Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"He offered a distinctive synthesis of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment. Science and the Bible he declared perfectly compatible, for God 'never contradicts in revelation what He teaches in his works.' Channing and his followers interpreted the Bible not literally but broadly, as a progressive revelation . . . Channing's sermon found no justification in either reason or revelation for the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, so he rejected it and called his own teaching 'Unitarian Christianity.' The heart of his discourse consisted of his rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. . . . Although the women's movement emerged only after his death in 1842, Channing admired Mary Wollstonecraft's early Vindication of the Rights of Woman . . . Channing's philosophy is best characterized as a form of Christian humanism. . . . Channing proclaimed the 'self-culture' of our human faculties and powers to be the trues form of worship and celebrated human dignity as what he called our 'likeness to God.' . . . Unitarian humanism also provoked a remarkable literary flowering that includes the unique outburst known as Transcendentalism."