The Unitarians

QUESTION: What do the Unitarians believe?

ANSWER: An easier question would be, What do they disbelieve! A wit has described their creed thus, "Deny the Deity of Jesus Christ and believe what you have a mind to." The very week in which I write this, Prof. Schmidt of Cornell University, in an address at the Unitarian Summer Meeting at Isles of Shoals, said, "Let us love and revere and follow Jesus, but let us convert every term of leadership so as to make it clearly understood that there is no one saviour, no one Christ, among men." Dr. Charming, the American founder, believed Christ was the highest created Being in the universe — his existence, virgin birth, vicarious atonement, miracles, resurrection and ascenion, which doctrines nearly all modern Unitarians deny. The doctrine of Christ's Deity protects all other distinctively Christian truths.

— Steele's Answers pp. 240, 241.

The Holy Spirit and the Trinity

The doctrine of the personality and divinity of the Holy Spirit is intimately connected with the most mysterious yet most practical fact of revelation — the fundamental doctrine of the Trinity of God. It is mysterious because it is above reason, not contrary to it, and lies wholly in the realm of faith. It is practical because it is insepererably involved in all true Christian worship and is the maintaing of all effective evangelism. It is fundamental because its removal from the Christian system subverts every distinctive doctrine. It protects all such truths, especially the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the efficacy of the atonement. Unitarians have been accustomed to say that Philosophy sustains their denial of the Trinity. This is a great mistake. The latest utterance of philosophic theism is that the Unitarian conception of Deity is utterly inadequate to preserve His personality and moral attributes from degenerating into naturalism and pantheism, and that the Trinitarian conception is the only effectual safeguard against such an outcome and the only rock on which reason can securely rest.