Sermon Archives : 2005/2006

Logical Conclusions

Rev. Jason Shelton  ·  November 27, 2005

Last month a portion of the Tennessean’s opinion section was dedicated to differing viewpoints on Intelligent Design. I was especially interested in the essay by the Reverend Jerry Sutton, pastor of Two Rivers Baptist Church, who concludes by citing several reasons why he believes in the idea. His list includes the arguments about complexity and the failure of Darwin’s theory to answer questions about the origin of the universe itself. But it was his last statement that really caught my eye. He writes:

And besides all this, intelligent design is compatible with my own Christian convictions and world view. These are some reasons I believe in intelligent design. (Tennessean, 10/16/2005)

My purpose in referencing Sutton’s essay is not to argue for one side or the other. In fact, I personally believe the two ideas have relatively little to do with one another and don’t belong in the same conversation, much less the same biology classroom. But I digress. My concern over Sutton’s essay is not about content, but about methodology. It troubles me to know that he and so many others want Intelligent Design taught in our schools not for scientifically justifiable reasons, but because it affirms their particular interpretation of the Christian world view. It troubles me to see proponents of this “theory” embracing traditionally liberal tactics by making this a free speech issue, claiming that it is good to “keep the debate open.” And they do this, as Stanley Fish writes, “not out of a commitment to scrupulous scholarship…but in an effort to accomplish through misdirection and displacement what they cannot accomplish through evidence and argument” (in Harper’s, 12/2005, p. 72)

There is no denying that the debate over Intelligent Design is religious in nature. One need only ask, “Designed by whom?” to uncover the not-so-thinly-veiled agenda behind the argument. But as I have said, it really is not my intention to advocate for either side of this issue. The question that came to me as I read Sutton’s essay was, “How do you sleep at night?”

These are questions that have been asked over and over again throughout our Unitarian Universalist history. There is much that is radically different about the religious tradition we share today from that of our denominational founders, but what we have in common with them is not so much about content as it is about methodology. In fact, I would hold that being a Unitarian Universalist has everything to do with methodology – the way we ask and explore religious questions and ideas –leaving the question of content open for discussion. Our shared faith is that honest inquiry will lead to truth, though its forms are ever-evolving and often surprising.

So what happens when religious ideas are put to the test of evidence and argument? To answer this question, we need a history lesson. I will now attempt to cover two thousand years of church history in twenty minutes or less. This means that I will have to resort to making a sweeping generalization here or there, for which I beg your forgiveness at the outset. But the story is much more compelling and easier to grasp if we fudge on some of the complexity. Here goes…

Our story starts with a socially-progressive Jew named Jesus of Nazareth. He taught and did some things that upset the established authority of the day, and they killed him. Within a hundred years of his death, a substantial body of writing had been amassed concerning this Jesus, and he had a great many followers who believed many things about him. During these formative years great controversies stirred over who this Jesus really was, and how his teachings should be interpreted. In 325, many of these controversies were settled at the Council of Nicea, resulting in the formulation and adoption of the Nicene Creed, which declared that Jesus was God, who, along with the Holy Spirit, exists as a Trinity.

The church, by this time, had become wedded to the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire, and so it had a good bit of power. It used this power to keep heresy out of the public debate, and order was more or less maintained for 1200 years or so. Several factors contributed to this sense of order and unity, not the least being the relative illiteracy of the general populous.

But things hit a snag when, in 1450, a man named Gutenberg invented the printing press, and large quantities of books became readily available for the first time in human history. Most importantly for our story, Gutenberg’s first book off the press was the Bible, which, by the way, has been on the best-seller list ever since.

Now up until this time most Christians had never actually read the Bible. The bits and pieces of it they heard in church were not the whole story, and some people were shocked to discover how much of the church’s theological and ritual traditions did not have a Biblical foundation. Some began to question how these traditions came to be, and they discovered the political machinations behind the development of some of the most complex theological ideas. This caused the most radical of the reformers to deny several of the church’s most foundational doctrines, such as the Trinity and the idea of eternal punishment. Michael Servetus was a man of fervent faith who accepted the authority of scripture without reservation. But after careful study of the text, he found no evidence to support the doctrine of the Trinity within its pages, and he published a book On the Errors of the Trinity. Through imprisonment and torture, and finally execution at the burning stake, he maintained his integrity while other leaders of the reformation tried to ignore the questions he raised. One such leader, Philip Melanchthon, when commenting on Servetus’ book, wrote, “As for the Trinity you know I have always feared this would break out someday. Good God, what tragedies this question will excite among those that come after us!” (quoted in Howe, For Faith and Freedom, p. 1)

Servetus died because he was willing to take the questions that many others were asking to their logical conclusions. He saw the discrepancy between the teachings of Jesus and the power, wealth and corruption of the church, and he challenged it. Servetus certainly considered himself a Christian, and he accepted the absolute authority of scripture as God’s revelation to humankind. But he did not trust the church or the traditions it had claimed as equally authoritative. He sought to restore the church to a pre-institutional form, and he paid for his integrity with his life.

As we will see, this is our heritage. We ask challenging questions of our faith, subject it to thorough inquiry, and accept the consequences of what we find, even if it means adapting our own theological understandings in unpopular ways. Why do we do this? Why, when our forebears risked persecution and even death for their heresies? Why, when today we risk certain estrangement from the mainstream, often from our own families? Why? Because, as professor Paul Conkin said in this pulpit several years ago, “matters of faith are never matters of choice.”

In 1811 Joseph Stevens Buckminster was appointed the first Dexter Lecturer on Biblical Criticism at Harvard College. Ordained to the Unitarian ministry in 1804, he had amassed one of the greatest personal libraries in the country – said to be over 3000 volumes. His primary scholarly interest lay in German higher criticism of the Bible, which “insisted that the scriptures be read in their historical context and be subjected to the same scrupulous scholarly investigation given other texts from antiquity.” (Robinson, 222) Keep in mind that prior to this time, the questions of authorship and context – ideas which are the starting point of any seminary scripture class today, even in the most conservative of schools – were not applied to the scriptures. Through this academic exercise, the New England liberals began to question the authority of scripture as a whole, giving weight to some books over others – the New Testament over the Hebrew Scriptures, and the gospels over the writings of Paul – and accepting the consequences of their commitment to rational integrity.

When William Ellery Channing preached his famous sermon, Unitarian Christianity, in 1819, our ties with the orthodox, which had become tenuous at best, were officially cut. Having thoroughly adopted Buckminster’s principles of Biblical Criticism, he declared that Unitarians were bound to exercise their God-given gift of reason upon the Bible.

For Channing, and for the Transcendentalists like Emerson and Theodore Parker who came after him, the idea of scriptural authority was not totally without merit, but one had to be careful in applying the best critical standards to the text in order to discern the meaning and relative credibility of each passage. Unscriptural doctrines were still unacceptable, of course, but now our forebears in faith also began to question what they did find in scripture, recognizing that some parts of the text had meaning for all times and at all places, but that others were limited by context to a particular place and time. Discerning between the two was the domain of reason.

Channing believed that at its core, Christianity was concerned with ethical living as embodied in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. To many Unitarians, especially those outside of New England on the so-called frontier (basically anything west of New York state), these ethics were certainly of supreme importance, but they began to doubt whether or not they were exclusively Christian in their origins. As they came into contact with the world’s other great religious traditions, the idea of absolute freedom in religion began to emerge. “The result was the formation in 1867 of the Free Religious Association, which welded the humanistic revolt against Christianity into a single movement based in individual freedom of belief, the scientific study of religion, and the conviction that a single, universal spirit underlay all historic faiths.” (Parke, 122). This development was not met with enthusiasm throughout the denomination, and in fact the Free Religious Association never really coalesced into a viable movement – perhaps due to the difficulty of organizing a group whose primary concern was the freedom of the individual.

Nonetheless, the movement was to have a lasting impact on the denomination. In 1886, as the “Issue in the West” was still a source of considerable tension between the more conservative New England establishment and the radicals in the heartland, The Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland wrote the following:

[They tell] us that the denomination first took its stand on “reason and revelation,” but it had to move on. Later it took its stand at the supernatural or the miraculous; but it had to move on. Later still it made another stand at the Lordship of Christ, but again it was compelled to move on. Now the stand is made at Christian theism, but once more, [they say], we must move on. Move on where?

The fact seems to be, there is nothing about which there is more mental confusion than about this whole moving on idea… If I am faced toward the edge of Table rock, [at] Niagara [Falls], I can safely move on for a distance – move on until I am within 20 feet of the edge, 15 feet, 10 feet, 5 feet, 2 feet, one foot – but if I move on much beyond that it will be the last moving on I shall be likely to do in this world. So a religious body may move on for a time toward the edge of religion – nearer and nearer to the edge – but what if it moves off? Our…friends have got us the place where they want us to move on and move off historic Unitarianism – move off Christianity, move off theism; they tell us if we will we shall find a religion of ethics which will be better… (Parke, 128-129)

At the dawning of the 20th century, both the Unitarians and the Universalists had “moved on” as a result of their stubborn and relentless inquiry into the questions of faith, and their challenges to the orthodox notions authority. Many Unitarians, especially those aligned with the growing Humanist movement, had abandoned the theistic, the supernatural, the miraculous as signs of a primitive faith. The Universalists more or less held to their theistic roots, but came to see that an infinitely loving God had to be operative in systems beyond Christianity. Their theology evolved from being focused on a particular act of salvation through atonement in the death of Jesus to a universal religion, a sense that at the core of every religion were basic, universal truths. Not unlike their Unitarian counterparts, the Universalist mantra in the early 20th century was, “We do not stand – we move.”

Both denominations were characterized by their optimism – their sense of the unstoppable, inevitable progress of humankind. Rapid industrial and technological advancement, a socially progressive movement that had ended slavery and brought about new rights for women, scientific discoveries that had revolutionized health care and the general well being of society – all of these left our liberal forebears little reason to doubt that they had, in fact, ushered in the kingdom of God on earth.

But it was not to last. Two world wars separated by a devastating economic depression left the liberal churches – and their naïve notions about human progress – in shambles. The Unitarians had staked their faith on the ever growing capacity of humanity to know and do the will of God. Even as their theological foundations and language moved toward the edge of the falls, this idea remained central. And the Universalists, who held that God’s love was so great that all would be forgiven and welcomed into eternal glory, were plagued by the nightmarish experiences of fascism and the holocaust.

In the face of the problem of evil, both the Unitarians and the Universalists reached a difficult point of contention. While some still held to the idea of human progress, and of humanity’s self-reliance as the only reasonable approach to the problems of the world, others began to look again to the old forms, to theological traditions which long had been abandoned to see in them new possibilities for exploration. Theologians like James Luther Adams were concerned that our tendency to arrive at logical conclusions was, in fact, an illusion. For Adams, faith is not about conclusions at all. Rather, faith is about transformation.

In his 1946 essay, “A Faith for the Free,” Adams outlines a new vision of faith and a new understanding of the power and importance of community:

There can be no reliable faith for the free unless there are faithful men and women who form the faith into beliefs, who test and criticize the beliefs and who then transform and transmit the beliefs. This process of forming and transforming the beliefs of the free faith is a process of discussion; it is a co-operative endeavor in which we surrender to the commanding, transforming reality. The only way in which we can reliably form and transform beliefs is through the sharing of tradition and new insights and through the cooperative criticism and testing of tradition and insight. In other words, people must sincerely work with each other in order to give reliable form and expression to faith…

Religious liberals who say that religious liberalism encourages people merely to think as they please no longer believe there is a commanding reality. They have become “faith-fully” neutral, and this neutrality is only a halfway station (if not already a camouflage) for an unexamined faith, for an unreliable, destructive faith. Neither the vague nor the neutral “faith” can be overcome except in faith-ful community.

In the half-century since Adams wrote these words, our two denominations have consolidated and formed a new tradition which embraces a pluralistic faith, one which is committed to Adams’ idea that the community requires both our power of organization and the organization of our power, in which many paths are celebrated and welcomed into the one free community of faith. His challenge to engage critically both tradition and new insight has not gone unmet – all around us there are encouraging signs that Unitarian Universalists are not simply willing to accept the logical conclusions of our forebears as final and decided. For example, new books on Biblical studies and theology from the liberal perspective have been appearing on many of our bookshelves, and at this year’s General Assembly I witnessed over 3000 Unitarian Universalists listening to and engaging with Dr. Elaine Pagels on the Gospel of Thomas. Our integrity demands that we not abandon free inquiry about such matters to figures of our past, and so we are taking seriously the demands of our fourth principle, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. It is not enough to trust that they somehow “figured it out.” Our responsibility is to take on the work of inquiry and transformation as it applies to this time and place. This is our calling as people of faith today, as it was for those who came before us, and as it is for every generation of seekers of truth.

We continue to move toward the edge of the falls. But we do not fear the edge, for we understand the mathematical reality that we can move infinitely closer to a point without ever reaching it. And perhaps the edge is our ultimate reality, the great, unknowable force which we approach but never wholly comprehend.

“I don’t know the name of it, but where we go, we’re really interested in trees. All of us believe in trees.” (Safford, Walking Toward Morning, p. 27) But even the trees are not quite the thing itself. Our Unitarian Universalist heritage is one of methodology, of questioning and exploring what is of ultimate value. It is our faith that honest inquiry leads to truth, and that matters of faith are never matters of choice. As each us strives to better ourselves, better our world, better our understanding of what is of ultimate value, may we find reason to hope, freedom to love, and faith that our logical conclusions will lead us to ever-evolving and surprising truth.

May it be so, and amen.