From heresy to liberty The political trajectory of Unitarian theology and its contemporary relevance
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
This study analyzes the political trajectory of Unitarian theology from heresy to liberty and its contemporary relevance. Employing a qualitative descriptive analysis method, the findings reveal: The Origin and Development of Unitarianism, tracing its roots from early anti-Trinitarian thought (such as Arianism) to its crystallization during the Reformation through figures like Michael Servetus, and its evolution into a liberal movement in America. The Theological and Political Conflict with Trinitarianism is multidimensional; the rejection of the Trinity was perceived as a challenge to both ecclesiastical and state authority, inciting persecution and influencing political stability. Religious Freedom in the Modern Era demonstrates a paradigm shift: from a persecuted minority, Unitarianism became an architect of religious freedom thought and the separation of church and state, particularly within the Enlightenment and American constitutional contexts. The Socio-Political Implications of its doctrine are significant, fostering democracy, pluralism, social justice, and rational education. The response of the Orthodox or Catholic Church consistently rejects Unitarianism as a modern form of Arianism that threatens orthodoxy and social order. The study concludes that Unitarianism’s journey is not merely a theological evolution but a dynamic reflection of the dialectic among religious belief, political power, and civil liberty in Western history, while also offering a critical lens for understanding challenges to religious freedom in states with institutionalized theological orthodoxy.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
References
Allen, J. H., and R. Eddy. The American Church History Series: A History of the Unitarians and the Universalists, edited by Philip Schaff. Vol. 10. New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1894.
Aling, Helen Jane. “Dickens’s Unitarian Theology.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1996. https://www.elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=5411285.
Bader, Veit. “Religious Diversity and Democratic Institutional Pluralism.” Political Theory 31, no. 2 (2003): 265–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591702251012.
———. “Religious Pluralism: Secularism or Priority for Democracy?” Political Theory 27, no. 5 (1999): 597–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591799027005002.
Barrett, Justin L. “Cognitive Science of Religion: What Is It and Why Is It?” Religion Compass 1, no. 6 (2007): 768–86. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2007.00042.x.
Bauckham, Richard. God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999.
Bauer, Walter, and others. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Edited by Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971.
Beeley, Christopher A. “The Holy Spirit in the Cappadocians: Past and Present.” Modern Theology 26, no. 1 (2010): 90–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-
2009.01581.x.
Benjamin, Saija, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Tuuli from, and Inari Sakki. “Safeguarding Social Justice and Equality: Exploring Finnish Youths’ ‘Intergroup Mindsets’ as a Novel Approach in the Prevention of Radicalization and Extremism through Education.” Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 19, no. 2 (2024): 289–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/17461979221135845.
Branson, Beau. “One God, the Father: The Neglected Doctrine of the Monarchy of the Father, and Its Implications for the Analytic Debate about the Trinity.” TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 6, no. 2 (2022): 6–58. https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v6i2.67603.
Butterwick, Richard. “Catholicism and Enlightenment in Poland-Lithuania.” In A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe, edited by Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy, 297–326. Leiden: Brill, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004183513.i-466.56.
Capetz, Paul E. “Theology and the Historical-Critical Study of the Bible.” Harvard Theological Review 104, no. 4 (2011): 459–89. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816011000411.
Corfield, Penelope J. “‘We Are All One in the Eyes of the Lord’: Christopher Hill and the Historical Meanings of Radical Religion.” History Workshop Journal 58, no. 1 (2004): 110–27. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/58.1.110.
Craig, William Lane. “Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar.” Faith and Mission 15, no. 2 (1998): 3–15. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/historical-jesus/rediscovering-the-historical-jesus-presuppositions-and-pretensions-of-the-j.
Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York: HarperOne, 2012.
Feenstra, Ronald J. “The Trinity.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, edited by Chad Meister and Paul Copan, 595–604. London: Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203813010.
Fortacı, Talha. “The Trinity in the Theology of Michael Servetus.” Oksident 4, no. 2 (2022): 175–98. https://doi.org/10.51490/oksident.1185570.
Fox, Mo. “On Queer Utopianism and Environmental Justice.” Master’s Thesis, Wageningen University, 2023. https://edepot.wur.nl/640750.
Fryer, Denna. “Rethinking the Dominant Narrative: An Analysis of Indonesian Approaches to Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia.” PhD diss., UNSW Sydney, 2015. https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/18552.
Goodman, Paul. Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Gwatkin, Henry Melvill. Studies of Arianism: Chiefly Referring to the Character and Chronology of the Reaction Which Followed the Council of Nicaea. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, and Co., 1900.
Hamburger, Philip. Separation of Church and State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Harnack, Adolf von. Outlines of the History of Dogma. Translated by Edwin Knox Mitchell. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001.
Haugaard, William P. “Arius: Twice a Heretic?: Arius and the Human Soul of Jesus Christ.” Church History 29, no. 3 (1960): 251–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/3162210.
Jefferson, Thomas. The Jefferson Bible, Smithsonian Edition: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2011.
Jenkins, Philip. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died. New York: HarperOne, 2008.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Kala, M. Historiography: A Critical Study of Methods, Interpretation, and Trends. London: LexArcheus Publications, 2025.
Lippy, Charles H. “J.D. Bowers. Joseph Priestley and English Unitarianism in America.” The American Historical Review 114, no. 4 (October 2009): 1072–73. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.4.1072.
Luhrmann, Tanya M. “A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind.” Current Anthropology 53, no. 4 (2012): 371–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/666529.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Gillian Bancroft, and Siân Salt. “A History of Christianity.” Episode 1, How God Made the World. BBC, 2009. Television documentary.
Macke, Karen E. “Que(e)rying Religious Activism: Culture, Identity, and the Politics of Family in Unitarian Universalist Churches.” PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2016. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/585.
Mancini, Susanna. “Global Religion in a Post-Westphalia World.” In Handbook on Global Constitutionalism, edited by Anthony F. Lang Jr. and Antje Wiener, 556–72. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802200263.00050.
Marshall, John. John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
McGrath, Alister E. Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022.
McGuckin, John Anthony, ed. The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. 2 vols. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Moses, Jonathan W., and Torbjørn L. Knutsen. Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research. 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Olimid, Anca Parmena. “European Personalist Model of State-Church Relations. Political and Legal Fundaments in the 16th-17th Centuries.” Revista de Științe Politice. Revue Des Sciences Politiques, no. 27 (2010): 60–68. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=731405.
Pellow, David N. “Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Studies: Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 13, no. 2 (2016): 221–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X1600014X.
Rosenfeld, Michel. “Constitution and Secularism: A Western Account.” In Constitutions and Religion, edited by Denis J. Galligan, 21–40. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786439291.00007.
Servetus, Michael. Restitución del cristianismo (2 v.). Edited by Ángel Alcalá and Luis Betés. Vol. 5, Obras completas. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2003.
Smit, Peter-Ben. “The End of Early Christian Adoptionism? A Note on the Invention of Adoptionism, Its Sources, and Its Current Demise.” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 76, no. 3 (2015): 177–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2015.1091981.
Smith, J. Warren. “The Trinity in the Fourth-Century Fathers.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, edited by Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, 109–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Szczucki, Lech. “Polish and Transylvanian Unitarianism in the Second Half of the 16th Century.” In Antitrinitarianism in the Second Half of the 16th Century, edited by Robert Dán and Antal Pirnát, 231–40. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004451384_018.
Tarrant, William George. Unitarianism. Chicago: DigiCat, 2022.
Teed, Paul. “Racial Nationalism and Its Challengers: Theodore Parker, John Rock, and the Antislavery Movement.” Civil War History 41, no. 2 (1995): 142–60. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cwh.1995.0007.
Wilber, Adelbert L., Jr. Church and State: Examining the Wall of Separation. Bloomington, IN: WestBow Press, 2018.
Wilbur, Earl Morse. A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England, and America. Vol. 2. Boston: Beacon Press, 1945.
Witte, John, Jr., and Joel A. Nichols. Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.