Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 29:2 (Summer 2025)
Article: The Triumph Of Truth: John Fawcett’s Defense Against Joseph Priestley’s Christological Heterodoxy During The Long Eighteenth Century
Author: Bill Marolt

The Triumph Of Truth: John Fawcett’s Defense Against Joseph Priestley’s Christological Heterodoxy During The Long Eighteenth Century1

Bill Marolt

Bill Marolt is a PhD student in historical and theological studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, where he also earned his MDiv. He has served his community as an insurance professional for the last thirty years and is the owner and president of the Matson Insurance Agency in Columbus, Ohio. He is married to Salean, and they have three children, two grandchildren, and are members of Covenant Church in Grove City, Ohio.

The arrival of William of Orange (1650–1702) at Brixham in 1688 ushered in a dawn of hope for English Dissent as Baptists, Presbyterians, and Independents longed for the day that the tide of persecution would give way to a new age of religious freedom. Their battles were far from over, however, for the long eighteenth century in England was a complex battleground for “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). The “Age of Reason” gave rise to Rational Dissent resulting in a “doctrinal minefield” concerning the Trinity, the humanity and deity of Jesus Christ, and the doctrine of the atonement, especially during the final decades of the eighteenth century.2 Stephen Wellum rightly identifies the critical importance of the Enlightenment era (c.1560–1780) as “the hinge that swung the medieval-Reformation era into the modern era” which displaced the Reformation worldview and gave way to the gradual secularization of

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thought and institutions in Western Europe.3 The stakes could not be higher as the church’s consistent historic confession which affirmed that “Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the eternal Trinity, who at a specific point in history took to himself a human nature and was born as Jesus of Nazareth in order to accomplish our redemption” was under attack.4

Unitarianism, which grew out of the English Enlightenment, denied Trinitarian doctrine and the atoning work of Jesus on the cross.5 This article will focus on the lives and writings of two prominent pastors from the north country of Yorkshire, the Unitarian Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and the Particular Baptist John Fawcett (1740–1817). The analysis of their writings will demonstrate Fawcett provided an orthodox defense against Priestley’s heterodox claims against the deity of Jesus and the doctrine of the atone...