Faculty in First Person: Greg Dodds

by Greg Dodds, chair, professor of history

New research into the life of Isaac Newton protégé William Whiston reveals a champion of faith, science, and Adventism before Adventism.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I WAS IN THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY at the University of Oxford when I made a surprising discovery. The focus of my research that day was the relationship between Isaac Newton and William Whiston. Isaac Newton is, of course, exceedingly famous and his name is almost synonymous with the scientific revolution. Newton broke new ground in our understanding of motion, gravity, and optics, and he helped invent calculus. Newton, however, was a very complicated individual and he wrote more on alchemy than on what we would now consider science. In addition to his interest in alchemy, Newton was passionate about biblical history, biblical prophecy, and Christian history. His protégé in his spiritual quest for truth was a young man named William Whiston.

When Newton decided to leave his teaching position at the University of Cambridge, he hand-picked William Whiston to be his successor on the faculty. They were close and shared a deep interest in science, history, and the Bible, though not in Newton’s alchemy. Newton was very secretive and never wanted to share the results of his spiritual investigations. His voluminous writings on religion and alchemy are only now starting to be published. Newton believed that God had only chosen a few special men, throughout history, to understand the deeper spiritual truths that existed behind the Bible and behind observable nature.

Whiston, however, was an evangelist. He wanted the whole world to know about both Newtonian science and his and Newton’s religious discoveries. Whiston, particularly was keen to use historical evidence to guide contemporary Christians back to the practices of the early church before the corruptions of Constantine and then the Papacy. It was this aspect of Whiston’s life that I was at Oxford to study, with the longterm goal of using his life as a case-study for exploring the relationship between faith and science during the scientific revolution and early Enlightenment eras.

It was while reading Whiston’s manuscripts, letters, and personal memoir in the Bodleian that I discovered, quite unexpectedly, that Whiston believed the seventh day of the week should still be the Christian Sabbath. He even started a house church in London that worshiped on the seventh-day Sabbath. Most Seventh-day Adventists assume that the unique combination of theological and religious insights that gave birth to the SDA church came together in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Names like William Miller, Uriah Smith, James White, and Ellen White stand out as the early founders of that Advent movement. William Whiston lived one hundred years earlier in England and died in 1752. I knew, of course, that there had been seventh-day worshippers among the sixteenth century Anabaptists and then, later, among some English Baptists. But I had never expected such a major figure as Whiston to be the founder of a new community of Sabbath worshippers.

In almost all areas of theoology, Whiston refigured the beliefs of the early Advent movement one hundred years later.

More research revealed further surprises. Pursuing his biblical and historical research, Whiston came to believe that the dead sleep in the grave until the second coming; he did not believe in an eternal hell, he believed in adult baptism by immersion, he was a pacifist, and he believed in a premillennial soon second coming of Christ. In almost all areas of theology he prefigured the beliefs of the early Advent movement one hundred years later. He believed that an historicist method of biblical prophetic interpretation not only proved the Bible true, but could be used to determine the date of the second coming. Also like later Adventists, he believed that apocalyptic prophecy was connected with the heavenly sanctuary. He even built a model of the sanctuary and traveled around England with it as he shared his message of the Sabbath and the soon return of Jesus. He could almost be called the first Seventh-day Adventist.

Whiston also had his own great disappointment. He became convinced that the second coming would take place in October of 1736. He prophesied that the immediate sign of that event, as at the birth of Christ, would be a comet in the skies over London. When that comet arrived precisely as foretold, London went into a full-scale panic. The stock market crashed, no one went to work, and the churches were overflowing. But Christ did not return and Whiston retired to the countryside. He and his movement were mocked by major cultural figures such as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and William Hogarth. His Sabbatarian advent movement was in ruins.

Whiston’s movement did not completely fade away and his writings continued to influence other writers and pastors who were later read by the nineteenth-century Adventists. In the coming years my research and writing will continue to focus on Whiston. There are so many fascinating stories about his life and work, both as a scientist and theologian, that need to be told. For example, he was tried for heresy, found guilty by the University of Cambridge, and removed from his faculty position. His heretical notions also caused the priest at his local parish church to stop the service one Sunday and declare that he would not continue until Whiston left the church. Whiston remained seated and the pastor remained silently standing. The impasse would lead to no further church that Sunday. In the scientific realm he played a key role in the race to accurately measuring longitude, was the world expert on tracking comets, was a gifted and popular teacher of astronomy and mathematics, was a prolific author, and he had a major interest in the emerging field of geology. His story is a perfect case study for looking at the deep connections between science and religion at a critical point in history. There is, obviously, not nearly enough space here to tell all of the stories, but hopefully I will be sharing and publishing them in the years to come…. Stay tuned ….

Greg Dodds is a member of the WWU Speakers Bureau. For more information, visit wallawalla.edu/speakers.