by restrangled 7 Replies latest jw friends
Is there a link or does some one have info on this? For an answer to my mom on a chosen religion by Christ. Her argument was Russel was the closet to the bible based on that.
I was too tired and involved with ancestrty stuff to listen.
Sorry if this has been covered before. Just need ammo!
Thanks in advance!
r.
FYI the Baha'i Faith was inniated in 1844 and a central doctrin is that God is One, indivisable, does not incarnate, ingress or egress so was not and is not a trinatarian based religion. carmel
Barbour and Paton were both trinitarians. Interestingly, Russell didn't write about the Trinity till much later. He may have been trying to figure it out.
It should be noted that the very group he was a member of, the Advent Christian Church were non trinitarians. That isn't the case with many of them today. Some are trinitarisn, some are unitarian. Also Ellen WHite and the early SDA's were not trinitarian.
There was also the Christian Connexion, which predated William Miller, non-trinitarian. The Christadelphians weere also non trinitarian.
The List goes on!
RR
Latter-day Saints (Mormons) have always been non-Trinitarians. I'm sure there are others.
Susan
The Baha'i faith was very big in my area about 20 yrs ago. The 'word of faith' was also huge around here at that time . Both are gone now. This is a huge Baptist and Church of Christ area. Nothing lives alongside them(well not for long anyhow).
I'd like to know more about the Baha'i, b/c on the belief.net test, it indicates I might want to investigate this faith.
Here's a LOT more than you probably ever wanted to know about Unitarians : ) Unitarians have always been non-Trinitarian. This is what the name "Unitarian" refers to. In the 4th century, Arius was condemned as a heretic for teaching that god was not a Trinity. Arius was one of the characters in a movie titled "King Arthur", starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightly, just a few years ago. In 16th century Poland, Faustus Socinus led a Unitarian movement, and Francis David led similar movements in Transylvania and Hungary. Both of these movements encountered persecution, and refugees from these countries travelled to Holland in 1619 and founded the Remonstrants. John Biddle introduced Unitarianism to England, and Joseph Priestly was an early Unitarian writer and scientist. In the United States, Kings Chapel in Boston adopted a Unitarian liturgy in 1785, and Joseph Priestly came to the U.S. from England in 1794. Until 1825, Unitarianism was more of a school-of-thought which existed within other denominations, however at that time, William Ellery Channing organized the American Unitarian Association, and Unitarianism became a denomination in its own right. Unitarianism was and is very popular in New England. Russell would have at least been aware of them. In the early 1960's, recognizing that they shared many beliefs in common, Unitarian and Universalist churches merged, so are now called Unitarian Universalist, or UU for short.
Although there were Unitarians that predate Russell, the origins of the non-Trinitarianism of Adventism came directly from the Christian Connection ( which later merged with the United Church of Christ). Many from Christian Connection became Millerites and brought their Arianism with them. Russell likely got his Arian views from George Stetson, who wrote a series of articles about the Ransom around the year 1872, in which he wrote that Jesus was a perfect man, a corresponding price to Adam, and had three different natures, pre-human, human, and post-human. Russell's view of the Ransom conflicted with the Trinity. George Storrs was ambigious on the Trinity, preferring to stick to Biblical language, but held similar ransom beliefs, but not as well defined as Stetson.
There were similar ransom views among the Adventists, and Stetson was likely not the only one to attempt to explain the theory of salvation in non-trinitarian, Arian terms. One is J. M. Stephenson (search online). Arianism was prevalent among the Adventists at that time, and openly espoused. However, SDA officially adopted the Trinity in the 20th century, as did the Advent Christian Church, and Herbert Armstrong's group Church of God. The Church of God 7th, an Adventist group, recently adopted a binitarian view. The Church of God of the Abrahamic Faith are non-Trinitarian, but are not Arian since they deny the pre-existence of Christ, influenced by the Christadelphians.
Russell's views are similar to unorthodox Christians in England around the time of Isaac Newton, John Milton, Biddle, William Whiston, with their date-setting, apocalypticism, Arianism, conditional immortality, annihilationism.
Actually, the Advent Christian Church has both Trinitarian and non-Trinitarian congregations. The non-Trinitarian congregations are strongest in the Northwest USA and usually hold to no preexistence for Christ. From what I've understood, there has always been a mix of both beliefs in the denomination. Currently, most AC's are Trinitarian. However, back 80 or so years ago most were not.
