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
stated to be the Unitarian Bible: and that the Unitarians not finding
their favourite doctrines in the actual Bible made a Bible for
themselves. Now let it be known that this new Bible is simply an English
Version of the New Testament having for its basis or model a translation
made by an Archbishop of the United Church of England and Ireland, a
circumstance which we were not told; that it is founded upon the
translation of Archbishop Newcome; that it is not used in Unitarian
worship and possesses no authority amongst us except such as it may
derive from its just merits, which are not generally rated by us as very
high: and lastly, that no one is answerable for it except its
editors,[37] and not even they any longer than they choose. And yet, one
would suppose, that the Church of England divines might be sufficiently
conversant with varieties of opinion, even in a church more strictly
bound than ours, and ought not to fall into the error of taking any book
whatever, or any man whatever, as the standards of a faith. With all our
differences I am not aware that our bond of union covers wider varieties
of opinion on the great questions of Theology and Criticism, than those
which separate Bishop Marsh, Bishop Butler of Durham, Archdeacon Paley,
to say nothing of the older and nobler school of Sherlock and
Barrow,[38] Tillotson and Taylor, from the modern Evangelical Divines;
and both from the Oxford approach to Popery, a late movement in the
direction which we have now endeavoured to show is the destined path of
Creeds.
But I shall be asked, has Christianity no essentials, and may a man
believe anything he likes, and yet be a Christian? I answer that the
essential belief of a Christian is the belief that Jesus Christ is the
moral image of God; that to be one with him is to be one with his Father
and become fitted for that Heaven in harmony with which his mind was
made; and that any doctrinal ideas which a man can hold in consistency
with this act of spiritual allegiance, he may hold, and yet be a
Christian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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