Theology – A Universalist Unitarian View

February 13, 1966
Somerville
(re-write from Alliance talk 1/66)

Theology – A Universalist Unitarian View

One of the more tricky snares in which the religious liberal is frequently trapped involves the conceit that theology is nothing but an antiquarian eccentricity occupying musty minds which live in the past. There are out-dated irrelevancies in theology, but there can be vital modern meaning too.

“God is Dead” theology in news – New Yorker – articles
Cartoon “closed because of the founder’s death, reopening soon under new management.”

I would like to speak to you about theology from the point of a Universalist Unitarian Minister, not overlooking the deficiencies or the rewards of theology; attempting to be candid about its limitations, urgent about its rewards.

Theology is exposition about the nature and will of God – words about God. In Christian thought, theology came to mean the systematic statements which explained and defended the great creeds of Christendom. The intent of systematic theology was both to help believers understand and to combat the claims of heretics.

But theology should include a wide range of thought. Whenever one talks about God, the inquiry inevitably widens to include all the experiences of religion – skepticism, heresy and rejection of the accepted forms and symbols of religion as well as belief, orthodoxy and the embracing of prayer, ritual, sacrament.

Should we bother with theology? Or are we above all that? “The consistent liberal is free from dogma only in the sense that he does not allow the patterns of his own theological thinking to be dictated by them. As a historian he will seek to find out what they meant to their authors; as a theologian, he will then ask whether they speak to his own condition.” (Adcock, “Hibbert Journal”, Aut.65).

Consequently, “theology” can be a murky subject when special pleaders are loud but confusing and debaters are not seeking mutually clear points of difference and disagreement.

In our day some of the intellectual and emotional disturbances about religion have some likeness to the loud cries of a few years ago in educational circles about whether or not “Johnny can read,” followed usually by the rhetorical question, “Why can’t Johnny read?”, followed by intense expositions on the subject of whether we should go back to McGuffey or forward to Esperanto. One of the points insufficiently understood in that controversy hinged on the lack of common ground of what is meant by “reading.” Is reading the process of identifying and pronouncing words? Is it the ability to secure meaning from a series of printed words? [There is a] parallel with theology – what do we mean?

Let me emphasize that by “theology,” I intend to include the whole field of religious thought, but with particular emphasis on its expression in words. Words expressing one’s most honest thinking are the most effective symbols of religious expression in our movement today. In our culture we are surrounded by the ancient faith symbols in art and architecture (crosses on church, plastic Jesus, crèche, bible oath). Certainly these signs help (or hinder) our total religious response. The greater need in our day is to comprehend religious truth in the light of modern thought and with an understanding of what is called the “unconscious.” Not that modern thought is ultimate, for it is not exempt from decay and change in the same way as all that has gone by and been discarded. But modern thought is our avenue to the interpretation of our experience. Thought and words are inseparable from the task of isolating and emphasizing the essential forces of human faith. “Theology must therefore be seen as a historical process of continual adaption and adaption of symbols and meanings taken from the dynamic movement of historical events, just as the New Testament may be seen as a series of attempts to interpret what was going on in the lives of Jesus and his followers and in the historical tendencies of the times.” (12/15/65, Max Stathouse, “Christian Century,” comment on THE SECULAR CITY, p. 1539)

I would have you think of theology then as the expression in words as plain and honest as possible about what God and religion mean to our lives now. To do this, we should confront equally the deficiencies and seek the rewards of the search for theological understanding.

The perennial theological deficiency is the temptation to confuse our personal convictions with eternal truth. In our culture, I suppose the most obvious example is the Roman Catholic assertion that God does not permit the Church to teach error on matters of faith and morals. But there are many instances of the deification of the power of a person or group. As individuals, we are sometimes prone to insist that what WE believe just has to be eternal truth and consequently a differing faith is mortal error. “Maybe this is what theologians are for – to tell us how we can be religious by doing what we would do anyway and believing what we would believe anyway.” (Paul Holmer, “Theology Today,” p. 360)

Robert McAfee Brown, a professor at Yale Divinity School, asserted that when theology suffers this deficiency, it becomes unimportant (THE SPIRIT OF PROTESTANTISM, p. 119-120). St. Paul made the same point in his day when in the second letter to the Corinthians, he commented (4-7) “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” That is, the most devoutly held faith is limited by our experience in our time in our world. Theology is contained in an earthen vessel.

RICHARD III, Act iv, sc. 2, after Buckingham balks at carrying out the order to kill the two young princes, King Richard turns to the page and asks,

“knowest thou not anyone whom corrupting gold
Will tempt unto a close exploit of death?

Page, “I know a discontented gentleman
Whose humble means match not his haughty spirit.
Gold were as good as twenty orators and will no doubt tempt him to anything.”

The practical test of theology is conduct. Whatever the discontented gentleman’s theology might have been, it did not stand the test of conduct. When conduct is a reproach, then there must be grave deficiency in the theology.

Two hundred years ago, Gotthold Lessing, German dramatist and critic was ahead of his times in recognizing this deficiency in theology. In his drama, “Nathan the Wise,” the dramatist created a parable dealing with the perennial question as to which of the three great religions of the Western World (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) is the true one.

A famous friend owned a special ring which had been handed down from generation to generation. Always the ring was given by the father to the son dearest to him. In the course of long generations, there came a time when three sons were equally dear to the father. To each he promised the ring; and had two exact copies made. On his deathbed, the father gave each son a ring. Then, each of the three brothers claimed that his was the genuine ring, the others, copies. There was a bitter dispute and finally a lawsuit. The judge listened and then refused to make a decision. He dismissed the three brothers with the advice that each one live so as to demonstrate that his was the authentic ring of the father, “The test is by our fruits, by them we will know.” Not to recognize that enduring wisdom as integral to worthy belief, is to make the mistake of the quarreling brothers.

Recognizing the deficiencies that attend theology, it is also true that there are rewards for the difficult, lonely disciplines of serious thought to matters theological. One reward of theological thought is that the powers of your mind illuminate the world of your experience. I have the feeling that in spite of the considerable popularity of religion in our land, that this is the gratification that is being neglected. Religion in general can be so vague and superficial that religiosity is a better description. If the theology we hold does not illuminate the world of our experience, then we are passing up a better part of religion.

This is the crucial insight of Jesus’ advice to put new wine into new wineskins. The world of our experience is not the world of A.D. 27 in a little country village on the edge of the Roman Empire. The principalities and powers we encounter are not like those Paul met.

We live in a world where every month or so astronauts rocket into space; where the Soviets have just accomplished the astounding achievement of a soft landing on the Moon and sending pictures back to earth. One of the first Soviet astronauts needed the Christian world when he remarked that all through the orbits he witnessed no God or angels. It is a reality of our experience that one will not experience the cosmic heaven of Persian origin and early Christian thought. The world of our experience is that heaven and hell are not locations in space or destinies in time, but states of being; and your mind should consider this theologically.

Our society is industrial, urban, and operated by collective consensus. Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan – the superb story of brotherhood applied on the road to Jericho. But what is the theology to preserve values where delinquency is collective, crime organized and the giantism of society prescribes social, legislative protection and redemption. The hospital care is financed not by the Samaritan’s coin but by Blue Cross and Medicare. The lost sheep is recovered, not by the devotion and sacrifice of one redeeming shepherd, but by the combined action of boys clubs, settlement houses, junior republic, psychiatric and social work, parole officers and innumerable agencies of group Samaritanism. The whole concept of the anti-poverty program (e.g., food stamps) is of a dimension completely removed from the old parable.

When we look at the social controls being legislated to compel decent housing, restrain discrimination, adjust prices, deter swindling and so on, we have been creating a theological point of view hardly contemplated in the older idea that redemption is accomplished by converting the sinner. We are acknowledging in our social controls (that is, legislation) that we can no longer wait for sinners to be converted. The laws cannot compel goodness, but they can restrain, prohibit and punish those who would do evil, knowingly or unknowingly to their fellowmen.

This was one of the most important contributions achieved by Walter Rauschenbusch of Col. Rochester fame. He was impressed by the obstacles to redemption in a society such as ours and sought not only to play an active role for social change, but also put the powers of his mind to a Christian thrust for social action which has been of enormous influence in organized religion, particularly in America. It has been known as the Social Gospel.

A supporting theology for modern man must wrestle with this world of experience, apply reason, confront and deal with chaotic experience in our world – which is not a world of dying-rising savior gods, but a world of astonishing technology and irresistible political change, occurring amid the vast struggle of political and economic ideologies in a setting where “have not” peoples are determined to become ....

The difficult task for the deeply concerned is to hew out a theology which will illuminate meaning in this world of our experience. There is a great deal of bluff and bluster in our world which feebly disguises the wide-spread fear that life has no important and enduring meaning. If to use Paul Tillich’s phrase, “theology is what concerns us ultimately,” then it is theology, as each of us may achieve it, which will lighten the difficult ways with a faith to live by. Not all of you find a place for God in your thinking, yet this for many is the superb expression of that which is of greatest value and comprehends purposes which make it all worthwhile. However that may be for you, you will find great reward in setting your course by a theological star, some illuminating purpose which brings all things into focus in depth. And as the old scripture says (1st Peter 3/15) “being ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you.”

Such a quest for meaning has additional reward to the patient and persistent mind by providing a uniting principle which puts your world together. Julian Huxley once defined religion as an “organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny.”

Much of the political growth of our country provides an example. Many of the bitterest controversies, civil rights, political franchise and religious freedom are settled by referral to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Although the interpretations of these basic constitutional documents are not fixed and eternal, but flexible and responsive to needed change, nevertheless, they are an undergirding, a point of referral whereby acts are measured, controversies decided. So the unifying principle of a thought-out theology will be a point of referral and measurement for the events and experiences which comprise our hectic world.

I have the notion that a lack of this unifying, reasonable theological foundation is the reason why so many persons find worship a tepid routine in which participation has a low priority when competing with other Sunday morning attractions. For many, there is no inner script which reacts in agreement or counterpoints of contradiction to the worship patterns of words and music in the gathered group.

Do you know the story about the man who handed his little boy a jig saw map of the world, fondly convinced that putting the puzzle together would take more than enough time for Dad to read the newspaper. He had hardly reached the editorial page before the boy announced gleefully that the puzzle was completed. Knowing that the boy was too young for any wide grasp of world geography, the father asked him, “How did you do it so quickly?”

“Well,” said the boy, “there was a man on the other side. When I put the man together, the world came out all right.”

A uniting principle, a “dimension of depth” can put the man together. For one of the great rewards of individual theological conviction is the freedom to embrace it in all its difficulties because it represents a central standard of value. With such theological conviction we can participate exuberantly in the wide range of ideas in a free religious society and a free country without yearning for the imposed authority of a creed pronounced by others. Achieving theological depth, we can endure the cruelties and enigmas of human social experience, falling victim to neither the evasion of pious platitudes or the easy way of ....

[editor’s note: end page(s) of sermon missing]