Unitarianism

Unitarianism is the doctrine of God holding that God exists as a single divine person, not three, denying the Trinity as historic Christianity has confessed it. On this view the one person who is God Almighty is the Father alone, and on that ground the Son’s full deity and the Spirit’s full divinity are both denied.¹ The name itself dates only to 1687, naming a movement descended from Socinianism that spread through English Dissent and, later, New England Congregationalism.²

Historical Origin

The denial that God is three persons is older than the name for it. Ancient humanitarian Christologies, treated at Psilanthropism, made a similar denial, and Socinianism revived it at the Reformation through the Italian Fausto Sozzini, organizing a church at Racow in Poland.² The name “Unitarian,” and the English movement it identifies, came later and grew out of its own, more specific controversy.

John Biddle (1615-62) revived Socinian teaching in England and came to be remembered as “the Father of English Unitarianism.”³ After Biddle’s death, and after the Clarendon Code had scattered Dissenters, the controversy he had provoked lay mostly quiet for a quarter century.³ It reawakened in 1687, when Stephen Nye, rector of Little Hormead in Hertfordshire, published, with the financial backing of Thomas Firmin, A Brief History of the Unitarians, Called Also Socinians. According to the historian H. John McLachlan, this was the first time the word “Unitarian” had appeared in the title of a book.¹ Despite its title, Nye’s work was less a history than an apology for the Unitarian doctrine of God. Nye stated the position plainly: Unitarians hold that the God of the Bible is “only one Person, not three,” that one person, God Almighty, being the Father alone, and for that reason “they reject the full deity of the Son and deny the full divinity of the Spirit.”¹

Nye’s tract, distributed freely from 1689, alarmed the Established Church at a sensitive moment. King William III, seeking peace among his Protestant subjects, directed his archbishops and bishops in 1695 to enforce the Trinitarian doctrine of the creeds and the Thirty-Nine Articles, and two years later approved the Blasphemy Act of 1697, which punished anyone who, having professed Christianity, later denied the Trinity.⁴

The controversy then moved from the Established Church to England’s Dissenting congregations. In Exeter, the Presbyterian minister James Peirce read Samuel Clarke’s Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity and came to deny that the Trinity in Unity was a fundamental article of the faith, affirming instead the Son’s subordination to the Father.⁵ When Peirce and other ministers were pressed in 1718 to declare their views, the dispute widened into the wider Dissenting community. London ministers from the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Baptist denominations met at Salters’ Hall in 1719 to decide whether to require subscription to a Trinitarian formula, and divided fifty-seven to fifty-three against requiring it.⁶ The Salters’ Hall vote did not itself settle the theological question; it registered how far England’s Presbyterian and Congregationalist Dissent had already come to tolerate open anti-Trinitarian teaching within its own pulpits.

That toleration proved consequential. Robert Letham observes that “English Presbyterianism soon became infected with Arianism and Unitarianism in the half century after the Restoration,” a judgment quoted by Daniel Scheiderer.⁷ A. A. Hodge traces the same drift on both sides of the Atlantic: “a number of degenerate Presbyterian Churches in England lapsed into Socinianism, and towards the end of the same century a larger number of Congregational Churches in Eastern Massachusetts followed their example, and these together constitute the foundation of the modern Unitarian Denomination.”² Quoting the historian Farrar, Hodge identifies three further phases of “Modern Unitarianism” in the nineteenth century: Joseph Priestley, who built “the old Socinianism” on a sensationalist philosophy; William Ellery Channing, who sought “a large development of the spiritual element”; and James Martineau, whose version reflected the philosophy of Victor Cousin and an idea of ongoing progress in religious understanding.²

Core Tenets

Unitarianism’s core claim, in Nye’s own eighteenth-century statement of it, is that God is a single divine person, the Father alone, so that the Son and the Spirit cannot be fully and coequally God.¹ A. A. Hodge classes the resulting system as “purely Unitarian in its theology—Humanitarian in its Christology—Pelagian in its Anthropology,” meaning the same denial that governs its doctrine of God carries matching entailments for how it treats the person of Christ and the nature of sin.²

John Gill compared the Unitarian denial of personal distinctions in the Godhead to the ancient error of Sabellianism, without treating the two as identical: “Our Socinians and modern Unitarians are much of the same sentiment with the Sabellians in this respect: and some who profess evangelical doctrines have embraced it, or are nibbling at it; fancying they have got new light, when they have only imbibed an old stale error, an ancient work of darkness, which has been confuted over and over.”⁸

Confessional and Biblical Response

Against the Unitarian denial of the Trinity, the Second London Baptist Confession states that “in this divine and infinite Being there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided.”⁹ Scripture identifies the Son as God in his own right, not as a delegated status granted to a merely human figure: “the Word was God” and “the Word became flesh” (John 1:1, 14). Christ himself commands baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19), a single “name” shared by three, and the apostolic benediction places all three alongside one another as equally the source of grace, love, and fellowship: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor. 13:14). Berkhof notes that the denial these texts answer did not end with the Reformation-era Socinians: the same denial of Christ’s deity “was shared by the Socinians of the days of the Reformation, and by the Unitarians and Modernists of our day.”¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Steven Tshombe Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 84, quoting Stephen Nye, A Brief History of the Unitarians, Called Also Socinians: In Four Letters Written to a Friend (1687). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 6, “A Comparison of Systems,” Q. 11, 103-105, quoting “Farrar’s Crit. Hist. of Free Thought,” Bampton Lecture, 1862. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” 83. ↩ ↩²
Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” 82-83. ↩
Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” 111-113. ↩
Godet, “The Trinitarian Crisis of the Long Eighteenth Century,” 113-114. ↩
Robert Letham, quoted in Daniel David Scheiderer, “Trinity and an Eternal Covenant,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 91. ↩
John Gill, Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, 127-28, quoted in Jonathan Elliot Swan, “‘Nothing Else Than Generation’: John Gill’s Doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship,” in “’The Fountain of Life’: John Gill’s Doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021). ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩
Louis Berkhof, Summary of Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1938), pt. 4, “Person and Work of Christ.” ↩