Living Faith
This year marks the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the First Congress of The International Council of Unitarian and Other Liberal Religious Thinkers and Workers. Hosted in London (26 May—3 June 1901), it was one of the first recorded interfaith meetings in the UK. Unitarians, Free Christians, and Ethical Religionists, met with contacts made at the first World’s Parliament of Religions (Chicago, 1893) from non-Christian religious traditions, including Jews and a representative of the progressive Hindu Brahmo Samaj movement. From Russia, a friend and ally of Tolstoy, Vladimir Tchertkoff, came to address the conference. (Tolstoy had recently been excommunicated by an Orthodox Church Synod (22 February 1901 and had written a widely-reported reply, 4 April 1901.)
The Council aimed to foster cooperation among those committed to reason, conscience, and moral autonomy; to promote free and progressive religion in light of religious modernism; and to resist dogmatism, creedal orthodoxy, and ecclesiastical authoritarianism. The first president, Unitarian Joseph Estlin Carpenter (1844-1927), chaired the Congress. He was a scholar of biblical studies, an expert in Sanskrit, and a pioneer in the study of comparative religion, building on foundations recently laid by Max Miller and others. He spoke of ‘the liberal faith’, understanding it as one that transcended religious boundaries.
The Congress was significant in treating religion as a cultural phenomenon to be understood in terms of ethical commitment and social responsibility, rather than as belief in revelation, incarnation, or supernatural intervention. Theistic belief in God was regarded as optional, while ethical and spiritual life were affirmed as human achievements. The Congress can be seen as a turning point between nineteenth-century liberal Christianity and twentieth-century religious humanism, as evidenced by the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, that promoted humanism as a “religion of the future”.
If religions are understood as disparate static “faiths”, defined by beliefs and practices, then this early meeting of religions might be seen more as a loss-of-faith dialogue than an inter-faith dialogue. This raises the question of what is faith, relating to the theme of this issue.
Faith and Reason
Thomas Aquinas’ theology is rightly taken to be an attempt to overcome the opposition between a rationalism that trusts only reason as a foundation for beliefs, and a fideism that holds beliefs only by faith, a decision or an act of will, despite evidence or reason. Lewis Carroll’s Queen satirised fideism as believing ‘as many as six impossible things before breakfast’ (Through the Looking Glass, Ch. 5). However, Aquinas held that the faculties of will and reason complement each other. Aquinas understood revelation to be both natural (in the natural world) and supernatural (in scripture and tradition). Where reason leads to knowledge of natural revelation, faith can complement reason by looking to the revelation of scripture and tradition. But crucially, as the truths of faith and the truths of reason cannot contradict one another, reason can and should always correct faith — for example, by showing where scripture is misinterpreted if a metaphor or parable is taken literally.
This does not imply that faith is merely a means of ascent to belief propositions unknowable by reason, because faith (a faculty of will) is disposition to act, in love, charity and holiness, hence is a virtue.
In a gloss on the claim, ‘Faith without works is dead’ (James 2. 10) Aquinas distinguishes between living faith, which acts, and dead faith, which doesn’t. A living faith is a theological virtue in that our acts are infused with love and directed toward happiness, which is union with God, for Aquinas. The commitment to love (informed by scripture and tradition, but interpreted by reason) should challenge both rationalism and dead faith.
Learning from history, sociology, and dialogue, members of the 1901 Congress came to see religious traditions as a cultural phenomenon. They also came also to understand ‘liberal religion’ as prioritising mutual respect, ethical commitment and social responsibility, over belief. In Aquinas’ light, this ought to seen as a critical and evolving ‘living faith’, emerging from the fruits of interfaith dialogue, the social sciences, and the reflection of reason. Such a living faith, centred on ethics, was later variously explored by Don Cupitt, Hans Kung (‘Declaration Toward a Global Ethic’ 1983), and Karen Armstrong (‘Charter of Compassion’ 2008) among others. It continues to be explored by the Sea of Faith today.
Faith in this Life – Contributions
In this edition Łukasz Liniewicz writes on the work of The International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF), an evolution of the International Council of Unitarian and Other Liberal Religious Thinkers and Workers. Also, Sister Isabel Smyth shares her experience of working in Interfaith dialogue, and how this informed her own faith. John Billings also asks what contemporary responses to trans lives reveals about faith today.
Simon Cross — a minister, writer, and Chair of Progressive Christianity Network Britain — reflects on faith in his life. Formerly the ‘Religion in my Life’ column, this regular column is being restyled as ‘Lived Religion’, to more clearly link to the developing inter-disciplinary field of study of lived religion, which is introduced on p. 8.
Dave Francis and Denise Cush continue our theme of Faith in this Life with a special two part series navigating Religion and Worldviews Education. A new column, ‘Network matters’, will regularly reflect on the charitable work of the Network. This edition considers the role of the magazine and its purpose, in light of the charitable objectives of the network and changes that have been taking place in religious studies. Longer than the column will usually be, I outline the approach that as editor I will take, and share it in the hope that it will help shape our thinking and offers of future articles.
Finally, while we continue to look for an arts editor, I offer a brief reflection on Saint Sofia and her daughters, Saints Faith Hope and Love. I thank my predecessor David Chapman for his highly-valued work on Sofia, and extend very warm thanks to all contributors to the magazine — from those within the network and those beyond — who support our educational work by writing articles for Sofia. Thank you!
Notes:
- The Humanist Manifest of 1933 was printed in SoF 21 (1995), pp. 7-8. Available online.
Faith, according to Alan Watts (1915-1973)
Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, if you go stiff and tight in the water you sink. You have to relax. Thusly, the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, of holding on. In other words, a person who is a fanatic in religion, one who simply has to believe in certain propositions about the nature of God and of the universe is a person who has no faith at all — [s]he’s holding on tight.
— Alan Watts, The Essence of Alan Watts (Celestial Arts, 1974) p. 37.