William Vidler, eighteenth-century Universalist

Just read F.W. Butt-Thompson’s study of William Vidler (1758–1816), a nemesis of Andrew Fuller, and by successive degrees a Calvinistic Baptist who turned Universalist and then Unitarian. His church, Butt-Thompson tells us, eventually became “an Ethical Society without any distinct Christian bias” [Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society 1 (1908), 42–55, quote at page 54]. I am looking forward to Chris Chun’s treatment of the controversy between Vidler and Fuller—that has so much contemporary significance—at ETS this November in San Francisco.