FirStu.org
Title
First Unitarian Church of Wilmington, DE
Contact
- Wilbur Emmons
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- West Chester PA
- United States 19382
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- +1.16107930503
Description
The Unitarian Universalist Association is composed of over 1,000 congregations in the United States which have their historical roots in late 18th and early 19th century movements for religious equality and pluralism.
The Universalist movement began in Europe and spread to the US in the late 1700s. Its central religious tenet was the rejection of belief in Hell and Damnation, in stark contrast to the Calvinist doctrine of the day. Early Universalists believed that "An Omnipotent and loving God would never condemn his children to eternal damnation." The earliest Universalist preacher in America, Rev. John Murray, landed in New Jersey in 1770. From this small beginning, the Universalist movement expanded until it became the sixth largest US Protestant denomination in the late 1800s.
The Unitarian movement grew out of a schism in the 1820s within the Puritan church of Massachusetts over belief in the Trinity. The schism was one outcome of the Transcendental Movement of that decade and was led by most of the faculty of the Harvard Theological School, which was the major seminary of the Massachusetts church at that time. Congregants who adopted a belief in the Unity of God became called 'Unitarians,' initially a derisive play on the word Trinity. The two churches which resulted from this schism were the American Unitarian Association and the Congregational Church -- now called the United Church of Christ. These two denominations have maintained many ties throughout the past two centuries, even as their theologies have diverged.
