"The German poet Heinrich Heine stood with a friend before the cathedral of Amiens in France.
"Tell me, Heinrich," said his friend, "why can't people build piles like this any more?"
"Replied Heine: "My dear friend, in those days people had convictions. We moderns have opinions. And it takes more than opinions to build a Gothic cathedral."[1]
Philosophers tell us we are in the post-modern era - what used to be certain is now uncertain. Our abiding faith in reason and science is being challenged by fundamentalists, political and religious. For many of us, the confidence of our convictions has been replaced by contradictory opinions and confusion.
This week I received a Washington Post article in the form of a memo from God to the Kansas Board of Education, which has dropped the teaching of evolution as a science requirement. While the whole memo is intriguing, these paragraphs stands out:
"The folks who wrote the Bible were smart and good people. Mostly, they got it right. But there were glitches. Imprecisions. For one thing, they said that Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel, and then Cain begat Enoch. How was that supposed to have happened? They left out Tiffany entirely! . . ." God concludes the memo: "Oh, wait. There's one more thing. Did you read in the newspapers how scientists in Australia dug up some rocks and found fossilized remains of life dating back further than ever before. Primitive, multicelled animals on Earth nearly 3 billion years ago, when the planet was nothing but roiling muck and ice and fire. And inside those cells was . . . DNA. Incredibly complex strands of chemicals, laced together in a scheme so sophisticated no one yet understands exactly how it works. I wonder who could have thought of something like that, back then. Just something to gnaw on."[2]
Lest we become too smug and self-satisfied with the superiority of the scientific theory of evolution over the literalistic claims of those who regard the Bible as the infallibly revealed word of God, consider these statements.
The great scientist Neils Bohr once told his students, "Every sentence that I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question." Max Born, Nobel-Prize winning German physicist, said, "I am convinced that ideas such as absolute certainties, absolute precision, final truth, etc., are phantoms which should be excluded from science."
The British mathematician Jacob Bronowsky wrote, "There is no absolute knowledge. . . . All information is imperfect."[3]
Two years ago Nicholas Gisin and his colleagues at the University of Geneva challenged parts of Albert Einstein's quantum theory of the subatomic world, in particular his contention that nothing travels faster than the speed of light.[4]
It all goes back to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which shook the foundations of science, and has spilled over into other fields as well. Truth is not really absolute. We live in a world of ultimate uncertainty.
If scientific truth, with its scientific method, replicable experiments and accumulation of facts is not absolute, then post-modernism has really compromised religion, which is more about convictions than facts. Some would say the Enlightenment is dead - or at least - under duress. Its promise is clouded by irrationality and fanaticism.
How could educated people like the Germans follow the evil Adolf Hitler? How do we rationally explain the killers of Kosovo and East Timor, the teen-age assassins of Columbine or the racist murderers of Texas?
In this sea of uncertainty fundamentalist religion and politics are thriving. When not only science, but politics, economics and ethics are in turmoil, it is appealing to cling to the certitude of the Bible as the revealed word of God, the divinity of Jesus or the latest guru of salvation.
For example, two years ago I received the following E-mail message, from rmundy@seidata.com, RJ Enterprises. The sender had evidently logged on to our church's Website: "As I was reading your pages, I was saddened with the blindness of your profession. There is really no need to try to get you to understand, for you have made up your mind that you are correct. I'm reminded of the passage in Proverbs, . . . 'there is a way that seems right unto man but the end thereof is death.' If you would look to the scriptures and honestly and openly ask God to show you the truth, He would. With a closed mind, no one can ever get through. Hope and pray you find the Truth, someday. It isn't what I believe but what the Bible says. Don't swallow some man's theology, but earnestly search the treasures of God's Word and see what it says about the Trinity, who Jesus was and what it means to be a Christian. I'll stop there. If you wish to dialog, . . . in searching for the truth, I'll be willing to do so. Best wishes in your search."[5]
But my electronic correspondent already has his mind made up of the absolute surety of his beliefs and my errors. My search must lead to his truth. I acknowledge the power of fundamentalist faith in the lives of millions, but I also know it is not my cup of theological tea. I respect his beliefs, but clearly he doesn't respect mine.
Neither does columnist George Will, who wrote a derisive column on "political Unitarianism,"[6] which he dismissed as "mild and inoffensive. . . the belief that there is at most one God. . . a salad bar." If he had parodied Judaism instead, he would stand accused of anti-Semitism. Apparently slighting Unitarianism was all right.
In my newsletter column response I asked him rhetorically, "Was it merely mild and inoffensive that Michael Servetus was put to the stake by John Calvin for his unitarianism? Was Unitarian Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence simply bland? Do you find a mere salad bar faith in the Florida Unitarian Universalist murdered at an abortion clinic defending a woman's right to choose?"
A few years ago church historian Martin Marty quoted The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier: "(Michael) Gorbachav's communism has a certain unitarian quality. It is theologically too paltry to support a religious war." Marty commented, "That's a nice compliment to Unitarians."[7] Well, maybe. Peace-loving, yes. Paltry? I don't think so.
Unitarian Universalism does, however, have a unique problem: how do we reconcile our cherished freedom of belief, without dogma or creed, and the human need for strongly held religious convictions? With our diversity of religious and political viewpoints, we pride ourselves on being able to agree to disagree agreeably. That is why I found amusing a cartoon of two men drinking coffee and talking in quite agitated tones. The one said to the other, rather angrily, "No. We can't agree to disagree."
People will not find infallible religious guidance in our midst. Some will say that the weakness of Unitarian Universalism is our unwillingness to submit to the authority of the bible or the clergy or the church - that each individual must build his or her own theology. This is thought to be the arrogance of our faith.
However, it seems to me both presumptuous and pretentious for anyone to claim infallibility in their faith. Why? Even if there are absolute truths in religion, how do we know if we have found them - unless we set ourselves up as infallible judge and jury - which would seem to smack of arrogance.
Take the parable of the three baseball umpires who were discussing how they call balls and strikes. The rookie umpire said "I call 'em as I see 'em." The somewhat more experienced umpire said "I call 'em as they are." The wily old veteran umpire said, "They ain't nothin' 'til I call 'em."
For a more serious - and biblical - example, consider the case of Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac in the Book of Genesis. In order to test Abraham's obedience, Yahweh commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Apparently without a word of protest or even a question, in blind obedience Abraham takes Isaac into the desert to sacrifice his beloved son when a voice tells him to stay his hand and slay the fatted ram, which conveniently appears out of the bushes. And they all lived happily ever after.
However, how does Abraham know whether the voice in the wilderness is Yahweh, God of Israel, or Moloch, the Canaanite god of fire to whom children were offered in sacrifice? Only Abraham himself can make that determination. He must decide which authority he will honor.
And so we, too, must ultimately choose our authority - whether it be the Pope, or the Bible or the church, or our own inner convictions. Only we can make this decision. This is the human predicament - we can never be sure we have absolute truth. We make our best judgments, try to correct our mistakes and move on.
Those of us who follow this line of logic and accept responsibility for discerning truth, beauty and goodness find ourselves in an awkward stance next to those who have already determined what constitutes this trinity of values. My E-mail friend has already concluded that the Bible is that source of authority. When we profess not to know the final truth, we are accused of relativism or worse.
We must then do our best with what information we have, apply our deepest values and make our hard choices. As one philosopher puts it, "If you're rational, morally sensitive, intellectually and spiritually honest, you're also confused. Theologians glorify the virtues of simply faith, but faith is never simple. . . . Moralists, too, always have clear-cut answers to ethical questions, but that's because they avoid complexity. If your values are open to other points of view, then you must expect to be bewildered on occasion. . . . Confusion is not the end of wisdom but the beginning of wisdom."[8]
I find this to be a hard, but satisfying way. Personally, I would rather live in humble uncertainty about the ultimate questions of life and death than in arrogant certainty that I have found the answer and must enlighten others who have not. That is a presumption I would not want to make.
Instead, I prefer to live in a community of truth and meaning seekers - in which we share what light we have found, acknowledge our limitations and support one another in our search. The communal nature of our theological method is aptly summarized in the African proverb, "I am because we are." Again, the African epigram, "It takes a whole village to raise a child," suggests that it takes a whole religious community to do theology.
And even though Governor Jesse Ventura says that organized religion is ". . . a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers,"[9] I still value that community of religious dialogue. It helps keep one humble - a trait that perhaps the good Governor might occasionally practice.
For example, I am not sure about the existence or the nature of God. My youthful image of God as the loving father has been replaced by a much more impersonal and mystical understanding of ultimate reality. Communications are no longer person-to-deity-and-back prayer, but a realization that revelation is not sealed - The beauty at the heart of being speaks to me in geese that unerringly mark the seasons with their glorious cry;
The truth is expressed as scientists uncover more and more wonders at the heart of the universe - in microcosm and macrocosm.
Goodness is expressed in the lives of those about me. As Abraham Joshua Heschel once pointed out - there are no adequate proofs for the existence of God - only witnesses to the power of love.
In our Building Your Own Theology seminar we have a session on God or Ultimate Reality. There the atheists and the agnostics will share their views with the Christians and the theists, while the humanists and the pagans listen and await their turn. Who is right? That is not the question, as if there were a universally valid right answer. Rather, I would ask how can we help each other to experience that ultimate reality in which we live and move and have our being? How does our God concept or our view of the cosmos affect our day-to-day living. If it does not, why have it?
One thing we can affirm. There is a reality greater than ourselves which sustains us, which in some mysterious way expresses itself in truth, beauty and goodness, which challenges our understanding in powerful ways. We probe at the edges of the mystery - seeking to discern its ultimate meaning, getting occasional glimpses, finding clues now and then, sharing insights and experiences, but the final veil is not drawn for us to witness ultimate truth. In the words of the liberal Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick, "Astronomies change but the stars abide."[10]
There are many images for this open-ended approach to doing theology. One is that of the spelunkers - those who explore caves. The spelunkers in Mammoth Cave Kentucky, before exploring unknown caverns, tie one end of a rope to an object outside. As they grope through the maze of passageways, they unwind the rope. Thus we need core commitments that are solid, not subject to fad or whim or caprice. From them we are free to explore the edges of our religious faith.
Or, we can in the words of one theologian "do theology like you do a crossword puzzle. First of all, you do it in pencil, because it is very arrogant to do it in pen. As you find out more, sometimes you have to change answers you thought you had. And sometimes you may never find the answer; sometimes you just have to live with the question."[11]
When we wrestle with the toughest theological questions, if we are utterly serious, we will often live in doubt. And, because of the pressures of those more sure than we of the right answers, we will be tempted to make pre-mature claims to truth.
One of the giant minds of this century, Christian theologian Paul Tillich, once warned that the search for truth may be "silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority. . . Don't give in too quickly to those who want to alleviate your anxiety about truth. Don't be seduced into a truth which is not really your own . . . even if the seducer is your church."[12] "The castle of undoubted certitude is not built on the rock of reality."[13]
At such times we will need to have the courage of our confusions - the courage to acknowledge we do not know everything, that we are not always sure, but that we can live with that uncertainty, struggle with that ambiguity, find meaning in the struggle and live out our lives with the confidence of the convictions we have. Ours is a spirituality of risk - not for the timid of heart and mind and spirit.
If we are serious theologically we will pencil in our best insights, our noblest aspirations, our deepest convictions, and will live by them until the school of experience teaches us a better way. We will live, as Tillich puts it, oscillating somewhere between "ecstatic confidence and despairing doubt."[14] We who choose the Unitarian Universalist way in religion will occupy the daunting, but exciting, space between the confidence of our convictions and the courage of our confusions. We will experience what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the choice between truth and repose and be candidates for truth.
I leave you with the story of a small girl's postscript to her bedtime prayer, with her grandfather, a Unitarian Universalist minister, at her side: ". . . and please God, give that I may stick up for myself, and not to believe that I am wrong when I am right, and not to be disturbed unless it is very, very important."[15]
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