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The Mission
Who are the Unitarians? What have they been? What shall
they become? We know that our reality changes, and that our way of
understanding transcendent reality also changes. These are not the
same thing; but they influence one another and the sense and meaning
of what is a Unitarian.
For the
casual observer of Unitarians, either at cocktail parties, at worship
or at political action events, the sense of what a Unitarian is is
largely conditioned by who the observer is. For some, Unitarians are
simply apostate Christians. Some others see them entirely in secular
terms. They are for many the interesting but degenerate remnant of a
biblically Christian group who once were faithful to scripture, and
who are now a sometimes charming discussion group concerned with
religious and political curiosities.
For
the purposes of this address, I should like to compose my initial
thoughts around three hoary bits of humor. This is apposite to my
previous comments, as these jokes are often what those casual observers
outside of the current Unitarian experience may have remembered about
Unitarians. And they are, too often perhaps, brief sketches by which
Unitarians summarily describe themselves to others. And these tales I
believe are also used, perhaps not benignly, as tools to seriously shift
people’s perceptions of who Unitarians are. The first joke: Several
Unitarians are walking along a road. They come to a fork. The sign
pointing towards one direction reads: ‘This way to heaven.’ The
other reads: ‘This way to a discussion group about heaven.’ All the
Unitarians proceed to the discussion group. The second joke, sometimes
attributed to that Universalist servant-leader of Unitarians, Thomas
Starr King, defines the supposed differences between these two faith
positions. “The Unitarians believe that they are too good to be
damned, and the Universalists believe that God is too good to damn
them.” The third joke’s punch line states that the only time one
will hear the words ‘Jesus Christ’ in a Unitarian church are when
the Puerto Rican janitor stubs his toe.
A little exegesis here. The jokes are hoary. Had they been constructed today, it would
perhaps have been a ‘chat room’, not a ‘road.’ And the topic,
‘heaven’, to be either experienced or discussed, reveals an
uncomfortable reality. For humorous purposes perhaps, or to relate to
old line Christians, the topic mentioned is ‘heaven.’ This is
silly. Unitarians almost never discuss heaven these days, either
amongst themselves or with strangers to the faith. Polyamory, yes. The
dreadful states of mind of those who disagree with us politically,
yes. The importance of a given political action group (which may have
only 53 members) to the future of the republic or to world peace, yes.
But not heaven. The joke then is disingenuous. It leads the
casual inquirer to believe that ‘Unitarian’ refers to a religion,
or at least to a religious stance. And it suggests that the Unitarian
is only casually interested in the supreme religious reality—union
or fellowship with God.
This first joke, then, marvelously serves its purpose. It
diverts Christian believers, or those who might be inclined to become
such, away from Unitarians. That is purposeful and it works. It also
denies the Unitarians’ partly rejected Calvinist heritage of
irresistible grace. They make a simple decision about their religious
nature (this road or that one). They are not elected by God [some Calvinists would
gleefully agree], nor, as is fashionable today are they even
‘oriented’ by nature to God. They are ‘free to choose,’ ultra-Arminians,
so much so that the reality and power of the Holy Spirit is utterly
absent among Unitarians—according to the joke. And this part of the
joke also serves its purpose well. That the work of God is not present
among Unitarians is in the subtext of the message. That communicates
very clearly.
The
second joke reinforces some of these same ideas, the absence of an
active God, of the Holy Spirit, of grace, at least among the
Unitarians. Between themselves and the Universalists they are
perceived in this joke to be the dominant group, even presuming to
tell God what’s what. As such they are the group that shall carry
the weight and influence between these two given faith positions,
Unitarian and Universalist.
The third
joke clearly tells the hearer that Unitarians are not Christians, nor
even curious about, respectful of, nor studious about, our Lord Jesus
Christ. It also introduces another important element. ‘We are white
and upper middle class. And we like it that way.’ As perhaps one of
the two whitest religious groups in the United States, they would not
cheerfully tell this joke unless they were at least unconsciously
pleased to reinforce this picture.
A side note: A few months ago Garrison Keillor was hosting
a marathon show on Public Radio. He repeatedly asked for some new
Unitarian jokes, stating that all the ones being called in to him were
old. It took him over six hours to get just one new Unitarian joke.
The point of this? That what Unitarians tell about themselves has not
changed because it works. It works to describe them and to
reinforce amongst the ‘heathen’ who they clearly are.
My
reading on the history and sociology of Unitarians leads me to believe
that these jokes are generally descriptive of the normative Unitarian
stance within their non-confessional association of congregations.
This is very important. If one hopes to influence the direction of a
social community that has had at its heart, to some extent, a faith
position which is now actively being censored and is partly
obliterated, one must, of course, focus on the dynamics of that social
community. You cannot simply focus on the faith position, as if the
marketplace of ideas were supremely open within that clamorous
concatenation of competing conjectures. It is not open. It is like a
river flowing towards the sea. And the tumultuous waters pass through
weirs that are designed to extract the fish. (Metaphor intended.) Most
of the fish (the Christians) being thus absent from the flow of the
river, the market for Biblical faith is minimized, and also, in many
sad ways, trivialized.
In order
to be a dominant or the dominant influence in such a fluid community,
one must either have the political skill which the Democratic
Leadership Conference exerted over a number of years and which allowed
it to redirect and dominate its party, or the consummate will to take
over the denomination which the fundamentalists had within the
Southern Baptist Convention in that decades-long struggle, or the
witty arrogance and subversive style that several groups have used to
influence Unitarian and Universalist fashions in the past century.
But none
of these are likely to work to the benefit of supporters of the
American Unitarian Conference. The first reason is typified by these
jokes. The jokes describe Unitarians as neither committed to a core
group position, nor worshipful, nor often lacking in
gravitas—characteristics that each of the aforementioned movements
relied upon to do their work amongst Democrats, Southern Baptists and
recent Unitarians and Universalists.
These
‘takeover’ methods will not work because firstly the AUC perceives
itself to be avoiding a core position (e.g. Unitarian or Arian or
Socinian Christianity, or perhaps even Christianity as such) to which
you would subscribe as a body. It is also perhaps too individualistic
to stage a systematic and disciplined takeover of a religious
corporation. And it is also filled with more gravitas, respect and
consideration than many of those who danced through the midst of the
AUA, commanding many earlier Unitarian allegiances, such as some of
the humanists, the extended family movement, those who managed to
convince three generations that the Bible is, at best, a compendium of
quaint and sometimes useful lessons based on legend, the false
situation ethicists who threw aside Joseph Fletcher’s anchor of
Christ, and the second generation of open marriage advocates — who
discarded all boundaries.
We are
attempting, in a worthy and effective fashion, to revive an early 19th
century American anti-Calvinist form of Unitarianism using three
announced principles, faith, freedom and reason as our pillars.
As we grow in maturity, we are adding more contemporary
expressions of Unitarian thought and faith to the good list of mostly
19th century expressions available in print and on-line at http//:www.americanunitarian.org.
We are
not likely to replicate these aforementioned instances of takeovers.
We are also not likely to win the hearts and minds of the present
generation of Unitarians and Universalists. The reason for that is
implied in what I have previously suggested. The fish have been
captured in the weirs. Our natural market is continuously being
dissuaded from entering the present mix of Unitarians and
Universalists by the jokes, which clearly reflect what most people
would encounter in UU congregations. And the overwhelmingly
good-natured and thoughtful people who are now members of UU
congregations are perfectly happy to see you enjoy your freely chosen, not God-inspired, but freely chosen,
point of view, for that is how they have been taught to see all that
we do, that, not God, but the freely chosen point of view is the
center of the faith. But these good people are a group largely
self-selected to be people who have no interest in adopting Unitarian
Christianity. Their hearts and minds are already spoken for. They have
pledged themselves to a less godly version of the Lover of Souls, one
who has 7 principles, not 10 commandments, to wrestle with, a process
wherein a ‘spirit’ promises ‘growth,’ not, as Mr. Channing
wrote, a religion which promises “redemption”.
Our
visible and committed Unitarian presence, with its historical memory,
and with our dissemination of documents and records of the past, is a
worthy and helpful work. Never, because of our small numbers, should we
underestimate its value.
But ours
is not a movement now capable of driving towards fundamental change
within the Unitarian Universalist congregations, nor of growing a
significant constituency within them.
Why not?
Firstly, are we God-centered or God-driven? That would imply, no
matter how much we may protest, a single-minded point of view. And
that happens to be mostly true, I think. For the most open-minded of
God’s household still know how to draw, with confidence, their
boundaries. And there are few places within the Unitarian Universalist
Association today where that is encouraged.
Secondly, can we speak positively? To the extent that we
do so on religious matters, we speak a language out of fashion.
Members of Association churches still use a great deal of negative
language to describe their faith positions (what they don’t believe
in). Our positive words may well confuse and alarm them.
Thirdly,
if we focus on the Unitarian Universalist Association, can we avoid
being as reactive to the UUA as the early Unitarians were reactive
towards New England’s brand of Calvinist congregationalism. That
helped cripple them. (As did perhaps also too easy a position on
membership. But that’s another story.)
You can see that what I’m leading up to is that our
mission needs to be, as much as possible, in terms of who we are at present, one that does not have as its primary goal in
some way dominating the UUA.
Some
Tools Available
In the
process of moving towards a consistent and whole Unitarian
Christianity, the nature of faith and of the faith transmitted from
one generation to another, from believer to believer, from the church
to the world, needs clarification and organization. The classic word
for this is ‘dogma.’ Dogma refers to the organized understandings
that can be taught and learned. In practice, all dogma is flexible and
changing. But the word dogma became a byword for evil to the
Enlightenment Christians because of the fact that Church dogma had
been made a state crime, and thus serious deviation from it could
result in confiscation of property, transportation, imprisonment or
worse. That this is no longer the case should not blind us to the need
for organizing a picture of God’s realities, as we can best
understand them, that we can use to transmit our faith, and also as a
basis for discussion of our faith. We should not be trapped by an 18th
century reactive definition of dogma. Without dogma as organized
thought we have no common language, nor a language that allows us to
communicate with other Christians.
A serious Unitarian theology that wishes to assert its
Christianity must also deal—in what is likely to be a century-long
process—with the aspects of Christian humanism and religious
liberalism and freedom that have had a tendency to move religion out
of the Unitarian picture. Since Erasmus, Christian humanism has been
identified with scholarly skepticism and a somewhat cavalier attitude
towards the holy. It has also been, perhaps as a consequence of its
lack of enthusiasm for absolutes, more conservative and more adaptive
to the political scene as it was to be found. Concomitantly, humanism
has been committed to a rational disposition, “lacking in
revolutionary aggressiveness,” as Paul Tillich puts it. And all humanism, Christian and otherwise, has
focused on education as the prime force in the development of the
individual. The almost complete lack of prayer life and spiritual
formation programs among Unitarians over the years echoes this. It is
perhaps also noteworthy that education lends itself more easily to
state control of people than does the development of a God-centered
spiritual and prayer life.
Freedom
is a tool that we rightly prize. But it is a tool. A tool is to be
wielded, intelligently, to achieve a goal. Mark Twain once wrote, as I
recall, that a man who has a hammer is constantly looking for a nail.
Freedom can be like that. From the time we’re told to go to bed as
little children, to the point where we can’t burn leaves in our
driveway anymore, to the employment
application that says at the age of 78 we can’t get a job as a test
pilot, we want our freedom. When it becomes obsessive, however, it
becomes an urge that also includes our faith.
No one can tell us, or perhaps even advise us, what to believe or
what to think or what to do. In the end, among people really consumed
with this extreme freedom, there seems to be a tendency to see the
activity of God as nonexistent. Then the idea of deism becomes very
attractive. God has done his thing. Now let him go away and let us get
on with running the world. This is something Unitarians need to think
about.
Religious
liberalism has brought into Unitarian thought two great and
fascinating issues, among many others of consequence, which still
dominate Unitarian Christian thinking. One of these is the quest for
the historical Jesus. Now, theologies do center on God, but when the
prime focus of one’s understanding of God’s Messiah, Jesus—at a
minimal description the lens through which we see God—is
investigated much the same way as the quest for Shakespeare’s
‘Dark Lady’ (or gentleman as it may turn out to be), then
burrowing about it in papyrus scrolls and ossuaries and the
recollections of Roman dignitaries reduces the nature of the Son of
God, the Christ who is the hinge of history and the door to our
salvation, the mediator between ourselves and our God—this I say
reduces him to being a confused young Jewish man who was trying to
figure out the simple question: “So, what’s going on?” The
second important consequence of religious liberalism was, and is, the
tendency of people exposed to this approach to focus strongly on what
they often call “the religion of Jesus,” namely, his moral
teachings. Inasmuch as these are identical on every count with
positions to be found in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old
Covenant or Testament, they provide no basis for a new religion. They
also tend to lead to a moralism, devoid of any sense of grace, where
salvation is a matter of keeping tabs on oneself and on one’s
neighbor, and one’s political institutions, to see that all things
are done rightly.
Christian faith is justly interested in these elements of
history and teaching, but it cannot be built upon them. An interesting
example of the problem of being excessively rational can be found in
the book, French Rational Religions of the Nineteenth Century.
It contains marvelously interesting stories of dozens of
religions founded on reason. All died. Reason can and ought to be
rightly used in Christian theology, in Bible study, in our
deliberations in congregations, but set alone by itself, with no
anchor, it flies adrift and causes us to violate one of Jesus’s
prime precepts: “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15-17). Several years
ago, I was at Christmas Eve worship at one of our most numerically
strong Unitarian churches. The sermon was devoted in part to
explaining to the congregation how the mother of the Buddha, Prince
Gautama, became pregnant. She dreamed of an elephant who caused her to
conceive. Perhaps this was supposed to be Ganesha. Other stories of
this nature took up 90% of the sermon. Is there nothing new under the
sun? These stories mimicked the attacks on Christians by Celsus in his
work, True Discourse, which he wrote in A.D. 177. Interesting
history? Yes! Is this feeding our Lord’s sheep on Christmas Eve? No.
You see,
if our primary goal is not to be in some way dominating the UUA,
through marketing perhaps, then we can help discover what our goal is
by first clarifying our Unitarian Christianity and freeing it from
some of its excesses and meanderings down unprofitable or unworthy
byways.
The
Field is The World
Now
I must come to the point of this presentation. The point is not that we
must gain awareness of how humor reveals some home truths about
Unitarians. Nor is my point to surface some possible directions for an
aware and/or militant Unitarian cohort to, so to speak, recapture the
flag. My point is to ask if a faithful and strong, focused and visible
Unitarian Christian people can awaken and inspire first a lively, that
is, Spirit-filled, American and Canadian Christian faith, then perhaps
one throughout
the English speaking world, and then the world beyond that.
The
categories of a visible and practiced faith, and a Spirit-filled one,
are not, apart from examples in political life, ones which emerge
strongly from American Unitarian history. But if we are not to be
culture-bound to New England’s historic culture, this faith must be
able to be heard and be heartfelt by people who share neither New
England’s family lineages nor that region’s commercial, industrial
and academic heritage, nor even our American Unitarian
heritage. It must transcend these things.
When C. S. Lewis wrote his works, he did not plump for the
Church of England, but for God, made known in Christ. As Billy Graham
preaches, though everyone knows him to be an ardent Southern Baptist,
his message was never one for those churches alone, but for a saving
knowledge and love of God. Unitarians, as well, must have a message
that has internal power, must not restrict themselves to fiddling with
what some see as a runaway Association, but must bring a vision of the
Kingdom of God to people who yearn for it, a knowledge of God to those
who grasp after it, a love of God to all who pray for this, and a love
of their neighbor which flows from these three realities, and not from either a
primary or exclusive focus on the neighbor, or his polis, to
the exclusion of God.
We are
not tasked with the job of being only teachers, who bring facts to
people. We are not asked to be only disciples, who hold the faith
deeply and dearly within us. We are called to be like the apostles:
messengers or ambassadors of the most high God, of whom we have direct
knowledge, not second- or third-hand knowledge. We are called to bring
good news of an immortal good, not news of a transient, culturally
determined metaphysic. We are called to do this, not alone to
facilitate discussion of ideas, but in order to allow the Holy Spirit
to work in people according to the purposes of God, that they may be
by grace regenerated and exalted (Channing’s words) and be found to
be, by this same grace, exemplars of that immortal good, and,
themselves, servants of it.
An
example: after you have tasted baklava and seen that it is good, you
may then look at recipes, compare cooks, argue about pastry shops that
sell it, et trifling cetera, but if you have not tasted it, all that
discussion is hollow. “O taste and see that the Lord is good!”
calls the Psalmist (34:08 RSV). When you have tasted, and known, then
you are able to be like that psalmist.
The Unitarian Christian is not called to be an archivist
or museum keeper. S/he is called to be a faithful witness, in the
language of the Bible, “members of the household of God”(Eph 2:19
RSV). What shall we become? “evangelists,
.... prophets, pastors, teachers, to equip God’s people for work in
his service, for the building up of the body of Christ” (Eph.
4:11b,12 REB). Who have we been? Like “men of Athens” (Acts 17:22b
REB), “groping after [God]” “in the hope that...they may find
him; though indeed he is not far from each one of us, for in him we
live and move, in him we exist; as some of [their] own poets have
said, ‘We are also his offspring’”
(Acts 17:27, 28). Or, to use Mr. Channing’s words about who
we shall be: “He will overturn, and overturn, and overturn the
strongholds of spiritual usurpation, until He shall come whose right
it is to rule the minds of men; that the conspiracy of ages against
the liberty of Christians may be brought to an end; that the servile
assent so long yielded to human creeds may give place to honest and
devout inquiry into the Scriptures; and that Christianity, thus
purified from error, may put forth its almighty energy, and prove
itself, by its ennobling influence on the mind, to be indeed ‘the
power of God unto salvation’” [“Unitarian Christianity,” 1819, last
paragraph].
I shall
close now with a quotation by someone I know only from the internet:
Anna Hall.
"Once
I stopped navel-gazing, I saw the Spirit drive up on a motorcycle. She
roared up loudly and said 'Child, you talk too much. Do you want to
stand here having
intellectual conversation or do you want to take a ride?'"
Or, as
Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”
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