Socinianism — Faith with Reason and Scripture

Socinianism is the name given to the doctrine that the Italian theologian Fausto Sozzini (1539–1604) developed from Scripture and interpreted with the aid of reason. Its core: the one God is the Father alone; Jesus of Nazareth is a true human being, conceived by the Virgin through the power of God and therefore the Son of God, whom God raised from the dead and made Lord; God forgives out of free goodness, without satisfaction, and faith is trust that obeys. This page takes the reader through all the essential points of doctrine and lets Sozzini speak for himself — with quotations from his works.

Fausto Sozzini (Lat. Faustus Socinus) came from Siena. He was a nephew of Lelio Sozzini (1525–1562), who left behind impulses, questions and notes, but no doctrinal system; “Socinianism” denotes the doctrine worked out by Fausto. Around 1570, while still in Italy, he wrote his treatise on the authority of the Bible. From about 1575 to 1578 he lived in Basel; there, in 1578, he composed his polemic against the Reformed preacher Jacques Couet on Christ as Saviour. In May 1579 he concluded his disputation with Ferenc Dávid at Kolozsvár in Transylvania and then went on to Poland. There he became the formative teacher of the Polish Brethren (Ecclesia Minor). He founded neither their church (1565) nor the Academy of Raków (1602), and he never became a formal member of that church, because he considered (re)baptism unnecessary. He died in 1604 at Lusławice in Lesser Poland.

The Racovian Catechism featured above is not Sozzini’s work. It appeared after his death (in Polish in 1605, in Latin in 1609), written chiefly by Valentin Schmalz and Hieronim Moskorzowski with the collaboration of Johannes Völkel, partly on the basis of an unfinished draft by Sozzini; the English edition follows the version later expanded by Johannes Crell, Jonas Schlichting and Martin Ruar. It bears witness to later Socinianism and departs from Sozzini on baptism, for instance. Here, by contrast, Sozzini speaks for himself, quoted from the English and German editions of his works. The path of this page leads from the foundation of knowledge — Scripture, revelation and reason — by way of God, the Spirit, Christ and the work of Christ, to the appropriation of salvation and the hope of immortality, and then on to the Christian life and the church.

Holy Scripture as the Standard

For Sozzini, the measure of all doctrine is Holy Scripture, above all the New Testament. The Old Testament has authority by virtue of the New: for Christians it is useful but not necessary, and in matters of doctrine it counts for them as history — the commandments of Moses, for example.

Tested like Any Other Book

Sozzini does not simply assert this authority; he tests it. His treatise On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) was written around 1570, while he was still in Italy; it appeared in Seville in 1588 under the name of the Jesuit Dominicus Lopez, and in Raków in 1611. In it Sozzini measures the New Testament against the standards by which any book is judged. Four grounds could justify doubting a book; none of them applies here:

1. The authors did not know what they were writing about, or knowingly wrote what was false. But Matthew and John were eyewitnesses, Mark wrote from Peter’s account, and Luke as a close associate of Paul. Small discrepancies in minor matters show that nothing was agreed beforehand; in doctrine they all agree.
2. The authorship is uncertain. But for the principal writings the ancient writers, from Justin to Eusebius, unanimously attest the traditional authorship. Sozzini openly doubts that Paul wrote the Letter to the Hebrews, but he does not deny the letter its authority.
3. The text has been corrupted. For this there are neither credible witnesses nor cogent reasons.
4. Credible witnesses speak against the book. Sozzini knows of no such testimony.

He even turns on its head the objection that the many variant readings in the manuscripts betray corruption:

“Wherefore among ancient writings that must be reckoned the less corrupted in more passages of which variant readings are extant — so that it is likely that in every passage which time has altered the true reading is extant among them, which the reader, with reason for his guide and by the comparison of other like passages, can attain and embrace. But that writing must be judged the more corrupted in which nowhere is any variant reading extant.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — Third Cause: Corruption of the Text › Variant Readings

This holds, Sozzini says, for writings that have been copied many times over, such as the New Testament. Behind it lies an early text-critical idea: where many readings have been handed down, the genuine wording remains recoverable. The copies in many languages and the quotations in the ancient writers also argue against deliberate corruption — but above all, God’s providence does. Sozzini himself also engages in textual criticism: in his commentary on the First Epistle of John he takes 1 John 5:7, the verse about the three heavenly witnesses, to be a later insertion.

The examination of the four grounds for doubt presupposes, as Sozzini himself says, that the Christian religion is true. To those who deny all religion, he points to history: to Jesus’ miracles, which even his enemies conceded, and to the resurrection, by which God confirmed what Jesus had said in his name. Therefore, he concludes, the biblical books are not to be treated like other books that hand down a doctrine and rest it on rational arguments:

“But the doctrine which is contained in the Old and New Testament is of such a kind that it uses as its chief foundation not Reason but Authority (of Scripture), and an authority resting upon the history of the things which are related in these books. So that, if anyone assents to the history, it must needs be that he likewise assents to the doctrine; nay, the doctrine itself is a part of that history.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — Greater Credit than to Other Books › The Inseparability of History and Doctrine

The history, then, carries the doctrine: whoever believes the accounts of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection must also accept what he taught, for the things that the evangelists record as binding doctrine have, according to Sozzini, “all proceeded from Jesus of Nazareth”. The authority of Scripture is thus not a dogma laid down in advance but the consequence of history that has been tested (cf. Heb 2:3–4).

Infallible in Doctrine, Not in Every Detail

What the apostles taught as things to be believed and done rested on divine revelation; in this they could not err. Their explanations and lines of argument stand on a different footing:

“Or the things which they teach pertain to … the interpretation of certain passages of the Old Testament and to the setting forth of arguments drawn from them, or brought forward by them in some other way. And this is less properly a part of the doctrine, but rather an addition (if I may so speak) or a proof of the doctrine. And as concerns this, it may be that all those things were most true which the history affirms of them, and that they nevertheless at times erred slightly in this part.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — The Authority of the Apostolic Epistles › Doctrine and Its Proof

Sozzini, then, does not teach inerrancy in every detail. Where the apostles lacked revelation, they avowedly gave only their own opinion, as Paul did concerning the marriage of virgins and widows (1 Cor 7:25, 40). Sozzini himself, it is true, does not doubt that every argument in the New Testament can be defended “in some good way”; but faith does not hinge on this: it is enough to hold the doctrine proper to be perfectly true.

Clear in What Is Necessary for Salvation, without a Magisterium

Does Scripture, then, need a church to supplement and interpret it? In a short tract included in On the Church, Sozzini takes issue with all who do not investigate for themselves what is necessary for salvation but follow the judgment of their teachers. To the objection that much of this has been handed down only orally, he replies: what is unwritten may stand, as long as it does not contradict what is written. His conclusion reads:

“And moreover, since it is certain that everything written in the books of the Old and New Testaments … is altogether to be regarded as divine revelation, those books are unconditionally to be consulted, and above all the writings of the New Testament, in which those divine things pertaining to the attainment of eternal life are expressly and specifically treated; and one should not wait until someone explains them to us, … but one should hold fast that they are, for every God-fearing person who seeks his salvation from the heart, in what is necessary to know for salvation itself, open and easily intelligible and carry their own explanation within themselves …”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Church (De Ecclesia) — Against the Neglect of Personal Inquiry › Against the Objection of Oral Tradition

No magisterium is needed, then, to serve as interpreter. That the apostolic writings were for a long time not understood by most people is, as Sozzini writes in a letter, “not to be attributed to their obscurity but to the wickedness of men or their ever slight zeal for piety”. In Paul’s words: the gospel is veiled to those who are perishing (2 Cor 4:3–4). For Sozzini, councils and Church Fathers bear witness only to the view of their own time and at most counsel caution; against clear Scripture they carry no weight.

Sozzini sees circular reasoning in this: one can recognize the true church only by its doctrine, and that doctrine is to be drawn from Scripture. The section ‘Church, Ministry, the Lord’s Supper, and Baptism’ shows how he argues this and how he reads 1 Tim 3:15.

For more detail, see the topic page The Scripture Principle; the texts themselves are available under Sozzini’s works in English.

Revelation and Reason

The motto of this site, “Faith with Reason and Scripture”, has the ring of the Enlightenment. Yet Sozzini was neither a rationalist nor a deist: human beings cannot know God by their own powers; religion rests on historically attested revelation. Reason is not its source, but it is the judge of its interpretation.

No Natural Knowledge of God

How far reason reaches is stated in the first sentence of the same concluding passage from which we have already quoted above:

“I conclude, therefore: Since the knowledge of divine things pertaining to eternal salvation infinitely surpasses every treasure in value and esteem … and since human reason of itself cannot grasp divine things — we must, in order to attain that knowledge, take refuge in divine revelation …”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Church (De Ecclesia) — Against the Neglect of Personal Inquiry › Against the Objection of Oral Tradition

This is the opposite of a religion of reason. In his treatise on the authority of the Bible, Sozzini points to reports from Brazil: if religion were a natural matter, there would be no peoples entirely without religion, such as had been found there. True religion is therefore revelation from God.

There is a piquant twist in the printing history of this little book: the Seville edition was given a preface by another hand which, of all things, asserted a natural knowledge of God, that is, the opposite of what the book teaches; the Raków editors noted this in 1611. Sozzini treated the question more fully later, in his theological lectures (Praelectiones theologicae, published posthumously in Raków in 1609); these are not among the works quoted here.

Grounds That Suffice but Do Not Compel

Why, then, should one believe revelation? Sozzini offers historical grounds that anyone who follows reason without partisan zeal can examine:

1. The spread of the faith: People without standing or power proclaimed it; for centuries no one was won over to it by threats or rewards; and yet it prevailed despite almost three hundred years of persecution.
2. The miracles of Jesus: Even his bitterest opponents never denied them, but attributed them to sorcery and to the power of the divine name (Kabbalah).
3. The resurrection: The first witnesses accepted persecution and death for their testimony that they had seen the Risen One; no one dies for what he knows to be a lie. And God would not have raised a liar from the dead.

These grounds cannot compel faith, and according to Sozzini that is precisely what God intended. Whoever demands irrefutable proofs mistakes the nature of religion; it is meant to be “as it were, a touchstone of human uprightness”. Were the promised reward certain, everyone would obey Christ, the wicked as well as the good:

“I say, therefore: if the writings of the New Testament were of such a kind that no one could in any way deny that they are truthful, there would also be no one who would not merely fail to profess the religion comprehended in them … Thus there would be no distinction between the evil and the good; … Since from this, that the reward is uncertain when it is at first set forth, it comes about that the evil are distinguished from the good.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — The Error of Demanding Proof

To the honest the grounds are sufficient; to the dishonest they are not. For Sozzini, unbelief stems from a person’s disposition, not from a lack of evidence.

Reason as the Judge of Interpretation

Within revelation, reason interprets and draws conclusions. When Ferenc Dávid, bishop of the Transylvanian Unitarians, demanded the express letter of Scripture in doctrinal questions, Sozzini pointed to an example: almost all Christians believe that God has no bodily members, although Scripture ascribes eyes, ears, and hands to him; even from John 4:24 (“God is spirit”), whose meaning Sozzini moreover considers uncertain, this is merely inferred. From this he derives the principle:

“Whatever is proved so plainly, whether by reasons or by consequences, that the human mind necessarily acquiesces, is altogether to be believed and held, whether it stand expressly written or not. Nor indeed is there any doubt that in this way no truly Christian — that is, true and of itself indubitable — doctrine can be overthrown. For truth cannot destroy truth.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Honor of Christ — Scriptural Proof and Rational Inference in Disputes of Doctrine › The Principle of Rational Proof in Matters of Faith

Reason does not thereby take the place of Scripture; it also infers what is nowhere expressly stated and discerns where Scripture speaks figuratively. At the same time, Sozzini is aware of its limits. He meets the objection that the resurrection of Jesus contradicts reason and nature as follows:

“… I shall answer: it is one thing to resist a matter, but another not to grasp and not to perceive it. Perhaps no one can grasp by reason or by any natural way how a dead man can return to life. But not on that account does either reason or nature teach that this cannot happen at all.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — The Resurrection and the First Witnesses › The Resurrection and the Limits of Reason

Above reason, then, does not mean contrary to reason. In the formula of one essence in three persons, by contrast, Sozzini sees a genuine contradiction of reason. This is set out in the following section, ‘The One God Is the Father’, which also explains why Sozzini rejected the objection that the doctrine must be dismissed simply because the words ‘essence’ and ‘person’ do not occur in the Bible.

Socinianism’s affinity with the Enlightenment belongs to the history of its reception, not to Sozzini’s own project: miracles, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and a personal Satan are firmly part of his teaching.

For more on this, see the topic page Philosophy and Reason in Socinianism.

The One God Is the Father

That God is one was not in dispute between Sozzini and his opponents; the Shema Israel already confesses it (Deut 6:4). What was in dispute was who this one God is. Sozzini’s answer: the Father of Jesus Christ alone — neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit, nor all three together.

Scripture calls the one God the Father and in so doing distinguishes him from Christ: Jesus calls his Father the only true God (John 17:3); Paul places the one Lord Jesus Christ alongside the one God, the Father (1 Cor 8:6; Eph 4:5–6); even the risen Christ calls the Father his God (John 20:17). Where the word ‘God’ stands on its own and denotes the divine essence itself, it refers, according to Sozzini, to the Father in countless passages, and in no undisputed passage to Christ or the Spirit alone. When Christ is called God, the word — as he writes in a short examination of the trinitarian argument appended to the volume On the Authority of Holy Scripture — occupies “not the place of the subject, but of the predicate”: it says something about him, but does not name the divine essence itself.

One Essence, Three Persons?

In the same treatise Sozzini examines the chief argument of the trinitarians: Father, Son, and Spirit are called God in Scripture; but God is one, and therefore one in essence and threefold in persons. He explains from John 10:34–36 why Christ too is called ‘God’: the word denotes first the one who is God of himself, but then also the one who has received dominion and power from him (more on this in the section on the exalted Christ). The conclusion, however, founders on logic:

“For One and Threefold are opposed to one another, as also One and Twofold. So that, if God were threefold or twofold, he could not be one. For that distinction, one in essence, threefold in persons, is nowhere extant in the Holy Scriptures and plainly conflicts with the most certain reason and truth. For it is most certain that there are not fewer individual essences than persons, since a persona is nothing else than an individual intelligent essence.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — An Examination of the Trinitarian Argument › The Holy Spirit as the Power of God

What carries the argument is the substance, not the absence of a word from the Bible: if a person is an individual rational essence, then three persons are three essences. In reply to Dávid, Sozzini even expressly rejected the inference that the doctrine meant by ‘essence’ and ‘person’ must be dismissed simply because these words do not occur in the Bible: “For it is enough for all lovers of truth that the matter itself which is in question be confirmed by reasons or by testimonies” (On the Honor of Christ, section ‘Against the Demand for the Literal Wording’).

Sozzini reads his opponents’ proof texts in context. 1 John 5:20 concludes: “This is the true God and eternal life.” The ‘This’ was taken to refer to Jesus Christ, the last person named. Yet John has only just distinguished between the true God and his Son:

“What would it be but to contradict oneself and to confound and pervert what has been said before, if the Apostle should here say that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is that true God? Who is so dull that he does not perceive, from this very thing that it is here expressly stated that Jesus Christ is the Son of that true God, that it necessarily follows that Christ Jesus is not the true God himself? Can anyone be his own son?”

Fausto Sozzini, Commentary on the First Epistle of John (Commentarius in Epistolam Johannis Apostoli Primam) — “This is the true God” — the reference of the pronoun to God or to Christ › The grammatical argument: the pronoun hic and the person to whom it refers

Whoever is called the Son of the one God cannot be that God himself. Likewise the three heavenly witnesses (1 John 5:7), which Sozzini, as mentioned, regards as a later insertion — and modern textual criticism bears him out — affirm in his view only a unity of testimony: Father, Word, and Spirit bear witness to the same thing, namely that Jesus is the Christ.

According to Sozzini, even the church itself has confessed the Father as the origin from the beginning — indeed, as he believes, to this day. He asks what else the common confession of Christians, “namely that the Father is the source and origin of the entire Godhead”, could mean “than that the Father alone is God of himself” (On the Church, section ‘Knowledge of God as Obedience to the Will, Not as Knowledge of the Essence’).

What Is Necessary for Salvation

Are trinitarians, then, lost? Sozzini says no. In Scripture, ‘knowing God’ for the most part means knowing his will and obeying it, not fathoming his essence (John 17:3; Jer 22:16; Titus 1:16; 1 John 2:3–4). What has been revealed to us is not God’s essence but his power and his will, insofar as they concern our salvation, as he replies to questions from Dávid (On the Honor of Christ, section ‘God’s Essence and Its Knowability’). To the first of thirty objections that an unnamed critic had raised against the Polish Brethren — whether the whole church could have erred in the foremost article, the knowledge of the true God and of his Son — he therefore replies:

“But whatever it is necessary to know about the essence of God and of Christ for the attainment of eternal life, all of that is contained solely in this: namely, that we know that no one is God of himself except that one alone who from all eternity is God of himself; and that that Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate is the Christ. … Nor do I believe that our people are so (if I may say so) inhuman as to exclude from eternal life so many most holy men, who did not hesitate to shed their own blood for the name of Jesus Christ, because they either held that in the one essence of God there were several ‘persons’, or believed that the Son of God had existed before the creation of heaven and earth.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Church (De Ecclesia) — Reply to the Objections › Knowledge of God as Obedience to the Will, Not as Knowledge of the Essence

Sozzini thus holds the doctrine of several persons and of the pre-existence of the Son to be false, but not decisive for salvation. Leniency, however, does not mean indifference: anyone to whom God has revealed that there are not several persons in the one divine essence and that the Son did not exist before his conception may neither deny this nor, when the matter is under discussion, conceal it; and anyone who condemns those who confess this doctrine without examining it, or even persecutes them, errs gravely (ibid.). What matters for salvation, in Sozzini’s view, is one’s disposition, not erudition about God’s essence: according to his commentary on the First Epistle of John, ‘to be of God’ (1 John 4:6; John 8:47) means “to be upright and eager to do what pleases God”; whoever is so disposed hears God’s word when it is proclaimed to him.

Further reading: The doctrine of the Trinity in the light of Scripture.

The Holy Spirit: God’s Power, Not a Third Person

The chief argument for the doctrine of the Trinity presupposes that Scripture also calls the Holy Spirit God. This is precisely what Sozzini contests: nowhere, he says, is the Spirit expressly called God, though Scripture does ascribe to the Spirit what is proper to God.

He gives the reason in the same brief examination of the trinitarian argument:

“The cause of this is that the Holy Spirit is the power and efficacy of God. For what is attributed to the power and efficacy of God is without doubt attributed to God himself. But the power and efficacy of God is not on that account any divine person; just as neither the goodness, nor the justice, nor the mercy, nor the judgement of God, nor the other effects or properties of God, are any divine persons. Otherwise there would have to be far more than three of them.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — An Examination of the Trinitarian Argument › The Holy Spirit as the Power of God

Anyone who infers a distinct person from such ascriptions would therefore also have to declare God’s justice and mercy to be persons. Where Scripture introduces the Spirit as acting (for instance 1 Cor 12:11: he apportions to each one ‘as he wills’), Sozzini sees a personification (prosopopoeia). The Spirit, he replies to Ferenc Dávid in On the Honor of Christ, is then “nothing else than the virtue and power of God”. For that reason, he says, the Spirit is neither worshipped nor invoked in Scripture; anyone who speaks of invoking the power of God means God himself.

Against the widespread view that faith must be preceded by a Spirit which God does not give to all who hear, Sozzini distinguishes two ways in which God’s Spirit works. In notes on a dialogue about justification he writes:

“… it must be conceded that without the Spirit of God one cannot even believe in Christ, but that this Spirit is given to all to whom Christ himself is duly proclaimed. But the divine Spirit, by which the truth of the divine promises is sealed in our hearts and which in Holy Scripture is called the pledge of our future blessedness and heavenly inheritance – this, I say, is granted only to those who already believe in Jesus Christ.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — Notes on the Dialogue › Notes on Faith and the Holy Spirit, No. 20

The first way is not separate from the Word; rather, “the Word rightly proclaimed is itself the divine power unto salvation” (ibid., no. 26; cf. Rom 1:16). As a rule, then, faith does not hinge on any secret allotment. The seal, by contrast, is received only by one who already believes (Gal 3:2; Eph 1:13–14); through it he experiences, as it were, that what he believed upon hearing the preaching really is so (ibid., no. 19). To an unnamed gentleman who presupposed that God by his grace gives the sinner “the spirit of living faith”, Sozzini replies in an Italian letter that he does not find it put that way in Scripture:

“What I do find, however, is that God through his Word invites all those to whom it is proclaimed or who know it in any other way to believe the Gospel, and that consequently none of them, generally speaking, is unable to believe. … Faith is therefore a gift of God because God owes absolutely nothing to those to whom he offers faith through the proclamation of the Gospel, but not because he pours it into the hearts of men in some other way.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — Justification of the Sinner: Faith and Works › Faith as a Gift of God through the Gospel

A gift remains a gift even if the recipient can refuse it — so runs Sozzini’s comparison; grace here means: God owes no one anything and yet invites all to whom the gospel becomes known. He grants that God can at times bestow faith in a special way; but he does not teach a hidden infusion that would have to precede all faith and that God would grant only to whomever he wills.

The promise that the Spirit would guide into all truth (John 16:13) applied, according to On the Church, to the apostles themselves; miracles and outward gifts of the Spirit served to confirm the teaching of Christ and were not meant to be permanent. What his commentary on the First Epistle of John describes, by contrast, applies to all believers: the ‘anointing’ (1 John 2:20, 27), God’s gift of knowing divine things so far as is necessary for salvation, and the Spirit by which one knows that God abides in a person (1 John 3:24). This Spirit, he says, is love, “since nothing is more proper to God than love itself” — here too, then, something proper to God, not a person alongside him.

Jesus: True Man and Son of God — without Pre-existence

Who is Jesus of Nazareth? For Sozzini, a true man, yet unique: he is God’s Son from his conception onward, not by a later adoption; Sozzini denies that he existed before this conception.

Conceived of the Virgin — God’s Son

Jesus is a true man, “born of a woman” (Gal 4:4), yet conceived without a human father, by the power of the Most High, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and therefore God’s Son (Luke 1:35). In the appendix to his treatise on the authority of Scripture, Sozzini concludes from this passage: “From this it follows that he can rightly be called the Son of God even according to the flesh. This befalls no one else, nor has it befallen anyone else.” This is the first ground of his sonship, and it begins with his conception: Sozzini was no adoptionist, for whom Jesus would have been adopted as the Son of God only later, for instance at his baptism.

This also settles the question of who died for us. From the Vulgate reading of 1 John 3:16 — “By this we have come to know the love of God, that he laid down his life for us” — opponents inferred that “he” was the God just named, and hence that Christ was the one God. Sozzini shows that “he” can also refer to someone else, and maintains:

“… that that one God by no means laid down his life for us, but that his Son alone did this, our Lord Jesus Christ, that man, I say, Jesus of Nazareth, conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the virgin and born of her.”

Fausto Sozzini, Commentary on the First Epistle of John (Commentarius in Epistolam Johannis Apostoli Primam) — The Children of God and the Commandment of Brotherly Love › The theological debate about the deity of Christ

So it was not God who died, but the Son — and the Son is this man. Further grounds of his sonship are his sanctification and sending by the Father (John 10:36), the Spirit without measure (John 3:34, if the passage is taken to refer to him), his resurrection and exaltation (Acts 13:33; Rom 1:4), and his eternal priesthood and kingship (Ps 2:6–7; Heb 5:5). Nowhere does Sozzini find a begetting from God’s essence. Jesus is called “only begotten” in the way that Isaac is called Abraham’s only son, although Ishmael too was his son (Gen 22:2; Heb 11:17): unique, not the only one.

According to Sozzini, eternal generation and two natures would first have had to be proved openly from other passages of Scripture; the communicatio idiomatum, by which his opponents ascribe to the one nature what belongs only to the other, leaves the meaning of the passages uncertain. He has already shown that Christ received even divine worship from the Father as a man (John 5:22–23, 27; Phil 2:8–10). His conclusion:

“In brief, there is nothing so sublime or so lowly attributed to Christ in the Holy Scriptures which does not properly pertain to that man Jesus of Nazareth. Wherefore there was no cause for feigning in one and the same Christ two natures, that is essences, a divine and a human one; …”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — The Divine Worship of Christ › Against the Fiction of Two Natures

The Father’s pre-eminence therefore need not be shifted onto a “human nature”: that he is greater than the Son (John 14:28), that he alone knows the hour of judgment (Mark 13:32), and that he is the God of the Risen One (John 20:17) are said by Christ himself, the man Jesus, without any division into natures — and the one God remains the Father.

And before His Birth? The Prologue of John

Before his conception this Son did not exist. In his commentary on the First Epistle of John, Sozzini speaks of Jesus Christ, “who is no other, neither besides him nor before him, than that man Jesus of Nazareth, who came into existence only when he was born of the Virgin”. Nor does “coming into the world” presuppose a prior life in heaven: of the false prophets, too, it is said that they have “gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1), and according to Sozzini this means appearing in public and taking up an office.

According to tradition, Sozzini had already expounded the prologue of John in an early work, which is not available here. His interpretation is accessible, however, in the same commentary on the First Epistle of John: there he explains why the epistle says “from the beginning” — which includes continuance — but the Gospel of John only “in the beginning” (John 1:1):

“Hence, when John at the opening of his gospel wished only to say that Jesus Christ is the author of the gospel, and thus that at the very beginning of the publishing of the gospel he not only existed but was endowed with this office of announcing it and singularly appointed to it by God, it was enough for him to say that he was in the beginning.”

Fausto Sozzini, Commentary on the First Epistle of John (Commentarius in Epistolam Johannis Apostoli Primam) — That which was from the beginning — Christ or the Gospel? (v. 1) › The meaning of “from the beginning” as distinguished from “in the beginning”

“In the beginning”, then, means the beginning of the proclamation of the gospel, not that of the world; the “Word” is Jesus, in whom was eternal life (John 1:4): the author and herald of the gospel, appointed by God. In 1 John 1:1, by contrast, “that which was from the beginning” means the gospel itself, the “Word of life”: John uses the neuter, and so means a thing, not a person.

Sozzini likewise applies statements that God created all things through Christ to the new creation: God, he counters Dávid, created all things through him, “that is, transformed and renewed” them (On the Non-Invocation). He argues this at length on Eph 3:9, a passage that his opponents, in its Greek reading, adduced as proof of two natures:

“For when it is said that all things were created by God through Jesus Christ, those things are not to be understood of whose creation Moses wrote most diligently at the beginning of his history. … Of other created things, therefore, is the passage of Paul to be taken, and the word ‘All things’ is to be referred to all those things which pertain to the new creation, which it is established was made through that man Jesus of Nazareth.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — Objections of the Adversaries from Passages of Scripture › The Creation through Christ

The “all” is limited, as in 2 Cor 5:17, where all things have become new although countless things remained as they were. In this, Christ acts not as the first but as the second cause, like the sun, which gives light to the earth under God — as Sozzini argues against Dávid in the passage mentioned. The writings quoted here offer no dedicated exposition of “All things were made through him” (John 1:3); by the same principles, however, the new creation would be meant there too.

John 6:62, according to which the Son of Man was in heaven “before”, Sozzini takes literally; John 3:13 he reads, with Erasmus and Beza, as “who was in heaven”. The true man Jesus, he holds, was caught up into heaven after his birth and before his preaching, in order to hear there from God himself what he was to reveal.

Going deeper: the topic page Pre-existence works through other passages such as John 8:58, John 17:5, Phil 2, and Col 1; on the prologue of John it follows the present-day interpretation distinguished above, not Sozzini’s.

The Exalted Christ: Dominion from God’s Hand

Everything the exalted Christ is, he has received. He did not raise himself: God raised him from the dead, made him immortal, and exalted him — and did so, Sozzini remarks on Phil 2:8–11, “as the reward of his obedience” unto death on the cross. Since then he has been “given all power in heaven and on earth” (Matt 28:18); God has “made him Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). With the ascension he became what he had not been before.

Dominion Even Now

This dominion belongs to the present, not only to the future. Dávid granted Christ, for the time being, only a reign through ministry and teaching; power and dominion, in his view, Christ had as yet only “by designation”, not in reality. Sozzini counters: “In vain do you try to shift into the future the power already given to Christ …” For him, sitting at the right hand of God (Ps 110:1) means “to hold the first rank in power and dignity after God”. Even King David, to whom Dávid appealed, fought against enemies almost his whole life and yet was truly king for forty years:

“Although, then, God had not yet subjected all his enemies to him, David was nonetheless truly king … So the Lord Jesus, although not all enemies have yet been subjected to him by God, is nonetheless truly king and truly has dominion and power, which he exercises most fully in heaven and on earth over all those who are dear to God and constitute the nobler part of his kingdom.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Non-Invocation of Jesus Christ in Sacred Prayer (De non invocando Jesu Christo in precibus sacris) — Christ’s Care for the Church › Christ’s Kingly Dominion and the Comparison with David

That not everything is yet subjected to him (Heb 2:8) is therefore no argument against his dominion: whoever must reign until all enemies lie at his feet (1 Cor 15:25) is already reigning before then. The Exalted One governs his church, stands by his own, hears prayers, and searches “minds and hearts” (Rev 2:23). Judgment has been committed to him (John 5:22–27), and at his return he will raise believers “with the power conferred on him by God” and transform their lowly bodies (John 6:40; Phil 3:21).

In What Sense Christ Is Called ‘God’

For this reason Christ is at times also called ‘God’ in Scripture. In the examination of the trinitarian argument mentioned earlier, Sozzini distinguishes two meanings of the word: it denotes the one “who is God in and of himself and depends on no one”, but also anyone who “has some supreme dominion or might or power from that same one God”. Jesus himself appeals to this: if Scripture calls those ‘gods’ to whom the word of God came, then he whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world may call himself the Son of God (John 10:34–36). Sozzini concludes:

“Christ therefore is indeed God, but nevertheless not that one God. Nay, he is God for this reason, that by that one God (for he is altogether the same as the Father, as we shall afterwards prove) he was in the most excellent manner set apart from the rest, heaped with heavenly gifts, and appointed both to announce eternal salvation to men and in fact to bestow it. For this is that very sanctification of him by the Father and his sending into the world.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — An Examination of the Trinitarian Argument › Answer: The Twofold Sense of the Name of God

Christ is thus truly God, not merely in name. In the answers to theses on the exclusion of Christ from true deity, likewise appended to the treatise on the authority of Scripture, Sozzini affirms that “he himself is also true God”, namely one who “is in reality endowed with divine dominion and power”, yet in such a way that he owes his deity wholly to the Creator and is entirely subordinate to him. For God’s deity, according to Sozzini, is twofold: the one “which we may call essential, … the other, which may be named effectual” (On the Honor of Christ, answers to Dávid’s second and third questions). The essential deity God communicates to no one; the effective he confers on creatures and can withdraw from them again.

Bestowed, Not Innate

Whereas according to the doctrine of the Trinity this power is “innate from eternity” in him, Sozzini regards it as a gift. When Dávid charged that anyone who ascribes to Christ a power of his own speaks like the “sophists”, Sozzini replied:

“We, on the other hand, say that that power was granted to Christ some years after he was born of Mary, out of the free and voluntary goodness of God, which does not proceed from his nature or essentia, although it dwells in him (as God willed) … Moreover, we assert that such a power of Christ can be separated from him and will cease whenever it pleases God.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Non-Invocation of Jesus Christ in Sacred Prayer (De non invocando Jesu Christo in precibus sacris) — Christ Gives Eternal Life

Even for his work on earth, power had been conferred on him; he had “already in part attained dominion and kingship”; he received the supreme power at his exaltation. Christ’s dominion is therefore real, but it remains dominion from God’s hand. In Sozzini’s words: “… the entire power of the Son truly lies in the hand of the Father alone, who can revoke it if he so wills.” Hence it is not eternal in the strict sense either: when there is no longer any room for faith and hope, Christ hands the kingdom over to the Father (1 Cor 15:24–28). This very fact presupposes that he reigns now: “But what kingdom will he be able to hand over if he has neither possessed one before nor at least administered one?”

Heavenly, Yet on Earth

This kingdom is heavenly, but not remote from the world. Sozzini stresses this against Martin Seidel and the “Semi-Judaizers”, who rejected Jesus as the Messiah not least on the grounds that he had had no kingdom on earth. In his reply to Seidel we read:

“For we affirm that all power was given him not only in heaven but on earth also, and we acknowledge him as the prince of the kings of the earth, and king of kings and lord of lords, inasmuch as he alone can do more on earth than all of them, and they can do nothing against his will, and at last all will be compelled to experience and confess his power.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Honor of Christ — Socinus’s Reply: The Kingdom of Christ › The Heavenly Kingdom as Surpassing the Prophetic Promise

With the heavenly kingdom, then, God has given not less than he had promised through the prophets, but more. Thus Sozzini’s Christ is neither the eternal God of the doctrine of the Trinity nor a mere man, as those who opposed worshipping him saw him, but the man on whom God has conferred the highest power after his own. It is on this, as the next section shows, that his worship and invocation are founded.

Worship and Invocation of Christ

May one worship Christ and invoke him in prayer, even though he is not the Creator? Sozzini defended his own distinctive answer against two opponents: against Ferenc Dávid in the Kolozsvár disputation mentioned at the outset, and against Christian Francken in a debate on the honor of Christ; the volume On the Honor of Christ also contains notes and fragments by Sozzini from the controversy with Dávid. The title of his treatise against Dávid, On the Non-Invocation of Jesus Christ in Sacred Prayer, names Dávid’s thesis, the one Sozzini is writing against — not his own, and not a recantation. What part Sozzini played in the subsequent proceedings against Dávid is disputed among scholars.

Worship Commanded, Invocation Permitted

The worship of Christ is commanded, because God wills it: all are to “honor the Son, just as they honor the Father” (John 5:22–23), at the name of Jesus every knee is to bow (Phil 2:9–11), and “let all God’s angels worship him” (Heb 1:6). Against Francken’s purely rational proof that no religious worship is due to a creature, Sozzini maintains: “God can communicate his honor to whom he will”. Ultimately this honor is meant for God himself: the worship of Christ “does not come to rest in Christ, but passes through him to God” (On the Honor of Christ).

Invocation, on the other hand, the prayer of petition addressed to Christ, is legitimate but not prescribed. It is attested by Stephen (Acts 7:59); by Paul, who according to Sozzini implores Christ three times (2 Cor 12:8–9); by the benedictions of the Epistles; and by the calling upon the name of Jesus (Acts 9:14; Rom 10:12–14). Dávid found it contradictory to call worship a duty and invocation merely permitted. Sozzini replies that service and worship are a different matter from invocation:

“So that we must indeed unconditionally serve Christ and adore him; but to invoke him, when an unconditional necessity is spoken of, we are indeed not bound, yet can do so with full right. For the service and the adoration of which there is speech here are certain dispositions of our soul and our spirit more than actions, and not restricted to a particular time or occasion, but constant and clinging to us.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Non-Invocation of Jesus Christ in Sacred Prayer (De non invocando Jesu Christo in precibus sacris) — Commandment to Adore Christ

Worship, then, is an abiding disposition of the soul; invocation is an act performed according to time and occasion. If one were absolutely obliged to invoke Christ, no one could ever pray to the Father alone — which is contradicted by “the most ancient custom of the pious Christian Church”.

First and Second Cause

The invocation of God and the invocation of Christ are not, however, of equal rank. Sozzini reads 1 Cor 8:6 as follows: God is the one from whom all things are; Christ is the one “through whom in the church all things happen” (On the Non-Invocation). Accordingly, he notes on the disputation about invocation:

“… that we invoke God as the sole and primary cause of all goods, but Christ as a secondary cause and one wholly depending on that primary one. From which it follows that the invocation of Christ is the invocation of God himself. For he bestows goods through Christ. But not conversely, that the invocation of God is the invocation of Christ. For Christ does not bestow anything through God.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Honor of Christ — Observations on the Invocation of Christ › The First Difference: God as First, Christ as Second Cause

Sozzini’s image for this (On the Non-Invocation): whoever petitions the governor appointed by the king is petitioning the king himself — and yet one may also turn to the king directly. From God one can ask for everything; from Christ, whatever concerns the Church and its individual members.

Against Trinitarians and Dávid

Dávid placed Sozzini’s invocation of the exalted man Christ on the same level as the trinitarian invocation of Christ as God. Sozzini turns the charge back on him:

“For into the same grave error have you both fallen, namely to believe that one can invoke no one who is not that Jehovah, the Creator of heaven and earth. From this it followed that those who recognized that Christ can be invoked asserted that Christ is that Jehovah-God; but you, who saw that Christ is not that Jehovah-God, denied that Christ can be invoked.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Non-Invocation of Jesus Christ in Sacred Prayer (De non invocando Jesu Christo in precibus sacris) — Reconciling the Testimonies › The Invocation of Christ among Catholics and Unitarians

Both sides draw opposite conclusions from the same false premise; Sozzini disputes the premise itself. Once it has been shown that worship and invocation are due to Christ, although he is a creature, then, as he writes in a letter, “all the bulwarks of the Trinitarians will fall” (On the Church).

The freedom not to invoke Christ does have a limit, however. Dávid took calling upon the name of Christ (as in 1 Cor 1:2) to be a mere designation: by it, Jesus was called ‘Christ’. In fragments of a reply to him, Sozzini counters:

“From which it follows that, since it is evident from the passages cited above that ‘to call upon the name of Christ’ is in reality the same as ‘to be a Christian’, and consequently no one can be a Christian who does not call upon the name of Christ, it is necessary that everyone who wishes rightly to be called a Christian should publicly venerate Christ from the heart, profess that he places his trust in him, and acknowledge and profess that he can lawfully ask for his help through prayers addressed to him.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Honor of Christ — To Invoke the Name of Christ as a Public Profession of Worship (passage translated from the German edition; not contained in the English edition)

Here, then, ‘calling upon the name of Christ’ means not the individual prayer of petition but a confession: venerating Christ from the heart, trusting him, and acknowledging that one may rightfully ask him for help. Whoever refuses this is, for Sozzini, not rightly a Christian. All that remains free is whether and when one actually addresses a prayer to Christ.

To Whom Prayer Is Addressed

Prayer is offered chiefly to God the Father as the source of all good things. Sozzini considers it right that “the ordinary and constant prayers, as has hitherto been the case, be directed in the church to God the Father himself rather than to Christ” (On the Non-Invocation). Prayers to Mary and the saints, as voiced in popular belief, smack of idolatry to him; for it is certain, he says, that “in a divine manner it is not permissible to ask for anything except from God himself or at least from the one who is subordinate to him according to God’s own counsel” (Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, section ‘Prayers to Saints’) — and that is the man Christ alone. The rest of the teaching on prayer follows in the section ‘The Law of Christ’.

In depth: The Worship of Christ — scriptural proofs, objections, and answers point by point.

Forgiveness without Satisfaction

Must God first receive satisfaction before he can forgive? That is the question at issue in Sozzini’s polemical treatise On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore). He wrote it in Basel in 1578 as a reply to the Reformed preacher Jacques Couet (Latin: Covetus), whose arguments he reproduces and refutes section by section; the work was not printed until 1594. His answer: God forgives freely.

Against this, Sozzini sets out his own definition at the very beginning — and it is this, not Couet’s doctrine, that he holds to be the orthodox one:

“I, however, maintain, … that Jesus Christ is our Savior for this reason: that he proclaimed to us, confirmed, and clearly showed in his own person — both through the example of his life and through rising from the dead — the way of eternal salvation; and that he himself will give eternal life to us who have faith in him. But as for the divine justice by which we sinners would deserve to be damned, I affirm that he neither rendered satisfaction for our sins, nor was there any need that satisfaction be made.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part One: Refutation of Covet’s Scriptural Arguments › The Justice of God

Christ saves, then, as the herald, confirmer, and lived example of the way of salvation, and as the future giver of eternal life — not as one who pays off a debt. For now, the statement asserts only that satisfaction was not necessary; that it would also have been impossible is something Sozzini proves separately later on.

The Lord May Waive His Right

Couet objects that God’s justice demands the punishment of every sin. Sozzini draws a distinction: the justice that truly dwells in God is rectitude and equity, that is, honesty and fairness. Severity and retribution, by contrast, are not attributes of God but effects of his will — were they attributes, he could never forgive. Even humanity’s subjection to eternal death follows from God’s free will, not from a necessary justice. Above all, however, sin violates God’s own right, not that of a third party:

“But everyone is free to give up his own right as far as he wishes. … Hence God, in punishing or acquitting men, is not to be reckoned as some judge, who deals with another’s right and is not permitted to depart from the prescription of the laws; but as a lord and prince, whose will alone, since it is a matter of his own right only, is the law of all things and the most perfect rule.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part Three: Proofs Against the Doctrine of Satisfaction › God’s Right to Forgive

God, then, does not judge according to someone else’s law, but in his own cause. Scripture, Sozzini reminds us, calls our guilt before God the debt of a debtor; God thus stands in the position of a creditor. “Now there is no creditor who could not, with full right, remit to his debtor either part of the debt or the entire debt without any satisfaction.” Free forgiveness is therefore no injustice. In his Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, Sozzini draws the same conclusion from the petition of the Lord’s Prayer for the remission of our debts (Matt 6:12), expressly referring in the process to this polemical treatise. The prayer that Christ has enjoined on us all, he writes, teaches “that we are freed from the debt of our sins in no other way than through the forgiveness and pardon that God, before whom we are guilty, grants to us”.

God Has Always Forgiven Freely

Sozzini shows from the whole of Scripture that God does in fact make use of this right: God is slow to anger and rich in mercy (Exod 34:6–7); with him there is forgiveness (Ps 130:3–4); he relents of the disaster he has threatened when a nation turns back (Jer 18:7–8); and the wicked man who turns back and does what is right shall live (Ezek 33:14–16). In the New Covenant he promises to remember sins no more (Jer 31:31–34). In return he has required nothing but repentance and amendment of life, as Christ commanded.

But a debt that has been paid has not been remitted. In the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matt 18:23–35), the king remits the debt without demanding compensation from anyone, and Paul urges us to forgive one another as God in Christ has forgiven us (Eph 4:32; cf. Col 3:13). Had God recouped his loss from Christ, we too would be entitled to demand satisfaction from a third party for wrongs we have suffered. Sozzini concludes: “Forgiving and accepting satisfaction can no more coexist than day and night, light and darkness.”

Vicarious Punishment Is Impossible

But satisfaction was not only unnecessary; it was also impossible. A fine can be paid by someone else, but a bodily punishment cannot; God himself says: “The soul that sins shall itself die” (Ezek 18:20). Moreover, a single death would suffice at most for a single person. Above all, however, the punishment owed was eternal death:

“… the penalty which each of us was bound to pay for his offenses was eternal death. This Christ assuredly did not undergo; and had he undergone it, the whole hope and ground of our salvation, and of our deliverance from the penalty of sins, would have been overthrown from its very foundation. … And yet, if Christ had saved us for this reason — that he had himself borne the penalties owed to our sins — and if faith in this had to be produced in us, so far as could be, he ought never to have risen, but to have remained perpetually in death.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part Three: Proofs Against the Doctrine of Satisfaction › No Satisfaction by Penal Payment

The doctrine of satisfaction thus founders on the resurrection, on which, according to Paul, our salvation hangs (1 Cor 15:17). Nor does it help to object that Christ’s divine nature lends his suffering infinite worth: even if one assumes, with his opponents, that Christ was at the same time the eternal God, as God he could not suffer.

God Reconciles — He Is Not Reconciled

Nowhere, Sozzini stresses, is it written that Christ reconciled God to us; everywhere it is we who are reconciled to God, and indeed by God himself (2 Cor 5:18–19; Rom 5:10; Col 1:21–22). In 2 Cor 5:19 Paul even says how this happens:

“For he says: ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.’ But in what manner? By demanding from Christ himself a penalty for our crimes? By seeing to it that he made satisfaction in his blood for our sins? … By no means: for he adds, ‘not imputing to them their sins.’ You see in what manner God reconciled us to himself through Christ: namely, by graciously forgiving us our crimes, as he had foretold through Jeremiah.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part One: Refutation of Covet’s Scriptural Arguments › Reconciliation Without Satisfaction

God, then, is the author, not the object, of reconciliation. That Scripture always speaks in this way shows, according to Sozzini, “that it was not God but we who were hostile: not he who had to be appeased, but we who had to lay aside the enmity”. The word mediator, too (Gal 3:19; 1 Tim 2:5; Heb 8:6), denotes not one who placates an angry God, but — as with Moses — the messenger and interpreter of a covenant that God offers of his own accord.

Sozzini in any case regards the imputation of another’s guilt or of another’s righteousness as absurd (on this, see the sections below on Adam’s fall and on justification). And he warns of the practical consequence: for whoever holds that all punishments were paid long ago, the zeal of piety grows cold, and a holy life seems dispensable for salvation.

In depth: the topic page Atonement and Satisfaction develops this doctrine at length, including with reference to the opposing side’s proof texts such as Isa 53:5, where Sozzini reads chastisement, not penal satisfaction.

Why Christ Died — and His Priesthood in Heaven

If God forgives freely, why the cross? Sozzini’s answer is neither vicarious penal suffering nor a mere example. Christ’s death seals God’s offer of forgiveness, leads to resurrection and power, and culminates in a priesthood in heaven. Atonement is wrought upon us, not upon God.

Sozzini expressly affirms that Christ died “for us” and “for our sins”; this, he says, “has rightly been written”. The only point in dispute is what ‘for’ means. In the ‘First Summary’ on our justification through Christ he makes it clear:

“From this it can be seen … that the phrase, Christ died for us, does not mean what many have perhaps believed, namely that he died in our place or as our substitute. … This also follows abundantly from the fact that it is so far from being the case that Christ by his death took our place, that rather we, following his example, must be ready to die, since otherwise we shall have no part in his kingdom …”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — Christ’s Death and Blood as the Seal of Forgiveness of Sins › The Meaning of the Phrase “Died for Us”

‘For us’, then, means, as he goes on to say, “for our sake”; ‘for our sins’ means “on account of our sins”. Were someone to die in our place, we would not have to follow him into death; yet Christ demands precisely this readiness of his own.

What His Death Accomplishes

Christ laid down his life freely, and yet at the Father’s command (John 10:18). What this death accomplishes can be drawn together from Sozzini’s writings in five points:

• It seals God’s offer of forgiveness and the new, eternal covenant, as the blood of the covenant once sealed the old at Sinai (Exod 24:8; Matt 26:28; Luke 22:20).
• It attests the truth of his teaching: Christ chose to die rather than cease proclaiming it.
• It makes God’s infinite love visible (John 3:16; Rom 8:32).
• It provides the example we are to follow: in Christ’s footsteps even unto death (1 Pet 2:21).
• Above all, it is the way to resurrection and supreme power: Christ gave himself up “so that by this way he might attain to immortality and also draw and lead us with him thither”.

Sozzini unfolds the first point in his polemical treatise against Couet: Christ confirmed the way of salvation not only through miracles but above all through his blood, the blood of the covenant (Mark 14:24; cf. Heb 12:24).

“And in this manner he so confirmed the divine promises that he has, as it were, bound God himself to fulfil them to us, and his blood cries out constantly to the Father, that he should be willing to remember the promises which Christ himself had announced to us in his name and for whose confirmation he had not shrunk from the shedding of his blood.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part One: Refutation of Covet’s Scriptural Arguments › Christ as Savior

As Sozzini’s ‘in a sense’ and ‘as it were’ indicate, the ‘binding’ and the ‘calling’ are figurative speech: the blood pays nothing and does not change God’s mind; it guarantees his promise. But it is the last point that carries everything: without the resurrection, Sozzini holds, Christ’s death would not have freed us but would have “wholly taken away the very hope of liberation”. Yet the resurrection alone would not have sufficed either, had Christ not, translated into heaven, obtained “eternal glory and power”. Whoever reduces Sozzini’s Christ to a teacher and an example overlooks this center.

From this center Sozzini also explains Scripture’s language of blood. The blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin (1 John 1:7), yet not by a hidden power, but by one “that we ourselves can clearly recognize”:

“For since Christ attained that supreme power through the shedding of his blood and by no other way, it is evident that it came about through his blood that we are cleansed from sins, that is, freed from the punishment due to our sins. For he, by virtue of that supreme power, can deliver all who obey him from eternal death and bestow upon them blessed immortality.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — First Summary › The Purification from Sins through the Blood of Christ

‘Cleansed’, then, means: freed from punishment, provided that we walk in the light. At the same time the blood brings it about “that we cease to sin”. The ‘ransom’ (Matt 20:28; 1 Tim 2:6) is likewise figurative speech for liberation, as when God freed Israel through Moses without any ransom, and not a true price “paid to anyone, least of all to God, for our liberation”.

High Priest in Heaven

Sozzini conceives of Christ’s priesthood in the light of the Day of Atonement (Lev 16:15–16): that sacrifice was complete only when the high priest carried the blood into the Holy of Holies (Heb 9:7). In the same way, Christ’s offering was completed not on the cross but when he entered heaven, which corresponds to the Holy of Holies (Heb 9:11–14; 9:24). Why the expiation, too, takes place only in heaven, Sozzini explains as follows:

“But since Christ expiated us not by making satisfaction to the divine justice for our sins, but by the declaration of the divine will and the attainment of eternal life and supreme power: it is right, indeed necessary, that the expiation was not accomplished before he was taken up into heaven. For he neither perfectly declared to us the divine will, nor did he himself attain eternal life and that supreme power, before he — rising from the dead — ascended to the heavens, there to remain forever.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part Two: Redemption as Figurative Speech › Expiation in Heaven

Christ is able to make expiation, then, only with the power he received in heaven; on earth “he would not even be a priest” (Heb 8:4). In heaven, however, he is able to save for all time those “who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb 7:24–25; cf. 1 John 2:1). Sozzini understands this intercession figuratively: Christ does not appease the Father, but with the power obtained through obedience he continually frees his own from punishment and eternal death. Atonement is thus wrought continually, and upon us; in the same chapter we read: “what serves for the expiation of sins concerns not God, but us”.

It is in this sense that Christ is called “the atonement for our sins” (1 John 2:2). Sozzini explains that hilasmos and related words “do not, especially in the Sacred Writings, have the signification of appeasing and of making mild one who is angry, but only of declaring that, as regards the punishments of sins, the mind of him who has the power to inflict and exact them is mild and peaceable, and of declaring that sins will not pay their deserved punishments” (Commentary on the First Epistle of John, on 1 John 2:2). It is not God whose mind is changed; it is his mildness that is made known. Christ is the atonement also “for the sins of the whole world”: he is ready to avert the punishments due from all who turn to him; Sozzini rejects any restriction to the unconditionally elect.

Further reading: how the cross and the resurrection belong together is also shown on the topic page Atonement and Satisfaction.

Adam’s Fall, Sin, and the Tempter

Sozzini interprets the Fall differently from the tradition: man was mortal from the beginning; Adam’s transgression brought eternal death, which befalls all his descendants by virtue of their descent, not through imputation. The inclination to sin grew out of habit; the will remains free. With the tradition he holds fast to this: the tempter is a real person — but God is not the author of sin.

The brief summary of the Christian religion appended to the volume On the Authority of Holy Scripture first considers the nature and standing of man before God:

“Man, because he is made of earth, is by his nature (Gen. 2:7; 1 Cor. 15:47) mortal (Gen. 3:19; 1 Cor. 15:48) and subject to corruption; and by an added circumstance, because he violated the divine precept, he is liable to eternal death (Gen. 2:17; 3:19); so that, as concerns immortality, he has nothing in common with God, and moreover through his sins he has become his enemy.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Holy Scripture (De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate) — The Sum of the Christian Religion › The Mortality of Man and Divine Grace

Sozzini thus distinguishes two things: man is mortal by nature, as a creature made from earth (Gen 2:7; 3:19); sin brought not mortality but eternal death, from which God alone can deliver (on this, see ‘Created Mortal — Immortality as a Gift’ below). As he expressly states in the Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, the first man was “by no means immortal even before sin”; he had set this out at length in his disputation with Francesco Pucci, to which he also refers in his commentary on the First Epistle of John.

Death by Descent, Not by Imputation

In the fourth part of his polemic against Couet, Sozzini contests the very first half of this inference: “But it is false that Adam’s offense and disobedience were imputed to men, and nowhere does Scripture teach this.” The Greek eph’ hō in Rom 5:12, he argues, does not mean ‘in which (man)’ but ‘inasmuch as’: death passed to all inasmuch as all have sinned. Yet it also reigned over those who had not sinned as Adam did (Rom 5:14). The comparison with Christ shows why:

“Not, therefore, because Christ’s righteousness and obedience are imputed to us do we partake of eternal life, but because, after we have been made his offspring through our own obedience, the same judgment is made concerning us as was made concerning him; just as we are guilty of death not because Adam’s offense and disobedience are imputed to us, but because, having been begotten of him, the same judgment is made concerning us as was made concerning him.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part Four: Justifying Faith and the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness › Christ and Adam (Romans 5)

As death comes through bodily descent, so life comes through spiritual begetting from Christ — both without imputation. Sozzini’s illustration: the children of a man declared a slave share his condition, albeit in a milder form, not because they are being wronged, but by virtue of being begotten. Whoever explains “original sin (if one may call it sin at all)” by imputation is therefore gravely mistaken (ibid.). Even the penalty of death does not follow from the nature of sin: death came into the world “because it pleased God to punish the sin of the first man with death” (ibid.; cf. ‘Forgiveness without Satisfaction’ above).

Sozzini does not thereby deny the consequences of the Fall. The statement that original sin is “a Jewish fable” does appear in the volume On Justification, but it comes from the dialogue of an unnamed author (N. N.). In his note, Sozzini counters: “It is entirely certain that the punishments decreed for the sin of the first progenitor affect his entire posterity, without regard to the sin of the posterity; solely because they are descendants of Adam himself and descend from him” (On Justification, notes by F. S. on the dialogue, no. 4).

The Inclination to Sin: Habit, Not Punishment

Far more gravely still than the advocates of imputation, according to Sozzini, do those err who teach that God, as a punishment, burned into Adam a corruption of the will that is passed on to us by inheritance:

“Nay, what could be devised more absurd, and more unworthy of God (who hates sin to the utmost), than that such a penalty was inflicted on Adam for his offense, on account of which he could not thereafter abstain from sinning? I know that God not seldom punishes the crimes of men with blindness of mind … but this happens only in those who, persevering continually in sins, have deserved that their impiety be openly arraigned and that they be a mockery to the rest. And yet they are not meanwhile punished with a depravation of the will. … I truly do not know whether anything more abominable could be said than that God, the fountain and parent of all rectitude, should be made the author of a corrupt will in man …”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part Four: Justifying Faith and the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness › Christ and Adam (Romans 5)

God, then, does not punish by imposing a compulsion to sin; even the blinded retain free will. Nor is the inclination to sin a natural consequence of the one Fall; rather, it has grown: “through repeated actions the habit of now this vice, now that, has arisen”, and the nature thus corrupted was passed on through procreation (ibid.). Even without Adam’s fall, human beings with free will could have sinned — like Adam himself, who came uncorrupted from God’s hands. On freedom of the will and on the sin of Christians (1 John 3:9; 5:16), see ‘Grace, Faith, and Justification’ below.

The Tempter and God’s Providence

Yet it is not only one’s own desire that entices us to sin, but also the devil, who sends evils and seeks to draw people away from the pure worship of God. Some Christians — even in his own day, according to Sozzini — regarded talk of the devil as merely figurative: according to Jas 1:14, they said, each person is tempted by his own desire, and it is precisely this desire that is elsewhere called Satan. In his exposition of the last petition of the Lord’s Prayer, Sozzini counters:

“I wonder, I say, most vehemently at these people who either teach or themselves believe such things and yet profess to give full credence to the Scriptures of the Old Testament. For the beginning of the story of Job alone suffices to convict them either of error or of falsehood; from which it is manifestly evident that Satan is a person who seeks to harm human beings, but above all those who worship God in purity.”

Fausto Sozzini, Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (Concionis Christi) — Deliverance from Evil › The Reality of Satan

In Job 1:6–12, Satan comes before God and is given power over Job’s possessions; according to 1 Chr 21:1, he incited David to number the people. Consistently, Sozzini prefers to take ‘Deliver us from evil’ (Matt 6:13), as he had already done with Matt 5:37, in a personal sense: what is meant is the Evil One, Satan himself. The devil sins “from the beginning” (1 John 3:8). According to Sozzini’s commentary on the First Epistle of John, this means that sinning is proper to him and constant — constant “because he has never, since the devil has existed, ceased to sin”.

But what, then, does the petition ‘Lead us not into temptation’ (Matt 6:13) mean? According to Sozzini, the word ‘tempt’ has two meanings: when God tempts Abraham (Gen 22:1), he puts him to the test; but God incites no one to sin (Jas 1:13) — that is what the tempter does. In the Lord’s Prayer, ‘temptations’ are the adversities that can turn us aside from the path of piety. Their immediate cause is usually the devil, yet they do not befall the godly “without a definite counsel of God”. Therefore we ask “not that we should not fall into such things, but that we should not succumb to them” (Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, section ‘Steadfastness Rather Than Exemption’) — just as, according to Paul, God with the temptation also provides the way of escape, so that we may be able to endure it (1 Cor 10:13).

But why does God let the tempter have his way? He is not the author of sin, nor did he create any beings in order to ruin us: the devils were once angels and brought their wickedness upon themselves (2 Pet 2:4; Jude 6). God lets them continue to exist and turns their enmity to good: against it the godly are to exercise their faith and prove themselves. That the devil seems able to do more for our ruin than God for our salvation is due, according to Sozzini, to the fact that God saves only while preserving our free will, whereas the devil employs cunning and force alike. That is why Christ closes the Lord’s Prayer with the petition that we may not succumb to temptations and may be delivered from the Evil One — as a petition of the greatest importance, just as one saves what is more valuable for the end (Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, section ‘Deliverance from Evil’).

In depth: The doctrine of original sin put to the test and ‘By nature children of wrath’? (Eph 2:3).

Grace, Faith, and Justification

How does a sinner become righteous before God? Sozzini’s answer: by pure grace — yet only those who trust Christ and therefore obey him are declared righteous. This presupposes a human being whose will is truly free.

In the Italian letter already mentioned, Sozzini replies to the unnamed gentleman, to whom free will perhaps seemed “most absurd”, indeed a blasphemy:

“For I by no means doubt that the most gracious God wills that everyone, even if he were previously ever so lost a sinner, who henceforth lives according to the commandments of Jesus Christ, should reach heaven; and I equally do not doubt that to live thus and to obey Jesus Christ lies generally in the power and freedom of all those to whom God himself has deigned to reveal the same Christ and his Gospel.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — The Inner Causes of Justification › Defense of Free Will

God’s saving will thus extends to all to whom the gospel is proclaimed, provided they believe and obey; and the ability to do so he grants, according to his theses on justification, “to all in common”. Without this freedom, as the letter puts it, “religion itself and all piety would also be abolished and destroyed from the ground up”. That faith is nevertheless God’s gift is shown in the section on the Holy Spirit.

Sozzini rejects an unconditional predestination of individuals. In On Jesus Christ the Saviour he does not refer its chief proof text, Acts 13:48 — “as many as were ordained to eternal life believed” — to an eternal decree: ‘ordained’ is whoever has a “mind neither dishonest nor averse to righteousness and piety”. God’s mercy is free (Rom 9:18); but whoever rejects the gospel does so out of his own wickedness (John 3:19–21; John 8:47). On the atonement for the whole world (1 John 2:2), see ‘Why Christ Died’.

Whether God foreknows future free decisions is not discussed in the writings quoted here. In the Theological Lectures (Praelectiones theologicae) mentioned above, Sozzini denies such foreknowledge, because these decisions are not yet settled; God’s omniscience, he holds, is not diminished by this, since it encompasses everything that can be known at all. The page Predestination treats this in detail and in Sozzini’s own words.

What Justification Is

For Sozzini, justification is a legal term in which no one “is made righteous but is declared righteous”. In his ‘Second Summary’ we read:

“Our justification before God is, to say it in one word, nothing other than being regarded as righteous by God. … Of his own accord, therefore, and entirely gratuitously God regards us as righteous and forgives us our sins, but only then, if we believe in Jesus Christ. But to believe in Jesus Christ is nothing other than to trust Jesus Christ and therefore to order one’s life according to his precept.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — Second Summary › The Nature, Manner, and Effects of Justification before God

The verdict includes forgiveness and is pure grace: nothing moves God to it but his own goodness. According to Titus 2:11–12 — for Sozzini the sum of Christian piety — this grace trains us for a sober, righteous, and godly life. What is credited is one’s own faith (Rom 4:3–5), not the righteousness of Christ: ‘to have righteousness imputed’, in Paul, “does not mean that an alien righteousness is imputed, but that one is held righteous” (On Jesus Christ the Saviour).

Sozzini marks off obedience on two sides:

“But just as we must guard against calling holiness and innocence of life, as most people do today, an effect of our justification before God, so we must carefully take heed not to believe that holiness and innocence itself is our justification before God, and not to assert that it is the efficient or impelling cause of our justification before God; but merely that cause without which that justification is not bestowed upon us, as God has decreed.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — The Nature, Manner, and Effects of Justification before God › Effects and Attendant Circumstances of Justification

Obedience is therefore neither the efficient nor the meritorious cause but, as his theses put it, the “indispensable cause (causa sine qua non)” of justification. In this way Sozzini reconciles Paul and James: Paul denies only justification on account of the merit of a perfect, lifelong fulfillment of the law (Rom 4:4–5); James demands real, if imperfect, obedience, such as Abraham showed (Jas 2:21–24). On James’s image of faith without works as a body without the spirit (Jas 2:26), Sozzini writes in the Italian letter:

“From which it is evident that works are by no means simply fruits of faith, as is commonly believed, but confer perfection upon the form of faith and give it, so to speak, life.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — On Faith and Works › The Efficacy of Works for Justification

Faith without obedience is accordingly neither living nor justifying; not for nothing has Christ “become the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb 5:9). One comfort remains: God does not deal with us by the strictest standard of law. Weaknesses do no harm to justification as long as we trust in Christ and earnestly strive to cast them off.

Sin, Relapse, and Repentance

According to Sozzini’s commentary on the First Epistle of John, whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is ‘born of God’ (1 John 5:1); the divine ‘seed’ (1 John 3:9) is most probably the word of the gospel (cf. 1 Pet 1:23). The new birth is thus a moral renewal through the word that is believed. ‘He does not sin’ means: he does not persist in sin. Lapses remain possible (Gal 6:1). In On Justification Sozzini adds: for whoever walks according to the Spirit, what he commits through weakness or ignorance is not counted against him; if he picks himself up again at once, he “has stumbled, not fallen”.

Whoever, on the other hand, relapses into a sin and persists in it ceases to be justified. He can be justified anew only through repentance, but this repeated repentance is, according to his theses, “not in our power, but God grants it” to whomever he wills; and the penitent he forgives, being “faithful and just” (1 John 1:9). Sozzini does not teach sinless perfection; whoever makes it a condition drives people, according to On Justification, into despair or self-deception. Finally, according to the commentary on the First Epistle of John, the ‘sin unto death’ (1 John 5:16) is not a particular offense but a persistence in which a person “in no way troubles himself to desist from it”.

Further reading: Sozzini’s On Justification in English.

Created Mortal — Immortality as a Gift

Sozzini’s hope rests not on an immortal soul but on the resurrection. By nature man is mortal; because he transgressed the divine commandment, he is moreover subject to eternal death. Hence, as shown above under ‘Adam’s Fall’, he has nothing in common, as regards immortality, with God, who ‘alone has immortality’ (1 Tim 6:16). Immortality is God’s gift, not a natural endowment.

The opening sentence of the ‘First Summary’ in On Justification says for whom it is destined; from this decree Sozzini there derives the sending, death, raising, and exaltation of Christ:

“God, out of his supreme and sole goodness, once resolved to forgive all sins to those who come to understanding and henceforth renounce worldly desires, living soberly, righteously, and devoutly in the present world, and to transfer them after this mortal life to immortal life by raising them from the dead; provided only that they would not be turned away from this manner of living, not even by the terror of death itself, however dreadful and abhorrent it might be.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Justification (De Iustificatione) — First Summary › Christ’s Death and Blood as the Seal of Forgiveness of Sins

The sole ground of the gift is God’s goodness. It is meant for those who repent, live according to Titus 2:12, and hold fast to this even under threat of death; it is bestowed not at death but through being raised from the dead.

This hope was revealed only through Christ. From 1 John 5:11–12 Sozzini concludes in his commentary on the First Epistle of John “that the promise of eternal life has been given by God in no other way than through Jesus Christ”; the law of Moses promised only well-being in this life. In notes on a treatise by another author, which saw the newness of the covenant in the inscribing of the same law upon the hearts (Jer 31:33), he objects:

“But it must be understood that that new covenant would be of such a kind as to have the force of inscribing the law of God upon the hearts of men. Which force the old did not have. Nor is this any wonder, since the new was made upon far more excellent promises (Heb. 8:6) … under it we are led perpetually, and kept in our duty, not by the fear of death and of punishments, as under the old, but by the hope of blessed immortality, which had not been set before those ancients in the divine covenant, and which was brought to light by Christ (2 Tim. 1:10).”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Honor of Christ — Remarks on the New Covenant › The Inscribing of the Law upon Hearts

The New Covenant thus binds through the better promise, not through threat. Yet in the commentary on the First Epistle of John Sozzini does not deny eternal life to the devout who lived before Christ: according to Luke 20:37–38 and Heb 11:39–40 they will be perfected together with the Christians, “made immortal and blessed”. It was not promised to them, but it will be given to them nonetheless.

That the dead should rise seems, according to Sozzini, to contradict reason as scarcely any other Christian dogma does; yet, rightly explained, it cannot be refuted by any argument. Certainty comes from the resurrection of Jesus. Against Couet, who denied that Christ had shown the way of salvation through it, he writes:

“The head, therefore, and as it were the foundation of the entire faith and of our salvation in the person of Christ is the resurrection of Jesus Christ itself … For it seems hardly possible that someone believes or sees that Jesus was raised from the dead, and does not give credence to his words and consequently does not turn from his sins to serve the living God, filled with the hope of immortality, and so attains the forgiveness of sins and eternal salvation.”

Fausto Sozzini, On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Jesu Christo Servatore) — Part One: Refutation of Covet’s Scriptural Arguments › Resurrection – Blessedness

The resurrection authenticates Jesus’ teaching and moves people to repentance. In the same context Sozzini concludes from Phil 3:21 that the exalted Christ has, as a man, the power to raise his own, to transform their lowly bodies, and to endow them with immortality. This takes place at his return (1 Cor 15:23); those of his own who are still alive then will be transformed.

Only then, according to Sozzini’s Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, do believers become children of God “in the highest and most exalted sense”, namely immortal (Luke 20:36); their goal is immortality, “whose seat is heaven”. Adam’s life, by contrast, was “natural and earthly” even before the Fall, as the polemic against Couet puts it; what has been promised is a “spiritual and heavenly life”.

Between Death and Judgment

In his commentary on the First Epistle of John, Sozzini expressly refrains from committing himself on the state between death and resurrection. Commenting on Jesus’ saying that blasphemy against the Spirit will be forgiven neither in this world nor in the world to come (Matt 12:32), he there first considers the supposition that the world to come begins already at death and that souls continue to exist; even then, the saying would mean only that the blasphemer is denied eternal life. His own interpretation runs as follows:

“But since we know nothing assured concerning the souls which continue in being after the death of each man, and in particular in such wise that they either enjoy good things or are tormented by evils, we say that Christ meant to say: when the end of the world shall come and the universal judgement shall take place, it will not come to pass that he who has blasphemed the Holy Spirit be freed from eternal death or rise again to eternal life, if he should already have died before; but if he be found still living by Christ the judge, it will not come to pass that he be changed and from mortal be made immortal and blessed, as will befall all those who have been Christ’s and who, when he comes to judge, are likewise found still living.”

Fausto Sozzini, Commentary on the First Epistle of John (Commentarius in Epistolam Johannis Apostoli Primam) — The Faith that Overcomes the World › Forgiveness and punishment in this age and in the one to come

The phrase about the souls “that continue to exist after the death of each person” merely takes up that supposition; it is not an affirmation that souls live on. Sozzini thus raises neither ‘soul sleep’ nor a conscious continued existence to the status of doctrine. His gaze is fixed on the end of the world, the general judgment, and Christ, who comes as judge.

How Sozzini conceived of the fate of the ungodly is disputed. Only this much is certain: the impenitent are not raised to eternal life and, if Christ finds them alive, are not transformed into immortals; they remain subject to eternal death. Scholars differ on whether he denied the raising of the ungodly altogether and conceived of their end as annihilation.

In the Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, Sozzini, along with other interpreters, understands ‘Gehenna’ (Matt 5:22) as a popular manner of speaking: it takes up a notion held by the common people and the Pharisees for which Scripture offers no manifest evidence; by it Christ merely meant to say that the person concerned “was worthy of eternal punishments”. Sozzini does not develop this into a worked-out doctrine of eternal torment. By contrast, he unequivocally rejects purgatory, which the Roman side derived from the words ‘until you have paid the last farthing’ (Matt 5:25–26). The passage, he argues, does not prove it: either the sin of one who is not reconciled with the brother he has offended robs him of eternal salvation altogether, or Christ is speaking of a temporal punishment still within this life.

The Law of Christ: The Sermon on the Mount as Commandment

For Sozzini, Christ is not only the Saviour but also the lawgiver of the New Covenant. What he adds to the Law of Moses in the Sermon on the Mount is neither merely its correct interpretation nor a counsel for a perfect few, but a commandment for everyone who wishes to be his disciple.

The Old Covenant promised the goods of this life (see the section ‘Created Mortal — Immortality as a Gift’) and kept the people to their duty through fear rather than through love. With the change of covenant, the ceremonial and judicial laws of Moses are abolished for Christians; whatever of them is still valid is valid only insofar as it agrees with Christ’s teaching. The manner of justification remains the same: forgiveness on God’s part, repentance and obedience on the part of human beings. Yet the obedience that God now demands is “much more perfect and excellent” (On Justification).

Christ came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it (Matt 5:17–20). In Sozzini’s Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, fulfilling means “completion and perfection”: the moral commandments of Moses remain, and Christ adds something new. In this, Sozzini contradicts two widespread views.

Even Matt 5:17, rightly understood, tells against the first view, and Christ’s ‘But I say to you’ does so conclusively: with these words he sets pronouncements that are not contained in the Mosaic wording against the Law. On the second view, Sozzini writes:

“The second opinion furthermore … rests on no foundation whatsoever, since Christ expressly declares that those who do not do what he himself adds to the Mosaic law will either be punished or will not receive the reward that he himself sets before his disciples. But nevertheless these carnally minded men, for whom it was too harsh to fulfill these new commandments of Christ, dared, against the very words of Christ, to say that what he openly commands is a counsel.”

Fausto Sozzini, Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (Concionis Christi) — Christ’s Teaching and the Law › Abolition or Fulfillment

What decides whether one receives the promised reward cannot be a mere counsel. Nor do Christ’s commandments apply only to apostles and preachers: he taught the crowd, and of his instructions it is established that “everything is common to all who wish to be disciples of Christ” (Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, section ‘Universal Address’). New in the gospel are the promise of eternal life, which the Beatitudes already pledge as the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:3), and the perfected commandment of love. That the commandment of 1 John 2:8 to put away darkness entirely and to follow the true light is called ‘new’ can, according to Sozzini, easily be explained as follows: the commandments it comprises, in particular brotherly love, were before Christ “not so complete and not of such intensity” as after him (Commentary on the First Epistle of John).

What Christ Adds

The prohibition of killing already covers anger that seeks to harm another, and the wounding insult (Matt 5:21–22); the prohibition of adultery already covers the desire for another man’s wife to which one has consented (Matt 5:27–28). Marriage may be dissolved only on the ground of fornication (porneia) (Matt 19:9); polygamy is forbidden under the gospel.

Regarding the oath, Sozzini draws a distinction: Christ forbids all voluntary oaths, especially promissory ones, by which one commits oneself to an uncertain future (Matt 5:33–37; Jas 5:12). An oath imposed by the magistrate, or one made necessary by a weighty reason, he considers permissible; after all, Paul too called on God as his witness (Rom 1:9; 2 Cor 1:23). Against Christians who reject every oath, he writes:

“From what has been discussed thus far, it follows that those err who do not wish it to be permitted for a Christian to swear, even when the magistrate imposes the oath upon him; … In my judgment I consider it more advisable in this matter to be rather too cautious than a little too bold, so that what Christ wished to be avoided by his commandment not to swear may be more easily avoided — however that commandment is ultimately to be interpreted.”

Fausto Sozzini, Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (Concionis Christi) — Nature and Definition of the Oath › Hebrew Justification

Sozzini, then, does not reject the oath; he limits it. When in doubt, he advises refraining from it, so that God’s name is not treated lightly and no one falls into perjury.

Love of enemies reaches furthest (Matt 5:43–48). In the Law, one’s ‘neighbor’ was a member of one’s own people (Lev 19:18); Christ commands us to do good to strangers and enemies as well. Sozzini sums it up in a formula: “Moses commanded love only toward the neighbor, but Christ also toward the non-neighbor” (Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, on Matt 5:43–44). Therein lies the perfection of Matt 5:48: whoever loves his enemies imitates God, who does good to both the good and the evil, and becomes like him in kind, though not equal to him in measure.

Almsgiving, prayer, and fasting are to be practiced without hypocrisy (Matt 6:1–18); one should be content with what is necessary and lay up treasures in heaven (Matt 6:19–21). Because the Christian does not have his happiness in this life, he seems to be obligated “to give away everything that exceeds what is necessary for a modest and sober life” (Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, on Matt 6:2–4). Sozzini does not forbid property as such, but he does forbid keeping more of its yield than one needs for oneself and one’s family. Whoever is to lay down even his life for the brethren, following Christ’s example, may all the less refuse them his goods (1 John 3:16–18).

Retaliation, Magistracy, and Violence

In Sozzini’s interpretation, ‘Do not resist evil’ (Matt 5:39) does not hold without limits. What is forbidden is resistance that seeks revenge (Matt 5:38–42): merely reclaiming one’s own property in court remains permitted; a lawsuit aimed at retaliation does not. The Law of Moses commanded the magistracy to inflict the retaliatory punishment of ‘an eye for an eye’ (ius talionis; Exod 21:23–25; Lev 24:19–20; Deut 19:21) and thereby tacitly permitted every injured party to demand it; it is precisely this that Christ revokes. Sozzini allows for a Christian magistracy, but denies that it may impose this punishment:

“But as regards the other question, namely whether a Christian magistrate may nevertheless impose retaliatory punishment, it must certainly be said that he cannot, since that punishment is entirely incompatible with Christian love of neighbor and with the prudence that the Christian religion has taught us in far richer measure than the Mosaic.”

Fausto Sozzini, Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (Concionis Christi) — The Command of Giving › Magisterial Penal Authority

For retaliatory punishment brings the injured party neither benefit nor compensation; it is mere revenge. It nevertheless suited the Old Covenant, because at that time the people, as Sozzini reads Rom 8:15, had received ‘the spirit of bondage unto fear’; it does not suit the New. In his reply to Jacobus Palaeologus (1581), which is not available here in translation, Sozzini, according to the common account, defended the brethren of Raków, who forbade Christians to shed blood in war and in criminal justice; how far he himself permitted offices with jurisdiction over life and death, or military service without killing, is disputed.

Praying after the Pattern of the Lord’s Prayer

Under the New Covenant, prayer is expressly commanded (Luke 18:1; 1 Thess 5:17). For the Old Covenant, Sozzini remains cautious: “I, at any rate, have not hitherto been able to find that such a commandment was unconditionally given under the Old Testament” (Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, section ‘Whether Prayer Is Divinely Commanded’). Yet even then the godly prayed often; according to Sozzini, it was enjoined on them tacitly, “from the force of the entire religion itself”. The Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9–13; Luke 11:2–4) is a model; it does not bind one to its wording, nor does it limit what one may ask of God. Empty babbling is forbidden (Matt 6:7); earnest repetition born of ardent longing remains permitted.

Those are heard who keep Christ’s commandments, ask in faith, and ask for nothing contrary to God’s will (1 John 3:22; 5:14–15; Jas 1:6). The petition for forgiveness presupposes that we ourselves forgive (Matt 6:12, 14), as an indispensable condition, not as a cause. Intercession for a sinning brother brings it about that God grants him the opportunity to repent, but it does not compel his will (1 John 5:16). Fasting is not expressly commanded in the New Covenant, but in particular cases it can become a duty, for instance to curb desire or to avoid giving offense; practiced voluntarily, it is pleasing to God. To whom prayer is to be addressed is discussed in the section ‘Worship and Invocation of Christ’.

Meekness, love of enemies, renunciation of retaliation, and truthfulness: this kingdom of God, lived out in practice, shaped the Polish Brethren and, later, Johannes Crell’s Christian ethics.

Church, Ministry, the Lord’s Supper, and Baptism

Which is the true church? Sozzini considered this question, so fiercely disputed in his century, almost useless: the church is wherever the saving doctrine of Christ is confessed. From this follow a simple congregational order, a Lord’s Supper that every congregation may celebrate, and a water baptism that he did not consider binding.

How to Recognize the True Church

For Sozzini, ‘church’ means two things: visibly, the whole body of assemblies that hold fast to and confess the saving doctrine of Christ; invisibly, those who truly believe, scattered throughout the world, whom no one can identify with certainty, because no one sees into the heart — God alone knows them. In what is necessary for salvation the true church does not err, for it is precisely through this doctrine that it is the church; in other tenets and rites it may very well err. Only the apostles could not err; their own congregations, as the Epistle to the Galatians shows, could already be led astray even in what is necessary for salvation.

Therefore, as already indicated in the section on Scripture, it is not the church that proves the doctrine but the doctrine, tested against Scripture, that proves the church; otherwise one would have to know the church before knowing by what it is to be recognized. Antiquity and great numbers settle nothing, miracles can accompany false doctrine too (Matt 24:24), and a line of bishops can continue in the same places while the doctrine changes. All that counts is the succession of doctrine, not that of persons and places.

This is also how Sozzini understands Paul’s words about the church as the pillar and foundation of truth (1 Tim 3:15): it upholds the truth but is not its source. What follows for the individual is this:

“If nevertheless it is asked whether each individual must seek and investigate where the true church of Christ is, we say: No one is obligated to do this, but each individual is only obligated to seek and investigate the true doctrine of Christ. … For even if there were no one who confesses the truth, it does not for that reason perish. For it can be preserved by God and is contained in the Holy Scripture, which is another pillar and foundation of truth.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Church (De Ecclesia) — Nature and Marks of the True Church › The Duty of Each Individual to Investigate the Doctrine of Christ

This does not make fellowship a matter of indifference: whoever has come to know the doctrine of Christ should join a congregation that confesses it — namely the one he considers the best.

Because what is necessary for salvation is narrowly circumscribed, Sozzini judges generously. In his correspondence about restoring the apostolic church, he writes:

“To condemn others who do not agree with you in all things, and to assert that outside your communities there is no salvation — this is not proper to the apostolic church, but rather foreign to it. For since there is much in the Christian religion that is indeed useful but not necessary for eternal salvation, nothing prevents several communities of Christians or churches, which differ among themselves to some degree, from all having such a teaching as suffices for the attainment of that salvation.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Church (De Ecclesia) — Restoration of the Outward Church › Whether Differing Christian Communities May Exist Today

But whoever deviates in articles of doctrine that are truly necessary for salvation may and must be excluded; which articles these are is to be drawn from the manifest Word of God alone. Condemning without examination, let alone persecuting, is by contrast a grave error in Sozzini’s eyes, as we saw above in the section ‘The One God Is the Father’. Even so, he was no systematic theorist of religious freedom; the classic Socinian treatise on the subject, the Vindiciae pro religionis libertate (1637), is the work of Johannes Crell.

Keys, Ministry, and Congregation

Sozzini connects the Antichrist, whom Paul foretells as the man of perdition (2 Thess 2:3–4), with the primacy of the Roman bishop; under it, he holds, the outward church collapsed. But because God has preserved the apostolic writings and made them accessible again in the vernacular, the church can and must be restored from Scripture alone, without any special commission and without new miracles: Christ is in the midst of those who are gathered in his name (Matt 18:20).

The promise to Peter (Matt 16:18–19) applies to all the apostles. The keys are the authority to declare with binding force what a person must have in order to belong to the kingdom of heaven; the forgiving and retaining of sins (John 20:23) is likewise a declaration, not the act itself, and binding and loosing mean exclusion from the number of the disciples and readmission to it. The apostolic office, however, was unique: an unbroken succession in office is neither necessary nor demonstrable, and auricular confession finds no support here.

Christians who think rightly about the Christian religion may come together, celebrate the remembrance of Christ’s death, pray together, and choose ministers from among themselves: teachers of the Word, as Paul describes them (1 Tim 3:1–7; Titus 1:5–9), overseers of the poor, and trusted men whom the assembly regards, as it were, as its senate. Sozzini considers the preaching ministry indispensable and defends it against all who would abolish it; yet that does not place it beyond criticism. Of the congregations he himself attended, he writes from Paulikowice (today Pawlikowice near Wieliczka) on 17 March 1585:

“Indeed, in these the ministers of the Word of God are also subject to the reproofs and corrections of all, and they are moreover very often reproved and corrected by others, and it is permitted to everyone in the church to express his opinion on everything that pertains to divine truth; indeed, no such matter is decided in the church without each individual being first asked by name for his opinion.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Church (De Ecclesia) — Restoration of the Outward Church › On the Election and Appointment of Ministers

The shepherds, however, as Peter admonishes, are not to lord it over the flock (1 Pet 5:3). This, according to Sozzini, is an admonition to the shepherds themselves, not a rein in the hands of the congregation; even the teachers of the apostolic age possessed “no small authority” (ibid.). For him, free discussion and a teaching office with a weight of its own belong together.

The Lord’s Supper and Baptism

Every assembly that confesses Christ may and should celebrate the Lord’s Supper. According to Sozzini, Christ prescribed “this most simply prepared and plainest ceremony … not to the Apostles as Apostles, but simply as his disciples or, if one prefers, as Christians” (On the Church, section ‘The Lord’s Supper’). Together the believers break the bread and drink from the cup, to remember the Lord’s death and to proclaim it until he comes (1 Cor 11:23–26); thanksgiving belongs to it as well, hence the rite’s oldest name, Eucharistia. Because no divine thing is dispensed here, no special minister is needed to distribute the bread and wine in Christ’s place.

Water baptism is another matter. In the letter on the restoration of the outward church, Sozzini refers to his own disputation Whether it is permissible for a Christian to forgo water baptism and gives his verdict:

“Concerning water baptism, I think as follows: that it was not prescribed to the Church for all eternity, and that it was never prescribed either by Christ or by the Apostles to be received by those who had already turned publicly to Christ in some other way, or who had been raised and instructed in Christian doctrine from earliest youth … But to return to the actual subject, I say that water baptism, in my judgment, contributes nothing to the restoration of the outward Church at this time and is an indifferent matter (in which our Brethren would have done better not to attempt anything new) …”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Church (De Ecclesia) — Restoration of the Outward Church › Water Baptism

If it is still to be retained today, then, according to Sozzini, it is for the sake of those who convert from other religions to the religion of Christ. They may then be baptized by whoever proclaimed Christ to them or by whomever the congregation appoints for the purpose; for baptism is nothing other than “a foreshadowing of the forgiveness of sins in the name of Christ and an open confession of his name, as well as a certain initiation into his religion, that is, through it nothing is truly given” (ibid.). It merely signifies outwardly what has already been given or will certainly be given.

For Sozzini himself this had consequences. He regarded the insistence of the Polish Brethren on (re)baptism as an unnecessary innovation; the parenthesis in the quotation alludes to this. He did not submit to it, and so was not admitted to their Lord’s Supper and never became a formal member — yet he remained their formative teacher. The later Racovian Catechism (1605), as mentioned at the outset, departs from him on precisely this point.

Further reading: The Church according to Sozzini; for the historical setting, the Timeline.

---

Where to go next: newcomers are best off starting with Getting Started; Sozzini’s works in English are listed under Books, expositions of individual passages under Bible Verses. See also: Sozzini’s Life · Polish Brethren · Timeline · Johannes Crell · Glossary · Frequently Asked Questions · Belief Compass · Forum.