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In 1553 Michael Servetus was burned at the stake by Calvin.
Servetus, or Miguel Servet, was a Spanish Catholic who had
become a geographer and editor in Paris, then a physician in
southern France. In that year, he published a book, The
Restitution of Christianity, in which he repeated assertions he
had made in his earlier writings: That the doctrines of the
Trinity and infant baptism made no sense. The order for his
arrest went out, and one Sunday morning soon thereafter he was
spotted in a Genevan church, arrested, tried for spreading
heresy and executed, with a copy of the Restitution strapped to
his thigh (or, according to some sources, his arm).
The death of Servetus was approved by the church leaders of the
time, but not by all its ministers or laymen. His writings
provided a stimulus for, among others, two Italians living in
Zurich: Lelio Sozzini, who was impressed not only by Servetus’
doctrine but also by his method of thinking — basing his thought
on reason as much as Scripture — and Giorgio Biandrata. Both men
went to Poland in 1558, Sozzini for a few months and Biandrata
to stay. There they joined the liberal wing of the Polish
Reformation, the socalled Minor Church, and helped to make it
part of the Reformation’s left wing. When Biandrata left Poland
five years later the Minor Church was in a weak condition, but
twenty years after that its leadership was taken over by Fausto
Sozzini, or Faustus Socinus, who had first absorbed liberalism
from the papers willed to him by his uncle Lelio. Socinus made
Poland a stronghold of liberal Christianity for almost a
century; the church he built and the theology he articulated
were known as Socinianism, until the movement was destroyed by a
decree banishing all Socinians. Some of the exiles went to
Transylvania; others to Holland, the country where they felt
they would have the best chance of practicing their religion.
Meanwhile Biandrata had been called to Transylvania to be the
personal physician of King John Sigismund. There he spoke of his
religious views with some of the leading citizens of the
country, one of whom embraced them with alacrity. This was
Ferenc Dávid, a former Catholic who had embraced Lutheranism and
then Calvinism, and who under the influence of Biandrata now
became the leader of the anti-Trinitarian movement. In 1568 he
succeeded in persuading the king to issue the broadest
toleration edict in Europe at the time, granting the Socinians
the same level of toleration as was already enjoyed by the
Catholics, the Lutherans, and the Calvinists. (It was in the
same year — 1568, just 15 years after the death of Servetus —
that Dávid coined a new name for his group: Unitarians, or
believers in one God, not three.) But Sigismund’s sympathy for
the Unitarians did not extend to his successor, and in 1578
Dávid was thrown into a dungeon, where he died a year later. The
Transylvanian church survived, though greatly weakened, through
the centuries. Its direct descendent today is an ethnic,
Hungarian-speaking denomination in Rumania.
Holland, we may remember, was the refuge of some of the Polish
Socinians; there were also many contacts between one of its
religious groups, the Remonstrants, and Transylvania. These
Remonstrants were in the late 17th century printing English
translations of Socinus and other liberals, and smuggling them
across the Channel. A result was a growing interest in liberal
religion among certain English churchmen, among them the
Anglican Theophilus Lindsay and the chemist Joseph Priestley,
who professionally was not a scientist but a Dissenting
minister. Priestley was the leader of the group that in his time
came to be called Unitarians, until he was driven from England
in 1794 by continuing threats to his life. So he came over to
the new United States of America, where he settled in
Northumberland, Pennsylvania, meeting regularly with a group of
twenty to thirty people to discuss religious matters. This was
not a formal church; but two years later he helped found in
Philadelphia the first American society calling itself
Unitarian. Even so, Priestley did not originate liberal
Christian thought in this country. Half a century earlier there
were two ministers, Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew, who had
preached heretical doctrines including the unity of God; and in
1785 their disciple, James Freeman, persuaded the members of his
church, King’s Chapel in Boston, to adopt changes in the wording
of its Prayer Book which made it de facto the first Unitarian
church in America, though it never acknowledged the fact in its
name.
The later history of the Unitarian movement in North America is
one of change and development, a change much more striking than
what has taken place in any other national Unitarian movement.
For whereas the Unitarians in Rumania worship and believe today
just about as they did four centuries ago, and those in England
do not seem at times to have changed much more, in this country
most observers would say that we have little in common with the
Philadelphia Unitarians to whom Joseph Priestley spoke in 1796.
In the 19th century our own great Trinity — Channing, Emerson,
and Parker — moved us from a totally Christian body to one open
to the other religions and philosophies of the world, and in the
early 20th century Curtis Reese and John Dietrich allowed us to
embrace even a nontheistic religion.
The same is true of the other half of our UU movement. In
England in the 1760s James Relly preached a doctrine of
universalism, which held that since God was a loving God, it was
inconceivable that he could condemn anyone to everlasting
torment, and there were therefore no such place as Heaven or
Hell; all people would eventually be saved. A disciple, John
Murray, came to North America in 1770 and began preaching the
doctrine, which merged with views already being propounded,
especially in Philadelphia by Benjamin Rush and Dr. George de
Benneville — yet another physician prominent in our history.
Murray went on to found Universalist churches in New England,
but in the following century the theology of those churches
underwent major changes, especially under the influence of Hosea
Ballou, who singlehandedly moved Universalism from a Calvinistic
to a Unitarian base. Like the Unitarians, the Universalist
churches were also prominent in social action, especially cases
involving freedom of religion. In short, the Unitarian and
Universalist bodies were coming closer together, and it was
inevitable that they should begin cooperating formally. From the
turn of the 20th century there were joint enterprises, e.g. in
youth activities and social action, and in 1961 the two finally
merged into the Unitarian Universalist Association.
So the key element in the theology of UUism in North America
appears to be change. But in another respect we have remained
true to the thought of Servetus and Socinus. These men were
known for their doctrine of the unity of God; but even
moreimportant than theology may be the way they arrived at this
doctrine, since that illustrates the kind of thinkers they were.
They, and Dávid and Priestley and Ballou and Channing and Parker
and Reese, have all confirmed the dictum of Earl Morse Wilbur,
who said that ours is:
“a movement fundamentally characterized . . . . by its
steadfast and increasing devotion to these three leading
principles: first, complete mental freedom in religion
rather than bondage to creeds or confessions; second, the
unrestricted use of reason in religion, rather than reliance
upon external authority or past tradition; third, generous
tolerance of differing religious views and usages rather
than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or
polity. Freedom, reason and tolerance: it is these
conditions above all others that this movement has from the
beginning increasingly sought to promote.”
© Starr King School for the Ministry
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See also:
Quick UU History
Online UU Document Library
Famous UUs Bios, Essays, and Letters
Notable Canadian Unitarians
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