A few more facts
Submitted by Heather on December 06 1999 at 17:29:07
In reply to Re: The Unitarian Church - is it Christian? Submitted by Jules on December 06 1999 at 08:57:09
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Hi, Jules, I worshipped with the Unitarians for a year, so I can supply a little more information. It's not quite accurate to say that the Unitarians didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus; what they didn't believe in was his deity. Some were firm believers in the Nicene Creed ("God from God") but felt that the modern church had misinterpreted what the Church Fathers meant by a hypostatic union; others believed – á la Arian – that Jesus was the Son of God and the Christ but that this was different from him being God himself; and others believed that Jesus was divine but that this was a divinity that could be inherited by everyone (sort of a common man's version of the Eastern Orthodox idea of theosis – this is Dirk Gently's cue to explain that the Orthodox idea was completely different). The most common belief was the one you mentioned, Jules, that Jesus was a very holy man, but Unitarians were never unified in their Christology. Essentially what united American Unitarians was not their beliefs about Jesus but their belief that the orthodox church's approach to Scripture and reason was skewed. The roots of Unitarianism go back to the Christological fights in the early Christian Church. The American Unitarian Church was formed in the early nineteenth century when the unitarian Congregationalists and the trinitarian Congregationalists were unable to live in harmony together; that's why, if you go to New England today, you'll find that the Unitarians usually have the historic Congregationalist meetinghouse, while the Congregationalists (now the United Church of Christ) have the meetinghouse across the square. Unitarianism wasn't confined to the Unitarian Church, though; it was popular in all of the American denominations at that time, and in fact the earliest Unitarian church in America was Episcopal (King's Chapel in Boston, which still uses its unitarian version of the Book of Common Prayer). Universalism was another denomination that become dominated by unitarian ideas, so most of the Universalist churches merged with the Unitarian Church in the twentieth century, though many Universalists aren't unitarian, and many Unitarians aren't universalists. Whew. Okay, what happened to the Unitarian Church – which was entirely Christian to begin with – was that the denomination underwent two waves of new theological ideas. First came the Transcendentalists, theists who believed that the primary way to know God was through nature. Then came the Humanists, who nearly turned Unitarianism into a Humanist denomination. Today, the trend in the Unitarian Universalist Association is turning away from Humanism toward various forms of theism. A survey in 1998 found the following major beliefs in the Unitarian Universalist Association: Humanists: 46.1% Earth- and nature-centered spirituality (mainly Pagans): 19% Theists (i.e. the descendents of the Transcendentalists): 13% Christians: 9.5% So the Christians are still there, and in fact they're a very lively group – their Christological discussions are among the best I've seen. They're very much an oppressed minority, though, fighting against being forgotten by the denomination. The situation is different in other countries; continental European Unitarians have always been Christian and are astounded by what happened in the American church. Heather |