Introduction

Thomas Woolston and Conyers Middleton were Cambridge divines accused in their lifetimes of being deists. In the existing literature neither writer has received adequate treatment. Woolston's substantive views have not been taken seriously, while Middleton has mutated into a forerunner of David Hume. No attempt has been made to consider them side by side. As a result, their common concern with Christian hermeneutics has largely been missed. Woolston and Middleton have been widely read as if they argued that Christianity was false. Both, however, were convinced that their fellow clergy subscribed to schemes of Christianity which could not survive informed criticism in the long run. Moreover, both had legitimate scholarly concerns about the significance of Patristic scholarship for the future of Christianity and presented their controversial views within the framework of Protestant Enlightenment.

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Thomas Woolston was a respected Cambridge Patristics scholar and divine who combined genuine religious insights with vast, if eccentric, classical learning, ruthless skills as an ecclesiastical debater and a Puritan hatred for ‘hireling Priests’. In the existing literature his thought has often been trivialized by interpreters who assume that he was insincere or insane. In this chapter, I read Woolston as a thinker wrestling with disbelief, that is, as someone who was preoccupied with the possibility that Christianity, as ordinarily understood, might be an imposture. As a Patristics scholar Woolston attempted to negotiate a path for himself in a world committed to a literal interpretation of Christianity which he considered false. He was a serious thinker, defending a mystical interpretation of Christianity which he claimed had prevailed in the ancient Church. Whether he eventually decided that this interpretation was fatally flawed we do not know, just as we do not know whether he had privately come to embrace a form of deism. What has been overlooked, however, is that his entire career hinged on a mystical theology of ridiculous events about which he was initially and possibly always serious.