Four Reflections on Unitarian Universalism’s Relationship to Christianity
The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
December 3rd, 2006
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I’m preaching a series of sermons on the six sources of the Unitarian Universalist living tradition. One of those sources is Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves. In September I preached on the Jewish origins of this teaching—what Jesus called the “great commandment” to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. This commandment appears in the New Testament book of Matthew but it is based on much earlier Jewish teachings found in the Torah. This morning I want to talk about Christianity as a source for Unitarian Universalism. Unfortunately for you there are so many things I want to talk about that I didn’t just prepare one sermon. I’ve prepared four. These are four reflections on Unitarian Universalism’s Relationship to Christianity.
(1) Unpacking Our Unitarian Universalist Christian Baggage
When it comes to Christianity, let’s not kid ourselves. We carry baggage. More often than not, in response to Christianity, we are ambivalent, sometimes confused, often negative, and at worst reactionary. (This is a general rule. Of course, there are many exceptions as well.) There are reasons for this general UU response to Christianity. Many of you began your religious lives in Christian congregations. Some of you left Christianity because you felt it had wounded you. Perhaps you are gay or lesbian and you were told that who you are is an abomination. Perhaps you are a woman who felt belittled because only men could become clergy in your denomination. Perhaps when some tragedy befell you or your family, you were told that your faith was weak or that you hadn’t prayed hard enough or that the tragedy was all part of God’s plan for you.
Not everyone was wounded in this way. Perhaps you left because you realized Christian doctrine no longer spoke to you; your rational mind couldn’t accept it as truth; you felt like a hypocrite sitting in those pews. Perhaps you just didn’t like being told what to believe. (Actually, that’s probably why most of you left!) I say it is understandable that experiences like these would instill in us ambivalence, confusion, and even negativity about Christianity.
Then we see Christian Evangelical leaders in the media preaching a message that, to our ears, sounds homophobic, sexist, intolerant of other religions, fear-based, earth-damaging, anti-scientific, militaristic and unwilling to respect alternative points of view. No wonder we react! These guys really get under our skin. But wait a minute. I interact all the time with Christians who would never—could never—practice Christianity in this way. We forget that the few Christian Evangelical leaders who make us particularly angry do not even speak for all Christian Evangelicals, let alone all Christians. Like all religions, Christianity is not a monolith. There are Christians in the forefront of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement and the environmental movement. There are Christian denominations that ordain women and gays, oppose war and militarism, embrace science and secular learning, seek interfaith dialogue and engage very deeply with alternative points of view. We Unitarian Universalists often forget this. We fall into the trap of painting Christianity with broad brush strokes that don’t begin to capture its complexities.
As Unitarian Universalists—as people who take religious freedom as a matter of utmost importance—as people who affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, our fourth principle—we need to remember that the strong negative feelings we often experience in reaction to Christianity, have very little to do with Christianity. They have everything to do with fundamentalism. In my assessment, Christianity doesn’t oppress gays and lesbians. Fundamentalism oppresses gays and lesbians. Christianity doesn’t prevent the ordination of women. Fundamentalism prevents the ordination of women. Christianity isn’t militaristic. Fundamentalism is militaristic. Christianity doesn’t reject science and reason. Fundamentalism rejects science and reason. Christians don’t ignore the obligation to be good stewards of the earth. Fundamentalists ignore the obligation to be good stewards of the earth, and even that is changing. The same distinctions tend to hold true in Jewish and Muslim contexts. So much of what we react to in Christianity (or Judaism or Islam) has nothing to do with the core of the religion. We react to the fundamentalist version of the religion.
(2) Unitarian Universalist Christian Roots
This distinction between Christianity and fundamentalism is important to me, because the Unitarian and Universalist denominations, which merged in 1961 to form our Unitarian Universalist Association, began as Christian denominations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I sometimes worry that if we don’t make this critical distinction, and if we allow our ambivalence, confusion, negativity and reactivity to guide our relationship to Christianity, then we won’t be able to fully appreciate our own origins. Our early Unitarian and Universalist forebears were Christians challenging and transforming the fundamentalisms of their day. They challenged what they perceived to be inaccurate Biblical interpretation and scholarship; they challenged doctrines like the Trinity that had no basis in scripture; they challenged the dominant Calvinist theology with its dismal view of human nature and its preoccupation with eternal damnation.
Imagine: at a time when the dominant theology held that the vast majority of people were doomed to eternal hell, the Rev. John Murray, a Universalist leader of the late 1700s, proclaimed a new Christian vision from pulpit to pulpit across New England: “Give them not hell, but hope and courage; preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.” It is hard for us to comprehend, but such Universalist sentiments were regarded as dangerous heresy. As one historian writes about Murray, most pulpits “were soon closed to him as the word spread concerning his true convictions. Increasingly he met opposition, some of it rabid and ugly. His meetings were disrupted. He barely escaped lynching several times. In Boston on one occasion a potentially lethal stone flew through the window at the back of the pulpit, narrowly missing his head. Murray, never at a loss for words or a moral, held up the rock to the congregation’s view, weighed it in his hand, and pronounced: ‘This argument is solid, and weighty, but it is neither rational, nor convincing.’”
What was the theological heresy behind “give them not hell, but hope and courage?” Very simply, that heresy was the belief that all humanity is already saved. Salvation was not simply for those who believed in Jesus Christ. There was no test to get into heaven, no special faith one must profess. Salvation was for everyone. Universalists found it completely irrational that a loving God would create hell to punish people. They stopped believing in hell. If Jesus’ death on the cross were meant to atone for humanity’s sins, then it atoned for all humanity, not some. Everyone was included in salvation. No one was left behind.
Today we generally don’t profess our Universalism in Christian terms. But as we proclaim the first Unitarian Universalist principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we can hear echoes of the old radical theology: God loves every person. God saves every person.
(3) A New American Universalism
It seems humanity can only bear so much preaching about hell, and when enough has been preached, some brave souls rise up to proclaim a more hopeful vision. 230 years ago it was John Murray and his colleagues. If you’ve been paying attention to religious trends in the United States, you may have noticed that someone has risen up today in the midst of fundamentalist Christianity to proclaim an end to hellfire: Bishop Carlton Pearson of Tulsa, OK, one of the foremost names in the Pentecostal movement. A disciple of Oral Roberts, in the early 1980s he founded Higher Dimensions, Inc., an international Pentecostal ministry, featuring a racially integrated, 5,000 member church. He has had a highly successful television ministry and gospel music recording career; he has advised three United States presidents; and he has helped launch the careers of many nationally known Christian ministers, including T.D. Jakes, leader of the Potter’s House, a 28,000 member mega church in Dallas, TX. Pearson achieved all this before age 50, an amazingly successful career by all measures.
And then he stopped believing in hell. In his new book, God is Not a Christian, he writes that “after 30 years of preaching holiness, with the accompanying hellfire and brimstone warnings to final judgments and eternal damnation, I have been arrested by the Holy Spirit and convinced that I have not been preaching an accurate gospel message.” I first heard him tell the story of his change of heart at a conference in Hartford a few years ago. Some of you may have heard him tell it in a recent interview on the This American Life radio program. In the mid-1990s he was watching a television special on the plight of African refugees. Graphic images of suffering touched his heart. His long-standing assumption was that these poor, starving souls needed to be saved before they died. Money needed to be raised. Missionaries needed to be trained and sent to Africa. A voice came into his head and said, “Is that what you think?” He thought about it, and responded, “It’s what I’ve been taught.” The conversation continued and he had a revelation that we are all already saved. There is nothing we have to do to earn salvation. It is God’s gift to all humanity. This is the nature of God’s love for humanity. Hell is not a punishment from God. It is rather a condition on earth that human beings create. Hell is something we do to each other. It has nothing to do with God.
Bishop Pearson has turned from Christian Fundamentalism’s fear of hell to what he calls the “gospel of inclusion,” or Universalism. He writes that “the message (Good News or Gospel) people need to hear, is not that they simply have an opportunity for Salvation, but that they, through Christ, in fact, have already been redeemed, reconciled and saved.” He’s talking about everyone. He says it doesn’t matter what religion you are. It doesn’t matter whether you accept Jesus Christ as savior. Everyone is saved. And he’s done his homework. He knows about Universalism in the early years of the Christian Church. He also knows about and claims the early American Universalists—our spiritual forebears. He knows about their theology and their struggles and mentions them in his writing. Of course, he is very clear that he is not a Unitarian Universalists. He describes us as a humanistic religion that prides itself on being non-creedal.
Bishop Pearson’s abandonment of hell and embrace of Universalism has created controversy in the evangelical world. The metaphorical stones have come flying through the church window. He has been branded a heretic by the Council of Evangelical Bishops and kicked off the Board or regents of Oral Roberts University. He has lost his church building, his staff, and most of his congregation, and now rents space in an Episcopalian church in Tulsa, preaching weekly to a congregation of 400. But he is not alone. There are other bishops on the margins of the African American Pentecostal movement who, with him, profess Universalist Christianity, or something close to it. I believe this new Pentecostal Universalism will grow if given enough time. I believe it has the potential to re-shape American Christianity. And though I don’t believe it is the future of Unitarian Universalism, I believe we ought to find ways to support this movement in its infancy. I feel strongly about this not only because of its connection to our Christian origins, but because this movement is open to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people; is inherently anti-racist; embraces religious pluralism; and rejects militarism.
It seems to me a basic truth that humanity can only bear so much preaching about hell, and then the idea of God’s universal love emerges, and hope is rekindled.
(4) Am I a Christian?
When I engage with Christianity—attend Christian worship, join in social justice work with Christians, or read the works of Christian writers—I am consistently left with a nagging question, “Which Christianity?” As the Christian mystic Howard Thurman put it, are we talking about the religion of Jesus—the religion which Jesus practiced—or the religion about Jesus the divine figure, the religion that elevates him to Christ or messiah? Are we talking about Jesus as religious subject or Jesus as religious object? I would like to claim the former. I would like to be like the human Jesus. What an incredible invitation and challenge to try to model one’s living and one’s religious life after him. What an incredible invitation and challenge to approach the world with the confidence of the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the those who are hungry now, for you shall be filled. Blessed are those who weep now, for you shall laugh.” What an incredible and difficult challenge to attempt to live Jesus’ great commandment: to love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself! And that, again, is the Christian teaching which Unitarian Universalists claim as a source of our living tradition.
But to what extent can I personally claim Christianity? Can I attempt to follow the life and teachings of Jesus separate from the other Christianity, the religion about Jesus? What if I resist the notion that God would demand Jesus’ crucifixion in order to save the world because I don‘t believe a loving God would ask anyone to make such a sacrifice? What if I resist the notion that Jesus died and was resurrected three days later, not because it couldn‘t possibly be true, but because I have no way of knowing whether it is true? What if, like Thomas Jefferson, I believe that after Jesus’ death, they laid his body in a tomb, rolled a stone in front of the door, and departed, and never returned, such that the story ends there? In order to authentically follow this great teacher, do I have to believe he is literally the son of God, do I have to accept him as my personal savior? Is my desire to be like him any less valid if I don’t believe? Is my trust in the Jesus’ convictions—those he expressed in the Sermon on the Mount—any less compelling if I don’t believe? Is my attempt to live in response to his great commandment any less valuable in the world if I don’t believe? Do not our deeds and how we choose to live in this world matter more than our professed theology? I think they do. There again I align myself with Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote that it is in our lives and not in our words and our ideas that our religion must be read.
I believe each night a child is born is a holy night. If I cannot be a Christian unless I accept the religion which privileges Jesus theologically as the only child of God, then so be it, I am no Christian. But this reflection, at least for me, begs the question: If Jesus were to come among us today, which would he recognize more, the religion that identifies him as Christ, which did not exist in his lifetime? Or all the various expressions today—and there are many—of the religion he tried to practice in his life, a religion of service, healing and justice, a simple religion whose core is love for God and love for neighbor?
I am deeply ambivalent about Jesus the Christ. But I love Jesus the person. As the mid-winter holidays approach, my prayer is that we focus on our deeds and on how we live, on service, healing, justice, and love, because regardless of what we say we believe, our religion will surely be known by what we do.
Amen and Blessed be.Cassara, Ernest, ed., Universalism in America: A Documentary History of a Liberal Faith (Boston: Skinner House, 1971) p. 11.
At the time of delivering this sermon, Bishop Pearson’s book has not been published (it is due for publication later in December, 2006). In this sermon, all quotes from Bishop Pearson’s book come from his website: http://www.newdimensions.us/.
On his website he says “all ecclesiastical historians and the best Biblical critics and scholars agree [on] the prevalence of Universalism in the early centuries. From the days of Clement of Alexandria, to those of Gregory of Nyssa and Theodore of Mopsuestia (A.D. 180-428), the great theologians and teachers, almost without exception, were Universalist.”
Thurman, Howard, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976) p. 15.
Jefferson, Thomas, ed. The Jefferson Bible (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1983) p. 132.
Boorstin, Daniel J., The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948) p. 155.
