I have not really given the Unitarians much attention unless I need some good images for a blog: theit twitter feed is reliably useful. In the same way that Lenin considered clerics: as examples of foolishness. But they do have a theology, and it functionally is throughout Christian churches.

They make it up according to their experiences. From (where else) the Huffington Post.

We are a free religious faith, and so have no creed. And as freedom is wont to do, our faith invites a certain degree of wackiness and abuse. But if that’s the price of freedom, then I still choose freedom.

Our faith, of course, does have requirements. To become an Unitarian Universalist, you make no doctrinal promises, but you are required to do much more. You are required to choose your own beliefs — you promise, that is, to use your reason and your experience and the dictates of your conscience to decide upon your own theology, and then you are asked to actually live by that theology. You are asked to take your chosen faith very seriously.

In a very real sense, all theology is autobiography, is it not? Our experience, real and vicarious, is what informs our sense of reality, our internal picture of the way the world works, what our values are. We believe what we know is true — that is, our felt knowledge–not what we are told is true. In the final analysis, how can a person who wishes to live with integrity do other than this?

Our free faith was hard won. It has a long history, and our religious ancestors died for this freedom.

She then goes back to the Anabaptist revolt and edicts of tolerance and claims Servetus as an Unitarian: who was burned by the council of Geneva (Note: it is the civil magistrate that punishes: and in this case Calvin argued against that penalty). But both Calvin and the Romans damned him.

Because we are not to tamper with what we have been given. Our faith is not free: it is of Christ.

Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James,

To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ:

May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you.

Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.

Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively. Woe to them! For they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam’s error and perished in Korah’s rebellion. These are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever.

It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” These are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires; they are loud-mouthed boasters, showing favoritism to gain advantage.

(Jude 1:1-16 ESV)

Now, the Unitarians have taken the worship of Love and their free thinking into a curious form of progressive group think. This is almost inevitable: because they are free they cannot deal with those who would use that very freedom to blaspheme.

And though I would argue strongly for their right to speak and protest: for if error cannot be said, then truth will be regulated, and that regulation, inevitably, will be by the ungodly… God does not have a tolerence of evil. And they align, fairly reliably, with evil.

But this is a small church. Apart, perhaps, for New York Petunias who read the HuffPo and Vox. What is far more treacherous is that the same logic occurs within the church. We are taught all is love: but then we cannot handle righteous anger, or sober warning, and call these things bad because they make us feel bad.

Forgetting that our conscience makes us feel bad, and that is a motivation to do good. And forgetting, above all, that a person who loves corrects error, and does not celebrate it.

So I am credal. Why? Because of Christ. Because it is a bulwark against error. And Christ, when he returns, will not bring a dove of peace, but conquer all that is evil and wrong, so righteousness can be established, and a new heaven and earth created.

Fall not into the trap of being overtly pious and spiritual while allowing evil to fester in your life and in your congregation. Be a little more honest about your imperfections. Be a lot more plain. For we should have the power of religion, not the images and trapping of it, while denying the God we claim to worship.