The Reformation Era · 1517-1650 · Poland, Transylvania
Anti-Trinitarian Currents (Servetus; Polish Brethren/Socinians; Transylvanian Unitarians)
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
The Reformation's appeal to Scripture alone led a minority to a conclusion the rest found intolerable: that the doctrine of the Trinity was not taught in the Bible. Michael Servetus published against it in 1531 and was burned at Geneva in 1553 with the city council's approval and Calvin's agreement. The idea survived further east, where the Polish Brethren built a printing town and academy at Raków and issued the Racovian Catechism in 1605, and where the Transylvanian diet's Edict of Torda in 1568 gave a Unitarian church legal standing under the preaching of Ferenc Dávid. Poland expelled the Brethren in 1658; the Transylvanian church is still there.
Sources
- Michael Servetus, On the Errors of the Trinity (1531; trans. Wilbur, Harvard, 1932) and Christianismi Restitutio (1553) (primary) — The movement's first voice, in his own words.
- The Geneva process, 1553: trial records of Servetus and Calvin's Defensio orthodoxae fidei (1554) (primary) — A hostile, institutional record — Servetus's answers were given while on trial for his life, a plainly coercive setting.
- The Racovian Catechism (1605; trans. Rees, 1818 - archive.org) (primary) — The movement's own confession of faith — a candid, published self-statement of non-trinitarian doctrine in their own words. Note on the text: Rees's translation is of the 1680 Latin recension, not the original 1605 edition.
- G. H. Williams (ed.), The Polish Brethren (Harvard Theological Studies, 1980) - documents 1601-1685; Socinus's works (Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum); Transylvanian materials (Francis David; the 1568 Torda edict context) (primary) — The communities' own records, including Raków's pacifist, communal social life — this movement was more than just its Christology. Much remains untranslated.
- E. M. Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and Its Antecedents (1945), with current scholarship (Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, 2010; the Polish school on Rakow) (secondary) — Wilbur writes as a Unitarian himself, so this is sympathetic, inside-perspective historiography rather than a neutral outside account.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 3 (McLaughlin, the radical Reformation) (reference)