There's a popular cartoon that references Unitarian Universalism and God. The scene is at a fork in the road. One road sign reads God,
with an arrow pointing down the road. The other sign reads Discussion about God,
with an arrow pointing down the other road. Unitarian Universalists tend to choose the road that leads to a discussion.
That is, in fact, an aspect of UU theologies: the belief that there is no one way to comprehend the Ultimate Source of All Being. No book, no faith system, no single epiphany, no religious authority can capture the entire mystery of the cosmos, which some call God.
We humans are relational creatures who come to know our lives through interaction and sustain our lives through interdependence. It is in our discussions, or shared experiences, or common endeavors that we come to a deeper sense of the meaning of our lives and our relationship to that which both transcends and is mysteriously present in all of our lives.
So, discussing God is not wishy-washy or non-committal; it is saying that it matters what we believe and that we must be intentional in coming to a sense of the truth of our lives. And therein we can encounter God.
Unitarianism and Universalism merged as a unified religion in 1961. This merging was centuries in the making, as Unitarians, Universalists and their forebears carved a system of being and believing that is intricately tied to ethics: our character and principles of relating to ourselves, each other and the Ultimate.
The inspiration for this way of being—and believing in Western culture—began with Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus brought a new message into Palestine. He reimaged God for the people as a Being that is knowable—relational—and one that operates through the power of Love. He encouraged his followers to embrace the amorphous spirit of God's law (the unifying principle and ultimate harmony of being) in the living of their lives. Jesus preached principles of relating, ways of being with one another that would usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. Jesus claimed that the seeds of this Kingdom, the raw material for its manifestation, are within each being, that we have the sacred knowledge within to bring about the peaceable realm fostered by the principles of love, compassion, equanimity and justice.
Jesus was not pushing to create a new religion or system of religious authority or to be worshipped as God. He challenged his followers to embrace the responsibility of bringing forth, through the living and loving of their lives, harmony of Being.
This radical reworking of religious being and believing introduced a paradigm shift that threatened authorities and boggled the minds of many. Jesus taught for three short years a theology that was so foreign that few, if any, fully grasped what he was trying to convey. When he was executed, his followers did not have a clear picture of what just happened… how exactly their lives had been changed, how the mysterious presence of God they felt could be invoked and what was supposed to happen next. Three short years; and the most relied upon texts of his ministry were not written till decades after his death.
So for a few centuries, in fact, people who wanted to keep the ministry of Jesus alive in their ways and walking approached the wisdom, passed down orally for some time, from many different perspectives. Separate house churches formed and varied leaders emerged. The dialogue was widespread and difference of opinion common. Who was Jesus? Was he God or some other kind of being? What is our relationship to God? How do we manifest the Kingdom of God on earth? There was no single standard of belief in Christianity for three centuries.
In 325 CE, Emporer Constantine wanted to convert to Christianity and wanted to know exactly what that meant. He was also aware of a growing discord rising about the nature of Jesus, whether he was God or not entirely God, or completely human. It was Constantine who called the first ecumenical council of Christian Bishops to figure it out. Whatever was determined would be the accepted religion of the Holy Roman Empire. So the shaping of Christianity as a professed faith was really mandated by a politician who was encouraged, of course, by a growing orthodoxy.
The result of this council was the establishment of a creed, a mandatory way of believing, which included claiming Jesus as both God the son and of God the Father, begotten not made.
This was the precursor to formulating the trinity, imaging God as one Being in eternal communion with three distinct essences: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
It was at this council that the nature of Christianity shifted from an ethically based religion, claiming Christianity by the way you lived your life and treated others, to a creedal religion, claiming Christianity by what you professed to believe and with whom you worshipped.
At this point, anyone who did not profess the Nicene creed was deemed a heretic. The Greek root of the word heretic, which is used in the New Testament, means to choose.
Heretics are people who choose beliefs other than the orthodoxy. Unitarian and Universalist forebears were among the people who chose a different kind of Christianity, one that believed Jesus to be an extraordinary teacher and prophet imparting the wisdom of God, but not God.
So our forebears scattered to avoid exile, imprisonment, even death and met in pockets of communities or became lone voices in the continued dialogue of the meaning of our lives in relationship to God. Formative convergences of Unitarian thought emerged, beginning in the 15th century in Transylvania, Poland, Holland and eventually England. To give a taste of the times, I offer a glimpse of Transylvania, the oldest continuous Unitarian presence, now known as part of central Romania.
In the 1560's Francis David, court preacher of Transylvania, used the term Unitarian
when arguing the case for the Unity of God and the humanity of Jesus. Francis David was asserting a theology from his Christian roots, though it was considered heresy by the orthodoxy. But in Transylvania, a country then nestled between a Catholic and Moslem empire, with adjoining Protestant, Greek Orthodox and Slav territories, the monarchy was open to diverse thought and encouraged hearty debates amongst religious scholars, which sometimes lasted for days.
Seminal issues were discussed. What was the nature of Jesus: human, divine or a combination of both? Were rituals, like the Lord's Supper, symbolic events or manifestations of the Divine? To whom do you pray: God, Jesus, Saints? How does one know God, by a direct connection or through religious authorities? What is the nature of God, a Trinity or a Unity?
To temper the outcomes of these fierce debates, King John Sigismund, by then convinced by Francis David to convert to Unitarianism, issued the Edict of Torda named, The Act of Toleration and Freedom of Conscience.
This was the first official edict of religious tolerance in recorded European history. An earlier decree of toleration had been administered by his mother, Queen Isabella, but it did not last. In 1568, however, these words heralded across the land:
His majesty, our Lord, in what manner he—together with his Realm… reaffirms that in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well, if not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve. Therefore none of the superintendents or others shall abuse the preachers, no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone… and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching, for faith is the gift of God…
In Unitarian churches throughout Transylvania to this day, these words are engraved in the frescoes of the buildings: God Is One.
This is the image of God as the Unity of Being, the Ground and Source of All Being, and the Holiness in the nature of Being.
In one of our hymnals there is music to a traditional Transylvanian blessing: Where there is faith, there is love; where there is love there is peace; where there is peace there is blessing; where there is blessing there is God; where there is God, there, there is no need.
1
Some basic sensibilities were emerging in the stream of Unitarian thought and the imaging of God:
Universalism came into view as a religious sensibility in the 18th century in Europe and then gained a foothold in colonial America. The main thrust of Universalism is the vision of a Loving God, one that does not permanently damn people to hellfire. It is humans who create their own hell and fall victim to the consequences of their actions and attitudes. All people, according to Universalists, have the inherent worth and cosmic welcome to eventually arrive in harmony with God.
The spirit of love will be intensified to Godly proportions,
Universalist minister Dr. George De Benniville preached in 1740, when reciprocal love exists between the entire human race and each of its individual members. That love must be based upon mutual respect for the differences in color, language and worship… we do not find those differences obstacles in love. Preach the Universal and Everlasting Gospel of Boundless Universal Love for the entire human race,
he said, without exception, and for each one in particular.
North American Christianity in the 18th century was infused with a Calvinist doctrine. The Calvinist doctrine claimed predestination, which taught that, being inherently sinful, few humans, only the elect, will be saved by God. Very few would succeed, according to this doctrine, because we are so flawed, so soiled, so far from God that we must discipline ourselves against most of human nature to have a chance at eternal life.
Universalists, on the other hand, preached the Gospel of God's Success,
claiming that creation and its creatures were not created to be condemned but to be cherished as precious gifts.
Sensibilities in the stream of Universalist thought brought in a primordial trust in the Universe, and a welcome of the fullness of being—body, mind and soul—as a blessed gesture of creation. In the vision of eventual harmony with God, and the cosmic logic of Love, a sense of interdependence and sacred responsibility emerged that was translated in works of justice and service to the disenfranchised.
A parallel sensibility in Unitarian thought emerged in the 19th century with the Transcendentalist movement. The Divine was imaged as a part of all that is. Transcendentalism enlivened the belief that truth or sacred knowing is not separate from embodied life and any one of us has the capacity to experience it, to manifest Truth in our being, to come to God consciousness.
Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought;
wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, that the Highest dwells within us, that 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. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us.
2
Understanding that all that ever was, is and will be is an expression of One mysterious source of Being brings a humility and a comradery with and for all being. We do not stand alone. We are interrelated in an interdependent web of existence. We are only a part of that existence, no more or less than any other. At first this was a human-centered concept, but through the ages, the understanding of the majesty of nature brought the deeper understanding that all life is interrelated, that we are beholden to the whole system and gifted with participation in it. This means we can no longer call ourselves victims of our human plight, nor dependent on magical interventions to save us from ourselves.
There are principles, however, embedded in the very substance of life, the spiritual DNA, if you will, within and about us. We can discern these principles in our affirmation of life and in the wisdom of affirmation itself, expressed as love, experienced as justice and known as fullness—a coming together of all the parts in cosmic harmony.
Our forebears took risks to claim the truth they knew within and to honor the diverse spiritualities about them, which includes those who reject the whole enterprise of naming God. We, from the wisdom of the ages and the expansion of scientific knowledge have been given the gift of seeing beyond our own universe within and without. Two truths remain steadfast in Unitarian Universalist religious knowing: that we are part of the cosmic process of being and becoming and we are connected far beyond our ability to understand.
So we stand at that crossroads, ready to engage in dialogue about God. We choose—the heretics that we are—we choose to apply our lives and wisdom of a cloud of witnesses to come to an ever deeper understanding of the Source of All Being.
Szekely Aldasas rendered in Singing the Journey, UUA, #1043.
The Oversoul,as rendered in Singing the Living Tradition, Beacon Press, reading #531.
Copyright © 2013 Lisa Ward. All Rights Reserved.