Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of LiverpoolMartineau, James
Religion
Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Liverpool
Martineau, James
Unitarianism
Now, strange to say this principle was broadly admitted. It was broadly
admitted that Christianity is not the property of scholars or critics,
but the gift of God to all men; and yet, with a remarkable
inconsistency, it was added, that “the all men” to whom Christianity is
the gift of God, must find in it the doctrine of the Trinity, else they
are no Christians at all. That is, Christianity is the gift of God to
those who, by the aids of interpretation and criticism, become
Trinitarians, and to all those who, following their leaders, accept this
doctrine; but is not the gift of God to Unitarians, who, though loving
Jesus as their Light on Earth and their Forerunner amid the skies,
cannot so read either the written Gospel or the light of the knowledge
of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, as to collect from them
the doctrine of a Trinity. If Trinitarianism is Christianity
exclusively, then Christianity _is not_ the gift of God to all men; for
many, in all ages of the Church and in the first century, perhaps,
without exception, have accepted Christ, but knew no Trinity. If
Trinitarianism is Christianity exclusively, then Christianity is the
property of critics and scholars, for that doctrine is not a
self-evidencing Truth, it does not shine out from the Gospels so that no
honest mind and pure heart can fail to receive it, and, if capable of
being proved at all, it can only be proved by a most technical and
subtle logic, by far-fetched inferences from disconnected texts, every
one of which is open to a hostile criticism, and by a most scholastic
and indirect system of interpretation, which is a task, and that a most
painful one, for plain men to comprehend. My audience will be enabled to
judge of this matter for themselves when I tell them that one of the
strongest reliances of modern Trinitarians, until proved to be
completely fallacious, was the power of the Greek article; and that one
of the texts long used in this controversy, and still used,[134] owes
its whole importance to an accident so minute as this, whether the
letter O was written with a central dot, or without the dot; so that the
chance touch of a transcriber might put in or put out one of the
principal proofs of the doctrine of the Trinity. Now I further declare,
that all the strongest evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity is
exactly of the same critical nature—that the only text of the slightest
difficulty, cited in Christ Church on Wednesday evening, owes its whole
force to a question of punctuation; and that the best critics and
scholars, and they Trinitarians, for true scholars never degrade their
high calling, nor enter the solemn sanctuary open to them alone, to
falsify the oracle, give many authorities against the Trinitarian, and
in favour of the Unitarian, Interpretation.[135] Now will any man tell
me that the doctrine of the Trinity, which, if true, is the most awful
Truth that ever bowed down the heart, that the God of Heaven walked this
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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