The UU historian Earl Morse Wilbur named the core principles of Unitarian Universalism as “Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance.” Freedom means freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom to choose. Both the Unitarian and Universalist theologies were named heresies by the early Christian church. The freedom to counter orthodoxies is a cherished part of who we are.
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We’ve been thinking and talking about the spiritual question of identity in worship, asking the question, “Who am I?” as a person, and “who are we?” as humans.
We’re also asking the question, “who are we?” as a religious community, addressing the important task for a church during an interim ministry to clearly define ourselves. We need to know, meaning you need to know, who you are, so you will be able to communicate that identity to minister candidates and choose a minister who will be an appropriate leader for who you actually are.
Who are we? Who are you?
That’s one of the questions I’ve been asking as I’ve worked to find my way into this congregation over the last few months. Who are these people? What’s their character? What’s their personality? What do they care about? What do they do? What do they believe and how do they express it? What do they want and how do they get it? What are their strengths, and what are their weaknesses?
Who are we?
One way to discern identity is to look around, observe, and ask questions. That’s what I’ve been doing. We are these people. These individuals. These stories.
Another way to define identity is to name our relationships. Who do we associate with? Who do we include? Who do we send away? We are a community defined by the people who have chosen to be members of this community, plus the folks who used to be members of the church but aren’t now, for one reason or another, plus, in a more mystical way the folks who might be members of this church in the future but haven’t found us yet, or don’t feel invited.
Another way to define identity is to look at history. We are the people who share the history of this church. That shapes our identity. Ours is not just any UU church, but a particular church: The Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City. Our church has a story unique to us.
Some of you lived through the recent history of this church, or decades of history. You have stories. Some of our history occurred before anyone here today was around. What’s important to our identity now is not so much what actually happened but how we talk about those old stories and how we tell them to newcomers. Do we tell stories of pride or regret? Are our church stories told with contrition, or with a wink? Do we face up to our past or sweep it away? Do we tell stories of suffering and victimhood where someone else had power and we had no responsibility, or stories of resilience, rising above, and claiming our identity for ourselves? Is our history a story of tragic doom, or a story of testing, lessons learned, and choosing a better way?
Because history is one way to define identity, I’ve been spending some time in worship services looking at the history of Unitarian Universalism, the identity we share with the folks who share our faith history.
We looked at early Christian history and how our name, Unitarian Universalism comes from two theological ideas that dissented from the Christian doctrine declared orthodox at the council of Nicea in 325.
Because of that history, one answer to the question, who are we, is that we are heretics. Officially. Both Unitarian and Universalism are heresies of the Christian church. Although no one much cares any more, either us or Christians.
Our later history continued our heresy as we encountered humanist thought and continued to refine our doctrines about the person of Jesus and the nature of God.
Another was to define the identity of a community, such as a church, is to speak of what the community values. We are the people who hold these principles to be important.
Last week I lifted up one important value of Unitarian Universalist communities, the value of democracy.
As Unitarians, we believe in the power of the individual allied with the Universalist truth that we are all in this together. Combine those together and you get democracy. We elect our leaders. We hold them accountable. We participate. We show us. We present our ideas. We reason and share experience, we persuade. We vote. And then we support the communal decision and stay together even when we disagree. And if it becomes clear that a decision arrived at through the democratic process was wrong, or becomes wrong because circumstances have changed, then we use the democratic process to reconsider the decision, and we vote again.
Democracy is a value of this community, part of our identity. Respecting that value requires maintenance, and vigilance. Democracy is also one of the values named in the Unitarian Universalist Association list of seven principles that define our faith, “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.”
Today I want to talk about three other values central to our faith.
These are the values of freedom, reason, and tolerance.
You may have heard that formulation before. It’s a famous way to define the core principles of our religion.
The phrase doesn’t come from the UUA seven principles. Freedom and tolerance are echoed in that statement, and reason appears in the companion statement, the six sources. But the phrase, freedom, reason, and tolerance, are an older formulation of Unitarian Universalist identity. It comes from a Unitarian minister and historian named Earl Morse Wilbur in the dedication of the first volume of his two volume history of Unitarianism. The first volume was published in 1945. The second volume was published in 1953.
Wilbur’s phrase affirms the basic principles of our faith, our identity, as “Freedom in thought, Reason in conduct, and Tolerance in judgement.”
Wilbur didn’t see freedom, reason, and tolerance as merely the fruit of Unitarianism in mid-Century America. He concluded from his historical research that these principles run like deep roots throughout our Unitarian history, a kind of Trinity of our own, defining our identity.
When I preached about our history over the last several weeks, I spoke about the choice to either write a history of institutions, or a history of ideas. As an institution, the earliest Unitarian churches were founded in Poland in the 16thcentury. The American Unitarian Association was founded in 1825 in Boston. The Unitarian Universalist Association was founded in 1961.
But as the history of an idea, the idea of a faith identified by freedom, reason, and tolerance, we can trace our history back to the earliest appearances of Unitarian and Universalist thought, the heretical Unitarian ideas of Arius, and the heretical Universalist ideas of Origen.
They argued against the Christian orthodoxy from the stance that a human person should be free to think what we will, to say what we will. They argued that human reason is a gift, to think through an idea, not merely to state a stubborn opinion, but to clarify, and defend, and persuade. Not merely to learn a doctrine discovered by others and ape it mindlessly, but to freely probe, to pick, to prod every idea until it proves itself. To question and improve, or critique and discard.
And only by tolerating and celebrating this diversity of dissent can old ideas be confirmed as true, or developed into better ideas, or can new ideas blossom and flower that move us ever closer to the truth we seek.
Freedom, reason, and tolerance were preached by our earliest forebears. And they were labeled heretics for it, while also establishing a legacy on which we stand today.
As Earl Morse Wilbur was researching and writing his long, two-volume history of Unitarianism, he realized he wasn’t writing a history of institutions, he was writing a history of an idea: the history of a faith founded on the principles of freedom, reason, and tolerance in religion.
He writes, in his preface, that his history is:
“Not so much a history of a particular sect or form of Christian doctrine,” but rather “the development of a movement fundamentally characterized by its steadfast and increasing devotion to these three leading principles: first complete mental freedom in religion rather than bondage to creeds or confessions; second, the unrestricted use of reason in religion, rather than reliance upon external authority or past tradition; third, generous tolerance of differing religious views and usages rather than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or polity.”
When I was in seminary, Earl Morse Wilbur’s two volume history was required reading for Unitarian Universalists studying for the ministry.
Wilbur spends 6 chapters in his history telling the story of another heretic who we claim as our own, and a name you should know: Michael Servetus.
Let me tell you a the story of Michael Servetus.
Michael Servetus was contemporary of Laelius and Faustus Socinus, the Unitarian uncle and nephew we spoke about a few weeks ago in Humanist Italy. Servetus was a Spaniard. Like Aruis and Origen, arguing against the Christian orthodoxy at the Council of Nicea a thousand years earlier, Servetus spoke against the Christian orthodoxy of his day, particularly, and most disastrously, John Calvin, one of the leaders, along with Martin Luther, of the Protestant Reformation.
And like Arius, and as Wilbur concludes in his history, it isn’t so much Servetus’ Unitarian beliefs that informs us today, it is Servetus as an exemplar of freedom, reason, and tolerance, that gives him a place among our ancestors.
Servetus was a remarkable man. Not only a student of theology, he was also an expert, for the day, in the fields of anatomy and medicine. He taught mathematics while he studied medicine. He worked as the personal physician to the Archbishop of Vienne. He wrote books on pharmacology and astrology, as well as Biblical commentary and theology.
In 1531, he wrote his first book, a book of theology titled, On the Errors of the Trinity. He followed that the following year by a book titled, Dialogues on the Trinity. He then turned to writing on medicine and other scientific topics.
His interest in theology led Servetus to begin a correspondence with John Calvin. John Calvin published his major work of systematic theology titled, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, in 1536 in which Calvin took several doctrines of God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and eternal nature to their logical extreme, concluding that God must have foreseen from the beginning of creation the entire future of every human person including whether they would be saved or damned, and therefore, powerless and mortal, there is nothing that a human can do to alter the destiny that God already knows for them. That’s Calvin’s doctrine of predestination.
Servetus began a correspondence with Calvin asking questions, pointing out where he thought Calvin was wrong, and offering his own ideas. Calvin’s response humored Servetus but patronizingly, treating him as an infuriating annoyance, who should leave theology to his betters.
Servetus sent Calvin a copy of his book explaining his Unitarian theology. Calvin sent back to Servetus a copy of his own book as a reply. Servetus then promptly sent back to Calvin, Calvin’s book, assiduously annotated with his own observations and criticisms of Calvin’s work. You can imagine how that went over! The two continued to correspond but the letters grew more heated until Calvin finally cut Servetus off, writing, “I neither hate you nor despise you; nor do I wish to persecute you; but I would be as hard as iron when I behold you insulting sound doctrine with so great audacity”.
In 1553, Servetus wrote his final major work of theology, titled, The Restoration of Christianity. For this book, and other reasons, probably some of them personal and political, he was accused of heresy by a friend of John Calvin’s living in Geneva. Servetus was living in Vienne, France at the time. The Catholic inquisitor in France interviewed Servetus and his publisher and they denied the charge and asked the accuser to offer proof. For proof, Calvin’s friend in Geneva produced the letters that Servetus had sent to Calvin, along with pieces of Servetus’ published writing. From this, Servetus was arrested and charged with heresy.
Three days later he escaped from prison.
But the trial went forward without him and two months later he was convicted of heresy and was sentenced to be burned to death along with his books. They burned him in effigy.
Meanwhile, Servetus, planned to flee to Italy, which he imagined would be more tolerant of his humanist-influenced theology. But Switzerland lies between France and Italy. Although Servetus could probably have avoided Geneva, for some reason he chose to confront Calvin and his accuser directly. He went to Geneva. He even attended Calvin’s church! Where he was recognized and arrested.
Now Servetus was tried in person. Again, he was convicted of heresy. And this time he was unable to escape punishment. On October 27, 1553, he was burned at the stake, his own books kindling the fire, a Unitarian martyr to the principles of freedom, reason, and tolerance.
Servetus’ unitarian belief would be hardly recognizable to any Unitarian today. He believed that God is a kind of creative, organizing, idea, called the Logos, in Greek, and that Jesus was an incarnation of the Logos in human form, thus Jesus would be a divinity but not a separate person from God.
Similarly, few of us would recognize the Unitarian belief of Arius that Arius promoted at the Council of Nicea.
In fact, their beliefs, and many others who held the name Unitarian throughout the centuries, would be as different from us and as diverse among themselves, as are all the diverse beliefs that we hold among ourselves in this congregation this morning.
What unites them to us, and all of us to each other, is not a shared belief but, as Earl Morse Wilbur observed, a set of shared values that lead to shared principles guiding our lives: freedom, reason, tolerance.
The freedom to speak our minds, even to the orthodoxy of the day. To share our thoughts, argue our opinions, and expect that others will be partners with us in good faith as we search our way toward the truth.
We defend our ideas with reason, and with reason critique the thinking of others. We listen respectfully to their arguments, not patronizingly. We respond with questions. We work it out.
And then we agree or we don’t. If we don’t agree and can’t persuade then we peacefully tolerate our difference. We don’t arrest people who hold different thoughts and throw them in prison. We don’t name call, belittle, or shun. We don’t ban books. We don’t burn our enemies at the stake.
We are the heretics. That is our legacy, and our strength. Our identity.
Heroes of faith in every age, far seeing, self denying,
wrought an increasing heritage, monarch and creed defying.
Faith of the free! In thy dear name
the costly heritage we claim: their living and their dying.