When a Unitarian Rescued the Meaning of Easter

Easter, for many Unitarians, represents a Christian hangover in a post-Christian denomination. Among Christian festivals it is especially challenging because it celebrates a supernatural miracle, something that science cannot explain or endorse, and is traditionally associated with strange and unpleasant atonement theories. Unitarian talk about Easter is, therefore, often negative: focused on not believing in the resurrection, and objecting to the idea that God would demand the gruesome sacrifice of his son. 

Liberal Christians within Unitarianism have tended to frame the resurrection as a turn around in the resolve and understanding within the early church, a 'spiritual experience' which led to a release of energy, inspiration, and new life. But substituting a metaphor for a miracle has not been enough to make Easter important to Unitarians in the UK. Ours is the only denomination to regularly hold its assembly during Holy Week. Other denominations meet in May, preferring to cope with non-standardised school holidays than pull folk out of their churches between Palm  Sunday and Maundy Thursday

Admittedly, the downgrading of Easter comes from Christians within Unitarianism as well as from non-Christians. This is because Liberal Christianity asserts the teaching of Jesus over theories about his death and resurrection. Easter gets in the way of this, with its embarrassing emphasis on resurrection and atonement. 

And yet, there was a time when Unitarianism distinguished itself with a radically different, yet impeccably biblical, interpretation of the Easter events. 

In the seventeenth century Fausto Sozzini (latinised as Socinus) consolidated the teaching of Lelio Sozini (his uncle) into what became known as Socinianism, a word that was once synonymous with Unitarianism. Its teaching was set out in the Racovian Catechism. In it we find a remarkable innovation in the interpretation of Easter, one that pulled the rug from under Lutheranism and Calvinism as much as from Catholicism. 

The Socinians made this radical new interpretation without assailing the authority of scripture. On the contrary, they claimed their departure from tradition as being more consistent with scripture than the mainstream Christianity which persecuted them. Socinians accepted the resurrection as fact but drew a daring new conclusion from it.

Classical Christian understanding of the atonement was, and still is, modelled on the sacrifices stipulated in the Torah (particularly Leviticus). The death of Jesus on the cross was interpreted by Paul, and others in the early church, in terms of the ancient ritual in which a lamb was sacrificed to make atonement for the sins of the people. Their sin was transferred onto the innocent animal (which had to be without blemish), freeing the people from the consequences of failing to keep God’s law perfectly. 

The rituals in Leviticus were meant to be repeated annually,  but Jesus’s perfection, as God’s son and God incarnate, (the ‘lamb of God’), meant that the cleansing only needed to happen once. 

Entwined with this were a number of different ‘atonement theories’ concerning what exactly had happened on the cross. Among them was the notion that a perfect God required perfect obedience. Human beings cannot obey perfectly so God’s justice demands that they pay for this eternally in hell fire. God, it was claimed, cannot be true to his perfect justice and forgive human beings for disobedience, and so, God has to send people to hell. 

Jesus’s death on the cross is seen as the solution. Our sins are placed upon him, as with the lamb in the ancient ritual, and so God’s justice is ‘satisfied’, meaning we deserve to go to hell but we don’t end up there, (as long as we believe in Jesus). We are said to be ‘forensically justified’, sinners, but counted as spotless. To put it another way, we need a perfect score on the test but get to hand in the work of an A-grade student (Jesus) and God accepts it as though it were our own. 

To us this is obviously offensive nonsense. But this was not so clear in the seventeenth century. The genius of Socinus was that he dismantled this cruel and unusual theory on biblical grounds. 

Across Europe, theologians conceived of the atonement as a legal transaction before the heavenly court of justice. Satisfaction for wrong had to be done and seen to be done. If the wronged party did not have satisfaction in the courts justice itself would be undermined. The aggrieved party (God) was, therefore, obligated to have satisfaction from those who had wronged him (all of us), meaning punishment for sin was unavoidable. Putting the punishment on Jesus was the only way round it.

But did this really come from the Bible? Or was this an assumption that had been read into it, rather than from it?

Crucially, Socinus was trained in Roman law, under which, the wronged party was entitled to satisfaction but also entirely free to forgive the party that had wronged them. This provided a radically new (and sane) interpretation of the atonement. It was as simple as it was profound. If God really is God then he is under no obligation to enforce a penalty against sinners. On the contrary, the whole of the gospel describes a merciful God who freely forgives.   

The resurrection was, for Socinus, among other meanings, a symbol of God’s free forgiveness of sin - unrelated to any sort of deal or obligation. God didn't demand Jesus's crucifixion. It was a human act of evil and the resurrection was God's response. It seems terribly obvious to us now, and yet this truth has yet to make its mark on the Christian world. 

This restructuring of the atonement between God and humanity is just one of the exciting ideas put forward in Socinianism. It dovetails with other Socinian convictions such as the genuine free will of humans, the openness of the future, the non-deity of Jesus, and the non-existence of hell. Easter would be a good time for us to rediscover this trove of Unitarian ideas, and to proudly declare that it was a Unitarian who first saw that Easter was about love and forgiveness, not bloodthirsty justice and damnation.