(Theodore Parker, who originally made the above statement at his famous May 19, 1841, Boston lecture, surprisingly enough, began his sermon by quoting Luke 21:33. This is where Jesus said, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away"!) For most UU’s today Jesus’ words have passed away and have little if any relevance.

While UU’s of the religious persuasion claim to respect and revere Jesus, it is principally a Jesus of their own making. They therefore discard those historical events in the life of Christ which they dislike (particularly the miracles), even while claiming they are "much more impressed by and committed to the historical Jesus than by, or to the theological Christ," as if the two ideas could in any sense be separated.³

Certainly, responsible recent biblical scholarship attempts no such arbitrary division. The "theological" Christ is the historical Christ if we are giving any deference at all to Scripture or facts of history.

At best, for UU’s, Jesus is an example of one who had faith in humanity, but never the object of faith for humanity (John 3:16) or a revealer of the one true God (John 17:3). From "the babe in the manger legend" to the "symbolism as poetry" of the resurrection, the life of the biblical Jesus is either rejected or ridiculed.

Even as far back as 1867 (and before), Jesus Christ was being assaulted by Unitarianism. The "Fifty Affirmations of Free Religion" of the Unitarian Free Religious Association (1867) stated in point 34 their desire that "the completion of the religious protest against authority must be the extinction of faith in the Christian Confession [i.e., here, the belief that Jesus was the Messiah]."⁴

By capitulating to and endorsing the highly dubious methods and findings of higher criticism (e.g., The Jesus Seminar), most UU ministers and laymen today believe they can know little or nothing of the "real" Jesus. They support these methods despite a flood of apologetic material refuting the biases and errors of such liberal scholarship. Perhaps with modern man in general today we could say the average UU is not really interested in the historic evidence for the biblical portrait, but that they believe what they want to believe, because it allows them to live as they want. We again find a refreshing frankness, at least occasionally:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, biblical antagonist and leader of the transcendentalist movement, spent two years in the Unitarian ministry. His famous July 15, 1838, "Harvard Divinity School Address" reflects the views of a majority of modern UU’s: "Historic Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion…. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus."⁹

The following statements are representative examples of various UU opinions about Christ:

Finally, UU minister and professor Jack Mendelsohn repeats the long discredited "Paul invented Jesus" view for which there was never even a shred of evidence:

Thus Mendelsohn claims that the deity of Christ and the Trinity were never believed in by Christians until officially formulated at the Nicean council in 325 AD: "The deity of Jesus thus became the official orthodoxy of Christian religion."¹⁷ This too, is proven incorrect by looking at numerous early church Fathers who unequivocably defended Christ’s deity.

Paul could hardly have invented a "new Jesus,¹⁸ for He was initially an orthodox Pharisee who hated both Jesus and his followers. If anything, Paul wanted Jesus kept in the grave. Yet soon after the crucifixion he was proclaiming Jesus Christ as the resurrected Hebrew Messiah, Son of God, and atoning Savior (Acts 9:20-29; Gal. 1:9-2:16). Paul had the means and the ability to check his facts; he would not have endured a life of much suffering and then died for Christ unless he was convinced He was indeed the prophesied Messiah. Only a miracle could have transformed "Saul" into "Paul." The position of unbelief is the one which must present some valid evidence for its views, for the clear weight of the evidence favors Paul’s position, one that is in complete harmony with the teachings of the Jesus of the Gospels. Thus, Christ himself was well aware he was the Messiah and that He was to be the One making atonement for the sins of the world (Matt. 20:28; Jn. 10:17; Matt. 16:15-27; Jn. 1:29; 4:25-26, 10:33, 11:25, etc.).

He also knew He was deity (Jn. 5:18; 10:30), and it is a fact that the earliest Christians believed in the deity of Christ and the Trinity. Nicea did not "invent" the Trinity; it simply recognized "officially" the already commonly accepted Christian beliefs. In fact, so many "unitarian" heresies were spreading that it was necessary and wise to officially declare biblical doctrines as a standard measure.

It is, of course, always simple to maintain a religious belief of one’s choosing: objectively documenting it is another story.

18 Machen’s The Origin of Paul’s Religion should be consulted for a thorough refutation of this idea.