Many people think religion is about truth propositions, but I believe it is about stories. Science is the means by which modern humanity discovers what it can about objective truth, but religion helps us define our equally important subjective truths. By what stories do we define ourselves? Through what stories do we live our lives and find our meanings?
British scholar Sheila Upjohn makes an interesting point about stories and myths and our attitudes about them. She writes:
"Although we do not openly acknowledge it, we have recently discovered a strange double standard about myths. It seems to have become received wisdom that nineteenth-century Christian missionaries were interfering busybodies who did more harm than good because they destroyed belief in the life-enhancing myths of the people they sought to convert. But no one, as far as I can see, has anything but admiration for the ardent nineteenth-century rationalists whose literal-mindedness did so much to destroy belief in the life-sustaining myths of Christianity."
I think her point is an important one. We do need myths. We do not need to confuse them with science, and it is good that we have outgrown doing that. But we need stories as lenses through which to find meaning.
Having acknowledged a positive need and purpose for stories, the question becomes: Where do we look for stories that might be meaningful to our lives? As someone who was raised at least nominally Christian, a relevant question for me is whether Christianity is one of the places I should look. I have felt over the years a strong resistance to going to that source for my stories. My resistance stems largely from the fact that part of the traditional Christian myth is a sense of exclusivity, the claim that Christ is the one and only way to God. I grew up in a pluralistic society. I have always had friends whose religious traditions were other than Christian, and I knew perfectly well that Christ was not the only way. The Unitarian idea that Jesus was a good rabbi and a great moral teacher was fine by me, but any stories that depended on Christ being any more than that I wanted no part of. I rejected them because I thought that taking those stories seriously necessarily meant following an exclusivist road. And that I could not do and cannot do.
Encounters with pluralism don't affect only those who become Unitarian Universalists. Liberal Christian seminaries are filled with Christian students wrestling with the same problems with exclusivism that have always plagued me. Some have found that the study of world religions helps in some unexpected ways. The study of Hinduism has helped some Christians find a way out of Christian exclusivism. In Hinduism, God is many, but God is also one. There is a multiplicity of Gods and Goddesses, each with their own names, personal attributes, and stories. They are nevertheless understood to be part of one divine reality. In Hinduism, an avatar is an incarnation or an embodiment of a God. So in one story, Lord Krishna is embodied as a fish, in another as a boar, in another as a human. Some Christians have come to think of Christ's incarnation as a human as their avatar, as the incarnation of God whom they particularly worship, the avatar whose story has been important to their ancestors and to their culture, the avatar whose story and message have been the context for their own journeys and their own relationship with the divine. Yet this does not make Christ thereby the only incarnation, or the only story, or the only route to God. This approach has been helpful to me as I've tried to develop a healthier relationship with the faith of my ancestors.
Once I begin engaging with Christian stories, what I discover is that there are more versions of these stories and more interpretations of them than first meet the eye. One of my favorite interpretations of the essence of Christian myth is that of Hosea Ballou, our own denominational forebear, the great nineteenth-century Universalist minister and theologian. For Ballou, Jesus was not only a great human moral teacher. He was that, but he was also specifically sent by God to reconcile the world to God. Ballou, however, objected to an orthodox interpretation of the cross. According to that interpretation, Jesus died on the cross in order to appease an angry God into forgiving a sinful humanity. Hosea Ballou was perfectly willing to admit that humanity was sinful, but not that God was angry. Remember that Ballou was a Universalist, a believer in Universal salvation, who refused to believe that a loving God would condemn any human being.
In Ballou's interpretation of the Garden of Eden story, the great sin of Adam and Eve is not that they disobediently ate the apple, but that they hid from God afterwards, mistakenly believing that God could be angry with them. They failed to understand God's infinite love. Ballou argued that Christ's atonement was not intended to reconcile God to humanity. God loved us all along. Rather, in Ballou's theology, Christ came to reconcile humanity to God, to remind us of God's love for us, thereby bringing us back into right relationship.
David Plante, in the essay I read earlier, makes a similar point when he speaks of the inner God within the outer God he rejected. His outer God was punishing, but his inner God is the God who suffers along with suffering people, and provides a loving presence in adversity. This suffering, sympathetic God is the positive strength of the cross for many Christians.
It was Anselm of Canterbury who in the twelfth-century first came up with the theory that the reason for Christ's incarnation as a human was so that he could die on the cross to pay for human sins. Anselm's theory became so widely known that most western Christians came to believe that it was the only possible biblical interpretation. Before then, however, it was by no means the prevalent theory. And even in Anselm's day, scholar and monk Peter Abelard argued against him, saying that the reason for the incarnation was not punishment, but love, God's loving presence among us. By this interpretation, illuminated further by Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century, the essential Christian message is that God loved humanity so much that God was willing to be incarnated as a human being, to live and die on earth as a mortal, in order to be with us. As in Hosea Ballou's Christian theology, divine love for humanity is at the center of this Christianity. Humanity is called to respond to God's love by loving God and one another.
Contemporary Biblical scholars draw a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. According to Christian scholar Marcus Borg, the Jesus of history was a finite mortal being. The Christ of faith is what Jesus became in the experience of Christians after his death. The expectations of Jesus' disciples were dashed when he was executed as a criminal by the Romans. And then something happened to the disciples. They found that their movement did not end with Jesus' death after all. They found that Jesus and his teachings seemed to be still with them in spirit after his death. This sense of their teacher's continuing presence among them was handed down in the story of the resurrection. That story and the sense of Christ's presence in the experience of Christians has been reinterpreted in every age. A sense of Christ's presence is a reality still for Christians in our time. I don't know if you have ever felt that sense and that presence. I know that for me, while I often sense God's presence in people and things, I rarely experience that as Christ's presence. But, once in a while, I catch glimpses of it, most often when I am encountering works of sacred music or art that have been created within the context of the Christian story. And then for a moment I am a part of that experience and a part of that story. And I feel how it is that the presence of that incarnated God who lived and taught and suffered and died as a mortal being out pure love for humanity, for us, matters so much to so many people. And I treasure those moments.
Unitarian Universalists in general, and the Unitarian strand of our history in particular, when talking about Christianity, have tended to focus exclusively on the Jesus of history. By contrast, most Christian denominations have traditionally focused primarily on the Christ of faith. This latter emphasis is now shifting. There is a flurry of activity among Christian scholars to unearth a clearer picture of the Jesus of history. Actually scholars have been doing this for a couple of centuries now. The real shift is that people in the pews are paying more attention. The media has latched onto the activities of the Jesus Seminar, and historical criticism is all the rage. Many of us took the opportunity to hear Catholic scholar and co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan speak last summer at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly here in Rochester. He spoke convincingly of the historical Jesus as a revolutionary peasant. All in all, the historical Jesus is getting more attention from a larger number of Christians than ever before. I applaud this trend. It is, after all, what Unitarians have been doing with Jesus all along.
Yet even as I celebrate that trend, I would argue on behalf of a counter trend that I see as equally necessary. While the Christian denominations are making up for a traditional overemphasis on the Christ of faith at the expense of the Jesus of history, the Unitarian Universalists could make up for a tradtional overemphasis on the Jesus of history, and an overemphasis on facts, generally, by engaging directly with stories whose context is a theology based on the Christ of faith. I do not suggest that we take mythical Christian stories literally, and I especially do not suggest that we tell exclusively Christian stories at the expense of stories from other faith traditions. But I do suggest that we should include among our broad canon of stories and experiences, stories which depend for their context upon a Christian framework. And we need not limit ourselves in this regard to Christmas carols. If we exclude Christian myth, we cut ourselves off from a major source of the spiritual strength from which our own tradition springs, as is evident by the example of Hosea Ballou.
There are three main reasons, I think, why it is difficult for us to comfortably include Christian myths in what we celebrate. One is that many of us aren't accustomed to thinking of them as myths or to thinking of myth as a positive term. It is easier to for us to hear a Buddhist story as a story full of wisdom that we can learn from, than it is to hear a Christian story in the same way, even though it may be equally full of wisdom. We may feel we are expected to hear it as something other than a story, as something literal of scientific, which makes us skeptical, and therefore we feel the need to reject it outright.
The second reason for difficulty is that we may have been affected by negative interpretations of Christian myths. In other words, we may have understood the myths as myths, but we couldn't accept the conclusions toward which the myths were pointing, finding them harmful or painful. The best healing for this I believe, is not to avoid the stories but to look at them again and find newer and truer interpretations.
The third reason we are uncomfortable with Christian myth, and I suspect it may be the biggest reason for many of us, stems directly from the two-millennia long history of Christian anti-Semitism. In our time, we are very aware of the Holocaust and of centuries prior to that filled with persecution and violence committed against Jews by Christians. This awareness makes us want to run screaming away from Christianity and have nothing to do with it. At least, I know it has this effect on me. I have called myself a non-Christian for the last twenty years largely because of this dynamic, in spite of my own Christian ancestry and heritage. It is too painful to deal with that horrific history without wanting to disassociate from it. But I am now seeking a way to heal. Not to heal from the history, in the sense of going into a denial of it, but to heal from the running away. Because I don't think we can heal from historical horrors, individually or collectively, by avoiding things. Just as we can't heal by avoiding or denying negative history and stories, neither can we heal by avoiding or denying positive history and stories. I believe that Christianity needs to encouraged in its process of growing out of exclusivism and into its own best and most loving self. We cannot help with that process by avoiding Christian myth altogether. I am becoming increasingly convinced that what we need most for our collective healing is to tell each other many stories. We need to tell Christian stories and Jewish stories. We need to tell historical stories and mythical stories. For our healing, for our sense of meaning, and for our sense of our place and purpose in the universe, stories of all kinds, profound, tragic, joyful, horrible, and loving, need to be felt and need to be shared. Amen.
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