The previous addresses in this series have looked at figures who rebelled, in one way or another, from the mainstream positions of Anglican and Catholicism. I hope it will not be thought presumptuous for me to end the series by charting the elements of my own move to Unitarianism, saying something along the way about the reasons - for me - which make Unitarianism the only Christian path truly representing the religion of Jesus himself.

First, though, I should like to sidetrack to consider two eighteenth-century Unitarian figures who are germane to today's theme, the Revd. Dr. William Robertson in Ireland, and later England and the Revd. Theophilus Lindsey, who resigned his Anglican living in Catterick, Yorkshire, in 1772 to profess Unitarian views. (See page 12 of today's Service Sheets for pictures of the two.) Lindsey's resignation was in part prompted, or at least made easier, by Robertson's in the previous decade from the Church of Ireland parish of Rathvilly in County Carlow. And when Robertson later moved to England to become headmaster of Wolverhampton School, he and Lindsey were in close touch, giving each other much needed mutual support, up to the time of Robertson's death in 1783. Lindsey indeed regarded Robertson as a sort of 'father-figure' of Unitarian dissent.

Robertson and Lindsey were significant in that, while they appear in one sense to have failed in their own day and time, they articulated the germ of an extraordinary idea, too little appreciated by commentators on them. I believe that they both came to the conclusion that Anglicanism was in effect dead, because of advances in the understanding of the nature of primitive Christianity; and, consequently, they both aspired to an ideal in which Anglicanism would be replaced by Unitririanism as the expression of 'real' Christianity in England. They failed in so far as Anglicanism did not die off as a result of their efforts, remaining in fact up to the present larger and more pervasive than Unitarianism in its following. But what is important is that they had their conviction, even if it was not realised.

Robertson and Lindsey have both had an impact on me, in that I too hold to the general thesis that they could only aspire to. And the successive stages of this position deserve to be carefully itemized. Robertson ceased to be an Anglican because his progressive omission of certain parts of the Anglican liturgy - for him, on conscientious grounds - began to raise questions among members of his Rathvilly congregation both then and afterwards, continued to be what one might call a 'minimalist' in his demand for change. He merely wished the Prayer Book to continue in use, but "silent on all controverted points", as he put it - in effect what he had been doing already at Rathvilly. I have not seen Robertson's precise omissions from the Book of Common Prayer - in spite of looking I have not managed to locate Robertson's annotated copy of this book -, but one may guess that the material omitted was largely consistent with Lindsey's work, of which evidence does survive.

Lindsey in fact went a good deal further than Robertson in bringing matters to fruition. He oversaw the publication of a fully Unitarian version of the Book of Common Prayer in 1774 and of a Unitarian so-called Improved Bible in 1806-1808 - the latter, for example, segregated the Nativity story of Luke, in distinctive print, something that scientific analysis was indeed to verify one hundred and fifty years later. But whereas this work on the Prayer Book had in time various 'offshoots' or 'descendants' - for example J.P. Hopps' Prayer Book of 1890, Ernest Savell Hicks Dublin Service Book of 1915, and the Unitarian Orders of Service of 1932, among others - Lindsey's far sightedness as regards the Bible has not caught on generally, and (unfortunately, in my view) many Unitarian churches up to the present continue to use what are in effect pre-Lindsey Bibles, the 1611 King James' (or 'Authorised') version or more modern equivalents. This ignoring of Lindsey in this area is both an absolute tragedy and, as we shall see, quite unjustified now in the light of subsequent knowledge and discoveries".

I came to Unitarianism in the 1980s, finally joining Dublin Unitarian Church in 1989, after a long period (twenty years) of growing doubt of, and dissatisfaction with, mainstream Christian practice. My mother's family were French Roman Catholics, and up to the time of my grandmother's death I usually accompanied her to Mass whenever our paths crossed. On my father's side, there was a mixture of Quakerism and Anglicanism - a direct ancestor Lot Pulbrook and his elder brother Joseph, both shoemakers and boot makers, had become members of the society of Friends in London in the 1790s. From time to time I went with my father to Quaker Meeting, but the lack of liturgy was not essentially some thing for me; and when I asked my father "Is there any group theologically like the Quakers, but using a liturgy?”, he replied “Why don't you try the Unitarians?" My presence here is due to that suggestion.

I studied Classics (Latin and Greek) at London University, being particularly drawn to the ancient Greek and Latin poets. And my doctorate, completed in 1973, was on aspects of the text of the Roman poet Ovid, something, that remained of continuing interest to me during my time as Classics lecturer at Maynooth between 1976 and 2000.

Now you cannot study the transmission of the text of the ancient Classical authors without being made constantly aware of the scribal propensity for error of all kinds in the copying of those texts. Before the introduction of printing in the fifteenth, century, production of books depended on the activities of those scribes. And when you have seen the sorts of errors made by scribes, and the frequency of them, the claims made by the official Church, for the purity and integrity of the biblical texts become frankly incredible and indeed impossible.

Therefore my work on Classical texts, and particularly on the text of Ovid, led me directly, where Scripture was concerned, in the same direction as had been taken by Theophilus Lindsey. But since Lindsey's death in 1808, there have been very many new developments, which have served only to reinforce his doubts and questionings. There is time to list just some of these here today.

The rediscovery of extra - canonical Scripture, in all its complexity, has had a seismic effect, for those who have analysed it objectively. The Christian New Testament is no longer a free-standing, divinely inspired entity, existing outside the norms which apply in the case of other literature. Instead we can see it in its objective context, against a wider background.

And the discoveries at Qumran have had the same effect where Christian theology and ethics are concerned. Again, Christianity did not come into existence - as the supporters of the mainstream continue to affirm - as a divine intervention from outside the normal parameters of the physical world. Christianity evolved from the lifestyle and values and expectations espoused by communities such as the one at Qumran, helped on to a very real extent by the spiritual and imaginative vision of Jesus himself.

And other studies continually emphasize the same trend. Those who have worked to uncover the most primitive level of Gospel text -what has come to be known as 'Q' - lying behind Matthew and Luke have pinpointed a situation in which Jesus, in these texts, did not claim to be the 'Son of God' in the developed Christian sense, but acted as a human being concerned with guiding his fellow humans towards spiritual understanding, the values of the Kingdom.

Again, where Creeds are concerned - a very important matter, since we may be certain that one of the items that William Robertson left out of his Services at Rathvilly was the Creed -, subsequent developments have gone completely the way of Robertson and Lindsey. In his landmark 1972 book The Apostles' Creed in the Light of Today's Questions Wolfhart Pannenberg went as far as to declare - admitting the position quite frankly - : "The difficulties with the creed as it has been passed down to us only began with the statements about Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and with the miracles of his birth and resurrection from the dead. Belief in Christ seemed to many people a troublesome addition to the simple faith in God which Jesus himself had taught" (p.15).

To these various issues I would myself add the growing historical awareness of the nature of what we may call the "uninstitutional Church. St. Patrick, St. David and St. Augustine did not "bring Christianity" to Ireland, Wales and England, as is so repeatedly and so erroneously claimed. They brought institutional Christianity, mediated outwards and controlled from the centre that was Rome, we must never tire of emphasizing that the earliest and original Christianity was independent and congregational in nature, as is well summarised by John Lyndelay in a 1347 manuscript referring to Lancashire: "In those times, ... there was not ... any lord who had ever claimed the patronage of ... churches ...; but each rector held and possessed the land ... in which his church was situated as the endowment of his church; and governed his church, so endowed, as if it were his own patrimony and inheritance".

The progressive uncovering, and then acceptance, of these various things over the years first of all led me towards Unitarianism, and then has progressively confirmed it to me as the only logical and sensible course. I would now maintain that it is only possible to remain a member of one of the mainstream or Trinitarian churches if one shuts one's eyes to the force of these various factors, pretending that they do not exist or that they are unimportant. To that extent, all the significant arguments have flowed , -and continue to flow, our way - as imagined and hoped for more than two hundred years ago by William Robertson and Theophilus Lindsey. And it is up to us to capitalise on that fact, and not to be shy in promulgating the inevitability, in theological terms, of the Unitarian position.

Amen

Dr. Martin Pulbrook - 9th January 2011