How Shall We Live?
Part I: The Evolving List
The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
September 16, 2007
Imagine for a moment you hold a firm theological belief. It could be anything. God is all-powerful, knows everything and can accomplish anything. God is fragile, weak and does not intervene in our lives. God is immanent—in everything. God is transcendent—separate from the world. There is no God. It doesn’t matter right now what it is. Imagine you hold a firm belief: it guides your life, brings solace amidst sorrow, strength amidst challenge. It brings joy, inspires thankfulness, informs who you are in the universe, your relationship to the sacred, your purpose.
What happens when you discover other people hold different, even contradictory beliefs just as firmly as you hold yours? Do you assume they are wrong? Are you threatened? Do you study how to defend your belief against theirs? Do you try to convert them? Do you accept them publicly but worry about them privately? Or are you open and willing to engage their beliefs to discern how you might grow and evolve in response?
Imagine you choose openness, and through engagement with others over time you notice your theology doesn’t seem as compelling as it used to. Your firm belief doesn’t make complete sense anymore, isn’t confirmed by your experience. Do you still hold to it? Do you still defend it even while suspecting it may be false, even though to leave it would leave you without a sure guide, without a source of comfort and strength, without a clear articulation of your relationship to the sacred? Does this unnerve you? Does this frighten you? Do you push all these questions away and continue defending your old theology? Or do you take a new step on your journey into the unknown?
Imagine you take a new step, and through the course of your journey you come to understand there are countless theologies, religions and spiritual practices. You arrive at an even more essential and difficult question: Is it possible each religion points only toward a portion of the truth and none holds truth in its entirety? Is it possible truth is not the question we should be asking of religion because it is impossible for human beings, and hence human religions, to grasp the whole truth? Is it possible religion simply isn’t true in a literal sense? Might it be possible that theology only tells us what we want to be true? And rather than focus so much on theology and what we believe, might it not be more important to focus on how we treat one another and the earth, asking the question, always, how shall we live?
I contend that if we look closely at Unitarian and Universalist history in the United States since 1800, the questions I’ve just raised actually describe the evolution of our liberal religious movement. Our forebears began their religious journeys with distinct, life-affirming Christian theologies. Over time they learned to question these theologies in response to their experience and in relation to other religions. They became willing to change and expand their theologies in response to new insights. They let go of ideas that no longer made sense to them, no longer spoke to their life conditions. They learned to be open to difference. They learned to listen to women and include women in leadership. They began to realize there was no theological position on which they all could agree, no theological core at their center lest they draw their circle too small. They evolved a way of being religious together that is concerned primarily with how we shall live, and which assumes that our theologies emerge in response to our living.
On August 26 my sermon was a response to a lecture by the Rev. Davidson Loehr called “Why ‘Unitarian Universalism’ is Dying.” One thing that stands out to me as I read Rev. Loehr’s work is his passion for the question, “how shall we live?” He speaks about character. “Religion,” he says, “is the search for a feeling of reconnection to a healthy kind of wholeness.* And the most enduring form of that health and wholeness is character, reconnecting individuals to their greater possibilities, and more responsible and vivid roles in their families, societies, and in history.” He proposes “a religion of salvation by character, grounded in the noblest parts of our common humanity.” It seems to me his quest for character is another way of asking, “How shall we live?”
Unitarian Universalism’s answer to this question is its seven principles. But Rev. Loehr raises a provocative question: can the principles suffice as the core of a religion? His answer is no because, he says, religion must begin with an articulation of the relationship between the individual and the infinite, and the Unitarian Universalist principles make no such articulation. He is correct. In fact, Unitarian Universalism refuses to make such an articulation. Unitarian Universalism is unwilling to make any definitive, theological claims on behalf of the collective, and has never succeeded in identifying its religious center. But we do agree on principles which guide us in our living and create spaces in which we may have spiritual experiences and thereby learn to articulate for ourselves our relationship to the infinite. Theology follows living.
So it may come down to a matter of definitions. If religion must begin with an articulation of the individual’s relation to the infinite, then Unitarian Universalism is not a religion. If religion is the search for the health and wholeness of the individual, the community and the earth, with the goal of salvation by character, as Rev. Loehr also contends, then I believe Unitarian Universalism is a religion. Rev. Loehr won’t agree because he doesn’t think very highly of the Unitarian Universalist principles, identifying them as the secular values of western liberals rather than anything uniquely religion, and referring to them as the seven banalities, bromides, dwarfs, etc. In my August 26 sermon I confessed I have felt the same way about our principles. I gave the example of a friend in seminary who said the principles were the last thing she wanted to hear on her deathbed.
But these are my principles! I was raised on them. They do guide my life and, like any religion, they are easy until you actually try to live them. They may be the secular values of western liberals, but I learned them in church. They do not articulate our relationship to the infinite, but they do challenge us to discern that relationship and proclaim it. It is my intention over the coming months to preach sermons on the principles, to test how deep they go and how difficult they are to live. It is not my intent to counter Rev. Loehr’s argument that these principles are synonymous with the secular values of western liberals, but I do want to examine how our attempts to live by these principles create pathways to spiritual experience and the emergence of relevant and compelling theologies. To begin this examination, I want to lead a quick tour of the evolution of our principles in the United States since 1803. I want to show how our forebears began in this country by making strong theological claims, and evolved to claims about how to be together in religious community, how to relate to others and the earth—answers to the question, “How shall we live?”
Religious people make lists. Christianity and Judaism share Ten Commandments. Islam has Five Pillars. Buddhism has Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold path. The first great, lasting Universalist list was the Winchester Profession of 1803. The first great, lasting Unitarian list was the five principles laid out in Channing’s Baltimore Sermon, which we heard earlier in the service. [For online readers they appear at the end of this text.] These two lists express firm theological beliefs. Imagine you hold a firm theological belief. For the Universalists it was a belief in one God who finally restores the human family to holiness and happiness. That is, universal salvation; all are saved. This theology was truly radical for its time and, I believe, still radical for among Christians today. For the Unitarians it was the belief that “God is one”—a rejection of the Trinity—also radical in its time and, I believe, still radical for most Christians today.
These two lists only marginally articulated how people should live. Certainly early Universalists and Unitarians talked about living a moral life. Yet the principles they used to define themselves were primarily theological claims, articulations of the individual’s relationship to the infinite. Imagine that through the course of your study your theology doesn’t seem as compelling as it used to. Imagine what you believe doesn’t make complete sense anymore, isn’t confirmed by your experience. Do you still hold firmly? Unitarians and Universalists struggled with these kinds of questions throughout the 19th century. Ultimately, they did not hold firmly. They embraced change.
Consider this list of ten Unitarian principles from 1887, written by the Rev. William Channing Gannet for a conference of the Western Unitarian Association. “1. We believe that to love the Good and to live the Good is the supreme thing in religion.” (Note that the object of their religious affection is no longer God as a divine entity, but rather Good, a moral value.) “2. We hold reason and conscience to be final authorities in matters of religious belief.” (Note that their final authority is no longer the Bible, no longer God, but the human faculties of reason and conscience.) “3. We honor the Bible and all inspiring scripture, old and new; 4. We revere Jesus, and all holy souls that have taught men truth and righteousness and love, as prophets of religion.” (They are stepping beyond Christianity and expanding the list of resources available to them in the religious quest.) “5. We believe in the growing nobility of Man; 6. We trust the unfolding Universe as beautiful, beneficent, unchanging Order; to know this order is truth; to obey it is right and liberty and stronger life.” (This reference to the universe, as I read it, points to the value of nature and science as resources for spiritual inspiration.) “7. We believe that good and evil invariably carry their own recompense, no good thing being failure and no evil thing success; that heaven and hell are states of being;” (Not places!) “that no evil can befall the good man in either life or death; that all things work together for the victory of the Good; 8.We believe that we ought to join hands and work to make the good things better and the worst good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all.” (This is a much more firm statement about how we shall live.) “9. We believe that this self-forgetting, loyal life awakes in man the sense of union here and now with things eternal—the sense of deathlessness; and this sense is to us an earnest of the life to come; 10. We worship One-in All” (sounds like Hinduism’s concept of Atman and Brahman) “—that life whence suns and stars derive their orbits and the soul of man its Ought—that Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, giving us power to become the sons of God—that Love with which ours souls commune.”
Notice that their theology is becoming vague. God is replaced by Good. God is the love with which our souls commune. These folks were profoundly aware Christianity was one among many religions. It was becoming more and more difficult for them to make a firm theological statement they all could agree on. They were looking for inclusive language, but the more inclusive, the more abstract the theology, even as their statements about how we shall live were becoming more concrete: “Join hands and work together.”
Consider this 1935 list of Universalist principles, known as the “The Bond of Fellowship.” “We avow our faith 1. in God as Eternal and All-conquering Love.” (As with the Unitarians in 1887, God is no longer a divine entity; God is a moral principle, an emotion, a feeling.) “2. in the spiritual leadership of Jesus.” (Jesus is no longer God or God’s son or even God’s mediator, but rather a spiritual leader.) “3. in the supreme worth of every human personality.” (The original Universalist theology that all are saved is replaced by the concept that all are worthy, a much more this-wordly claim.) “4. in the authority of truth known or to be known.” (They’re building into their principles the possibility of encountering further revelations from a variety of sources, the possibility of change. They are allowing themselves to be open to the discovery of new truths.) “5. in the power of men of good-will and sacrificial spirit to overcome evil and progressively establish the Kingdom of God.” (A more precise statement about how we shall live.) After referencing two earlier Universalist lists, including the Winchester Professions, The Bond of Fellowship” ends with language indicating they have moved away from creedal tests to an ethic of free inquiry: “These historic declarations of faith with liberty of interpretation are dear and acceptable to many Universalists. They are commended not as tests but as testimonies in the free quest for truth.”
Might it be too much to ask of theology that it tell us the whole truth? And rather than focus so much on theology and what we believe, rather than put so much emphasis on doctrine and knowing the essential core of one’s religion, might it not be more compelling and more relevant to focus on how we treat one another and the earth, asking the question, “How shall we live?” When Unitarians and Universalists merged in 1961, they agreed on six principles that placed theology in the background and notions of how we shall live in the foreground. “The members of the Unitarian Universalist Association, dedicated to the principles of a free faith, unite in seeking: 1. To strengthen one another in a free and disciplined search for truth as the foundation of our religious fellowship; 2. To cherish and spread the universal truths taught by the great prophets and teachers of humanity in every age and tradition, immemorially summarized in the Judeo-Christian heritage as love to God and love to man; 3. To affirm, defend and promote the supreme worth of every human personality, the dignity of man, and the use of the democratic method in human relationships; 4. To implement our vision of one world by striving for a world community founded on ideals of brotherhood, justice and peace; 5. To serve the needs of member churches and fellowships, to organize new churches and fellowships, and to extend and strengthen liberal religion; 6. To encourage cooperation with men of good will in every land.”
The bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association call for a process of reflection on the principles—and revision if necessary—every fifteen years. In the late 1970s when it was time to reflect, women in large numbers called for new, gender-neutral language so that the principles would be fully inclusive. The original version of our current principles was drafted by a coalition of women’s groups, presented to the General Assembly in 1981, and eventually adopted in 1984. Unitarian Universalists now covenant to affirm and promote seven principles, which we spoke together at the beginning of our service. [For online readers they appear at the end of this text.] The Unitarian Universalist Association is currently embarking on its next period of reflection and revision, which is another reason I would like to preach directly on the principles.
Until preparing this sermon—really until yesterday—I felt I agreed with Rev. Loehr that religion must begin with an articulation of the individual’s relationship to the infinite. It sounds like the right definition. But I realize that definition isn’t in my bones. I wasn’t raised with it. As much as it sounds right to my ears, it doesn’t feel right and necessary in my gut. It doesn’t speak to my heart. It comes with certain risks I’m not sure I want to take. As soon as I try to articulate our relation to the infinite as a starting place for our religious lives, I risk closing us off to other possible articulations. I risk closing us off to the possibility we could be wrong. I risk drawing a box around us. I risk moving us, even if imperceptively, towards dichotomous, us-them, we-they thinking. I risk creating “others” where there weren’t any before. There is nothing wrong with making a firm theological claim, but it seems to me such claims ought to come after the search, after experience, after reason and conscience, after living. I would much rather risk living by a set of principles that call for justice, compassion and respect than try to figure out my relationship to God before I’ve done any living. I believe when human beings begin their religious lives with doctrines and theological claims, we create a dynamic where we are called to defend those claims when we encounter new and different truths. It is that defensive posture that holds within it the seeds of war and violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia. It is a posture that risks killing spirit, freedom, creativity, openness, and spontaneity. I’m not interested in taking that risk.
The risk our Unitarian and Universalists ancestors learned to take over the past two centuries was in daring to live well in the absence of theological certainty. I find great wisdom in the evolution of the Unitarian and Universalist principles, in the movement from a firm theological center to a focus on how we shall relate to each other, to our larger world, and to the earth. In this approach to the religious life lie the seeds of peace, justice, love and, if I may be so bold, as our forbears put it, the creation of the kingdom of God on earth. How shall we live? If Unitarian Universalism answers this question well—and I believe it does—then it is certainly a religion worthy of our commitment, worthy of our loyalty, worthy of our love.
Amen and Blessed Be.
* I suggest religion is more than ‘the search for a feeling of reconnection to a healthy kind of wholeness.’ I suggest it is more accurate—and more simple—to say that ‘religion is the search for a reconnection to a health and wholeness.’
Loehr, Davidson, “Salvation By Character: How Unitarian Universalists Can Find a Religious Center,” 1999.
This is Rev. Loehr’s paraphrase of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s definition of religion in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, written in 1799.
Since preaching that sermon on August 26, I have heard from a few Unitarian Universalists that they actually do want to hear the seven principles on their deathbed!
