I first encountered Spirit & Truth via their content-rich, long-running website biblicalunitarian.com. I returned to this often as I wrestled with disentangling my understanding of Scripture from distorting later traditions. They popularized the term “biblical unitarian,” a helpful and more accurate replacement for “Socinian.”
The UCA is delighted to have Spirit & Truth as a Conference Partner for this year’s conference. You’ll be able to meet John and Jerry at the Conference; be sure to stop by the Spirit & Truth table to find out more about what they’re doing and how it can benefit you.
Finally, I must mention their amazing REV project, an unabashedly unitarian translation and commentary. (With phone apps too!) Translation always involves at least a little interpretation; thus, every trinitarian translation reflects some level of distortion from traditional Trinity and Incarnation speculations. Here, that layer of distortion is peeled back, and they add very helpful study-Bible-like explanatory notes. I frequently use this resource, and I urge you to check it out.
The UCA is delighted to again have the Williamsburg Christadelphian Foundation as a Conference Partner. They state that their mission is to help “individuals and families grow their faith in God and His Son. . . We help nurture trust in God and Jesus that endures through all the ups and downs of life. WCF sponsors programs and special initiatives around the world that:
Root faith in the word of God, learning from the faith lessons of faithful people in the Bible
Nurture faith by supplying tools that spur a whole faith to develop – one of head, heart and hands.
Inspire stronger growth by connecting people of faith, fostering a spirit that edifies all.
Show faith to others by enabling generous service for Christ.”
Be sure to stop by the WCF table at the conference to find out more about how this amazing organization is serving as salt and light in this broken world.
So many good memories here, so many lovely Christ-followers! Will we see you at the UCA Conference this year?
Our venue is better and bigger than last year, but we anticipate that we may fill it up! So don’t delay; you can register now here.
This year we’ll have informative, cutting-edge presentations like last year, but we’ll also have less-theoretical offerings in the form of hands-on workshops and meet-ups. But it won’t be the same without you.
In this post, which has been approved by the UCA Board, I will make a couple of clarifications to help with some misunderstandings of the UCA which crop up from time to time.
Because the UCA is a non-profit organization which aims to promote unitarian Christian theology and to connect like-minded believers, it can best achieve its mission by being neither a church nor a denomination nor a high-control group. Only by protecting its members’ right to hold various beliefs outside of the Affirmation can the UCA most effectively achieve this two part mission.
So, given this mission as an organization, we will not do many things which a Christian church must do. The UCA does not exercise church discipline, and has no spiritual authority over its members. We encourage all UCA members to become members of churches, house-churches, or online fellowships in which all aspects of Christian teaching and practice are taught and lived out, and in which responsible, biblical church discipline is exercised.
It has sometimes been suggested that the UCA elevates knowledge or theological prowess over issues of holiness and good character. This is not and never has been true. Serious character issues, in our view, are grounds for the UCA to distance ourselves from any person, including but not limited to: sexual immorality, sexual harassment, sexually predatory behavior, antisemitism, racism, vicious conspiracy theories, divisiveness, and in general unkind or immoral online or offline behavior. In general, any violation of our terms of servicecan be a sufficient reason for the termination of membership.
The UCA has recently been accused of being a “politically correct” organization. But the UCA does not and will not participate in culture war or political issues: we exist to promote unitarian Christianity and to network and serve unitarian Christians. It seems that some have misinterpreted moderation decisions in the UCA Facebook group, in which people have been admonished or removed for aggressive online behavior, to mean we will tolerate anything. Some also seem to interpret our narrow focus as implying that in our view no other aspects of Christian teaching matter. But of course, they all matter, and all churches must teach them. But the UCA as such (but not its individual members and member groups!) must remain neutral about many such issues which are understood differently by various unitarian Christian groups. In fact, it is to be expected that UCA members and even members of its Board will differ widely on various issues outside of the UCA’s Affirmation.
Another common confusion is noticing that a Board Member has publicly said X, Y, Z, and thinking that therefore it is the position of the UCA that X, Y, and Z. But the UCA has no official policy or statement unless it has been approved by the whole Board, and it will be clearly posted as such at unitarianchristianalliance.org. Board members, like every member of the UCA, have many opinions and interests beyond the scope of the UCA mission and its policies. The views expressed in podcasts, blogs, Twitter feeds, videos are their own, and do not necessarily represent those of the UCA.
In conclusion, bad actors have no safe harbor among us. Nonetheless, it is important for any UCA member to exercise all caution and wisdom in dealing with those who contact you via UCA means (e.g. the Facebook group, the contact boxes in the Directory) for the simple reason that we can’t vet all UCA members or police all such interactions.
The Board of the Unitarian Christian Alliance is pleased to announce a general call for papers to be presented at the second annual UCA conference in Springfield, Ohio, October 14 – 16, 2022. (Watch this blog for the opening of registration.)
The submission deadline is the end of the day (U.S. Eastern Standard / New York time) of July 1, 2022.
Submissions will be blind-reviewed by a committee of three.
We are looking for scholarly (or at least: informed, insightful, and well-argued) papers which are also accessible to an educated lay audience on topics which can advance the cause of unitarian Christianity.
Topics may include but are not limited to: biblical theology, systematic theology, biblical studies, textual criticism, history of theology, history of unitarian Christianity, apologetics, Christian philosophy, analytic theology.
Authors may submit even if they are neither a member of the UCA nor a unitarian Christian.
Paper submissions should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style (Notes and Bibliography style, with footnotes and bibliography).
The main text should be no longer than 6,000 words, so that the presentation is no longer than 45 minutes.
Submitted papers longer than 6,000 (in the main text – so not including footnotes) will be automatically rejected.
Authors should plan on about 10 minutes of audience Q&A after their talk.
Papers may be read, although authors are encouraged to present the material in an engaging way.
Conference presentations will be video-recorded and may be posted on the UCA YouTube channel, and our social media committee may also snip out interesting “sound bites” for short videos.
By submitting a paper, you agree that your presentation may be filmed and used in these ways by the UCA.
Still, a fully written paper must be submitted; an outline or proposal is not enough.
Authors of accepted papers will be expected to supply a PowerPoint or Keynote or Google Slides (etc.) presentation to accompany their talk by the end of Thursday, September 15, 2022. (This should be emailed to the address below.)
After removing any self-identifying features (e.g. your name, references to your other publications or other work), please email your submission to conference@unitarianchristianalliance.org.
Our conference coordinator will ensure that the papers are suitable for blind review and then pass them on to the committee.
Results will be emailed to authors by the end of Friday, July 15, 2022.
What do scholars say about this traditional proof-text for “the Trinity”? Does the author assume that God is multi-personal? Is this a hint or foreshadowing of a doctrine of God as three “Persons”?
The UCA Board is excited to announce that our second annual conference will be hosted by the Lawrenceville Church of God in Springfield, Ohio!
The Board hopes to have online conference registration open online some time in the next few weeks.
Check-in for the conference will open at 4:00 p.m. EST on Thursday, October 13, 2022, and the conference will end with the last session after dinner on Saturday, October 15, 2022.
Attendees are invited to attend church on Sunday at our host church or at one of some nearby unitarian Christian churches; details to come.
If your unitarian group, ministry, etc. would benefit from an opportunity to gather in person (e.g. a board meeting), the host church has generously offered to make rooms available before the conference starts that Thursday. If your group is interested, please contact us at conference@unitarianchristianaliance.org.
Also watch this space for coming announcements about submitting a paper to be presented. (The deadline for submissions will be July 1, 2022.)
That’s the topic of this recent online debate between UCA member Dr. Dustin Smith and evangelical apologist Kelly Powers. Check it out:
In this post I offer a few quick thoughts after watching it. Most importantly, I thought Dr. Smith did a good job of laying out the strong case that the God of the OT is a single self, a someone, one “person” or intelligent agent. This is based on the whole way that these books refer to the one God, using singular verb forms, adjectives, titles, nouns, pronouns, and so on. He might have also added that the function of a personal proper name like “Yahweh” is to refer to a single person, and that the very concept of a god is the concept of a certain sort of self (i.e. a being with intellect and will, who does things for reasons). And also, in the OT God is sometimes portrayed as a human-like figure, which is a natural way of portraying God as a single self. It’s fair to say that specialists in OT theology, unlike popular apologists and a few other scholars, generally agree that the OT God is a single self. In addition to the sources cited by Dr. Smith, we could add the verdict of evangelical scholar and specialist in OT theology Dr. John Walton:
No Trinity . . . In the Old Testament, God’s revelation centered on the idea that there was one God as opposed to a community of gods. The metaphysical models that would make trinitarianism meaningful simply do not exist in the Israelite cultural context. In some passages in the Old Testament, [trinitarian] Christians can look back and catch glimpses of some nascent trinitarianism, but such hindsight interpretations cannot be construed as a revelation of God in the Old Testament context and do not factor into the theology of the Old Testament.
Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief, 287-89.
Against this, Mr. Powers really only pointed a few unusual OT texts which arguably are consistent with God being multi-personal. But that’s not really an argument for his claim that the OT teaches God to be multipersonal, nor does it engage with the evidence pointed out by Dr. Smith. Mr. Powers gets distracted on the irrelevant point that the NT (allegedly) teaches Jesus’s pre-human existence. He seems never to have heard of illeism, and Powers’ Google-answer that the “plural of majesty” only starts being used in the high middle ages is . . . well, obviously mistaken. The plural of majesty appears in the 7th c. AD Qur’an. And Dr. Smith pointed out that it occurs in some much earlier Jewish writings as well. Powers clearly over-reaches in asserting that the OT clearly teaches that God is multipersonal.
I’m not sure why both debaters dismiss the fairly popular scholarly suggestion that in texts like Genesis 1:26 God is supposed to be addressing his “divine council.” But I suppose that since it is natural for a king or emperor to speak both for himself and for his court or administration, maybe it’s not easy to tell the difference between his doing that, and his self-magnification by using the royal “we.”
Powers, unfortunately, tries to get some trinitarian mileage out of the fact that something called echad (Hebrew for “one”) may be a compound thing, something composed of parts, e.g. one family, one bunch of grapes, or one pile of rocks. Well, sure. But we unitarian Christians are not saying that anything which is echad is simple (partless); that’s no part of our case that OT theology is unitarian.
I appreciated how Dr. Smith brought out the fact that no OT God-word was then understood to refer to a Trinity or three “Persons.” If you think about it, it’s incredible that this would be so if, as some apologists claim, these authors are thinking of God as a Trinity.
Overall, it’s a substantial and respectful debate. Powers planted his flag on there being no explicit unitarian OT text, in other words, a text which says in so many words that “God is a single self” (or, as Powers oddly says, a single “personage”). But a teaching needn’t be explicit to be clear; implications are often very clear. And using proper names, singular person pronouns, a singular verb tenses – that is how human language express the assumption that the thing in question is a self. A reader who only had the OT could only conclude that the unique God is a single someone, even though sometimes prophets and angels speak in the first-person on his behalf.
Popular apologetics is riddled nowadays with misinformation about Old Testament theology. I hope Dr. Smith continues to shine the lights of common sense and good scholarship onto this subject.
We already know things we can do better next year, but the consensus is that the first-ever Unitarian Christian Alliance Conference was a big hit, an encouragement and a blessing to many. When I wasn’t busy meeting and having meaningful conversations with many people, I did snap a few phone photos, mostly of the presenters.
Thanks again to all the speakers, volunteers, attendees, and Conference Partners who made this an unforgettable event. Over the coming months we will be releasing professionally-edited content from the conference on our YouTube channel. Stay tuned for further conference-related posts.
Thanks to Patrick Navas for the sweet group shot including my wife!
