Socinian controversy

The Socinian controversy in the Church of England (sometimes called the First Socinian controversy to distinguish it from a debate around 1800 mainly affecting Protestant nonconformists; and also called the Trinitarian controversy) was a theological argument on christology carried out by English theologians for around a decade from 1687. Positions that had remained largely dormant since the death in 1662 of John Biddle, an early Unitarian, were revived and discussed, in pamphlet literature (much of it anonymous).

This controversy was part of a larger debate after the Act of Toleration 1689, which excluded from its eligibility for high offices anti-trinitarian Christians (such as Unitarians) as well as Roman Catholics. By the end of the 1690s it had become clear that, for many years, religious tolerance would not be extended. Across all media, the Blasphemy Act 1697 prohibited any preaching, teaching, writing or "advised speaking" of Christians for unitarianism for 116 years (and three other basic teachings of Christianity in its view, which are rarely debated so continued until the abolition in secular law of all blasphemy). The Doctrine of the Trinity Act 1813 then re-enables Christians, subject to any tenets of a church they wish to remain part of, to critique and practise against the equality within the Holy Trinity, but kept a prohibition for advised speaking or writing as to more than one God among Christians.

During this decade the arguments had become well aired, and the Church of England was proven to be more diverse in theological understanding than much law and treatise had suggested. An unintended consequence of strong attacks by theologically orthodox Anglicans, in the longer term, was a resulting greater de facto tolerance extending among English Protestants, after a halt was called to the aggressive orthodoxy of William Sherlock. This tolerance, becoming a hallmark of Latitudinarian views as they changed into low church liberality, worked its way out in impactful controversies; the splintering away of many congregations and even some parish priests of the eighteenth century, for which see English dissenters (all nonconformists including Roman Catholics), ecclesiastical separatism, and 17th-century denominations in England.