Later Unitarians in Christianity 247Common sense dictates that everyone who daims to be follow
ing Jesus should be united, but what the commonly shared princi
ples on which such unity should be founded has, as we have seen,
always been a matter of intense argument and debate, and even
bloodshed.
It has been possible in the more recent past, however, to avoid
disunity to a certain extent simply by avoiding rational argument
and only selectively quoting the passages from the Bible which ap
pear to support the Paulinian hypothesis without contradicting each
other. An uncritical acceptance of the'absolute redemption' which
is apparently offered by God in exchange for an unconditional be
lief in Jesus, exercised in conjunction with complete reliance on
Paul's words that, 'The entire Law is summed up in a single com
mand, "Love your neighbour as yourself,'" (Galations 5: 14), have
resulted in a blurring of the main issues and a clouding over of the
intel1ectual dilemmas and discrepancies which have always char
acterised the debates and conflicts both with and within the Trini
tarian Church in the past.
Nevertheless, any modern Unitarian Church which still insists
that there is only One God -and that Jesus was no more or less
than a Prophet of God, and that each person is answerable for his
or her own actions in this IHe and will have to answer for them on
the Day of Resurrection - will not find itself particularly welcomed
by the ecumenical movement which is essentially Trinitarian in re
ligious nature and general outlook, but rather it will be ignored
and isolated and alienated by it in a society which is now so frag
mented that everyone is free to disagree with everyone else with
out any threat of retribution, simply because any such dissent is no
longer a threat to those who now maintain the present status quo
and who, in any case, are no longer Trinitarian Christians.
Inotherwords, althoughthe modernforms ofTrinitarianChris
tianity still continue to support the structure of the modern state,
in which the new cathedrals are the international banks, they no
longer control it -and in this situation the most that the believing
Christians can hope to achieve is to combine together in order to
protect their common interests and their religion.
In spite of modern Christianity's beleaguered situation, how
ever, the views of the Unitarians and the Trinitarians continue to
remain diametrically opposed to each other - as in the past, so also
today - and this will never change.