Category Archives: Theology

What do you believe?

Duncan Howlett was minister here in New Bedford in the 1930’s, and later went on to a distinguished career as a Unitarian Universalist minister. In 1967, Howlett wrote a pamphlet for the Unitarian Universalist Association titled “What Do You Believe?” Today, in 2006, what Howlett said still rings true:

The heart of our faith, judged by the historical record, centers in things like the independence of the mind, freedom, and the pursuit of truth; in the rejection of fixed dogmas, fixed forms of worship, and ecclesiastical authority.

Therefore when a friend says, “So you have joined the Unitarian Universalists. Let’s see. What do they believe?”, our first task is to persuade the questioner that his [sic] question cannot be answered. At least, it cannot be answered the way he has asked it and the way he assumes it must be answered. His is like the old duoble question, “Do you still beat your wife?” It can’t be answered because it carries and assumption we are not willing to grant. The question, “What do Unitarian Universalists believe?” carries the assumption that we, like everyone else, have a set of theological beliefs to which we hold and by which we may be identified.

But that is just the point. We don’t. If we are going to be understood, we have to make that clear at the outset.

Today, some Unitarian Universalists have the mistaken notion that our faith has a fixed set of theological beliefs, a.k.a. “the seven principles,” which they can recite to their friends. But that’s not true. The “seven principles” are not particularly theological; they were written to apply to the Association not to individuals; and not all of us believe in them. I don’t believe in them, because, like Duncan Howlett, I don’t think it is possible to say that Unitarian Universalists can be characterized by a certain set of beliefs.

Maybe I can make this point clearer by quoting an anecdote from Howlett’s pamphlet:

One Saturday night some years back my telephone rang. It was about midnight. On the other end of the line was a young woman who had just recently joined my church. There was a good deal of noise in the background and it was easy to tell that a party was in progress. Obviously shouting, she said, “The Unitarians don’t believe in the Trinity or in the Virgin Birth or in the Divinity of Christ. That’s right, isn’t it?”

I said, “No, that’s not right.”

“Not right?” she exclaimed. “Look, I’m in a theological argument and they’ve got me cornered. What should I say?”

“Tell them,” I said, “that you can’t identify a Unitarian by his beliefs or lack of them.” There was a long pause while she thought that one over.

“But isn’t it true,” she insisted, “that we don’t believe in the Virgin Birth or the Ressurection or miracles or any of those things?”

“Yes,” I said, “it is true that most of us don’t believe those things, but you mislead people when you tell them so.”

“I don’t have to tell them,” she said, “they’re telling me. They say we don’t believe anything. Is that right? Don’t we believe anything?”

My answer to that young woman that night and later in detail in my office was this: Asked what they believe, Unitarians and Universalists have been trying to answer an unanswerable question. It can only be answered if you first take the question apart and show the questioner that he has built into it an impossible answer.

I suspect some readers of this blog will not be satisfied with Howlett’s contention, and like the young woman in the story will plead, “Surely we believe in something!” What is your response? Do Unitarian Universalists have a set of fixed beliefs? And perhaps if there’s any interest in this topic, later on I’ll post what Howlett answers when asked, “What do you believe?”

Update: Another post with Howlett’s statement of “belief” Link

Beyond the progress narrative

Over at Left Coast Unitarian, James writes:

In general, I believe that Unitarian Universalism (though in particular I am thinking of pre-consolidation Unitarianism) constructed a post-christian identity based on Humanist Manifesto style supersessionism and the progress narrative. For a variety of reasons, the progress narrative does not really work any more. I don’t think anyone has really come up with anything else to fill the vacuum left in its wake.

That vacuum may be filling in some interesting ways. Carole Fontaine, a Unitarian Universalist scholar (professor of Hebrew Bible at Andover Newton), has pointed out that Unitarian Universalists are well-suited to negotiating between the two main camps of human rights organizations: those who do human rights out of divine law (theistic), and those who do human rights out of natural law (non-theistic). Her contention is that we already know how to have conversations across those boundaries. A summary of one of her lectures on the topic states:

Fontaine began by asking, “What will it take to form a global conscience for planet Earth?” Using both feminist analysis and deconstructionism, she looked at how the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an can influence understandings of human rights. Fontaine contends that Unitarian Universalism, with its traditions of religious tolerance and free inquiry, stands in a unique place to promote understanding between differing conceptions of human rights. Link

A wider application of the same principles (of relatively free inquiry, and relatively greater religious tolerance) could have Unitarian Universalism understanding one of its roles as facilitating conversations across various boundaries, in a postmodern world populated with many groups having quite different worldviews. This idea would place us as one more group among equals, thus avoiding the trap of thinking we’re the best of all religions.

Davidson Loehr’s angry letter

Davidson Loehr, senior minister at First Church Unitarian Universalist of Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) back on November 30, 2005. In that letter, he lambasted the Pathways Church project, a Unitarian Universalist start-up church sponsored by denominational headquarters, for its complete failure to meet any of the initial goals of the project. Loehr said he believes that failure is tied to another problem with contemporary Unitarian Universalism, “the lack of a serious religious center.”

Now that’s a sweeping generalization, but Loehr does have a point about the wider denomination. My partner, Carol — who is unchurched — once pointed out that many Unitarian Universalist sermons sound like commentary on National Public Radio, which is to say, while hip and fun they are not particularly religious. At denominational headquarters, I am not aware of serious theological thinking affecting policy since Hugo Holleroth (who grounded religious education in existential theology) left there in the 1970s. Loehr elaborates on this problem later in his letter:

The center [of Unitarian Universalism] is political rather than religious, as it has been for decades. I’m not saying this as a crank; I’m saying it as someone who earned a Ph.D. in theology, with a good understanding of what religion is, and what it isn’t.

Rev. Peter Richardson has been instructive for me in this area, in pointing out that there actually once was a vision of a religion for the future that would still work, but that the UUA actively sabotaged it from the beginning. This was the vision of a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions — the “wisdom traditions” of the great religions — with its symbol of the circle of logos from eight or so of the world’s religions. While this seems the logical — even obvious — path toward a pluralistic future for any liberal religion, it simply can’t be done now, and may not be possible for a decade or more, unless there is a conversion of consciousness.

Actually, Ph.D. or no, Loehr is a little behind the times, intellectually speaking. That old idea of thinking that Unitarian Universalism could be a “a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions” has been seriously challenged in recent years. If you subject that idea to some simple deconstruction, you uncover tendencies towards an unfounded sense of superiority, reductionism, and imperialism. The unfounded sense of superiority comes into play in the assumption that we’re so much better than anyone else that we can find those “deep ontological commonalities” that somehow managed to elude the greatest religious thinkers up until now — it’s possible, but no one else in the world seems to recognize this superiority of ours. The reductionism comes into play in the assumption that religions can be reduced to relatively simple ontological “commonalities” that can be divorced from a lived religion, including liturgical practice and day-to-day embodied living of one’s religion — that’s a little too Cartesian and Western to be considered universally true. The imperialism comes into play when the previous two assumptions remain unexamined; and the imperialism can manifest itself as cultural misappropriation or worse.

A number of us who are a bit younger than Loehr are heading in a different religious direction. Some of us are looking within our own tradition for a religious center — and we’re finding it. I don’t want to speak for others who are doing this work, but I know I’ve been drawing on Universalist and Transcendentalist religious thought, filtered through American pragmatism (which has roots in Emerson) and ecological theology and ecojustice (with roots in Thoreau and Emerson) — and uncovering a deeply religious center for my religious praxis. This is in distinct contrast to Loehr’s stated aim to incorporate “eight or so of the world’s religions.”

I have a suspicion that what I’m seeing, in my differences with Davidson Loehr, is that he is very much within the modernist tradition of creating grand meta-narratives that attempt to encompass and explain everything. Those of us who find themselves immersed in post-modernism are far more wary of making grand claims about religion — for instance, we’re wary of saying that we can incorporate other religious traditions into our own. Instead, from a postmodernist perspective, I might say that I am a post-Christian: acknowledging that I am very much in the Christian tradition, but recognizing that in a postmodern globalized world we have to accept that we are influenced by other world religions; the difference being that we aren’t trying to co-opt those other religions, but rather to understand what impact they have on us.

So where does this leave us? I think we do have a religious center, which I’d call post-Christian. Other Christians might not accept us, but we know that we are in, and came out of, the Christian tradition. Looking back to our past, I think we started becoming post-Christian as early as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hosea Ballou, diverging from the Christian mainstream, rejected by them, and growing into something new. By claiming our place on the margins as our religious center, by engaging in “theological archaeology” to find out who we were and who we are, by avoiding the construction of grand metanarratives about who we might be — I think we could become a far more viable postmodern religious tradition.

What do you think?

Original post revised in light of Scott Wells’s comment.

God is in the argument

Today I have been reading in Introduction to World Religions, consulting the sections on African traditional religions for this week’s sermon. But while I was having tea this afternoon, I flipped to the section on Judaism, and read this:

The Talmud is at pains to blur any distinction between holy and profane. Even more striking is that it is not concerned with answers. It is far more concerned with the process of answering them. One of its most celebrated passages captures this tendency and is worth citing at length:

On that day, Rabbi Eliezer put forward all the arguments in the world, but the sages did not accept them. Finally, he said to them, ‘If the halakah is according to me, let that carob-tree prove it.’

He pointed to a nearby carobtree, which then moved from its place a hundred cubits. They said to him, ‘One cannot bring a proof from the moving of a carob-tree.’… [Two more miracles were performed by Rabbi Eliezer in a bid to have his argument accepted.]

Then said Rabbi Eliezer to the sages, ‘If the halakah is according to me, may a proof come from heaven.’ Then a heavenly voice went forth, and said, ‘What have you to do with Rabbi Eliezer? The halakah is according to him in every place.’

Then Rabbi Joshua rose up on his feet, and said, ‘It is not in the heavens….’ [Deuteronomy 30.12. Rabbi Joshua goes on to explain that since the Torah has already been given on Sinai, we do not need to pay attention to a heavenly voice.]

Rabbi Nathan met the prophet Elijah. He asked him, ‘What was the Holy One, blessed be he, doing in that hour?’

Said Elijah, ‘He was laughing, and saying, “My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.” ‘

Talmud, Bava Metsia 59B

In other words, God’s children are grown up enough to argue with him. For the rabbi it is even a responsibility. In this sense, the Talmud captures something essential not just of the historical period, but also of the ongoing life of Judaism: God is in the argument, and he [sic] may well be found in the delight of vigorous human discourse.

pp. 285-286, Introduction to World Religions, Christopher Partridge, general editor (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2005; U.S. edition of The New Lion Handbook: The World’s Religions, 3rd edition).

“God is in the argument.” I can agree with that, although I’d argue with the Talmud about the reason for agreeing: I don’t feel the need to accept that because the Torah was given at Mount Sinai, we can therefore ignore a heavenly voice; I’m happy simply to challenge the notion of God’s omniscience, and to advocate for the possibility that humanity has matured enough to be able to argue with God. Nor is saying “God is in the argument” sufficient; there’s more to religion, and humanity, and divinity, than argument. Nonetheless, I find myself convinced by the idea that God is in the argument.

If not belief then what?

Sometimes when people ask me if Unitarian Universalism is Christian, I’ll reply: No, it’s post-Christian. It’s a good way to describe us, partly because it’s so ill-defined, and let’s face it we are an ill-defined religious group. But recently I’ve been thinking that maybe I should start saying that Unitarian Universalism is a post-believing religion; not that we believe nothing, but that for us belief is not the way we define ourselves.

One of the books I’m reading at the moment is From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, by Shane J. D. Cohen (1987), part of the “Library of Early Christianity” published by Westminster John Knox. Cohen examines the side-by-side emergence of early Christianity and rabbinical Judaism. In a chapter titled “Sectarian and Normative,” Cohen writes:

Christianity is a creedal religion, and Christian sectarianism too is creedal. The vast majority of the sectarian debates of early Christianity centered on theological questions, especially the nature and interrelationship of the first two persons of the Trinity. Judaism, however, was not (and, in large measure, is not) a creedal religion. The ‘cutting edge’ of ancient Jewish sectarianism was not theology but law. Abundant evidence makes this point clear… [Cohen gives a number of examples]. All this material emphasizes the legal character of the debates among the sects and ignores or slights philosophical and theological matters. [p. 128]

Obviously, we Unitarian Universalists are not concerned with correct behavior in terms of laws set forth by religious authorities (thus our ministers do not have to learn some Unitarian Universalist equivalent of the Mishnah and Talmud, a body of law). As a non-creedal religion — as post-Christian religion — Unitarian Universalism certainly doesn’t concern itself much with correct belief.

Indeed, as someone who grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, I find that I have basically no interest in knowing what someone merely believes;I want to know who they are as a religious person including where they fit into a covenantal community. I find myself talking about theology a lot, but the branches of theology that interest me are ecclesiology (i.e., how people come into religious community together) and theological anthropology/sociology (i.e., who persons/peoples are religiously speaking).

Gandhi and prayer services

From Book of Prayers by Mohandas K. Gandhi, ed. John Strohmeier (Berkeley Hills Books, 1999), this passage in the introduction discusses why Gandhi took the time for daily worship:

Why, one might wonder, take the time to do all this [daily prayer services] in the middle of a revolution? Gandhi was not one to cling to empty forms. An answer may be found in the testimony of someone who observed Gandhi during one of those evening prayers. As you read it, bear in mind that the nineteen verses of the second chapter of the [Bhagavad] Gita, the description of the illumined man [sic], is widely regarded as the Sermon on the Mount of Hinduism:

“The sun had set when we got back [from his regular evening walk]. Hurricane lanterns were lit; Gandhi settled down at the base of a neem tree as ashramites and the rest of us huddled in Some hymns were sung, then Gandhi’s secretary began reciting the second chapter of the… Bhagavad Gita. Then it happened.

“Not that I can describe it very easily. Gandhi’s eyes closed; his body went stock still; it seemed as though centuries had rolled away and I was seeing the Buddha in a living person. I was what we had almost forgotten was possible in the modern world: a man who had conquered himself to the extent that some force greater than a human being… moved through him and affected everyone.”

…Gandhi had the power to shake India, in part, because he drew on resources within himself that are not normally accessible. And that access happened, among other occasions, at the high point of these prayer meetings….

There is a tendency to think that meditation and action are opposties, that one chooses between one way of life or the other. But as the Bhagavad Gita insists, meditation and selfless action are inseparable. They are opposite sides of the same coin, as complementary as breathing in and breathing out….” [pp. 14-15]

While of course we might phrase this differently to fit the context of our Western religious tradition, it is still true that worship services in our tradition are not escapes from the world, but a way for us to change the world. Worship unleashes powers that can heal us and heal the world; and it is probably dangerous for us to ignore this point.

Thoughts about just war

Veteran’s Day is coming up tomorrow, and so this Sunday I decided to preach about the concept of just war as it pertains to religious liberals. That meant I wound up reading Thomas Aquinas on just war, from the Summa Theologica.

What particularly struck me was Thomas’s three criteria for just wars:

In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged…. And as the care of the common weal is committed to those who are in authority, it is their business to watch over the common weal of the city, kingdom or province subject to them. And just as it is lawful for them to have recourse to the sword in defending that common weal against internal disturbances, when they punish evil-doers, according to the words of the Apostle (Romans 13:4): “He beareth not the sword in vain: for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil”; so too, it is their business to have recourse to the sword of war in defending the common weal against external enemies. Hence it is said to those who are in authority (Psalm 81:4): “Rescue the poor: and deliver the needy out of the hand of the sinner”; and for this reason Augustine says (Contra Faust. xxii, 75): “The natural order conducive to peace among mortals demands that the power to declare and counsel war should be in the hands of those who hold the supreme authority.”

Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. Wherefore Augustine says (QQ. in Hept., qu. x, super Jos.): “A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.”

Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil. Hence Augustine says (De Verb. Dom.): “True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.” For it may happen that the war is declared by the legitimate authority, and for a just cause, and yet be rendered unlawful through a wicked intention. Hence Augustine says (Contra Faust. xxii, 74): “The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war.”

It’s amazing how current each of these three criteria sounds. I have heard variations of all three used in the ongoing debate about whether or not the Iraq war is a just war. The interesting question in my mind is to what extent can religious liberals feel comfortable with Thomas Aquinas’s thinking, especially given how much he relies on appeals to scriptural and ecclesiastical authorities (which is not really our cup of tea). No answers to that question, but it seems to be leading me in interesting directions….

Still relevant

I’ve been reading a two hundred year old book this afternoon, and I keep finding passages that sound as fresh and reasonable and relevant today as they must have sounded back in 1805. Here’s one such passage, which still sounds relevant after all these years:

The origin of sin has, among Christians in general, been very easily accounted for; but in a way, I must confess, that never gave me any satisfaction, since I came to think for myself on subjects of this nature. A short chimerical story of the bard, Milton, has given perfect satisfaction to millions, respecting the introduction of moral evil into the moral system which we occupy….

This passage comes from one of the founding documents of Universalism, Hosea Ballou’s Treatise on Atonement. And, sadly, two hundred years after Ballou wrote this passage, the bad theology of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” remains deeply ingrained in our culture. If you’re a religious liberal in 2005, you inevitably wind up having conversations with people who are quite convinced that Milton’s account of evil is, in fact, the only and correct account — even though you know perfectly well that while Milton’s book is great literature, it is not good theology. So, religious liberals, it is worth your while to review Ballou’s scathing and hilarious review of Milton’s book at the beginning of the second chapter of the Treatise on Atonement,which concludes with Ballou saying:

So, after all our journeying to heaven after a sinning angel, and after pursuing him to hell, and from hell to earth, we have not yet answered the question, viz., What is the origin of sin? We have only shown, that the way in which this question has been generally solved, is without foundation.

I’ll be talking more on this subject in my sermon this Sunday, so come on down and find out more.

Good and evil

As I was writing this week’s sermon, I found myself thinking yet again about the strange, strange story of the Garden of Eden. I came across a passage in Elaine Pagels’s book, The Origin of Satan, where she tells about an anonymous early Christian author who wrote a book called “Testimony of Truth.” This anonymous author also tried to make sense out of the Garden of Eden story, and wound up by saying the character of God must really be the evil one in the story — after all, God lies to Adam and Eve (by telling them they would die if they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), and is vindictive and mean-spirited. No, said this anonymous author, the real hero of the story is the Serpent, who (believe it or not) is actually Christ!

I don’t buy the bit about the serpent. But let’s face it, God behaves in a less than exemplary fashion in this story. I like to retell the Garden of Eden as an existentialist parable with Eve as the protagonist: Eve has to make a decision in an absurd universe — she makes the best choice she can, a choice that turns out to have unforeseen consequences — and her choice shapes the rest of her life. No original sin, just an existential choice in the face of absurdity.

In this story and elsewhere, I feel the Bible matches both Camus and Sartre as a source for good existentialist philosophy. Take Ecclesiastes — how existentialist can you get? And if you’ve gone beyond existentialism to postmodernism, the confusing figure of Jesus is just whimsical enough, and just engaged enough, to suit.

That’s the lovely thing about being a heterdoxical heretic who doesn’t give a tinker’s dam for creeds and dogma — when that’s your attitude, you can read the Bible as a source of spiritual inspiration suitable for this very moment. And as Elaine Pagels points out, people have been doing this right along.