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> remitting power of Christ's blood, then we are just wet.  However, the
> original, post-Apostolic writings to which I refer, do not illustrate this
> afidelity.

I agree the historical record is a powerful argument.  There is no
record of anybody proposing salvation apart from water baptism before
the 15th or 16th century!  Even Martin "Justified by Faith" Luther, who
at one time considered the book of James ("Faith without works is
dead") non-canonical, agreed in the necessity of water baptism.

> Concerning the Unitarians, you must remember that that Church (if we may
> still call it such) has left its Christian roots.  They formerly affirmed
> the deity of Christ,

Yes, though at one time they were what one could consider
"fundamentalist" (in that they claimed the Bible was the plenary Word
of God), they moved away from that over the past couple of centuries,
eventually merging with the Universalist "church," so that now we have
bizarrely syncrestic groups within the UUA like the "Unitarian
Universalist Buddhist Fellowship," "Covenant of Unitarian Universalist
Pagans," and "Evangelical Universalist."

The Unitarians got their name by affirming the absolute unity of God
and denying the trinity.  They do this, however, by saying that Jesus
Christ was merely human.  A special human, to be sure, and one anointed
of God such that he could be called "the Son of God," but still human
and only human nonetheless.  (This differs from the Jehovah Witness
belief that Jesus Christ is a supernatural son of God who was created
before the begining of the world and who participated with Jehovah in
creating this universe: "divine" in the sense that he was not human as
Adam was and we are, but still a wholly seperate person from God.)  The
Unitarians have never ascribed deity to Christ.

The Univeralists got started out by believing that Christ's sacrifice
and the grace of God will allow *everyone* to be saved, regardless of
their beliefs (thus, salvation is truly _universal_).  They've also
moved to the point of removing all pretense of accepting the authority
of the Bible.  The Universalists and Unitarians merged in 1961.

See http://www.uua.org for more information, if you can stand the
dreck.  Amongst some of the revisionist claims: they're responsible for
women's suffrage, abolition of slavery, and penal reform.

Richard "religion history is fun" Masoner