Liberal Answers to Fundamentalist Claims of Divine Inspiration

Rev. Annie Holmes
Sunday, January 16, 2000

I receive phone calls all week long, an often the callers ask me, "Can you explain to me, who are you as a church?" I respond, "we are a church community of people from all walks of life, who are open to cherishing people of all faith systems. I tell them as a church we promote tolerance, openness and the belief that each person has the freedom and responsibility to define their own faith within their own lives." Then, there is always that pause - I wonder if they are still on the line. Then comes the questions, "How can that be who you are as a church?" How can it be indeed.

As members of First Unitarian Church, Des Moines, there is a core, a center, a foundation to our faith. What puzzles people the most is that that core, center or foundation is simply different than what they are used to in other church settings.

I try to explain to people that the core of our church is diversity. But for most people a core, or foundation in a church setting must be where everyone must agree. Our position as UUs is then usually challenged, how can diversity be a foundation, doesn't diversity simply split everyone apart? How can diversity be a core, indeed.

Often people want to know if this is a Christian church. I assure them we have Christians who are members of this congregation, but a belief in God is not necessary to be a member. "Do we believe in the Bible," is a question that is often asked. At this point I ask the person if they have a minute or two, because that explanation will take some time. Asking for time is a good rule of thumb for all of us to remember, when explaining to friends and family just who we are as a church. Who we are is not a simple explanation as saying I am Lutheran or Methodist or Jewish. I remind myself, there is never a need to rush through this explanation. To explain who we are within this context and what this faith community is like, takes time.

I explain to people that not mine, nor any individual person's spirituality makes up the center of who we are as a church. Simply because I am a Taoist does not make this a Taoist church. Nor is our center the long laundry list of the compilation of everyone's separate spiritualities. I remind the caller that being a Unitarian Universalist is not a central belief at all, rather it is an approach to life, a way of living openly and honestly, treasuring all faith systems. It is a way of living religiously.

But I find our diversity of theological approaches can be a problem, a barrier, a potential hazard to our living together in community. Or, it can be the most unique part of who we are as a church, and brings about the most discussion by people who are trying to figure out who we are religiously.

We say we affirm diversity, but we have little language for articulating that affirmation. I'm sure you would agree with me if you tried to explain who we are as a church to anyone over the Holidays. I find we have few congregational patterns for articulating that affirmation, few congregational norms for reinforcing it and no coherent rationale for why we should. Therefore, often we are confused about what diversity means. We would rather see ourselves as members of this congregation and not as individuals who are members of this congregation who also have a personal faith system that may differ from others. What happens in our UU congregations, because there is such a limited vocabulary for talking about diversity, we declare an unspoken truce in the sharing of our diverse religious opinions and that truce in fact is not healthy, because we continue to worship together and think differently.

It was once joked that this church was for people who had lost their religion but couldn't break the habit of going to church. I get a little angry at statements or jokes about us like that, because it speaks to me of the fact, that as a society, we have so little tolerance and understanding of true diversity of religious thought.

When I first became a UU I was nervous for years, because I couldn't say who I was religiously. I panicked a bit because I was always used to having the answers to the larger questions of life given to me. But as I panicked, a very wise person told me not to worry. They said I should take a deep breath, relax and let the new religious freedom I had found sink in. I was told to be patient with myself. Don't expect too much for some time. All this religious freedom was so new to me, I loved it, wanted it, desired it so much in my life, but it surely was new to me. Read, they told me, talk to other people, go to classes where different faith systems are being discussed, absorb the knowledge and experiences of others. In other words, why was I in a hurry? There were no religious police going to come to get me because I could not or would not articulate my idea of God.

There are two parallel systems going on in simultaneously every UU church. On the one hand, whether you are a long term member or a new member, you are formulating your individual faith system. Personally, we are each searching for the right format, the right amount of reason and mystery, the right balance, a way to integrate our past with the way we feel about life and world around us in the present. In other words we are walking our own individual religious path.

Secondly, we are as a faith community, seeking to be the kind of community where all these differences can flourish, not an easy task in these rising fundamentalist times. As individuals and as a church we are continually going through stages.

M. Scott Peck in his book, "Further Down The Road Less Traveled" feels there are four stages of faith either an individual or an institution will need to go through to begin to understand where people are coming from and to help people understand where they may be going in this search for religious freedom.

Stage one: Chaotic stage, the person feels antisocial when it comes to matters of religion of the discussion of spirituality. Stage two: Fundamentalist stage, where the person can tell you the date, place and time of their rebirth. These people feel everyone must believe the same way they do in order to convince themselves that what they felt spiritually was correct. Stage three: Skeptic approach to all things religious or spiritual. A person in this stage takes on a very limited view of all things having to do with religion or the realm of the soul. Often religion and church is seen in a negative light. Fourth stage: Mystic/Communal, in this stage a person is ready to be open to the spiritual side of life and the awakening of the spirit within them and in their religious community.

Peck reminds us we will probably move from one stage to the next but not necessarily in this order. And the stages are not stay static. He reminds us to be vigilant at finding out what is at the basis of our responses, negative or positive to topics of religion. He says also, that stage four is the beginning of a new way of viewing church.

Most important to remember, as we ponder how to define who we are as a church, is that we as individuals, and a church community are always on a continuum, never staying static. As we travel those stages of faith we travel in the stages of learning to be being open and liberal religiously as well.

One of the few religious answers we as liberal faith people have to the world is that we are tolerant of other's faith systems, even when we don't agree with them. But I would challenge you to begin to see tolerance as the first baby-step in embracing diversity. Tolerance, which involves an open-mindedness, patience and endurance is still the minimum almost the meanest position we could take to theological diversity.

Affirmation is a step closer to where I would like to see us as a church in the world. Affirmation has within it a possibility that tolerance does not allow, and that is seeing value in a position that is not our own. When affirming someone or someone's faith system it is very difficult to try to convert them. Affirmation of differing opinions summons us be the conveners of the conversation, the question askers, the ones who are always seeking to find bridges, not walls.

But although affirmation is worthy for us to strive for, the position I long for in our UU communities is where we reach a place of cherishing the faith systems of others. When we cherish another person and their differences I feel we have come close to liberal heaven, because it is here within the cherishing that we begin to treasure, appreciate, honor and revere even that with which we cannot fully understand in our own lives. I believe people come to church seeking cherishing for their preferred theological language, a cure for their theological indigestion and a respite from a culture of theological imperialism.

Tolerance, affirmation, cherishing and convening the conversation are some of the answers we as liberal religious people have to the fundamentalist claims of divine authority. And even as we are being hit over the head with the Bible or beaten into submission by those who need to convert us from our evil ways and jaws of hell, we continue to convene that conversation. It takes practice I know, but the rewards are endless.

In the six months that I have served here as your interim minister I have been made aware again and again of the fear many of the people have in this church to anything Christian. Many factors play into this fear. There is the past experiences many of us have experienced in Christian settings that were less than encouraging. There is the fact that many Christians are in the converting mode and we forget one of our answers to fundamentalism is the stimulating the conversation. Added to this mixture of past experiences and often being attacked, is that most UUs do not feel they have adequate knowledge about the Bible or Christianity to even have a conversation. So, often as liberal religious people we feel at a definite disadvantage, hence we are fearful in the presence of someone who is trying to convert us or send us to hell.

As I stated in the Order of Service, Mark Twain once said, "First, get the facts straight, then you distort them all you want." Some of the facts about the Bible are:

· I will refer to the Old Testament as the Hebrew Bible, as the Jewish community does not see these writings as old in apposition to calling the other Testament new. This Hebrew Bible was complied over centuries by thousands of authors. Most of it was written in Hebrew, some in Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Koninia Greek, and Aramaic. Unfortunately neither language is spoken today so it is anyone's guess of the true meaning of any of the words or phrases.

· Mark's gospel is probably the oldest of the Gospels, written about 70 years after Jesus' death. Matthew and Luke were written around 90 years after and John's the latest, 100 C.E.

· At about the same time as John's Gospel was penned, Josephus, a Jewish historian and others began putting together what we now call the Canon of the Bible. The word Canon comes from the Greek word meaning stalk or root, or that which was used for measuring, like a yardstick. Only later the word was used to denote the list or norm of which books would be allowed into the formation of the Bible.

· All the books of the Bible came from oral tradition first. They were stories, poems, legends, myths that were told around the campfires before they were put into writing.

· It is believed by many scholars that the reason we even have a book called the Bible today, is because of the supposed heretical texts that were forming around the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Common Era. There was a feeling that some of the stories were not in keeping with teachings the early church thought should be used. Most of what was considered heresy had to do with the debate about the divinity of Jesus. So, in order to have the correct teachings taught, some books were allowed into the canon and others, like the Gospel of Thomas and the Apocrypha (the hidden books) were left out.

· What do we know for sure about the formation of the Bible? We know that around 200 BCE the Jewish sacred books were translated into Greek and called the Septuagent, meaning 72. The legend goes that 72 scholars took 72 days for the translation.

· We know that Jerome in 384 CE put together a Latin translation of both Testaments, the first time the Testaments were put together and probably the oldest Bible.

· We know for centuries, until the printing press in the 1500's that Monks copied Jerome's version of the Bible by hand. We know they took liberties in the margins to add their own grammatical changes and often their own commentaries on a particular text. These commentaries were often later put into the main text. The question for us now is how to tell original texts from later additions.

· We know the most stirring and complete version of the Bible put to a mother tongue, German was by Luther in 1522. And for the first time in history, the printing press invented by Gutenberg, allowed this Bible be made available to everyone rich or poor.

· We know William Tyndale in England at the same time as Luther translated the Bible from Jerome's Latin Vulgate into English and that King James later used Tyndale's translation in his famous King James Version. So the King James Version is actually a revision of Tyndale's earlier work and still is a standard Bible.

· We know now that most of the Bibles that are in existence today are translations from Hebrew or Greek into French or German into English. Try translating a word like serendipity into three languages and see what you get.

· We know today the Christian world is divided between two worlds. Those who see the Bible as authored by God's hand. That each word, sentence or chapter is equal in authority to the last word, sentence or chapter. And fundamentally speaking, (pardon my pun) the message, all the Bible's message, is the same for every generation of every time now and throughout eternity. The other division in the Christian world, includes those churches who use the historical critical method when interpreting the Bible. They too say the Bible is an authority, but they add one must read the Bible in the light of the time it was written and the in the understanding of the time it was written and to whom it was intended. These churches claim the Bible is not a single book, rather it is composed of types of literature; songs, stories, poems, prayers used for centuries in worship services before there ever was the written word or a Cannon.

Liberal churches, like ours that use the historical critical method, read the Bible with reference to the times and remember when the piece of literature was written, by whom and for whom.

The Bible, whichever Bible you happen to pick up, and there are hundreds, has had an immense impact upon our society. I would say it would behoove us to know something about this book that has been translated into 337 of the world's approximately 6,000 languages.

Have you heard these sayings: Money is the root of all evil - 1Timothy 6 Eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Exodus 21:23 To see the hand writing on the wall - Daniel 5:5 A wolf in sheep's clothing - Matthew 7 Eat drink and be merry - Ecclesiastic 8

We are after all the conveners of the conversation. We remind others to converse with us not convert. We continually look for ways to spread a web that takes people in rather than shutting them off.

We, within our cherishing mode, listen, discuss, teach and learn. With family members, or those at our places of work, we remind them that we can agree to disagree - we explain patiently and diligently who we are as members of this congregation and we are never embarrassed about being UUs. Within this framework we can be clam, serene and relaxed. In an unhurried way we explain who we are, what we believe and how we expect to be treated. As we cherish others, we also need to expect and even require that others treat us with dignity and respect.