A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation.
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Last week, during the section of the Sunday morning service of mindful meditation, music and conversation, at the point when we celebrate an important date from the 460+ year long history of the Unitarian tradition, I noted in passing something important about in what our creative, inquiring, free and liberative religious/spiritual tradition truly consists — something that, alas, can easily be obscured especially when we look back to our initial years of existence. Anyway, a couple of you asked me to expand a bit upon this thought, hence this thought for the day.
But the difficulty of doing this is rooted in the fact that we began, without any shadow of doubt or ambiguity, as a radical, protestant Christian church whose first members were, primarily, protesting against the doctrine of the Trinity — a doctrine which defines one God as existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit. Antoher way of saying this is to say, three distinct persons (hypostases) sharing one essence/substance/nature (homoousion). Now, this extraordinarily complex theory — which only become a doctrine of the church and characteristic of the religious tradition known as Christianity some three centuries after the Jesus’ life and death — this doctrine struck our forebears as not only something in which Jesus did not believe but which could also not be found in the Biblical text — their authoritative, foundational text. Consequently, they desired to promote instead, in a variety of nuanced ways, a religion based on their own doctrinally expressed belief that God was one — hence they were called “Unitarian” rather than “Trinitarian” — and that Jesus was himself a human being like us. He was our brother, a human being who was, perhaps, a messiah, a prophet or exemplar, but who, most certainly, was not God.
But, in addition to this doctrinal aspect, because holding and promoting a Unitarian Christian, rather than a Trinitarian Christian view of God and Jesus was deemed dangerously heretical by the main Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic church, severe persecution, and sometimes execution, all too often followed. Consequently, it’s vital to understand that our tradition, from the outset, also began to promote the idea of tolerance in matters of belief, which may be summed up in the much later phrase, “We need not think alike to love alike.” And, as Charles W. Eliot, a key American Unitarian, said in 1893, for us, religious toleration was “the most precious fruit of the past four centuries.”
OK, so far so good. But, as our nascent, creative, inquiring, free and liberative religious/spiritual Unitarian tradition began slowly to unfold across generations and geography from the 16th century onwards — a geography which eventually came to include non-Christian cultures such as Hindu India and Buddhist & Shinto Japan — to those with the time, inclination and wherewithal directly to study the historical sources it also began to become clearer and clearer that what lay at the heart of the Unitarian tradition was not doctrine at all, Christian or otherwise, but something else, something far, far more precious. So what was our movement’s precious, beating heart, our unique way of being in the world?
Well, the person to turn to here is the genuinely great Unitarian historian Earl Morse Wilbur (1886-1956) who, in his Berry Street Essay of 1920 called “The Meaning and Lessons of Unitarian History” [the full text of this can be found at the end of this post] in which he tried to give an historically informed overview of what it was he saw lying at the heart of the Unitarian movement which gave it “its significance in religious history,” and which he thought “must still largely direct it to-day, unless indeed we are to assume for it a future development which shall make a violent break with its past.” It was, by the way, Wilbur who coined the motto, Freedom, Reason and Tolerance.
Although he acknowledge that, at first sight, Unitarian history might appear to teach us “the principal meaning of the movement has been a purely doctrinal one and that the goal we have aimed at has been nothing more remote than that of winning the world to acceptance of one form of doctrine rather than another,” the truth was very different. Wilbur’s extensive and thorough researches helped him to see that if Unitarian Christian doctrine were all the movement had been about then, it was already finished. However, after carefully and deeply studying the movement, Wilbur felt sure that the “doctrinal aspect” of our churches could be seen as being only “a temporary phase” and that Unitarian doctrines were only “a sort of by-product of a larger movement, whose central motive has been the quest for spiritual freedom.”
And, with this insight we arrive at what Wilbur thought was our movement’s beating heart, our unique way of being in the world. Indeed, Wilbur’s Berry Street essay begins with a clear statement of his belief “that the keyword to our whole history . . . is the word complete spiritual freedom.”
But this, of course, does not answer the question of to what end this freedom was to be employed. Well, for Wilbur, and indeed for me — and here I cannot but sense Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influence — our freedom was to be employed to help each individual human soul, without exception, to experience the genuine opportunity to come face to face, “at first hand,” with the Ground of Being which, in his essay, Wilbur simply names God, but which may also be gestured towards by countless other names, whether the Spirit of Life, the Light, Allah, Hashem, Brahman, Buddha-nature, or deus sive natura. This kind of freedom is what Wilbur thinks is “the fundamental quality of true Mysticism,” and it is clear that he feels, in the end, we are to be characterised as a mystical tradition, albeit of a rational and free-thinking kind which never loses sight of the need always to be drawing upon sound historical and scientific evidence as much as upon our personal, direct religious experiences.
Now, holding all this in mind, let me now turn to the penultimate paragraph of Wilbur’s 1920 essay in which he says the following:
“But if, as I have tried to make clear, the doctrinal aspect [of the Unitarian movement] is but a temporary phase, and if Unitarian doctrines are only a sort of by-product of a larger movement, whose central motive has been the quest for spiritual freedom, then our work is not yet finished; in fact, we have thus far done hardly more, as we have removed the obstacles which dogma had put in our way, than clear the decks for the great action to follow.”
Again, I agree with him, but this immediately raises the question of what is “the great action to follow”?Here we run into what I think is the major, if perfectly understandable and forgivable, problem with Wilbur’s essay. Like each of us in our own ways — and lest it be unclear, I am absolutely including myself in this — Wilbur’s vision was limited. In 1920, he simply could not see beyond the admirable form of liberal Unitarian Christianity in which he lived, moved and had his being, and so his essay concludes as follows:
“Our vital task still remains, in common with that which falls to every other Christian church, the task of inspiring Christian characters and moulding Christian civilization, the task of making men and society truly Christian, the task of organizing the kingdom of heaven upon earth.”
We see that the decks of the ship that he thought needed clearing were Christian decks. That was and remains an important task. But, today, the ship upon which our creative, inquiring, free and liberative religious or spiritual community is currently journeying — our raft to the other shore if you like — although some of the planks that make up its deck are, indeed, gratefully taken from the liberal Christian tradition, many of them now come from the Buddhist tradition, whilst still others come from Hindu, European Radical Enlightenment, humanist, idealist pantheistic/panentheistic and religious naturalistic traditions, and many, many more besides. Ours is a syncretic ship for sure, and it is one that, even as it remains consistent with the historical Unitarian tradition, is now something that transcends even the raft that was once called “Unitarianism.” For ours is a raft upon which we are seeking a way of being religious and spiritual that is beyond any -ism.
So, in the hope the Wilbur would understand why, I want to conclude by radically rewriting his concluding paragraph something like this, and with it I leve you today:
“Our vital task still remains, in common with that which falls to every other spiritual community, the task of inspiring all humans and all kinds of human civilizations, the task of making all people and all societies truly creative, inquiring, freeing and liberating so that, together, we can set about the task of organising the ideal cooperative community in this, our most beautiful, but often bruised and hurting world.”
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A short, but important postscript
In the preceding piece I hope it is clear that I agree with Wilbur that the keyword to the whole of Unitarian history is the word complete spiritual freedom. Like him, I strongly feel that this must still largely direct it to-day, unless indeed we are to assume for it a future development which shall make a violent break with its past.
However, it deeply saddens me to see that, in the United States, the Unitarian Universalist Association, has begun a major process of reformation that is increasingly looking very much like a violent break with its past. Indeed, since 2019, a number of my own American liberal religious friends and associates have found it necessary to leave the Association. Even more sadly, some have been “disfellowshiped” — in other words, excommunicated. In it’s national, denominational institutions and structures, thanks to major revisions to its Article II, finally passed at its General Assembly in June 2024, it seems to have rejected the general characteristics of the Unitarian tradition famously summed up by Wilbur in his magisterial, “A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents,” as consisting in “complete mental freedom in religion rather than bondage to creeds or confessions; the unrestricted use of reason in religion, rather than reliance upon external authority or past tradition; and generous tolerance of differing religious views and usages rather than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or polity” (Earl Morse Wilbur, “A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents,” Harvard University Press, 1947, p. 5).
It’s a salutary reminder, should any be needed, that, today, all over the world, in all kinds of organisations that once liked to proclaim they were liberal, and promoted freedom, reason and tolerance, are now becoming profoundly illiberal by promoting forms of restrictive ideology, unreason and intolerance.
In other words, the decks of many, once liberal ships are becoming crowded again with all the unhelpful and dangerous clutter that our forebears spent centuries clearing away.
