Right Left Whatever

Yesterday, Mark Byron wrote this

Yesterday, Mark Byron wrote this post about the need to be alert for heterodoxy within the church. He closed with this statement:

Rewind the tape three-and-a-half centuries and that bunch is the Puritan Congregationalists of 1600s New England. Guys like Cotton Mather weren’t politically correct universalists; they were as much a Bible-thumper as Billy Graham. However, allow a little decay each generation, and the Bible-thumpers turn Unitarians in all but name within two centuries.

He's got a very good point, for he nails the origin of the Unitarian Universalist Association exactly, and the "all but name" can actually be replaced with the word "literally".

You see, the American Unitarian Association (one of the two organizations which formed the UUA) was actually formed from liberal congregations which left the Puritan Congregationalists. How did this happen? Congregational polity, combined with a general distaste for the evangelical movement that swept across America in the late eighteenth century, which led many New England religious intellectuals to move away from traditional Protestant doctrine. Congregations elected liberal pastors and slowly, one-by-one, became Unitarian.

In 1819, William Ellery Channing, preached an ordination sermon in Baltimore entitled "Unitarian Christianity". Channing claimed that liberals had claim to the title "Christian" even if they were Unitarian, and in addition to describing how he interpreted the Bible (rationally, with some parts more important than others, by which I think he meant he was free to disbelieve anything he wished) he listed six main differences between Unitarian and Trinitarian Christianity:

The unity of God and rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity,

The unity of Jesus (the controversy over His God-Man nature),

the moral perfection of God, where Channing all but declares Unitarianism to be Universalist in nature,

the rejection of the Atonement,

holiness as a personal quality, rather than of God

Interested readers can read the whole thing, but I'll comment on one item: the rejection of the Atonement. Channing claims that it isn't in the Bible, but anyone who has actually read the New Testament knows that just isn't so. Paul's letter to the Romans, Chapter 5 explicitly says

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (ESV, Romans 5:6-8)

The only way to say that the Bible doesn't support the Atonement is to deny that Paul's letters belong in the Bible (as well as John's Gospel) and many other books. Of course, that is exactly the course that the scholars at The Jesus Seminar would take in the following century.

More info on Unitarian history, from the UUA's website

UPDATED: Corrected the date of the sermon, it was actually delivered in 1819. The American Unitarian Association was founded six years later by Channing and several other religious liberals.
UPDATED AGAIN: Added some words after the word "holiness" in the list. I just felt funny leaving that word hanging all alone there.

Posted by joelfuhrmann at November 14, 2002 12:51 PM