121 The Socinian Movement (Five Hundred 6)

In the 1500s scholars in northern Italy began questioning the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. Before long the Inquisition forced these burgeoning Italian biblical unitarians to flee, resulting in the spread of their ideas to other parts of Europe. The two most significant groups that emerged were the Polish Brethren and the Unitarian Church of Transylvania. In this lecture, you’ll learn about this interesting though typically overlooked chapter of church history.

This is lecture 6 of a history of Christianity class called Five Hundred: From Martin Luther to Joel Osteen.

All the notes are available here as a pdf.

—— Notes ——

“Not only psychopannychism but also Antitrinitarianism was to find its fullest ecclesial expression in Polish Socinianism and Hungarian Unitarianism.  The leaders of these two parallel and closely interrelated movements…were Italians or palpably dependent upon Italians.”[1]

 

Italian Roots

• Marsiglio Ficino (Marsilio Ficino) (1433-1499)
  • Subordinated Son to Father

“Made bold to translate Verbum as sermo, thereby sloughing off the philosophically freighted conception of Christ as the Eternal Word (Logos, Verbum), as the Mind and Instrument of God, and substituting the idea of Christ as merely the voice of God. Although Ficino, basing his thought allegedly on Paul, wrote of approaching the preached sermo with the same reverence as the eucharistic corpus, he had started a train of thought that would equate the Word with the prophetic vox of the Old Testament, and even with rational meditation and literary scripta, and which would inevitably render philosophically difficult the received formulation of the Logos-Son as consubstantial with the Father.”[2]

• 1540s – Vicenza Society
  • Vicenza is a city in Italy that had a strong unitarian church
  • Fled and ended up all over Europe in Moravia and Switzerland
• Lelio Sozzini (1525-1562)
  • Part of the Vicenza Society, a leader
  • Visited Poland in 1551
• Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604)
  • Went to Poland and Hungary and worked with unitarians there
  • In 17th, people started calling the Polish brethren “Socinians”

Polish Brethren (1565-1658)

• Also called Minor Reformed Church of Poland and Socinians by outsiders, but called themselves “brethren” or “Christians”
• Peter Gonesius (1525?-1573)
  • Studied at University of Padua in northern Italy and graduated with a doctorate in philosophy
  • 1556 – Synod of Secemin: excommunicated for non-Trinitarian beliefs
  • Became the leader of the Ecclesia Minor in Poland along with Marcin Czechowic
• Georg Schomann (1530-1591)
  • Left a letter to children and grandchildren (a kind of will)

“If you want to find out these things yourselves, there is my second catechism which I compiled from Holy Scripture privately for you. It explains about the Most High God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, man, only begotten Son of God our Lord, who are to be worshipped in spirit and in truth…May your understanding of God be that which we have from the prophets of Israel and not after the fashion of the Lutherans and Papists.”[3]

• • In 1574, a little work, Confession of Faith of the Congregation Assembled in Poland (thought to be Schonmann’s work)