It began in Hungary

Among all the mental projections which the word “Hungary” is likely to trigger, non would depict the country as a dogma pioneer. One of the most obscure facts about Hungary is that it had an unprecedented finger print on the evolution of Christology. A purely Hungarian idea possessed an influence that was carried beyond the borders of its birth place, sculpting minds and souls of many around the globe.

Over four hundred years ago, a Hungarian man raised questions that had not remained as inquiries for long. David Ferenc, the former Calvinist, elected bishop of the Hungarian churches of Transylvania institutionalized heresy against the triune God. By pointing out the complete absence of biblical reference to the Trinity, a dismantlement of the components of the Christian God followed. Jesus Christ was to be thought of as a prophet, a teacher, but not in any shape or form a divine being.

Many continental theologians at the time carried out the same mission of revising Trinitarian beliefs. Following the Reformation movement in the sixteenth century, Michael Servetus in Spain challenged the trinity in 3 different books, refuting the eternity of Jesus Christ and solely associating this attribute to Father Facet of the Christian God. Servetus not only questioned the soundness of the trinity but also argued that mainstream Christology is a form of tri-deism. After being accused of heresy by Calvinists, Servetus was tried and burned on a stake in Geneva. Around the same time, an Italian theologian called Faustus Sozzini followed the footsteps of his uncle Lelio Sozzini in arguing that Jesus’s existence was not before his conception by Mother Mary. Faustus was the main theologian of a protestant church called the Polish brethren which held anti-Trinitarian beliefs.

Although all the aforementioned accounts of emerging Unitarianism had a notable impact, none of them could instill an institutionalized foundation that would help maintaining the debate over trinity in Christendom. Only David Ferenc had the inquisition-free atmosphere that allowed him to receive recognition for the first Unitarian Church. Under the reign of John II Sigismund Zápolya, Ferenc was allowed to retain and change his former episcopate from Calvinists to Nontrinitarians, and for the first time, Kolozsvár was evacuated from all its inhabitants except for the congregation of Ferenc’s church.

The revolutionized understanding of divinity which the Unitarian church presents reverberated in the relationship between faith and science. By debunking the claims of divinity of man, relativity was endorsed automatically, vaporizing the fabricated dissonance between faith and science. The church believes in a cooperative relationship between science and religion as one of its main declared doctrines, a thing that can explain the high relatively high number of Nobel Prize winners (11 winners) among its followers (around 300,000). Many people would not imagine that Charles Darwin was Unitarian.


Although Unitarianism had not garnered large numbers of followers, many of its followers have had a distinctive influence where they lived. 4 United States presidents were Unitarians: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft. Also Charles dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson adhered to the same belief.

Unitarianism is a hallmark of the human story of faith, the defeat of traditionalism, and the success of the critical mind. The exceptional approach it provides booked it a seat among the World’s major philosophies, placing Hungary in the list of lands where the search for truth took place.