Works
His major work was a 'Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament,' begun in 1688 and published in 1700; last edition, 1822. Philip Doddridge thought it preferable to any other commentary. In his commentary he opposes John Tillotson's view of hell torments. Faith he defined as mere assent to Gospel facts as true. In 1710, Whitby challenged the critical works of John Mill and defended Textus Receptus against thirty thousand textual variants in Mill's edition of the New Testament. Of this Examen variantium Lectionum Johannis Milli use was made by Anthony Collins; it was reprinted (Leyden, 1724) by Sigebert Haverkamp.
During 1710-11 Whitby was engaged in refuting the Calvinistic positions of John Edwards. In 1710 he wrote his Discourse on the Five Points (on the Five Points of Calvinism) which eventually drew Calvinist responses from English Baptist John Gill in his The Cause of God and Truth (1735) and American Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards in his Freedom of the Will (1754).
Whitby is usually ranked as an Arminian, but denial of the imputation of Adam's sin carried him beyond Arminian lines. In the Bangorian controversy he wrote (1714 and 1718) in defence of Benjamin Hoadly. On the doctrine of our Lord's deity, which he had defended in 1691 and had upheld throughout his New Testament commentary (1703), he was affected by the treatise (1712) of Samuel Clarke, as shown by his later criticisms of George Bull and Daniel Waterland.
A later Latin dissertation (1714) rejects the authority of the fathers as interpreters of Scripture, or as entitled to determine controversies respecting the Trinity. He had been led to this position by his antagonism (1707) to the arguments on which Henry Dodwell the elder based his rejection of the natural immortality of the soul. He made further use of it in criticisms directed (1718) against Bull and (1720-1) Waterland.
The extent of his departure from conventional opinion was not revealed till the posthumous publication in April 1727 of his Last Thoughts, which he calls his 'retractation,' and which 'clearly shows his unitarianism'.
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