Now I come to the sources of the enlightenment. Here we are in the good position that the Enlightenment appeared very early as theology. The movement which did this is called Socinianism, from Faustus Socinius, who f led from Italy to Poland where he found a haven of security against the Counter-Reformation and at the same time against the persecution -complex of some of the Reformation churches; he wrote a book called,”The Catechism of Rakovitz.” where he developed the first fully rationalistic Protestant theology. Everything later is partly dependent on his ideas, and partly a restatement of the same ideas on the basis of similar sources. Therefore Harnack, in his History of Christian Dogma says that Socinianism – you can keep in mind the year 1600 – was the end of the history of Christian dogma. In Protestantism there was still some dogma – at least the early dogmas – preserved. Socinianism dissolves all the Christian dogmas with the help of Renaissance rationalism. and humanism. So this is a very important movement, more important even than the repetition of it: first in English deism, where it is radicalized; and then in modern liberal theology, including Harnack himself, where it is carried through.
1) The Socinians accept the authority of the Bible, but they declare that in non- essential things the Bible may fall into error. Beyond this, historical criticism is necessary. The criterion for historical criticism is that nothing can be a revelation of God–and therefore in the Bible–which is against reason and common sense and nothing can be in the Bible as revelation of God which is morally useless. Therefore he speaks of religio rationalis , rational religion, which is given in the Bible and which is the criterion for the authority of the Bible.
2) In the doctrine of God he mainly criticizes the Trinitarian dogma. The Socinians are the predecessors of all Unitarian movements. He says – and :in this he is historically right – the arguments of the Bible for the Trinitarian dogma, as it has later developed, are not developed. The Bible does not have the Trinitarian dogma, although it sometimes has Trinitarian formulations. The Greek concepts and this a very important criticism of the whole dogma in the Ritschlian school (upon which we all depend today) – are inadequate for the understanding of the meaning of the Gospel and are contradictory in themselves.
3) God has created the world out of the given chaos – Genesis 3 (tohu wabohu) , the chaos which all pagan religions and also Greek philosophy presuppose. Man is the image of God because he is superior to the animals; he has reason. Adam was not a perfect man, but he was primitive and by nature mortal. He had neither original immortality nor original perfection. (1 believe this is much nearer to the Biblical text in both respects than the later glorification of Adam which makes his fall absolutely un-understandable. The Socinians derive the fall of Adam from the strength of his sensual impressions and on the basis of his freedom. This freedom is still in man; it has not been lost.
4)Therefore the idea of original sin, or hereditary sin, is a contradictory concept. He says: there is no sin without guilt; if we are guilty, by birth, then we must have sinned before we were born, or at least in the beginning of our life, which is a meaningless statement. What really is true is that we are historically depraved and that our freedom is weakened. And this makes it necessary that God gives us a new revelation beyond natural revelation. This new revelation is Christ, but he negates the Divinity of Christ. Christ has a true human nature, but not a Divine nature. On the other hand, He is not an ordinary man; He is a higher type of man, a “superman,” so to speak – in the Nietzschean, not the comic book sense. Therefore He is an object of adoration.
