The Joy of Socinianism Part One: What if...

Michael Servetus often gets first mention in Unitarian histories, but was he really a Unitarian? He denied the Trinity, but this was because he considered Jesus a lesser God than his father. That makes him an anti-Trinitarian, and an honourable martyr, but not a Unitarian. It was Laelio and Fausto Sozzini (latinized as Socinus), and then their followers (the Socinians) that first affirmed the full humanity of Christ, in the post-Reformation era. Their ideas found some favour in Poland and Transylvania, and emerged in Britain via John Biddle and then into the new world, becoming the cornerstone on which Unitarianism, as a post-Reformation historical movement, was built. So Socinianism could be described as Unitarianism 1.0. 

Despite being used as a synonym for  Unitarianism, the Socinianism of the sixteenth and seventeenth century was more than an opinion about the relative status of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. It was an innovation in Biblical interpretation that claimed to restore the original meaning of scripture, and with it the belief of the early church. It was also despised, feared, ridiculed and persecuted throughout Europe. Sadly, it never really came to much. But what if it had triumphed?

Socinians have always been spoken of in terms of what they don’t believe rather than what they do. Perhaps this is understandable, since a list of the doctrines they refuted is shocking to mainstream Christianity, even today.  When first presented, Socinian teaching was incendiary. They denied the Trinity, Predestination, Original Sin, and Penal Substitution in the seventeenth century. This was suicidal.  They also denied the immortality of the soul and refused to accept that hell was eternal conscious torment in the afterlife for non-believers. 

But let us not characterise Socinians in terms of what they didn’t believe. Theirs was a positive faith, affirming the full humanity of the Son of God, the true openness of the future and the freewill of humans. They believed in the moral capacity of humans to do right, and they explained the death of Jesus as a supreme example of obedience to Godly ethics. His resurrection, they said, was God’s vindication, and promise of immortality for all who would likewise take up their cross. Underpinning all this was a profound belief in the goodness and justice of God, which was why they rejected the idea of hell for non-Christians as preposterous. 

These were astonishing positions to put forward in the same centuries as the wars of religion, and then in the aftermath of the English Civil War, a time when faith really was a matter of life, death, and geopolitics. Catholics and Protestants may have seen each other as Satanic and hellbound, yet they could agree on one thing: the Socinians were beyond the pale. 

Throughout Europe, Socinianism became a byword for all that was dangerously heretical. This gave rise to Socinianism being associated with a cavalier attitude towards scripture. After all, how else could you explain their ditching of so many core Christian doctrines? And yet, even though it is often associated with rationalism, Socinianism is very biblical. It may be highly rational, but it is not rationalistic. That's why descriptions of the like of Joseph Priestley as a Socinian seem wide of the mark.

Socinianism was, and is, a complete theology with profound potential. On reading the Racovian Catechism (in which its teaching is gathered) one senses an enormous sense of possibility, both then and now.  What if this really was the doctrine of the early church? What if such a church had not allowed itself to be submerged in Greek concepts, then overlaid with corrupting state power? What if these arguments had prevailed in the Reformation, or taken hold in the seventeenth century? And what if Socinianism were to make a comeback today?

Church and State, War and Peace

Of the many ways in which Socinian beliefs are preferable to the Augustinian mainstream, it is their attitude to the state and earthly power that seems like the biggest deal to me. This is because the church’s attitude towards this question affects all other outcomes. Had it cut its ties with the state, the church could still have got everything else wrong, without having its theological errors forcibly injected into the cultural and psychological bloodstream of Europe. 

This was a time when Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists all hoped to use the power of the state to enforce their theology. Socinians, though, like Anabaptists, eschewed a role for the church in government, and even considered it out of the question for individuals to act as magistrates. This position was modified by the next generation of Socinians, to the extent that the Racovian Catechism permitted Christians to become magistrates, but only insofar as they were able to make judgements that accorded with the teaching of Jesus. 

No theology could survive long without finding favour with at least one monarch, and this was true of the Socinians under John Sigismund in Transylvania. But Sigismund gave them protection not power. 

What if Socinian views had prevailed, and all churches had, from the beginning, kept their distance from government? What if they had said no back in the fourth century to the pseudo-convert, Emperor Constantine? Or what if, in the wake of the Reformation, the churches had returned to the position of the early church, and made themselves entirely separate from kings and princes? 

The answer, perhaps, depends on whether we imagine Socinianised Christianity as a tiny, persecuted minority, or whether we believe it could have, post-Reformation, retained its large numbers across national boundaries. Had it done so it might have acted as a brake on war. Either way, if Socinianism had prevailed, when states did go to war, it wouldn’t have been with the church’s blessing. If the churches didn’t drive wars, then at least wars wouldn’t have so disfigured the church.

Predestination, Original Sin, Immortalism and Hell

Socinianism's inability to effectively challenge the supremacy of Augustinian theology meant that horrible ideas about damnation, salvation, and how to avoid one and qualify for the other cast a long shadow over Christian and post-Christian Europe. 

Protestant Europeans were taught that their eternal destiny rested on their beliefs not their actions, and that anything other than the correct beliefs would lead to eternal, conscious torment. In an age of uncertain health, Luther was not untypical in expressing the fear that each time he went to bed he might wake up in hell. 

Worse still, you really couldn’t do anything about it. Some people, according to the Reformers, were predestined for hell, others for heaven, and that was that. 

The idea that God has predestined all things without compromising human freewill or responsibility is even more absurd than the Trinitarian formula in which God is one being in three persons. And yet it was a powerful force across Europe and the New World, leading inevitably to certain classes of people being seen as irretrievably lost causes, damned according to a divine decree made in eternity. 

Hell loomed just as large for Catholic Europe, except they had the church standing between them and the lake of fire. Priests administered the ‘keys to the kingdom’ and the means of grace. This gave the church power that was, in every sense, terrifying. The Roman Catholic Church was ensconced in the governing structure of several states, but having the power to withhold salvation from leaders and the led meant this was not even necessary. Having control of eternal destiny means not having to formally control the state. Whether Catholic or Protestant, churches dangled heaven and hell before rulers and the population. Now what could possibly go wrong with that? 

The doctrine of hell meant that one could torture and kill people in their own interests. After all, if sinners were headed for eternal conscious torment, nothing that the Spanish (or Genevan) inquisition did to them could be worse than the fate that awaited them if they didn’t recant.  

The doctrine of original sin, which came from Augustine’s handling of a couple of Pauline verses, inculcated a continent with the idea that human beings are helplessly corrupt, hellbound sinners that are incapable of doing good. We cannot complain, though. Not only have we inherited a corrupted nature from Adam & Eve, we have also inherited their personal guilt for the sin that made us, along with the rest of humanity, deserving of hell. God, it was said, is merciful because he deigns to spare the chosen few, though not because of anything they have done to deserve it. It is all but an expression of his grace and mercy in the theatre of his glory.

Socinianism refuted predestination, original sin and hell. And it did so on Biblical grounds. It also taught that humans are naturally mortal. God grants eternal life to those he is pleased with, on account of their actions, but it is not in him to resurrect the dead simply to torture them for eternity. 

What damage might we have been spared had Socinian arguments such as these prevailed? And how might society have developed had its church been nourished on a Socinian reading of scripture? How different could the psychological and mental health of the past few centuries have been if the theology of Sozzini had defeated that of Augustine?

Penal Substitution

As if denying the above theological horror show weren’t enough, Socinianism also opposed Penal Substitutionary Atonement (aka PSA). This is the belief that Jesus died as a direct consequence of our personal sins, to pay a price demanded by God’s justice and wrath. In this way, PSA portrays God as petty and vindictive, unwilling or unable to forgive without receiving a bizarre payment in kind. It is still the dominant model of atonement for evangelical Christians, who claim it is a thoroughly biblical doctrine. But it isn’t biblical, and this is the key point. The orthodox were not and are not orthodox. The Trinity isn’t biblical, nor is predestination, original sin, the immortality of the soul, eternal conscious torment of the damned, or the intertwining of church and repressive and militaristic state power. Augustinian Christianity, whether Catholic or Evangelical, is at odds with the Bible. And yet the Socinians were condemned as heretics.

Setting the Bible Free

Sociniansm’s great legacy is that it fatally undermines the Augustinian church’s hold over scripture. Why should the Bible be tainted by association with such ghastly doctrines? What if we could yet learn from the Socinians that none of these terrors is actually scriptural? For centuries, Socinians have been vilified for disregarding scripture but this is the opposite of the truth. They dared to oppose the most vicious persecution from church and state because they believed what they read in the Bible. They believed in it so much that they risked everything to refute Augustinian distortions. Might they yet be the ones to restore the meaning of the Bible? Socinianism could rescue scripture and create a space in which Christianity can become what it should have been all along.

We don’t need to share the first generation of Socinians’ ideas about the divine inspiration of scripture to profit from their clear-eyed reading of it. For too long, even liberal theologians have been approaching the texts with Augustinian assumptions in place. One can’t help thinking of Derren Brown or the Emperor’s New Clothes. Somehow, we have been persuaded to see things that aren’t there, and to miss things that are there, hidden in plain sight. 

Socinianism reflects what scripture actually says, not what centuries of church theologians have imposed on it. And asking what it says is the very first task of biblical interpretation. I wish everyone knew about Socinianism. Getting acquainted with its teaching would improve all versions of Christianity, whether liberal, conservative, radical, evangelical, orthodox or catholic. And getting to know Socinianism would do the world of good for avowed non-Christans too. They’d wonder just what it was they’d been rejecting all these years.