The 21st of April is an interesting day in the Christian calendar.
During the Reformation the small town of Pińczów in southern Poland was a hotbed of radical thought. Lots of Calvinsits. But also some rather more daring Christian thinkers as well. The good folk held some twenty-two synods there over the years.
On the 21st of April in 1562, twenty-eight clergy including Stanisław Paklepka and Gregory Paul of Brzeziny and twelve laymen gathered in synod, voted to reject the doctrine of the Trinity, as unscriptural and “papist.”
This laid the ground for another synod the following year where they established an Arian and anti-trinitarian communion they called the Polish Minor Reformed Church, and is generally remembered as the Polish Brethren.
A few years later Faustus Socinus, fleeing the Italian Inquisition, would be embraced by this community. And it there in dialogue with them that a coherent theology of a natural Jesus began to flower.
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