Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a nontrinitarian movement of Christianity. Unitarians affirm the unitary nature of God as the singular and unique creator of the universe, believe that Jesus Christ was inspired by God in his moral teachings and that he is the savior of mankind, but he is not equal to God himself. Accordingly, Unitarians reject the Ecumenical Councils and ecumenical creeds, and sit outside traditional, mainstream Christianity.
Unitarianism was established in order to restore "primitive Christianity before later corruptions set in". Likewise, Unitarian Christians generally reject the doctrine of original sin. The churchmanship of Unitarianism may include liberal denominations or Unitarian Christian denominations that are more conservative, with the latter being known as biblical Unitarians.
The birth of the Unitarian faith is proximate to the Radical Reformation, beginning almost simultaneously among the Protestant Polish Brethren in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the Principality of Transylvania in the mid-16th century; the first Unitarian Christian denomination known to have emerged during that time was the Unitarian Church of Transylvania, founded by the Unitarian preacher and theologian Ferenc Dávid. Among its adherents were a significant number of Italians who took refuge in Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, and Transylvania in order to escape from the religious persecution perpetrated against them by the Roman Catholic and Magisterial Protestant churches. In the 17th century, significant repression in Poland led many Unitarians to flee or be killed for their faith. From the 16th to 18th centuries, Unitarians in Britain often faced significant political persecution, including John Biddle and Theophilus Lindsey. In England, the first Unitarian Church was established in 1774 on Essex Street, London, where today's British Unitarian headquarters is still located.
As is typical of dissenters and nonconformists, Unitarianism does not constitute one single Christian denomination; rather, it refers to a collection of both existing and extinct Christian groups that share a common theological concept of the unitary nature of God. Unitarian Christian communities and churches have developed in Central Europe, Ireland, India, Jamaica, Japan, Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In British America, different schools of Unitarian theology first spread in the New England Colonies and subsequently in the Mid-Atlantic States. The first official acceptance of the Unitarian faith on the part of a congregation in North America was by King's Chapel in Boston, from where James Freeman began teaching Unitarian doctrine in 1784 and was appointed rector. Later in 1785, he created a revised Unitarian Book of Common Prayer based on Lindsey's work.
Terminology
Unitarianism is a proper noun and follows the same English usage as other Christian theologies that have developed within a religious group or denomination. The term existed shortly before it became the name of a distinct religious tradition, thus occasionally it is used as a common noun to describe any understanding of Jesus Christ that denies the doctrine of the Trinity or affirms the belief that God is only one person. In that case, it would be a Nontrinitarian belief system not necessarily associated with the Unitarian movement. For example, the Unitarian movement has never accepted the Godhood of Jesus, and therefore does not include those nontrinitarian belief systems that do, such as Oneness Pentecostalism, United Pentecostal Church International, the True Jesus Church, and the writings of Michael Servetus. Recently, some religious groups have adopted the 19th-century term biblical unitarianism to distinguish their theologies from Unitarianism.Unitarianism is a Christian theology and practice that precedes and is distinct from Unitarian Universalism. In the 1890s the American Unitarian Association began to allow non-Christian and non-theistic churches and individuals to be part of their fellowship. As a result, people who held no Unitarian belief began to be called Unitarians because they were members of churches that belonged to the American Unitarian Association. After several decades, the non-theistic members outnumbered the theological Unitarians.
History
Unitarianism, both as a theology and as a denominational family of churches, was defined and developed in Poland, Transylvania, England, Wales, India, Japan, Jamaica, the United States, and beyond in the 16th century through the present. Although common beliefs existed among Unitarians in each of these regions, they initially grew independently from each other. Only later did they influence one another and accumulate more similarities.The Ecclesia minor or Minor Reformed Church of Poland, better known today as the Polish Brethren, was born as the result of a controversy that started on January 22, 1556, when Piotr of Goniądz, a Polish student, spoke out against the doctrine of the Trinity during the general synod of the Reformed churches of Poland held in the village of Secemin. After nine years of debate, in 1565, the anti-Trinitarians were excluded from the existing synod of the Polish Reformed Church and they began to hold their own synods as the Ecclesia minor. Though frequently called "Arians" by those on the outside, the views of Fausto Sozzini became the standard in the church, and these doctrines were quite removed from Arianism. So important was Socinus to the formulation of their beliefs that those outside Poland usually referred to them as Socinians. The Polish Brethren were disbanded in 1658 by the Sejm. They were ordered to convert to Roman Catholicism or leave Poland. Most of them went to Transylvania or Holland, where they embraced the name "Unitarian". Between 1665 and 1668 a grandson of Socinus, Andrzej Wiszowaty Sr., published Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum quos Unitarios vocant.
The Unitarian Church of Transylvania was first recognized by the Edict of Torda, issued by the Transylvanian Diet under Prince John II Sigismund Zápolya, and was first led by Ferenc Dávid. The term "Unitarian" first appeared as unitaria religio in a document of the Diet of Lécfalva, Transylvania, on 25 October 1600, though it was not widely used in Transylvania until 1638, when the formal recepta Unitaria Religio was published.
The word Unitarian had been circulating in private letters in England, in reference to imported copies of such publications as the Library of the Polish Brethren who are called Unitarians. Henry Hedworth was the first to use the word "Unitarian" in print in English, and the word first appears in a title in Stephen Nye's A Brief History of the Unitarians, called also Socinians. The movement gained popularity in England in the wake of the Enlightenment and began to become a formal denomination in 1774 when Theophilus Lindsey organised meetings with Joseph Priestley, founding the first avowedly Unitarian congregation in the country. This occurred at Essex Street Church in London. Official toleration came in 1813.
The first official acceptance of the Unitarian faith on the part of a congregation in America was by King's Chapel in Boston, which settled James Freeman in 1782, and revised the Prayer Book into a mild Unitarian liturgy in 1785. In 1800, Joseph Stevens Buckminster became minister of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, where his brilliant sermons, literary activities, and academic attention to the German "New Criticism" helped shape the subsequent growth of Unitarianism in New England. Unitarian Henry Ware was appointed as the Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard College, in 1805. Harvard Divinity School then shifted from its conservative roots to teach Unitarian theology. Buckminster's close associate William Ellery Channing was settled over the Federal Street Church in Boston, 1803, and in a few years he became the leader of the Unitarian movement. A theological battle with the Congregational Churches resulted in the formation of the American Unitarian Association at Boston in 1825. Certainly, the unitarian theology was being "adopted" by the Congregationalists from the 1820s onwards. This movement is also evident in England at this time.
The first school founded by the Unitarians in the United States was the Clinton Liberal Institute, in Clinton, Oneida County, New York, founded in 1831.
Beliefs
Christology
Unitarians charge that the doctrine of the Trinity, unlike Unitarianism, fails to adhere to strict monotheism. Unitarians maintain that Jesus was a great man and a prophet of God—perhaps even a supernatural being—but not God himself. They believe Jesus did not claim to be God and that his teachings did not suggest the existence of a triune God.Unitarian Christology can be divided according to whether or not Jesus is believed to have had a pre-human existence. Both forms maintain that God is one being and one person and that Jesus is the Son of God, but generally not God himself.
In the early 19th century, Unitarian Robert Wallace identified three particular classes of Unitarian doctrines in history:
- Arian, which believed in a pre-existence of the Logos;
- Socinian, which denied his pre-existence but agreed that Jesus should be worshipped;
- "Strict Unitarian", which, believing in an "incommunicable divinity of God", denied the worship of "the man Christ."
"Socinian" Christology
The Christology commonly called "Socinian"—after Fausto Sozzini, one of the founders of Unitarian theology—refers to the belief that Jesus began his life when he was born as a human. In other words, the teaching that Jesus pre-existed his human body is rejected. There are various views ranging from the belief that Jesus was simply a human who, because of his greatness, was adopted by God as his Son to the belief that Jesus literally became the son of God when he was conceived by the Holy Spirit.This Christology existed in some form or another before Sozzini. Theodotus of Byzantium, Artemon and Paul of Samosata denied the pre-existence of the Christ. These ideas were continued by Marcellus of Ancyra and his pupil Photinus in the 4th century AD. In the Radical Reformation and Anabaptist movements of the 16th century, this idea resurfaced with Sozzini's uncle, Lelio Sozzini. Having influenced the Polish Brethren to a formal declaration of this belief in the Racovian Catechism, Sozzini involuntarily ended up giving his name to this Christological position, which continued with English Unitarians, such as John Biddle, Thomas Belsham, Theophilus Lindsey, and James Martineau. In America, most of the early Unitarians were Arian in Christology, but among those who held to a "Socinian" view was James Freeman.
Regarding the virgin birth of Jesus, among those who denied the preexistence of the Christ, some held to it, and others did not. Its denial is sometimes ascribed to the Ebionites; however, Origen and Eusebius both indicate that some Ebionites did accept the virgin birth. On the other hand, Theodotus of Byzantium, Artemon, and Paul of Samosata all accepted the virgin birth. In the early days of Unitarianism, the stories of the virgin birth were accepted by most. There were a number of Unitarians who questioned the historicity of the Bible, including Symon Budny, Jacob Palaeologus, Thomas Belsham, and Richard Wright, and this made them question the virgin birth story. Beginning in England and America in the 1830s and manifesting itself primarily in transcendentalist Unitarianism, which emerged from the German liberal theology associated primarily with Friedrich Schleiermacher, the psilanthropist view increased in popularity. Its proponents took an intellectual and humanistic approach to religion. They embraced evolutionary concepts, asserted the "inherent goodness of man", and abandoned the doctrine of biblical infallibility, rejecting most of the miraculous events in the Christian Bible. Notable examples are James Martineau, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederic Henry Hedge. Famous American Unitarian William Ellery Channing was a believer in the virgin birth until later in his life, after he had begun his association with the Transcendentalists.