The Bible and Unitarians

When I started the Worship Studies Course (a training course for Unitarian lay preachers), my knowledge of the Bible was very superficial - I knew most of the dear old stories that we learn at our mothers' knees, and was reasonably familiar with the four canonical Gospels. And I knew that an awful lot of good advice was squirreled away in it - advice by which countless Jews and Christians had live their lives. But my knowledge of the Hebrew Bible was, as I say, limited to the famous stories - Daniel in the Lion's Den; Moses and the Ten Commandments; Joseph and his Coat of Many Colours and so on - you can fill in the rest.

At the beginning of the Biblical Studies module, I realised that I was going to have to do quite a bit of reading. What I hadn't realised was how fascinating I was going to find it - there is just so much in the Bible. To know it well must be a life's study. My first shock was how readable a modern version can be - I have a New Revised Standard Version. My second shock was how much I didn't know - for example, in the famous story of David and Goliath, I had never appreciated that the stone David threw only stunned Goliath, and he finished him off by cutting his head off!

This exciting experience of revelation and discovery must be like that experienced by people in the 16th century CE when the first Bibles became widely available in English, due to the spread of printing (up until then, the Church had made sure that they were only written in Latin and Greek, and were hence 'closed books' to all but the highly-educated. Before these brave pioneers (William Tyndale in 1526 and Miles Coverdale in 1535) published their translations of the New Testament and the entire Bible, only those with Latin or Greek (in effect the clergy) could read the Bible, and ordinary people had to believe what they were told.Why do I say "brave pioneers"? Well, the Church was desperately afraid that if people could read the Bible for themselves, they might distort or misinterpret its message (thinking for themselves, shock, horror!). So Tyndale was burned at the stake for heresy.

Then, following the English Reformation in the 1530s, King Henry VIII ordered that copies of a new translation, The Great Bible, be placed in every church, in 1539. This was the first "authorised version" of the Bible in English. The revolution had begun. After a brief period of suppression during Queen Mary's reign, bishops of the Church of England produced The Bishops' Bible in 1568, which was followed most famously by The King James Bible in 1611, which is now known as The Authorised Version. Although there have been many other translations since, the Authorised Version is certainly the edition that has influenced so much of English literature, and the edition whose language most people are most familiar with.

The printing press enabled more books to be published in the vernacular, which in turn led to a sort of virtuous circle: the more books that were available, the more people were likely to be able to learn to read, and hence educate themselves. Unitarianism is a most unusual faith, in that it evolved simultaneously in many countries at about the same time. People in many lands were studying their Bibles, and, finding no evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity (which had been accepted as Christian doctrine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and further confirmed at the Council of Constantinople in 381 CE). So they rejected it, going back to their Bibles to find out what the earliest Christians had believed.

It is worth realising that our progressive, questioning faith is built upon the blood of some brave men, who died in defence of their beliefs that the doctrine of the Trinity was a mistake - for example, Michael Servetus in 1553 (who was burnt at the stake in Geneva under the influence of John Calvin); Francis David, the pioneer of Unitarianism in Transylvania, who insisted that prayer could only be offered to God and not through Jesus, and who died in prison in 1579; and our own John Biddle, who died of a disease caught while in prison for his beliefs, in 1662.

So the Bible had a vital role to play in Unitarian thinking and history, from the denomination's earliest days. Today, the Bible is one of the many sources of wisdom available to us, and used by us in our spiritual quests. Cliff Reed puts it like this in Unitarian? What's That? "Unitarians see the Bible as the record of a people's long struggle to understand themselves, their world and their God. In it the writers describe and interpret the spiritual dimension of their existence and their history ... Where we find in scripture a source of sustaining and abiding truth, it can be said to be a source of divine wisdom."