A few years ago, I was meeting with the men's group at the First Unitarian Church of Austin, Texas, where I was serving as interim minister. Of the 10 regulars, half were retired and all but one had been long-time UUs. The newest, a retired physician, was particularly enthusiastic about his newfound faith. He asked, "Where have you been all my life? Why aren't there more people beating their ways to our doors?"
In general, we agreed that our liberalism is both a great strength and a weakness. We will never claim that ours is the only sure way to salvation or that we have everything neatly packaged with final answers. And so, Unitarian Universalism will never appeal to the general public, who seem to want exactly what we cannot offer.
But if, as some sociologists of religion claim, our liberal way should appeal to one-half of 1 percent of the population, where are the estimated 1½ million to 2 million free thinkers who might be attracted to UUism?
One reason our Unitarian Universalist Association remains so small (about 190,000 adults in North America) is due to our woeful denominational public relations, hampered by chronic lack of money, as well as our disinclination to be too "pushy" about our religion for fear of sounding dogmatic or too much like the evangelical denominations. This was my line of reasoning as we discussed the dilemma.
"But many liberals do know about us and stay away, or have tried us out and move on -- why?" asked another of the men.
I conjectured that we are no longer that much different from moderate Protestantism, and fetched a list I'd recently been handed by a member who had visited a nearby Methodist church. The list contained several things modern Methodists didn't have to believe in order to be good Christians. Included were the Trinity, Christ's miracles, the infallibility of the Bible, the virgin birth and Immaculate Conception, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, belief that his death washed away our sins (vicarious atonement), and many other doctrines that Unitarian Universalists had rejected a century ago.
Many moderate Christians have become non-doctrinaire, much as are we UUs, except that they have not abandoned Jesus as the central figure of their faith, including his concept of God the Father. This is the sacred center of liberal Christianity.
I was led to ask: "What is the compelling myth for Unitarian Universalists? Where is our sacred center?" We UUs have divested ourselves of much of the theology and superstition of the past. Yet we seem to be unfocused, with no compelling vision to steady our course. We jokingly quip that we address our prayers "To whomever it might concern," not aware that there seems to be a vacuum of sacredness in our worship. Past studies of those who have departed our churches reveal their common feeling that we are not "religious" enough; our worship does not "feed the soul."
Old beliefs and myths we have rightfully cast aside. But can we create a new myth or vision by which we may shape our religious understanding? Can we find, as a colleague of mine wryly calls it, a "myth-ing link"?
To this end, I have delivered four sermons over the past few weeks on what I call the ultimate questions of religious reality and existence. Perhaps this may help us to fashion a new concept of what is our sacred center.
Why all this concern with theology? Because behind the theological concepts of salvation, human nature, knowing and death are the ultimate questions of human existence that concern all religions, even Unitarian Universalism. And the more carefully we consider ultimate questions, the better thinkers we are about our own religion, whereby we become better able to speak positively about what we believe, rather than to define ourselves in terms of what we don't believe.
Now, having considered being, knowing, salvation and death, let us endeavor to look at ultimate reality, no mean accomplishment for a 20-minute sermon. And, of course, that would be impossible. It took weeks for Carl Sagan to give us a broad view of the cosmos in his public television series. I will not try to outdo Carl Sagan. And I also will not go into the vast realm of scientific knowledge, ranging from molecular structure to the makeup of the universe. I would rather that we consider the question that has been asked by every wondering human mind in every age. And that question is: How did it all begin, and is there a prime mover behind it all? This question, in turn, leads one to wonder about the idea of God: "Who/What's in charge?"
Let me state at the beginning: Human beings create their gods. It's not the other way around. Humans have been "god-makers" since the beginning of human consciousness. Let me quote this little poem from the newsletter of the First Unitarian Church in Columbus, Ohio, by E.Y. Harburg:
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree,
And only God who makes the tree
Also makes the fools like me.
But only fools like me, you see,
Can make a god, who makes a tree.
In this modern day, one might ask whether the god concept is valid anymore. If one is asking about the old, outmoded god concept, then the answer is that modern religion has no need for the old gods. As Alfred North Whitehead has written: "The progress of religion is defined by the denunciation of the gods. The keynote of idolatry is contentment with the prevalent gods."
The idea of God is born in the wondering mind. Humans look at creation and wonder about its origin. Not content simply to accept the "is-ness" or "given-ness" of the world and the universe, humans postulate a "Giver." A God or gods come into being. Religious myths arise, are finally written down and become dogma. Revelations by religious seers are accepted at face value. Later, medieval scholastics try to prove the evidence of Deity with rationalizations such as: "Since so many different people and cultures come up with the idea of God, God must exist," or "Since so many people seem to lead moral lives, then the human inclination toward kindness proves God's existence." Eighteenth- and 19th-century science and the Enlightenment postulate God as the great Mechanic or Designer, evidenced by the marvelous complexity of nature, with interworkings that cannot be justified simply by random chance or mutations.
All of this type of thinking has been made fun of by modern scientific skeptics. But lately science is taking a second look. Through modern mathematics and molecular physics, scientists are seeing new evidence of design that cannot be explained away. For instance, if gravitational force had been ever so slightly greater or weaker, the universe would consist of either giant blue stars or red dwarf stars, and life could never have evolved. Modern cosmologists calculate the odds against life as we know it as 10 to the 301st power, a number that could never be contained on all the paper ever created in the world. Consideration of a Grand Design seems to be coming back in cosmological thinking, but not the old "Grand Architect of the Universe" idea of God. Nowadays the mysterious, inexplicable realm of God seems to belong more to the scientists than to the theologians.
No matter how scientific or skeptical or religiously sophisticated we may claim to be, the idea of God will not go away. To quote a ministerial colleague, Alfred Judd, "God has to be faced. God has to be dealt with."
As Unitarian Universalists, we have rejected most, if not all, the old gods, but this should not mean that our minds are closed to any consideration of the idea of God. We don't disallow astronomy or chemistry even though they grew out of astrology and alchemy. The same should hold true for religion even though all of it grew out of ancient superstition.
The idea of God persists, even for us moderns. Friederich Schleirmacher and Immanuel Kant, theologian and philosopher of the 18th and 19th centuries, argued that the idea of God is rooted within our native human religious capacity, a capacity just as trustworthy as is our capacity for theoretical and moral reasoning.
Mortimer Adler, renowned philosopher of our day, argues for God's existence without one's beginning from a predetermined faith stance, as do most theologians. Unfortunately, the god that Adler ends up with is a characterless, benign god with little quality to evoke our reverence or awe. The late Buckminster Fuller claimed the existence of a supreme intellect behind the universe to which he could not ascribe personhood, nor did it enter into the affairs of human beings.
It seems to me that the dilemma for modern religious thinkers lies with the problem of God's personhood. We've killed off the "Man Upstairs" type of god-thinking and have put little back. Many would say, "Fine! It's time human beings stood on their own." I would agree with this. But also, as one who tends to agree with Schleirmacher and Kant about our innate inclination to think religiously, I would say that, though we killed off the old gods, humans still yearn for a divine "personhood." The rub today is how, in this scientific age, do we consider the idea of a personal god without lapsing back into the old anthropomorphic images of God?
In this respect, Rice University philosophy professor Konstantin Kolendu wrote an article in Religious Humanism magazine a few years ago titled "Religion Beyond God." Kolendu feels that the personhood element within religion is necessary and may even be attained without a need for a traditional god concept. He proposes that the concept of God arises out of our innate religiousness, which constantly and intensely asks of us what it means to be a person. Religion, he says, arises from our ascribing supreme importance to certain aspects of personhood to which we then add mythical, intellectual, imaginative, artistic and poetic embellishments. Humans thusly create their gods.
Kolendu sums up by saying that the love of life unites the human race. And because we take life seriously, we are moved to embellish that seriousness with multiple religious forms. Human probing for greater personhood motivates religion, not the human search for God. Thus Kolendu seeks to explain why people are inclined to believe in a personal god. To back up his theories, Kolendu cites Paul Tillich, who once shocked many Christians by suggesting, paradoxically, that we might have to reject religion in the name of religion. Similarly, John Dewey once proposed that we throw out the noun "religion" and keep only the adjective "religious."
Tillich was on the right track, I believe, when he defined religiousness as "ultimate concern" and God as "Ultimate Being." Tillich was seeking to create a non-biblical, almost secular theology for the modern era.
Other theologians are grappling with religion beyond the old gods. Our own Unitarian theologian, the late Henry Nelson Weiman, was one of the modern school of "process" theologians. For Weiman, the idea of God was not of a personhood but the result of transactions between human beings -- "creative interchange" were Weiman's words for these transactions. And Weiman's colleague, the late Bernard Bloomer of the University of Chicago, imagined a network of beings living and dead, interconnected as in a giant cobweb, with the interconnectedness representing the idea of God. Weiman and Bloomer, then, were seeking to describe God as Process, not as Being as did Tillich. (Our UU Principles and Purposes reflect Bloomer: "the interconnected web of all existence.")
Still living at the age of 101 is Charles Hartshorne, respected contributor to the Process School of theology and member of the Austin, Texas, UU Church. According to Dr. Hartshorne, God is not abstraction but the supreme example of the creative process who participates in our knowing.
Mind-boggling, all this. How much better to be either a fundamentalist or an atheist. So much simpler.
Speaking personally, I can relate to almost all these areas of modern religious thinking. And I'm open to any new thought about religiousness without a personal god. I've done my share to kill off the old gods, and good riddance.
But something deep down within me persists no matter how I rationalize away the old personal gods. Something gives me a solid assurance that ultimately I am not alone. Ultimately there is something, not nothing. I know this is a faith statement. Reason will not support it. But I am supported in this by Pascal's famous words: "The heart hath reasons which reason knows not." This something has Being, both distinct from and merged with my own self. This something is "Person" without personhood, though at rare times I have experienced almost a personalized presence.
I could go on, knowing I speak only for myself. And yet I know that I am not unique in this line of thinking. I am continuously amazed at the number of people who experience as I do -- not the same as I do, of course, but people who in their own solitude know that they also are not ultimately alone.
Analyze it, criticize it, belittle it -- the religious experience, the sense of "Presence," exists for many and will not go away. To my mind, it exists independent of our probing for personhood and our use of super-concepts as Kolendu theorizes. There is something to Tillich's idea of "Ultimate Being" -- something beyond even the human mind that conceptualizes it.
Voltaire said, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Later, Voltaire said, "I am rarely satisfied with those lines, but I confess I have a father's tenderness for them."
Let me continue with these quotations from other Unitarian Universalist ministers, who in reality are the "practicing theologians" of our liberal faith -- most UU theology is spoken from our pulpits, not contained in the dry leaves of books. First, this statement by the Rev. Peter Raible of Seattle:
Unitarians are sometimes accused of having little theology. Because we do not presume to slap God on the back, we are deemed non-believers. But could it be that our theology does not try to limit the divine to our beck and call? The trouble with most concepts of God is that they are simply too small. Before the complexity and majesty of the cosmos, the most reverent attitude is sometimes to be tentative, non-dogmatic, and open.We affirm existence too much to limit the divine. Unitarians need to be more articulate in stating that our theological tentativeness grows out of a true sense of the holy which seeks ever to accept the ambiguity and paradox inherent in all existence.
And then let me quote at some greater length the eloquent words of our recent president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, William Schultz, contained in the March/April 1987 edition of our denominational magazine, UU World:
Today I can say with confidence that I know not one rational proof by which God's existence can be demonstrated. And yet, perversely once again, I may be closer to God today than at any time since my childhood bedtime prayers.No contemporary theologian of any sophistication would understand God as an Old Man in the sky who can intervene in the affairs of humanity. Whatever God may be, God is limited, not omnipotent; gender-free, not male; naturalistic, not magical; an aspiration, not a solution. The ardent atheist who would have no truck with the Holy is a small-minded zealot. The rabid theist who knows God exactly is a fool.
Take my following remarks, then, for no more than what they are: the evolving reflections of one who would experience the Gracious, no matter what its name.
What I know is that I do not live at my own behest alone. I did not make the sun; I cannot control the rain. What small breath I take is copied after the rhythms of the stars. I contain within my genes a replica of the cosmos; clouds course through my lungs; my bones and sinew are made of earth; my blood is a hologram of the tides; my heart is modeled after the sea.
I have a good deal of influence over my life, it's true, but I cannot make another love me; I will never be a ballerina; and my death is always awaiting me. In this sense I am at the mercy of the Given, held in the palm of a larger pattern. The only wise response to that larger pattern is surrender and gratitude for its blessings.
Sometimes of course that larger pattern is the source of tragedy, consternation, errant suffering. But still it is the source of courage, faith, and trust. Whatever there be which points us on to the meridian; whatever there be which discloses the silhouette of possibility behind the plenum of distress; whatever there be which elicits a moral vision - these too are grounded in that larger pattern which nurtures and sustains.
If this be God, it is not the God of my childhood who can control events but it is a God with whom it makes sense to converse at night. For only in communion with the larger tapestry of which we are a part can we be changed, transformed, made whole. And what is amazing is that that tapestry of hope and possibility is always changing too, dynamic, responsive, ever being born. In this sense God does not exist but is always being born.
I am not sure that what I have described is God but what I know is this: that whether or not God exists, something of inestimable splendor surely does. What is important is not whether we call that splendor by a certain name but whether we experience it in all its glory; not whether we define it in a certain way but whether we allow it finally to touch our hearts.
Well, there you are, the words of two great ministers of our day concerning the idea of God. I maintain that if more of our present-day UU ministers similarly wrestled with evolving concepts of the divine rather than circumventing such thinking, our liberal faith would find a resonance with the many unchurched freethinkers of our nation, who would be beating a pathway to our doors.
The great ministers of the last century, now gone -- John Haynes Holmes, A. Powell Davies, Paul Carnes, John Cyrus, Dana Greeley -- all wrestled with the divine. And today we have such as Peter Raible, Earl Holt, Roy Phillips, Robert Doss, John Wolf, Forrest Church and others who are packing their churches with worshippers. People go to church to feed their souls and to encounter the mysteries of existence in worship. They do not go to hear each Sunday about the latest burning issue in the world, though they expect their minister to fill the prophetic role as well as that of pastor. Unitarian Universalist ministers have always spoken out on ethical matters and will continue to do so, but they should remember that it is as important to comfort the afflicted as it is to afflict the comfortable. To preach out of a firm relationship to the transcendent in all existence impels the preacher to encourage the seeker of purpose and meaning in life as well as to empower the urgings of conscience and justice within all who encounter oppression and evil in the world. Great preaching makes great congregations.
I cannot believe that the miracles of life and matter that surround us, even the miracle that is us -- trillions of living cells made of star-stuff and combined so as to make the universe conscious of itself, through us -- I cannot believe that we humans came into existence purely through random chance.
The universe is a grand living system and we are privileged to be conscious participants of the grand design of the universe. Yet the universe is grandly indifferent to us -- benignly indifferent.
And though benignly indifferent, there is a certain benevolence perceptible within this grand living system. For some of us, this benevolence, this beneficence, this grace is felt through our loving interactions with other living things and with other humans. Some of us also sense benevolence through nature's beauty or the immensity of the starlit heavens. Some of us encounter it within ourselves as we battle with inner turmoil or painful affliction. Something there is -- something that sustains us, if we allow it, something not entirely of our own making. Something there is that gives us to know that if we peel all of existence down to its core, ultimately there is something, not nothing.
In billions of ways, human beings -- poets, scientists, mystics, even common people who are never recorded in history -- billions of people have stated their faith in this ultimacy of Being, of a real presence of the Divine. Yes, those billions have created their gods and religious systems that in turn may have enslaved them, but through the ages they have steadily refined and sophisticated their understandings of God. God grows with us. The searching heart and the honest mind will have their way.
Evolving concepts of God mark the ascent of human civilization. The questing human spirit leaves old religions behind just as wayfarers leave behind the fire that warmed them during the night. Religions die but religion remains.
Who or What is in charge? As a skeptic, I know that the old gods are dead, if ever they lived. As a humanist, I know that we are free as human beings to choose and to determine our lives to a great extent. And yet my humility will not allow me to arrogantly shout out the poet's boast that "I am the captain of my soul."
As one as conversant with science as most, I realize how science has stripped away the mysteries of the universe and that much that is mysterious today will stand revealed tomorrow. Still I cannot be a strict materialist in regard to reality. There should always remain a possibility for miracles, for angels and fairies -- even for Gods.
And as a mystic, deep yearnings within will not go away, no matter how many old gods I destroy. There is an inner reality to which I resonate, the place where conscience, compassion, creativity, a sense of beauty, and the loving impulse abide. There, also, I occasionally experience the Presence that assures me that I am not alone, a Presence that has sustained me in danger and in personal trial.
Who/What's in charge? Never will there be an answer, nor would we desire an answer. Beyond science and religion lies the threshold of mystery. Religion deals with the inner reality, science with the outer reality. Both realities encounter the mystery. The mystery, whether bearing a name or not, won't go away. And in the end, we all become one with it.
Prayer:
May we ever have skeptical minds bound to hearts attuned to the music of the spheres. And thus with truth as our guide, may we find the courage to follow the celestial melody.
So may it be.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors' comments on Rev. Oren A. Peterson's "Who's in Charge?" .
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