Isaac Newton’s theology was so radical that his ideas could not be published during his lifetime, although he wrote and studied extensively. His executors published after his death. One of his theological treatises was `Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel’, which was published in 1733 in Dublin, 6 years after his death.
In this work he advanced the idea of ‘prophetic language’ whereby a reference in the scriptures to the bodies in the divine natural world, are a figure for events in the human political world. For example, ‘heavens and things therein’, signify ‘thrones and dignities’; or ‘Great earthquakes and the shaking of the heaven and the earth’, signify, ‘the shaking of kingdoms so as to distract or overthrow them’; or again, ‘the creating of a new heaven and earth and the passing away of an old one, or the beginning and end of the world’, represents, ‘the rise and ruin of the prevailing political organisation’.
We are all familiar with this kind of interpretation in some of our Christadelphian writings, making use of this prophetic language and its significance, particularly with some of the more difficult passages in say, 2 Peter 3, or Acts 2 or Luke 21.
Biography
Isaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day, 1642, and was not expected to survive this first day of his life: he was said to have been so small that he could have
fitted into a quart pot. His father died before he was born. His childhood seems to have been a lonely one.
When he was born at Wools thorpe Manor, near Grantham, Lincolnshire, in the English East Midlands, the Newton family had been yeoman farmers in Lincolnshire for several generations, and had built up a modest estate in the parish of Colsterworth, in which lies the tiny hamlet of Wools thorpe.
When he was three years old, his mother, Hannah, married a clergyman, leaving young Isaac to be brought up by his grandparents at Wools thorpe. He was sent to the local grammar school in Grantham until 1659, when his mother, being widowed for the second time, decided that the 17 year old Isaac should abandon his education and manage the now considerable estates. Hannah’s brother, however, who himself had studied at Cambridge, realized that Isaac would never make a farmer and persuaded his sister to return him to Grantham to complete his education.
Newton went up to Trinity College Cambridge, aged 19. Like all students of the time he commenced a study of the works of Aristotle, whose philosophies were still adhered to, despite the scientific revolution which was under way. He went on to absorb the ideas of the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Descartes, and the astronomers Kepler and Galileo. He quickly mastered their achievements through his analytical approach and ability to separate fact from fiction.
Because Cambridge was hit by a plague in 1665, he returned to Woolsthorpe for a couple of years, and this was to be a very profitable period. In eighteen months he laid the foundations for his work in mathematics, optics, and dynamics.
Newton never married. He was an introverted and isolated man, not given to levity. He was also over sensitive to the point of obsession, a characteristic which involved him in bitter quarrels with contemporary scientists. After his mother died in June, 1679, Newton withdrew from the intellectual society of Cambridge, and turned his attention to his other interests, particularly alchemy and theology.
Encouraged by the astronomer Edmund Halley, Newton published in 1687, his monumental work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. With the publication, his position as the leading scientist of the day was established. About the same time, he took the lead in resisting James II’s efforts to Catholicise Cambridge University. When James lost his throne in the 1688 revolution, Newton represented Cambridge in the Convention Parliament, which met in 1689 to ratify the claim of William III and establish the Protestant Succession to the English throne.
Newton devoted much of his last 30 years, when living in London, to his passionate interest in theology, and although he claimed to spend more time studying the Bible than on his scientific works, his theological writings have all but been forgotten. He had strong and unorthodox religious beliefs for the time, which rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, but he chose to avoid further controversy by not publicising these convictions. He found no difficulty in placing God firmly at the centre of his universe.
According to his biographer, Richard Westfall, Newton was ‘the culminating figure of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century’. Others say of him, ‘His discoveries place him among the greatest thinkers of all time’.
Acknowledgements.
These brief biographical details have been extracted from the 2001 edition of ‘Isaac Newton and Woolsthorpe Manor’ by Oliver Garnett, and published by the English National Trust.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One