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To: jwalsh07
Thank you so much for sharing your insights re: Newton's theological views, jwalsh07. I wonder how/why he would have been agnostic on the Trinity.... Mabe HayekRock's links (at reply #335 can shed some light.

Thanks again!

411 posted on 09/02/2006 8:23:38 AM PDT by betty boop (Character is destiny. -- Heraclitus)
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To: betty boop
"I wonder how/why he would have been agnostic on the Trinity." Well, boopster, here's alist of his reasons. Interestingly, he put a number "13" on the page (according to Keynes) but didn't make an entry for it:

1. The word God is nowhere in the scriptures used to signify more than one of the three persons at once.

2. The word God put absolutely without restriction to the Son or Holy Ghost doth always signify the Father from one end of the scriptures to the other.

3. Whenever it is said in the scriptures that there is but one God, it is meant the Father.

4. When, after some heretics had taken Christ for a mere man and others for the supreme God, St John in his Gospel endeavoured to state his nature so that men might have from thence a right apprehension of him and avoid those heresies and to that end calls him the word or logos: we must suppose that he intended that term in the sense that it was taken in the world before he used it when in like manner applied to an intelligent being. For if the Apostles had not used words as they found them how could they expect to have been rightly understood. Now the term logos before St John wrote, was generally used in the sense of the Platonists, when applied to an intelligent being and the Arians understood it in the same sense, and therefore theirs is the true sense of St John.

5. The Son in several places confesseth his dependence on the will of the Father.

6. The Son confesseth the Father greater, then calls him his God etc.

7. The Son acknowledgeth the original prescience of all future things to be in the Father only.

8. There is nowhere mention of a human soul in our Saviour besides the word, by the meditation of which the word should be incarnate. But the word itself was made flesh and took upon him the form of a servant.

9. It was the son of God which He sent into the world and not a human soul that suffered for us. If there had been such a human soul in our Saviour, it would have been a thing of too great consequence to have been wholly omitted by the Apostles.

10. It is a proper epithet of the Father to be called almighty. For by God almighty we always understand the Father. Yet this is not to limit the power of the Son. For he doth whatsoever he seeth the Father do; but to acknowledge that all power is originally in the Father and that the Son hath power in him but what he derives fro the Father, for he professes that of himself he can do nothing.

11. The Son in all things submits his will to the will of the Father, which could be unreasonable if he were equal to the Father.

12. The union between him and the Father he interprets to be like that of the saints with one another. That is in agreement of will and counsel.

415 posted on 09/02/2006 9:24:48 AM PDT by MHGinTN (If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote life support for others.)
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To: betty boop
You are welcome Betty Boop.

While Newton may have been agnostic on the Trinity he was not agnostic as to the Word. He was a fervent believer in the God of Abraham.

417 posted on 09/02/2006 12:19:24 PM PDT by jwalsh07
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