Unitarian Universalist Principles – The Plumb Line

February 20, 1983
Lakeland

In the old Hebrew scripture of Amos, that wandering ethical prophet with a rough tongue for the status quo had a vision (7/7) of Yahveh holding a plumb line and saying, “Behold I am placing a plumb line in the midst of my people, Israel.”

Two weeks ago I tried to deal with the widening horizons of Unitarian Universalism – how through the years, the principles have become broader and increasingly inclusive.

Today I would attempt to deal in some depth, or, to use Amos’ metaphor, use the plumb line for truing up. Under consideration is just one of the radical ideas that seethed in our denominational beginnings. “Hell” is the subject. You may be asking yourself, “why spend time on an abandoned notion, an out-moded concept?” But my theme is two-fold:

Hell extinguished
Hell re-ignited

The threat of Hell was one thought to be potent to compel good conduct and to strongly deter misbehavior. Today, Hell is no longer a weekly sermon exhortation. Furthermore, “Hell” has changed from somewhat unacceptable profanity to commonplace slang. “I had a helluva time,” we say, not to indicate misery, but merriment. Yet the receding of the by-gone belief that literal Hell would follow life for most people has not eliminated the torment that we humans experience.

I would like to review briefly this ancient idea which once had threat and power. Then I would have you consider the proposition that outgrowing an out-moded doctrine does not in itself liberate us from the emotional and moral agony with which the old notion attempted to deal.

The doctrine of Hell is so old that its earliest beginnings are shadowy in the mists of ancient history. There were antecedents and varying influences feeding into this doctrine of orthodox Christian faith.

The Old Testament people believed in “Sheol.” Sheol was markedly different from the later Christian Hell in that Sheol was not a place or punishment, but a neutral shadowy existence after death. All souls were placed in Sheol, almost like the way a business might store out-dated records in a warehouse. All souls were filed in Sheol, there to stay, but available to be summoned in an emergency. You may recall how the Witch of Endor conjured up the spirit of Samuel. Sheol had similarities to the Greek mythology of the underworld, where the souls of persons once alive maintained a somewhat hazy, gloomy existence. If you happened to see, this week on PBS, the Stravinsky ballet “Persephone” you witnessed a beautiful representation of this myth.

The strongest influence in the development of “Hell” came from the Zoroastrians, followers of the ancient religion of Persia. The idea of evil was of prime importance in Zoroastrianism, because Ahriman, the devil of darkness, had powers nearly equal to Ahura Mazda, the god of light. Consequently, the struggle for souls was never easily decided. Out of the Persian belief in the supernatural power and origin of evil came much of the influence which developed into the image of Hell as a place where eternal torment was administered by Satan, a being more powerful than any but Ahura Mazda himself.

Because Arabia and Persia are countries of intense heat and scorching sands, we can readily appreciate how Hell was imagined as a place of eternal fire. Naturally enough, ancient Scandinavian mythology pictured heaven as warm and the Norse hell is a place of cold and frosty mist.

In the Christian scriptures, when Christian thought began to develop Hell as a place of eternal torment for the damned, the word “Gehenna” was sometimes used. This was a valley just outside of Jerusalem, the Valley of Hinnon. There, in ancient times, the god Moloch was worshiped. Infants were sacrificed in the red-hot arms and gaping mouth of the giant iron image. After Moloch worship was abandoned, the Valley of Hinnon became the city refuse dump. There, like many city dumps I remember, not equipped with incinerators, there was a constant glow of fire. Because frequently the bodies of criminals were thrown there after execution, Gehenna became a symbol of the place of future punishment.

In the development of Christian doctrine, the ideas of Hell became increasingly more morbid and terrifying. This cruel doctrine was by no means confined to the Catholic Church, for both Luther and Calvin maintained the reality of Hell and were certain that the majority of humankind were destined, irredeemably, for eternal punishment. Even the creative Wesleyan movement, which gave birth to the great Methodist Church, taught in its catechism that, “Hell is a dark and bottomless pit full of fire and brimstone; that the wicked are punished there by having their bodies tormented by fire and their souls by a sense of the wrath of God.”

There were no available remedies against the strong probability of Hell except to be lucky enough to be pre-destined for Heaven or to have God’s grace bestowed on you; or in less harsh sects, complete faithfulness to a creedal formula would give you a chance to be saved. This salvation was not one you could earn by good deeds or one you would forfeit by lack of morals. For salvation, one was entirely dependent on the grace of God or the redeeming act of a supernatural savior who was God in human form. There were always dissidents in Christian history, but they were repressed or ignored.

It was a protest against this ancient terror that motivated itinerant preachers and pamphleteers to proclaim Universalism. These protestors filtered out proof texts from scripture to demonstrate that no person, no baby, baptized or not, no sinner, irrespective of the depth of his depravity, would ever be permanently barred from God’s love and irresistible redemption.

Not many, if any, of us living can feel the enthusiasm for controversy and the willingness to be a scandal that gripped the religious liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries. And people responded: this faith that God was good; the belief that humans could achieve progress by their efforts, the growth of scientific knowledge, the persuasiveness of the theories of evolution and geology, the erasing of heavenly boundaries by astronomers and mathematicians – all these aided the growth and kindled the spirit of liberal churches.

Eventually, most protestant churches stopped belaboring their constituencies with the threat of a literal Hell. Except for the fundamentalist wings, by common consent, Hell became an ignored tenet of the Christian faith. Hell is no longer taken seriously as a geographical location, where, after death on this earth, human souls and bodies are tormented forever.

Yet, there needs to be a re-ignition of Hell, a new consciousness. Hell, as a theological doctrine, is properly ignored, but hell as a very present individual and social reality is a fearsome condition which confronts us.

Hellish atomic fire, everlasting enough to destroy all that lives and despoil all that is good, is a threat that hangs heavy about us. Not even the pulpit eloquence of Jonathan Edwards, who terrified his parishioners with exhortations of “sinners in the hand of an angry god,” as he spoke sternly of theological Hell, can surpass the ghastly testimony of Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the nature of the hell that we the people can create, when we the people unlock the doors of the many mansions of universe power before we have the maturity and ethics to walk safely in such dangerous paths.

Dante’s imagination and art were creative enough to picture the inferno in enduring poetry. But in communicating the hellishness of human hell, the Nazi extermination camps, where five million Jews, alone, died within the living memory of almost every one of us, makes Dante even naïve and restrained when it comes to projecting the image of horror.

Violent death, hunger, the increasing number of homeless (even in our country), mindless brutality, unexpected and terrible catastrophe when an avalanche or volcanic eruption mows a wide swath of earth – these are part of the human scene. Hell was banished by those who could not believe that God would visit any of his creatures with everlasting torment. But hell, re-ignited on earth, a new Gehenna, sparked by human devilishness, selfishness, greed or by mysterious disaster, might very well be acknowledged in our consciousness as the continuing stage-set of ethical struggle.

Abraham Lincoln said to one of his generals during the first few months of our civil war, “If to be the head of Hell is as hard as what I have to undergo here, I would find it in my heart to pity Satan himself.” (MARY LINCOLN, Randall, p. 228).

Not the least hellish of the threats in this turbulent world is what the late Sir Charles P. Snow called the “Venetian Shadow.” (THE TWO CULTURES AND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION) The noted British figure, who was both a creative writer and learned scientist, wrote, “I am saddened by a historical myth. Whether the myth is good history or not, doesn’t matter; it is pressing enough for me. I can’t help thinking of the Venetian Republic in its last half-century. Like us, they had been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident. They had acquired great political skill, just as we have. A good many of them were tough-minded, realistic, patriotic men. They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had become crystallized. They were fond of the pattern just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will to break it.” [CJW note: Quote, Morris Cohen: “Inertia is the first law of history, as it is of physics. The dominant fact is that though people generally complain against the existing situation, inertia makes them unwilling to revolt or take active measures to change the situation.”]

The reading from Koestler’s JANUS sums up our hesitation and weakness in the face of group pressure, even when excessive devotion to nation, system, or power leads to death and suffering. Such perversion of devotion is a bitter displacement of human love.

Furthermore, there is no health to be found in individual withdrawal from the sparks of this social hell in the hope that one will not be singed. For in their withdrawn, individual loneliness, fears, guilts, millions now living are experiencing private hell. In the many times I have conferred with troubled people, never do I remember one saying, “I’m afraid I’m going to Hell when I die.” No, what I have heard so many times is, “I’m going through hell, now.” or “Life is hell.”

Shakespeare, with his rare understanding for our embattled feelings, portrays the torture of private hell in the guilty-ridden Lady Macbeth. The crimes have been carried out, but her conscience has soured the sweet flavor of victory. Distraught, she scrubs her hand obsessively, “Out damned spot ... Hell is murky.” Hell did not create her guilt, guilt created her hell.

Out private hells are as agonizing as the thirst of Tantalus, who in the ancient myth stood in water, level with his chin, yet when he bent his head to drink, the water rushed away and not a drop remained; hungry, he was surrounded by trees heavy with ripe fruit. But when he reached for pear, apple, or pomegranate, the winds whirled the branches out of reach.

Our human salvation here, seems like that often enough – happiness, understanding, self-fulfillment near at hand, but tantalizingly beyond our reach.

Hell, re-ignited as a reality in time and in human experience, is a stubborn obstacle. The cause is not reasonably found in the nature of the God you may believe in, but in the nature and behavior of men and women, individually and in our collectives. There seems to be freedom of choice in the human venture. Alternatives are available. In spite of elaborate arguments which propose that our choices are pre-destined by inheritance and prior conditioning, most of us feel that there are opportunities for us to decide on what sides we will vote, where our voice will be heard, what issues of living will receive our attention.

This, it seems to me, is a natural consequence of the old Universalism which refused to believe in a God who would torment souls forever – a Unitarian Universalism which has faith that men and women have ways to dampen the fires of the social hell; have resources which can help quench the fires of our private hells.

This is optimistic. Unitarian Universalism has always been a hopeful religion. But it should not be naïve enough to hold a wishful fantasy that progress is possible without effort, without individual responsibility. If there is one stunning reproof to individual lethargy, it is the record of recent history. Many observers have recorded their amazement, for example that the 20th century Germans – energetic, scientific, bright, cooperative, intelligent – could have tolerated and supported the unspeakable Nazi age. But they did. This illustrates a quality in our human nature by no means confined to the Third Reich, although Hitler represented the depth of ghastliness. Under the sanction and pressure of the group, the individual will tolerate, even participate, in acts that individually would be repulsive. Koestler wrote penetratingly on that. Most of the hells of human creation are ignited by the abdication of individual responsibility, judgment, reason, and choice.

In former times, some of the old meat-packing houses used the Judas goat method. The Judas goat led sheep through the chute to the wheel. There the sheep were hung up on the moving belt for slaughter. The Judas goat is then sent out to head another group of sheep to their death. The story is told that on one occasion, a new worker, unfamiliar with the process, picked up the Judas goat too and hung him from the slaughter wheel. As the Judas goat started his fatal journey, he raised a terrific din. The story-teller concluded, “The moral is very clear, whoever hooks his neighbor, sooner or later gets hooked himself.” “Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.”

The “Venetian Shadow” falls heavily on current history. There seems little doubt, to me, that there is hardly any limit to the economic changes, the political changes, the industrial changes, the education changes that are required. The signs of the times indicate that perhaps only sweeping changes may transform the shadow into light. These changes will be painful and require that we place greater trust in a parliament of nations, exert a stronger effort on winning the friendship of nations hostile to us, as well as being nice to our allies, and begin to understand what could be done in a community of nations who choose not to be hellish incendiaries. That is the plumb line of our times. But do we have the will to be true to it?

Generalities, to be sure. Yet our private hells are caused not only by our closely-guarded immature feelings, fears, and hostilities, but by our knowledge that there are convictions we hold out but dare not speak, for we like to take our ease and be free from criticism. Hell is murky when we smother our convictions because of fear, power-hunger, status-seeking, economic climbing, reluctance to lose esteem, or any other of the damnable ways we impede our best selves.

[Editor's Note: some of the concepts addressed above are very effectively presented in the following YouTube video: Hell: an excessive punishment, by QualiaSoup]