It was called A New Theory of the Earth and argued for something like a literal historical reading of Genesis, and used Newtonian philosophy to argue for elements of creation. It also argues that the flood was caused by a comet. Curious, yes. Today.

But it made Newton a fan of his, and soon he was back at Cambridge as a tutor under Newton, and then he took over Newton’s chair. He could have been remembered as one of those early Enlightenment Christians attempting to understand the study of the natural world and its bearing on Scripture.

Except he wrote more. Kind of a lot more. Amongst his sermons and essays, there was a common leaning into Arianism- the idea that Jesus is not God, just a click below, maybe “the first created being”. Not heeding the warnings, he undoubtedly got- he was defrocked and dismissed from the college.

With the income from the farm, he began to teach in coffeehouses- a kind of “open-air” professor, preaching Newtonian physics and Biblical literalism, or something like that.

Between 1711 and 1712, he published his magnum opus, the multi-volume Primitive Christianity Revived. He relies heavily on the Apostolic Constitutions— a text from the mid-300s that is interesting as a historical document- but purports to be from the Apostles themselves, and for Whiston, the key to the true primitive church.

That’s curious enough, but he developed this into his argument that to retrieve truly primitive Christianity, we had to get away from the influence of Athanasius, who he believed forged a report as to what the council of Nicaea passed, and suppressed the true one, which, according to Whiston, did not condemn Arianism.

While dismissed from his orders and removed from his job, the eccentric Whiston did have an audience with the Parliament, and with the support of many leading minds, he argued for a competition to be held- a prize for whoever could figure out how to gauge longitude at sea. It was a problem, and Whiston believed he had the answer.

Parliament agreed to the competition and, well… Whiston failed. But he had developed enough of a following in his public teaching that he lived, by many accounts, a happy life- happy in marriage with 4 children surviving him.  

An eccentric, genius, philosopher trying to be faithful to the Bible, but put his faith in a primitivism that argued himself right out of the Trinity and his job as Newton’s Successor. William Whiston died on this day in 1752. Born in 1667, he was 84 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and Acts 17:

When Paul and his companions had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue. 2 As was his custom, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, 3 explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Messiah,” he said. 4 Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and quite a few prominent women.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 22nd of August 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who knows that the problem of measuring longitude required the invention of the chronometer- a reliable and rugged timekeeping device set from a fixed time on land, often the time at Greenwich. He is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who spent some time reading up on the old chronometer… I’m Dan van Voorhis. 

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.