Measuring The Past – Weighing The Future

January 2, 2000
Venice

(re-write of March 21, 1982, Lakeland)

Thirty-nine years ago the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association consolidated, and the Unitarian Universalist Association became a new religious name on the continental scene. Today, I would like to review briefly the values that each brought from an historic past – values which should not be erased – and re-affirm proposals and principles which seem to me essential to justify an on-going religious enterprise which asks for loyalty and support. We are justified if we are useful in service to the human family, courageous, and thoughtful in evaluating the conflicts and stresses in society, and aware of the need to provide situations where we celebrate life together – worship. No religious endeavor is worthy of the commitment it requires unless it serves persons in their needs, challenges society to create both larger liberties and stronger social cohesion, and deepens our human grasp of the importance of the great ideas: the nature of this creating universe, our purpose and destiny on this earth and the “source of human good.”

There were Universalists and Unitarians hundreds of years before the movements were organized on this continent. The associations and denominations were structures to unite congregations and to house and protect ideas which had previously existed as heresies within other religious frameworks.

That all humankind, without exception, was not condemned to everlasting Hell, but was to be saved, was a theological affirmation existing from earliest Christian times. In America, the early Universalist preachers were almost exclusively “Bible Universalists,” many of them self-taught. They rebutted the orthodox claims of Hell and damnation with proof texts from the Old and New Testaments which indicated clearly that many of the Old Testament prophets, and in the New Testament, Jesus, Paul, and others believed that the nature of God was love, and that eternal creating love, by its very nature, prohibited eternal damnation, even for one single human soul. Hosea Ballou, the pioneer Universalist preacher, was riding circuit, place to place, preaching Universalism. He stopped in homes overnight. Somewhere in New England he stopped overnight with a farmer who did not agree with him and they discussed Universalism. The farmer’s son was somewhat of a drunk and when he did not return from town, the farmer was worried. He was afraid his son would go to Hell. “All right,” said Ballou, “We’ll find a place on the path where your son will be coming home. We’ll build a big fire, grab him and throw him into it.” The farmer was shocked, “That’s my son, I love him, I can’t do that.”

“If you, a human and imperfect father, love your son so much you wouldn’t throw him into the fire, how can you possibly believe that God, the perfect father, would do so?”

It is fair to report that the orthodox opponents could find numerous biblical proof texts which seemed to buttress their position that a few souls would be saved by the grace of God. But most souls were destined for eternal punishment in Hell.

This demonstrates one can “prove” almost anything from scriptures. Those who advocate “scientific creationism” using the scriptures as laboratory proof that evolution is erroneous do not seem to recognize that by the same means, scripture, one can “prove” that the earth is flat. So it would seem consistent to me that a believer in “scientific creationism” should, logically, belong to the Flat Earth society.

In Christian beginnings, universal salvation was a doctrine defended by many of the early leaders of the Church. Even when it became a heretical doctrine, some five hundred years after Jesus lived, there were frequent re-assertions of the doctrine of universal salvation by courageous heretics.

In modern Universalism in America, there was Dr. George de Benneville. Influenced by the Universalism of some of the German pietists who were a small but influential wing of the Protestant Reformation, de Benneville was preaching Universalism in Pennsylvania in the 1740s. John Murray, disciple of James Relly, came to America. After the remarkable experiences of the New Jersey landing, he found his ways to New England. Much to his surprise, he found a Universalist group in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1770. We would call it a fellowship today. After a series of dramatic events, he became minister of the first organized society of Universalists in America, The Independent Christian Church.

The movement spread rapidly in New England and Pennsylvania, soon reaching out to gather societies in New York and Ohio. In 1805, Hosea Ballou’s famous TREATISE ON THE ATONEMENT was the theological proposal which made most Universalists unitarian (small u) in their theology years before Unitarianism became an organized movement.

Unitarianism has roots as deep or deeper in the soil of human history. The Hebrew scripture proclaimed a monotheism at least from the time of the ethical prophets, 800 years B.C.E. The New Testament offers no evidence of Trinitarian belief. Belief that God was three was a later development of Christian dogma.

Disbelief in the Trinity became heretical. While monotheism remained the foundation of Jewish and Moslem theology, the Christian Church punished those who deviated from the Trinitarian dogmas.

Nevertheless, Unitarian thought flared again and again. Servetus, most well-known of the anti-Trinitarians of the Reformation period, was burned at the stake by John Calvin in Geneva, but his influence was not destroyed thereby. In the same sixteenth-century, the Socinian or Unitarian movement was organized in Transylvania by Francis David. David, later imprisoned, died in jail, but Unitarianism has persisted in Hungary for more than four hundred years.

Unitarianism in England pre-dated the movement in America by almost a century. Under the leadership of Theophilus Lindsey and Joseph Priestley, organization was made effective in the founding of Essex Hall Chapel in 1774.

In the United States, although there were early Congregational preachers who were Unitarian in thought, specific organization was delayed.

King’s Chapel was the first Anglican (Episcopal) Church in Boston. However, in 1785, the membership elected a liberal minister, James Freeman. Importantly enough, when the Bishop would not approve Freeman and refused to ordain him, the Parish delegated its Senior Warden to ordain Freeman – a radical departure from and rejection of the Anglican/Episcopal practice of ordination by the Bishop through whose laying on of hands on the ordinand maintained the doctrine of apostolic succession.

The American Unitarian Association was formed in 1825. It was not a uniting of churches, but was an individual membership organization. The inspired preaching of William Ellery Charming and the Unitarian influence on the faculty of Harvard Divinity School were important in the founding of the AUA. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, among others, strengthened the intellectual position and increasingly isolated the Unitarian movement from the prevailing orthodoxies.

For more than a hundred years, the Universalists and Unitarians maintained their denominational separateness, each accumulating heroes, heroines, traditions, trusts and institutional habits which were difficult to alter or abandon. Recognizing, however, that their theology and social attitudes were developing along parallel lines, there were overtures toward merger as early as 1865.

Both denominations took pretty much in stride the revolutions in scientific ideas and adjusted theological positions to cohere with modern thought. Darwinian evolution, the higher criticism of the Bible, and Freudian theories of our motives and inwardness all were accepted generally by both denominations and were positions which helped liberals toward a better understanding of human nature in a world of natural and orderly processes.

[CJW note: Mainline religions stopped preaching hellfire & brimstone; reference to a cartoon which depicts a minister giving a sermon in which he declares, “No matter how badly you have sinned, you don’t have to worry about losing your coverage!”]

In the 1950s, deliberations about merger intensified and in progressive steps, studies were undertaken, and various merger proposal voted, which led to the conclusive vote in 1960. The negotiations had been complicated and there was opposition, but the consolidation was overwhelmingly approved by the delegates. At the time, some of us remembered the words of the prophet Amos, “Can two men (sic) walk together except they agree?” Unitarians and Universalists agreed that their religious association was one and to walk together henceforth.

It is important to remember the values of the old which have been preserved in the new:

First, there is the basic theological/philosophical tradition of individual freedom, reason, character, optimism . This right of individual belief is maintained specifically in the purposes and objectives of the UUA: “To strengthen one another in a free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship.”

Second is the great Reformation affirmation of the priesthood of all believers. We make no division between the clergy and the laity that asserts or implies that the clergyman has a unique, sacred calling. We ministers are trained to carry out the duties and responsibilities of the ordained minister, but we have no wisdom from on high that is denied the person in the pew or chair. The freedom and responsibility of both pulpit and pew have both historical precedent and continuing symbol in our traditions, in the ordination in King’s Chapel of James Freeman by the Senior Warden, a layman and ordination of John Murray by the Gloucester Universalists – laypeople all.

The parallel institutional right of congregational independence was a high value in both Unitarian and Universalist traditions and it has been preserved in the constitutional documents of the UUA.

There are many traditions in our historical past which are points of referral and wise guidance, but the most vital are the freedom of the individual and the independence of the congregation.

What shall we dream and try to make real in the future? The future cannot be precisely determined by the conditions of the present. One of the mysterious, tantalizing, and hopeful features of this dynamic universe is that effects can never be exactly predicted from observable causes. Prediction of things to come is always a venture of chance. I do not happen to believe in crystal balls, tarot cards, or the daily astrological column.

But it seems to me that one of our responsibilities is theological. When one looks back on the “death and Glory” argument which badly split the Universalists in the 19th century, when one considers the agitation and hot debates in the humanism/theism controversy of a few decades ago, as well as other issues on which there was division, one must surely recognize that theological debate is seldom a placid encounter. As one historian has remarked, “there is no rancor like that between theological opponents who fight for the glory of God as if the very devil were in them.”

We do need a theological framework which provides a reasonable enclosure for the revolutionary changes which are occurring in electronic communications, science, politics, economics and government. The UUA has a program, “Building your own theology” which I recommend, if you have not already used it.

But we must be just as wary of establishing a creed as were our forbears. The fact that a religion may be appraised as modern is no warrant whatsoever for an attitude requiring conformity to it, or being arrogant about it. In the historical room of the Universalist Church in Gloucester, there hangs a replica of the original Charter of Compact of that first organized Universalist Church. If you ever visit there, read the whole compact, but particularly notice the 9th article: “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 associated with us should suffer persecution from the undue exercise of power, we do agree and resolve to afford him all legal means of extricating him from difficulty and of enjoying that freedom which is held forth by the Constitution.” The language may be slightly archaic, but the ethic is as imperative today as then.

Universal salvation, among us, has become less a theological proposition for the after-life and more an article of faith for the people living in this world – to affirm, defend, and promote the worth of every human personality and the use of the democratic method in human relationships. This is the additional meaning, The Big Idea, that has been transfused into the grand old theology of the universal salvation of all humankind.

There is no blinking the requirement that our faith must be not only free, but also exacting, for the defense of all souls is no trivial or easy task. It is something we must do together. John Coleman Adams, one of the superior of our 19th century preachers, once said that “our forbears were too jealous of their liberties to cultivate their unities.”

The defense of the free mind requires a good deal of unity. We should be neither boastful of our knowledge nor extravagant in our claims of virtue. Even as a consolidated association, we are tiny compared with the millions other churches can count. Nevertheless, we need to exert our efforts, the ounces of our weight, toward achieving a world which will consider all persons on earth worthy of salvation here on earth, which will Define salvation in terms of enough to live on as well as freedom to choose a faith to live by.

We live in communities where there is a multiplicity of differing religions, denominations, associations with differing theologies, symbols, sacraments, rituals, traditions. What is most needed for the 21st century is not a unity of faith, as faith is commonly understood, but rather an urgent witness to stimulate and encourage all persons to live up to the ethical demands of their own religions. We do this best by living up to our own. In our own way and in cooperation with others whose faith symbols may differ widely, can deal with issues of human dignity, rights, freedom, hunger, sickness, and the search for the common good.