This last Sunday I attended a Unitarian Universalist church. The church building itself was rather large; it had a lot of stain glass windows, including one with Jesus and Mary at the front, as well as a cross over the window engraved in the stonework. It had the feel of an old school Congregationalist church. The liturgy was rather “normal” some songs then a reading (the reading was of Ralph Waldo Emerson, this was the first really big tipoff that the church was not simply some bland form of Christianity). The children’s message was about a panther than learned to walk in the sun like apes. Again nothing overly out of the ordinary. The basic thrust of the liturgy was that all faiths have beautiful aspects to them, that faith is important and strengthening, and if one scrapes off the nasty metaphors found in religious texts you end up with a vision of the transcendent, and it is the same transcendent no matter the faith.
Then the speaker came up to give his homily “Where the Giants Lead.” His basic point was that the founders of Unitarian Universalism were pretty radical, and they moved from denying the divinity of Christ to a belief that all faiths, properly understood, contain God. THEN he talked about going to a funeral at a predominantly African American church and feeling uncomfortable about singing about Jesus dying on the cross, but after a while he thought about how it was just a metaphor about how all people suffer, then he was able to sing it with gusto. Then he decided the thing that most Unitarian Universalists had lost since the Holocaust was a belief in salvation. He proclaimed that the world, all caught up in a war between Islam and Christianity, can only be saved by Unitarian Universalism. He believed the current “war on terror” is like the 30 years war between Protestants and Catholics, the result of which was religious tolerance between the two groups. Likewise he feels that after a long struggle between people of different faiths, along with the unstoppable jugernaught known as globalization, we will all look beyond our silly myths to the great transcendant truth, come to our senses, and worship together as Unitarian Universalists.
Wheew. So, the two main things that hit me were the difference between the rhetoric of liturgy and the rhetoric of word, and the utter Enlightenment era mentality of the whole thing. The liturgy was all about affirming the diversity of faith options, but the sermon was all about tearing down the silly myths by the violent other, that is people of specific faiths. Also the arrogant idea that everyone, if they really understood what they were talking about, is saying the same as “the enlightened few,” the Unitarian Universalists, smacks of ultra-uniformity, giving power over the other to “experts.” In essence I think if the speaker was very entrenched in a modernist viewpoint and a healthy dose of either pre-modern mythopoetics, or probably more helpfully post-modern philosophy, would have made him realize how he was pulling a total “Will to Power” trip.
2 comments:
Ah, thanks for posting this, Chris.
Your description of the Unitarian service and teachings reminds me of something atheist Jew-turned-Jewish-believer-in-Messiah Art Katz once said:
"Have you heard of pluralism? The whole modern western world is pluralistic. That is to say, "many paths to God." There's no single truth.
Jesus made a remarkable statement: "If you see me, you see the Father, I and the Father are one. No man comes to the Father but by me. If any man comes any other way, that man is a thief and a robber." You guys realize what a scandal the gospel is? You realize how abrasive the gospel is? Do you realize that God has chose the foolish things? That there's nothing about the gospel that's intellectually credible? God has given us something calculatingly foolish, compared to the wisdom of the world. The world that is pluralistic and likes to consider many paths to truth has got to contend with a gospel that insists upon itself, and the Jesus of that gospel, as the only truth. It is uncompromising in its insistence. It is absolute in its expression. And the very question of absoluteness and singularity itself runs right across the whole tenet and grain of the modern world. You understand that? Do you understand how pluralistic the whole mindset of the world is, how many options -- I don't know's, the maybe's, the grey's, who's to say's -- and into that whole mucky world of vagaries, and choices, and nuances, comes one statement out of the heart of God: "I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by me."
If I hear anything from my Jewish kinsmen in conversations I have been involved with my people, invariably they bring up, "What about the other people of the world? What about Buddhists, what about Muslims, what about Hindus? Don't they have a religion, isn't it a world faith? Aren't there redemptive elements in these religions? And you feel a blush coming up to the roots of your being, when you have to insist and say, "No, these are satanic deceptions and false alternatives that lead unto death." To insist on the singularity of the gospel, to insist on the absoluteness of it: this is not just an issue of religion, it's hitting the world head-on in a confrontation of wisdoms, of moral systems, of mentalities."
"he was pulling a total “Will to Power” trip."
Are you suggesting that this TrU*Ue believer is a UnitAryan as it were? There are actually persistent rumours that Nazi UnitAryans subverted the German Unitarian "church" following WWII and held influential leadership positions in the Deutsche Unitarier Religionsgemeinschaft for decades.
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