Authority, Reason, and Anti-trinitarianism: John Abernethy and the Competing Pressures Within Irish Presbyterianism in the Early Eighteenth Century

Irish Presbyterians found themselves in an unusual position at the start of the eighteenth century. Close historical, cultural, and family ties linked them to the Church of Scotland, the established church in Scotland, but in Ireland they were Dissenters; they didn’t possess full civil and political rights and lived under an Anglican ascendancy in a country that had a Catholic majority. The main issue which divided Irish Presbyterianism was the question of subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith which resulted in the non-subscribing minority being placed together in the Presbytery of Antrim in 1725 and removed from ecclesiastical communion in the following year. Many later writers saw the early Non-Subscribers as paving the way for anti-trinitarianism. The orthodox Presbyterian historian Thomas Witherow described the Belfast Society, a ministerial society for reading and discussion, as providing ‘a seed-plot of error, from which erroneous principles were carried out and disseminated over the church’. The aim of this chapter is to show that anti-trinitarianism played little or no direct part in the development of non-subscription. Whilst it is true that there were proponents of Arianism at this time (such as the Rev. Thomas Emlyn, 1663–1741) and deep-rooted fears amongst orthodox Presbyterians of the spread of Arianism in Ireland and in Glasgow University, where so many Irish ministers were trained, what animated the Non-Subscribers was a reliance on the centrality of the Bible allied to a belief in the crucial place of reason in religion. Looking particularly at the career and writings of John Abernethy (1680–1740) it will examine how agitation for Presbyterian rights and the questioning of Anglican civil authority became applied to the rights of individuals within the Presbyterian church. Abernethy began to apply the ideas of Bishop Benjamin Hoadly (1676–1761) to his own church and the question of Non-Subscription within Irish Presbyterianism ultimately became orientated around the nature of authority in the church.