Category: Theology

Theological unity — a conversation

On Thursday, January 31, Amy, the senior minister at our church, and I are going give a class on theological unity within Unitarian Universalism. We’re starting our class with an online conversation about the topic. And I’m going to begin my side of the conversation by listing five areas where I think Unitarian Universalists already have some degree of theological unity:

(1) Women and girls are as good as men and boys: During the 1970s and 1980s, Unitarian Universalism, like many liberal religious groups in the U.S., went through the feminist revolution in theology. We came out of those decades with a very clear theological consensus: when it comes to religion, women and girls are just as good as men and boys.

(2) Human beings must take responsibility for the state of the world: The Unitarian Universalist theologian William R. Jones has argued that humanists and liberal theists have come to resemble each other in that both affirm the radical freedom and autonomy of human beings (“Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows,” Christian Century, May 21, 1975, pp. 520-525). Today, we have a wide consensus that, whether or not we believe in God, none of us believes some larger power is going to come fix up our problems for us — if humans made the mess, it’s up to us to fix it.

Continue reading “Theological unity — a conversation”

Moral law

Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, offered an interesting statement yesterday in response to the mass murders at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a statement that reveals a coherent moral outlook. According to a report in the New York Times, LaPierre said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” He therefore proposed providing armed security guards in every school in the United States. The report goes on to quote LaPierre as saying

Now I can imagine the headlines — the shocking headlines you’ll print tomorrow…. More guns, you’ll claim, are the NRA’s answer to everything. Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word?

This is only a partial exposition of this particular moral outlook. Zane Grey, popular author of Western novels, gave a somewhat more complete exposition of this morla outlook in his 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage. Towards the end of the chapter titled “Faith and Unfaith,” the gunman Lassiter is explaining to the heroine Jane Withersteen why he must keep his guns:

“Blind — yes, an’ let me make it clear an’ simple to you,” Lassiter went on, his voice losing its tone of anger. “Take, for instance, that idea of yours last night when you wanted my guns. It was good an’ beautiful, an’ showed your heart — but — why, Jane, it was crazy. Mind I’m assumin’ that life to me is as sweet as to any other man. An’ to preserve that life is each man’s first an’ closest thought. Where would any man be on this border without guns? Where, especially, would Lassiter be? Well, I’d be under the sage with thousands of other men now livin’ an’ sure better men than me. Gun-packin’ in the West since the Civil War has growed into a kind of moral law. An’ out here on this border it’s the difference between a man an’ somethin’ not a man. Look what your takin’ Venters’s guns from him all but made him! Why, your churchmen carry guns. Tull has killed a man an’ drawed on others. Your Bishop has shot a half dozen men, an’ it wasn’t through prayers of his that they recovered. An’ to-day he’d have shot me if he’d been quick enough on the draw. Could I walk or ride down into Cottonwoods without my guns? This is a wild time, Jane Withersteen, this year of our Lord eighteen seventy- one.”

For the character Lassiter, to be a man (not “to be human,” but to be a man) means being able to protect yourself, and implicitly to be able to protect women and children. According to Lassiter’s character, the Civil War caused a kind of moral vacuum — the Civil War meant the destruction of a way of life, the triumph of Northern industrial might over the South’s emphasis on honor and duty. Even “churchmen” carry guns, and kill people, denying that Christianity can offer an alternative moral outlook that effectively competes with the moral outlook that requires a man to carry guns.

Packing a gun continues to be a “kind of moral law” in the United States today. I find it hard to name another moral law in U.S. society today that is as compelling to as many people as packing a gun. LaPierre knows that he isn’t going to convince those of us who hold to a different moral law; but he also knows that his moral law of packing a gun attracts more adherents than any other single moral law.

This clash between moral outlooks, between moral laws, is not going to be over in the near future. And at the moment, the moral law of packing a gun remains stronger than any other alternative.

Decomposition theology

Jack sent Carol and me a link to a wonderful article titled “What if God were a maggot?” which outlines a theology of decomposers:

“You can choose who seems holy to you, godlike, a god even, but I’ll take the bacteria and other decomposers. I’ll take the vultures standing on rooftops and fences, raising their angular wings as if in some unchoreographed tribute to Martha Graham. I’ll take the dung beetle. I’ll even take the maggot. Anybody can celebrate a monkey or a panda; they are easy gods, worthy of a simple sort of worship, one of fences and nature reserves. The decomposers are harder. They are everywhere and they need to be, without them nothing would be reborn. Without them we would all be, like the Australians of yore, knee deep in feces and bodies. Without decomposers even the plants would eventually stop growing. Some gods are clever, some gods are beautiful, some gods — it has been said but not proven — are even merciful. You can have those if you want. As for me, I’ll take the maggot and the vulture. I’ll take the bacteria. I’ll even take the catfish rolling in the shallow stink of Techiman’s market, the catfish whose groping mouth reaches up like the afterlife, that tunnel through which, as the poet Yusef Komunyakaa reminds us, we must pass to get to some other side.” (Rob Dunn, Scientific American blog, “What If God Were a Maggot?” 20 December 2012)

Back in October, I mentioned Carol’s notion of “compost theology” in this blog post. Decomposition theology is compost theology as seen from a biologist’s point of view, where you look at specific species or clades; by contrast, compost theology takes an ecologist’s point of view, where you look at processes, cycles, and interrelationships.

Whichever point of view you take, I see all this as related to Universalist theology. Classic Universalist theology asserts that every human will be saved, i.e., every human will got to heaven after death. Compost theology asserts that every organism gets saved, i.e., every organism will decompose after death and its constituent elements reabsorbed into the Web of Life — and, according to theologian Bernard Loomer, the Web of Life was what Jesus intended when he said “Kingdom of Heaven.”

This, by the way, argues against the theology of Richard Dawkins, who says that immortality is achieved by an organism’s genes (The Selfish Gene). Dawkins takes a taxonomist’s narrow point of view, in which clades or species are most important. Compost theology, by contrast, argues that cycles and ecological relationships are of equal or greater importance to genes. Dawkins is a fundamentalist: it’s all about genes! Whereas we compost theologians are mystics: all is one, everything is part of an ecological unity.

Trying to make sense

How do we make sense out of the recent school shootings?

The Unitarian side of our heritage gives us a strong belief that we can control our own destiny. Instead of assuming that God will bail us out of tough situations, we believe it’s up to us humans to make the world a better place. However, this belief seriously challenged by a senseless act of violence: for although the level of violence has been declining steadily in Western societies over the last few centuries, nevertheless horrific acts of violence still occur. We have less control over life than we’d like to believe.

The Universalist side of our heritage gives us a strong belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person (that’s what universal salvation was all about, that every human is worthy of be saved). But this belief is seriously challenged by mass murderers. Intellectually, we might be willing to assert that yes, even mass murderers have inherent worth and dignity, but emotionally we can’t help thinking that a mass murderer is not quite human, and neither worthy nor possessing dignity.

Another common theological resource we have for making sense of such senseless and horrific events is existentialism: the belief that the world is absurd and senseless, with no inherent meaning or purpose; that whatever meaning or purpose comes from the way we act in the face of life’s absurdities; and even if we do the right thing, our reasonable and moral actions might still lead to evil consequences. For some Unitarian Universalists, existentialism provides no comfort, since it challenges our belief in reason and our belief that we can have quite a bit of control over life. But many Unitarian Universalists over the past seventy or eighty years have appreciated existentialism as confirmation of their perceptions of the world: that it is an absurd world with no inherent meaning, and we do what we can to make meaning out of the absurdity. Continue reading “Trying to make sense”

Did God really say THAT?!

Chris Schriner has started writing a new blog titled “Did God Really Say THAT!? A Blog about the Bible.” Chris decided he wanted to take on Biblical literalism, so that’s what he’s writing about on his new blog. Chris is learned, funny, and provocative. He’s also a former psychotherapist, and a humanist who is sympathetic to theists. Who better to write such a blog? In his most recent posts, he’s been taking on capital punishment in the Bible, like the following words spoken by God in Exodus 20.15: “Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death.” Wait, did God really say that? If so, as Chris points out in one post, then there are going to be a lot of toddlers on death row.

So what are you waiting for? Go join the fun by clicking here.

Peace Pilgrim and universalism

Peace Pilgrim, the woman who achieved some small measure of renown for traveling “25,000 miles on foot for peace,” was a pacifist deeply rooted in Western religious traditions. Not surprisingly, she held a universalist theology (note the small “u”; I’m speaking of her theology, not implying she was a member of the Universalist denomination). In the collection of her writings, I find this brief response to a correspondent who asked her, “Do you believe there is both a heaven and a hell?”

Heaven and hell are states of being. Heaven is being in harmony with God’s will; hell is being out of harmony with God’s will. You can be in either state on either side of life. There is no permanent hell. — Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, 5th compact edition (Shelton, Conn.: Friends of Peace Pilgrim, 2003), p. 150.

In the first two sentences, Peace Pilgrim expresses sentiments that can be found in such classic Universalist writers as Hosea Ballou; really, this is a notion that extends back in Western thinking at least to Plato.

The third sentence is at odds with Ballou’s Universalism; for Ballou, God’s power is such that you get saved and put in heaven after death whether you want to be there or not, whether you’re worthy of it or not. By contrast, for Peace Pilgrim your freedom of will continues after death, and remains strong enough to go out of harmony with God’s will. In a sense, Peace Pilgrim is somewhat like the Restorationist Universalists who allow for a time of punishment after death; at least, insofar as moving oneself out of harmony with God can be considered a form of punishment.

The final sentence is a clear statement of universalist theology: “There is no permanent hell.” Whatever denomination they may belong to, universalists all affirm this truth.

An obvious point

An obvious point, but one worth making:

Traditional Christianity, which still dominates the United States, sets up a hierarchy of worth among human beings: all humans may be ultimately equal in the sight of God, but those who will be saved upon dying (sometimes phrased differently: those who accept Jesus as their personal savior, those who are Christians, etc.) will go to heaven and everyone else will not. The humans who get to go to heaven thus feel that they are more equal than the rest of us. There’s a good name for this theological viewpoint: it is called the “limitarian” viewpoint because the number of humans who get to go to heaven is limited.

Traditional Universalism, by contrast, leads us to a radically egalitarian viewpoint: all humans will be saved, all humans will go heaven upon dying. The conversion experience for traditional Universalists is not an experience of relief (“Whew, now I’m one of the ones who gets to go to heaven!”); the Universalist conversion experience is an experience of happiness upon knowing that we all get to go to heaven (“Wow, now I realize that we’re all worthy of God’s love!”).

The humanist and non-theistic Universalists may be somewhat less cheerful than the traditional Universalists, because the humanist and non-theistic Universalists don’t say that everyone is going to go to heaven; there is however a very cheerful humanist or non-theistic Universalism which rejoices in knowing that one’s body will return to the ecosystem and remain a part of the web of life. I like the term “compost theology,” coined by my partner Carol, for this theological position. (Since some traditional Universalists feel comfortable with Bernard Loomer’s contention that when Jesus preached about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, he meant the web of life, these traditional Universalists find substantial common ground with the compost theologians.)

But the obvious point here is that all Universalists — humanist Universalists, traditional Universalists, compost Universalists — come down on the side of a more radical egalitarianism than the vast majority of U.S. Christians. (This may be what really annoys U.S. Christians about us Universalists: they like to think they’re better than we are, and we’re so very sure that they are not.)

William R. Jones in 1975

I discovered an article on William R. Jones from a 1975 Grinnell College newspaper. The views attributed to Jones in the article correspond closely to some of his writings from the early 1970s, including the book Is God a White Racist? and the essay “Humanism and Theism: The Chasm Narrows.” But the article is still worth reading for two quotations, both of which sound like they accurately report Jones’s thoughts: “Humanism does not require the death of God. All it requires is the affirmation of human freedom” and “The humanist does not regard the Christian God as ultimate reality, but he does not disregard ultimate reality.” I wish some scholar would go through Jones’s papers to see if the texts of the two lectures reported in the article are still extant; I find the first quotation particularly interesting, and would like to be sure of its accuracy.

The text of the article follows: Continue reading “William R. Jones in 1975”

Calvinism and the American League East

The Red Sox are in the cellar, sixteen and a half games behind Baltimore and the hated Yankees, who are tied for first in the division. The Sox are so bad that when manager Bobby Valentine was asked where the team could use help, he replied:

Are you kidding? This is the weakest roster we’ve ever had in September in the history of baseball. It could use help everywhere.

The Red Sox are obviously the virtuous team; so why have they been relegated to last place in their division? It is because of Calvinism: according to Calvinism, God does not choose the Elect based on any actual merit they may have. As this Web site on Calvinism puts it, “chooses the elect according to the kind intention of His will (Eph. 1:4-8; Rom. 9:11) without any consideration of merit within the individual.” The Yankees are in first place, not because of any merit they may have, but simply because God put them there.

No wonder I’m a Universalist.

Hmm, why do we…

So why do Unitarian Universalists do social justice work? In other words, what’s our religious reason for trying to improve the world?

I know my own personal reasons for doing social justice work. My reasons come partly from classic Universalism: we don’t have do worry about whether or not we’re going to heaven, but it is our job to make this present world a better world. I have updated classic Universalism with Bernard Loomer’s naturalistic interpretation of the teachings of Jesus: Jesus had a vision of the “kingdom of God,” which Loomer defines as an egalitarian interdependent web of existence in which all persons are valued, and in which no person shall go hungry, and this “kingdom of God” is the highest value towards which we can strive (note that Loomer was the one who introduced the phrase “web of existence” to Unitarian Universalists, which he identified with the kingdom of God). Thus I do social justice work to try to bring about what Jesus called the “kingdom of God,” where “God” is understood in an egalitarian, naturalistic way.

But people like me who rely upon Universalism and Jesus are definitely in the minority. What is the religious grounding for other Unitarian Universalists doing social justice? And pointing to the “seven principles” is not a sufficient answer — just because we voted to include the seven principles in the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1986 doesn’t tell me why we included them in the bylaws (e.g., I would argue that we included the seventh principle on the basis of Loomer’s understanding of Jesus).

I want to know why we do social justice. What’s your reason why?