Justified True Belief

(●) The Italian exile who pressed the Reformation’s appeal to Scripture past every boundary the reformers kept, and left Europe a Christianity with no Trinity and no atonement. + Luther and Calvin both said the same hard thing: a doctrine had to be shown from Scripture or given up. Faustus Socinus took them at their word, and then he asked a question they had not expected. What happens if you apply that rule to the Trinity, to the two natures of Christ (the teaching that the one person Jesus is at once fully God and fully man), and to the idea that Christ’s death paid a penalty on our behalf? His answer was that none of the three survives the test. There is one God, he said, and that God is one person, the Father. Jesus of Nazareth is a man, born of Mary, raised and exalted and now to be prayed to, but a man for all that. And forgiveness is given freely, with no debt paid to anyone. He matters, for Christian readers, because he is the most serious version of a challenge that keeps coming back. A great many of the arguments a modern reader meets against the deity of Christ, or against substitutionary atonement, the teaching that Christ bore in our place the punishment our sins deserved, were put into careful Latin by this deaf Sienese gentleman four hundred years ago, and some of the church’s most careful replies name him outright. Hugo Grotius wrote a whole book against him. So did John Owen. When theologians today distinguish a penalty paid from a debt forgiven, they are still working inside the distinction Socinus forced on them. One fact is worth holding on to, because it explains the shape of his life. For fourteen years he published almost nothing under his own name. A Medici grand duke had agreed to keep paying him the income from his Italian property so long as his books carried someone else’s name or none at all, and Socinus took the deal. When the money finally stopped, the books started appearing with SOCINUS on the title page, and within eight years a mob had wrecked his house.

(●) 1539 AD: Born into the most famous family of lawyers in Siena, and given almost no schooling at all. + Fausto Paolo Sozzini was born at Siena on 5 December 1539. His people were jurists, generation after generation of them, running back through his grandfather Mariano Sozzini the younger to Mariano Sozzini the elder, one of the celebrated legal minds of fifteenth-century Italy. His father Alessandro, a lawyer of such subtlety that colleagues called him prince of fine distinctions, died in 1541, when the boy was little more than a year old. So the education that a Sozzini son should have had never happened. He grew up at Scopeto, the family place in the country, with his sister Fillide, reading whatever came to hand. What he got instead of school he got from the women of the household and from his uncle Celso, a Catholic in name and a freethinker in fact, who founded a short-lived literary club that the young Fausto joined. In 1556 his grandfather’s will left him a quarter of the family estates and made him, at sixteen, a man who never had to earn a living. The following year he was admitted to the Accademia degli Intronati, the centre of intellectual life in Siena, and took the academic nickname Il Frastagliato, the jagged one. Members chose a badge and a motto, the way a club might choose a crest. His badge was a sea whipped up by winds, and his motto was Turbant sed extollunt: they trouble it, but they lift it up. It turned out to be a good deal more fitting than the young man who chose it can have meant it to be. The jurist Guido Panzirolo put him into a survey of famous lawyers that did not reach print until long after both men were dead, and the verdict there is worth having: a young man of fine talent with a legal career in front of him, who despised the law and preferred to write sonnets.

(●) 1562 AD: His uncle Lelio died, and out of the notes he left came Fausto’s first book, unsigned, reading John’s prologue so that Christ is God by appointment rather than by nature. + Every family has the relative who asks the question nobody wants asked at dinner. In the Sozzini family that was his uncle Lelio, the sixth of his grandfather’s sons and only fourteen years older than Fausto. Lelio had spent the 1540s and 1550s wandering the Protestant cities of Europe asking exactly those questions, and had made friends of Melanchthon, Bullinger and Calvin himself while quietly doubting things all three held. During two visits to Siena in 1552 and 1553 the older man talked theology with his teenage nephew, and the seed of everything that followed was planted there. Lelio died at Zurich on 14 May 1562, at thirty-seven. The news reached Fausto at Lyons, where he had gone on coming of age, and he travelled to Zurich to collect what his uncle had left: not books, but a thin bundle of notes. From one of those notes he took an idea he never let go. Lelio had suggested that "in the beginning" in the opening of John’s Gospel does not mean the beginning of the world at all, but the beginning of the gospel, so that the prologue describes the new creation rather than eternity past. That same year Fausto wrote an anonymous Explicatio of the passage building on it, and in it Christ already holds a deity of office rather than of nature. The distinction is the one that governs everything he wrote afterwards, so it is worth having plainly: a deity of nature would mean Christ is God in what he is, while a deity of office means he is called God because of the position he has been given. God has put him in charge, and the title follows the job. He has often been written off as a man who simply published his uncle’s ideas. He was not. He took two hints from Lelio and built something Lelio never would have built, because the two men were opposites: the uncle restless and mystical, hunting for the spiritual root of a doctrine, the nephew dry, legal and systematic, hunting for a text that would settle it. A letter of 1563 shows him already denying that the human soul is naturally immortal, and there is no hint of that in Lelio at all.

(●) 1563 AD: Twelve years as a courtier in a Medici household, which he afterwards called time thrown away. + Late in 1563 he went home to Italy, conformed to the Catholic Church, and entered the service of Isabella de’ Medici, daughter of Cosimo, grand duke of Tuscany. He stayed twelve years. His own unpublished letters, which are frank about everything including himself, treat the whole stretch as wasted: a clever man in fine clothes, attending a princess, attending to nothing. Not quite nothing. Around 1570, at the request of someone he describes only as a great personage, he wrote a short book called De auctoritate sacrae scripturae, on the authority of Holy Scripture. It is the least characteristic thing he ever wrote and the most widely admired: a compact case that the Gospels are genuine, that the witnesses had nothing to gain, and that the spread of a religion offering its converts poverty and trouble is itself evidence that something happened. Nothing in it attacks the Trinity. It would be read with pleasure, a century and a half later, by men who thought its author damned. He left Italy at the end of 1575. Isabella was strangled by her husband the following year, and her brother Francesco, now grand duke, pressed him to come back. Socinus refused, and the two of them struck a bargain instead: the income from his Italian property would keep coming so long as he published nothing under his own name. For fourteen years it was a working arrangement, and it is the reason so much of his output appeared anonymously or under names like Prosper Dysidaeus and Felix Turpio of Orvieto.

(●) 1578 AD: At Basel, going deaf over his Bible, he finished the book on the atonement that made his name. + Basel in the 1570s was where a man went to read and argue. Socinus settled there around 1576, worked at the Bible with the attention he had refused to give the law, began putting the Psalms into Italian verse, and became a fixture in the city’s theological debates even as his hearing failed. People who wanted to argue with him increasingly had to write it down. One of them was Jacques Couet, a Calvinist minister, and the subject was how Christ saves. Out of that exchange came De Jesu Christo servatore, On Jesus Christ the Saviour, finished on 12 July 1578. It says nothing whatever about the nature of Christ. Its single question is what Christ’s death accomplished, and its answer is that it did not pay anybody anything. God forgives freely, as a creditor may simply cancel a debt; Christ is our Saviour because he announced the way to eternal life, confirmed it with his death, demonstrated it by rising, and will himself give that life to those who trust him. Copies went round in manuscript for sixteen years before it was printed, and one of them reached Giorgio Biandrata, a physician who moved between the courts of Poland and Transylvania and spent his spare energy arranging the affairs of heretics. Biandrata read it and decided he had found the man he needed.

(●) 1579 AD: Four months as the house guest of Francis Dávid, Transylvania’s leading anti-Trinitarian, ended with Dávid in prison and dead. + Transylvania had enjoyed twelve years of genuine religious liberty under an anti-Trinitarian prince, John Sigismund. Anti-Trinitarian is worth pausing on, because the whole quarrel turns on it: it means holding that God is one person rather than three, so that the Father alone is God and Jesus is not. The anti-Trinitarian churches of the country were led by Francis Dávid, a preacher of real power, and Dávid had taken the argument one step further than Biandrata liked. If Jesus is a man and not God, he said, then praying to him is praying to a creature, and no Christian should do it. Biandrata, whose own standing had collapsed under a charge against his morals, could not answer him. So he sent for Socinus. Socinus arrived at Kolozsvár in November 1578 and lodged in Dávid’s own house for four and a half months, arguing with his host almost daily. He had a position worked out with a lawyer’s care, and it turned on two words. Adoration, meaning the homage of the heart, is owed to Christ by every Christian. Invocation, meaning addressing prayer to him directly, is permitted rather than commanded, and in any case a prayer made to Christ is carried by him to the Father. Dávid was not moved by any of it. In April he climbed into his pulpit and denounced every form of worship offered to Christ. What followed is the darkest stretch of Socinus’s life, and the honest account of it is neither the Unitarian one, which keeps his hands clean, nor the Calvinist one, which puts the blood on them. Take the two sides of the ledger in turn. Dávid was put on civil trial for innovation, that is, for teaching something new. Socinus had already left for Poland before it opened, getting clear of an outbreak of plague. He called what Biandrata then did a rage, and he was no party to the imprisonment at Déva where the old man died within three months. Now the other side. He had been sending Biandrata the running papers of their debate. He had warned Dávid to keep quiet, partly because he thought the opinion impious and partly because he knew what Biandrata intended. And he was willing for Dávid to be forbidden to preach until a general synod ruled. Alexander Gordon, a Unitarian historian with no motive to be hard on him, put it exactly: his theological aversions, "though they never made him uncivil, froze up his native kindness and blinded his perceptions of character."

(●) 1580 AD: In Poland he remade a church from the outside, because it would not admit him to communion, and it took his name anyway. + The rest of his life, twenty-five years of it, was spent in Poland among the Polish Brethren, the anti-Trinitarian body usually called the Minor Church. They would not have him. Most of them were anabaptist, holding that a believer baptized as an infant must be immersed again as an adult before he can be received into the congregation. Socinus held nothing of the sort. Water baptism, he said, is a rite for converts coming in from outside the faith and no test of anyone’s standing, and he refused to be rebaptized. He wrote to Simon Ronemberg, an elder at Raków, the little town that was becoming the movement’s own capital, that his brethren were in grievous error and were laying a burden on people that Christ had not laid. So he never took communion with the church he reshaped. He reshaped it anyway, synod by synod, over fifteen years. He argued the Brethren out of the Arian position, which allowed that Christ had existed before Bethlehem as the first and highest of God’s creatures, and he argued those same men into praying to Christ after all. The party that held with Dávid he never persuaded; they were quieted rather than answered. By the 1590s the Minor Church taught what Socinus taught, which is why a movement he did not found and would not join has been called Socinianism ever since. He disliked the label. He refused, to the end, to be the head of a sect. There was a life going on around the theology, and it was not an easy one. In 1583 the papal nuncio Alberto Bolognetti, the pope’s resident ambassador at the Polish court, was pressing the Polish chancellor to have him dealt with as a heretic whose teaching undermined the magistrate, which in the language of the century meant the civil power itself, the prince and his courts. Socinus left Kraków on his friends’ advice rather than wait for King Stephen Báthory to act. He found shelter at Pawlikowice, a village outside the city belonging to a Polish nobleman, Christopher Morsztyn, and in 1586 he married Morsztyn’s daughter Elizabeth. She died the next year, a few months after their daughter Agnese was born. He was forty-seven, deaf, a foreigner, and now a widower with an infant, and he lived another seventeen years without marrying again.

(●) 1598 AD: A student mob dragged him through Kraków and burned the book he thought his best. + The riot had a cause, and the cause was eight years old. In October 1590 the Inquisition at Siena disinherited him. Family lawsuits over his grandfather’s will had dragged on for years, and the holy office settled them by taking his share and allowing him a pension that appears never to have been paid. The Italian money stopped, and with it the silence he had sold for it. From then on the books came out with his name on them. Eight years later a crowd of students came for him in Kraków. They wrecked the house, hauled the sick old man through the streets, and burned his papers in the square. Among what burned was an unfinished work against atheists, Contra atheos, which Socinus considered the ablest thing he had ever written. No copy survives. It is a loss worth pausing over: the man remembered for taking Christian doctrine apart spent his last strength on a defence of the faith against those who denied God altogether, and that is the one book of his nobody can read. Friends took him in at Lusławice, a village thirty miles east of Kraków. He had suffered for years from colic and the stone, which is what his century called the agony of kidney and bladder stones, and he died there in his sixty-fifth year, in early March 1604, on the third of the month or the fourth as the accounts differ. A block of limestone marks the grave, its inscription worn past reading. A Latin couplet is often quoted as his epitaph, saying that Babylon has fallen because Luther destroyed its roof, Calvin its walls, and Socinus its foundations. It is a good line and it is not on the stone; no trace of it has ever been found there.

What He Taught

(T1) Nobody works out God on his own; the whole of religion has to be told to us. + Here is the surprise about Socinus, and nearly everyone gets it backwards. He is remembered as the man who made reason the judge of revelation, and the memorial tablet put up at Siena in 1879 calls him the vindicator of human reason against the supernatural. But he did not believe reason can reach God at all. He denied what philosophers call innate knowledge of God, the idea that a person has some awareness of his maker built in from birth, the way a child seems to arrive knowing that cruelty is wrong. Socinus thought a man left entirely to himself would know nothing of God, nothing of any life beyond this one, and nothing of what God wants. There is a small comedy that makes the point. In 1588 a Jesuit named Lopez got hold of his unsigned book on the authority of Scripture, printed it at Seville as his own work, and prefixed a preface arguing that men do know God by nature. He had stolen the book and contradicted its foundation in the same breath. What reason does, on this account, is read. Scripture is the only place the way of salvation can be learned, and reason is the instrument for finding out what Scripture says, which means that no interpretation can stand if it cannot be made to make sense. The catechism his church published after his death, a book of short questions with short answers written to teach the faith, says that God’s power extends to everything that does not involve a contradiction. That single sentence is the hinge of his whole system. He thought the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, and a penalty paid to purchase a free pardon were all contradictions, and so none of the three could be what the text means, whatever the text appears to say.

(Q) "The Christian Religion is the way of attaining eternal life, which God has pointed out by Jesus Christ." + Source: The Racovian Catechism, Section I (Thomas Rees’s translation, 1818). The opening question and answer of the catechism, and the next question is where this religion may be learned. The answer is: in the Holy Scriptures, especially those of the New Testament. Socinus planned the catechism and left it unfinished at his death; Valentin Schmalz and others completed it from his papers, and it was printed at Raków in 1605. Where his own treatises argue, it states.

(T2) God is one person, and Jesus is a man who holds the title God by appointment. + An ambassador can be addressed by the honours of the country that sent her. She speaks for it, her signature binds it, and treating her with contempt is treating the state with contempt. None of that makes her the state. That analogy is roughly how Socinus read every passage where Jesus is called God. His term for it was an official deity rather than an essential one. Jesus of Nazareth is a man, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, with no existence before that birth. God raised him, exalted him, and handed over to him the government of the world; so the man now holds divine authority in heaven and on earth, and the title follows the office. Take away the office and there is a man. The one God, the God of Israel, is the Father, and he is one person and not three. The consequences run everywhere. If Christ never pre-existed, the eternal Word of John’s prologue has to mean something else, which is what Socinus’s first piece of writing was for. If Christ is a man, his death cannot be an infinite payment, which is what his book on the atonement was for (T4). And if Christ is a man, the question Dávid put to him becomes unavoidable: may a Christian pray to him (T3)? Socinus said yes, and spent the rest of his life defending the one piece of orthodoxy he had kept.

(Q) "He may, therefore, with the utmost propriety be called God; since he filleth an office of the greatest dignity, and is invested with the highest divine power in heaven and earth." + Source: Socinus, replies to the propositions of Francis Dávid, in Thomas Rees’s translation (notes to The Racovian Catechism, 1818); Rees points the reader to the full set of propositions and answers in Joshua Toulmin’s Memoirs of Faustus Socinus, 1777. Socinus set out his position in a numbered series of short propositions during the Kolozsvár debate, and this is the one the whole quarrel turned on. The proposition just before it says that having obtained the kingdom promised to him he governs the whole church, and does it by a divine power communicated to him.

(T3) That man is to be worshipped and prayed to, and whoever refuses him that offends God. + This is where Socinus becomes interesting rather than merely destructive, and it is where his own followers thought he had lost his nerve. Dávid’s argument was simple and, on the premises, hard to beat. Worship belongs to God alone. Jesus is not God. Therefore worship of Jesus is idolatry, the sin Israel was destroyed for, and the Christian churches have been committing it for fifteen centuries. Socinus agreed with the first two lines and refused the conclusion. The man Jesus, he answered, was worshipped in the Gospels before he had his kingdom and never rebuked anyone for it; God has now given him all authority; and to withhold worship from the one God has appointed is to insult God. Prayer offered to Christ, he added, is received by Christ as mediator and carried to the Father. Whether that holds together is precisely the question Christian readers should press, and Dávid pressed it first. It is a strange position to defend: a creature who may be prayed to, honoured with more than human homage, and held to be the proper object of a Christian’s hope and trust. Socinus kept the practice of the church while removing the reason for it. Most of those who later called themselves his heirs, the English Unitarians of the eighteenth century among them, dropped this teaching and went back to Dávid.

(Q) "And we ought to place our hope and trust in him, as in that person who, with the approbation of God, hath himself promised and can bestow upon us the greatest felicity." + Source: Socinus, replies to the propositions of Francis Dávid, in Thomas Rees’s translation (notes to The Racovian Catechism, 1818). He goes on to add that to invoke Christ, that is, to implore his aid in our necessities, is the same as if one prayed to God himself, since it is certain that by power from God he can both hear our prayers and grant what we want. In the same series he writes that religious adoration is to be paid to Christ though he is absent, and that those who neglect it offend shamefully against God.

(T4) Christ saves by making the way to eternal life known and certain, not by paying our penalty. + Suppose a man owes you a thousand pounds and cannot pay. You can tear up the note, which is forgiveness, or his brother can come in and pay it for him, which is satisfaction. What you cannot say is that you graciously forgave a debt that was paid in full. Socinus built his case on that ordinary observation, and it is why De Jesu Christo servatore still has to be answered rather than waved away. Satisfaction is the word the older theology used for Christ’s death considered as a payment: the penalty our sins deserved, borne by him in our place, so that God’s justice is met and we go free. Against that Socinus pressed three objections, and they are worth taking one at a time. The first is about the word freely. Scripture says God forgives freely, and a debt discharged by a substitute has not been forgiven; it has been collected from somebody else. The second is about justice. Justice is not a force inside God that must discharge itself, or God could never pardon the smallest sin at all. Justice and mercy are both things God wills, and in pardoning he wills mercy. The third is arithmetic. The penalty of sin is eternal death. Christ did not undergo eternal death. One death cannot equal countless eternal deaths, and if you appeal to the infinity of his divine nature to make up the difference, you have said that the divine nature died. So what did the cross do? It confirmed the message. Christ announced the way to eternal life as no prophet before him could, since he was the original herald of it; he sealed that announcement with his blood; he showed the thing itself by rising from the dead; and he will himself give eternal life to those who believe. The death matters enormously on this view, and matters as evidence and example rather than as payment. What Socinus has done is quietly move the whole weight of salvation off what happened to Christ and onto what we do about it.

(Q) "But to a free forgiveness nothing is more opposite than such a satisfaction as they contend for, and the payment of an equivalent price. For where a creditor is satisfied, either by the debtor himself, or by another person on the debtor’s behalf, it cannot with truth be said of him that he freely forgives the debt." + Source: The Racovian Catechism, Section V, chapter 8, on the death of Christ (Thomas Rees’s translation, 1818). The catechism, which Socinus planned and other hands finished (T1), is putting his central argument from De Jesu Christo servatore into the form his church confessed it. The question being answered is how the doctrine of satisfaction is repugnant to Scripture, and the texts cited against it are 2 Corinthians 5:19, Romans 3:24, 25 and Matthew 18:23.

(T5) Adam was made mortal, and everlasting life is a gift added, not a possession the soul already has. + A candle does not contain the flame. It will burn for as long as it is lit and no longer, and the question of how long it lasts is a question about the one holding the match. Socinus thought a human soul is like that, and he was denying something both Rome and Geneva took for granted: the natural immortality of the soul, the teaching that once a person exists he cannot cease to exist, and so faces either endless joy or endless punishment. He denied it in a letter as early as 1563 and never went back. His reasons are the kind a lawyer gives. Adam was made out of the earth; he needed food from the first day; he was made to have children; none of that is true of an immortal nature. He was given a tree of life, and why give a tree of life to a creature who cannot die? He could have been stabbed or suffocated or crushed. So man was made mortal, capable of being kept alive forever by God’s goodness, and certain to die if left alone. Two things follow that matter more than they look. Eternal life is not a fact about human beings; it is a gift held out in the gospel and given to those who take it, which is why Socinus could call the Christian religion the way of attaining eternal life (T1) rather than the way of avoiding hell. And the wicked, on his account, do not suffer forever. They perish. He was denying original sin at the same time, the inherited guilt and corruption Augustine taught: Adam’s sin, for Socinus, brought death into the world by example and consequence, not as a stain passed down the family line.

(Q) "He was originally created mortal; that is, was so constituted that he was not only by nature capable of dying, but also, if left to himself, could not but die; though he might, through the divine goodness, be for ever preserved alive." + Source: The Racovian Catechism, Section II, chapter 1, on the way of salvation (Thomas Rees’s translation, 1818). The catechism has just been asked why man is subject to death, and answers on two accounts. This is the first. The second is the sin of Adam, which it treats as bringing the sentence of death rather than a corrupted nature.

(Q) "I can scarcely think that Christian charity by any means allows the putting of the guilty to death, or mutilating their limbs. Nor will any Christian magistrate, if he regard my advice, venture to do this." + Source: Socinus, letter to Elias Arciszewski, in Joshua Toulmin’s translation (Memoirs of Faustus Socinus, 1777), reprinted by Thomas Rees in 1818. The Polish Brethren were divided over whether a Christian may hold public office or carry a sword, and Socinus took the moderate side of the debate: a Christian may serve as a magistrate, even a chief magistrate, provided he does nothing against Christian charity. Then comes this. He held that taking human life is never lawful, in war or on the scaffold, which is a long way from the century he lived in, and a long way from what happened to Francis Dávid.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He forced the church to say precisely what it had spent centuries assuming. + Before Socinus, Christians had explained the cross with a family of images, a ransom paid, a sacrifice offered, a reconciliation made, a victory won, and had rarely been pushed to say exactly how the images fit together. After him they had to. His objections were too specific and too well argued to answer with a text and a sigh, and the answers changed Protestant theology permanently. Hugo Grotius replied first, in 1617, with Defensio fidei catholicae de satisfactione Christi, a defence of the catholic faith concerning the satisfaction of Christ, written expressly against him. Grotius conceded a good deal of the ground: God in forgiving is not a judge tied to a statute, he agreed, but a ruler acting on his own authority. He then argued that a ruler still cannot set aside the moral order of the world without loss, and that the cross is the public act by which God upholds it while pardoning the guilty. That is the theory later called governmental, and it exists because Socinus wrote. John Owen, the leading theologian of the English Puritans, answered him at length in 1655 in Vindiciae Evangelicae, and at Geneva Francis Turretin worked through the arguments one by one in twenty academic disputations, De satisfactione Christi, printed in 1666. The distinction a serious discussion of the atonement still has to make, between a debt cancelled and a penalty borne, is on the table because Socinus put it there and would not take it off. An opponent who improves his opponents is rarer than a friend who does.

(†) His one book that defends the faith was used, and praised, by the men who wanted him silenced. + The little treatise on the authority of Scripture had a career its author could not have predicted. A Jesuit printed it as his own at Seville in 1588. Grotius, having written a book against Socinus on the atonement, borrowed from this one for De veritate religionis Christianae of 1627, one of the most widely read defences of Christianity in Europe for the next two centuries. In a charge to his clergy in 1728 Richard Smalbroke, bishop of St David’s, said that Grotius had been helped in that work "by the valuable performance of a writer otherwise justly of ill fame," Faustus Socinus’s little book on the authority of Scripture. Three years later an English clergyman, Edward Combe, translated it and dedicated the translation to Queen Caroline. In small compass it does what a whole school of English writers would do a century later: it argues from the honesty of the witnesses, from their lack of any worldly motive, and from the improbable spread of a faith that offered its converts nothing this world wants. Socinus himself was not satisfied with it. By 1581 he judged that it had not really met the hardest objections, and he began rebuilding its case in a work he never finished.

(†) His catechism carried the system across Europe and governments kept burning it. + The Racovian Catechism appeared in Polish at Raków in 1605, the year after his death, and in Latin in 1609 with a dedication to James I of England. The dedication was not a success. Everywhere it went the book was treated as a public danger: on 2 April 1652 the English Parliament resolved that it contained matter blasphemous, erroneous and scandalous, and ordered the sheriffs of London and Middlesex to seize every printed copy and burn them at the Old Exchange and in New Palace Yard at Westminster. Raków itself had become a small capital of the movement, with a press and an academy that drew students of several confessions. The press was destroyed in 1638. Twenty years later, at the Diet of Warsaw in 1658, the Diet being the parliament of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the Brethren were ordered to leave Poland within three years or conform, on pain of death, and they scattered into Holland, Germany, Transylvania and England. Scattering spread them. Socinian books and Socinian exiles reached English readers through the middle of the seventeenth century, and the questions Socinus had asked about the Trinity and the atonement were live in English divinity from then on. The English and American Unitarian churches of the eighteenth century are his descendants, though they dropped his prayer to Christ (T3), and the liberal Protestant theology of the nineteenth century rediscovered his account of the cross as example and demonstration without always knowing whose account it was.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the deity of Christ, the cross as a ransom, and the day he let a magistrate settle a doctrine. + The ledger has to be kept, and with Socinus it is long, because what he denied is not a formulation but the substance. - Who Christ is. John does not say that the Word held an office. He says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" and then "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:1, 14). Thomas, seeing the wounds, does not congratulate an appointee: "Thomas answered him, My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). Paul writes that in Christ "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2:9). Socinus read every one of these as honours conferred. The plain sense of the texts is that they describe what he is. - What the cross did. Scripture does not present the death of Christ only as an announcement confirmed. Isaiah says "he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities" and that "the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:5, 6). Jesus says he came "to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). Peter says "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24). A ransom is paid; a burden laid on one is lifted off another. Socinus’s creditor analogy assumes a debt God is owed by us as a private party; Scripture speaks of a penalty that God as judge both requires and himself provides. - Worship without a reason for it. The most unstable point is the one he defended hardest. He taught that Christians must pray to Christ, trust him for their greatest happiness, and honour him more than any man, while insisting Christ is a creature. If he is right about the second, Dávid was right about the first. Scripture joins them instead: every knee bows and every tongue confesses "that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:11), and the worship in Revelation goes to the Lamb on the throne alongside the one who sits there (Revelation 5:13). - His own conduct in one case. He taught that a Christian may never take a human life and that a magistrate should not execute even the guilty, and then he handed the papers of a private theological argument to the man who was arranging his host’s prosecution, warned that host to keep silent, and agreed that the state should stop him preaching until a synod could meet. Francis Dávid died in a prison at Déva. Socinus neither sought that nor rejoiced in it, and he called what Biandrata did a rage. It remains the case that the one time his principles were tested against a man he could not answer, he was willing to let the state settle by force what he had not settled by argument. Whether he is a Christian heretic or the founder of a new religion has been disputed since he was alive. He would have answered that he was returning to the New Testament and nothing else, and that is the claim to test. A Christianity without the Trinity and without the atonement is, at least, no longer the religion that Paul summarized when he wrote "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3).