Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) was considered an insightful and erudite theologian by his Protestant contemporaries.[ENGLISH & LATIN] Professor Rob Iliffe (AHRC Newton Papers Project) THE NEWTON PROJECT – Newton's Religious Writings [ENGLISH & LATIN] He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies, and he wrote religious tracts that dealt with the literal interpretation of the Bible. He kept his heretical beliefs private.

Newton's conception of the physical world provided a model of the natural world that would reinforce stability and harmony in the civic world. Newton saw a monotheistic God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation.Principia, Book III; cited in; Newton's Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his writings, p. 42, ed. H.S. Thayer, Hafner Library of Classics, NY, 1953.A Short Scheme of the True Religion, manuscript quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir David Brewster, Edinburgh, 1850; cited in; ibid, p. 65. Born into an Anglican family, he became a devout but heterodox Protestant. Quote: "Newton was also a Protestant Christian (although an unorthodox one in private)." Christian. By his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christians.Richard S. Westfall – Indiana University Many scholars now consider him a Nontrinitarian Arian.

He may have been influenced by Socinian christology.

Early history Newton was born into an Anglican family three months after the death of his father, a prosperous farmer also named Isaac Newton. When Newton was three, his mother married the rector of the neighbouring parish of North Witham and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. Isaac apparently hated his step-father, and had nothing to do with Smith during his childhood. His maternal uncle, the rector serving the parish of Burton Coggles, was involved to some extent in the care of Isaac.

In 1667, Newton became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,Cambridge University Retrieved 29 January 2012 making necessary his commitment to taking Holy Orders within seven years of completing his MA, which he did the following year. He was also required to take a vow of celibacy and recognize the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.Professor Rob Iliffe (AHRC Newton Papers Project) THE NEWTON PROJECT Newton considered ceasing his studies prior to completion to avoid the ordination made necessary by law of King Charles II.Cambridge University Library He was eventually successful in avoiding the statute, assisted in this by the efforts of Isaac Barrow, as in 1676 the then Secretary of State for the Northern Department, Joseph Williamson, changed the relevant statute of Trinity College to provide dispensation from this duty. Newton then embarked on an investigative study of the early history of the Church, which developed, during the 1680s, into inquiries about the origins of religion. At around the same time, he developed a scientific view on motion and matter. Of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica he stated:S.D.Snobelen (University of King's College) – To Discourse of God : Isaac Newton's Heterdox Theology and Natural Philosophy Nova Scotia Retrieved 29 January 2012

Christian heresy

According to most scholars, Newton was Arian, not holding to Trinitarianism.Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, (1980) pp. 103, 25. Scholars have generally concluded that Newton's heretical beliefs were self-taught, but he may have been influenced by then-current heretical writings; controversies over unitarianism were raging at the time.

As well as rejecting the Trinity, Newton's studies led him to reject belief in the immortal soul. Despite his unorthodox beliefs, Sir Isaac Newton affirmed infant baptism, in keeping with his Anglican upbringing, writing, "The Declaration by imposition of hands is a Jewish ceremony. We call it confirmation, meaning a confirmation of what was done by the Godfathers in baptizing the Infant."

Although he was not a Socinian, he shared many similar beliefs with them. They were a unitarian Reformation movement in Poland. A manuscript he sent to John Locke, in which he disputed the existence of the Trinity, was never published. In 2019, John Rogers stated, "Heretics both, John Milton and Isaac Newton were, as most scholars now agree, Arians."John Rogers, "Newton's Arian Epistemology and the Cosmogony of Paradise Lost." ELH: English Literary History 86.1 (2019): 77-106 online.

Newton refused the sacrament of the Anglican church offered before his death.

After his death, Deists sometimes claimed him as one of their own, as have Trinitarians. In fact, he was an active apologist who opposed both orthodox teachings and religious skepticism.

God as masterful creator Newton saw God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation.Webb, R.K. ed. Knud Haakonssen. "The emergence of Rational Dissent." Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in eighteenth-century Britain. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1996. p19. Nevertheless, he rejected Leibniz's thesis that God would necessarily make a perfect world which requires no intervention from the creator. In Query 31 of the Opticks, Newton simultaneously made an argument from design and for the necessity of intervention:

This passage prompted an attack by Leibniz in a letter to his friend Caroline of Ansbach:

Leibniz's letter initiated the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, ostensibly with Newton's friend and disciple Samuel Clarke, although as Caroline wrote, Clarke's letters "are not written without the advice of the Chev. Newton".Caroline to Leibniz, 10 January 1716, quoted in Alexander 1956, p. 193. (Chev. = Chevalier i.e. Knight.) Clarke complained that Leibniz's concept of God as a "supra-mundane intelligence" who set up a "pre-established harmony" was but a step from atheism: "And as those men, who pretend that in an earthly government things may go on perfectly well without the king himself ordering or disposing of any thing, may reasonably be suspected that they would like very well to set the king aside: so, whosoever contends, that the beings of the world can go on without the continual direction of God...his doctrine does in effect tend to exclude God out of the world".Clarke, first reply, in Alexander 1956 p. 14.

In addition to stepping in to re-form the Solar System, Newton invoked God's active intervention to prevent the stars falling in on each other, and perhaps in preventing the amount of motion in the universe from decaying due to viscosity and friction.H.W. Alexander 1956, p. xvii In private correspondence, Newton sometimes hinted that the force of gravity was due to an immaterial influence:

Leibniz said that such an immaterial influence would be a continual miracle; this was another strand of his debate with Clarke.

Newton's view has been considered to be close to deism, and several biographers and scholars labelled him as a deist who is strongly influenced by Christianity. However, he differed from strict adherents of deism in that he invoked God as a special physical cause to keep the planets in orbits.Avery Cardinal Dulles. The Deist Minimum . 2005. He warned against using the law of gravity to view the universe as a mere machine, like a great clock, saying:

On the other hand, latitudinarian and Newtonian ideas taken too far resulted in the millenarians, a religious faction dedicated to the concept of a mechanical universe, but finding in it the same enthusiasm and mysticism that the Enlightenment had fought so hard to extinguish.Jacob, Margaret C. (1976). The Newtonians and the English Revolution: 1689–1720. Newton showed considerable interest in millenarianism, as he wrote about both the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation in his Observations Upon the Prophecies.

Newton's concept of the physical world provided a model of the natural world that would reinforce stability and harmony in the civic world.

Bible

Newton spent a great deal of time trying to discover hidden messages within the Bible. After 1690, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible. In a manuscript Newton wrote in 1704, he describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible. He estimated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. In predicting this, he said, "This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail."

The Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, holds in its collections Newton's personal copy of the King James Version, which exhibits numerous marginal notes in his hand as well as about 500 reader's marks pointing to passages of particular interest to him. A note is attached to the Bible, indicating that it "was given by Sir Isaac Newton in his last illness to the woman who nursed him". The book was eventually bequeathed to the Library in 1878. The places Newton marked or annotated in his Bible bear witness to his investigations into theology, chronology, alchemy, and natural philosophy; and some of these relate to passages of the General Scholium to the second edition of the Principia. Some other passages he marked offer glimpses of his devotional practices and reveal distinct tensions in his personality. Newton's Bible appears to have been first and foremost a customized reference tool in the hands of a biblical scholar and critic.Joalland, Michael. "Isaac Newton Reads the King James Version: The Marginal Notes and Reading Marks of a Natural Philosopher". Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 113, no. 3 (2019): 297–339 (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/704518?journalCode=pbsa)

Newton's alchemical knowledge influenced his religious views. Quote: "Yet nothing has been said about a possible influence of alchemical knowledge over Newton's Biblical exegesis." (Open Access PhD dissertation)

The Trinity Newton's work of New Testament textual criticism, An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, was sent in a letter to John Locke on 14 November 1690. In it, he reviews evidence that the earliest Christians did not believe in the Trinity.

According to Manoilă, Newton considered Jesus to be God as dominion, not as being or substance.

Prophecy Newton relied upon the existing Scripture for prophecy, believing his interpretations would set the record straight in the face of what he considered to be, "so little understood". Though he would never write a cohesive body of work on prophecy, Newton's beliefs would lead him to write several treatises on the subject, including an unpublished guide for prophetic interpretation titled Rules for interpreting the words & language in Scripture. In this manuscript, he details the requirements for what he considered to be the proper interpretation of the Bible.

End of the world vs. Start of the millennial kingdom