Personal Theology: Unitarian Universalism, Why It Matters

It was an interesting coincidence. Last Spring, as Martha invited me to take another swing at a Personal Theology presentation in the fall, we received notice that today would be Association Sunday. The Unitarian Universalist Association, through which we are affiliated with more than a thousand other congregations, was inviting us to take note and celebrate what we do together.

We are pleased to welcome to the pulpit in the 11:00 service, the Rev. Stephan Papa, Special Assistant to UUA President Bill Sinkford, for this Association Sunday.

I have always thought of these Personal Theology presentations as an opportunity to reflect on and articulate some aspect of my “personal” theological position. With the conjunction of this opportunity and Association Sunday I’ve decided to offer you some of my reflections on the state of liberal religious theology, where we are and where we may be going.

My intent is to limit these reflections to a bit of historical grounding and to discuss four characteristics that have been at the core of liberal theology for 200 years, name some challenges we face, and pose some thoughts for the future.

This being “personal” theology, I need to name my own grounding, having grown up in a Unitarian church, and learning of Universalism, in any depth, only as part of my theological studies in preparation for the ministry.

So, I begin an American Unitarian. What does that mean, theologically? If we consider religion to be the search for, creation and celebration of meaning in life, highlighting the experience of meaning, we can consider theology as the systematic reflection on religion. This broad meaning takes theology beyond its beginnings in the Judeo-Christian tradition as pointedly the study of God, or the Divine, and grounds it in the human longing for a sense of purpose, or a reason for being.

Beginning an American Unitarian means that the theological grounding I have is rooted in the evolution of liberal religious thought within the congregations of New England that led, in the early 1800s, to the founding of Unitarianism in America. We look back to William Ellery Channing’s 1819 sermon, Unitarian Christianity, as the formal beginning.

Channing, and all those liberal Christian ministers of the time, were responding with a new vision to the Calvinism of New England Puritanism, with its focus on the inherent sinfulness of humankind. This new vision was formed out of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, and stressed the moral capacity of human beings, the use of reason, and the exercise of free will.

They viewed God as a loving being, interested in the formation of character and the use of conscience. God gave humans the capacity to reason for a reason — to use it! — and that has led us down the theological path from non-creedalism to pluralism.

Along the way, we Unitarians expanded into Transcendentalism, Free Religion, Humanism, Social Gospel, Existentialism, Process Theology, Atheism, Liberation Theology, Feminism, Earth Centered Spirituality, not to mention Universalism, and probably many more!

Paul Rasor, a Unitarian Universalist minister with a PhD in Theology is Director of the Center for the Study of Religious Freedom and professor of interdisciplinary studies at Virginia Weslyan College. In his 2005 book, Faith Without Certainty, he states:∥

“Liberal theology is characterized by commitments to free and open intellectual inquiry, to the autonomous authority of individual experience and reason, to the ethical dimensions of religion, and to making religion intellectually credible and socially relevant.” Liberal theology embraces a commitment to critical inquiry and intellectual freedom.

Channing and his contemporaries were greatly influenced toward their liberal perspective by the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose first book, in 1799, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, argued that theological aims must be consistent with other areas of human knowledge.

This included science, and there was no more important development than the publishing in 1859 of Unitarian Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species. Clear evidence was given for the errors of the Biblical account of the creation of the Earth in seven days six thousand years ago. The notion of “time” in human consciousness was in for a jolt, the ripples of which we continue to experience today.

By the beginning of the twentieth century many of the ideas of liberal religion were accepted by Mainline Protestant churches. The idea of a God whose love could be extended through human effort created the Social Gospel Movement, and the optimism that was at the heart of liberal theology led to the spread of the Unitarian notion of progress, onward and upward forever. This period is sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of liberal theology.

The first half of the twentieth century brought two world wars, economic depression, and the holocaust, to name a few of the cataclysmic upheavals in our Western understanding of humanity. Liberal theological assertions such as the goodness of all people, the perfectibility of humanity, and the certain course of progress lost their grounding in the immensity of suffering humans inflicted upon one another. The religions of fear gathered fuel and kindled the flames of the McCarthy era. Their influence grew steadily through the remainder of the century, flexing their political muscle in a take-over of Congress and, at the turn of the century, the election of our current President.

In this crisis period for liberal theology “neo-orthodoxy” emerged, with the claim that the liberal understanding of sin and evil was completely inadequate and the liberal tendency to locate God in human cultural movements was simply wrong. These neo-orthodox critics asserted God’s transcendent sovereignty and human beings as “fallen.”

Before we move to consider some of the major characteristics of liberal theology and what has happened to them in this two hundred year time span, we must note other significant developments in the last forty or so years. I’m thinking of the Civil Rights movement, of Women’s Liberation, Human Rights, Ecology, The Space Age, The Information Highway, The Global Community…and on and on…We live in a rapidly changing world with instantaneous communication and information overload!

Our theological reaction to all this change has been to embrace pluralism, and evolution, even more fully than before. Paul Rasor suggests, “The commitment to linking religious life to the modern world is perhaps the central characteristic of liberal theology…” ∥ We are not satisfied with a theology of abstractions. We want to understand religion in terms of how we live our lives. We experience life as constant change. Our theology must embrace this experience.

In this way we are true to our liberal religious forebears of more than two hundred years ago. This first characteristic of liberal theology is called “mediation,” or cultural adaptation.

In this sense, mediation means “that religious ideas are often adapted or restated in terms of the language and values of contemporary culture.”∥ Our liberal theology accommodates to natural science, social science, the arts, and other cultural sources. Just one example of this is, again, the impact of the theory of evolution on liberal theology. Within decades after Darwin published his time-bending book, Francis Ellingwood Abbott a Unitarian minister in tension with our Christian roots wrote Scientific Theism (1885) in which he recast theological categories in light of Darwinian theory.

In the twentieth century, Unitarian Henry Nelson Wieman (1884-1975), spoke of God as “creative interchange,” a power operating in the natural world. He came from a scientific orientation, grounded his theology in “empiricism” and understood its strength in being able to show and test its assertions in our everyday lives.

We find in this notion of mediation another element that affects our theology today. Adaptation suggests that everything is in relation to everything else, that we are in tension, with all elements affecting one another. Here are the roots of our current affirmation of the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, and the call for a theology that integrates the understandings of everything from microbiology to astrophysics.

Similarly, a second characteristic of liberal theology is what we can call “process” or “flow.” Everything is changing, whether slowly or rapidly. Nothing is ever finished. This is a characteristic of liberal theology from centuries ago, including in 1620, when the Rev. John Robinson preached to those Pilgrims leaving for the New World and implored them to remain open to new truth that may unfold before them. We talk about this characteristic of flow when we say “revelation is not sealed.” Or, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“Why should not we enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? The sun shines also today. There are new lands, new men (and women), new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and law and worship.”

Henry Nelson Wieman is considered a process theologian. His thought was rooted in Darwinian notions of time and change and evolution, and he called us to pay close attention to the processes of change in which we participate. Creative transformation toward the good requires our participation, and it suggests a third characteristic of liberal theology: Ethics.

Ethics have been a part of theological thought throughout the history of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Our liberal emphasis can best be understood in the context of the Calvinism out of which our New England religious ancestors emerged. Calvinism heralded the total depravity of the self, rooted in original sin, meaning humans lack any capacity to save themselves. Added to this was the notion of the “elect,” holding that a select few would be saved and that God had already determined who they would be.

Liberal theology offered a radically different understanding of human nature, based in a different understanding of God. Instead of a stern, judging figure, God was seen as benevolent and loving father. And, because humans are “made in the image of God,” we, likewise have benevolence at our core, and have freedom to choose the good.

“This positive view of human nature … led liberals to believe that the role of theology was not simply to articulate doctrine but to contribute to character formation and the development of the human potential for goodness.”∥

Development of moral character has been a goal of religious education from the early sermons of Channing to the Our Whole Lives sexuality curriculum we offer youth in our religious education program.

This concern with ethics is also the basis of all the reform efforts Unitarians, and Universalists have made from early abolitionists, organizers for women’s suffrage, reformers of prisons and hospitals, and educators to our current efforts for peace and marriage equality. The California Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry is ethics in action in the name of all Unitarian Universalists in this state.

These three characteristics: mediation or cultural adaptation, process or flow, and ethics are solid foundations for our liberal religious future. The fourth characteristic is more troublesome for us as we face the future. Let’s call it “autonomy.”

For it’s roots we can go back to seventeenth century French philosopher Rene Descartes, and his famous quote, “I think, therefore I am.” What a powerful idea this has been in shaping personal identity. I authenticate myself. I validate myself. It’s not a long step to Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” nor to our Unitarian Universalist Association principle of affirming the worth and dignity of every person.

And, what a powerful idea this has been in reforming religion in the West. Most religious traditions posit authority in a person, a pope or a guru, a scripture, like the Bible, religious tradition, or church doctrine. When we elevate the individual to the position of self-validation, when we say “follow your conscience in matters of religious belief,” we have done away with the need for any intermediary to interpret the meaning of our experience.

This freedom has been the foundation of liberal theology for two hundred years, and I wouldn’t want to give it up. It is to our religious life what the Bill of Rights and the Separation of Church and State are to our national life. It preserves our freedom. But, I would like to remind us of the context in which it grew to be our Unitarian Universalist foundation. It grew out of the covenanted community. The context was the congregation agreeing to be together in ways that would guarantee this freedom for everyone. As much as “autonomy” speaks of individual freedom it calls us to mutual commitment. It is not a plan for anarchy but an invitation to deep sharing.

It doesn’t say, go off in the woods and be religious, it says come in this sanctuary together to share your understandings, to respect one another, and to enter into a process of growing your soul, or your character.

I am concerned that in this rapidly changing world, when the generations of computers and software are measured in a few years, when you walk down the street and see so many people in their own world of headphone oblivion, when mobility means loss of relationships, that our imbalanced emphasis on individual freedom may be contributing to the problem.

We need to put our best thinking to how we can be together in ways that will build relationships, not win arguments. A member of the congregation gave me an article that quotes a member of the Blackfoot tribe. He says there is no word in languages like Blackfoot for “I” or “ego.” They start from community. Each person speaks a portion of the truth of the community. Each person’s perspective is valued. The tribal gathering is a circle in which each voice is heard.

What might we arch individualists, we who question any authority, learn from another vision of community? How might our lives be different if the filter through which we experienced life was the interconnectedness of us all? We do so well at telling our own stories. We practice that. We have classes to help us remember and name meaning for the turning points of our lives, we invite people to share their Personal Theology and, in the Sunday service, to share their story. How would it be different if we asked each other to share the story of another? How deeply, in how much detail, could we do so? And how much do we know about how one another would tell the story of this community?

I want us to learn better how to be other-authenticating, other-validating. I want us to balance our commitment to individual freedom of conscience with intentional action to create community. I want us to practice the skills of relationship, of active listening, being present, offering gratitude, appreciating difference. What might we gain if the locus of authority we invest with our deepest commitment included one another?

In this time when the global community shrinks daily through advances in transportation and communication, there has never been a greater need for human skills, rooted in our deepest commitments, to help us overcome the seeming boundaries of age and gender, skin color and affectional orientation, language and religious belief.

Our liberal religious theology must adapt again to the challenges of our times. Let us create understanding and skills in building and nurturing community.

The theme of Association Sunday is “Now Is the Time to Grow Our Faith:
in the goodness of life, in our way in religion,
in one another, in our Association,
and in the positive impact we can have on the world around us.

It’s a call to us to create a theology of community, of our interdependent web, that we might offer the world a clearer vision of a future inclusive of all.

On this Association Sunday, when we celebrate our connections with Unitarian Universalists across this continent, what new images of the divine might we express through our creativity?
 ♦