Chalice Art by Selma Blackburn
THE REV. BOB KLEIN
Unitarian Universalist Church of Little Rock January 30, 2005
THE HEART, MIND, AND SOUL OF UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISM
A look at the influences shaping our movement and the ways that our roots help to secure our future while also challenging us to make more noise in the world
One of the real challenges of Unitarian Universalism is remembering our roots. With our welcoming of humanists, atheists, agnostics, pagans, gays, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, and virtually anyone else of good will who wants to be part of our movement, it may be far from obvious that we grew out of Christianity. As much as many of us may oppose the teachings of fundamentalist Christian evangelists, we share common origins through the early followers of Jesus. Our forebears early on struck out in two directions that ended up being called heretical, but the beginnings of our faith were in the teachings of and about Jesus. Early Unitarian Christians did not accept the Third Century Trinitarian formula making Jesus equal to God. Universalist Christians got in trouble for believing that all persons would be reunited with God, thus denying the existence of an eternal hell. Both beliefs were voted heretical in the early centuries of Christianity, but both persisted as minority positions, persecuted but not eradicated.
The modern history of Unitarianism begins with Michael Servetus. He felt the injustice of Muslims and others being killed by the Spanish Inquisition because they did not accept the doctrine of the Trinity. His study of scriptures convinced him that Trinitarianism has no base in scripture. Servetus wrote, “On the Errors of the Trinity,” challenging Catholic views. He was condemned by the Inquisition, and then after hiding for many years and beginning a correspondence with Calvin, was actually burned at the stake by Calvin’s order in Geneva. His quest to reopen the question of the Trinity helped to inspire Laelius and Faustus Socinus, Georgio Biandrata, and Francis David, who explored and helped promote a Unitarian perspective in the 16th Century in Poland and Transylvania. Under the influence of Biandrata and David, Unitarian King John Sigismund of Transylvania welcomed not only Unitarians but promoted tolerance of other faiths.
In England, Unitarian views grew within the dissenters churches, though practitioners were persecuted for decades. In 1774, Theophilus Lindsey opened the Essex Street Chapel in London as the first congregation dedicated to a Unitarian perspective in the English speaking world. Ben Franklin often visited Essex Street Chapel when he was in London. Later Joseph Priestly, discoverer of Oxygen, became the most prominent Unitarian minister in England, before his laboratory, house, and church were torched in 1791. Three years later, Priestly decided to move to America and settled near Philadelphia where he founded a Unitarian church.
In the United States, Unitarianism was growing amidst the congregational churches in Boston. The first Unitarian Church in the U.S. was the formerly Anglican, King’s Chapel in Boston which followed their minister, James Freeman, in revising the Book of Common Prayer after he offered to resign due to his increasing discomfort with the doctrine of the Trinity. After the congregation ordained Freeman in 1787, it was expelled from the Anglican convention and became a Unitarian church.
The intellectual integrity of early Unitarians helped shape a movement which highly valued learning and the toleration of individual’s religious thought. During the 1800’s Unitarians grappled with matters of slavery, war, and various moral and ethical issues. The movement also began to establish itself as a religious institution. Theologically, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, and Ralph Waldo Emerson each left significant marks on the growing movement. (I apologize for the sexism inherent in the quotations which follow.) In “Unitarian Christianity,” his famous Ordination sermon for Jared Sparks in Baltimore in May 1819, Channing addressed the differences already existing between Unitarians and other Christians.
We are particularly accused of making an unwarranted use of reason in the interpretation of Scripture. We are said to exalt reason above revelation, to prefer our own wisdom to God’s….Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books. (Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism, Conrad Wright…p.49)
Channing and other 19th Century Unitarians were much in sympathy with the attempts of German academic theologians to bring scientific approaches into the study of the scriptures. Since the time of Servetus, Unitarians had resisted accepting doctrines, dogmas, or religious theories standing without both scriptural and rational support. Channing clearly considered himself a Unitarian Christian, yet his commitment to rationality foreshadows the development of Unitarianism later in his century as well as the next. Channing also called for tolerance of the beliefs of others, again in the language of his time and his Christian Unitarianism.
We can hardly conceive of a plainer obligation on beings of our frail and fallible nature, who are instructed in the duty of candid judgment, than to abstain from condemning men of apparent conscientiousness and sincerity, who are chargeable with no crime but that of differing from us in the interpretation of the Scriptures, and differing, too, on topics of great and acknowledged obscurity. We are astonished at the hardihood of those, who, with Christ’s warnings sounding in their ears, take on them the responsibility of making creeds for his church, and cast out professors of virtuous lives for imagined errors, for the guilt of thinking for themselves. (Three Prophets…p. 84)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, also an ordained Unitarian minister, who served the parish briefly before devoting his time and energy completely to the lecture circuit is probably the most famous of the Transcendentalists, who found truths of religion and morality in immediate intuitions of the divine (Three Prophets…p. 23) Emerson’s address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School in 1838 illustrated well the break he was making with the churches of his day. A few excerpts of that address:
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. (Three Prophets…p. 92)
This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and successively creates all forms of worship. The principles of veneration never die out. Man fallen into superstition, into sensuality, is never quite without the visions of the moral sentiment. In like manner, all the expressions of this sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity….This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental genius, its divine impulses. (Three Prophets….p. 95)
That Emerson mentioned Persia, India, and China is an indication of the breadth of his own studies as well as the world-mindedness that was beginning to be expressed within Unitarianism during the 19th Century. That Emerson’s religion was based more in every individual than in the revelatory aspect of scripture was perhaps also related to the opening of religious awareness beyond the Judeo-Christian experience. Whereas Channing remained a Unitarian Christian, Emerson grew ever more interested in morals, ethics, and natural religion.
Theodore Parker, also influenced strongly by Transcendentalism, remained an active Unitarian minister, if often an outcast among his colleagues. Parker, like Channing, considered himself clearly a Christian Unitarian, though his ideas, too, helped expand the worldview of the movement. In his classic sermon, The Transient and Permanent in Christianity, at the Ordination of Charles C. Shackford in South Boston in May 1841, Parker laid out his views.
Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure, Religion; the love of man; the love of God acting without let or hindrance…. The only form it demands is a divine life; doing the best thing, in the best way, from the highest motives; perfect obedience to the great law of God. (Three Prophets…p. 140)
…while one generation of opinions passes away, and another rises up; Christianity itself, that pure Religion, which exists eternal in the constitution of the soul and the mind of God, is always the same. The Word that was before Abraham, in the very beginning, will not change, for that word is Truth. From this Jesus subtracted nothing; to this he added nothing. (Three Prophets… p. 139)
Parker believed that the core message of Christianity, which we might expand to include all true religion, is too often obscured by its particular transient manifestations. Parker wrote of the call to forgiveness, humility, reverence, and charity coming from the core of the tradition. Though few of us claim Christianity, would we expect less from a true expression of Unitarian Universalist principles?
And lest we ignore the Universalist side of our tradition, I should mention that Universalism, too had a significant message for the United States. An English Methodist lay preacher, John Murray, had become convinced of the Universalist position after visiting James Relly who had influenced one of Murray’s parishioners toward Universalism. Murray, suffering the death of his wife and a child and being cast into debtor’s prison, determined in 1770 to come to the New World. Though having decided never again to preach, he was convinced to offer one sermon in Thomas Potter’s chapel after the ship was becalmed off Barnegat’s Light, New Jersey. Miraculously the wind returned after Murray preached, and he became the great evangelist of Universalism on the East Coast. In 1774, Murray settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the first Universalist church in North America dedicated its first building in 1780.
By 1793 there were many Universalist congregations and ministers and the New England Universalist Convention was organized. In 1805, Hosea Ballou, a self-educated Universalist preacher, published A TREATISE ON ATONEMENT, which laid out the Universalist theology but also denied the Trinity. Over the following decade, as Ballou’s ideas spread, American Universalism became Unitarian in view. Through the 1800’s, Universalism became a significant movement, growing to be the 6th largest denomination in the US with perhaps 600,000 members. Universalists had struggled with social issues from their point of organization in 1790, for though they believed all souls would eventually reunite with God, they also believed in human responsibility in righting the wrongs in society. In 1863, the Universalists ordained Olympia Brown and Augusta Chapin as the first fully credentialed women in ministry.
By the beginning of the 20th Century, other denominations had become practically if not officially universalist, and the uniqueness of universalism was lost. Also by the early 20th Century, Universalists were becoming more and more aware of the world and the wisdom, truth, and beauty of other religions.
Through the 20th Century, both Unitarians and Universalists struggled with the breakdown of society and various injustices. Both movements were recognizing that Christianity had become too narrow to address the needs of the future. The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 was signed by many Unitarian ministers and one Universalist minister. Both movements were discovering wisdom in the vast array of religions of earth while distancing themselves from the parochialism of traditional Christianity. The merger in 1961 merely acknowledged that the strands of religious liberalism which had grown out of Christianity had recognized the benefits of uniting even in the face of the diversity of opinions each represented. Since the history within four decades of Unitarian Universalism is better known than much of the earlier history, I will not dwell on the recent past, but conclude with some questions for the future of our movement.
As we struggle with concerns such as institutional racism and classicism in a very white middle to upper class religious movement, how will Unitarian tolerance and Universalist understandings of the shared end of humanity help us express a message that is inviting, even compelling to a broad spectrum of people in an ever more diverse world?
As we seek to address the injustices within U.S. society and the impact of the U.S. around the globe, how shall we seek to live out the toleration that King John Sigismund once offered to practitioners of other religions? As we struggle to regain our national balance after the Terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, will our historical understandings help us to create opportunities for dialogue between Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others which can then help in efforts to create a world with enough for all? Many of us are deeply committed to the effort to seek peace, while others would accept continued warfare to bring justice. Can we continue to respect each other as part of a religious community?
Can Unitarian Universalism become a truly global religion on the basis of our historical growth beyond Christianity, our commitment to the inherent worth of each human person, and our discovery of the value of the many religious traditions of earth? Is it part of our calling as Unitarian Universalists to try to become a movement that can really make a difference around the world?
In the call of Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves, lies a challenge raised in many voices by prophets and teachers in every age. The shapers of American Unitarianism and Universalism were advocates of morality, tolerance, justice, and compassion. Neither dogma nor doctrine confine our movement. The Principles and Purposes, ever subject to further development, stand as a challenge to us to practice the best that humans may offer, to seek justice and community, to seek to understand ourselves within the entire cosmos, to value each person and the good in every belief system, in short to do the best that we can do in this and every moment.
We stand on the shoulders of great women and men who have built this movement. Now it is our turn to stand up and make a difference in the world, to love and accept, to challenge injustice, to create opportunities for hope to triumph even in this troubled time. It is our turn to seek the best, the highest, the most true expressions of religion in this instant and in the future. In our congregations, our district gatherings, and in our General Assembly, we have the opportunity to continue shaping a religion which will aid the building of a better and more just world. From our roots in primitive Christianity and the religious dialogues of Boston, we stand uniquely poised to call for justice and compassion in the continuing journey toward religious truth. May our individual journeys and our shared community be a light to the world which is never hidden but always available to inspire a brighter future!
Shalom, Salaam, Blessed Be, and Amen!