“. . .to engage intentionally in theological conversation. . .”
On Wednesday, I gave you the the Rev. David Takahashi Morris’s distillation of the Unitarian Universalist Commission on Appraisal’s report published in 2005, “Engaging our Theological Diversity” (very long PDF).
Today, I give you the sermon that he preached in response to his interpretations of the report, which I find gives us a few more pieces in our individual puzzles of how to answer the fundamental question, “What is Unitarian Universalism?” Rev. Takahashi Morris is co-minister at Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia, and preached this sermon on December 5, 2005.
Three D’s and an F: Unitarian Universalist Theology
Rev. David Takahashi Morris
In a community as liberally sprinkled with teachers, scholars, and others connected with education as ours, I know the title of today’s sermon has a certain ominous resonance. There are certainly those who would say that three “d’s” and an “f” make a pretty accurate report card for Unitarian Universalist theology. Critics argue that without a creed or an easily articulated belief statement, we are a religion that offers no solid ground to stand on. And in a troubled time, a religion without solid ground can’t be much of a refuge.
Recently this has become a significant conversation topic around the Unitarian Universalist Association, and last year’s publication of Engaging Our Theological Diversity, from which we’ve been quoting this morning, is a landmark in that conversation. The Commission on Appraisal, which issued the report, is charged by our General Assembly to study issues they believe are important for the health and vitality of our larger community of faith. If today’s subject interests you at all, I strongly urge you to head for the Book Table and pick up a copy, or ask Willow to order you one.Some of us hoped the Commission might bring back a carefully distilled statement of beliefs that we might point to as the foundation of Unitarian Universalist theology, but they didn’t. Instead, they described as best they could our core identity as religious people, and listed key areas of theological unity and tension among us. Then they challenged congregations and the Association to engage intentionally in theological conversation, examining our commonalities and our differences.
Does this mean that the critics are right, that there is no theological center of Unitarian Universalism? Sometimes it seems as if our way of doing theology is to avoid the subject. It’s not uncommon to hear people call us “the religion where you can believe anything you want.” Is that really all there is? Do we deserve three d’s and an f in Theology?
I have something other than a GPA in mind for the four letters of my title. I think Unitarian Universalists do have a distinctive theological method embedded in our history and our contemporary culture. If we are willing to claim it and take responsibility for using it, it can offer what we need to face a global society that is not organized to serve human wholeness, worth, freedom, and dignity.
So my first “d” is for “dogma.” Dogma is the foundation of orthodox theological method. A dogma is a belief that has been declared unquestionable, an idea which is placed beyond the possibility of doubt and which is used as the standard for judging all other ideas. When I studied theology at Duke Divinity School, the very liberal social activist who taught my first class said at the outset that all our explorations would start with four assumptions: God is Trinity, three distinct persons with one substance; Jesus is Lord and the sole path to salvation; God is omnipotent, and God is all good. Anything we came up with had to support those assumptions. There were three Unitarian Universalists in our class of twenty, something which had never happened before or since at Duke. One of us said, “What if we understand Jesus and God differently from these assumptions?” “Then we wouldn’t be doing Christian theology,” she answered.
We beg to differ, and we have begged to differ for a long, long time. We have a special relationship with dogma. Our great patron heretics challenged the dogmas of their day, declaring the Trinity unscriptural and illogical, rejecting the idea that the story of Adam and Eve means that all humankind is innately depraved, and characterizing the notion of eternal damnation as insulting to God. They were doing Christian theology.
Our theological method then and now begins with the willingness to question any idea that has frozen into a dogmatic assertion. We try not to have dogmas of our own, even when we are very sure of ourselves. Our tradition calls us to be willing to revise our own most basic assumptions if they seem to be in conflict with our experience or with humankind’s ever expanding knowledge of how the universe works. This is very hard, but it is basic to our theological identity: We always know we might be wrong.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t claim what we believe passionately, however. I think this has been a great mistake of religious liberalism, especially in the last fifty years or so. We forget that there’s a difference between doctrines and dogmas, and we shy away from declaring what we believe for fear of being seen as dogmatic.
So my second “d” is for “doctrine.” Unitarian Universalism has teachings, and it is important for us to know what they are and to come to grips with them for ourselves. We are a liberal faith, and so our doctrines are not dogmatic; we don’t insist that everyone in a congregation has to believe them, we don’t make them a test of membership, we don’t silence opposing ideas, at least not intentionally. But we do have teachings.
The teachings of a liberal tradition evolve. We are responsive to the new discoveries of science, to the advances of cultural and political understanding, and to our own experiences and those of others. Yet we are also a grounded faith, as the Commission noted, and not all of us hold our roots lightly. Though our teachings have significantly changed shape over time, I believe we still echo our earliest declarations of faith.
When we affirm the inherent worth of every human being, for example, we are echoing an understanding of Christianity and Judaism that sees humankind as made in the image of God, an understanding that claims Jesus as the model of what all human beings can be. We are echoing a Christian tradition that says all human beings are saved, that the only thing that sends us to Hell is our own failure to understand that we don’t belong there.
This particular doctrine is one of those that gets us accused of being soft-hearted and fuzzy-headed. To claim that every person is sacred, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the human potential for evil and shortcoming, seems romantic and naïve to some. It is also our hardest doctrine to live—and if you don’t believe me, try having a political or moral discussion with someone you passionately disagree with, without failing to fully affirm their sacredness, their worth and dignity within the first five minutes. This doctrine is troublesome!
But we go on teaching it. We don’t go on teaching it because it has always been part of our tradition, even though it has. We go on teaching it because our reason and our interpretation of the intellectual, social, and spiritual history of humankind supports it. We go on teaching it because it is our continuing experience that when people awaken to a genuine sense of their own value, their whole life can be changed.
Still, we’re always open to the possibility that we might be wrong about this, or anything else that we believe strongly. And so we come to my third “d”: “dialogue.
In the Co-Ministers’ class where we are exploring some of the issues raised in “Engaging Our Theological Diversity,” someone asked the other night if you can be a Unitarian Universalist alone. I don’t think you can. In the first place, as the Commission reports, we are a responsible faith, committed to the wellbeing of the world. We have no monastic tradition. It is all right for a Unitarian Universalist to go on retreat in a solitary quest for insight, but we can’t stay there. Sooner or later, as my colleague Patrick O’Neal says, like Thoreau we have to come out of Walden Woods and engage with the world on the issues of our time.
But on a deeper level, the integrity of our own personal theological exploration demands that we engage in dialogue about matters at the heart of our most profound beliefs. Our insistence that no one person or religion can have exclusive possession of the truth, and our evolutionary understanding of religious doctrines, imply that we have to put our beliefs to the test of conversation.
A dialogue depends on both parties having the willingness and the freedom to hear each other and modify their thinking and actions because of the exchange. You can’t have a genuine dialogue if one of the parties isn’t free to disagree, or if one party isn’t really listening. Talking with your teenager about taking out the trash isn’t a dialogue, for example. . . unless you’re genuinely willing to accept the possibility that you might wind up taking it out yourself. Dialogue demands unforced participation. Freedom of belief is one of our most cherished principles—but it isn’t the “f” of the theological method I think is uniquely ours.
My “f” is for “faith.”
“Faith” is often used to mean “belief without evidence,” which can make Unitarian Universalists very suspicious of the word, but that is not its only definition, or its most important one. Henry Nelson Wieman describes “faith” as a purposeful transformation of our lives to reflect our religious understanding. That is the sense in which I mean “faith.” It isn’t so much something we have as something we do.
Faith in the sense of a life transformed is a vital component of a Unitarian Universalist theological method, for we are not a people who believe in beliefs as the core of religious practice. For Unitarian Universalists simply having beliefs about religious matters isn’t being religious. Our theology must have an action component.
Last week Leslie spoke of “faith without certainty,” the title of a book about liberal theology by Paul Rasor. That’s a particular challenge of a Unitarian Universalist faith, and it makes the quality and rigor of our theological thinking very important. Knowing that all doctrines are open to question and evolution, knowing that we must always be open to the possibility of changing our minds and hearts—we must somehow be sure enough to commit ourselves fully to the deepest and most powerful truths we can discern.
The world we live in is so demanding, so hectic and stressful, that organizing our lives around some great structure of meaning is not a luxury, it is a necessity. We will be overwhelmed by life if we are not deeply rooted in a sense of meaning and purpose larger than the details of our day-to-day existence. Without those roots, we will dry up and blow away.
“The religion where you can believe anything you want” will not sustain us. Neither will the New Age spirituality of the month. We need something stronger, more disciplined, more sure.
Three d’s and an f. Rejecting the false comforts of dogmatic thinking, embracing doctrines evolved over centuries of discourse, committing ourselves to their continued evolution in dialogue with others, and allowing our lives to be transformed in faith—this is the invitation and the challenge of Unitarian Universalist theology.
How deep are your roots? How well do you know your own source of nurture, of comfort, of courage, of commitment? Has your own faith changed your life?
Someone in this room today needs to hear about it. Someone in this room today is feeling lost, overwhelmed by the world, overcome by pain. They need to know what sustains you.
Let’s talk. And let’s live together in faith.
Source: “Three D’s and an F: Unitarian Universalist Theology,” by the Rev. David Takahashi Morris, co-minister at Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Tags: David Takahashi Morris, deepening, doctrine, dogma, faith, identity, theology
