The Universality of God

February 1, 1959
Akron

THE POSITIVE TEACHINGS OF THE UNIVERSALIST CHURCH -
IV - The Universality of God

Universalists persist in freedom even when discussing the idea of God. We value freedom not because we reject "faith," but rather because we have a poor opinion of shallow prejudices and we have a strong conviction that religion can have depth and richness to a degree yet unrealized. This wealth of religious affirmation can be minted only when persons have sufficient confidence in themselves and their fellows to welcome the interplay of varied interpretations and unusual ideas.

You may have heard Harry Emerson Fosdick's story of the little girl who was painting energetically on a large piece of paper.
"What are you doing?" asked mother.
"I'm painting God's picture."
"Oh," said mother, "nobody knows what God looks like."
"Well," said the five-year-old with determination, "They will when I get through."

This sermon is not motivated toward such an end. No matter how fervently I may hold certain convictions, for me to insist that you must believe as I do, would be both presumptuous of your rights and also ignorant of the vast ocean of ideas about God which persons have cherished in honesty. Creedal insistence always seems to develop an alarming and acrimonious intolerance. Shakespeare sensed this (AS YOU LIKE IT) when Adam says to his young master Orlando,
"Know you not master, to some kind of men
Their graces serve them but as enemies.
No more do yours: your virtues gentle master,
Are sanctified and holy traitors to you.
O what a world is this, when what is comely
Envenoms him that bears it."

First commonly held among Universalists is a strong sense of the necessity of toleration of different interpretations of the idea of God, and a sensitivity to our own limitations. We are creatures bound to our place in the world and to our time in history. While there has been pressure in our culture to sound the name of God, it is only proper to acknowledge that this has not always been the acceptable thing to do. In the religious experience of the burning bush, when Moses asked God what name shall be announced, Moses was instructed not to use God's name, "I am who I am," was the cryptic instruction.

This fragment in Exodus which relates the beginning of the emergence of the splendid God idea cherished by the Hebrews, is noteworthy because it points to the kind of God a man experiences, rather than another man's name for a deity which should be imitated. Such an attitude is as modern and as relevant as this morning's Beacon-Journal. There is no more devastating way to short-change the magnificence of religion than to be content with sounding words which carry piety because of the religious experience of other people.

We are limited in our experience in conveying religious ideas. Theodore Reik (THE SEARCH WITHIN) tells how religious doubts were first awakened in a little boy "who grew up in the pious atmosphere of the Russian ghetto. The child saw the picture of Moses in the desert in the Haggadah. The drawing showed the great lawgiver of Israel dressed as a Russian Jew, since the medieval artists gave the persons of the Bible the costumes of their times. After having looked long at the picture, the boy asked the Rabbi, 'Why is Moses wearing a fur cap in the desert?'"

[It is] in such a spirit of inquiry, added to a properly humble sense of our own limitations, that Universalists assert that there is no magic word which is "open sesame" to our liberal fellowship. If a person in our fellowship is, like the author of Exodus, reluctant to use a name for God, the liberal church extends the same welcome to its work, learning, play, and worship. When Universalism discusses God, there is a certain negative aspect, -- a large majority of Universalists do not believe the Trinity. But the positive teaching is that "no figure or representation or limitation is great or broad enough to contain God. To present him as a Trinity is not very different from presenting him as a many-headed Hydra. Either figure limits; neither contains."

Whether a person imagines the force behind all movement and experience to be One God, who is "over all and through all and in us all," or whether he is reluctant to use a traditional name is not important. The humility with which we advance one idea of God's universality should be aware that our theological obligation to our fellow liberals is not to gather passionately evidence for a heresy trial, but rather to be mentally and emotionally alert to participate sympathetically in the way another interprets and expresses him experience.

For example, we say every Sunday that God is "Eternal and All-Conquering Love." This is an abstraction attributing a human emotion to the Ultimate Power. I am one who believes God is more likely to be Justice. This, too, is an abstraction. There seems to be substantial evidence that there is a force of just retribution operating historically. For example, the white man enslaved the Negro, transported him from his homeland, degraded standards to that of the level of livestock. A century later the mammoth problem of our land is achieving equality and freedom for those who were slaves. Without equivocation, the answer to world problems may lie in how honestly, repentantly, and fairly we try to eliminate old evils by practical demonstration that we now recognize the supreme worth of persons. You may call the present state of affairs sociological consequences; to me it is the Hand of God in history. We stand before a Court of Justice. As Hector remarked,
"Nature craves
All dues be rendered to their owners."

This to me is the universality of God.

In our Universalist climate this experience of universality may occur in different ways. Some withdraw from the question when they attempt to confront the hard reality of evil and unmerited suffering in the world. They ask and find no answers for the series of questions David Hume proposed (DIALOGUES):
"Is God is willing to prevent evil but not able?
Then he is impotent."
"Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent."
"Is he both able and willing? Whence then evil?"

Others among us affirm the universality of God in differing ways. Among Universalists are those who find positive affirmation for the universality of God in the order of the universe, others discover God in beauty, others feel the Divine Spirit in poetry, still others find no evidence for God in any of these, but are deeply moved as the spirit they call God comes to them as they labor for moral values and human betterment.

Consequently, there is [a] need to be cautious about absolute statements on theological matters. Harry Emerson Fosdick knew this when he said, "All theological systems and all others that will follow are tentative, contemporary formulations of great matters. To take the best insights in them all, to see the incompleteness and falsity in them all, to trust none of them as a WHOLE, to see always that the thing to be explained is infinitely greater than our tentative conditional explanation, -- this seems to me wisdom."

In Goethe's Faust, there is a dialogue between Margaret and Faust (quoted by Spiegelberger, LIVING RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD.)

Margaret asks, "Do you believe in God?"
Faust, "My darling who can say: I believe in God.
You may ask priests and sages,
and their answer will seem mockery of him who asks."
Margaret: "Then you do not believe?"
Faust: "Is not the sky there over us?
Is not the earth secure beneath our feet?
And do not the eternal stars ascent in friendly smiles?
Do we not look into each other's eye?
And does not everything in you also aspire to the highest heavens?
And is not everything around you also so inspired, though invisibly?
And isn't your heart ready to burst with the joy of all that?
And since that feeling makes you full of bliss,
It doesn't matter what name you give it:
Call it bliss, heart, love, God.
I myself have no name for it.
For the feeling is all that counts, and names are but noises and smoke beclouding the effulgence of heaven."
Margaret: "All that sounds fine and good.
The preacher in his own way, also says such things, but the way is somewhat different."
Faust: "All men say so,
though each in his own language, so why not in mine?"

The universality of God thus finds different vessels of interpretation among Universalists.

First, many see God's universality as the reign of law in an orderly universe. Even though the vastness of the cosmic structure inevitably wraps our understanding in ultimate mystery, nevertheless that portion of human experience which reaches out into space, and also analyses microscopic cells, finds a rule of law and a harmony of parts.

Secondly, there are those who are unmoved by natural law, but who apprehend the universality of God in experiences of beauty. As the hymn-writer said,
"No leaf that dawns to petal
But hints the angel plan."

If religion is feeling, and art the language of feeling, perhaps most of us grossly underestimate the religious power of artistic representation. In the creation of form and color, the artists feels throbbing within him a thrilling awareness of being in communication with the Real Power behind all experience. Comfort and security were nothing to Van Gogh as long as he could capture on canvas the shining sun and glowing fields of Southern France. So with many artists, they apprehend a Great Universality and try to communicate their stirring experiences to us. But not many of us respond.

Thirdly, there are those who express universality through poetry. The beauty of the descriptive phrase, and the rhymed poetic line, attempt to capture the image that the poet has in his heart. Whether it is Bobby Burns, -- "A man's man, for a'that and a'that," or Francis Thompson expressing his intense feeling for God in the HOUND OF HEAVEN, or James Russell Lowell sounding the pitch of infinite universality when he sang, "Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong,"-- the creators of words to live by have sought to express universality.

Lastly, in this incomplete list, human beings capture the universality of God in human values. Many thoughtful persons do not find God in philosophic argument, in outer space, or aesthetic expression. God for them is an experience encountered only when persons act unselfishly in the pursuit of the best human goals of conduct.

If a man's God is the object of worship because it is the highest he knows, then when God is realized in human conduct, is not such a God worthy as a universal idea? God, if the idea can be entertained at all, must be as good as a good man, at least. Gandhi once said, "I used to believe God was truth, now I have come to believe that truth is God." Truth is a human value. Dewey once defined God as "the process of ideals becoming real." When the New Testament writer defined God as love, he was expressing the individuality of God in ethical human relations, "He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?"

Ernest Crosby expressed this same ethical emphasis for religion,
"No one could tell me where my soul might be;
I searched for God and he eluded me;
I sought my brother out, and found all three."

Thus, when once considers order, beauty, poetry and ethics, the idea of God does not require a single name, or any one interpretation to justify universality. Of prime importance is that in the scheme of things these values of law, beauty, and conduct have emerged in human affairs. Furthermore, a real sense of security is not in magic ritual but in the predictability of the universe. The greatest adventures are in expressions of truth, beauty, and goodness. The historian Spiegelberger thought of life's values, the ineffable and unspeakable, "as if it were a fluid, which, though it by no means changes its nature in the process, yet takes the shape of the various vessels into which it is poured." The shapes of our containers, (our interpretations) may differ, but the ultimate substance is the same, "a universal and unvarying thing common to all faiths, people and times."

It would seem to follow that when our religious perceptions of the universals will become more sensitive as we pursue deepening moral vision rather than attempting to justify or explain words or creeds others have found helpful. We have to find the way ourselves to a larger faith which will glow more brightly when poured from the crucible of our own experience.

In our day we will measure our experience in the light of history and the universals in all the world's religions. Because we are individual persons who live in groups, we will be acting the wiser part when we look to our own self inwardly just as critically as we measure outwardly, the attitudes of others. If we will do this, we will not fail spiritually because we will have reckoned with the nature of man. The ancient Greek philosopher, Xenophanes, illustrated the relativity of religious ideas when he commented, "If donkeys could speak they would describe God as a super-donkey." Xenophanes also pointed up the universals, "the gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning, but by seeking, men find in time what is better."

There is scarcely one of us who does not need a more meaningful conviction and more vivid experience of religious faith. We live in a world which boasts a long history of antiquities and treasures; a world which is bright with chrome and gleaming with the mechanical consequences of human genius and persistence. We live also in a world which will not become much older, or continue to shine for men, unless we humans become wise and compassionate, truthfully and freely expressing arguments, arts and ethics for the enrichment of the whole human family.

That the precise nature of the universality of God remains undefined, or that good people express varying interpretations should neither alarm nor divide us. As William Butler Yeats said,

"I grew wild
Even accusing heaven because
Nothing that we love overmuch
Is ponderable to our touch."