Richard Price (in a sermon that George Washington endorsed!) articulates this understanding:
Montesquieu probably was not a Christian. Newton and Locke were not Trinitarians and therefore not Christians according to the commonly received ideas of Christianity. Would the United States, for this reason, deny such men, were they living, all places of trust and power among them?
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
New Post at "Ordinary Times"
I have a new post at "Ordinary Times" on, basically, what I've been studying and blogging at for some time. A taste:
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2 comments:
Newton was into alchemy and Bible codes; Locke, like Jefferson, hid his heterodoxy from the public eye; Montesquieu was circumspect as well.
The question is whether a vociferous non-Trinitarian like Richard Price himself could have got elected to anything in the first place. Judging from the fact that Dr. Benjamin Rush urged Price to ix-nay the inity-Tray stuff because it would hurt the credibility on his theories on education, I'd say no.
http://americancreation.blogspot.com/2009/06/99-out-of-100-trinitarianism-at.html
Let us also note that Price is doing a commercial here for his own Christian heterodoxy, unitarianism [non-Trinitarianism]. As a theological outcast himself, he's allying himself with some of the great names of the Enlightenment.
But he also wrote
Christianity informs us, that good men will be raised from death to enjoy a glorious immortality, through that Saviour of the world, who tasted death for every man.
http://americancreation.blogspot.com/2008/08/richard-prices-influence-on-american_29.html
So this isn't black-and-white secularism here. He does not ally himself with such names as Voltaire, Hume and Thomas Paine. His statement would read far differently if he'd tried hiding behind the skirts of those famous infidels!
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