Although he was often classed as a deist, his biographer William H. Trapnell regards him as an Anglican who held unorthodox theological views.
[4][5] After a time, by the study of Origen and the other early Fathers, he became possessed with the notion of the importance of an allegorical or spiritual interpretation of Scripture, and advocated its use in the defence of Christianity both in his sermons and in his first book, while attacking what he saw as the shallow literalist interpretation of contemporary divines, The Old Apology for the Truth of the Christian Religion against the Jews and Gentiles Revived (1705).
For many years he published nothing, but in 1720-1721 the publication of letters and pamphlets in advocacy of his assessment of the Old Testament,[6] with open challenges to the clergy to refute them, brought him into trouble.
The infidel intended was Anthony Collins, who had maintained in his book alluded to that the New Testament is based on the Old, and that not the literal but only the allegorical sense of the prophecies can be quoted in proof of the Messiahship of Jesus; the apostate was the clergy who had forsaken the allegorical method of the fathers.
Two years later he began a series of Discourses on the same subject, in which he applied the principles of his Moderator to the miracles of the Gospels in detail.