Never heard of them.
Hard to imagine you have never heard of Harvey Cox. Harvey Cox was a preeminent Protestant theologian who was a professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School. He wrote 'The Secular City' and 'The Future of Faith'. He's retired but he was the cat's pajamas for liberal theology in the 1960's and 1970's. I am NOT a Cox devotee by any means.
I would be surprised if our friend
@hislegacy reads or follows professors of theology at a divinity school which since the late 18th century has been under Unitarian control, and to this date is the main seminary of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I myself, despite my interest in keeping a general eye on the Unitarians, do not do this, since the various scandalous statements and actual scandals that surround the institution with people like Karen L. King as the Hollis Professor of Divinity, who could be described as an enthusiast of Gnosticism and who was also duped into purchasing for quite a large sum of money a manuscript that said and implied blasphemous things about our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”, which has turned out to be an obvious forgery. And making matters worse, before spending the money on the manuscript, Professor King failed to conduct adequate due diligence - some persons involved in the authentication from Harvard’s end had conflicts of interest. I make no secret of the fact that I don’t like Harvard and I have never liked Harvard, and this sort of thing is the reason why:
The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife
If I were to make a point of reading and studying the various academics associated with Harvard, my blood pressure would be a lot higher.
There is the related ultra-liberal UCC seminary, Andover Newton Divinity School, which was located in Cambridge and for a time shared facilities with HDS, Andover having been formed by dismayed Calvinist Congregationalists after the Unitarians seized control of Harvard, which was originally established as a Puritan seminary, but went from Puritanism under the leadership of Increase Mather in 1692, to Unitarian heresy* in 1805 with the appointment of Henry Ware in 1805, which eventually led to “post-Christian” apostasy with the popularization of transcendentalism by Ralph Waldo Emerson, so that by the time the Unitarians and the Universalist* Church merged, the result was the rapid emergence of a predominantly non-Christian religion, from the wreckage of two extremely liberal Christian churches, one of which was heretical or non-Christian by CF.com standards.*
In a sign of the decline of liberal Christianity, Andover Newton Divinity School wound up in serious financial trouble and merged with Yale Divinity School (traditionally Episcopalian), becoming Andover Newton Divinity School at Yale, and providing United Church of Christ and American Baptist Convention seminarians with access to the previously Episcopalian-exclusive rival to Harvard, so it now becomes a one-stop shop for finding a new associate pastor if one is a member of one of three of the members of the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism, including the two most widely regarded as the most liberal (although in fact, the ELCA is more liberal than the Episcopal Church, it simply is less interested in suing congregations that decide to leave, and the United Methodist Church has gone from being the most conservative to the most liberal mainline church in the span of six years, from the adoption of the Traditional Plan in 2018, to the current oppressive anti-traditionalist regime officially formalized this year, but which we saw coming two years ago when the General Conference was delayed for reasons related to Covid, despite Covid travel restrictions having been listed and the virus regarded as being well under control by the summer of 2022.
* Unitarians, insofar as they reject the Nicene Creed, the doctrine of the Trinity and the deity of Jesus Christ, are not regarded as Christians on CF.com , and Unitarians themselves began to reject the Christian identity over the course of the 19th century.
Universalist Christianity however is recognized and we have a number of devout members who are Universalists, but discussion of Universalism and certain other controversial ideas such as Full Preterism is permitted only in the Controversial Christian Theology forum.
However, members who join who list their faith as Unitarian or UUA are not considered Christians and do not have access to General Theology, from what I have been told by my friends among the forum staff. I enthusiastically support the CF.com Statement of Faith and the current rules, which do a remarkably good job at identifying Christians who agree on enough so that we are able to enjoy fruitful discussions and form friendships despite being of different denominatinoal backgrounds, a fellowship that I love. I heard that things used to be more fraught when Mormons and J/Ws were allowed to participate in the main forums, and one can understand why that would be, given the extreme missionary focus of those churches and the fact that they regard every other church as being completely in error, and in the case of the J/Ws, also have the practice of shunning former members, like Scientologists.
Doctrinally, Unitarianism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are very similiar, in that both reject the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. The main difference is that Unitarians are, I suppose you might say, somewhat nicer about it, and in the case of the UUA, more than any other denomination, the “Social Gospel” and various left-wing political issues are stressed as being the main priority. Additionally, the UUA has since removed whatever Unitarian confessional standards it had, along with anything else which would exclude a non-Christian from membership, but a side effect of this is that theoretically, a Trinitarian could be a member of the UUA, whereas in the case of the J/Ws, anyone who believed in the Holy Trinity after joining the denomination would be shunned, excluded by members of their own familiy, just as is the case with Scientology and “disconnections.”
It is also interesting to note that according to Pew Research, of the major religions in the US, the Unitarian Universalists are the wealthiest on a per-capita basis (probably in large part due to wealthy Yankee families in Boston and New England who could be described as “Old Money”, and also the popularity of the UUA among intellectual members of the left wing who define themselves as spiritual but not religious, and who have some sense of a Christian cultural identity but no desire to actually be Christian or to associate themselves with the likes of Evangelicals or Fundamentalist Calvinists or Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, which they regard as being dangerous, backwards superstitions which cause harm, and indeed many of them regret the protections the First Amendment provides our churches, and would like to see Christian clergy who refuse to deviate from traditional doctrine concerning human sexuality prosecuted for hate speech. Many would also like to see Christian churches lose their tax exempt status. Presumably this would not impact the UUA, since it could claim it was not a religious organization as such, but rather an educational entity, since the UUA at present has nearly no doctrine, and the small amount of remaining shared belief could be torn up. However, there are parishes within the UUA which identify as Christian, and there is even an association of such churches.
Conversely, there are no Jehovah’s Witness “Kingdom Halls” which identify as Christian, nor members of the J/Ws who identify as Christian, at least, not without the qualification of J/W, except when engaging in missionary work, where they often seek to refer to themselves as “Bible Students,” that being the original demonym of adherents of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the formal name of their denomination. I mean, what could be more harmless and Christian than a Bible Student? They even have their own, we are assured, extremely reliable and carefully researched translation, the New World Translation, which they claim is the most accurate in the world. It would be more fair to say that it is the most intentionally deceptive translation in existence, for it is designed to prevent J/Ws from being evangelized by Christians and to seduce Christians into accepting the heretical doctrines of the J/Ws, by altering certain key pericopes in the New Testament, such as John 1:1-18, so that the doctrine of the Trinity is obscured (John 1:1 is changed to say instead of “In the beginning, there was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, the verse which historically caused the most problems for Arians and Unitarians, to saying that “the Word was a God,” which is not only Arian but, like many forms of Arianism, also polytheist (insofar as Arians who did not go as far as Paul of Samosata or the Unitarians in denying the deity of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ outright would instead try to say that he was divine, but not the eternal God, but rather the firstborn of all creation, “of like essence to the Father,” and as such, they presented our Lord as though he were a second, junior god, as opposed to being one person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, who is coeternal with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, one God in three coequal and coeternal persons, consubstantial with the Father, with the Son begotten of the Father and not created, and there never being a time when the Son was not, and likewise, with the Holy Spirit proceding eternally from the Father.
And unfortunately, the average member of the J/W and also those targeted for conversion into their cult are not in a position to research these beliefs and identify the falsehood, because the J/Ws, in contrast to the Unitarians, are the poorest religion in America on a per-capita basis. While some leaders of the cult have substantial wealth, the average member has very little money. Most members are working class people, many of them members of ethnic minorities. Recently I met a very gracious African American truck driver who was a J/W - I liked him a great deal, and I felt immensely sorry for him. Such persons are vulnerable to conversion to a cult, because of peer pressure from relatives, and a lack of financial stability and a lack of knowledge that would give them the time and the intellectual ability and indeed the money (since some theological resources which are quite useful are also expensive, and also time spent doing serious theology is time spent not driving a truck or otherwise engaged in one’s profession) to do the research to get to the truth of the matter.
Thus I have much more sympathy for the J/Ws than for the UUAs, for the latter have, to a large extent, chosen to be there, whereas the former are trapped - if they stop attending Kingdom Hall regularly or do anything to offend the hierarchy, they will be shunned, losing contact with their loved ones. Whereas the UUA has largely degenerated from being a heterodox denomination into a post-Christian, post-modern left wing political organization with a veneer of religiosity (particularly among the case of the Universalists, who, before their merger with the Unitarians, would have in many cases been regarded as Christians by CF.com, and one suspects there were a number of Christians in that denomination who were to varying extents disenfranchised by the merger with the Unitarians, since the Universalists never had a specifically anti-Trinitarian doctrinal stance).
