Category Archives: Theology

untitled

At his request, today I’m turning the blog over to my alter ego, Mr. Crankypants. While he is not my favorite person in the world, it’s really hard to turn down a request from your alter ego (just ask Dr. Jekyll). Without further ado, then, please welcome my alter ego, Mr. Crankypants….

Humanism. Theism. God doesn’t exist. God does exist. Mr. Crankypants is sooo bored by Unitarian Universalists who have endless debates about whether or not God exists. It is just too early-20th century. Yawn.

I mean, for pete’s sake, thirty years ago already William R. Jones pointed out that the real divide isn’t between theism and religious humanism. It’s between the religious right who blame everything on God, and those of us who actually take some personal responsibility for the world. Why, in his essay “Theism and Humanism: The Chasm Narrows,” Dr. Jones sounds even crankier than Mr. Crankypants:

“For these reasons [says Dr. Jones], I see the coming encounter and dialogue between humanism and theism not as the occasion for sour-tempered vendettas, but as another of those recurring interludes in the history of the race when the search for truth pits conscientious antagonists on the battleground of human thought. The issue is not who wins, but whether the combat enlarges our understanding of ourselves. And as future generations review the coming clash, the verdict may well be that the adversaries were, unknowingly, not-too-distant relatives.”

Although the bit about “conscientious antagonists” is a little too earnest for Mr. Crankypants, and “enlarges our understanding of ourselves” is a little too pious, he does love the phrase “sour-tempered vendettas.”

Not that Mr. Crankypants has anything against sour-tempered vendettas. No indeed! He engages in them on a daily basis. But he is mortally offended by boring sour-tempered vendettas like humanism vs. theism. Let’s focus our energies on fun and new sour-tempered vendettas — perhaps a pitched battle about the way Unitarian Universalists market themselves to the world. What’s that you say? How delightful! Something new to get cranky about!

Conflict and theology

My favorite branch of theology has become ecclesiology, which I define as the study of how congregations should work ideally, how they do work in reality, and how individual congregations cooperate together. I also contend that too many of us Unitarian Universalists reduce theology to ontological theology, or the study of the nature of ultimate reality (i.e., whether God exists or not, etc.) — which I actually find fairly pointless because no one ever seems to get anywhere with ontological theology. Ecclesiology, on the other hand, is something that you can actually experience, and observe, and experiment with.

More and more, I’ve been reading up on the sociology of congregations to try to gain some insight into how congregations work in reality. I don’t want to oversimplify, but one of the biggest realities in most congregations is conflict — conflict is a fact of life. I found a great resource online for understanding conflict in congregations — a concise summary of “Levels of Conflict” — Alban Institute’s model for conflict management in congregations.

If you haven’t run into this model before, click on that link above and scan the summary. If you have run into the model before, this is the best summary I’ve run across

Who should do theology?

Got a message from jfield of Left Coast Unitarian about doing Unitarian Universalist theology. He, too, thinks it is important, but in thinking about going and getting a degree in theology he finds himself less than enthusiastic.

Getting a doctorate isn’t the only way to do theology, I contend. I believe the person who had the most influence on Unitarian Universalist theology in the past century was… Sophia Fahs. Her excellent series of church school curriculum books helped to shape a theology of naturalistic theism that was also receptive to humanism. I was in church school a little past the height of the Sophia Fahs curriculum, but when I look at her books now, it’s clear how her curriculum books shaped me. Jesus the Carpenter’s Son helped me think of Jesus as a fully human political and religious thinker. The Church across the Street shaped my understanding of how I should relate to other faith traditions. Martin and Judy (which my mother taught when she taught Sunday school in the 50’s) has me seeing religion growing out of everyday experiences.

I might put Kenneth Patton second to Sophia Fahs in terms of theological influence. Patton was a humanist who believed in the power of symbols and liturgy. He developed exciting new ways of doing worship services without needing a reference to God, Goddess, C’thulhu, or whatever. You could argue that his experimentation with high-church humanism laid the groundwork for contemporary UU theology. His use of American folk tunes for hymns has, I believe, profoundly shaped the way we conceive of worship — after Kenneth Patton, we have to go beyond music composed by “dead white men” in the high Western tradition. If we would pay more attention, I think we’d see that Patton opened us to amazing possibilities in multiculturalism (even if his personal approach had a whiff of colonialism).

Oh, and forget trying to base theology on the “Seven Principles.” While Christian theologians do tend to ground their theology in interpretations of their sacred texts, the “Seven Principles” are excerpts from the UUA’s bylaws, and — alas — lack the poetry and human depth of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. The “Seven Principles” function fairly well as a profession of faith (thought I still prefer the old Universalist Winchester Profession for sheer poetry, even though I pretty much disagree with it) — but the “SevenPrinciples” are definitely not theology.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if one of the things keeping Unitarian Universalists from doing theology in our local congregations is that we make the false assumption that the “Seven Principles” are sufficient. They aren’t. They say “what,” but not “why” or “how” or “when.”

To answer the question in the title: Yes, Virginia, you should be doing theology, too.

Conversations at coffee hour

A few years ago, I heard Ruppert Lovely speak. He was the long-time minister at the Countryside Unitarian Universalist church in Palatine, Illinois. He said that he believed the main task of a minister was to do theology with his/her congregation. Other tasks of ministers are incidental to doing theology. This seems to imply that the main purpose of the congregation is also to do theology.

At coffee hour here at our own church this morning, I found myself involved in a number of theological conversations. People here like to talk theology. My guess is that that’s why many or most people stay with this church — so they can talk about the ultimate nature of reality and the meaning of life, what happens after death, what the nature of humanity is, what people ought to do with our lives, whether there is a transcendant reality — all those great theological questions.

So how about this statement: every part of church life should be shaped by theological questions. Why can’t that be true, too? Which would mean that committees should figure out the thological grounding of their work. Finance people should understand the theological nature of their work. The Board should shape overall policy of the church based on theological considerations. I’d even argue that we already do this much of the time in Geneva — our founding covenant, which we still say each week in worship services, and which we read at the beginning of Board and Council meetings, frames our work together in theological terms.

Since we’re Unitarian Universalists, someone is bound to argue with me and assert that theology is not at the center of church life. Admittedly, I would be surprised if were entirely correct about this. Nonetheless, I’ll bet I’m not too far from the truth (whatever truth is).

Voice from the past

I’ve been looking through old copies of our church’s newsletter, The Pioneer, dating back into the 1950’s. In June, 1962, Rev. Charles Lyttle, then minister here in Geneva, printed part of an old letter from Rev. R. L. Herbert, who had been minister in Geneva from 1874 to 1880. Rev. Herbert went off to serve in the Denver, Colorado Unitarian church, and in 1881 he wrote this to his former church in Geneva:

“And to all of you in that dear congregation I write again to say: Do your best to banish superstition. Be brave for truth at any cost. Do not bow to any fashionable lie; and chiefly, in thought and life, teach the nobility and excellency of good character. Prove by these fruits that you believe in the best doctrines. Then, every day, winter and summer, you will make to be Flower Sunday and this earthly life heavenly!”

[If you’re a UU history nut like me, it’s clear that Rev. Herbert was moving into humanist beliefs even at this early date. Herbert was the one who got our congregation to substitute the phrase “practical goodness” in our covenant, in place of the original “practical Godliness.”]

Belief, schmelief

Forget those beliefs, we do have a unifying theology.

I’ve decided I’m bored with the ongoing debate about whether Unitarian Universalists have a unifying theology or not. It bores me because all too often instead of getting into the really interesting areas of Unitarian Universalist theology, it winds up with someone declaring, “Well, I don’t believe there’s any unifying theology. I can believe whatever I want to believe in this church.”

Well — no. You can come up with counterexamples to disprove this last statement just as easily as I can. Obviously, we simply won’t tolerate outright sexist beliefs that proclaim men are superior to women. We have a low tolerance for charismatic authoritarian leaders who would control how we think and act. We would never require our young people to spend a year or two trying to convert people to Unitarian Universalism. If you want to believe these things, it will be easy to find you a church where you can believe ’em — but you can’t believe ’em in a UU church.

It is equally clear that we strongly affirm certain theological points. We strongly affirm insights of feminist theology, including that women are equal to men, that children are valuable, and that we are embodied beings. We affirm what William R. Jones has called the “functional ultimacy of humankind”; which is to say, whether or not we believe in God, we must act as if we have ultimate responsibility for our actions. We also remain strongly influenced by the insights of the social gospel movement of a hundred years ago, and we affirm that it is not enough for persons to try to save themselves, because in addition we all have a responsibility to save the world and make it a better place.

There you have three theologies which unify all us Unitarian Universalists: feminist theology, the functional ultimacy of humankind, and the theology of the social gospel. Bet we could come up with a few more, but that should be enough to get us started — and we do have to get started. All this boring bickering about beliefs is keeping us from acting out our theologies in the world.

How about that…

…a group of evangelicals has produced a new gender-inclusive Bible.

The bi-weekly magazine Christian Century continues to be my source of choice for news about liberal religion, particularly in the area of same-sex marriage, the intersection of politics and theology — and feminist theology.

In the most recent number (March 8, 2005), Christian Century reports that Zondervan, a publishing house with a bit of a tilt towards the evangelical side, has just issued a new version of the New International Version of the Bible (NIV), called Today’s New International Version (TNIV), which uses gender-inclusive language. Politely, Christian Century refrains from mentioning that the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation of the Bible, used by many liberal Christians, accomplished the same thing years ago. (Christian Century also refrains from mentioning that the allegedly liberal New York Times has stopped using gender-inclusive language, but I am happy to point that out.)

The report adds that “The TNIV text… was produced by an independent committe of evangelical schalors whose members are associated with institutions such as Wheaton Graduate School….” Those of us who live in and around Geneva know Wheaton College well, in part as the alma mater of Billy Graham, and in part as our near neighbor.

The old New International Version used to be the Bible I recommended to Unitarian Universalist youth and young adults who were interested in reading the Bible on their own. I always thought the NIV translation was clearer and less academic than the New Revised Standard Version. But a few years ago, I stopped recommending the NIV because it didn’t use gender-inclusive language.

So I’m one of the people who welcomes this new version of the Bible — and if a young Unitarian Universalist in your life decides he or she wants to read the Bible, it looks like the TNIV would be a good translation to recommend.

I can’t resist adding that our little church here in Geneva has been working on including women in positions of prominent leadership at least since 1893, when the church called its first woman minister. I also can’t help but wish for a gender-inclusive translation of the Bhagavad Gita, but maybe there is one out there that I haven’t found yet.

The power of Universalism

No doubt you’re already aware that this is a big year — the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Hosea Ballou’s monumental Treatise on Atonement, still the most influential of all books of Universalist theology. But you may not realize that Universalism still has the power to stir up quite a ruckus. Turns out two evangelical Quaker pastors from western Indiana, Philip Gulley and James Mulholland, published a book titled If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person back in 2003.

Just as happened with Hosea Ballou, Gulley and Mulholland’s thoughts on God’s love provoked lots of hate. Chuck Fager tells about the ruckus Gulley and Mulholland have raised in a review of their book in the online journal “Quaker Theology.”

I know you’ll want to read the whole article, but to whet your appetite, here are the opening paragraphs:

“Almost two hundred years ago, Hosea Ballou foretold what would befall two Quaker pastors in Indiana, Philip Gulley and his good friend James Mulholland, in 2002: ‘To profess universal salvation,’ Ballou wrote, ‘will subject some to excommunication from regular churches; others to the pain of being neglected by their neighbors; others to be violently opposed by their companions . . . and a man’s enemies will be those of his own house.’…

“Ballou wrote this about his own time, and the controversy generated by the ideas contained in his magnum opus, A Treatise on Atonement. In it Ballou, an early New England Universalist, made a case that Unitarian-Universalists [sic] today claim as one of their founding classics.

“That was in 1805. But Ballou’s words were indeed prophetic: Since Gulley and Mulholland put forth their work, all hell has broken loose in the Hoosier state….”

I’ve just ordered If Grace Is True, and their new book, If God Is Love, just out last year. Needless to say, I bought both books from the Seminary Coop Bookstore — thus supporting co-ops and independent booksellers!