October 1st, 1977 (Saturday)
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Rev. Dale Arnink Since becoming a Unitarian Minister, I have often been confronted with questions about what I do. When I say I am a Unitarian Minister, the response is “You’re a WHAT?!” Often it comes with a tone that is quite disarming. I begin feeling like an alien, a strange creature, or like I have a boil on my nose. Thrown off-balance, I am not always ready with an immediate response that is satisfactory to the communication process. On the other hand, I have also had the experience of being ready with an answer, coming up with one that is really quite well thought out, and then being disappointed that it is not persuasive. I recall in particular that shortly after I had become a minister, my mother wrote a letter saying “Well, it is nice that you have become a minister but what is Unitarian?” I sat down and wrote out a very thoughtful five page letter explaining what Unitarians were and her reply was — “What you said about the group that you now belong to is rather interesting.” An icy reply, eh? I have also found that when I say that I am a Unitarian some people say, “Oh, you belong to that Korean Moon thing.” I say, “No, that is Unification; I am Unitarian. We are quite different.” Or, some people have confused Unitarian with the Unity Church which tends to follow an Eastern mystical philosophy. It is quite respectable in and of itself, but I have to say, “No, we are not Unity. We are Unitarians.” It is very difficult to say what we are as Unitarians. The prime difficulty lies in our diversity. We each hold our own separate beliefs, have our own style of life and it is hard to summarize who we are, and what we are, and what we stand for. I am not sure there is any one right answer in reply to what is a Unitarian. We tend to be a forward looking group. But in order to give some description of us Unitarians, I am going to use a historical approach and ask you to look to the past. There has been great adventure in the past and it makes me personally feel good to think about that past. Moreover, I find that bringing up age and time lends a certain dignity to an argument. No, we are not Unification. They are new. They are just barely getting started. We Unitarians have been around for a long, long time and have the dignity of age. I like to remember that the first Christians were Unitarians. They didn’t have the title of course. But the Jerusalem Christian Church was a Jewish Church; they did not have a belief in a trinity or a tritheism. They believed in the unity of God. That church survived for about five centuries as the Ebionite Christians in the Trans-Jordan area. When the Romans kicked the Jews out of their homeland and the Diaspora began, the earliest Christians were also kicked out of Palestine. They went to the Trans-Jordan area and survived for centuries as Jewish Christians who believed in one God and in Jesus as a special man who had served a special mission as Messiah, a bringer of new truth, new insights, and new moral teachings. Moreover, I like to remember that the greatest early theologian, an exciting profound thinker named Origen, was a Unitarian Universalist. While much of his doctrine would sound quite boring to us now — he wrote in the mid-200s’ in a Platonic and Stoic vocabulary — two things do stand out: first, he believed in the single unity of God and that Christ was a creature of God — hence he was a Unitarian of sorts. Then, secondly, he believed in the ultimate restoration of all things to the glory of God, so he was a Universalist as well as a Unitarian. Some centuries later when orthodoxy got into full power, Origen was condemned as a heretic. But in his own time and for three centuries after, he was a very popular, influential person. We can refer back to this early history of Christianity and say that we have been around that long, not as an organized movement and not with those titles, Unitarian and Universalist. There were many Christians who hung onto the religion of Jesus and rejected the growing development of the religion about Jesus which distorted the view of who and what Jesus was all about. That religion about Jesus become Christian Orthodoxy. We have been more true to the original message. It is because of this that throughout the periods of history, including our own time, we Unitarians have felt a special alliance with Judaism, for they too can look upon Jesus as a special prophet who taught us something about the unity of God and the moral requirements of Holy living. So I like to appeal to our long-standing history sometimes. That is not always persuasive, but it feels good to me to talk that way. It sometimes appeals to a listener if you can tap into their own sense or rationality, their own anti-authoritarianism, their own democratic spirit. So I sometimes refer to our roots in the Reformation. Luther and Calvin challenged dogmatism; they challenged institutionalized authoritarianism. I like to point out that we Unitarians began to organize in the same period for similar reasons. The Unitarians were saying, “Luther and Calvin, what you’ve done is on the right track, but you didn’t go far enough. Instead of going the whole way, you rejected dogmatism and then set up your own dogmatism. You rejected authoritarianism and then you yourselves became authoritarian. Instead of allowing individual experience and conscience their full rights, and instead of allowing reason its full sway, you opened the door to these things but did not enter.” Miguel Servetus, for example, wrote a book in 1553 called “On the Errors of the Trinity”, rationally attacking the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. He showed that the doctrine simply doesn’t make rational sense and that ascribing the word “mystery” leaves nonsense nonsense still. Furthermore, he showed that a rational exploration of the scriptural writings shows that there is no basis for such a doctrine in the scripture itself. So if one is going to take a stand on common rationality, the doctrine simply doesn’t hold water. The Catholics, of course, attacked Servetus, but Luther and Calvin did too. Indeed, Calvin “caught him” after about twenty years and delighted in burning him at the stake as a heretic. Servetus did not found Unitarianism, but the death of Servetus did move people in directions that eventually came to be Unitarianism. A number of people began saying, “Hey, you Catholics and you Protestants are both wrong. There has to be another alternative.” They began searching out their own way. They were persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants, fled from this country and that country, and finally found asylum in, of all places considering the humor of recent years, Poland. Poland was the most enlightened and liberal state of Reformation Europe. Unitarians found a name in Poland long enough for them to get organized and solidify some of their own beliefs. Poland finally became oppressive and then the Unitarians found a homeland in Transylvania. One of the heroes of this early Unitarian history, whose name some of you may not know, was Faustus Socinus, an Italian fugitive from several countries. He was a tremendous thinker, a good organizer and he is largely responsible for organizing Unitarianism and through his writings made the rest of Europe aware of what Unitarianism was all about and what was going on in Poland and Transylvania. Another name from this period is Francis David. And it was the Transylvanian king, King Sigismund in 1568, who first declared religious liberty in a national state. Well, Unitarian thought progressed from Poland and Transylvania to Holland, which was a rather liberal state and had lots of printing presses. Unitarian writings came out in Holland and went on into England and gradually Unitarianism gained hold in England in the 17th century. In brief, then, we Unitarians make an appeal to rationality, and appeal against authoritarianism, and appeal to one’s own reason and experience in order to find truth, and we have done so since the Reformation. In the United States, however, the issues were a little different, and one can’t say that Unitarian Universalism was simply transported from England whole cloth to the United States. It had its own independent development in this country and the focus was not so much upon the doctrine of the Trinity and the nature of Jesus, as it was upon the nature of man and the nature of God. Unitarians came from the Puritan Congregationalist background and they finally took a stand against the Calvinistic doctrine that Congregationalist ministers began looking at that doctrine and then looking at what human beings were doing in the new county and said, “That is hogwash — human beings are not all that bad. We may not be all great but we can sure do some marvelous things.” The revivalistic emphasis of belief in Jesus to escape damnation and hell was loudly proclaimed when the evangelistic Great Awakening began, associated with the names Jonathan Edwards and the Wesleyan Whitefield. Some of the Congregational ministers stood up and said, “We don’t believe that any longer. We do not believe that mankind is bad enough to be damned to eternal hell.” They began gradually breaking away from the Congregational Calvinist theology. At the same time, another group of people called Universalists (these coming not of the Congregational background but a Baptist background — nevertheless rebelling against Calvinism) objected that Calvinism presents God as a vengeful, wrathful God who cannot stand sinners. The Universalists reject this view of God. They noted for example, that God instructed human beings in the Bible that they should love their enemies. If we humans are suppose to do it, surely God does too. A loving God will love even his enemies and all human beings therefore will be encompassed in the love of God and finally saved. Thomas Starr King noted that both Unitarians and Universalists reject the idea of an everlasting hell but from somewhat different perspectives, sums it cleverly this way: “One group thinks that God is too good to damn them. The others think they are too good to be damned.” Unitarians and Universalists remained separate for several centuries, having common beliefs, common social programs, and a very common theology. But the one came from an upper class Congregationalist background and tended to be somewhat coldly and objectively rational while the other came from a Baptist lower class farming and rural background, and tended to be somewhat personalistically and pietistically and warmly rational. They finally realized that they shared the outcomes of their rationality, although they differed in many years as separate denominations until finally, in 1961, they united to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. Both Unitarians and Universalists throughout the 17 and 18 hundreds were Christians, and theistic, although they believe in Jesus not as a divine being but a moral exemplar, totally human, but nevertheless a superb human who served as a guide and mediator to our own human higher fulfillment. Indeed, they could say God is incarnate in Jesus, just as all men may become God-like in their progressive development. Thus both Unitarians and Universalists have concentrated upon religion as a character building exercise. Attention has been given to religion as a growth process, a moral process, and not simply an individual growth process but a social development process as well — rather than as religion that views human being as helpless people snatched to deliverance out of damnation by some supernatural, mysterious, and irrational power. Unitarian Universalists have always been involved in controversy with other denominations about God, Jesus, the Bible, reason, authority and so forth; also involved in controversy amounts themselves, whether we need be theistic or atheistic, what should be the content of our ethics, what should be our stances on social issues, whether we ought to be Christian or deny the Christian heritage. There has been controversy, after controversy, after controversy. But Earl Morris Wilbur, who has done the most extensive historical study of Unitarian Universalists, has said that there are common themes that characterize Unitarian Universalist throughout the controversy. While we have steadfastly rejected creeds and dogmas and particular theologies as limiting the search for truth and encroaching upon human freedom, nevertheless there are certain principles that have always guided our controversy. These principles are:
These have always characterized Unitarians and Universalists. Freedom, reason and tolerance. We believe that the test of any religion is the people it produces and the people it attracts, the characters that are developed. So sometimes I can counter, “What is a Unitarian?” by talking about some of the people in our heritage that I am proud of, who are examples of growing, creative, concerned, sensitive, socially aware human being. One could cite a long list of them. They include four presidents of the United States, many scientists, many people or arts and letters, social workers, and so forth. The following are Unitarian Universalists (or were closely allied but not joiners): Millard Fillmore, Isaac Newton, Adlai Stevenson, Carl Sandberg, Ethan Allen, Albert Schweitzer, Ben Franklin, Daniel Webster, Horace Greely, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alexander Graham Bell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph Priestley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bella Bartok, Dorothea Dix, Thomas Jefferson, James Buchanan, Samuel Morris, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Mann, Florence Nightingale, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Mondales, John Milton, John Locke, Dr. Spock, Paul Dudley White, Linus Pauling, Nathaniel Hawthorn, P.T. Barnum, John Quincy Adams, William Taft, Whitney Young, John Marshall, John Adams, e.e. cummings, William Cullen Bryant, Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, Brett Harte, Herman Melville, and on, and on, and on. Our children should know these names. Let me close by reading from the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association the article which lists its purposes: The Association, dedicated to the principles of a free faith shall:
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