Unitarian-Universalism: A Faith that Shines

by Linda A. Dove
January 18, 2015

Introduction

I grew up in the Anglican Church. For me, its doctrines were a source of puzzlement, skepticism, and anguish—about my sin—my inability to have faith. Finally, I rejected Christianity. And, with the baby, I threw out the bath-water; I turned away from all religion. How many of you had similar experience?

In my 30’s I began to search again. I felt that “holy longing” to understand life’s mysteries. I wanted meaning and purpose; a faith in something larger than myself. By that time I was agnostic, unwilling to throw God right out of the water, but unwilling also to embrace a divinity I was unable to touch, see, hear or talk with. How many of you resonate with this?

My Purpose Today

Now, I’ve been a Unitarian-Universalist for only five years. Quite a few of you are also new UUs. How many of us are fully aware of where our UU faith comes from? I’ll try fill us in with a little bit of our complex origins—the Christian ones—today. And then I hope to encourage us all, both old and new members, to deepen our own understanding and then not to hold back about what our liberal faith stands for. Speaking out takes courage in a conservative, church-going area like the Valley.

Why do we sometimes hold back? An obvious reason is we don’t want to be lumped together with religious theologies like Christianity, Islam or Judaism that we rejected. Many of you tell me UUism attracted you because of fellowship in a like-minded community that is NOT one of these religions.

A second reason is our dis-ease with organized religion. George Marshall said it all in The Challenge of a Liberal Faith (1970). I quote. “The formation of the UU Churches…will always be a challenge because we are trying to create a religious establishment for the unestablished, to build an organization for the anti-organization person, to maintain a church for free spirits and free thinkers.”

And a third reason for our discomfort? We don’t have what many Christian denominations profess:

• creeds that summarize what the faithful must accept as religious truth;

• doctrines that prescribe the authorized religious texts; and

• liturgies to which the faithful must conform.

For instance, today, the U.S.Catholic Bishops’ Conference prescribes a catechism as follows: “God the Father is the divine person of the Most Holy Trinity”… and “the creator of heaven and earth”.… (no. 198). We may interpret this as poetry, but Church congregations must trust it is the truth: God exists and “his” nature is as described. It’s a because-I-say-so theology.

But What do We Have Faith in?

Compare this certainty with what the UU Association affirms. “Welcome to Unitarian-Universalism. We are brave, curious, and compassionate thinkers and doers. We are diverse in faith, ethnicity, history and spirituality, but aligned in our desire to practice our faith in tangible ways. We are believers in what is good, what is right, and what is just.”

Christians might well be puzzled: “UUs seem like decent, friendly people who want to do good but this doesn’t really tell us what they have faith in.

The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) states only that UUs welcome anyone who identifies with (and I’m quoting) “Atheism and Agnosticism, Buddhism, Christianity, Humanism, Judaism, Earth-Centered Traditions, Hinduism, and Islam.” How confusing. These religions differ in theology, their faith in God, or many Gods, or no God, and the nature of divinity and of humanity. So, people say, what do UUs believe—everything or nothing?

Reading 563. A Person will Worship Something.

So how to explain to people about where UU faith comes from and what it is today?. Today, I’ll deal only with how it comes out of Christian theologies, not others. And I’ll simplify horribly because time is short.

We UUs say we do not prescribe for our members. We avoid catechisms and doctrines. Our liturgies are varied and flexible.

UU Seeds in Christian Theological Disputes

Now, until the 1500’s, our Christian forebears did not question that God exists. Today, however, some UUs have faith there’s a God, some deny there’s a God, some sit on the fence, and some wait and see.

So how is UUism founded on faith? Let’s take Jesus as our example. Harvey Cox, in his The Future of Faith, 2009, looks at faith in Jesus and belief in creeds and doctrines. They are different. Cox found in the early Christian texts in Aramaic and Greek that the early Christians had faith in the living Jesus. If you’d asked them what their faith was, they would have said they admired Jesus as their leader, trusted his love for them, had confidence that he would keep his word, do what he said he would do, and modeled for them how to live a good life. Jesus asked them to have faith in themselves, to work for a better future for the world, not wait for an after-life.

As it grew strong in Europe, the Catholic Church changed all this. From the Roman era through 1,200 years till the Reformation in the 1500’s, the Church mandated that the choice for Christians was to profess belief in Church creeds and doctrines (all in Latin) and then they would gor in an after-life to eternal heaven or they could be unbelievers and be damned as sinners to eternal Hell in an after-life. The Church taught belief in a divine Jesus, a being unrecognizable to early Christians. Today, some of us, particularly in Christian Universalist Churches, continue to have faith in the divinity of Jesus, however they interpret divinity. Most other UUs, though, limit their faith to his example as a great human being.

One Seed of Unitarianism

One seed of today’s Unitarianism was sown on the battlefield of 3rd. century theological warfare. An example. The Church adopted the Nicene Creed with its doctrine of the Trinity—God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—a three-in-one God. The scholar, Arius, searched first century texts and found no mention of the Trinity. So he claimed that God was one. At that time, the Catholic Trinitarians won the battle and our Unitarian forerunners went underground as heretics. One thousand years later, they raised their heads from the trenches when the rise of Protestantism weakened the Church’s monopoly power over faith. Eventually, the “heretic” leaders fled from persecution to Transylvania. It was there they first became known as Unitarians, the One-God Church.

Seeds of Universalism

One seed of today’s Universalism was fertilized with the blood of another theological battlefield. One of their heresies rejected the doctrine that humans are original sinners whom God saves or restores if they profess faith in Church doctrines. God sends them to heaven in an after-life, while he sends faithless sinners to Hell. (The Church subsequently acknowledged Purgatory as a halfway house with term-limits for minor, but faithful, offenders).

The forerunners of Universalist faith also led the charge against Church dictates about what God is like. They said that God as our creator has to be loving and compassionate, not vengeful against his own creatures. They would have liked what Dr. Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist minister in the 1920s, remarked. If we see God as a model for our own lives, it’s better for humans to believe in no God than to believe in a vengeful, cruel, merciless God.

Shared Seeds of UUism

These UU forerunners also fought against the Church’s doctrine of predestination and waved the flag for free will, free thought and expression, personal liberty, and individual responsibility. Their leaders fled western Europe and founded Christian churches in liberal Transylvania and Poland that were tolerant and inclusive. The movement later spread to Holland and England, and then to North America through European immigrants seeking freedom for their faith. Eventually, in the 1700s, some Christian churches here began to identify by name as Unitarian or Universalist.

Hymn 193. Our Faith is but a Single Gem.

Remember, before the 1700’s, the fledgling Unitarians and Universalists had faith in—did not question—the existence of God, the supernatural order, and the after-life. It was over the nature of God, an after-life and human destiny and duty, as dictated by the Christian establishment, that they rebelled.

Faith, Reason and Human Efficacy

Then the Age of Enlightenment shook the foundations of faith in God as defined by the Churches. Increased reliance on rationality, reasoning and empirical enquiry led people—at least more educated people—to ask a new question about the source of their faith. “Show us proof God even exists?” A little boy quoted by William James, the philosopher, was quite a diplomat. He said, “Faith is when you believe something that ain’t true”. This mature kid would have appreciated what Jerry Coyne, a biology professor of our day, quipped, “In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice”.

At this time atheists and agnostics began to come out—and Deists too—and many found spiritual sanctuary in the growing Universalist and Unitarian movements.

In the late-1700’s, the Universalist churches expanded a lot. From the 1850’s, the Unitarians prospered more. And for a century or more, Unitarians and Universalists fought each other over details of the same old theological battles I’ve outlined. But they also began to sense shared mission and values. And, interestingly, the word “secular” was first used in 1853s.

Then, in the late-1800’s Darwin’s evolutionary theory challenged the Churches and the Bible on God and Creation. Darwin showed that scientific observation and reasoning taught an alternative truth about creation. The Churches saw this as undermining faith . They cried scandal and blasphemy. Then, as the 1900’s dawned, social evolutionary theories—Social Darwinism—also developed. Humanist ideas spread too.

For the first time, congregations saw new possibilities for mankind to work for social progress, prosperity and peace for all, without waiting for God’s grace and intervention. This encouraged UUs to build on their earlier anti-slavery work. Now they had the faith in themselves to work, not for a heaven in after-life, but for a universal heaven in the here-and-now. The engagement of UUs today in social justice work worldwide began in big way in the civil rights movements—on behalf of blacks, the poor, women, persecuted religious groups, and later LGBTs and other minorities.

Reading 560, Commitment.

In 1961, nearly six decades ago the Unitarians and Universalists finally formed the Unitarian-Universalist Association (UUA), the joint organization we have today. Some Unitarian and Universalist Churches still operate separately. But, generally, we Us and Us united because we had so much in common—in care-giving, sense-making, and justice-seeking.

Dimensions of UU Faith Today

Today, most UUs do accept scientific knowledge and some also retain faith in a God because “he” or “she” fills gaps in knowledge that science has not yet filled—knowledge about the mysteries—creation, life, the universes. The late Christopher Hitchens in God is Not Great, 2011, and the biologist Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, 2006, are fierce modern critics of these stances that use God as a fall back when science fails. For Hitchens and Dawkins scientific rationality is the only path to truth.

But for many of us UUs, that’s only half of it. Some of us also have faith in our gut feelings, our intuition, or Emerson’s transcendental knowing. Now, if you agree that all religions are vehicles for expressing the universal sense of awe and wonder at mystery—from the ancient creation myths, through Christian visions, to the ideas of philosophers and scientists such as Spinoza and Einstein. This kind of faith is from our hearts, our feelings, our souls, our direct experience of something bigger than ourselves. Some of us who’ve had peak experiences know how these inexplicable, timeless, shining moments create in us an ineffable certainty of an alternate reality.

Trust in this sort of knowing through revelation may well be the future. For example, the Pentecostalists today have a faith in which they celebrate mystery and in which truth is their felt intimacy with the holy spirit and their personal God. This mirrors the kind of faith in Jesus the early Christians felt in what Cox calls, the Age of Faith. The Age of Belief, as mandated by the creedal Churches, suppressed the Age of Faith. Now, let’s hope the Pentecostalists, and others like the Quakers and UUs, are the pioneers of a resurgence of spirit—an Age of Spirit where mankind finds in its heart, its soul, a passion to create a better world. Along with many other UUs, I like to think of spirit as the holy spark in each of us, and in the web of all life—the spirit, the spark that will ignite our faith in our best selves to strive for that heaven on earth.

Hymn 158 Praise the Source of Faith and Learning.

Explaining Our UU Faith

Critics of UUism say our Church is not faith-based. In other words, if not an external God or Church doctrines, what do we have faith in?

How many of you, like me, have been asked by local folk if we UUs are Communists? So, how do we respond to people who are misguided or puzzled or interested about what our UU faith is today? Surely, it’s important for all of us to inform ourselves deeply and then to offer clear answers if we are to shine our light bright in the world.

If you haven’t done so, study the UUA website. It describes our values and life-purposes—flexibly, of course. Carry around with you your copy of our Principles and our Sources. (They are just after the Preface in our hymnal). The Principles spell out our highest values. The Sources summarize like a beautiful poem the multi-dimensional, inspirational backstory of our UU faith today.

Centuries ago,Thomas Paine wrote, “My own mind is my own church. It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself.” I like that. Whatever life throws at me, if I find and stay true to my best self, I’ll experience meaning and purpose. And for me, meaning and purpose are a large part of happiness.

And George Marshall nails it for us today. He says our Principles define our ethical and moral standards. When we live our Principles, we live with integrity. We put into practice UU values of trying to bring our imperfect human culture closer to the ideals of peace, love and justice for all. We do this through our internal work based on the personal truths of our experience, through fellowship with others doing similar work, and by acting out our values in the wider world. Marshall says, “Let our faith shine through life.”