Our Theological House:
God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit

A sermon written to be delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), November 12, 2006, by the Reverend Christine Brownlie. This sermon is the third in a series called “Our Theological House.” The metaphor of a theological house comes from a series of lectures by the Rev. Rebecca Parker, President of Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley California. (Starr King is one of our two Unitarian Universalist seminaries.) You will find a fuller description of Rev. Parker’s thoughts in the first sermon of the series, “Our Theological House: A Tour of the House,” which is on our congregational Web site at this URL.

I’m often asked how I respond to people who ask me to explain Unitarianism Universalism. I start by telling them a bit about our odd name. First, we are Unitarians, not Trinitarians. If we believe in God (and I do) that God is one-not three-in-one. We come from the branch of Christian heretics who claimed that Scripture does not support the doctrine of the Trinity. This means that Jesus is not equal to God and that the Holy Spirit is not a separate entity apart from God.

The historic position of Universalists, which is also based in an early Christian heresy, is that a good and loving God would not condemn anyone to eternal torment in hell. If the conversation doesn’t get bogged down in questions about why terrible people like Hitler and others should be in hell, I will then move on to an explanation of my sources of authority — that is, where I go for support of my ideas and beliefs. For me, these sources are reason, experience, the teachings and writings of the world’s great religions, and sources of modern knowledge — the sciences, history, anthropology, art, and literature. My point here is that I cannot believe anything I want, nor can I blindly accept what someone else claims to be true. This is what makes our way of the Spirit so challenging and so vital.

. Both Unitarianism and Universalism are offshoots of Protestantism that has its roots in Judaism, a monotheistic faith. But Unitarianism and Universalism differ over the doctrine of the Trinity. I’ve already explained the Unitarian position on this, so let’s look at the other side of the family tree. Universalists were Trinitarians and they held to all of the accepted Protestant teachings about the nature of God and the nature of Jesus. God the father, Jesus the son, and the Holy Spirit were co-eternal and of the same essential nature. While on earth, Jesus was wholly human and wholly divine and his death and resurrection provided salvation for all people.

Unitarians came out of a well-known — and much hated — heresy called Arianism that was condemned in 325CE. In this year leaders of the various Christian sects met in the lovely town of Nicea, in what is now Turkey. They’d been called together by the Roman Emperor Constantine, who was quite annoyed by the fighting that was raging between these sects over the nature of Jesus and his relation to God. Constantine feared that this violence would undermine his power, so he told the church leaders who assembled at Nicea that they could not leave until they had settled these questions.

There were three major factions among these leaders: Arias and his followers who taught that the essential nature of Jesus was different from the nature of God, Athanasius and his followers who believed that Jesus and God were of the same essential nature, and the majority who claimed that God and Jesus were of a similar nature. Athanasius was a clever man, and he was able to win Constantine’s support for his point of view. Arius was declared a heretic and sent packing.

But Arius’s beliefs survived and even flourished — most notably in Eastern Europe during the time of the Reformation. Those who accepted Arianism, believed God was the only entity that was divine. God was the creator, sustainer, judge, and comforter of humankind. God acted in history and used supernatural powers to work miracles.

Arianism, which came to be known as Antitrinitarianism, took hold in parts of New England. Several of the Congregational churches in Boston were accused of this heresy, a charge that was initially denied. The first openly Antitrinitarian church was King’s Chapel, which was an Episcopal congregation. This congregation decided to revise the Book of Common Prayer so that all references to the Trinity were expunged. The teaching was that God alone is divine and Jesus serves as humanity’s mediator. The Holy Spirit came from God to comforter and a source of revelation but it was not a separate person.

By the late 1700s a new view of the nature of God was evolving. It was known as deism and it appealed primarily to those who were educated in the sciences. This view teaches that God is the creator of the universe and the author of the laws that keep it going, but God does not interfere with the world in any way. This means that there were no miracles and no savior sent by God to redeem the world. Deists claimed that reason alone was sufficient in the quest for knowledge of God. The only god is “Nature’s God,” so ordinary human experiences are sufficient to discern the existence and nature of God. Jesus is a human teacher and model of the perfect man.

For many Unitarians of that time, deism worked. But other people found it to be a cold theory that offered little comfort during hard times. These people wanted and needed a god who cared about people, their needs and their problems. They longed for a sense of meaning in their lives that told them that they mattered and that there was a reason to be a good person beyond the rewards of this life. They also longed for a God that they could understand, at least to a degree, and the God of the trinity was baffling. The Rev. William Ellery Channing explained the Unitarian disagreement with this doctrine in these forthright words,

“One God, consisting of three equal persons or agents, is so strange a being, so unlike our own minds, and all others with whom we hold intercourse, that He cannot be apprehended with that distinctness and that feeling of reality that belongs to the opposite system.”

Channing and other Unitarian ministers who held pulpits in the early to mid 1800s taught that the God of the Bible was a God of love. This love caused God to create humanity for good and to give them the gift of reason so that human beings might know their creator. Reason was supplemented by revelation. For Christians, the most powerful source of revelation was the Bible — followed by personal experience.

Channing’s God was deeply personal. He believed that God wanted to be in a relationship with human beings. Jesus was a man who possessed a profound understanding of God’s nature and God’s desires for humanity. Jesus was not divine, but the way he lived his life was an example of divinity. His close relationship with God was made obvious by his many miracles. The Spirit was a source of inspiration, revelation, and comfort. It came out of God, and thus was an expression of God’s concern and love for humanity.

Channing’s message was powerful and inspiring to many, and most other Unitarian ministers of the day offered a similar message.

But younger Unitarian ministers were moving away from an anthropomorphic concept of God and the stories of Jesus as a miracle worker and a savior. For some, the old concepts of God were little more than a primitive myth that should be discarded in the light of the natural laws that were revealed by science. Many agreed with the Rev Theodore Parker, who said that if Jesus was a prophet and a teacher, then it is his message and not the man that should be revered. As the Rev. David Robinson explains, for these more radical thinkers,

“the word ‘God’ might be thought of simply as name or symbol for the aspiring religious sensibility of humanity. If this religious sensibility was not necessarily tied to a transcendent being, it might be thought of more precisely as an expression of the human personality itself, and religious might well be redefined as a purely human enterprise.”

You may recognize that this view is in keeping with the philosophy we now call Humanism, a worldview that had a profound impact on both Unitarianism and Universalism beginning in the first half in the 20^th century. Humanism teaches that the idea of a supernatural divine being is beyond the scope of reason and cannot be taken seriously in this age that relies on reason and the sciences as the best sources of truth. There was also a growing interest in the teachings of other world religions. For many Universalists and Unitarians, Jesus shifted from being the greatest of religious teachers to one of many important prophets and exemplars.

Modern UUs hold reason and the scientific method as ways to truth in high regard. But for some of us, reason and science are not enough. The 2005 report from the UUA Commission on Appraisal titled Engaging Our Theological Diversity notes that in matters of religion, personal experience carries more weight. A surprisingly high percentage of UU ministers and lay people who responded to the survey that is the basis of the Commission’s report, said that both spirituality and reason were very important sources of their religious beliefs. Humanist teachings were ranked as important, but few called this source “very important.”

One section of this survey includes two statements about God. Respondents were asked to rank these statements on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 as not important and 5 as very important. The two statements are:

1. We encounter God in our own depths, in others and thru nature.”

2. God can be conceived as a pervasive Creativity, ever evolving that lures us beyond our limiting horizons.

80% of the respondents rated both statements as very important to their personal faith. Others said that “God” was a concept that had no meaning for them at all. Young people were more likely than older people to say that God was an important concept in their spiritual lives and many came from congregations that had a strong Humanist identity. Their understanding of God was cast in a new mold.

One person wrote,

“I believe in God, but not in the traditional sense. For me, God is the organizing force of the Universe, the rays of sun that shine through breaking clouds on the horizon, and most importantly that which gives existence to all kinds of love between living beings.”

The Rev. Richard Gilbert, who calls himself a “mystical humanist,” offered these thoughts:

“I think of the divine as the power of cosmic creativity. That creativity is manifest in nature as creative evolution; it is observed in history in those prophets of the human spirit who have tried to bend the arc of history toward justice against all odds, it is manifest here and now as we are co-creators of the Beloved Community.”

For many UUs who find their spiritual home in the Universalist branch of our heritage, this sense of Beloved Community is grounded in a deep faith in a God of love that, in the words of the Rev Rebecca Parker, “will not let us go.” The Rev. Carl Scovel, retired minister of King’s Chapel, shares Parker’s view and writes that for him this enduring transforming love is “that good intent at life’s own center” and that learning to trust in that love, “transforms me, not as I have expected — god’s other name, after all, is surprise — but most surely and most steadily.”

This survey did not ask about a faith in Jesus or any other teacher. But I will note that the UU Christian Fellowship is growing, and that their “revivals” and services at General Assembly are well attended. There are several other groups that draw from religious traditions such as Earth-based spirituality, Buddhism, and Judaism. There is also a growing interest in “spiritual practices” as a way of being in touch with the holy or the sacred in everyday life.

And what about the Spirit? How can we, who honor Michael Servetus who died at the stake as a martyr for his denial of the Holy Spirit as the third party of the Trinity, explain that the hymn Spirit of Life has become the anthem of our denomination? Or that the phrase “our way of the spirit” has entered into our religious vocabulary? What is behind the renewed interest in “spiritual disciplines” such as meditation and prayer? To be sure, we modern UUs are not talking about the “Holy Spirit” of the Christian Trinity, but we are pointing to something that is beyond reason, and something that is known to us only by experience and reflection.

When you are asked by someone to explain what Unitarian Universalists believe, please don’t respond with the words “whatever we want to.” Our free faith demands something better! I might want to believe in a God that protects the weak and the poor, that cures little children of horrible diseases, and who raises a mighty hand whenever the innocent are attacked by the forces of evil. But I don’t. I might long to believe that I too have a friend in Jesus who will comfort me and wipe away my tears when I ache with sadness and think that I just can’t go on another minute. But I can’t. I might wish that I stood fast in the conviction that if I were overcome with despair and loneliness, that the Holy Spirit would come upon me and fill me with the power of the Almighty. But that too is beyond me. I am aware that our ideas about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are human constructs, and I try to avoid the idolatry of fundamentalism that holds that there is only one way to understand God or the message of Jesus (or Allah), and that’s my way — or the way of the Christian Right or of Rev. Jerry Falwell or of someone else with whom we disagree.

When I contemplate ideas about God, Jesus, and the Spirit, I recall the words of Clarence Russell Skinner, the great Universalist minister who wrote:

“The Universalist idea of God is that of a Universal Immanent Spirit whose nature is love. It is the largest thought the world has eve known, it is the most revolutionary doctrine every proclaimed; it is the most expansive hope ever dreamed.”

There are many who have proclaimed this spirit of love. For me, the teachers who speak most deeply to my heart, mind, and soul, are Jesus and the Buddha. They keep me away from a sticky sentimental love by pushing me into the hard realities of life and who I am as a human being. They remind me that I have to learn to love myself as well as all the other folks I deal with. They never let me off the hook when I fail, but they encourage me to try again and again, because love is a much better path than bitterness or the delusion that nothing I do will really make a difference.

This may not be your path, in fact you may think that my path is foolish and unworkable. But that’s OK. What I hope is that love will make it possible for us to speak to one another, to listen to each other, and to consider carefully what we each have to share. For out of that sharing will come something new: creativity, understanding, and a deeper love. And for me, that’s really what our beloved way of the spirit is about.

May it be so!

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