William Ellery Channing 1780-1842
The Doctrine of the Trinity was adopted at three Church Councils. The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE said that Jesus was "very God of very God," equal to God. The Council of Constantinople in 381 said that the Holy Spirit is also God. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 declared that Jesus is both completely human and completely divine, thus completing the Doctrine of the Trinity. After Chalcedon, the dogma of the Trinity was required by the Catholic Church. Unitarians see themselves as having been on the losing side of this debate.
Jesus was not a Trinitarian Christian. He was a Jew, and Jews believe that God is one. Therefore, if Jesus had believed himself to be the Second Person of the Trinity, and believed this doctrine to be important, one would expect that he would have made it central to his teachings. We would see that reflected in the New Testament. But the word "Trinity," or its ancient equivalent, never appears anywhere in the Bible, and the doctrine is never clearly set forth anywhere in the Bible.
Jesus did not pray, "Dear Me, who art both here and in heaven, hallowed be my name. My kingdom come, my will be done..." Rather, he prayed to God, and taught his disciples to pray to God. According to Mark 12:30, Jesus said, "The Lord our God is the one Lord," and according to John 14:28 he said, "the Father is greater than I." According to 1 Timothy 2:5, "There is only one God, and there is one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus who is himself a man." These passages and many others appear to refute the Doctrine of the Trinity.
In fact, both the Gospel of John 1:18 and the Epistle of 1 John 4:12 say, "No one has ever seen God." But if Jesus was God, hadn't people seen him? If a Trinitarian had written those books he would have said, "No one has ever seen God the Father, but we have seen God the Son."
The modern Unitarian controversy was touched off by the publication of Michael Servetus' book, On the Errors of the Trinity, in 1531. Servetus was condemned to death by the Catholic Church in France, and was burned at the stake in 1553 by Protestants in Geneva, Switzerland. His books inspired great debate. By 1565 there was an organized Unitarian movement in Poland (the Minor Reformed Church, also called the Polish Brethren). Faustus Socinus became leader of the Minor Church, and so they are sometimes called "Socinians." The Socinians were wiped out in Poland in 1660, when they were told to convert to Catholicism, leave Poland, or be executed.
Another Unitarian movement began in Transylvania in 1568, led by David Ferencz (Francis David in English). The Transylvanian Unitarians, part of Romania's Hungarian-speaking minority, still survive. There are about 124 Unitarian Churches in Transylvania, with a membership of about 80,000.
The Transylvanian Unitarians are liberal Christians who believe in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as found in the New Testament, and hold him up as an exemplar. Adhering to strict monotheism, they maintain that Jesus was a great man, a rabbi and a prophet of God, but not God himself. They believe in the moral authority, but not the divinity, of Jesus. Jesus was "divine" only in the sense that all people have within them a spark of the divine.
A Unitarian movement dates to the 1600s in England, and Unitarians began to organize in America around 1819. In that year William Ellery Channing's sermon, "Unitarian Christianity," provided a platform for liberal Congregationslists who believed in the unity of God, the basic goodness of human nature, and the use of reason.
Unitarian Christians believe they follow "the religion of Jesus, not a religion about Jesus." (Today, most Unitarian Universalists no longer consider themselves to be Christian.) We do not pray to Jesus, but many Unitarians pray to God, as Jesus taught.
Unitarians have encouraged open-minded, freethinking views of God, Jesus, the world, and purpose of life, as revealed through reason, scholarship, science, philosophy, scripture and other prophets and religions. Unitarians believe that reason and belief are complementary and that religion and science can co-exist and guide us in our understanding of nature and existence. We were among the first to accept Darwin's explanation of human origins.
We do not enforce belief in creeds or dogmatic formulas. Although there is flexibility in the nuances of faith for the individual Unitarian, general principles have been recognized as a way to unite our congregations in community. Our members generally accept religious pluralism, but many of us remain committed to a core belief in Jesus' teachings. While an important Unitarian minority consider themselves to be Christians who worship God, and revere Jesus and the Bible, the majority of Unitarian Universalists today no longer consder themselves to be Christians. For most modern Unitarian Universalists, the wisdom of the great world religions, and spiritual leaders such as the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., play a role equal to Jesus and the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.
We value a secular society and the constitutional guarantees that Thomas Jefferson called the "wall of separation between church and state," which require government to stay out of religious affairs.
In 1961 the American Unitarian Association combined with the Universalist Church in America to form the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA). Unitarian Universalists are not to be confused with either the Unity School of Christianity or Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.