The Truth Shall Make You Free
This is the sixth sermon in the series I’ve called "Eight Themes that Unite Us." The point of this series has been to lift up some of the dominant ideas or ways of thinking about the matters of the spirit that have been important throughout the history and development of UUism.There is another reason for this sermon. A member of the congregation offered a suggestion for a sermon topic. This person asked,
"What does it mean to search for truth and meaning in our UU tradition as compared to our culture?"
I hope that this attempt to answer her question offers some satisfaction.
It seems to me that the claim of the on-going nature of revelation and the never-ending quest for truth may be the most important of the eight themes in terms of who we are and how we do religion. If there is an overarching story that brings our way of the Spirit into focus – a story that animates our history and sets us apart from other religions – the story of the free and responsible search for truth. That’s a bold claim to make and I don’t say these words easily. I’ve read enough church history to know that the search for truth has been a driving force in Christianity for centuries and that this search has cost thousands of human lives. In fact, our early history is very much a part of the Christian story.
Our way of the Spirit has always been the way of the dissenter. That means that our spiritual heritage is not the lineage of the unquestioning believer who set faith above all else in the search for truth. Our spiritual forbearers have always valued reason as an essential and tempering element of a truthful and healthy religious belief system. They did not make an idol of human reason. There has always been an awareness of the limits of reason, and we have always made a place for mystery and a sense of the transcendent as aspects of human experience. Nevertheless, reason has always been an important guide for those brave men and women who went before us and gave us the priceless gift of the free mind and the free church.
Let’s begin our examination of how our search for truth sets us apart by telling the story of a church official in Alexandria named Arias who lived in the early fourth century. At this point in church history, the question of just who Jesus was and how his death and resurrection brought about human salvation was still unsettled. Arias was a convinced and unswerving monotheist. Like other early Christians, he believed in one God who was supreme, and this belief was the bedrock of his religious faith. After considerable study of scripture and careful thought, he came to the conclusion that if Jesus were a creature, created by God and from God, then Jesus could not be identical to God since God was eternal and not created. You couldn’t have two co-equal Gods, both unbegotten. Arias’s heretical conclusion was that Jesus is neither divine nor eternal.
Arias’s ideas about the nature of Jesus were taught in many of the Christian churches in Alexandria and pretty soon he found himself in trouble with the local pope who demanded that he either change his teachings or be silent. Arias refused, because he believed that the ancient teaching to have no other gods before the one true God was consistent with Jesus’s own teachings. The result of his determination to hold fast to the leanings of his own reason and conscience was that he was forced to flee Alexandria. A few years later, at the council of Nicaea in 325 AD, Arias was once again the purported loser of the grand debate over the nature of Jesus and he left the council in disgrace. But the so-called "Arian heresy" continues to hold truth for many and is the foundation for the Unitarians' historic denial of the doctrine of the trinity as being both unscriptural and unsupportable by human reason.
During the time of the Enlightenment, when human reason was bringing new truths to light in many areas of learning and human endeavor, two Unitarians – Joseph Priestley and Joseph Stevens Buckminister – took up the tools of philosophy, history, and (of course) reason to the study of religion. Both men were attacked for their efforts, one by a mob and the other by his own friends. But the lure of the new truths that were out there and the desire to bring these truths in to the light of day were too powerful to be ignored.
The English scientist, Joseph Priestley was a man of many interests. He was an ordained minister who found his reasoned study of the Christian scriptures leading him to a very different set of conclusions from those taught in the doctrines and creeds of the Anglican Church. His work to discover the historic Jesus was explained in a book with the in-your-face title of A History of the Corruption of Christianity. In this work Priestley attacks the church for taking the simple religion that Jesus taught and transforming it into doctrines, ritual, and a hierarchy that had little connection with Jesus’s own ideas. Priestley’s Jesus was a man who was commissioned by "the universal parent" of humankind,
"… to invite all to the practice of virtue, by the assurance of his mercy to the penitent and of his purpose to raise to immortal life and happiness all the virtuous and the good, but to inflict an adequate punishment on the wicked."
Jesus was superior to other great teachers because he was
Priestley paid a price for sharing his new ideas when in 1791 his house, library and laboratory, and some of his neighbors' homes were torched and all of the Unitarian chapels in Birmingham England were ravaged by a furious mob. He and his family barely escaped with their lives. They fled to London, and three years later they sailed to the United States where they were warmly received. Here, Priestley continued to teach his understanding of the "pure" teachings of Jesus and is remembered as one of the most prominent of the early Unitarians.
Until the early 1800s men and women who believed that reason and religion were complementary to one another found that thoughtful analysis of the scriptures offered the most light for their search. But the source of light grew in power and scope as a young Unitarian minister by the name of Joseph Stevens Buckminister brought new methods and new tools to America. Another brilliant thinker, he was one of the first to bring some of the new forms of Biblical criticism that were being used in Germany to America. These methods of criticism used literary analysis, accounts of history, and a growing understanding of ancient cultures that offered new insights into biblical texts. In the light of these new methods the Bible was no longer seen as the inerrant word of God, or even as one unified book. Scholars began to talk about the Bible as a collection of books that had been changed as they passed through many hands over the ages.
Buckminister was so convinced of the value of there new methods that he learned the German language and traveled to Germany where he bought a small library of books by the new biblical scholars to bring back to America. He wanted the newest knowledge and the newest methods to be available to American scholars even though he knew that controversy and condemnation might follow. And it did. Some of the harshest words came from his own Unitarian colleagues. The more conservative ministers warned that,
"Reason must be put down or she will soon ask terrible questions"
and
"There are limits to free inquiry!"
But once opened, the doorway to new revelations and new truths could not be closed off and, as our own Julia Ward Howe would say,
"The truth goes marching on!"
Buckiminister was more than an intellectual in an ivory tower. He was also a gifted preacher who encouraged the spiritual growth of the members of his congregation. The great revivalists of the day claimed that men and women came to know the unexplainable and undeniable truth of Christianity only through a God-given conversion experience. Buckminister believed in the potential within each person to discover truth and urged his congregants to see their spiritual development in the same light as their intellectual development. In one of his sermons he said,
"Look back, my hearers, upon your lives, and observe the numerous opinions that you have adopted and discarded, the numerous attachments you have formed and forgotten, and recollect how imperceptible were the revolutions of your sentiments, how quiet the changes of your affections. Perhaps, even now, your minds may be passing through some interesting processes, your pursuits may be taking some new directions and your character may soon exhibit to the world some unexpected transformation. Compare with this the spiritual regeneration of the heart. So is everyone that is born of the Spirit."
Buckminister told his congregation that the process of revelation and spiritual growth was organic and internal and that they would see this process in their own lifes if they looked within. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading Unitarian of the next generation agreed that individual insights, leanings, and experiences were to be valued as a primary source of revelation and truth. He too taught that reason was to be a lens and a judge for reading scripture. But he went further in his use of reason than his Unitarian predecessors when he repudiated the miralces attributed to Jesus because they were beyond reason and therefore unnatural and untrue
Emerson believed in the world of nature as a rich.source of revelation about the transcendent aspects of existence and the universal meaning of human existence. In his essay entitled Nature he asks,
"Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein as a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, free, arise and shine. This universal soul he calls reason."
Like other scholars of his day, Emerson looked for truth in the sacred scriptures of the Hindu and Islamic traditions. His study of Eastern religions led Emerson to a profound revelation of a truth that we still treasure today: that in their deepest aspects, the Easterner and Westerner are profoundly alike and that all religions offer important revelations about the meaning of human existence.
In the years that followed Emerson, Unitarianism continued to follow an ever-broadening path in the free and responsible search for truth. No longer limited to the authority of one book or one teacher, we claimed to honor all holy souls and to honor all inspiring scripture. We said that reason and conscience were the final authorities in matters of religious belief, not creedal statements or ecclesiastic authorities. We embrace the truth available through science, the arts, and personal experience. Our search for truth and meaning is conducted in an atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance that honors the insights and wisdom of the individual. We aren’t afraid to ask questions that we can’t answer and to stay in a place of ambiguity. We’d rather say "I don’t know" than to offer an answer that offers fantasy rather than the truth.
But there is a price to be paid for our freedom and tolerance and we do pay that price. Our sense of identity as a religious community is sometimes vague and even misunderstood. Too often we describe ourselves by naming what we don’t believe, or by the claim that in our church we can believe anything we want to. Our commitment to tolerance can lead us to a spiritual and intellectual softness that can lead to the development of a world view that is comforting and self-serving and that can’t withstand the penetrating light of reason. And we can rest too long in a cozy personal faith, unwilling or unable to push ourselves to grow, to continue the work of exploring new truths, new paths. In our own way, we can be as firmly embedded in our own personal faith as any fundamentalist who claims that all the truth is found in the teachings of one true church. If we believe that revelation is on-going, then we ourselves must be open to new truths and be willing to test our long-held beliefs by that light. We owe this much to those who labored to create the way of the spirit that is our heritage and we owe it even more to those who will be our heirs.
Let us make it so!
Links to earlier sermons in this series: Eight Themes that Unite Us, The Divine Seed in Every Person, Ah Mystery!, Mutuality and Variety: How UUs Walk Together on Different Paths, and Engagement, and Standing Against the Negative. Use the Back button to get back to this sermon.
Copyright 2002, HelenChristine Brownlie; Commercial Duplication Prohibited
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