Faith of the Free
Reverend William Metzger
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, PA
October 23, 2005
A key element of our religious faith is that it is a faith of the free. Freedom of thought is central to our identity. We are, as James Luther Adams, the preeminent Unitarian theologian of the twentieth century, said, “fated to be free.”
By this he meant that every person must choose. He said: “We cannot escape making a choice, nor can we escape the responsibility for the choices we make, any more than we can escape their consequences.”
I have always believed that a central task of the church is to create intimate community—that is, a community of persons who share of themselves with each other in an ongoing way in their spiritual journeys together.
Today I want to reflect on the relationship between freedom and the community building aspect of the church. Superficially, critics of our emphasis on free thought suggest that we are so radically individualistic that we end up standing for everything and for nothing. I believe, however, that it is more complicated than that.
It is true that theological freedom is one of the ways Unitarian Universalism is distinctive from other religious traditions. We are committed to freedom, reason, and tolerance—and all three of these commitments are challenged in today's world.
We are free to choose as we develop our religious point of view; we are committed to the use of reason in the pursuit of our faith; and we seek to be tolerant of the different perspectives that arise in our journey together.
There is nothing shallow or easy about such a faith, contrary to those who insist on biblical “truth” as their guide. “Faith” has always been a difficult word for UUs, because it is often associated with the notion of accepting whatever the bible or the Church tells us, and it often seems the more nonsensical the better. As James Luther Adams said, “To many people the word signifies the acceptance of something that puts a strain on the intelligence.”
These times we live in do tax credulity. What are we to think when polls tell us that 22 percent of Americans are certain (!) that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years, and that another 22 percent, while not certain, believe it probable? Moreover, polls show that, as Sam Harris notes in his book The End of Faith , “Unreason is now ascendant in the United States —in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of our federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 72 percent believe in angels. We can't ask incredulously, “Who are these people?” For we know them and they surely include many of our friends. But ignorance in this degree [as Harris declares], concentrated in both the head and the belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.”
James Luther Adams's comment about nonsensical beliefs was demonstrated rather well, I think, in the statement of St. Ignatius that “We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white to us is really black, if the hierarchy of the church so decides.”
In an essay called “A Faith for the Free,” originally published in 1946, Adams declared that we cannot hide behind someone else's authority or choice. “Whenever we delegate a decision to someone else, or to the Bible or to a church, we have made a decision,” Adams said. “The decision is still our own, and the claim that humility dictates the decision does not make the decision any less our own.”
Freedom, he said, is “our fate [and] our birthright, and we cannot, even if we wish to, slide back into vegetability.” I love that line; we are free, we are not vegetables.
Now it may sound like freedom to choose is entirely a faith in oneself. But that isn't the case; it is rather a faith in the “capacity of sincere persons to find freely together that which is worthy of confidence.” That is where the intimate community enters the picture. We develop our faith in community with others in an atmosphere of free inquiry toward truth. We only speak of moving toward truth, for faith develops over time, through full participation in intimate community.
It is also crucial to the development of a faith that has authority, that we be open to growth in scientific understanding. While science doesn't provide all the answers to religious questions, it is nevertheless an ignorant and credulous religion that continues to insist on a universe that is only six thousand years old despite the evidence of cosmologists and biologists that it is in fact many millions of years older.
Our reading of ancient scriptures can appreciate its beauty, its poetry, its psychological richness, but also must take into account the ways in which scientific advance contributes to our understanding of creation and evolutionary processes. To declare the bible to be the authoritative, always applicable word of God is, not to put too fine a point on it, absurd.
Unitarian Universalism is not a frozen faith; we are not locked into a “once delivered” faith. We live in nature and in community, and we live in history. We develop within forms and traditions, but we are also open to new learning, to new discovery, to new understanding, to new formulations of our faith. Our faith is built on experience, not on words recorded in a primitive culture thousands of years ago.
Actually, I believe the best way to think about faith is as a verb. We might speak of “faithing,” a rather clumsy construction, I admit, to suggest that the process of defining a faith is a process in which we strive to understand the ground we stand upon. The theologian Paul Tillich was famous for saying that God is “the ground of our being.” In this conception, God is neither “out there” or “up there,” but is that in which we are grounded and given root—and that ground can be understood better for the role science plays in explaining life.
James Luther Adams, like Tillich, said the word “God” is so heavily laden with unacceptable connotations that it would be well to find another way of talking about it. He suggested the phrase, “that which ultimately concerns humans,” or “that which we should place our confidence in.”
Perhaps some of you remember Buckminster Fuller, the protean thinker at the University of Southern Illinois who invented the geodesic dome and the dymaxion car. He once defined what he called “the verb god.” He called this “the synergetic integral of the totality of all principles.” And he said of this god that its “sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us” (from Fuller, Critical Path , 159).
A key point in Bucky Fuller's reflections on God is that god itself is “continually testing its own comprehensive adequacy.” As a “synergetic integral of the totality of all principles,” what else could god be but a verb?
Adams identified three tenets of a faith of the free. The first of these is that we are dependent on a creative power and processes that are not of our own making. We are dependent on nature and history and “the commanding, sustaining, transforming reality” of life—including, of course, tsunamis and hurricanes and holes in the ozone. We operate within forms and structures, but within these forms and structures we also possess freedom. A big piece of that freedom is the ongoing scientific enterprise.
The second tenet is that what Adams calls “the commanding, sustaining, transforming reality” finds its focus in human community in history—in “free, cooperative effort for the common good.” This is precisely the work of the church. It should also be the work of governments, though one wonders sometimes.
The third tenet is that “the achievement of freedom in community requires the power of organization and the organization of power.”
Adams was not just a theologian, but a social ethicist as well. He devoted major energy over many years to social justice issues. We discover in intimate community that to achieve freedom requires organization. Power comes out of organization, and that includes unions and movements for peace and social justice, even in the face of misguided and incompetent governments.
Freedom is not acquired through an extreme form of libertarianism, and it is not, I think, what Janis Joplin declared in a great rock anthem, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”
You have all heard, I'm sure, the line, “You can believe anything you want and still be a Unitarian.” That's not true. As Frederick Buechner wrote, “A religion which demands that first-born children be fed to crocodiles to ensure a good harvest means that somewhere lines have to be drawn.” And we do draw lines. While we entertain a wide variety of thought, and look to multiple sources for authority in our faith, we do stand for ideas, and we do place value on persons and relationships.
We are not here because we have rejected religion, but precisely because religious questions matter so much to us. We take religious questions seriously, but unlike fundamentalists, we do not claim to possess all the answers. But we all have lots of questions and some tentative answers, “working assumptions” perhaps we could call them.
I believe the free faith of Unitarian Universalism provides the best environment for asking and forming answers to the religious questions. The question for all of us, I believe, is what do you take seriously, without reservation?
What is it about your work, your relationships, your social involvement, and your goals that you take seriously? What aspects of your life experience puzzle you? What experiences of life inspire awe? What makes you laugh? What makes you cry?
These are all serious questions; they are religious questions, and if you have ever asked yourself such questions, whether verbalized or in your internal life, you are a religious person. I don't think there breathes in this world a person who is not religious, for to be religious is not dependent on a particular brand of piety or form of worship or belief in God, or even on whether you live an exemplary life, but on the simple fact that you cannot escape religious questions.
Even an atheist is a religious person—never mind how much they would argue against such a proposition—for an atheist is grappling with the ultimate question. James Luther Adams said: “The only person who is really an atheist is one who denies that there is any reality that sustains meaning and goodness in the human venture. The true atheist is one who recognizes nothing as validly commanding. It is very difficult to find this sort of atheist, perhaps impossible.”
Perhaps the most important thing I want to say about this subject today is about how we might find a more reliable object of faith than the infallible authority of the bible or orthodox religious leaders.
James Luther Adams expressed it this way: “Even the less credulous faith that acknowledges human fallibility also requires a faith in humanity—a faith that can be found if people are free to learn from each other by mutual criticism, free to discard old error, free to discover new insight, free to judge, free to test. The free person's faith is not merely a faith in oneself: It is a faith in the capacity of sincere persons to find freely that which is worthy of confidence.”
Being free to learn from each other means that we must test our ideas with each other and be ready to judge and to be judged, and prepared to change our minds.
This free faith has made it difficult in these times of fundamentalist fervor for our movement to grow. This level of freedom has a way of getting in the way of any desire we might have to spread our faith in significant ways when so many wish to close off all doubt. It is a big question whether we can in any sense of the word become evangelistic. But that is a subject for another Sunday.
This is always the challenge when we seek to discover what is worthy of confidence. We are trying to build a learning community in which people are free to exercise this faith process. It is the now and always task of the free church to encourage others to join us in this ongoing exercise in religious inquiry. It is why we are here.
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