[betty boop]

Jefferson was a Unitarian…. Thomas Paine said in no uncertain terms he was a deist. Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams and others get labeled with the word "deist" because other congregations did not like Unitarians and thought they to not be Christians (same thing we see today...Mormons, Catholics and various protestant groups claim others are not true Christians). Liberals also like to pretend many of our Founders were not Christians but were deists.

Hi LarryLied! I think what we have here is a case of “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” At the level of foundational beliefs, I don’t see any distinction between Unitarianism and deism, which differ fundamentally from the Christian revelation of the New Testament.

I’m not a Unitarian (i.e., a deist), though my Dad is. He refers to himself by either term more or less indistinguishably. Which suggests to me that he considers the terms to be synonymous.

A look at the core beliefs of Unitarianism and deism as compared with Christian ideas may help to illustrate the identity of the two.

First, Unitarians and self-described deists both believe in a creator god – One impersonal God – who got the universe started, but then withdrew. This God is not active in creation, either directly or through human souls. God is “unitarian,” that is, One; therefore, Jesus was not the Son of God, not the Logos of the “in the beginning,” but a great human moral teacher on the level of a Buddha. The soul is not immortal – there is no afterlife. When a man dies, he is simply extinguished, his body decomposed and returned “back to nature.”

Christians, on the other hand, are Trinitarians: They believe in a God of Three Persons, One of Whom – the Son – incarnated as Jesus the Christ and entered into actual human history. This is a “suffering God” who died for the forgiveness of sins, and to restore the order of the human soul destroyed in the Fall by bringing it back into relationship with the Father. The soul is immortal, and lives everlastingly.

We are clearly speaking of two different creeds here. On this basis, Reformed Christianity, Roman Catholicism, and the Church of Latter Day Saints are all “on the same page” – that is, they are “Christians” in the fullest sense. Unitarians, however, in rejecting the creedal core of the Faith, have gone a different way.

I don’t mind if we lump them all together and call them all Christians, provided we do not ignore the fact that there are profound differences in belief as between Unitarians (deists) and Trinitarians (theists).

Thanks for writing, LarryLied. Best, bb.

[LarryLied]

Unitarian/Universalists today certainly can be called deists. But in Channing's time it was different. Jefferson, John and John Quincy Adams and other Unitarians did not believe in some vague God. They believed in the God of the Bible, their faith came out of the Anglican, Congregationalist and Presbyterian traditions. They dissented on doctrine, they didn't create a faith out of whole cloth. No doubt they were heretics but they were Christian heretics :-)