Concept

Biblical Unitarianism

Intro

Biblical unitarianism holds that God is one Person, the Father alone, and that Jesus is the virgin-born, risen and exalted Messiah and Son of God, but not God himself. The position is often confused with two things it is not. It is not Arianism: Arians and Jehovah's Witnesses hold that the Son is God's first and highest creation, divine in a derivative sense. Biblical unitarians deny that Jesus pre-existed as a heavenly being at all (some Christadelphians allow a form of ideal pre-existence in the mind of God, but not personal pre-existence). And it is not the Thomas Jefferson or Enlightenment-deist version of unitarianism, which treated Jesus as a great moral teacher and nothing more. Biblical unitarians confess the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the ascension, and the second coming. They call Jesus Lord and Messiah. They simply deny that he is God.

The name "Unitarian" came to cover a wide range of positions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Emerson's transcendentalism to the modern Unitarian Universalist Association, which no longer requires any Christian confession at all. Biblical unitarianism is the older and narrower stream: Christians who read the Bible as teaching one God who is one Person, the Father, and who regard the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon as having departed from the apostolic faith.

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In full

Biblical unitarianism is the Christological position that God is strictly one in Person as well as in being, that the Father alone is the one God of Israel, and that Jesus of Nazareth is the human Messiah and Son of God, not a pre-existent divine being and not a second Person of a triune Godhead. The position maintains the full authority of Scripture, confesses the virgin birth (Luke 1:35), the sinless life, the atoning death, the bodily resurrection, and the exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of God (Acts 2:33), and expects his visible return. What it denies is that Jesus is ontologically God, whether in the Nicene sense (coeternal, coequal, consubstantial second Person) or in the Arian sense (pre-existent first creation).

Core claims.

1. One God, one Person. The Shema (Deut 6:4) and the monotheistic declarations of Isaiah (Isa 44:6; Isa 45:5) identify God with the Father and admit no second Person. Jesus himself names the Father as "the only true God" (John 17:3).
2. Jesus is the Messiah, not God. The title "Son of God" denotes a unique relationship of origin and authority, not ontological identity with God. The virgin birth makes Jesus "Son of God" by conception (Luke 1:35), not by eternal generation.
3. No personal pre-existence. Unlike Arianism, which posits a pre-cosmic created Son, most biblical unitarians hold that the Son's existence began at the incarnation. The "Word" of John 1:1 is read as God's plan, purpose, or self-expression, not a second Person.
4. Exaltation, not equality. God highly exalted Jesus and gave him the name above every name (Phil 2:9) as a reward for obedience, not as a restoration of pre-existing status.
5. The Spirit is God's power, not a third Person. The Holy Spirit is the Father's own active power, not a distinct hypostasis.

Distinction from Arianism. Arians and Jehovah's Witnesses hold that the Son is God's first and highest creation, divine but not God Almighty, who personally pre-existed and served as the agent of creation. Biblical unitarians deny personal pre-existence altogether: Jesus is a human being, not a downgraded deity. The two positions share the denial of the Trinity but differ on who Jesus was before Bethlehem.

Distinction from Enlightenment Unitarianism. Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Priestley (in his later career), and the nineteenth-century Unitarian movement progressively abandoned the virgin birth, the miracles, and the bodily resurrection. Describing unitarianism as "Jesus was a great teacher, not God" is the Jefferson framing, and it is a strawman when applied to biblical unitarians who confess the resurrection and the messianic office in full.

Historical development

• Patristic antecedents. Certain strands of Jewish Christianity (the Ebionites, as reported by Irenaeus and Epiphanius) held a strictly human Jesus, though the sources are hostile and the reconstruction uncertain. Paul of Samosata (condemned at the Synod of Antioch, 268) taught that the Logos was an impersonal attribute of the Father, not a second Person.
• The Socinian movement (16th-17th c.). Faustus Socinus (Fausto Sozzini, 1539-1604) settled in Poland and gave his name to the Socinian movement, formalized in the Racovian Catechism (1605). Socinians denied the pre-existence of Christ, the Trinity, the satisfaction theory of atonement, and original sin. They affirmed Christ's virgin birth, resurrection, and lordship. The Polish Brethren were suppressed in 1658.
• John Biddle (1615-1662). Commonly called the father of English Unitarianism. Biddle published Twelve Arguments Drawn out of the Scripture (1647), arguing that the Holy Spirit is not God, and was repeatedly imprisoned. His followers, the Bidellians, formed the earliest self-conscious unitarian congregations in England.
• Christadelphians (1848-present). Founded by John Thomas (1805-1871), a physician who emigrated from England to America. Christadelphians reject the Trinity, affirm a strictly human (but virgin-born and resurrected) Jesus, deny the immortality of the soul, and hold that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection. They are conscientious objectors and refuse military service. The movement is small (perhaps 50,000 worldwide) but theologically disciplined.
• Modern biblical unitarianism. The term "biblical unitarian" has been reclaimed in the twenty-first century by individuals and networks (e.g., the Biblical Unitarian website, the Restitution Fellowship) who distinguish themselves from the Unitarian Universalist Association (which has moved beyond Christian theology) and from Jehovah's Witnesses (who hold Arian rather than unitarian Christology).

Key texts and the Trinitarian response

Tensions

• The worship texts. If Jesus is not God, the worship offered to him in Rev 5:13 and the proskunesis in Matt 28:17 either violates the first commandment or requires redefining worship. Biblical unitarians distinguish degrees of honor; Trinitarians call this equivocation.
• The pre-existence data. John 17:5 ("the glory which I had with you before the world was"), Col 1:16 (creation through him), and John 8:58 ("before Abraham was, I am") resist a purely human Jesus. Biblical unitarians read these as notional pre-existence (foreknown in God's plan) or as prophetic past tense. The reading is contested.
• Creeds and councils. Biblical unitarianism's claim to recover apostolic teaching faces the patristic record: the ante-Nicene fathers (Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen) unanimously affirm a pre-existent Son, though they differ on how to articulate it. The unitarian counter is that the earliest stratum (the Synoptics, Acts, Paul's letters) does not require what the later fathers read into it.

See also

• Trinity vs Oneness vs Modalism vs Arianism, the four-position comparison hub
• Arianism, the distinct position that the Son is a pre-existent creature
• Oneness Pentecostalism, one God, one Person, but Jesus IS God in the flesh
• Christs Deity, the Trinitarian proof-text compendium
• Trinity, the orthodox doctrine this position rejects
• Jehovahs Witnesses, the modern Arian-type movement, structurally distinct from biblical unitarianism
• Monotheism, the shared premise all these positions claim