Unitarianism and Community

27 Apr 2004

...I've been looking at resurrection texts and now the gospel authors and Paul with some Peter.

http://www.change/learning/relthink/resurrection.html -resurrection notes http://www.change/learning/relthink/ntauthors.html - New Testament Authors and One

I'm also involved in debate in the discussion boards of http://www.surefish.co.uk on resurrection and other matters. A wide range of opinions there.

As you read the New Testament and the commentaries, what becomes clear is that these are all written in the light of resurrection faith. All the apparent histories and parables cannot be understood divorced of their theological meaning in the questions asked by early Jewish-Christian and Gentile-Christian communities, many excited in their synagogues expecting the last days or with a Messiah filled faith. It is a strange world of expectations that we can hardly understand today.

What, therefore, strikes me as odd, is where there is strong attachment to the Bible and yet an ignoring of resurrection. There is the idea, by no means unique to Unitarians, that there is a recoverable historical Jesus (of Jesus not about). But just about every text - its choice, framing and delivery - is in the context of these communities going back to the Hebrew scriptures and constructing from there, and producing a Messianic figure of the last days (with some later modification). Now there is much open to examination and critique, and to understanding context, but then the books as they are state the community and its forward thrust. What happens to these books when one states, "We are different from that stream of community?" Why is there an attachment to the Lords Prayer, and I think someone recently wrote in Faith and Freedom that this is greater than many a mainstream church?

I know very similar questions have been asked before, and obviously I have a conclusion. The texts represent a set of dramas that have an uneasy relationship to drama. The texts are about a community for a community (and its expansion). How are they used otherwise?

Martineau had an answer of sorts:

if Barth was opposed to the projection of religion in theism, Martineau was opposed to making the crucifixion-resurrection events the projected central dynamic. The eternal theistic mystery of God lies beyond all such narratives, or incorporates them all into a higher level. [from my MA dissertation]

So we are back to the [universalist] approach again!

Nevertheless the result is that outside this community stream, the New Testament for sure cannot be very significant. Another solution is that Unitarianism can be understood as a set of Calvinists who set up congregations and produced an historical stream, and so there is a continuous stream via them from the first days of the texts. But when does a river change its name? How many Calvinists must be turning in their graves at what their movement became? Unitarianism is a change, many for some time have openly denied this stream, but old habits seem to die hard. Habit is not a good enough reason.

What I am also suggesting is that the Bible is not a literary treasury but has a context, and it is community. The New Testament is a community of resurrection faith. That is the viewpoint of everything therein. Is Unitarianism a community of resurrection faith?

22 Jun 2004

Jesus was hardly Unitarian in the sense that, in all probability, he believed in a coming end of the known world and institution of the kingdom of God for which people had to prepare themselves. He healed people of their sins (ill health was from sin, so was death - that is why Christians began saying Jesus the sinless died so that we do not have to die, but now this is a nonsense as we think biologically). Jesus was a supernaturalist, the world was wholly different in conception from now.

Saying Jesus was a Unitarian is like saying Unitarians are Jews.

Come to think of it, this is a better description than saying Unitarians are liberal Christians. But neither is a good description. As far as I can see, most Unitarians do not have the stance of resurrection faith, nor do they have a stance of the historical Jesus. Most Unitarians do not think that Mosaic Law is the Law to live by or that Abraham is the founder of a people. Unitarians, as regards then, when they talk about then, for the most part make it up.

25 Jun 2004

The interfaith that is the Unitarian future is that of the religious literate gathering together to exchange ideas and find forms of practice that express a wide range of views from the religions and philosophies. There is the ethical Islamic God, the purity of the Sikh Guru-God, the connection between the self and the God of Hinduism, the transience in Buddhism towards the no-self, the material corporeality of the Christian God, the duality of the Zoroastrian God, the plurality and sexuality of the Pagan godhead, the modernity of the Bahai God, the absence of God in humanism. We all of us sit somewhere within that mixture, and a wealth of world resources is available: and all of these have developed in time. We all have our preferences and biases to discuss and consider.

This is a different interfaith from the usual meaning however. Most interfaith considers a comparative interaction between faith traditions. How does the prophet of Islam manifesting God compare with the Christ of Christianity incarnating God? How do the views of Christians about the Bible and the Qur'an compare with Muslims and their views of the Qur'an and the Bible? These are between believers and examiners of traditions in depth. I do not think Unitarianism can do this, except of course compare its tradition of evolved bipolarity with other traditions.

If we believe the Dalai Lama, then religions should be followed within themselves in depth. So his idea of interfaith is not the Unitarian pluralist but the comparative. He is saying, do not jump ship between faiths; he is saying not to create a pluralist soup either. There are Christians who start to investigate Buddhism, and then think perhaps they should be Buddhists if only in part, and the advice is against. Rather, examine the depths of that tradition, where much more is to be found. Of course there will be people for whom a tradition is well past the point of belief and where another religion is like "coming home", and they should change. But this should intentionally be an act of stability, not instability. The interfaith here then is between traditions of those who examine their own in depth: deep conversations of comparisons and differences.

Inevitably though the theology that investigates another faith brings in something of that faith in relationship to its own tradition. So the difference between the Unitarian type interfaith and the traditions type is not hard and fast. I suspect that the Dalai Lama does not like the prospect of a Christian Buddhism for example. He may find that it is produced in the West and he will not like it. He will approve, though, of a Buddhist insight that is located within an existing Christian tradition, and the like: rather like a Hindu seeing Jesus as an avatar rather than the Christ.

The Unitarian approach seems to me to be more a creative soup, where parts are reattached to others, in the process knowingly changing them (and stating so). It is more of an artistic enterprise. It will produce mixes like Christian and Buddhist. It is at the far end of postmodern transience, working with the appearance-disappearance of linguistic meaning and symbolic ideas. Some ideas will be ugly, others reveal a new beauty.

I suspect that some... hope for a kind of universalist conclusion to come about from this activity: general and essential attributes of that called spirituality. I don't think that the transience of language will allow such universals to be found: every universal is just a new idea and symbolic form for the time being, another package to add to the others. Plurality has instability at the heart of it, and change, and creative play.

The Unitarian message to the world, and the larger interfaith world of traditions, is social in that in one place people of different views can come together and make something of their existence together. Active toleration is a social gospel. Unitarians can produce new and exciting comparisons and integrations, and show people getting on with each other. Perhaps then we might see some signposts for the religions to mix and match themselves in the future.

Yet is this happening? In some places, but Unitarianism is adrift really as a concept. It is some Christians and some Buddhists who have produced expressions of Christian Buddhism, not Unitarians for example with the exception of some in the UUA. There is found mostly an uneasy mixing and expression of humanism with Paganism, and Christianity mixing and melting into other expressions like nature transcendentalism. Americans tend to be more ghettoised than the British, but they are doing something this way.

8 Sep 2004

The reason we need academics in religion is because people need to develop in an appropriate way towards some of the more complex issues to be expressed in that interface between language and experience, where each works on the other.

Academic thinking does go ahead in some complexity, but then its main themes spread out with more people becoming involved. Also academic thinking takes what is happening in popular expression and seeks to analyse and understand it, so that the popular expression becomes more aware and may adjust where issues arise. If you do not have academics then the result is what is seen in Unitarianism today, a kind of Edwardian expression of religion that relates to no theologian, no one outside the churches, and no one in other churches. It seems to become devoid of experience, except to those already subject to the language over many previous years and decades. You end up with a religious museum that people remaining within understand but is not penetrable by anyone else. The ability to interpret ancient texts disappears, and the ability to produce relevance disappears. Then you end up with what has been reported to be the case in a place like Walsall. Something that was once meaningful and relevant ends up becoming a bubble of pointlessness.