Our religious history is grounded in Judaism and Christianity but crucially passed through a Humanist lens 500 or so years ago. From Humanism we shifted our religious focus from God’s power to our power, recognized the beauty of human bodies, exulted at the reach of the human mind, and re-oriented our spiritual practice from hard lives aimed at a heavenly reward, to healthy, joyful lives in this world.
watch the video of this worship service
Jim and I had the opportunity to take a wonderful trip this summer. We went to Italy. Specifically, the cities of Venice, Florence, and Rome. We spent several days in London as well on the way home.
We had planned the trip a few years ago around the every-other-year international art festival in Italy called the Bienalle.
That’s as much Italian as I know, by the way. Bienalle.
But then Covid canceled our first attempt to take the trip. And then Covid, again, postponed the Bienalle from last year to this. So after a long delay and a lot of eager anticipation and excitement, and a couple of extra years to save up our credit card points, we were able to go this summer, in June and July.
Venice was magical. The art festival was fascinating.
Florence was very hot, but spectacular. Here we timed our visit to catch a show on Donatello, the artist who worked just at the beginning of the Renaissance and who practically invented the Renaissance style. You could trace in his work the shift from stylized figures to more natural faces. Bodies start to turn and bend, instead of being always presented stiffly and facing straight toward the viewer. Donatello and others pushed painting beyond the flat pictorial surfaces of the Gothic style, to introduce perspective, giving painting the illusion of interior depths. Da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo came in the next century and all learned from Donatello.
And then a week in Rome. Again, we focused on art: The Vatican Museum, a long stand in the Sistine Chapel and the room that contains Raphael’s imagined scene of philosophers called the “School of Athens.” We sought out all the Caravaggio’s in the little churches where you have to drop a coin in a box to turn the lights on. We paid our respects to Michelangelo’s “Moses.” And we visited many of the smaller private museums, The Villa Borghese, the Doria Pamphili, the Palazzo Barberini, to seek out more Caravaggio, and Titian and Tintoretto, the spectacular sculptures of Bernini, and the Spaniards, El Greco and Velazquez.
Our trip was centered around art, but Italy during the Renaissance also saw the flowering of numerous other fields, science, politics, poetry, music, philosophy, and, as concerns us this morning, theology, specifically, Unitarian theology.
We’ve been exploring for the last several weeks the spiritual question of identity. Who am I, as a person, and Who are we, as human beings generally, and who we are as this spiritual community, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City?
Understanding who we are, as a community, is essential to everything that we do here. Knowing who we are is the foundation of all we do. Everything we do emerges from this deep sense of knowing who we are, combined with the two other spiritual questions we will get to later this year, the question of meaning, which concerns the values that our community names as important to us, and the question of purpose, which is the question of how we will live into the world: our mission as a church.
One way to answer the question of who we are as a spiritual community, is to say that we are Unitarian Universalists. We are people of a particular faith, and we are the current expression of a faith tradition that has a history stretching back to the earliest days of Christianity, and with roots even older than that in Judaism.
But what is that history? And what of that history is really ours, rather than just an interesting footnote. Does it really serve to define us today to claim our identity with Unitarians and Universalists of the past? And because there is so much history to look at, and so many different people and ideas and institutions over two millennia and more, what of all that is relevant to us, and how can we decide to claim some parts of it but not others?
First of all, let’s note that there was no such thing as a Unitarian Universalist until 1961. Prior to that there were Unitarians and Universalists, two separate faiths in two separate churches. And even with the merger in 1961, the architects of the merger didn’t imagine they were creating a new religion called Unitarian Universalism. All they were doing was creating a bureaucracy: an association of free congregations. They were creating an administrative structure to support liberal religious congregations.
Interestingly, you may not know that prior to 1961 when they were discussing the merger, the idea was floated to create a liberal religious association that would include non-Christian congregations as well. So there were talks to include liberal Jewish congregations, and liberal Hindu congregations, along with the Unitarian and Universalist congregations under the same umbrella. Wouldn’t that have been interesting? I’d love to know more about that idea and why it was abandoned.
But as soon as the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed, in 1961, we started calling ourselves Unitarian Universalists. And then we had to ask, well what is Unitarian Universalism? The question of identity. Who are we?
The seven principles, from the mid-80s, were one attempt to define what we have in common, defined around guiding principles rather than belief statements. The seven principles built off an earlier, similar statement, written at the time of the merger. There’s a framed statement of the original principles of the UUA, hanging in the hallway by the bathroom. You might want to take a look.
But looking further back, before we were UUs, when were just U, or U. Who were we? What defined our identity? And is there any meaningful thread that connects them and us, and could usefully define us as we?
There are two ways to think of history. One is the history of institutions. The other is the history of ideas.
As an idea, Unitarianism, stretches back to the earliest days of Christianity, and back through Judaism to the beginings of monotheism.
We are Unitarian because we believe that God alone is God. God is a single being. This would not have been controversial to the Jews who had been monotheists for hundreds of years before Jesus.
But when Jesus appeared, the nature of God became complicated, for the early Christians. Jesus had been a very remarkable person, with a seemingly special relationship to God. Was Jesus a divine being himself? Some said Jesus was a reincarnation of Moses or Elijah. Some said he was an incarnation of God. Other said Jesus was born a human being but God adopted him as a son and raised him to divinity at his Baptism.
And then comes Paul, who worked out for Christians not what Jesus was, but how Jesus served to save sinful humanity. In order for the salvation scheme proposed by Paul to work correctly, Jesus needed to be fully human, in order to suffer pain and death, which was the price God demanded for human sin, but Jesus had to also be fully divine, in order for Jesus to be able to share the benefit of his sacrifice with all humanity.
But if Jesus was fully divine, then either there were two gods, or the god that Jesus called Father, and the divine Jesus were the same person.
And then, as well, the gospels contained stories where Jesus was visited by yet a third divine being, a Holy Spirit, often in the form of a dove, that descended upon him at special times, and also visited other early Christians in the stories.
But Jesus was also a Jew. And nearly all of Jesus’ early followers were Jews. And Jews were monotheists. There can’t be two gods, or three. God is one. “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.”
For nearly three hundred years after Jesus’ death there was no agreement among Christians of the right way to think about the nature of Jesus and the nature of God. Dozens of Christian bishops had dozens of different beliefs and followed their own way, and taught their flocks different doctrines.
In the year 325, Emperor Constantine decided that the far-flung network of Christians and Christian churches could be useful in uniting the Empire as a Roman state religion, but only if the Christians were not divided among themselves. So he brought all the Bishops together in the city of Nicea, in present-day Turkey, and asked them to hammer out a single theology they could all agree to.
The result was the Nicean creed, which elevated the Trinitarian formula over all other possible solutions to the Jesus/God question. From that day, the orthodox Christian teaching has been that Jesus is somehow two persons in one being, fully human and fully divine. And God is somehow three persons in one being: God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.
But, of course, simply declaring that this is so, didn’t end the matter. Although Orthodox Christianity followed the Nicean creed, other ideas continued to thrive. The idea of God being three-in-one, and also containing as one of the three a person who himself is two-in one, is confusing, contradictory, and illogical. Judaism had no such complicated theology. Mohammed, in founding Islam, some 300 years after the Council of Nicea, felt no need to follow the complicated Christian conception and retained the simple, unified God of Judaism.
But Christianity felt it had to become Trinitarian because the salvation scheme of Paul demands it. Jesus must have two natures to both suffer the punishment of sin for us, and apply the price he pays to save us. Because Jesus must be divine, the salvation scheme must also then complicate God’s nature.
But what if Christianity had a different salvation scheme? What if Paul were wrong about the ministry of Jesus and how Jesus works to save humanity? What if, instead of a supernatural scheme that requires death and resurrection and one person magically and bizarrely paying the price for someone else’s misdeeds, what if it were all much more simple, and clear, and logical, and human?
And that brings us back to Italy, and the Renaissance.
One only need to stand in front of Michelangelo’s David, or one of Donatello’s life-like statues, or gasp at the marvels of Da Vinci in art and engineering, or thrill at the scientific explorations of Galileo, or contemplate the celebration of human thought and culture in Raphael’s “School of Athens”, to recognize that humanity was awakening to the possibilities of its own gifts.
“We are smart enough, strong enough, and good enough” as I said last week “to create lives of health and joy for ourselves, for each other, and for the world we share.”
Developed in Italy, in the 16th century, by a younger contemporary of Michelangelo named Laelius Socinus and later his nephew Faustus Socinus, here as a product of the Renaissance, was birthed an alternate salvation story that didn’t depend on the effort of a supernatural being saving us for us, but said we humans could save ourselves on our own.
Although the theology was called Soccinian, this was the birth of Unitarianism as we would recognize it today. God alone is God. And Jesus was a remarkable but totally human, human being. The Soccinian salvation scheme is that Jesus shows us the way to save ourselves. Jesus teaches us through his parables and through the example of his life how to lead a life pleasing to God. And then Jesus says, I’m human just like you. I can lead a life completely acceptable to God, and you can too. Because I’m nothing special, I show you it’s possible for you. Now go and do the same for yourself.
The Italians Laelius and Faustus Socinus were not the only ones injecting religion with the principles of humanism. The monolith of Christianity was breaking apart everywhere under the pressures of the Protestants Luther and Calvin, and some of the more radical thinkers were coming to the Unitarian theology independently.
Faustus Socinus took his ideas to Poland. If you were a member of this church when Jay Atkinson was the minister, I’m sure you heard him speak about the Polish Brethren, which is a special interest of his. There, in Poland, in the late 16th century, the idea of Unitarianism, finally finds a Unitarian institution, with the first churches to carry our name.
Unitarian churches were soon suppressed in Poland, during the Catholic-led Counter-Reformation. But Unitarian churches were protected in Transylvania, where 500 year-old Unitarian churches exist to this day. And Unitarianism spread further into the more liberal countries of Holland, and then England, and then to Boston, and eventually to Studio City, CA.
The through-line that makes that Unitarian history, our Unitarian identity, is this faith in the power of human beings to do for ourselves.
Without supernatural assistance. Without a divine savior. For many of us, even without a god. We can ground a religion in the creativity, capability, and morality, of human persons alone.
Beyond theology, we give the name “humanism” to this genial perspective of the potential of human persons.
The first humanists, in 15th century Italy, were teachers of the humanities: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, philosophy, history, music and mathematics. They worked from the classical fields which showed off the best of human achievement and encouraged in their students further development.
Although the humanists were criticized for not devoting themselves to religious subjects, and therefore undermining Christian morals, the humanists argued that in fact the study of the human person, and the human mind, and the wisdom of classical authors, and the beauty of the natural world, was in fact the best possible preparation for Christian life.
We see here, what we see today in our Unitarian churches, that religion can grow up from a foundation of personal exploration not requiring a religion forced down upon a person. We see our faith as something that pre-exists inside ourselves, brought out by our worship and our teaching and discussion and fellowship, not something that must be learned and accepted from a revelation outside ourselves. Religion is one more human achievement, just as is sculpture and science. And like the arts and sciences, religion should be available for critique and improvement, and requires change to stay relevant as human culture advances.
As Walt Whitman says in our Call to Worship. “We consider bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine; I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still.”
This humanist history is now our humanist faith. Creating our own religion. Writing our own sacred texts. Approaching our spiritual lives as fascinating life-long journeys, rather than as a catechism to memorize. And our work to create lives of health and joy for ourselves, and each other, and the world we share, not to postpone our salvation to some other world and some other life.
Grateful for our ancestors in ancient Israel, and early Christianity, and humanist Italy, and Poland and Transylvania and England and Boston, we claim an identity with all who see the glory of the human person, the beauty of our bodies, the reach of our minds, the power of our muscles, the subtlety of our morals.
“O what a piece of work are we, how marvelously wrought;
Humanity we wonder at with every breath we draw,
But give us room to move and grow, but give our spirit play,
and we can make a world of light out of the common clay.”
May it be so.