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Were there any “biblical unitarians”, or what I call humanitarian unitarians in the early church?

Buckle your seatbelts – this post isn’t a quickie.

First, to review – in this whole debate, Burke has argued that all the NT writers were humanitarians. But if this is so, one would expect there to be a bulk of humanitarian unitarians in the times immediately after the apostles. Here, as we saw last time, Bowman pounces. All the main 2nd century theologians, he urges are confused or near trinitarians. (Last time, I explained that this is a dubious play on the word “trinitarian”. My term for them is non-Arian subordinationists.) There’s not a trace, Bowman urges, of any 1st c. humanitarians – with the exception of some off-base heretical groups, like the Ebionites.

We’re talking about mainly the 100s CE here, going into the first half of the 200s. The general picture, as I see it, is this. Early in the century, we find the “apostolic fathers” basically echoing the Bible, increasingly including the NT (the NT canon was just starting to be settled on during this century). However, some of them seem to accept some kind of pre-existence for Christ (in God’s mind? or as a divine self alongside God?), and they’re often looser, more Hellenized in their use of “god” (so even though as in the NT the Father is the God of the Jews, the creator, Jesus is more frequently than in the NT called “our God” etc.) But clearly – no equally divine triad, no tripersonal God, and in most, no clear assertion of the eternality of the Son. In the second half of the century, starting with Justin Martyr, we find people expounding  a kind of subordinationism obviously inspired by Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish Platonic theologian Read More »SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 5 – BURKE – Part 3