Our Immediate Background

January 6, 1963
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
15. Our Immediate Background

If the persons in our immediate religious background were to be studied as if they comprised a family tree, we would be struck by the differences between the branches and surprised by the strength generated in our ancestors by their strong convictions about the nature of God and the worth of man. The consolidation at the Continental level of Unitarians and Universalists is recent enough that the heritages are still considered separately; the final culmination of a hundred years of merger attempts indicate that there was long-standing kinship of belief and purpose.

In restricting examination of the family tree to liberal religion in America, I assume you know there was an ancient history of Universalism and an ancient history of Unitarianism. The belief that God was too good to damn any person of his creation was not only biblical, but continued as a widely-held belief for centuries until the forces of orthodoxy declared universal salvation heretical. The Trinity did not become dogma until the Council of Nicea (325). Anti-trinitarianism, or Unitarianism, testified that human personality was God’s greatest creation and the proof was in the kind of man Jesus was.

In singling out certain important branches of our family tree, there should be awareness that the tree is a large one with many branches and innumerable twigs, all carrying the life-giving spirit which provided us with the opportunity to be new buds on the tree. Those who read widely in our heritage know that the branches I name are but examples of differing, but vital emphases that blend into the full foliage of our heritage. Some I shall name did not know they would be related to us and they might well repudiate the direction of growth taken by latter-day Universalists and Unitarians.

One of these would be great-uncle John Robinson, pastor of the Pilgrims before the Mayflower hoisted anchor on the voyage which concluded in Plymouth harbor. John Robinson typifies the heritage of congregational government which provided the precious religious institution of the autonomy of each congregation.

Joseph Crooker, an historian of religious liberty made the observation that throughout Christian history there had been liberal men, tolerant men, courageous men, but that their efforts had been sporadic and short-lived. Something new was needed – and that was the independent congregation with members committed to mutual obligations and principles in an organization continuing in time and flexible to changing conditions and emerging needs.

The local independent church meeting provided the pattern for the New England town meeting; the Mayflower Compact was an important influence in our Constitution.

The Church of the Pilgrim Fathers evolved from the Separatist movement launched in England by Robert Browne in 1580-81, when he founded a Congregational Church in Norwich, England. The principles of voluntary allegiance and individual religious experience were an inheritance from many European Anabaptist movements and pietistic movements.

The Separatists movements had to struggle for existence; persecution was severe and prolonged. But in their hard times an unusual policy has had an incalculable influence on you and me. In the age of exploration and colonization in the Americas, England was the only European nation which permitted its heretics to emigrate as an organization and establish themselves in the New World. Other colonial empires established their state religions as well as governments, but the Pilgrims, granted a charter by the King, were a striking exception.

So John Robinson is in our immediate background. His parting words to the embarking Pilgrims have been the prevailing spirit in our later emphases on religion as discovery: “God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his Holy Word.”

Then there was cousin John Locke (1632-1704), who neither came to America nor had any intimation that later religious liberals would consider him a relative in their family tree. John Locke was a rationalist philosopher whose influence has been immense on tolerance, understanding, and the development of democratic practices in government. The rationalist (and John Locke was an eminent example) said essentially, “we know what we have thought out.” Moving from facts and self-evident truths, the rationalist proceeded by logic to new conclusions or revised assumptions.

But we have equal cause to be grateful to John Locke for his statement on the emancipation of the Church from the State. His last writings, “Letters on Toleration,” indicated how much he was in advance of his times and anticipated the present convictions of many of us on the separation of Church and State: “There is absolutely no such thing as a Christian commonwealth .... The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force: but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God .... As the magistrate has no power to impose by his laws, the use of any rites and ceremonies in any church; so neither has he any power to forbid the use of such rites and ceremonies as are already received, approved and practiced by any church; because if he did so, he would destroy the church itself; the end of whose institution is only to worship God with freedom after its own manner.” (See Joseph Crooker, THE WINNING OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.)

The most able champion of these views in the colonies was cousin John Wise (1652-1725). He, too, might wonder at our claiming him on our Universalist Unitarian family tree, for he was the minister of the First Church in Essex, Massachusetts. But John Wise made trail in two thorny areas. In one sense, he was the father of the American Revolution, for when Governor Andros levied a tax on the Colonial towns in 1687, John Wise passionately urged his fellow-townsmen to refuse to pay the tax. He was jailed, denied the right of habeas corpus, put on trial, found guilty and removed from the pastorate. He may have been the first to suffer for the pivotal Revolutionary issue of a century later, “no taxation without representation.” (Crooker, ibid.)

More particularly, we owe him gratitude for his resistance to a proposal that, because the religious interest of the people was dwindling, there should be a government committed to check upon religious delinquency. A committee of 16 ministers drew up “The Proposals.” John Wise, effectively pamphleteering, extinguished this fire which if uncontrolled, might have branded our religious life with governmental control.

Other great names in our family tree, directly and indirectly related, need but passing mention, not because their contributions were unimportant, but rather because they should be well known to all of you.

There was great-uncle Thomas Paine, whose writings and personal sacrifice saved the Revolution; whose life was a pronouncement of reason and the rights of man. Again and again in our churches, I have met committed liberals who could recite page after page verbatim of “The Crisis,” or “The Age of Reason.” Paine’s Deistic philosophy, and fellow Deists such as Jefferson, Franklin, Ethan Allen and many others of that age have been influential in the proclamation of a Creator God who in the beginning established the laws of the universe and the natural rights of man. Few of us hold precise Deistic views but we were influenced by them.

There was Grandfather George DeBenneville, the good physician, who came to Pennsylvania (1741) to minister to the bodies and souls of settlers and Indians. In Europe, DeBenneville had been powerfully influenced by the plain piety and individualistic convictions of Anabaptists and the Moravian Brethren. That Universalism became widespread and influential in Pennsylvania can be attributed in good part to Dr. George DeBenneville.

Father John Murray, convinced by James Relly that all souls would be saved, shared this conviction along with the Methodist evangelistic fervor he retained from his days as a disciple of John Wesley. Not only in Gloucester where he was the first minister of the first organized Universalistic Church, but all along the North Atlantic seaboard, John Murray brought the good news of Universalism.

Father Hosea Ballou exemplified the self-educated Bible scholar and philosopher whose TREATISE ON THE ATONEMENT was the first book published in America refuting not only endless punishment, but also the Trinity and the doctrine of total depravity. Sometimes the intellectual and social elite looked down on Hosea Ballou, for he was a Vermont farm boy, self-taught and could show no Harvard degree. But he won people to his cause; his words were plain and direct; farmers, carpenters, shop-keepers heard him gladly and joined him in the new faith.

Father William Ellery Channing led the theological reformation of New England. His broad and educated intellect, his reason, winsomeness, literary and preaching genius led the cultured New England people from Calvinism to Unitarianism. His Baltimore sermon, preached at the installation of Jared Sparks, persuasively announcing his Unitarian convictions is justly regarded as one of the greatest sermons ever preached in America.

Then there was uncle Theodore Parker. No living Universalist Unitarian preacher speaks to as many today as did Parker tot he thousands who crowded the Sunday services in the Music Hall in Boston, over one hundred years ago. Theodore Parker brought us the wisdom of the German scholars, who in establishing the academic discipline of Biblical scholarship, opened up new worlds for understanding the history of religion and the origin and development of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Theodore Parker looked beneath religions to find religion. His distinction between temporary doctrines eternal verities was best illustrated by the title of his most famous sermon, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.”

Theodore Parker was not accepted in his own day, even by his companions in the liberal faiths. Ardent to correct wrongs committed against people, he was a controversial abolitionist; made plain his convictions and acted on them.

About such religious pioneers as Channing, Emerson and Parker there arose such dispute that William Channing Gannett reported that a common question in those days was, “Are you of the Boston religion or the Christian religion?”

Time does not permit discussing some of our famous females in the family tree, but they were there: Judith Murray, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, Susan Anthony, to name a few.

The more one looks at influences in our background, the more difficult it becomes to tie a few branches into a bouquet and say, “this was Universalism,” or, “this was Unitarianism.” The backgrounds are not only variegated, but we have appropriated as our own, contributions of reason, knowledge, freedom made by countless known and unknown pioneers in a religion of free minds.

Our religious standards were not easily achieved, can be over-simplified and the sacrifice of the men and women in our background are either under-estimated or unknown. But the forgoing are some of our immediate past influences for which we should feel pride and affection. There is one gross mistake that should be avoided by all those who point proudly at the family tree. The worst use of a family tree is to live in it. Just as all our ancestors were different from each other, so there is no consistent, complete guidance in our immediate religious background. If we choose, we can emphasize part of our heritage and dwell on it, but we are not thereby preserving a unique and authoritative way of life which will be an answer to the demands of our times.

In THE PRAIRIE YEARS (p. 69), Carl Sandburg tells the story of the frontier church in Illinois, which because of the wide prevalence of moonshine stills operated by members, was not ready to stand firmly for the temperance movement. When the school teacher “joined the temperance movement, the church trustees suspended him. Then to hold a balance, the trustees suspended another member who had gone blind drunk. The action puzzled one member who stood up in meeting, and shaking a half-full quart bottle so all could see, drawled, ‘Brethering, you have turned one member out beca’se he would not drink and another beca’se he got drunk, and now I wants to ask a question. How much ... does a man have to drink to remain in full membership of this church?’”

Our dilemma cannot be stated in those terms, but we, too, have our inconsistencies. Whatever consistency we have will not be found in any one of the branches of our background. The consistency we acquire will have to be achieved contemporaneously. We shall find abundant wit, wisdom and illustration in the lives of Channing, Murray, Ballou, and Emerson, but the ways we walk will have to be guided by our decisions in our time as we study the maps of our times.

We have won all the individual religious freedom it is possible to have within the democratic framework of congregational church government. The evolution has been one in which for us, the authoritarian roots in our Judeo-Christian heritage have been withering. We fail to find consensus in matters of belief and stake our covenanting together on agreements on the way church government functions.

Our heritage has brought us to the waning half of the 20th century with a prospect for acquiring the allegiance of large numbers of persons who have been taught to reason, analyze and draw conclusions based on facts, experiment, reason. We hope to appeal to minds that are seeing the reasonable faith that makes sense in our time.

Yet as we begin to engage in the concluding sermons of this extended one-man’s view of our Judeo-Christian heritage, I believe that our present service to mankind depends not only on our specific, liberal, intellectual heritage but also on our willingness to embrace the feelings of the heart as well as the operations of the mind.

A religion of feeling involves no contradiction with a religion of reason. We must recognize the unity of body, mind, spirit. If our religion is confined to rational discourse about how wrong other people are in our faith, then we are less than appreciative of the richness of the total human heritage. Then, too, in such limited approach, we sever our potential to gain the allegiance of persons who are growing toward full stature of maturity, whose motions support, whose bodies tingle with the strength of the convictions of the thoughtful mind.

Among the most moving expressions, even though a bit archaic, of our oneness in church covenant and our freedom to hold individual conviction and to act independently, is the 9th provision of the 1785 Charter of Compact of the Independent Christian Church in Gloucester, the first organized Universalist Church in America. The signers solemnly promised, “Whereas the privilege of choosing and professing one’s own religion is inestimable; and in order to maintain that privilege unimpaired, in case any person associating with us should suffer persecution from the undue exercise of power, we do agree and resolve to afford him all legal means of extricating himself from difficulty and of enjoying that freedom which is held forth by the Constitution.”

Not a creed, but an affirmation of individual freedom protected by mutual covenant, this is a variety of religious experience which will be a strengthening, ennobling faith, now as then if we hold fast to such spirit, rather than to anybody’s letter.