Re-Appropriating Sacred Tradition

Re-appropriating Sacred Tradition, or, Are You a Christian Without Knowing It?

George Kimmich Beach October 2015

Why would anyone want to re-appropriate sacred tradition in this manifestly secular age? To answer the question involves questioning myself, inviting memory to speak and following its labyrinthine path. The short answer is, it’s a question of saving my own soul.1 In a 1670 sermon the Reverend Samuel Danforth lamented the flagging sense of mission and commitment among the Puritans of New England, and called for repentance, perseverance, renewal. Historian Perry Miller adopted Danforth’s remarkable title for his own remarkable book, Errand Into the Wilderness. Several essays in the book were important in my own developing thought: one on the “covenant theology” devised by the Puritans; another on the surprising commonalities, hidden by the obvious divergences, between Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson; and especially the lead essay, “Errand into the Wilderness.” Miller finds in Danforth’s sermon a continuing theme of American national consciousness: Who are we now, when the world ignores us and our own children turn indifferent?2 Despite the anti-Calvinist polemics, for instance, William Ellery Channing’s 1809 discourse, “The Moral Argument Against Calvinism,” the Puritans are the direct progenitors of the Unitarians.3 We inherit more than congregationalism, or even our recent re-appropriation of “covenant.” We too have sought to be the conscience of a commonwealth, and our proudest moments have arisen from our public sense of mission —a reformist errand into America’s unformed, societal wilderness. Miller suggests at the conclusion of his essay that the Puritans’ quest to re-conceive and renew their mission —their confident sense of identity—inaugurates a tradition of agonizing self-criticism and self-discovery that runs throughout American culture. Certainly it runs through the history of liberal religion. Unitarian Universalists have always longed to be more important and more widely recognized than we are: “So many people are like us—why don’t more of them join us?” We console ourselves with noble words of resignation: “It doesn’t really matter.” The paradox is that playing a significant role on the public stage requires not “blending in” with our culture’s secularism but, rather, self-differentiation—becoming more “a community of character,” in Stanley Hauerwas’s term. James Luther Adams often cites Whitehead’s dictum: “Definition is the soul of actuality.”4 Only with

1 Speaking of religion we can only speak for ourselves, albeit seeking to be persuasive and inviting others to follow us as far as they will. Throughout, when I say “we” I mean “we Unitarian Universalists.” 2 Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956). p. 15. Rev. Joseph Barth, minister of King’s Chapel, Boston, once told me that Miller had “almost” decided to join the church but then held back. His essays reflect deep personal interest in religion, but also academic detachment. 3 Conrad Wright’s classic study, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King/Beacon Press, 1955), describes the evolution among the New England Puritans from strict Calvinism, to the “Arminian” view allowing for free human response to God’s grace, and from there to Unitarianism. 4 Adams cites Whitehead’s dictum in the context of arguing that “the task of theology [is] to define reality. . . . Reality is not only that which we confront, but also that which is in the human being. There will always be an element of faith—unless you are in complete despair and say that nothing has any meaning.” “A Time to Speak: Conversations at Collegium,” An Examined Faith, edited by George K. 2 definition—“getting our act together,” as I learned from several years in urban ministry— does a group become capable of engaging the larger community and world.5 The organizational task is at root a theological task and a gift of faith. The lament for losing our collective way is an old story. In Unitarian history Hedge, Bellows, and William Greenleaf Eliot voiced it loud and clear. Even Eliot’s grandson, T. S. Eliot, can be read in this light.6 Also Emerson, although he chose a path of abandonment rather than re-appropriation; his spiritualizing message: Read not the Bible but the world itself through “transcendental” eyes. Also James Luther Adams, who pointed out, pace Emerson, that there never was a great religion without a sacred text. Religious identity is not a matter of devising a better “elevator speech”; it is a matter of placing ourselves within a frame of reference that is vastly larger and longer in duration than “we few” gathered here and now. Such a frame or “system of reference,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein defined “religious belief,”7 is borne by texts of a cherished sacred tradition.

I. The Age of Innocence My earliest memories of church cluster around the basement of the original First Unitarian Church of Richmond, in an old neighborhood of radiating streets called the Fan. I have no memory as a child of being invited upstairs to participate in the adult services. A small certificate reminds me of the exception, the day in 1935 that I was christened by none other than the former President of the American Unitarian Association, Samuel A. Eliot. Years later I asked my father, why him? Because, he said, I was the first baby they’d had in the church in several years, so they saved me for Dr. Eliot’s forthcoming visit. Yes, Unitarianism was at a low ebb. What remains vivid from my earliest church-going (and being devout Unitarians, we always went) was the worship services, in a hall that had a large, empty stage and an old, disused organ you could pump with your feet and get great, groaning dissonances. We sang “I would be true, for there are those who trust me,” and “Hearts like flowers”— forever unfolding in simple beauty and godly kindness. Best of all, when your birthday came around, you got to put one penny for each of your years in to a little lighthouse and see it light up with each coin’s drop. I can still picture John and Carolyn McKinnon on

Beach (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), pp. 20-21. 5 Several Unitarian Universalist urban ministries of the 1960s, including the Cleveland Unitarian Universalist Parish, of which I was a co-minister with James Hobart, are described in my essay, “New Ministries” Journal of the Liberal Ministry IX: 2 (Spring, 1969), pp. 42-59. In sum, we found that we could not “change the world” without first changing ourselves and our churches: we needed a new understanding of the church, namely, a dedicated community that takes the community at large as its parish. Which, briefly, we did. 6 Frederic Henry Hedge, “Anti-supernaturalism in the Pulpit” (1864), and Henry Whitney Bellows, “The Suspense of Faith: A Discourse on the State of the Church” (1859), An American Reformation: A Documentary History of Unitarian Christianity, eds. Sidney Ahlstrom and Jonathan Carey (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985); William Greenleaf Eliot, “Christ and Liberty” (1870), appendix, Earl K. Holt III, William Greenleaf Eliot: Conservative Radical (Village Publishers, 2011). Holt cites a fine tribute by T. S. Eliot to his grandfather’s civic, educational, and religious ideals and actions (pp. 23- 24), words that contrast with his derisive poem, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.” James Luther Adams speaks of a conversation with T. S. Eliot in which Eliot ascribed his sense of civic responsibility to his grandfather’s influence; see Adams, An Examined Faith, op. cit., p. 35. 7 Wittgenstein: “Religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference, . . . really a way of living, a way of assessing life.” Quoted in George Kimmich Beach, Transforming Liberalism: The Theology of James Luther Adams (Boston: Skinner House, 2005), p. 287. 3 the front porch of the next-door parsonage. Rev. McKinnon had been a research chemist before entering ministry, and being science-minded he was also a humanist—or so said my father, Stephen Beach, who was himself a humanist of the genial, commonsensical sort, one who might ask, Who can make sense of that old theology, anyway?8 Skip forward to the decade following World War II. Now the actual content of Sunday school began to register with me. I remember Jesus the Carpenter’s Son—no Virgin Birth to be sure, but a young, star-gazing boy—and other books in the “New Beacon Series,” edited and partially authored by Sophia Lyon Fahs. My mother once met her at Star Island, and remembered her as a gentle, inspiring soul. There was a book on Moses as liberator of the Israelites, and another on Akhenaten as the first great monotheist. How quaint that we thought that a red thread running through our Unitarian tradition was rejecting paganism in favor of one God! Even if that meant, as Whitehead quipped, “at most, one God.” And I remember the beautifully illustrated Sunday school book, How Miracles Abound, depicting wonders of nature, like the chambered nautilus, Religion had a lot to do with wonder. In the post-World War II period Unitarians began to boast rapid denominational growth. The Layman’s League ran small ads in liberal publications such as The Saturday Review of Literature asking, “Are You a Unitarian Without Knowing It?” Perhaps so, it suggested, if you are as far removed from traditional Christianity as we Unitarains are! As a teenager in our burgeoning congregation in suburban Cleveland, I remember being vaguely bothered by the ad’s implication that you could be a Unitarian so effortlessly. Were we no more than a free-form religiousness shared by a congenial group of liberal- thinking folks, “our kind of people”? Ouch! But apparently copious returns came from the ad’s name-and-address clips-off, and who can argue with success? I remembered this, too, when in later years I began to ask, were we feeding off the after-glow of a nation in which “everyone” still went to church? It was an age of innocence. Adlai Stevenson lost to Eisenhower, to our chagrin, and four years later lost again. It irked me that Stevenson was said to be a Unitarian, but attended the Presbyterian church in Springfield.9 It was an age of innocence. In short, the question of identity—for the church and equally, for myself— crowded my consciousness early on. I collected and read the entire, mimeographed sermon series by our minister, the Rev. Wayne Shuttee, “Faiths that Fight for the Mind of Man.” One was Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Neo-orthodoxy,” a burr in the Unitarian saddle: in spite of the renowned public theologian’s liberalism, he championed a doctrine of original sin rooted in realism about human nature, especially in groups.10 Shuttee concluded with “The New Naturalism,” his own stance, rooted in the philosophical theology of Henry Nelson Wieman. All this was solid intellectual fare, but left me with scant personal feeling for the minister who crafted these discourses. We have too little

8 On my dialogues about God with my father, Stephen Holbrook Beach, see my book, Questions for the Religious Journey (Boston: Skinner House, 1995/2002), pp. 33ff. 9 Stevenson’s entry in the Edward R. Murrow series, This I Believe: 2 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), pp. 142-143, is titled “No Other Rock of Safety,” a phrase from Psalm 27; he also cites St. Paul on Christian liberty (Gal. 5: 1). 10 For years I kept a copy of the Unitarian pamphlet, “What Is This Neo-Orhodoxy?” attacking especially Reinhold Niebuhr, and asked Jim Adams what Niebuhr thought about it. Answer: he was angry and said these critics were ignorant. See G. K. Beach, Transforming Liberalism: The Theology of James Luther Adams (Boston: Skinner House, 2005), pp. 96-97. 4 recognized that ministry lives not by ideas alone, but by the sense of personal connection with a spiritual leader and with a lasting “company of saints, sinners, and sages,” in Joseph Barth’s well-wrought phrase.11 I first heard James Luther Adams at a continental conference of the Unitarian and Universalist youth organizations, newly merged as Liberal Religious Youth. We LRYers boasted that ours was the only self-governing youth organization anywhere! But not, of course, self-financing. We sang somewhat leftist songs, like “There once was a union maid / Who never was afraid” and “God bless free enterprise / System divine!”and somewhat sacrilegious songs, like “Christianity hits the spot,/ Twelve apostles, that’s a lot,/ Holy Ghost and a Virgin, too. . .”. Our liberal religion was long on moral idealism and youthful spirit, short on historical awareness and mature self-reflection. Inevitably, trouble arose in our adolescent paradise, when our vaunted “youth autonomy” stumbled —on one occasion being unable to enforce our own rules, and on another, being accused of undermining the ambitious Director we had hired. Discovering your ability to cause hurt, even though unintended, you discover the existential meaning of the Fall. Religious movements regularly cultivate a proud, “we few” stance, and just this was our strength: self-consciously standing apart from the regnant youth culture, a “culture of conformity.” When Time Magazine called ours “the silent generation” we proclaimed that we were not that—not politically inert and not chasers of teen idols. Professor Adams came to our convention and talked about the central figure in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—Holden Caulfield as the harbinger of a new sensibility, “authenticity” in place of the old, adult “phoniness.” I was hooked on Adams from that day forward. No doubt I read later understandings into these encounters, but in Adams I heard a liberal theologian with intellectual heft, one who said he’d come to our conference “because I wanted to see what the youth are thinking.” This, as I was to discover, was characteristic Adams: wide-ranging enthusiasms and attentiveness to “the tides of the Spirit.” Ah, to become such a preacher! Erik Erikson speaks of authenticity and commitment as developmental issues of adolescents. Accordingly he calls fidelity the key “virtue” (or ego strength) of youth in the passage from childhood to young adulthood.12 Erikson’s way of drawing ethical concepts into a stage theory of psychological development fascinated me when I encountered them in college, where the reigning theory in “the psych department” was B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism. Skinner and his academic friends, determined to compete with the natural sciences, reduced human behavior to a set of concepts, such as stimulus- and-response, that lent themselves to empirical observation and control. This turns out to be the perfect Procrustean Bed: cut down your subject to fit your methodology. It’s an epistemological issue, “reductionism,” that seemed to turn up frequently in academic fields of study, religion prominently among them. I majored in sociology after professor Daniel Stein assigned us a topic that most interested me, my sociological autobiography! Karl Mannheim’s development of the sociology of knowledge became for me a key to understanding and insight: ideologies are, as Marx saw, self-serving constructs that

11 Joseph Barth became a mentor in ministry when I served as a student assistant with him. One Sunday when I wore brown shoes for the service he informed me that at King’s Chapel we wore black shoes! He was not stuffy but he had standards. A few years later when he became the head of the UUA Department of the Ministry, he was met with acrimony by colleagues who saw apostasy in his move from a “humanist church” in Miami to tradition-laden King’s Chapel. He didn’t see it that way. 12 Erik H.Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968)., Chapter III. 5 perpetuate themselves until there is a radical break, a revolution. The break comes when internal contradictions overcome the ability of an established frame of reference, or paradigm, to perpetuate itself.13 Religion, too, is a frame of reference. Here was a fruitful way of understanding oneself and ones world, my world. Perhaps that’s why I chose what might be called “salvation by ministry”: I could think and talk about these things full time! Little did I know. At my instigation the Oberlin Channing Club invited Professor Adams to the campus, paid for by the denomination’s Billings Lectureship program—sadly, now defunct. Adams came and spoke in grand concert hall named for Charles Grandison Finney, College president, staunch abolitionist, and famous revival evangelist. Adams started with what seemed to me a most un-Unitarian biblical text, from Acts 2, which cites the prophet Joel speaking of “the last days”: “I shall pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” The very idea of Pentecost was incomprehensible, even alien, to me: Pentecostals were “holy rollers,” weren’t they? Adams did not speak about an ancient, obscure holy day; he spoke about the generational task of youth and the formation of a consciousness that responds to the cultural and moral challenges of the age. Relevant and effective response, he said, calls for engagement with others in associations that build consensus and take corporate action. He had a way of bringing the sacred and the secular into close proximity, in what he called prophetic theology. The gift of divine Spirit at Pentecost is a wonderful symbol of his brief, memorable, and profound definition of God: “the community forming power.”14 Since that time I have re-appropriated Pentecost. In Jewish tradition it celebrates the giving of the Law, and in Christian tradition, the giving of the Holy Spirit; in both cases, it signals the birth—and the perennial rebirth—of the community of faith. It is a fecund symbol, signifying repentance, thinking again, new-mindedness—metanoia is the underlying New Testament word. In “Our Truest Myth,” a sermon given years later, I argued that Pentecost was by rights the quintessential holy day of religious liberals. It celebrates the diversity of voices gathered “in the unity of the Spirit,” somehow hearing one another with perfect understanding, and so, giving birth to a new covenant, a new dedicated community.15 Miraculous is an event that is impossible to believe if you are an outsider and impossible to doubt if you are an insider. This vision of “unity in diversity” is a kind of miracle: the more diverse are the voices of faith coming together under one canopy, the stronger the tent must be. It follows also, as with all challenges great enough to inspire us, we inevitably fall short. We have almost forgotten this image of the Spirit coming down in “tons of fire,” as Corita Kent painted it for all to see on a huge storage tank by a Boston highway.

13 Karl Mannheim., Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1936). Like good theology, “depth sociology” (Tillich’s term) feasts on paradox, the contradictions and conflicts that arise in social and political life. Paradox is prominent, for instance, in two other books that most interested me during my intellectual awakening, Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, about the resentment, fear, and mob psychology that brought Hitler to power, and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, about the psychic anxieties attendant upon modern American conformism—being a crowd rather than a community. 14 No text of Adams’s address has been preserved, to my knowledge, but close to it is the address he gave, headed by the same biblical text, “Our Responsibility in Society,” in The Prophethood of All Believers, edited by George K. Beach (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), pp. 151-164. 15 George Kimmich Beach, “Our Truest Myth,” The Unitarian Universalist Christian Vol. 48, Nos. 1-2 (Spring/Summer, 1993), pp. 27-31. 6

Recently I attended a Unitarian Universalist dedication service for a new church building; it fell on Pentecost Sunday afternoon, but not so much as a oblique allusion to this blazing moment in sacred tradition was uttered. It’s not an accident, but a learned amnesia. My first ministry, in Buffalo, coincided with the first year of the brand new Unitarian Universalist Association. My primary job as Assistant Minister with Paul Nathaniel Carnes—later to become President of the UUA—was to develop the religious education program and to conduct children’s worship, in the side-chapel of the main sanctuary, adorned by a cross. I was appalled by the religious education materials that had displaced Sophia Fahs’ “outdated” curriculum: “The New Science Series,” texts devised to teach our children how to think rationally about the natural world, in ways, it was said, their public schools probably wouldn’t. Scientific humanism had swept the field.16 Virtually everyone, it seemed, assumed that our distinct Unitarian and Universalist traditions would simply carry on, in the merged denomination, with minor adjustments to include one another. Did the Universalists share this view? Probably more so, for fear of being submerged in a Unitarian tide. My own insensitive attitude was, “they became us.” But in time all but the churches with a strong sense of local history have changed their names to reflect the unwieldy name of the merged denomination. The presumption that we had created a new religion, “Unitarian Universalism,” took root. We love to sing, “roots hold me close,” but how deep do our roots go, even in Unitarian and Universalist history, let alone Jewish and Christian history? For instance, we often honor the Italian theologian and church reformer who shaped the Unitarianism of Poland in the 16th century; yet his unorthodox Christianity, where understood at all, seems entirely foreign. Do we then only honor him as a stepping stone leading to us—we who, after all, must represent the pinnacle of liberal religion? So I asked myself, can we re-appropriate Socinus? I’d heard the late Professor John C. Godbey’s address at Collegium, modestly titled “Fausto Sozzini,” and now returned to it. Godbey gives us a succinct and scholarly outline on Sozzini’s theology, but doesn’t directly ask the question that most interested me: what does this say to our present self- understanding as Unitarian Universalists? My essay, “Are We, Even Today, Socinians?” concluded that yes, we are Socinians on virtually every point in Godbey’s essay. We learn from Socinius that God enters into history not as “from eternity,” but in time and history; accordingly, Jesus of Nazareth was a man adopted in Christian existential witness as God’s representative, his story the parable of transcendence entering into human community.17 If we are not Socinians, what are we? Identity unsettled, our religion becomes whatever you bring to it that more or less fits in. I used to say that the irony of Unitarian Universalist religion is that, while celebrating openness to change, we are more nearly those who, as my mother used to say,

16 This dominant view was reflected in the report of the study commissions appointed by the UUA administration shortly after the denominational merger, especially the group led by Prof. Robert Tapp, on theology. See The Free Church in a Changing World (Unitarian Universalist Association, 196?). 17 George K. Beach, “Are We, Even Today, Socinians? A Study in Constructive Theology in Appreciation of Dr. John C. Godbey,” The Unitarian Universalist Christian, . . . . As my title indicates by the term “constructive theology,” this is not simply a matter of asking: Can we repeat without translation into our own, contemporary language of faith, the language found in the tradition? It suggests, rather, that we must see whether or not we can constructively appropriate a tradition by discerning its symbolic meaning and intent. Not easy, but necessary to any act of re-appropriation. 7 who “only become more like themselves.” In fact, however, Unitarian Universalists have undergone an almost unconscious shift in consciousness over the decades. “Scientific” humanism has given way a “spiritual” humanism, especially among the clergy, with no less aversion to a transcendent Other. This sideways shift reflects the distinction increasingly found in the larger culture, between being spiritual and being religious—“religious” suggesting “organized” or “institutional” religion, terms increasingly burdened with negative connotations. It is hard not to agree: Does it really matter whether one is a member if ones heart is in the right place? Yes, it does, because definition is still the soul of actuality. Once a man told me he joined our church in Austin, Texas because, he said, “I don’t believe in organized religion.” I laughed, recalling all my blandishments about getting the church to learn new habits of organizational effectiveness. In the 1970s we began to feel the benign winds of the Spirit, a shift in consciousness that felt genuinely liberating. I’ve been known to say that in the 1960s we believed in nothing—except, of course, science—and in the 1970s we decided to believe in everything--TA, ESP, Tarot, and Maslow, Perls, “Born to Win,” and all the other excrescences of the “human potential” movement. Do you remember men’s longer hair styles, then in vogue? That’s when I had my first haircut by a woman; she said to me, “The trouble is you don’t love your hair.” I smiled, and since that time I’ve never had a haircut by a man. But the 1970s were also a decade of denominational doldrums: exhaustion and alienation had set in after the tearing conflicts of the 1960s; the numbers—membership, money, children and youth—all fell precipitously. What picked us up in the two decades following? In the 1980s, a denomination more practically focused on understanding and strengthening congregations. Also, a decision to re-appropriate the idea and the practice of covenanting, that is, making relationships explicitly committed. Still, when it came to restating the pallid Principles and Purposes in the original UUA Constitution, and a covenantal form was proposed, the prominent minister who headed the commission said, “We don’t use that Biblical language,” and then resigned, saying that the very effort to state shared commitments would tear us apart! We did not “have our act together.” With new leadership, which invited broad participation in the process, we succeeded in making a fundamental revision of the Association’s statement of Principles and Purposes. It invites us to “covenant” with one another, and reflects the form of ancient covenants, stating the diverse sources of our “living tradition” and the value- commitments that follow from them. Thus we adopted a statement of statement of value commitments rooted in a cherished history, Biblically formed without quite knowing it. Is it a theological statement or a purely ethical one? “The interdependent web of all existence of which we are part” names a reality that transcends us—that includes us and therefore lays a claim upon us. Adams coined a similar idea when he spoke of “the covenant of being,” a doctrine of creation reflecting ecological sensibilities. Biblical tradition is reflected in the “sources” section at two other points in the new UUA Principles and Purposes: “prophetic teachings” (this language was directly suggested by Adams) and “Jewish and Christian teachings” with regard to “God’s love.” In brief, we named and claimed, however imperfectly, a sacred tradition that calls forth our fidelity, that declares our identity. The new language at the head of the UUA constitution has been valued by the members—in the face of carping by some about “creeping 8 creedalism” and from others that it is verbiage “nobody could disagree with.” So cautious are we of the dead hand of tradition that the denominational by-laws require us to revisit the statement every ten years. Recently the Board of Trustees passed this task to the Commission on Appraisal, which proposed a set of changes, mostly the Sources section of the statement—call it “the sacred tradition” section. The General Assembly delegates rejected the changes, in effect: this language tells us, our children, and the world who we are. It helps us past “the pale negations” Emerson decried long ago.

II. The Education of George Kimmich Beach By the time I was a teenager, I was deeply imbued with the spirit of liberal religion. Freedom is intoxicating to an adolescent. But the more seriously I took my religion the more uneasy I became with its vagueness. We knew far better what we did not believe in than what we did. The pale negations have persisted to the present, as when we hear it said that, while values unite us, “Belief is the enemy of religion.” Beliefs are articulations of faith, the kind of thing we can rationally deliberate. They also name what we hold dear, as the etymology of the word indicates—the affiliative be- plus the OE loef, from which we also get the word “love.” In college I began to read Paul Tillich—The Courage to Be, giving psychological issues an existential dimension—neurosis as “ontological anxiety”—and The Religious Situation, interpreting the cultural and political crises of the mid-20th century as a crisis of meaning. These themes were becoming central in my consciousness; they brought to the fore ideas that the individualism and rationalism of my Unitarian upbringing had little prepared me. The existential turn, which Tillich represented in theology, shouldered aside liberal religious idealism and optimism, and especially its gloss on “the goodness of human nature,” in opposition to “the bad old idea” of original sin. But consider that it is a great equalizer: If “in Adam’s fall / we sinned all,” we had no choice in the matter, and accordingly, can be the more readily forgiven than if we did something evil of our own volition, pure and simple. Such an idea came as a surprising reversal. Theology, it seems, can provide an angle of vision to which earnest moralizing, left to its own devices, is blind. What, then, did liberal religion have to say about the paradox that human freedom depends on accepting constraints and personal disciplines?18 Far from being “the cutting edge,” as we had imagined ourselves, our inherited liberal faith began to seem, in James Luther Adams’s words, caught in “a cultural lag, the tail end of the laissez-faire philosophy of the nineteenth century.”19 I’d begun to read Adams—there were no books but only scattered essays—during my years at Oberlin College. Finally, a slim volume of essays, Taking Time Seriously, was published at the instigation of friends at the time of his departure from Chicago for Cambridge in 1956.20 Why did I come to set my heart and mind on ministry—and to do

18 Freedom taken to be the “right” to believe whatever you want is a meaningless idea, and yet we hear that this is what Unitarian Universalist creedlessness means. On freedom as a spiritual reality that lies at the heart of a liberal faith, see George Kimmich Beach, “Religious Freedom and Spiritual Freedom” Interreligioius Insight 13: 1 (June 2015), pp, 114-119. 19 James Luther Adams, “Taking Time Seriously,” in The Prophethood of All Believers, George K. Beach, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 37. 20 Taking Time Seriously (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957. Long out of print, it contains four essays that are reprinted in the two primary volumes of Adams essays that I edited for Beacon Press. 9 so straight out of college? There were all those unanswered questions that the church had stirred up but left unanswered—not religious questions in the narrow sense but questions of identity and vocation and what was worth giving my life to. In a sermon in my first solo ministry, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, I astonished my kind and loyal parishioners by declaring that I had chosen ministry for no nobler reason than “to save my own soul.” Why? Because we are mysteries to ourselves and uncover the mystery through decision, a leap of faith. I applied to Harvard and Meadville-Lombard but chose Harvard for the simple reason that Adams had moved there the year before. “Taking Time Seriously,” the title essay of Adams’s book, is a midlife reflection on his intellectual and spiritual odyssey. Here he speaks of his quest for a penetrating theological vision, a stance broad and deep enough to sustain forward movement. He hitched his wagon to Paul Tillich’s star, he reports, and soon was translating and publishing his essays on history and faith: In Tillich’s view of the dialectical nature of reality, of revelation, of God, and of the Kingdom, of human nature and history, I find an interpretation and an application of Christian doctrine which are far more relevant to the social and divine forces that determine the destiny of humanity than any other theologian I happen to know about. Here, if ever, is a theologian who takes time seriously.21 Unpacking these two sentences would take an essay of its own. Suffice it to say that history is the medium that bears Adams’s theology—the quest for meaning in history, a conception of “the destiny of humanity.” His commitments lie within the field and tradition of “Christian doctrine” and their contemporary “application”; he later defined theology as interpretation of major symbols of faith in relation to the contemporary concerns: revelation, God, the kingdom of God, and human nature and history. Speaking in intellectual short-hand, he speaks of being drawn to the “dialectical” form of Tillich’s thought; that is, Tillich addressed the fundamental issues of human existence in relation to its internal tensions, its crises and turning points, its creative resolutions. Take, for example, the theological concept that religious liberals have set in opposition to rational, scientific knowledge: revelation. “Reason” and “revelation” stand in dialectical relation, each qualifying the other. Transcendent realities—for instance, love, freedom, soul, spirit, God—are mysteries; yet their meanings may be disclosed in “revelatory” moments. Such moments are often the subject of religious art, including art that does not have traditional “religious” subject-matter. They are the stuff of sacred tradition. This does not make them irrational, and we are always morally required to “be reasonable.” A quintessential Tillichean definition, “Revelation is the ecstasy of reason.”22

In Germany of the 1930s, Tillich was a politically engaged anti-Nazi, resulting in his emigration to America. He represented, then, the kind of theological and personally committed stance that Adams was looking for in his quest to renew liberal theology, a stance that “takes time seriously.” God is not Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” but the prophetic sense of sacred tradition, informing and transforming secular history. The sacred and the secular are dialectically linked.

21 The Prophethood of All Believers, op. cit., p. 41. 22 On “Revelation and ecstasy,” see Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 111ff. 10

Such were the ideas that attracted me in theological school and resulted in commitment to a Christian humanism—the view that a profound and unbiased understanding of the human experiment depends on commitment to a particular, but not exclusive, sacred tradition. In this I was influenced not only by Adams but also in widely contrasting ways, by a number of other teachers at Harvard. (What a privilege to have access to both the Divinity School and “the Yard”!) What did I learn? From Raphael Demos I learned to love Plato, who invented dialectical thought, brilliantly dramatized in his dialogues. In his dialogue on epistemology, Theatetus (see 253c-254b), he calls thinking the dialogue of the mind with itself, moving through yes and no until it reaches a judgment. Both the conversation and the judgment are essential. As a young Unitarian I had a lot of dialogues with myself, and have come to see preaching as a conversation with a congregation, preferably one that you have an ongoing relationship, starting from an internal dialogue. But about what? George Buttrick, master of the art of preaching and professor of homiletics, admonished us, “Preach on the great themes.” Which is to say, don’t squander your pulpit on ephemeral issues. I’ve learned to ask myself two questions: what’s the purpose and what’s the point? In his inaugural address as Dean of the Divinity School, Samuel Miller cited Thomas Carlyle’s words on the preacher who went on and on (here I quote from approximate memory) “so eloquently, so passionately, one could not but admire the nobility of his words—could he but find the point again!” Adams named as the great themes of sacred tradition the drama of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, a dialectical pattern that generates endless sub-themes.23 Another teacher, the famously eccentric Arthur Darby Nock, said: “Religion is what people in community do, say, and think, in that order, with respect to those things, real or imagined, over which they have no control.” Precisely: we are not finally in control of anything: this is the human condition from start to finish, and therefore the fundamental reason for faith in God, the giver of being and freedom.24 Nock also said, “Religion is man’s refusal to accept helplessness.” Make that personal and gender neutral: Our refusal to accept helplessness. Nock made it concrete and existential by quoting an Eskimo: “We believe our shaman, for he sees what we cannot see, and much farther. Without him the animals would disappear from us in the snow and mist.” One of the great themes: wilderness, the world that lies beyond our control. George Huntston Williams, scholar’s scholar par excellence, described the dialectic between “God’s garden,” nature itself, and the garden we plant and tend by the sweat of our brows. As a historian he noted that one part of the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness” was to create a seminary, a fruitful garden, in the midst of the American wilderness—not as a realm to be conquered but, in my own words, as an aspect of the encompassing “mystery of being, a place to be, to grow, to rejoice together.”25 23 This triad provided the structure for my book, Transforming Liberalism, op. cit., on Adams’s theology: on being (religious and human), on confronting (the demonic and injustice), and on renewing (community and faith). When I taught a course on Adams for the Unitarian students in Transylvania, Bishop Arpad Szabo told me that my structuring of Adams’s notoriously unsystematic theology made him comprehensible in ways he had not been before. 24 This is essentially the first of my four reasons “Why We Believe in God,” a sermon for Collegium devotions, November 2014. 25 Words for chalice lighting from For Love’s Sake Alone, meditations and prayers published by the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship in 1995. Williams’s book, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), relates symbols of sacred tradition to 11

Krister Stendahl suggested that, to read an ancient document such as the New Testament, you should read “with two eyes”—one eye on the original meaning of the text, seeking to maintain its integrity, and the other eye on your present, personal context. Otherwise you are tempted to impose modern conceptions on texts that presuppose a very different view of reality; but discounting your existential self, as scholars seeking “objectivity” tend to do, you may fail to understand why such “odd” ideas could be entertained and miss what has given this text enduring value. The Gospel of Mark has long fascinated me in this regard. Mark says that Jesus told parables to confound outsiders to his circle, and that he “did not speak to them without a parable.”26 Modern commentators almost invariably ignore or deny such claims because they contradict the usual view that parables are a kind of sermon illustration told precisely to help outsiders become insiders! I take Mark at his word, believing that faith is fundamentally a matter of “parabolic vision”; the gospel, then, is incomprehensible except to insiders, the spiritually receptive who have “ears to hear.” The theological principle reflected in this view was stated by St. Anslem: Credo ut intelligam, I believe in order that I may understand: otherwise the animals will disappear into the snow and mist! Once again, the religious liberal’s idea that we believe on the basis of evidence, and not on the faith to which sacred tradition witnesses, is turned on its head. I asked another teacher, Amos Wilder, what became of Jesus’ idea of the kingdom of God, and got a simple, almost obvious answer: it was identified with the Church. Historically, this recognition leads to questions about the meaning of “church”—hence the Reformation distinction between the visible and the invisible church, and the Congregational distinction between the local church and the church universal. Again, these are dialectically related pairs, each requiring the other. But has such language, or any doctrine of the church, become meaningless to religious liberals? Is “church” simply a gathering of the like-minded, not a conversation of the diverse-minded? If the word “church” is edging its way out of our vocabulary, then where will we go—if not to Starbucks—on a bright Sunday morning? With declining membership we see the urge to redefine the church as a “movement.” The trouble with saying that one no longer need to be a card-carrying member to be counted as part of a “movement” is that it is too spiritual. It’s a way of teaching ourselves to say that membership as institutional commitment doesn’t matter all that much. It remains, I believe, that membership signifies a personal decision, responding to an existential question—a question that asks for a yes or no answer. The institution matters because it ties us to others, past and present, saints and sinners. We contribute to its “living tradition,” and in turn we are challenged by it to grow morally. Beyond lamenting what has been lost, our communities need to re-appropriate, “to repent and do your first works over again,” in the words of Revelation (2: 4). The symbol, “kingdom of God,” lies at the heart of the “good news” brought by Christian sacred tradition. Another teacher, theologian Richard Reinhold Niebuhr, suggested translating the Greek phrase, basileia tou theou ,“God-ruling,” an awkward but a non-territorial and more dynamic expression. To say, with Jesus, “God-ruling is at hand”—drawing near—available—is to witness to the power and presence of God. It is contemporary concerns for the environment. 26See Mark 4: 11-12 and 34. On these issues see George Kimmich Beach, The Seminal Gospel: Forty Days with Mark (Madison, Virginia: Campicello Press, 2013), Chapter 12, “The Mystery of the Kingdom of God,” and my Collegium paper, “On Reading the Gospel of Mark with Two Eyes,” November, 2013. 12 not, as the Jesus Seminar implies, Jesus’ big fat mistake, a judgment that presumes we know exactly what Jesus meant by “kingdom of God”: a cataclysmic historical event, an event that never happened. The inside view—the personally engaged view—is radically different: the kingdom of God is something hidden, veiled as if in stone. This is why Jesus speaks of “the mystery of the kingdom of God”: it is a sacred tradition that transcends rational understanding, and yet is known by taking part in it—celebrating it in song and prayer, living it in just and merciful deeds. Christianity, it turns out, is essentially “a mystery religion,” as its primary ritual, taking part in holy communion, suggests. At the same time its theological and ethical beliefs are rooted in prophetic Judaism. I read “kingdom of God” as Jesus’ eschatological vision of Jeremiah’s prophetically envisioned “new covenant,” the gift and task not written in stone but in the human heart. (See Jer. 31: 31) It expresses the first article of my personal credo, the presence of transcendence. In the master myth we inherit “the powers that be” reject this new covenant, for it was and is antithetical to their coercive, self-aggrandizing power. Still, the marginalized strove, and strive still, to live within its promise. Most memorable to me was Richard R. Niebuhr’s observation that “the Enlightenment project,” which foresaw an age of reason sweeping away the ancient, superstition-laden ages of faith, did not reckon with the reality of faith, that in the face of limits, it resists and renews itself. “The matrix of faith is astonishment and fear.”27 No doubt the path I am marking out would court tension, conflict, trouble among religious liberals. We have trouble enough, I think, observing the instability of our professional ministries. In a single course at Harvard, Hans Hoffman introduced me to Friedrich von Huegel and his monumental study of St. Catherine of Genoa, The Mystical Element of Religion (1908). Catherine, a pre-Reformation Catholic saint, would seem an unlikely example of von Huegel’s underlying theme, that Christian faith is “the revelation of personality and depth” in western culture. Von Huegel, “reading with two eyes,” saw that religion cannot be understood narrowly, as a set of beliefs or as the religious experience of individuals, but only as a cultural tradition that is carried forward by institutions; nor is the Church a monolithic institution, but a network of associations. Adams testifies to von Huegel’s deep influence on his own development, leading him to deeper appreciation of the way in which the liturgies and spiritual practices of religion are woven into its enduring power.28 Most startling to me as an aspiring parish minister was professor Hoffman’s clinical observation of the tensions that beset ministry, rooted in heroic but psychically conflicted efforts to be “all things to all people.” He said, as I recall it, the ministry today is not only sick, but sickening. There was much talk among students at this time about “the gap between the pulpit and the pew.” We Unitarians, a small minority of the student body, counted on our own “exceptionalism”; we escaped that anxiety because our liberal- minded laity were not going to be troubled by Biblical criticism, historical relativism, and the like. Au contraire, they demanded it. Ironically, with my personal quest to re- appropriate beliefs that were routinely debunked from our pulpits, I fell into the opposite gap. I remember my mother remarking that the minister had called the Christmas story

27 Richard R. Niebuhr, “Religion Within Limits,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin I: 2 (Winter, 1968). 3. 28 “The Sacred and the Secular: Friedrich von Huegel,” The Prophethood of All Believers, op. cit., Ch. 4. The perception that faith, Christian or other, can be a profoundly humanizing force is the underlying theme of my essay, “Christian Humanism” Unitarian Universalism 1986: Selected Essays, edited by Wayne Arnason (Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association), pp. 93-108. 13

“an oriental fairy tale.” Did she simply find it amusing, or a crude denigration of somebody’s (if not ours!) sacred tradition. The underside of the “gap between pulpit and pew” was reflected in a strikingly personal way by Rev. Marlin Lavanhar in his 2015 General Assembly sermon on ministry, to ministers: “I’ll confess something else,” he said. “I spent the first five years of my ministry apologizing to God nearly every Sunday when I came home for the ways I failed again to share honestly with my congregation how important prayer and my relationship to God are to me. And I was the minister. Yet, many times even I was afraid to be fully open about my walk with God.”29 It was a courageous confession, told to urge us to reclaim our spiritual power by testifying to our heart-felt faith without fear. The very power of our message, especially to reach beyond “our kind of people,” depends on it. If spiritual freedom lies at the heart of our message, then nothing is more deadly than self-censorship to a tradition rooted in the idea and experience of spiritual freedom; Lavanhar’s homiletic aim was to move us to liberate ourselves from inner constraints that undermine our ability to connect at deeper emotional levels with our people. From Conrad Wright we learned about the origins of congregational polity; that it was rooted in the Standing Order of old New England; that under the Cambridge Platform of 1636 even our radically congregational forebears understood their interdependence; that the Church is a face-to-face community, historically particular and entirely visible, even while, theologically, it is the embodiment of Christ, universal and invisible.30 Congregational polity reflected, then, the Puritans’ dialectic: They both cleaved apart and cleaved together. Not unlike my father, Conrad Wright was an avowed humanist, not of the ideological but the “commonsense” sort. Both might say: We can’t really make sense of the theology, but practically speaking, the ways of congregational self-determination are treasured, democratic practices, and lie at the foundation of the American experiment in communal self-determination. Understanding this we understand that ministers speak with authority not by virtue of spiritual superiority but by virtue of their election—being chosen out of the congregation’s number, in recognition of their piety, leadership, and learning. We believed, my father said, in “the learned ministry.” And do we still? When did you last hear that phrase? Today these old traditions of congregational polity seem less and less comprehended or honored; they are displaced by the secular model: the minister as hired professional. Does it matter? It does if our congregations are interdependent members of the church universal, a community historically constituted by a covenant of mutual support and respect. Sacred tradition first of all concerns who and what we are and only secondarily the moral obligations we accept. Being precedes doing, even while doing confirms being, for as Jesus said—that is, as sacred tradition testifies—“By their fruits you shall know them.”

III. Metanoia

29 Marlin Lavanhar, “For Just Such a Time as This,” Portland, Oregon, June, 2015; text shared by author. 30 For my recollections of Wright as man and teacher see “Conrad Wright’s Search for a Usable Past,” Journal of Unitarian Universalist History XXXV (2011-2912), pp. 1-6. 14

With characteristic flourish James Luther Adams added two corollaries: “By their groups you shall know them.” Which is to say, organizations, associations, even institutions, flawed and fallible as they surely are, are instruments of “the community forming power” of God. On a rhetorical roll he also said: “By their roots you shall know them.” Sacred tradition, borne by historical communities and their institutions, is the root of our roots, even in the liberal church. Consider (1) our concept of ministry, (2) our fundamental values, (3) our liturgical forms and hymns insofar as they express a transcendent vision. In all these ways we are Christians even without knowing it. But “not knowing it” is a kind of slumber. “Sleepers, awake!” is one of J. S. Bach’s greatest cantatas. Several teachers and ministerial mentors and colleagues have touched and influenced me; Adams was formative. A quality of his persona not often remarked but very significant in my experience was his boundless enthusiasms. Ever attentive to what others were saying, doing, creating, he would declare, “Now, isn’t that remarkable!” Hearing him, our prematurely narrowed and judgmental minds would be opened. There is something new under the sun! Adams was fully capable of cutting critiques, especially where he smelled “individualistic pietism,” but he was incapable the kind of “pale negations” that Emerson descried. A revelatory moment for me came when I first read Adams’s report of an event that can only be called a conversion experience. As radically different as Adams’s early experience of religion was from mine, his story posed a spiritual challenge that makes me shudder still today. While still a settled parish minister, Adams took on demanding graduate studies in philosophy and comparative literature at Harvard. His academic ambitions represented, it seems, an alterative career path, for he found himself thoroughly discontented with his vocation, tied as it seemed to be to a shrinking, almost irrelevant religious institution. Now at mid-life, he wrote: Nathan Soederblom has remarked that Bach’s St. Matthew Passion music should be called the Fifth Evangelist. So was Bach for me. One night after singing with the [Harvard Glee] Club in the Mass in B Minor under Serge Koussevitzky at Symphony Hall in Boston, a renewed conviction came over me that here in the mass, beginning with the Kyrie and proceeding through the Crucifixus to the Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacem, all that was essential in the human and the divine was expressed. My love of the music awakened in me a profound sense of gratitude to Bach for having displayed as through a prism and in a way that was irresistible for me, the essence of Christianity. I realize now that this was only the culmination of my praeparatio evangelica. He indicates he’d been moving in this direction for some time; the reported experience was a “culmination,” bringing on a shock of self-recognition. My own existential shock came when I read on, and compared my own position to his: For suddenly I wondered if I had a right even to enjoy what Bach had given me. I wondered if I was not a spiritual parasite, one who was willing to trade on the costly spiritual heritage of Christianity, but who was perhaps doing very little to keep that heritage alive. In the language of Kierkegaard, I was forced out of the spectator into the “existential” attitude.31

31 The Prophethood of All Believers, op. cit., pp. 36-37. 15

To what kind of moment is Adams here confessing? A moment of guilt and repentance: I have been “a spiritual parasite.” I must repent, turn about, commit to be one who works to keep this heritage of faith alive. Metanoia is the New Testament word for the experience. “A tradition cannot be inherited, it must be earned,” said Goethe. The work of re- appropriation is not only a going back to a once-inspiring past; it is also a way, when you are stuck, of going forward. A tradition cannot be earned by lapsing into passive acceptance; it must call forth an active, creative response. The parabolic curve traced by a stone thrown in the air comes down, but always in a new place.32 So too with the rediscovery of one’s personal or institutional history. This is what I saw Adams doing— his countless personal stories resonated deeply with my own spiritual journey and vocation in ministry. I speak of sacred tradition not as “a” or “the” but generically because it is not the same thing for any group or even any individual. It is manifold, finding myriad expressions among all peoples in all ages. But who among all these possibilities am I? Who am I actually? To answer this question we need to choose, lest we condemn ourselves to an all-embracing dilettantism, a perpetual vagueness. There is no external perch (as science tempts us to think) from which to make objective discrimination between these possibilities. In the end we must choose from within our own skins, existentially. Re-appropriating sacred tradition requires us to stop talking about what foolish things somebody else believes (an externality), and take the existential “road less travelled,” talking, instead, about what we believe in (an internality)—the spiritual reality that both includes us and transcends us. This, I think, is the vision reached for in Whitehead’s panentheism and in Charles Hartshorne’s mind-bending idea of “the divine relativity,” an idea that turns on seeing the difference between internal and external relations.33 Christian sacred tradition in particular has been repressed by contemporary Unitarian Universalism, contributing to our besetting sin, vagueness, and our consequent identity confusion. In an abstract but hardly an existential sense, we seem to be Christians without knowing it. How so? (1) Our concept of ministry reflects the ministry of Jesus. Entirely. In the first chapter of Mark, our earliest source, Jesus is seen as (a) a teacher with a prophetic message, (b) a caring pastor with healing powers, and (c) an organizer calling together a religious community. Sounds like an up-to-date job description for our ministry! It’s all there in Mark 1: 21-45. (2) The central value- commitments of religious liberals are named by the prophets of ancient Israel: (a) love, (b) justice, (c) faithfulness, (d) righteousness, (e) truth-telling, and (f) peace. No, they don’t talk about (g) rationality or (h) democracy. It’s almost all there in Hosea 2:18-20. No, the Bible is not our only source of values. But the prophets demonstrate courageous (i) spiritual freedom, in both personal and public realms; this is also one of the most striking characteristics of the latter-day prophet, Jesus. (3) Our liturgical forms—and

32 The image of the parabolic curve—rising and falling like a projectile—describes the relationship of successive theological themes in my theological system titled Questions for the Religious Journey (Boston: Skinner House, 1995, 2003). The underlying concepts derive from Bernard Lonergan’s seminal Method in Theology (1972), and developed in my paper, “Lonerganian Reflections: What Am I Doing When I Am Doing Theology?” (Harper’s Ferry Group, 1988). 33 George Kimmich Beach, “Adams’s ‘Covenant of Being’ and Hartshorne’s ‘Divine Relativity,” lecture for the Unitarian Universalist Process Theology Network (Quebec City, Canada, June, 2002). 16 recent efforts for liturgical renewal—are drawn from Jewish and Christian traditions. Yes, we cut Jesus out of the hymn, “For All the Saints,” but we kept the rousing tune for its sense of marching in a spiritual community far larger than ourselves. The hands down favorite new hymn among Unitarian Universalists is Carolyn McDade’s “Spirit of Life,” a beautiful melody that addresses a transcendent reality in personal terms: “Spirit of life, come unto me!” The hymn’s prayer is for transformation, a life devoted to compassion and justice. It invokes the images of “roots” and “wings,” connoting tradition and liberation as complementary, not contradictory, aspects of the religious life. In sum, it is a Gospel song. As for “Spirit of life,” it’s important to have circumlocutions for “God,” lest God become too far removed from our feeling and experience. These matters seem to me altogether obvious, and yet they are most often kept hidden, like the cross that used to be visible in some of our churches, if only in a side chapel, like the one in Buffalo, where a preacher of deep feeling and underlying faith, Paul Nathaniel Carnes, let it be. The idea of re-appropriation arises to resist the thoughtless and often ignorant dismissal of the “costly spiritual heritage” that has made us what we are. To re- appropriate is to reclaim something lost in the mists of incomprehension, or even deliberately dispossessed. It means to completely revaluate, driven by a fresh appreciation of something of unique value, “a pearl of great price.” By the word sacred I mean whatever is not profane—before the curtain— something indefinable in itself but held as precious, not to be violated without dire consequences. Consider the place of the story of Adam and Eve in our religious consciousness. The consequences of taking and eating the forbidden fruit are several: the travail of accepting adult responsibilities—giving birth and tilling the soil are named— and the travail of being morally responsible for ones decisions—knowing the difference between good and evil. The story can be called “timeless” but it tells of something that happens in time and happens all the time: the Fall from grace. The Fall signals a consciousness of what is called original sin, as in, “If something can go wrong, it will.” It can also be called original responsibility: we are responsible for the consequences of our actions for good or for ill. It is called “original” because responsibility is a state of being and not just something we do from time to time. Sacred tradition grounds ethics in theological vision of humanity as morally constituted. Religion is not rocket science, but something everybody knows, or comes to know in the process of growing up. Growing up, we have choices to make, and some of our choices will be bad ones, that is, sins. But the situation is not that bad, for just this growing consciousness—sometimes a shocked consciousness—is the price of growing up, at least if we learn from our mistakes, our sins, such as the hurt we inflict open others and often, in the very process, on ourselves. Learning, in this field, does not just mean learning rules; more fundamentally, it means heightened moral consciousness, also known as conscience. Original responsibility means that we humans are morally constituted beings. Responsibility is entailed in everything we do, and to be conscious of this is both a blessing, for without it we cannot be human, and a curse, for with it we cannot be automatically, mindlessly, carelessly happy. We know we must choose what is good. 17

In sum: There is such a thing as forbidden fruit, but eating it need not be fatal, and could even be good for us. In other words, good theology allows for the reality of moral ambiguity—that stuff that virtually all our story-telling is made of. In this excursus we see several ingredients of a powerful sacred tradition: That it is borne by myths, histories, and mixtures of the two. That important ideas come in pairs which are dialectically related; they generate creative tensions that move us to seek resolutions. That “resolution” is never automatic; tragedy happens; courageous decision is necessary. That traditions invite an existential turn, challenging us personally. That religious language is at root not rational or literal; it is symbolic and persuasive, dramatic and heart-felt.

IV. “And I only am escaped alive alone to tell thee.” Job 1: 15, 16, 17 The minister was preaching on “The Death of God.” In a self-conscious moment —perhaps to assure us he meant no offence—he asked, “Can anything be ‘blasphemous’ for Unitarian Universalists?” Laughter rippled across the congregation. Silent, I reflected on how far out of the mainstream I had drifted. Friedrich Neitzsche wrote: “Whither went God? I will tell you, we killed him, you and I.”34 Was this slyest of philosophers suggesting that we killed God as an act of self-affirmation, that any idea of transcendence must now be recognized as oppressive, inimical to human freedom and dignity? His anti-theism was different in kind from Richard Dawkins’ thoroughly rational atheism.35 It presaged, rather, an epochal shift, from what Neitzsche called the Apollonian to the Dionysian sensibility, or more plainly stated, from idealistic liberalism to existential post-modernism. What, then, can we take from Nietzsche’s famous assault on Christianity? Perhaps this: We have created god- images that are sentimental, “too small,” too much made in our self-image and therefore incapable of standing over against us, of casting us down and lifting us up, of transcending us and thereby spurring us to transcend ourselves. The alienation I felt came not with the sermon topic itself but with the laughter induced by a rhetorical question. Perhaps the purpose was to help atheists feel included, and perhaps the laughter was a nervous and embarrassed reaction. This was not Nietzsche’s sermon, nor mine, but something else; it was a mirror of our loss of sacred tradition and, with it, I believe, our loss of a self-sustaining religious identity. God, a central symbol of sacred tradition, signifies transcendence. In its quest to displace God, the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 is unembarrassed and unambiguous: “The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.”36 When this becomes a distinction without a difference the nerve of transcendence is cut. When everything is secular—of this saeculum, this world-age—nothing is sacred, set apart as inviolable. Sacred tradition is abolished and the future just goes on and on, more or less the same. Then Jesus was wrong, for the kingdom of God never was at hand and will not be, now that the power and presence of God are banished from consciousness.

34 Quoted, Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965), p. 242. 35 Richard Dawkins:”[W]hat is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 347. 36 See David B. Parke, The Epic of Unitarianism (Boston: Starr King Press, 1957), p. 140. 18

Trying to re-appropriate ideas rooted in an ancient times and their modes of thought looks a lot like Don Quixote riding out as the “knight errant” to rescue the age of chivalry. It’s quixotic. A friend commented over dinner that a survey showed that 95 percent of academic scientists today are atheists. She said she was not herself religious but enjoyed attending the local Unitarian Universalist community because she found the people congenial. This is a good, commonsensical reason for church affiliation, but something less than enough to engage my soul. Probably I tilt at the windmills of an intellectually dominant secularism. Looking back over a ministry in which writing on theological and ethical themes has played a prominent role, I find a sense of loss and a desire for re-appropriation running like a red thread through the whole labyrinth. Perhaps that’s why I named our young beagle Ariadne and have imagined an autobiography called Getting Out Alive.