The fringe Unitarian theology of Transcendentalism (which eventually took over the whole of the faith) holds that every human has the natural ability to connect directly with the divine spirit of the universe. It’s a personally liberating spirituality that is also deeply threatening to communal institutions like the church. We’ve been wrestling with that blessing and curse ever since.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at the history of Unitarian Universalism. Or rather the history of Unitarianism and Universalism, as the two were separate religious ideas until they began to overlap in the late 19th century, and eventually merged officially in 1961.
We are starting this church year with an historical look backward, because this is a year of preparing our church for your search for your next settled minister. This is a year for you to discern who you are and where you’re going, which will then help you select a Search Committee and give them a charge that will help them find a minister who will be helpful in taking you where you want to go.
One good way to explore who you are, and discern where you’re going, is to begin by naming who you were and the path that brought you here. Personally, or institutionally, who were you, throughout the years of your history? What kinds of ideas and peoples and causes attracted you? Where did you spend your time and your money? What stories from the past do you keep lifting up as meaningful to you, while other stories have been forgotten or buried? To what goal have your been traveling that maybe you still long to reach?
Our already lived history creates a path, a direction; a line has already been drawn. The easiest way forward from here, the most frictionless path, is to continue following the line that has already been set. That’s the direction you will go, for good or ill, unless you make a different choice. It is possible, after some careful examination of the historical line so far, to deliberately make a different decision. To make a change. A course correction. Some purposeful energy will be required to shift direction, but it can be done. If you want to. If you feel you need to.
So we start a year of looking forward, paradoxically, by first looking backward.
We started this year with a look at the early history of Unitarianism. I talked about the roots of the Unitarian theology, the theology that God is a simple unity, first appearing in places where imaginings of multiple, tribal and local gods began to shift toward imagining a single, universal God: monotheism.
Multiple gods battle amongst themselves for dominance. A monotheistic God must be in charge of both sides of the conflict, both blessings and curses. That creates the theological problem of “Why bad things happen to good people” but it also opens the possibility that God might be the god of a universal ethical system, caring more about what you do then who you are.
Early Christians wished to retain the monotheism of Judaism but had to account for the dual divine and human nature of Jesus. According to the salvation scheme worked out by Paul, Jesus must be human in order to suffer the price of sin on our behalf, but then must be divine in order to apply that payment to our debt. So the one God, God the Father, had to also somehow include Jesus as God also. Christians debated how that could be for centuries then agreed on a solution only when Emperor Constantine insisted they do so. The Christian church became officially Trinitarian at the Council of Nicea, in the year, 325 AD.
The symbol of the dissenting voices at the council of Nicea was a man named Arius, a Bishop from Alexandria, Egypt. Arius held that God (meaning God the father) is God alone and proposed that there was a time at the beginning of creation when only God existed. Then, God’s first act of creation was to create Jesus. Arius proposes that Jesus is separate from God and slightly less than God, while still being the most perfect and divine creature possible.
Next, according to Arius, Jesus creates the rest of the universe. Jesus is the connection between the perfect, changeless God, and the messiness and imperfection of the world, including the business of reconciling sinful humanity to perfect God. We relate to Jesus, and Jesus, only Jesus, relates to God.
Arius was a Unitarian, after a fashion, although his theology might sound very foreign to you. But, if you’re interested in tracing our history back to early Christianity, Arius is the place to peg our earliest appearance. God is God. And Jesus is not God. Arius was deemed a heretic at the Council of Nicea. And his theology became heresy.
The Unitarian idea appeared again in Western culture at the time of the Reformation. Two Italian men, an uncle named Laelius Socinus and his nephew, Faustus Socinus, taught the idea that Jesus was not God at all, just a human being. The Renaissance, which had immediately preceded the Reformation, was a time of affirming the power and beauty of the human person. Socianism, as it was called, claimed that Jesus showed the perfection that was available to all human persons.
Socinian teachings were suppressed in Italy, which was still heavily controlled by the Catholic church, but the teachings of Jesus as perfected human being took root in northern Europe. Faustus Socinus himself traveled to Poland and helped to found the first Unitarian churches about 1565. There’s even a Unitarian catechism that dates from that time. Those Polish Unitarian churches were eventually closed during the rising wave of Catholicism called the Counter Reformation, but meanwhile Unitarianism had spread south into Transylvania where it eventually received the protection of King John Sigismund under the consel of Francis David. Those Unitarian churches continue to exist to this day.
Other Unitarians, though, kicked out of Poland, moved west to the more liberal environments of Denmark, and then England. Unitarian ideas also arose independently as a outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment principles emphasized the power of human beings, reason and science, and downplayed the supernaturalism of traditional Christianity.
Then, as you know from the stories of the Pilgrims, when even England became too intolerant for the most radical religious thinking, liberal religion emmigrated to New England.
The Unitarian church in America emerged from the Congregationalist churches founded by the Puritans. As the Congregationalist churches were independent, bound to each other only by voluntary covenant and without a central authority to preserve unity of doctrine, it was possible for different churches to proclaim different theologies.
The Unitarian Congregationalist churches existed for a time, side-by-side with their Trinitarian sister churches, but eventually the Unitarian heresy proved too much for the Congregational churches to include. Reluctantly, the Unitarian churches created their own, separate association: the American Unitarian Association founded in 1825.
The Founding Father, so to speak, of the Unitarian church in America is William Ellery Channing. His foundational statement, in a sermon called “Unitarian Christianity” from 1819, laid out the principles of this new faith, which he still regarded as a reformed version of true Christianity.
In the spirit of laying out a through-line from historical Unitarianism up to today and where we go from here, here are the landmarks of Unitarianism plotted out by Channing:
First. That the Bible is a book written by human beings, for human beings, and thus, when reading the Bible, we must apply our reason to the text, just as we would skeptically examine the assumptions and purposes of any other text written by human beings.
Second. Channing affirms the Unitarian position that God is one, as supported by a reasonable reading of the scripture text.
Third. That Jesus is only and completely human, not an illogical human and divine creature.
Fourth. That God is morally perfect and thus any doctrine that compromises God’s goodness, such as predestination (some to Heaven, some to Hell) must be false.
Fifth. It follows then, that the morally perfect God doesn’t need Jesus to die in order to reconcile human beings to God. So Jesus’ role then is an example, a teacher and an inspiration to be the good people we can be.
And finally, then, that our good natures are natural in us, and it is the role of Jesus and the church merely to draw out that virtue inherent in us, not to correct some inherent flaw. And the method of calling us to virtue is by inspiring our love of God, rather than our fear of God.
Now that might sound a little closer to what you actually believe. We are certainly more Channing than we are Arius. Minus for most of us the God and Jesus and Bible language, Channing’s Unitarianism does start to sound like the core principles of what we mean by Unitarian today.
A religion that requires reason to examine any claims of truth from outside sources.
That god is one, if there is a god. Or as I said a few weeks ago, the Unitarian belief in one God, at most.
That Jesus is a human being, a teacher, an example. And although Channing would still put Jesus in a special category among human beings, we, today, can expand that principle of following a human teacher to look for teachers among any exemplary human beings: be they religious leaders or philosophers, or social reformers, or poets.
That the divine nature of the universe exemplifies moral perfection, so what would be unacceptable among human beings, like torture and eternal damnation, would certainly be unacceptable among any divine being.
And finally, an optimistic sense of humanity. Admitting that we aren’t perfect, yet holding that we ever are capable of doing better, of reaching higher, of being, by our own power, creatures of love, and peace, and justice.
From Channing, who wrote his defining statement of Unitarian Christianity in 1819, and founded the American Unitarian Association in 1825, it is only one short step and only a few short decades to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the doctrine of Transcendentalism, the religious view that more than any defines the path that has brought our religion to where we are today.
The differences between the principles laid out by Channing, and the current principles as I reinterpreted them for today, were almost all raised by Emerson in a speech he gave in 1838, less than 20 years after Channing’s sermon.
By 1838, for a new generation of Unitarians, Channing had already become emblematic of an old and stodgy Unitarianism. Gathered around Emerson, who had been a Unitarian minister in Boston from 1829 to 1832, this new religious movement sought to overthrow the traditional church and free human beings to connect directly to the divine spirit each by each.
The principles are already there in the Unitarian Christianity of Channing, but Emerson and his friends took those principles to the furthest degree.
Yes, bring reason to your reading of the Bible, but why read the Bible at all? If the Bible is merely a human text, then the Bible is merely the record of other people’s spiritual experiences and you can have your own experiences directly instead of reading about them second hand.
Yes, Jesus is a mere human being. But then, so are you a human being, so what can Jesus teach you that you can’t know directly, for yourself?
If God, or the Universe, or the divine nature, or whatever you call it, is loving and moral, then that divine nature and its wisdom and love should be accessible anywhere, everywhere, freely given and available, not hidden in churches or mysterious teachings. Take a walk in the woods and there it is. Sit beside a pond and there it is. Talk to friends. Or sit alone in meditation in your study and talk to yourself.
And if the optimistic attitude toward human possibility is true, then we can be bold to march forward toward our own utopias, and free to sever ties with any past that holds us back.
Called the “Transcendentalists” Emerson and his group preached that true religion was a personal possession, and that any time you looked for a religious source outside yourself, that outside source would merely serve to block and further separate yourself from the truth you sought.
In Emerson’s own words he advised that we look for, “an original relation to the universe”. Don’t go to church for the spiritual, don’t go to sermons, don’t go to the Bible. He asked, in 1836, in the first paragraph of his essay Nature: “Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
“There’s a river flowin’ in your soul”. That’s the river you should swim in.
Emerson observed that when we look to the Bible, or the religious tradition, or the teachings of a minister, we are looking for external, objective proof of religion. But those sources can never be objective because they all come to us through the experience of others. Therefore, we should look internally for our own subjective experience and then use our direct intuition to judge the truth or falsity of the outside sources. It is the transcendent truths within us, accessed directly, that then guide our experience and spiritual growth in the world outside us.
You can see then, why Emerson lasted as a professional minister only a little over three years. How foolish to think that anyone could be a minister of someone else’s religion. How perverse to stand between his congregation and their direct experience of the divine! The best spiritual service he could give them was to get out of the way and encourage them to explore on their own.
He wrote, in his essay, The Oversoul, “the highest dwells within us, the sources of nature are in our own minds. As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.” Isn’t a minister, or the church itself, just exactly that kind of screen, or ceiling, barrier or wall?
It is a liberating theology, perhaps the most freeing theology that could be imagined. All that humanity means by “God” or needs of “God” is already inside you, directly available, a natural part of our human nature. “Mysterious Presence, source of all–the world without, the soul within.”
It was too radical for the Unitarians of the day. Emerson had already left the church by the time he developed this theology. Those ministers still in the church, such as Theodore Parker, who embraced Transcedentalism, were shunned by their colleagues. After Parker’s death his followers established for a time a new organization following the principles of Transcendentalism called the Free Religious Association, meant to be a more liberal alternative to Unitarianism. It lasted only a short time, as such anti-establishment, establishments usually do. But meanwhile, as the decades passed the principles of Transcendentalism eventually became Unitarianism itself. We find it now as the first source of our six sources. “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”
How strange then, to follow the path of Unitarian thought, from Arius, to Socinus, to Channing, to finally Emerson and a point where a Unitarian voice argues that Unitarianism is unnecessary, that our own liberal religion might actually be a hindrance to the direct experience that would be best for us. From ancient conceptions of multiple gods each attached to a particular place, we follow a path to monotheistic theologies that say every place can be a holy place, and then to Transcendentalism that says God might best be found not in a holy place like church but in a nature walk. From the Jesus as God of orthodox Christianity we move to Jesus just a little lower than God with Arius, to Jesus as a little higher than other humans with Channing, to Emerson holding that Jesus is a dangerous distraction who stands between you and your own intuition of the truth.
What then, is the place of a Unitarian church, we might ask, as we consider together over the next year what should be the purpose and mission of this Unitarian church? What then, is the use of a Unitarian minister, we might ask, as we consider together over the next year the qualities that you might ask your Search Committee to seek for you in calling your next settled minister?
I’ll leave those questions hanging for now. We will return to them again.