“Love, as everything else, no doubt, ‘came slowly into the world’ …”
Today’s selection is really a treat. I went looking for Unitarian Universalist perspectives on the events in Pearl Harbor, the attack that happened on this day in 1941, and came across the writings of Rev. John B. Isom (December 2, 1909 - April 23, 2004), who served as an Army chaplain during World War II. He was a Baptist minister, who then underwent a theological crisis and became a Unitarian in 1955. He served churches in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Louisville, Kentucky, Wichita, Kansas, and the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, Iowa, where he was named an emeritus in 1975.
Rev. Isom was quite a prolific writer, and his children and grandchildren have collected many of his works for the public to read. The excerpt I chose for today is from “As I Remember Me,” Rev. Isom’s memoir, specifically dealing with his theological crisis. His reading of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historic Jesus was a major tipping point for him, which he describes here. What strikes me is the pain that is evident in Rev. Isom’s realizations that he can no longer believe what he was raised to believe, and his sense of loss as he comes to these realizations.
I hear echoes of the sermon I posted last Friday, in which the Rev. James Covington states, “No, my friends, you and I are not free to believe anything we choose. You and I believe what we must. The beauty and genius of a faith like ours is that we are not asked to pretend to believe things we do not believe. You and I are not free to choose what we believe, but we are free to stay with our religious community when we grow and when we change our minds.”
For consideration: Have you experienced a crisis of faith? Have you experienced a conversion to Unitarian Universalism, not just from another religion, but perhaps a moment of realization of your commitment to your faith?
From “As I Remember Me”
by Rev. John B. Isom
When I went to Spartanburg, as I have already confessed, I had some serious doubt about some things I was expected to believe and teach as a Baptist minister. I knew then that I had no hard evidence to justify me believing some of the very basic assumptions which were essential to the Christian faith of Baptists and most other Christian believers, such as the Bible being the holy word of a supernatural being called God, who created the heavens and the earth and all life therein; the supernatural events associated around the birth, life and death of Jesus; Heaven and Hell as places for the eternal abode of all human beings. By the time I read “The Quest for the Historic Jesus” I knew I had no evidence for believing such assumptions. All I had left was a very dim hope that such evidence might still be found. After reading “The Quest for the Historic Jesus” that dim hope was no longer possible. There are a number of reasons why that book made me face up to the truth of my disbelief in the basic essentials of the faith as taught in most Christian churches.
What made the book so convincing and compelling was more than just the fact that the book was Schweitzer’s confession of his own disbelief in the Jesus the Christian church had made him out to be. There are three things that gave his book such weight and authority — his massive accumulation, understanding and appreciation of the research and study that went into the creation of the book; Schweitzer’s own Christian heritage and respect for that heritage, and his solid belief in the ethics expressed in he sayings of Jesus, whoever he may have been.Schweitzer had a mind capable of collecting and absorbing huge amounts of knowledge. He was a student of the religious, philosophical and ethical thought of the eastern world as well as the western world. He was a great biblical scholar. It was his scholarly study of the gospels that raised some puzzling questions that motivated him to set out on his long search of the historic Jesus. That search demanded more of him than just a comprehensive and detailed knowledge of the contents of the bible. He had to know all that could be known about the authors of the books of the bible and the society in which each did his thinking. His quest required that he learn all that was knowable about the make up of the society in which Jesus was born and lived and a knowledge and understanding of the trends of thought, beliefs and world and life views of the first century B.C. In addition to all the research and study such matters required, Schweitzer made a study and appraisal of every biography of Jesus, of any significance, that had been written up to the time he began preparing the book for publication.
What made the conclusions in “The Quest for the Historic Jesus” so difficult for the traditional Christian believer to ignore and dismiss, without serious consideration, was the fact that Schweitzer was a devout Christian. Schweitzer’s father was a Lutheran minister. Albert was taught the traditional Christian beliefs about Jesus from his youth. By the time he was ten years old he was playing the organ for his father’s church services. From early childhood his mind and heart had been attracted to the love ethics expressed in the sayings of Jesus. He became a minister himself. When he began his search for the historic Jesus he was hoping he would find the historic Jesus to have been the same Jesus his father’s church pictured him to have been, and in whom the young Schweitzer devoutly believed. As his quest progressed however, that hope slowly faded as one cherished belief about Jesus after another was made painfully unbelievable by the facts he found, the truth of which he could not deny. Finally, with deep regret, filled with pain and sadness, he knew and had to say that the Jesus taught and preached during the first decade of the 20th century never existed.
In the last short chapter of the book he sums up the results of his “Quest for the Historic Jesus”. Bowing to the truth he knew he said what he hoped he would not have to say when he began his quest. Here are the first few lines of that chapter:
Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can find their account here. There is nothing more negative than the result of a critical study of the life of Jesus. . . . The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethics of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven on earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. His is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism and clothed by modern theology in a historic garb.
Schweitzer goes on to affirm that the eternally valuable thing in the Jesus story is not who the historic stranger of Galilee was, not his theology, nor his world and life view; but the ethics expressed in the sayings of Jesus - the ethics of love. It is this “spiritual Jesus”, as Schweitzer called him, who has something to say to the people of the 20th century and to those of all centuries to come.
Out of his respect and appreciation for his Christian heritage, and having associated the ethics of love with Jesus from his youth, Schweitzer may have exalted his “spiritual Jesus” higher than the truth could justify, more highly than he meant to, as his own beliefs expressed elsewhere would indicate, especially in his “Memoirs of Childhood”, and Schweitzer may have confused, if not misled some who read his book.
To identify love with a “spiritual Jesus” might be an inspiration to us of the Christian heritage, but it would be a mistake to think of the spirit of Jesus, whoever he was, as being the invisible reality of love itself. His spirit could only be a powerful expression of that reality. I have to believe that is the role his “spiritual Jesus” played in Schweitzer’s thinking. However in re-reading the last chapter of “The Quest for the Historic Jesus” I can see how a reader could get the impression that Schweitzer’s “spiritual Jesus” is the intangible reality of love itself, rather than just a great expression of it.No, neither the historic Jesus, whoever he might have been, nor Schweitzer’s “spiritual Jesus” was or is the father of the invisible reality we call love. Love, as everything else, no doubt, “came slowly into the world,” arriving long before Jesus came. We find expressions of it in the literature of many cultures and religions hundreds of years before Jesus was born. We are not dependent upon the “spiritual Jesus” to give or bring it to us, or teach it to us, however much his expressions of it may inspire us to listen and obey love’s demands.
The invisible reality of love is not far from each of us. In fact it is an indigenous part of each of our beings. Because of the significant religious and philosophical suggestion it makes to me, I must quote here a passage from a book of the bible, Deuteronomy 30:11-14, written according to the dates given in the King James Bible, in 1451 B.C.
The commandment which I command you this day, is not hidden from you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven that you should say, who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it to us that we may hear it and do it? Neither is it beyond he sea that you should say, who shall go over the sea for us and bring it unto us that we may hear it and do it. But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart that you may do it.
I have no idea what the author may have meant by the “word” he spoke of as being in the mouth and heart of those to whom he was writing. Whatever it was, he made it plain that you did not have to go to heaven or across the sea to get it, or send somebody to fetch it to you. Whatever it was he made it clear that it was to be found in you. I have always assumed the author meant that what is most worthy to be the ultimate ethical judge of your life is within you, and from childhood I have believed that to be the intangible reality of our being that we call love; that there is nothing in heaven or earth, within the reach of our knowing, that has anything better to suggest than the love reality within us.
We must look within for our own salvation. If the human race can be saved from war and the fear of war, from hate and malice, from poverty and the fear of want, it will be through our obedience to the invisible reality of our nature that demands us to treat others, all others, as we want others to treat us. That is the straight and narrow gate, the only one, through which we may enter into the heaven of our hopes and dreams.
Source: from “As I Remember Me,” by the Rev. John B. Isom (December 2, 1909 - April 23, 2004), late Minister Emeritus of the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, Iowa.
Tags: belief, evolving faith, James B. Isom, Jesus, love, theology
