An Introduction to Dissident Heroes

John Biddle (1615-1662) was a distinguished British academic, graduate of Oxford, and at the age of 26 elected headmaster of Crypt Grammar School in Gloucester, England. Since he was asked to teach Scripture, he began a painstaking examination of the Bible. He was supposed to teach his students according to the catechism of the Church of England but soon found this impossible. His relentless search for truth in Scripture produced in him an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible. He knew the whole of the New Testament by heart in English and in Greek. He admitted that he had some difficulty in remembering the Greek text after Revelation 4!

He spoke against the spurious Trinitarian verse in 1 John 5:7 and explained the oneness of Jesus and the Father as “an union in consent and agreement…but never an union in essence.”[2] He later debated with Bishop Ussher (of “Ussher’s chronology” fame) and outwitted him, asserting that the Father is the only true God! He produced a pamphlet entitled “Twelve Arguments against the Deity of the Holy Spirit.” Someone gave a copy to the magistrates and he was committed to jail.

In 1646 Biddle was summoned to London and confined in the Gatehouse at Westminster while his trial dragged on. He remained in prison for five years, mostly for his questioning of the Trinity. He spoke of the church fathers as those who “did in outward profession so put on Christ, as that in heart they did not put off Plato.”[3] He alluded to Matthew 19:4 where he maintained that Jesus, in referring to “Him that made them in the beginning,” attributed the creation to a Being other than himself. Deserted by his friends, he spent most of the rest of his life in prison.

Biddle had single-handedly recovered central truths of the Bible. He claimed that he had read none of the (unitarian) Polish Brethren’s literature (see below) before coming to his own conclusions.

On February 10, 1652 Biddle was released. He remained in London addressing small groups on Sundays, but he was never officially ordained. He produced a large number of tracts on different biblical topics, but principally his A Twofold Catechism, consisting almost entirely of Scripture verses. In his preface he speaks of “all Catechisms generally being so stuffed with the supposals and traditions of men, that the least part of them is derived from the Word of God…not one quotation amongst many being a whit to the purpose” (i.e. having any point at all).[5]

From his catechism he banned all phrases like “eternal generation of the Son,” “God dying,” “God made man,” “mother of God.” The catechism was ordered to be burnt, and he was again imprisoned along with his publisher, Richard Moore. Two days later some brethren from Poland arrived in London with tracts translated into English by Biddle and printed by Moore!

Biddle was charged with blasphemy and heresy. He escaped a capital sentence but remained in confinement. Some influential persons were bold enough to ask parliament "whether Biddle does not, in fact, profess faith in God by Jesus Christ. Is he not like Apollos, mighty in the Scriptures? Is his crime that he believes the Scriptures according to their most obvious nearest signification, and not according to the mystical and remote interpretations?"[6]

A typical argument of Biddle’s is this: “He that saith Christ died, saith that Christ was not God, for God could not die. But every Christian saith that Christ died, therefore every Christian saith that Christ was not God.”[7] His last days were spent writing on the personal reign of Jesus Christ on the earth.

In 1658 he was released once more. He maintained a steady contact with the Polish brethren. An observer remarked that “there is little or nothing blameworthy in him, except his opinions.” Government agents pursued Biddle frequently but some were forced to admire his “strict, exemplary life, full of modesty, sobriety and forebearance, no ways contentious, altogether taken up with the great things of God revealed in the Scriptures.”[8]

On June 1, 1662, he was holding a Bible study in his own home. An armed party entered the room and carried him off and imprisoned him before a Judge Brown. Five weeks later, sick with jail fever, he died, confident of his hope in the resurrection at the Second Coming. He had been unable to pay the £100 demanded as a fine. He is the father of British unitarianism.

I began with these brief sketches from the lives (and deaths) of two of the most interesting examples of dissidents to show the extraordinary antagonism which awaits any who question orthodoxy’s view of the Godhead or, in the case of Sattler, other traditional doctrines. Sattler was a staunch advocate of Christians not being involved in war, a point of view recently espoused by a leading evangelical scholar in the United States.[9]

To count God as one rather than three-in-one is a risky business. The denial of popular Trinitarian notions, though less dangerous in our day, is an invitation to be labeled “cult,” and to be included in the late Walter Martin’s documentation of the ever-growing Kingdom of the Cults. It is essential for a believer in the Shema of Israel and in Jesus’ affirmation of that creed to be well-informed about the doctrine of the one God. He must be expert in that teaching if he is ever to convince anyone of its truth, especially those who have been fully exposed to “orthodox” views of God.

The Mennonites have been quick to see that converts should be given a detailed course of instruction in the history of their movement. This sense of heritage builds confidence and stability. There is a highly significant, vociferous, if often tragic heritage in the field of belief in one God, the Father, which ought to make us deeply grateful for those who lived in times of much less religious freedom. We should be conscious of their tremendous devotion to truth, often to the point of martyrdom.

For this reason The Radical Reformation by George Huntston Williams[10] should be central in the libraries of those espousing a “biblical unitarian” point of view. This book inspires confidence and humility, as it recalls a galaxy of dedicated Christians — those who struggled against terrible odds to preach a doctrine of God which has a firm basis in Scripture, but which is regarded as heresy by some of the mainstream.

My book Jesus Was Not a Trinitarian represents a Socinian view of the Son of God (after Faustus Socinus, 1539-1604).[11] A brief survey of unitarian history reveals the following as leaders in the movement which understands the Son of God as not literally preexistent, but “ideally” or “notionally” preexistent in the counsels of God. The other principal form of non-Trinitarianism is represented by the Arian position (after Bishop Arius, 256-336 AD), which sees Jesus as preexistent but created (“There was a time when the Son was not” — Arius).[12]

Michael Servetus (1511-1553) is perhaps the most celebrated anti-Trinitarian. A native of Spain, anabaptist (“rebaptizer”), and “soul-sleeper,”[13] his doctrines were a constant red flag to the bull, in this case Calvin, who energetically tried to silence millenarians, soul-sleepers and anti-Trinitarians. (A little-known fact is that Luther preached a sermon in 1524 upholding the sleep of the dead.) Servetus believed that the Son of God was the biological product of God and Mary. There was no literally preexisting Son. Jesus’ divinity consisted in the nature he received from God at conception. Forgotten truth was rediscovered in the Reformation period, by stages — first Servetus, later the Polish and Italian brethren led by Faustus Socinus, who arrived at a purely unitarian view (not, of course, Unitarian — capital “U” — in the contemporary sense of that word).[14] However, the Spaniard Servetus’ deviation from orthodoxy on the Godhead was enough to cause his martyrdom at the hands of Calvin. His effigy was burned before he succumbed to the same fate in 1553. The theology which resulted in death for Servetus is summarized by Earl Morse Wilbur:

Anti-Trinitarianism found its fullest expression not in Spain but in Polish Socinianism[16] and Hungarian unitarianism. Many of the leaders of these movements were Italians, notably the Sozzini (Socinus) family, Faustus and his uncle Laelius (from whom the label “Socinian” came). Earlier and less-known pioneers who had set the scene for radical questioning of orthodoxy were Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), an Italian philologist who in the 1400s raised questions about the Trinity; and a priest and Platonist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) who suggested that the logos of John 1:1 should be rendered not “word,” but sermo (from which our word “sermon” is derived). He thus began a whole trend of thought which would equate the “word” with the prophetic voice of God in the Old Testament, not with an eternal second Person. He began thus to undermine the whole concept of the logos = preexisting Son as consubstantial with the Father. Where the church fathers had spoken of the “word” as an eternal Son,[17] the anti-Trinitarians of the Radical Reformation following Ficino spoke of Christ as wholly human, as the fullest and final form of the prophetic voices which had preceded him (cf. Heb. 1:1). Erasmus was also part of the anti-Trinitarian camp, and wanted to have the spurious text 1 John 5:7 removed.

In England we can single out (in addition to John Biddle mentioned earlier) a surgeon, Dr. George Van Parris, Dutch by birth, burned at Smithfield in London on April 25th, 1551 because “he believeth that God the Father is only God, and that Christ is not very God.”[18] The unitarianism produced a spate of “helpful” literature from Calvin including “A Short Instruction for to arme all-good Christian people” (i.e. against the heretics), and from Bullinger “An wholesome Antidotus or Counterpoyson” (1545) and “a most necessary and frutefull dialogue between ye seditious Libertin or rebel anabaptist and the true obedient Christian” (1551). In those days of close religious control, Bishop John Jewel reported on unitarians as follows: “We found, at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, a large and inauspicious crop of Arians, Anabaptists and other pests, which, I know not how, but as mushrooms spring up in the night.”[19] There followed under Elizabeth I’s reign the burning of two anti-Trinitarian Anabaptists in 1575: Henry Terwoort, a 25-year-old goldsmith, and John (Jan) Pieters, 50, a father of nine children. Such merciful measures as strangling, suffocation or gunpowder around the neck were omitted and the two men died in unrelieved agony amidst the flames.

A notable non-Trinitarian hero was Adam Pastor, one of the clearest exponents of the unitarian view of the Godhead. He is rightly recognized as a father figure of biblical unitarianism in Europe. He had been a Roman Catholic priest before joining the Anabaptists in 1533 in Münster, Germany. Pastor held (against Menno Simons of the Mennonites) that Christ was human only, though the bearer of God’s Word. Adam Pastor and a Frisian elder, Francis de Cuiper, stated at a conference in 1547 that Christ did not exist as the Son of God previous to his coming into the world, and was divine after his birth only in the sense that God dwelt in him. Adam Pastor was excommunicated even by some of his Anabaptist colleagues, but gained a large following calling themselves Adamites.

Pastor wrote tracts on thirteen topics including Incarnation and the Kingdom of God. The section on God is a listing of unitarian texts of the Old and New Testaments with a minimum of comment. Pastor insisted that no text showed that the Son existed before the Incarnation, as a member of a tri-personal Godhead. Adam Pastor was described as earnest and critical, but mild and reverent in his debates. He was to influence the Polish unitarians who later established a significant unitarian academic center, a college at Racow in Poland.

Faustus Socinus was born on December 5, 1539. His father and grandfather had been famous lawyers. His first theological essay was an explanation of the prologue to John’s gospel. He maintained that Jesus was divine by office rather than Deity by nature. He wrote also on the mortality of man.[20] It was his perception of the meaning of the logos which led him to the truth. The word or will of God appeared in the form of flesh — a man. After his death and resurrection, Christ ascended to take his place at the right hand of God, sharing henceforth in God’s power. In that sense only could Jesus be called God, as representing God, but always distinct from the one true God (John 17:3; 5:44). God, said Socinus, assigned to Christ at the ascension an adoptive deity as co-regent in the government of the world. Socinus considered Jesus to be entitled to divine adoration, in opposition to the chief spokesman for unitarianism in Transylvania, Francis David, who did not think Jesus should be worshipped. There was really no need for serious dispute on that issue.

It was this same Faustus Socinus, perhaps the most refined theologian of the Radical Reformation, who moved to Poland and helped to establish a college and printing press at Racow, as well as farms and craft industries. This organization became an institution of international repute. Many of the faculty were scholars of unquestioned learning, some of them having been originally schooled in Hebrew and Greek before becoming Anabaptists. The school drew one thousand students from all over Europe, including three hundred from families of European nobility. A Scot who visited the campus remarked, “For whereas elsewhere all was full of wars and tumult, there all was quiet, men were calm and moderate in behaviour, although they were spirited in debate and expert in language.”[21]

In many countries this confession was banned and its owners punished, often by death. The confession contains the doctrines of adult baptism, sleep of the dead, and the Second Coming. Many passages in John’s gospel are dealt with. Typical is the following:

Having concentrated largely on the Reformation period and the century following (in which we noted John Biddle, the schoolmaster), we should now turn our attention to the earliest period of church history. Holding as a fundamental conviction that Jesus did not in any way propose to alter the strictly monotheistic faith of Israel, we are naturally keen to know how the unitarianism of the New Testament could have been disturbed.

Church history shows that the development of the “three in one” notion was a process extending over centuries, culminating in the Nicene and Chalcedonian Councils (325 and 451 AD). It is very far from the truth to suggest that the doctrine of the Trinity gained universal acceptance from the beginning of the post-New Testament era. As the Harvard theologian F. Auer says so well in the Encyclopedia Americana:

The crux of the whole Trinitarian problem lies in the logos doctrine and its development. The “orthodox” position was based upon the understanding of logos as a second divine Person in the eternal Godhead. The point is obscured for contemporary readers of the Bible by the simple fact that the grammatically masculine word logos in Greek is referred to as “he,” “him” by translators (John 1).[25] If however logos were rendered “God’s utterance,” and “it,” a quite different impression would be gained. Thus the impersonal logos of the prologue, i.e. God’s word, wisdom and mind, becomes embodied in Jesus, the man.

In theology’s most gripping detective story, “How the logos became a Person, before it became a person,” we are astonished to find that Justin Martyr, writing in 150 AD, contends against a Jew, Trypho, with whom he held a lengthy debate, that Jesus as Son of God preexisted his birth quite literally and was in fact the angel of Yahweh mentioned frequently in the Old Testament. Trypho the Jew protested against the inherent contradiction involved in saying that Jesus was a man, but not really a man. Thus he says to Justin:

The astonishing fact is that, had the Jewish argument prevailed against the philosopher Justin Martyr (supposedly representing Christianity), the Trinitarian “problem” might never have arisen. Once the idea is floated that Jesus was “around” before his birth, he must be “found” in the Old Testament. Without a shred of biblical proof, the angel of Yahweh was said to be the preexistent Jesus, and many evangelicals as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses have ever since accepted the theory. It is wise to consult the New Testament on the point. In Acts 7 Stephen summarizes the history of Israel and makes specific mention of an angel of the Lord (Acts 7:30, 38), who represents the Lord God (Exod. 23:20-21). What an opportunity for Stephen to say that the angel was Jesus, preexisting! That equation he does not make; and the writer to the Hebrews took two chapters to explain that Jesus was superior to all angels. He never has been and never will be an angel. Furthermore God did not speak through a Son until New Testament times (Heb. 1:1-2).

With Justin the logos as a second divine Person became entrenched. In the ensuing centuries isolated individuals arose to challenge orthodoxy. Notable are the “dynamic monarchians.” The first of these, Theodotus of Byzantium, was a man of learning. He came to Rome in 190 AD and taught that Jesus was fully a man, born of the virgin, upon whom the Spirit came at his birth. Theodotus held that Jesus became to a greater degree divine at his resurrection. Theodotus was promptly excommunicated by Bishop Victor of Rome. He was followed in his thinking by another Theodotus, and by Asclepiodorus and also by Artemon, but dynamic monarchianism was dying in the West.

In the East Paul of Samosata was the chief exponent of a non-preexistent Jesus. Paul was Bishop of Antioch from c. 260-272. He considered the logos to be an impersonal attribute of the Father, not a preexisting Son. Jesus is a uniquely inspired man. “Paul’s doctrine is akin to the primitive Jewish-Christian idea of the person of Christ.” So say church historians, notably Henry Chadwick in The Early Church.[28] Three councils considered Paul’s view and the third excommunicated him. He kept his place until driven out by the Emperor Aurelian.

Of Bishop Arius (father of Arianism, as distinct from Socinianism) much more is known. He contended that Jesus was pre-existent but created (“There was a time when he was not”). This view was thought to be unsatisfactory since it made Jesus neither God nor man. But could not exactly the same be said of the “orthodox” view which has prevailed to this day? A leading contemporary New Testament scholar, John Knox, seems to think so:

Before leaving the early period we should mention as representative of a Socinian school of Christology Bishop Photinus (d. 376) whom The Catholic Encyclopedia labels “heretic.”[30] "Photinian" became a term to describe anyone who held Christ to be a man, who did not exist until his birth at Nazareth. Photinus’ writings are lost, but he is known to us mostly through the twenty-seven anathemas of the council in 351 which condemned him. Much later in the 600s our Christology was perhaps represented by the Paulicians (possibly named after Paul of Samosata) whose leader Constantine-Silvanus was executed for his heretical views of the Trinity.

Of significance for the proponents of unitary monotheism in our time was the publishing in 1977 of The Myth of God Incarnate.[31] Though we would not subscribe to the general theological position of these scholars (i.e. in eschatology, particularly), we must welcome their refreshing analysis of the doctrine of God. They seldom use the terms Trinitarian or non-Trinitarian, but they do question whether Incarnation in the traditional sense can be found in the Bible. That is just the question asked by the pioneers of return to the unitary monotheism of the Shema. It is encouraging to hear scholars say that the Trinitarian dogma “was determined neither by scripture nor by experience but by the Arian controversy on the doctrine of the Trinity.”[32]

It is interesting to find a schoolmate of mine, at one time a well-known television theologian and Cambridge professor, writing, “God’s Son is not a second co-equal person alongside God the Father but simply man ‘filled’ with God, united with God.”[33]

The current debate in theological circles worldwide concerns eschatology and Christology. Our desire is to lead the way back to the true Jesus, and to the Gospel about the Kingdom. John A.T. Robinson, one of Britain’s best-known New Testament scholars, adopted a view of Jesus which reclaims a simple unitarianism. When I told him that I was teaching in a Bible college, his immediate reaction was: “You won’t last more than a few days there; a non-Trinitarian Jesus will be quite unacceptable in an American Bible college.” But his own “heretical” views were orthodox in more circles than he recognized, and even in one American Bible college.[34] We might present the debate about Christology dramatically, as below.

Ultimately the confusion of Jesus with the Creator seems to come perilously close to idolatry, and we may well wonder if the Living Bible is not encouraging just that in its extravagantly inaccurate paraphrase of John 1:1-3, 10: “Before anything else existed, there was Christ with God. He has always been alive and is Himself God. He created everything there is — nothing exists that He didn’t make…But although He made the world, the world didn’t recognize Him when He came.”

The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia’s article on the history of objectors to the Trinity records the cruel treatment they received from the “Christian” lands in which they lived.

"Some of the English martyrs of the sixteenth century suffered for Arian[37] views, but the first noteworthy expression of the spirit and method of Unitarianism was The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (London, 1638) by William Chillingworth, and the first conspicuous application of this method with express Unitarian results was made by John Biddle, who under the Commonwealth gathered a society in London and published his views. In 1662 he was imprisoned for the third time, and soon died of prison disease. His writings were collected and published by his disciple Thomas Firmin in 1691 (The Faith of One God). Although Unitarianism was excluded from the operation of the Toleration Act of 1689, while its advocates were threatened by the act of 1698 with loss of civil rights and imprisonment, Socinian and Arian views of the person of Christ found increasing favor in the course of the eighteenth century both in the Church of England and among dissenters. Noted instances of this tendency are Samuel Clarke, Nathanael Lardner, Isaac Watts [the hymn writer], and Philip Doddridge.

"The first chapel with the Unitarian name was founded in Essex Street, London, in 1778 by Theophilus Lindsey, who on the refusal of parliament (1772) to receive a petition for the relaxation of subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles had resigned his living in Catterick, Yorkshire. In his London Chapel he used Clarke’s revision of the English liturgy. Lindsey was aided by the sympathy of Presbyterians, who had made their chapels built since 1688 free from dogmatic restrictions, and, seeking conformity with the Bible alone, had relinquished Calvinistic views and the doctrine of the Trinity.

"The decisive influence in this change was exercised by the eminent scientist, publicist and theologian, Joseph Priestley. As an avowed Socinian Priestley ministered to congregations in Leeds (1768-80) and Birmingham (1780-91)…He died [in Pennsylvania] in 1804…

"The successor of Priestley in Birmingham and of Lindsey in London (1795) was Thomas Belsham, who sought to make 'the simple and proper humanity of Christ' the acknowledged Unitarian view. Another notable leader was Lant Carpenter, preacher in Bristol.

"In 1813 the legal disabilities of Unitarians were removed and in 1825 the British and Foreign Unitarian Association was formed by a union of Presbyterian and Baptist churches to which were later joined small Methodist groups like the 'Christian Brethren.' By the Dissenters’ Chapels Act of 1844 the possession of ancient endowments and chapels was secured. The national conference, a purely deliberative body, was founded in 1881. In 1911 there were 378 ministers, and 374 churches, of which 295 are in England. Theological instruction is given in Manchester College, Oxford, and the Home Missionary College at Manchester. The Hibbert Fund, instituted by Robert Hibbert, a Jamaica planter (died 1849), has promoted scholarship and established relations with the theological liberalism of the continent. To this foundation are due the famous Hibbert lectures and the Hibbert Journal (since Oct., 1902).

"Welsh Unitarianism began with the Arminian revolt from Calvinism of Jenkin Jones in Llwynrhydowen in 1726. His successors adopted Arian views. There are thirty-four churches in South Wales and a college at Carmarthen. Irish Unitarianism began in 1726, when the presbytery of Antrim separated from the general synod in order to establish worship without subscription to creed. In 1830 the Remonstrant Synod of Ulster was formed on similar principles, and in 1835 an Association of Irish Non-Subscribing Presbyterians united these free churches. There are thirty-eight churches, chiefly in the counties of Antrim and Down. In Scotland there are seven churches, the oldest (Edinburgh) dating from 1776."[38]

Unitarianism has of course continued since the early twentieth century when the Schaff-Herzog article was penned. In general Unitarians have become less “biblical,” meaning that they lost a grip on central biblical teachings such as the virgin birth, the resurrection and the Second Coming. The loss of these central truths is hardly likely to make unitarianism attractive to evangelicals, and the fault lies in this respect with the Unitarianism which has lost its biblical basis, other than its rejection of creeds which superseded the creed of Jesus.

[1]Alan Eyre, The Protesters, 1975, 69-70. Sattler was convicted for his views on non-involvement in war.

[2]Ibid., 123-24.

[3]Ibid., 125.

[4]Ibid., 125.

[5]Biddle’s A Twofold Catechism can be read at http://home.pacific.net.au/~amaxwell/biddle/000start.htm

[6]Alan Eyre, The Protesters, 129.

[7]Ibid., 130.

[8]Ibid., 130, 131.

[9]Gregory A. Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church, Zondervan, 2005.

[10]Third edition, Truman State University Press, 2000.

[11]Our Christological view does not, however, include an adherence to a Socinian view of the atonement. Many biblical unitarians now insist with evangelicals on the substitutionary death of Jesus for the sins of the world. Modern Socinians (in Christology) include the Church of God Abrahamic Faith, Christadelphians, and some Church of God Seventh Day members and Advent Christians. Many modern scholars of different nationalities have proposed the views we are espousing without labeling them “Socinian.”

[12]Little advertised by Trinitarians is the fact that Tertullian, supposedly a stalwart supporter of orthodoxy, also stated that there was a time when the Son did not exist (Against Hermogenes, ch. 3). The Trinity was clearly not yet fully developed in its Nicene form.

[13]I.e. the teaching that man is unconscious in death until the resurrection. The view is known as “conditional immortality.”

[14]I.e. Unitarian Universalist.

[15]Our Unitarian Heritage: An Introduction to the History of the Unitarian Movement, Beacon Press, 1943, 61, 62. Servetus’ most important work The Restoration of Christianity is now available in an English translation by Christopher Hoffman and Marian Hillar (Edwin Mellen Press, 2007).

[16]A noted leader was Gregory Paulus.

[17]“Son” and “eternal” are really mutually contradictory terms since one who is begotten, i.e. brought into existence, cannot be eternal.

[18]Williams, The Radical Reformation, 779-780.

[19]John Jewel’s Works (1560), Cambridge, 1850, 4:1240.

[20]I.e. the doctrine that at death man sleeps until the resurrection and that the final punishment of the wicked is annihilation, not everlasting torture.

[21]Eyre, Protesters, 109.

[22]The Racovian Catechism, trans. Thomas Rees, rep. Christian Educational Services, 1994, lxxiv, note.

[23]Ibid., 144-145.

[24]Encyclopedia Americana, 1956, 27:294L.

[25]Eight English translations from the Greek prior to the KJV spoke of the logos as “it,” not “him.”

[26]Leonhard Goppelt, Theology of the New Testament, Eerdmans, 1982, 2:297, 299, emphasis added.

[27]Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 48.

[28]Penguin, 1993, 114.

[29]The Humanity and Divinity of Christ, Cambridge University Press, 1967, 106.

[30]Robert Appleton Co., 1911, 12:43.

[31]John Hick, ed., SCM Press, 1977.

[32]J.A.T. Robinson, The Human Face of God, Westminster Press, 1973, 102.

[33]Don Cupitt, The Debate About Christ, 28.

[34]Atlanta Bible College, formerly Oregon Bible College (Oregon, Illinois), since 1939.

[35]The Kingdom of the Cults, Bethany House, 2003, 107.

[36]“Unitarians,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 1912, 12:82.

[37]The term Arian was sometimes used to describe all forms of non-Trinitarian belief, i.e., both the strict Arian view of Arius and the neo-Arians of the fourth century, and the “Socinians” from the sixteenth century (and a few from earlier centuries).

[38]Ibid., 82-83.

[39] Ibid., 83-84.