Unitarianism

Orthodox Christians recognise the distinctness of God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit - or God the Holy Ghost, to use the language of the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer - but they nonetheless believe that there is only one God. They seek to clarify this position by appeal to the doctrine of the Trinity, according to which God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are three 'persons' but one 'substance'. Whatever the precise import of this doctrine, it is clear that the theologians who formulated it in the fourth century intended to emphasise that the three 'persons' of the Trinity have always existed together, the existence of the one being inseparable from the others, and that they have equal status.

Unitarianism holds, in contrast to Trinitarianism (i.e., the doctrine of the Trinity), that God is not three 'persons' but one 'person' - a position which may be elaborated in a number of different ways, but which typically ensures that God is one 'person' by denying that the second and third 'persons' of the Trinity (i.e., Jesus and the Holy Spirit) have the same status as the first 'person' (i.e., God the Father). Thus Unitarians do not accord Jesus (fully) divine status: at one extreme some Unitarians believe that Jesus was divine but in some way subordinate to God the Father - a position similar to that advocated by the heretic Arius at the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth centuries - while at the other extreme other Unitarians believe that Jesus was (no more than) a human being possessed of exemplary human virtues.

The term 'Unitarianism' was first used in the context of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, though what were Unitarian doctrines in all but name were widely accepted in the first centuries of the Christian era - see, e.g., Arianism. The Unitarian movement began to attract significant numbers of adherents in the eighteenth century, and in England the Unitarian Church was established as a distinct denomination in 1774, though it was not fully legal until 1813 with the passing of the Doctrine of the Trinity Act. In America many of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century were Unitarians, e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), and James Russell Lowell (1819-1891).

In the last century or so some Unitarian churches have become progressively more liberal in their beliefs; and when the word unitarian - often in this use with a lower case initial letter - is applied to an individual simply in virtue of his or her membership of a Unitarian church, this need not imply any commitment to theistic beliefs, let alone to a particular theological doctrine. For many contemporary Unitarians their religious beliefs are in effect a set of distinctive moral convictions.