On the Integrity of Individual Belief

October 3, 1965

Sermon Series: WHERE I NOW STAND

On the Integrity of Individual Belief
Plainfield

As I begin my ministry with you, it seems important to me to attempt to disclose and elaborate the foundations of my belief – the way I see religion. After this initial three-part series, there will be ample opportunity to discuss particular issues and various crises. But the specific convictions I may affirm from time to time are inferred from the basic assumptions I hold. I believe that explicit particularities should be implicit in generalities. Furthermore, many of the observations are attempts to answer more adequately questions asked me during that busy week in June. You will note that the general title of this series is, "This is Where I NOW Stand." It is basic that my conclusions are tentative only. I hope I shall grow in wisdom and perception among you – for if I am to have a fruitful ministry here, then our relationship will be characterized by mutual growth and increasing understanding. Each Sunday's section must stand by itself, but any comprehensive judgment on my present beliefs as a Unitarian Universalist minister should consider not only today's statement about man and himself, but also the succeeding statements about man and man, and man and the Universe.

Introduction

"A fool can put on his own clothes better than a wise man can do it for him." This was a saying that a U.S. Public Health Officer kept in his desk drawer for frequent reflection. (Quoted by Jane Jacobs, DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES.)

"A fool can put on his own clothes better than a wise man can do it for him." In this Unitarian Church and in our Unitarian Universalist societies generally, a basic justification for our corporate religious existence pivots on the prime assumption that every person has the right of individual belief. This foundation assumption prevails because the dignity and worth of every person are values on which we must agree. We can and do disagree in differing measure and varying intensity on the nature of specific issues and the merit of various proposals. But this I believe – the integrity of individual belief must continue to be vital among the values we promote and defend.

(1) First of all, this claim for the integrity of individual belief is based on the reality that experience precedes interpretation. If individual religious experience is to be understood, one must not rely only on theological interpretations made after the experience itself. Many sensitive mystics have testified to the awesome and shattering nature of personal religious experience. Moses and the burning bush, Elijah on the mountain, Jesus in the wilderness, Muslem dervishes in ecstatic dance, Hindu holy men in absolute concentration – all these human religious expressions are varieties of religious experience. In every case these basic experiences are interpreted in the framework of the beliefs held by the individual. A Roman Catholic will encounter religious experience and interpret it as a revelation of the Triune God or the Atonement of Jesus. An Islamic Sufi may experience similar inward rapture and interpret according to Allah - One God, not Three. A non-theistic mystic will interpret the experience in non-theistic recollection. For those of us who cannot believe that certain persons have been selected as divinely chosen channels for the revelation of specific eternal truths, the only reasonable conclusion is to accept what should be obvious – that experience precedes interpretation. Interpretation necessarily and inevitably is organized in the framework of particular religious premises and particular religious culture.

When religious experience is scanned historically in time, or currently across the world, there is no escaping the elementary reality that religion is expressed in countless and variegated interpretations.

In the light of our premise about the worth of persons, we should feel an obligation to respect the honest reverence of another person or group. But respect for the sincere convictions of others does not mean that their beliefs are true or useful for us. To respect the beliefs of others while candidly disagreeing with them is a virtue that many of us should cultivate more than we do.

(2) When a Unitarian attempts to practice this, he should have a reason for the dissenting faith he holds. Secondly, then, I believe that integrity of individual belief requires that we affirm positively that the "old time religion" is not good enough for us because we live in the new dimensions of the 20th Century. Religion, too, must measure up to standards of increased knowledge, more perceptive understanding and sterner, more complex ethical demands.

Most persons who participate in the standard branches of Christianity, or most other world religions, base their faith on a holy man who is believed to have revealed God's truth; or a divine Book, believed to have been supernaturally inspired to reveal God's truth without error; or an authoritative Church, supernaturally given power to reveal correct dogma and perform redeeming sacraments. But you are here because you question, cannot accept, or have rebelled against these ancient ways of irrational religious authority. We have reason to believe that dogmatic religion many times held with excessive self-righteousness is not necessarily a virtue, even though we may respect the zeal of the believer. Unitarians and Universalists would concur with that courageous old dissenter, John Milton, when he wrote in Areopagitica: "A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determine, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy."

In my view, integrity in religious belief requires critical thought as well as enthusiasm, investigation of facts as well as nostalgic embrace of tradition for its own sake.

Religious truths are not sudden, magic revelations, but have origins and evolution. Outmoded doctrines and irrelevant teachings are not the fantasies of heretics. Religion, like an ancient delta, silts up with the sediments of many ancient streams. If one wants to remain tied up at the pier, there may be no problem; but if one wants to navigate toward some port of call, the silt must be dredged away. Most of us are Unitarians because we see no reason in the doctrines of the trinity, virgin birth, sacrificial atonement, physical resurrection, etc., and feel no need for these old deposits from an antique source.

We seek new ways of prayer or, for example, meditation, because there is no reason, or for that matter, justice, in begging gifts from God who might neglect us were it not for our persistent reminders. The story was told by the late Erwin Goodenough of Yale that the late Knute Rockne, famous football coach of Notre Dame used to say apropos of the pre-game prayers of the team, "the prayers work better when the players are big."

Our individual differences create certain levels of tension within a Unitarian or Universalist congregation, as well as when confronting the neighborhood and the city. Christopher Fry's play about Moses some years ago deals with the conflict arising between sincere persons, each of whom believes himself to be right. The legend of the Exodus tells how the first-born of the Egyptians were stricken by the plague, but the children of Israel were spared. In the play the plague brings death to young Rameses. Moses, because he had been reared in an Egyptian family and culture, is disturbed for he has some loyalty and affection still for Egypt. As he is about to leave on the Exodus, he says, "Death and life are moving to a call. I turn from Egypt." Anath (who discovered him) asks, "What is left to call to me?" Moses answers, "The morning which still comes to Egypt and Israel, the round of lights which will not wheel in vain. We must each find our separate meaning in the persuasion of our days until we meet in the meaning of the world. Until that time."

So with us and the nostalgia that comes upon us when the teaching of new occasions separates us from what once was valuable and dear.

We have rejected many dogmas and doctrines because they have been shown to be false or outmoded in the constant light of ever-expanding knowledge and the searching rays of reason. But reason should not be our God. The French revolutionists crowned a beautiful actress as the "Goddess of Reason" in Notre Dame Cathedral. This was as wrong-headed as any other idolatry. Reason is not an idol to be worshiped, but an intellectual tool we should keep sharp and ready.

(3) But right here an important qualification must be made if we are to be true to the basic premise of the individual worth and dignity of every human being. It is well, just and honorable to hold that we must "each find our own separate meaning in the persuasion of our days," but we have an obligation not only to disavow but to condemn ideas, religious or political, which denigrate human dignity or injure human personality.

Sir Julian Huxley wrote, (ESSAYS OF A HUMANIST, p. 50) about the belief of the Aztecs that the sacrifice of human beings every day was necessary to ensure that the sun should continue to rise each day. In order to maintain the supply of sacrificial victims, more and more prisoners were taken from neighboring tribes. As a consequence, these neighboring tribes sided with Cortez when he invaded Mexico. Thus the Aztec's beliefs not only were a savage denial of human dignity, but also contributed greatly to the final Aztec downfall.

But we need not dig into early Central American history to make the point that some false beliefs injure human dignity. One of the dishonorable pages in Christian religion was maintained in the South and elsewhere that human slavery was divinely ordained and authorized by scripture. This base attitude has continued in various forms, some more polite, but the damage has been cruel and pervasive.

Just in the last few years there have been about fifty persons murdered because they spoke for and worked for civil rights and equal opportunity. I do not know of one murder or assault for which anybody has been convicted.

In August my colleague in the UU Ministry, Donald Thompson, minister of the First Unitarian Church, Jackson, Mississippi, was shot in the back by a shotgun blast and although he has made satisfactory improvement, still lies seriously wounded in the Baptist Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi. Why was he shot in the back? – because he believed in and worked for equal opportunity for all persons. A few days before the murder attempt on Don Thompson, an Episcopal Theological student was foully murdered and a Roman Catholic priest badly wounded. A jury has just acquitted the accused murderer of Jonathan Daniels in a courtroom spectacle that was a travesty of justice. The question now is relevant, what must be done to ensure that justice and law prevail in fact?

None of us should be tolerant of murderous actions and continued misery created and maintained by cruel discrimination under any guise of "tolerance" of ideas or any subterfuge labeled "patience."

We may maintain the individual integrity of our separate beliefs and convictions, but neither supposed "tolerance" or alleged "diversity" can justify outrages visited upon human persons, everyone of whom is of individual worth. And if we forget that, may our movement lose its strength.

(4) One thing more – because experience precedes interpretation and revised knowledge creates enlarged understanding, we should be careful that our present Unitarian Universalist belief does not harden into dogma. Our beliefs too must be held tentatively. We have an obligation to try ever to find new and better ways to understand and define the faith that is ours. I ran across an item that may illustrate. The famous publisher of the "little blue books," which those in my generation may remember, Haldemann-Julius, once published a short biography of Henry VIII which sold only 5000 copies. However, when the shrewd publisher published a second edition, without altering a single line of the text, he sold 300,000 copies. The difference was that he changed the title in the second edition to "The Story of a Lustful King." (See item, "New Republic.")

Now I am not an advocate of a more erotic "sell" for our Unitarian beliefs. But I am persuaded that to be true to the genius of our faith, that is, each of us is a responsible seeker of truth, we should feel committed to a perpetual process of searching out better expressions of faith which embody both deeper perception and a broader embrace of the new knowledge constantly flowing from the sciences and the humanities. Our religious experience is conditioned by our human experience in a technologically fantastic and politically perilous world.

The merit of tentative conclusions is grounded in the nature of man. Man's evolutionary process is one of constant adaptation and creative selection of unending options of belief and action. In a notable Phi Beta Kappa address, Moody Prior, Professor of English at the graduate school of Northwestern, said, "The problem of the human race and therefore of all human societies is continuous adaptation to changes in the conditions of life, both those which are imposed from the outside and those which man brings upon himself by virtue of being a creative animal....

"Francis Bacon expressed the essence of (our attitude) when he wrote, 'he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator, and if time of course alters things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?'"

Therefore we Unitarians ought to put to rest the clever but shallow criticism that we are negative – that we "disbelieve everything anyone else believes and have a strong sustaining faith in we don't know quite what;" or to repeat another saying that is going around about the pilot who called the control tower, "I'm lost, but I'm making record time." Such critical barbs are sharp but inaccurate.

The premise that new conditions require new appraisals and modified responses, far from being "negative," is positive because creative change is the very stuff of life itself. Erwin Goodenough said it well, writing specifically of the agnostic, "What the agnostic wants is to find out a little more than he knows now, and this the man who really thinks that he has the final answer cannot. Far from being a negative position, it is the greatest positive stimulus man has." (PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION, p. 182.)

To summarize: I believe that the integrity of individual belief requires that 1) I recognize that for all persons experience precedes interpretation. Therefore, I am obligated to cultivate a respect for the experience of reverence even when I reject particular interpretations. 2) Because knowledge increases and the opportunity is always here for enlarged understanding, I am obligated to try to use reason as a tool in understanding persons and events. 3) But however much I may respect another's reverence, if his ideas are an offense to human worth and his actions are injurious to persons, I can be true only by disavowing such ideas and resisting such action. 4) The merit of holding conclusions tentatively is the keystone in the arch of creative belief.

Next week I shall devote the second section of this three-part sermon to the nature and values involved in man's relationship to man, with particular application to our religious society, but let me conclude today with a reminder that as far as an individual is concerned, full integrity is maintained when one discovers in his own experience that the truth he believes is actable.

John Mason Brown, the drama critic in his biography of Robert Sherwood, the American playwright, said of Sherwood, "He was a delegate at large for the American conscience."

Few there are who merit such a significant description. But whether the ripple of our influence is narrowly circumscribed or has far reaching boundaries, if our beliefs and values are deeply held, then we will be delegates for those values in the world we encounter. One cannot predict success, popularity or acceptance; one can only make the effort. Mrs. John F. Kennedy, speaking of her late husband, said, “He believed that one man can make a difference and that every man should try.”