Unitarianism

Unitarianism – W. J. Fox, in his sermon The Spirit of Unitarian Christianity (London: C. Fox and Co., 1824), set forth the three cardinal tenets of Unitarianism: (1) the doctrine of divine unity: ‘that there is one being or person, the Father, who alone is God, and to be adored; and whose dominion is sole, absolute, and universal’ (11-12); (2) the humanity of Christ: ‘that Jesus, the Messiah, the Messenger of the covenant, the author of our faith, the first-born from the dead, was of the human race, and like unto his brethren’ (12); and (3) the final universal restoration: ‘that the dispensation of grace with which his name is indissolubly connected, and which chiefly consists of the results of his teaching, sufferings, and resurrection, shall terminate in saving all that was lost, and bringing every rational creature to goodness and happiness’ (12). Arians would not have agreed with Fox’s second point, one of the central tenets of Socinianism.

Roland N. Stromberg, in Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), adds: ‘The Unitarians of this period accepted the Bible’s literal truth, and sought only to purge all subsequent accretions to it, in order to get back to the simplicity and clarity of early Christianity’ (p. 51). After the creation of the Unitarian Fund in 1806, Unitarians began to function as a distinct denomination.  For more on the development of Unitarianism in England in the latter part of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century, see Raymond V. Holt, The Story of Unitarianism (London: Lindsey Press, 1931); Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, From the Reformation to the French Revolution.  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 465-90.