It appears the first recorded usage of the term “unitarian” in the West was published on this day in 1600, at the Diet of Leczfalva, in Transylvania.
I think it certainly a date worth marking…
I gather that at the time it was used as an adjective rather than as a noun, modifying the word “Christian.” Also at the time and for some considerable time following it pointed to a view of god as having a singular characteristic, a divine unity as opposed to the normative Christian idea of trinitarianism, where god manifested in three distinct ways.
The term unitarian as a noun, as a word describing first a unique form of Christianity that rejected trinitarianism and later as an emergent Western liberal faith in many ways distinct from Christianity would gradually arise.
Without a doubt from its inception within the various considerations of the Christian church there had been rumbles and intimations of unitarianism of one sort or another in contradistinction from what would become orthodox or normative trinitarian Christianity. Such a challenge, or challenges to trinitarianism makes a lot of sense. After all the Jewish faith had always been “unitarian,” that is Judaism called for worship of one undivided god in an unambiguous way. Also, the texts of the New Testament didn’t anywhere obviously support any form of trinitarianism. So, the questions of a trinitarian idea of the divine was always challengeable.
It was only with an emergent Christian state, with its naked powers of torture and other mechanisms of enforcement of orthodoxy that these questions ceased to be voiced.
Therefore, it seems totally natural that eventually, as it did, with the rise of the third of the great “western” faiths, Islam, there would also arise a relentless focus on a return to that unitarian ideal for the divine source of all.
What, perhaps, is less obvious, is that this question would also arise within Christianity. But, perhaps of course, it did.
And, for the first time, it was here at the Diet of Leczfalva that the term explicitly entered the Christian dialog.
For the first, but not for the last time. In fact it seems probable that within Christian communities there was some sort of identity with this original unitarianism from perhaps the beginning, but also it came as a rising thought in what would become a proto-reformation emerging at least from the fifteenth century. This declaration at Leczfalva was a natural outcome of these reflections, conversations, and debates within that time and place.
Later, among the first English and eventually American, Unitarian theologian (also noted scientist as well as minister) Joseph Priestley would explore much of what this meant at length in his study, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity published in 1733.
And later still, inspired by this rational analysis of scripture and tradition and upon that basis a reclamation of a unitarian approach to the divine would birth a liberal religion that drew upon its Christian as well as to some substantive extent, its Jewish origins, would also follow. But now it was a faith that was no longer dependent exclusively upon its “Semitic” and “Greek” origins, but now something new, open to the wisdom of the world’s religions traditions…
It’s that inherited tradition, liberal and rational, western, but also willing to look anywhere that presents a reasonable approach to truth, that caught my heart, and continues to do so…
Hurrah for the Unitarian way!
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