Socinus’ Unitarian Views

Socinus’ Unitarian Views

Thomas Allen

In History of the Dogma of the Deity of Jesus Christ (revised edition of 1876, translated 1878), Albert Reville, a minister of the French Reformed Church, gives a brief description of Faustus Socinus’ Unitarian views. Socinus (1539-1604) was the most famous Unitarian of the sixteenth century. His system of theology is known as Socinianism.

Socinus’ first argument against the Trinity of orthodoxy is that it is a mass of contradictions. It claims that the Deity consists of three persons “distinguished from each other by individual and exclusive properties” (p. 191): “the Father by the absoluteness of his being, the Son by the qualification of having been begotten, the Holy Spirit by that of being proceeded” (p. 191). Yet, it claims “to remain faithful to Monotheism” (p. 191). To justify the contradiction of its Trinity, orthodoxy takes “refuge in the idea of the mystery transcending human reason” (p. 191). However, “its Trinity does not transcend reason, it subverts and disowns it. . . . None of those who have endeavoured to reconcile it, however subtitle they might be, have been able to avoid either the Tritheism which denies the unity or the Modalism which denies the persons” (pp. 191-192).

Socinus’ second argument against the Trinity is that it “cannot stand against the idea of the Divine perfection” (p. 192). God can have no imperfection. So, is the property that “makes each person distinct from the other two a perfection or an imperfection” (p. 192)? If it is a perfection, then it is lacking in two out of the three persons.

Likewise, this perfection is lacking in the special relation of the Father and the Son. Orthodoxy claims that “the Son is a Divine person eternally begotten by the Father of his own substance” (p. 192). However, “God the Father possesses in Himself all perfection immutably” (p. 192). Therefore, “if He begets another God exactly similar to Himself[,] He is no longer absolutely perfect, for the existence of two absolute perfections side by side implies a contradiction” (p. 192).

Further, orthodoxy claims, “that the Son, God infinite and perfect like the Father, became man, uniting in his single person the perfect divine nature with the human nature complete” (p. 192). Thus, Christ has a “double consciousness, knowing itself to be at once infinite and finite, perfect and imperfect, insusceptible to pain and yet suffering, incapable of sin and yet tempted, knowing all things and yet ignorant of many things, praying to itself and hearing its own prayers” (pp. 192-193).

“Before the incarnation there were three Gods having the Divine nature in common” (p. 193). After the incarnation, human nature became inherent in the Deity. Thus, according to the doctrine of the Deity of Christ, “the Creator of the universe was born in the condition of the human embryo” (p. 193), and, therefore, he cried like a baby, ate, drank, slept, and died by human hands. As a consequence of his two natures, did “the man in Jesus alone passed through these vicissitudes while God remained exempt from them” (p. 193)? If so, then Nestorius, whom the Church condemned as a heretic, was correct. Optionally, “the Man-God has borne or felt in his single personal consciousness all these imperfections, . . . or the consciousness of Jesus was double; what one consciousness thought and felt was neither thought or felt by the other” (p. 193).

Moreover, according to the Socinians, the Arian Christ “is no more truly man than is the orthodoxy Christ” (pp. 193-194 fn).

Also, according to orthodoxy, “the absolute deity of Jesus is necessary for the accomplishment of his work as Redeemer, since the infinitely outrage justice of God called for an infinite satisfaction” (p. 194). However, the redemption involved some “inextricable difficulty.” “Who suffered in Jesus, the God and the man at the same time? If so, God has made satisfaction to himself, which is absurd; and we have a God suffering and dying who is no longer God. Or if only the man suffered, what becomes of the infinite expiation which was supposed to be necessary” (p. 194).

Nevertheless, the above reasoning about the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation were secondary to Socinus. Arguments from the Bible were his primary method. He asked his “opponents where the New Testament had taught the doctrine of the Trinity; in what passage Jesus had said that he was the second Divine person, and that he possessed two natures; and how they could explain, without doing violence either to their common sense or their own system, the numerous declamations in which he absolutely subordinated himself to his Heavenly Father” (p. 195). Likewise, where did his apostles make such claims?

Like Calvin, Socinus saw the unity between Jesus and God as a purely moral unity and not as any degree or identity of substance.

According to Socinus’ Christology, Jesus is a man, which is his first principle. Nevertheless, he accepts the miraculous birth of Jesus, which he maintained did not alter his true humanity. Afterward, God miraculously carried Jesus locally to heaven and revealed to him the heavenly mysteries so that he could speak them to men from personal knowledge. Then, Jesus descended from heaven and discharged his commission. After his death, he again ascended into heaven, and God deified him as a reward for his virtue. Henceforth, he lives as the dispenser of divine grace. Unlike Calvin, who opposed praying to Jesus, Socinus accepted praying to Jesus.

In the name of protecting free will, Socinus limited the omnipotence and omniscience of God.

For Socinus, the Holy Spirit was “the mechanical, external gift of certain particular graces to such men as God judged to be worthy of them” (p. 199). Consequently, Socinianism “comprehended nothing of the idea of an indwelling presence of the Divine Spirit in creation and the human soul” (p. 199).

Reville concludes “that the Socinians doctrine, apart from its criticism of orthodoxy is somewhat poor and common place, too nearly resembling the vulgar rationalism of another period, and unsuited to our modern modes of thought from a certain rigid quality it has, a something mechanical and capricious, which replaces the difficulties of orthodoxy only with affirmations quite as embarrassing” (p. 196). Socinianism used “a method of biblical exegesis intended to reconcile reason with faith in the written revelations. It assumed the necessity of submitting to Scripture, but the real meaning of each passage is what reason determined” (pp. 196-197). Socinianism “was in its dogmatic views as supernaturalistic as orthodoxy — perhaps even more so” (p. 199).

Copyright © 2021 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More religious articles.