Rev. Ron Robinson
It is a privilege to be
starting off your month’s theme on liberal theologies. Independence Weekend is
an appropriate time to begin with this particular theme.
In Professor Gary
Dorrien’s monumental trilogy of religious history published a few years ago
called “The Making of American Liberal Theology,” he begins his first chapter in
1805 with us and our roots in American soil that had sprouted that year with
the liberal or Unitarian control of Harvard University. The decades-long reaction
to that by others would soon lead leading New England minister William Ellery
Channing to preach his Unitarian Christian sermon in 1819 and to the American
Unitarian Association being founded in 1825 to promote “pure Christianity”
(their term for liberal Christianity) and with that American Liberal Theology
was flowering institutionally, in both academy and church and some of society. Many
today, both in and out of church life, across faiths and denominations, whether
they have ever heard of us much less our religious ancestors, have inherited
much from us as Dorrien’s work shows, even as it chronicles much of the ups and
downs of liberal theologies and as it concludes on an upbeat note---as will I.
While it starts with Channing in the first chapter of the trilogy, also in the
final volume there are chapters on some of the leading liberal theologians of
recent times who were also in our church life—Henry Nelson Weiman and Charles
Hartshorne and the great James Luther Adams and even more recently Forrest Church
and Thandeka, all received chapters for their influence in and beyond our own
church life.
Of course the actions
in the early 1800s were a direct result of the changes brought about through
the events of the year we celebrate this weekend, 1776. The revolutionary
spirit in politics manifested itself right along with a revolutionary spirit in
theology. For example, The war had caused half of the members of Boston’s
King’s Chapel to flee to Canada loyal to the British Empire. King’s Chapel was
the first Anglican, or Episcopalian, church in the colonies. In 1785, after the
war, those who had remained tried to get a new priest appointed by the Church
of England but were unable to do so, and so they turned to one of their liturgists,
a former Harvard student who was also a convert to the liberal movement and
anti-Trinitarianism that had been emerging in the United Kingdom. Acting then like
the other churches in the Boston area, like Channing’s church for example, what
were called the Standing Order churches that were the oldest in New England,
King’s Chapel voted to call their own minister. And when he became the
minister, James Freeman, with the support of the church, made some changes in 1785
to the Book of Common Prayer to fit in with his theology. So they then became,
as their motto now says, Anglican in worship, Unitarian in theology,
Congregational in polity.
Another result of 1776
is seen in the story of Joseph Priestly, the famed scientist in England, friend
of Benjamin Franklin’s and supporter of American Independence, and liberal
Unitarian minister, who was chased out of his country, found refuge in
Pennsylvannia and started the first church on these shores explicitly named
Unitarian in the 1790s.
Liberalism’s openness
to differences—even back then there were major for the time theological
differences between the likes of Channing and Priestly and others in how they
understood Jesus—and liberalism’s historic trust in human nature and God’s
nature and in what the future might unfold means it is somewhat inherently
revolutionary. James Luther Adams used to write about the Religious Reformation
always being through liberalism in process of Reformation. And liberalism
itself too. Liberalism is dead. Long live liberalism, he wrote. The first of
his famous five smooth stones of religious liberalism is that truth is
continually being revealed.
Of course if you look
at the Unitarian Universalist Association today you will see that our oldest
churches have been in existence many years before 1776 and its revolution and King’s
Chapel or the church Priestly founded. Those Puritan Standing Order churches in
Massachusetts date back to 1620 in Plymouth and in enough other places that
just by 1636 they needed to start Harvard University in order to educate the
ministers. By 1648, they had experienced enough controversy that they needed to
come together in the first major gathering of churches in order to write the
founding document of our covenanted congregational spirit, the Cambridge
Platform (a few of our oldest churches, though, like Plymouth and a few others,
proudly and somewhat in jest point out they didn’t attend that Cambridge Synod
and so have their doubts still, though they follow its tradition.)
That document maintained
as one of its major covenants that the voluntary association of persons coming
together to become the church had the authority, the wisdom, and the
responsibility to choose its own lay and ordained leaders, whom they called, in
their typical counter Roman Catholic style, Christ’s representatives on earth.
Not one pope you might say, but one for every congregation. And If they could
do that, why not be trusted to elect other mere public servants like governors,
Presidents? The Cambridge Platform and the Independent Puritan
Congregationalism that came to these shores in New England set the stage for
the political discernment that those same people had the ability and calling to
choose their own governing leaders.
We wouldn’t consider
those Puritans as liberals today in many ways, as for example they restricted
their leadership according to gender, and they weren’t theological Unitarians
either as they accepted at Cambridge in 1648 without debate the Westminster
Catechism that was rooted in John Calvin’s theology. But they were still
religious revolutionaries; and an unintended consequence of their action in
placing so much focus on the covenantal nature of religious community is that
those very covenants came to be perpetual new wineskins for new wine and took
the place of the creeds. Not that creeds didn’t and couldn’t contain religious
truth, but they would not let even that truth become the arbiter for all time;
that went to the covenants. And so, many of these churches too, after the
revolutionary war, bloomed with a new spirit that took Unitarian shape whenever
they discerned the spirit of their age and called a new minister to serve with
them. The covenants allowed them to do so. The same way they allow for radical
changes to this day.
In this way, 1648 led
directly to 1776 which led, on the Unitarian side to 1825 and the founding of
that side of our Association today. And there is something inherently liberal
about the choice of covenants to be the structure or the way of the church even
when the outcomes of those covenants is far from what would be called the
liberal, progressive, generous spiritual path of today. Covenants reflect a
belief that, as one of the old brochures at All Souls used to put it, God works
in freedom. And does so in large measure through the blessed imperfections of
humanity. And that freedom is not the same as the license to do what one can do
or one wishes to do, but is a gift we give to one another and maintain in
community.
Those covenants of the
Cambridge Platform guide our liberalism today: the covenant between persons and
church; the covenant between church and elected and called leaders; the
covenant between churches; the covenant between leaders of those churches; the
covenant between a church and its parish, its wider community; the covenant
between a church and what it finds Most Sacred.
The liberal tradition
says there is not one way to be liberal, not one way to craft those covenants
that fits all congregations, not even all congregations within the same
religious association, but that we should take them seriously. Conrad Wright,
the late Unitarian Universalist professor emeritus of church history at
Harvard, in his essay on The Doctrine of the Church for Liberals, said that too
often liberals focus attention and concern on the adjective liberal and what it
requires, and not enough on the noun Church and what it requires, and that
taking all of these covenants seriously and in love is what makes the
difference between a church and a “collection of religiously oriented
individuals.”
We can see then that
liberal religion is often focused on the how of religion, on the processes and
openness of community. In his work, Professor Dorrien describes this focus as
liberalism’s foundation as a mediating force, as a third way movement, that
always has one eye on how it differs from the fundamentalist or dogmatic
religion, and one eye on how it differs from disbelief, from the non-religious.
This is a valuable function, but it can result in liberalism becoming consumed
with its self, and how its identity crisis is wrapped up in how unique it may
or may not be, and it can become so attached then to how it presents itself, to
what it proclaims, to getting its message right, that it can become irrelevant,
especially in a world that is increasingly more concerned with what difference
a religion makes in communities that are suffering than in what a religion says
about itself, and especially in a culture where many of the values of
liberalism and pluralism and free thought have become the air in which newer
generations naturally breathe and grow up in, in ways my generation and older
ones did not experience and had to struggle to achieve and needed religious
community to help us do so.
In the churched culture
of this country, dominant in the 1950s and before, liberalism’s inherent process-orientation and
third way focus for helping liberal churches define themselves in society
helped them to thrive because the church was primary, and so the primary
mission of the church, rightly or wrongly, was how to promote how one church
differentiated itself from another. Particularly if you were a church where the
majority of its members came from other churches. The mission was to get as
many members into a church as possible in order to perpetuate the institution
of that church as part of the overall churched culture of society.
If we simply were to
take a view of what Sunday morning options were like even in Bible Belt Tulsa
in 1960 and what they are like this morning we will easily know that we are in
a different environment for churches, what is now called post-Christian,
post-denominational, and finally post-congregational. In this world, has
liberal theology’s success and its foundation—a focus on how of church more
than on why of church and on message and membership more than on ministries in
the world—has that become its greatest weakness? If as Conrad Wright said, we
tend to focus on the liberal too much and not on the church part of the liberal
church enough, will all the great manifestations of theology that Dorrien has
chronicled we have helped usher into the world become nostalgia, become spent,
or at best become real not in our tradition and our communities but in and
through others?
I write a blog that is
called MissionalProgressives. The aim of that digital space is to cultivate
connections between what is called now the missional church and the liberal
church, because I believe that each needs the other in order to better become
its best self, for a world that needs desperately a church both missional and
progressive or liberal. A situation that reminds me of the words of one of the
founders of the Catholic Workers movement, Peter Maurin, who said the problem
is that those who think don’t act and those who act don’t think. A liberalism
in Unitarian Universalism that was more concerned with ministries in the world
than with its own elevator speech or getting its message right would be
welcoming more new churches planted in the world than only the single one that
it welcomed last week at General Assembly, and it would be present in places of
great and growing poverty and sickness instead of just occasionally visiting
them. And the missional church that is transforming the church landscape and
what it means to be a spiritual community in countless ways, if it truly wants
to make an impact in the emerging world it says it wants to impact, would be
open to and embracing the growing rich diversity of the world not only in ethnic
terms where it does a decent job, but in terms of gender and sexual orientation
and also theological orientations.
Such a liberal,
missional church is the response to the question of what the emerging world
needs. A liberal, missional church does not create or have a mission; it is the
result of what the world’s needs creates, and so its orientation is always radically
outward beyond its own internal needs in order to thrive and realize its
beingness in the first place. It is like the perhaps apocryphal story of the
company that used to see its mission as making drill bits when what its mission
really was, making holes. Making that shift allowed it to focus on what counted
and to create new ways to make holes.
In this shift from the churched to the postchurch culture, a
strange dialectic took place. The more the world out there, the external
community, became less focused and dependent upon the institutional church, the
more the churches became focused on themselves as institutional beings. Especially
liberal and so-called mainline churches who also during these recent decades of
the Sixties to the Nineties in particular often seemed to feel that their
theology and their place in the spiritual landscape had become marginalized
compared to what it was before. “The mission” then became to perpetuate
churches in a world where the “missional field”, the world out there, flowed
toward the church and for the church; but in a world where the church itself as
institution has been marginalized, and the missional field has shifted and has
now become primary, the mission or purpose of the church must shift; instead of
the world being a resource to draw upon to sustain the church, the church must see
itself as becoming a resource for the world to draw upon to sustain itself,
especially in all the places the world suffers today.
The good news for liberalism (which I maintain is also
inherently good news for missionalism) is that as we talked about just a few
minutes ago, the revolutionary spirit that is required for the shifts underway
today is a revolutionary spirit embedded in liberalism—if we can disembed it in
all the ways it has become bound up over time in such things as classism, in
its own self-reflection, in moderation and fear of risk, fear even of embodied
vulnerable communities.
We are inheritors of a tradition of those who sought
revolutionary new forms of spiritual community. It was our great preacher
Theodore Parker in his sermon The Transient and The Permanent in Christianity
who said the church that worked for the first century didn’t for the fifth, and
the one for the fifth didn’t for the fifteenth, and the one for the fifteenth
didn’t for his nineteenth century, and I have found, with society’s
revolutionary not evolutionary change now, that the one for the late twentieth
century doesn’t for the first part of the twenty-first century.
Even those covenants in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, at a
time when colonialism’s evil was running full bore and the church was trying to
master the world and the indigenous people in it, those covenants reminded us
with their vision that the world had a claim on the church and the church
needed the support of the parish. What the missional church today has done is
to revolutionize that old missionary church and turn its focus upside down;
instead of going to the world in order to convert the world to its ways and and
make more church members and get more resources for the church’s sake, now the
church goes to the world in order to be converted by the world’s needs, to make
beloved community in the world where so many institutions are seeking to
disrupt it, and to put the church’s resources into the world.
Even at the center of James Luther Adams’ five smooth stones
of religious liberalism, the third stone, is the principle that we have a moral
obligation to direct ourselves toward creating a just and loving world, and we
know from his own witness in the world that he didn’t mean we did that focusing
on building up communities of the like minded to stay like minded.
No, Our revolutionary ancestors have given us the structures
of freedom to be able to respond to the changing world. Liberalism’s fuller
sense fosters Freedom as Freedom To Do, To make anew, even to renew the old in
the world, not to be stuck in a paralyzing perpetual Freedom From the world,
from one another. That’s what so many of our politicians and preachers around
us don’t know when they cavalierly toss around the word freedom at this and all
times of the year.
How have we used this better understanding of freedom? Well,
in Theological and liturgical expressions, liberal churches have used it often
among us—it is why this past Sunday I could go to a church in the Unitarian
Universalist Association in Providence, Rhode Island just a few minutes walk
from our General Assembly and attend worship and take communion in First
Universalist Church that is Trinitarian Universalist and uses a universalist
Book of Common Prayer, or could have gone to Boston to King’s Chapel that is
Unitarian Christian and uses its own Book of Common Prayer, and someone else
could go to a Unitarian Universalist Association church nearby or far away
where Christians and prayer and communion of many varieties are few and far
between and rarely mentioned. But, at the same time, we do not have much
variety among us in the very forms of spiritual community; at a time when this
is more vital than ever to connect with people looking for different forms; we have few missional churches and communities
and ministries, and there are many different kinds of those operating in the
world today too to model after; we have few new communities period that we adequately
support and resource. We have too much kept liberalism’s revolutionary spirit
locked in the box of churched culture that it was born in, though that culture
is dying or gone.
Again, the good news is that the seeds of revolution are being
planted nevertheless; community-based ministers are becoming are dominant form
of ministry; part time and bi and tri vocational ministers are being seen not
as a weakness but as a potential strength in our movement; we are seeing
ourselves not as individual institutions, but as a movement with many
manifestations for a diverse world; as parts of “the church universal” not
just, to paraphrase Conrad Wright, collections of individual churches; our
existing churches that remain with worship as the central act oriented and are
attractional in nature, these are seeing that how many they can help turn out
for community justice meetings and missions is more important than how many
join their church; at www.faithify.org you see just a glimpse of new
innovative ministries among us (though still only a few like ours I would see
as disruptively innovative); and finally we are finding new momentum with a
mission that sees making more Unitarian Universalists not as our end but simply
as a means, as only one way among many, to the greater end of resourcing
refreshing and sending people into the world to build beloved community, and so
become the church, liberal and missional, there.
