Related organisations and groups
Many of our members are also members or attendees of:
- Nontheist Quakers
- Progressive Christianity Network Britain
- Humanists UK
- Free To Believe
- Conway Hall Ethical Society
SoF and the Quaker Tradition
The Sea of Faith Network draws on a wide variety of religious and humanist traditions – but how much do we know about traditions other than those we happen to be born into or find ourselves at home in? This is the first of a series of articles on some of the streams which feed the Sea of Faith, each written from within the tradition in question. David Boulton has written widely on Quaker history and his forthcoming book “In Fox’s Footsteps” relates Fox’s seventeenth century theology to the radical non-realist theology of the late twentieth century.
The Quaker movement was a direct product of the English civil wars of the 1640s and the republican experiment of the 1650s. Before the breakdown of the old order in 1642, England was a totalitarian state with only one lawful church: the Church of England. The king’s subjects belonged to the Church, paid tithes and other compulsory taxes to the Church, worshipped as prescribed by the Church, had their transgressions punished by Church courts, and, of course, were baptised, married and buried by the Church. They were ruled by the Lord’s anointed, king and Head of the Church.
When king and parliament parted company, this monolith collapsed. As in eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was suddenly not just freedom but a cacophony of free expression. Religious censorship was effectively abolished along with the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Bishops, church courts, and the Church of England itself. New sects came and went. The Quakers came, and stayed.
George Fox was one of a number of radical dissenters who took advantage of the new and short-lived freedoms. Travelling through the Yorkshire Dales and the southern Lake District in 1652, he encountered an organised group of separatists calling themselves Seekers. They were seeking a charismatic leader, he a following. They got together, and the Quaker movement achieved lift-off.
Early Quakers – so-called by their detractors because of the way they quivered with charismatic enthusiasm – had a number of distinctive beliefs. They valued the Bible (and knew it better than most), but denied the orthodox Protestant view that it constituted an infallible authority. Their ultimate authority was their “inward light”, the light of conscience. Samuel Fisher subjected scripture to scholarly analysis, inventing Biblical criticism one and a half centuries before the German liberals. Gerard Winstanley taught that God was Reason, Rhys Jones that it wasn’t necessary to believe in an historical Jesus. George Fox derided churches as “steeple-houses” and priests and ministers as “hirelings”. Above all, Fox taught that there was “that of God in everyone”: in Don Cupitt’s words, he “sought to bring spiritual power down from heaven and disperse it into human hearts”.
Early Quakers were very political. They shared Cromwell’s republicanism, and many of them served in his armies until they were kicked out as suspected subversives. They did not embrace pacifism till after the Restoration, when renunciation of arms was embraced not only as an inescapable implication of loving one’s enemies and turning the other cheek – Jesus of Nazareth’s most revolutionary teaching, never taken seriously by the church – but also a piece of shrewd politics.
They were social radicals. Edward Billing warned that there “would never be a good world as long as there was a lord in England”, defining lords as “the whole rabble of Duke, Marquesse, Lord, Knight, Gentleman”. Fox also pamphleteered against the class enemy, those who “cumbred the ground”, who were “harlotted from the truth, and such gets the earth under their hands, commons, wastes and forest, and fells and mores and mountains, and lets it lie waste, and calls themselves Lords of it, and keeps it from the people, when so many are ready to starve and beg”. And he had a remedy: take into public ownership all former monastic properties, great private estates, church glebe lands, and – a nice touch this – turn Whitehall into a hostel for the homeless. Lords should be dispossessed of their manors, parsons of their tithes.
Small wonder the Quakers were bitterly persecuted when the 1660 counter-revolution restored king, lords and bishops! Sweet revenge! But, responding to the moral imperative they called God, Friends (their own preferred name for themselves) organised England’s first nonviolent mass civil disobedience movement against tithes and military taxes. Most important of all, they went to jail in their thousands campaigning publicly, relentlessly, non-violently and quite unlawfully for “toleration”: the right to believe, act and worship according to conscience. Fox just lived to see the passing of the Toleration Acts before he died in 1691. They were his and his Friends’ lasting legacy to subsequent generations, for they opened the way to a new world of religious and political freedom and pluralism, a world which, in the West, we have long taken for granted, but a world long resisted by those who stood to lose their ancient monopoly of power – not least the established Church of England.
Quakerism turned in on itself after the achievement of Toleration, becoming obsessed with distinctive modes of speech and dress – “a silly poor gospel” as Fox’s widow complained – and shaking off its earlier radicalism till its rediscovery and revival a hundred years ago.
Today’s Religious Society of Friends sits loose to all dogma. It has no creed or formulation of faith. The Society acknowledges its Christian roots, and most Quakers would probably call themselves Christians, but rejection of the Christian label is no bar to either full membership or the half-way-house membership of “registered Attenders”. There are Quaker Buddhists, Quaker agnostics, Quaker atheists and Quaker universalists. There are even Anglican priests like Paul Ostreicher in full membership, which must make George Fox turn in his grave.
These very different outlooks do create tensions within the Society, and these tensions have tended to grow as non-Christian or post-Christian ideas have gained greater visibility. It was easy for the Christian majority to tolerate radical and even bizarre minorities in their midst- “See how tolerant we are!” -but it is harder when the minorities use their freedom to voice their own insights, and perhaps cease to be minorities! How the Society copes with its diversity will be one of its greatest tests in the next decade.
A great strength is the fact that the Society’s unity (it has avoided the major splits which divided American Quakerism into competing sects) is dependent not on doctrinal agreement but on common practice: the form of the weekly “meeting for worship”. As is well known, there is no liturgy. Each meeting begins in silence, and sometimes the silence is maintained for the full hour. More often, someone, anyone, (women, of course, as often as men, for women shared in the “priesthood of all believers” from the outset) will stand and speak, sharing a thought, a reading, an idea, with the rest of the meeting. Prior preparation of spoken contributions is discouraged. Speakers rise “as the spirit moves them”, which some interpret as the prompts of a “real” God, and others as a metaphor. Similarly, some think of themselves as offering worship to a “real” God, others as celebrating human values, “things of worth”. All emphasise that “the fruits of the spirit” are more important than its definition: deeds rather than creeds.
It is not difficult to see why the Society – like SOF – has become something of a refuge for those fleeing the churches but reluctant to abandon all religious links. In this sense it is hardly surprising that several Quakers have joined SOF, and some members of SOF have found a spiritual home among Friends. Certainly SOF ideas are beginning to get an airing, if not always a welcome, in Friends’ meetings and journals. The Friend has published articles expressing SOF ideas, which invariably attract both polite Quakerly denunciations and letters of support in its correspondence columns; the Friends Quarterly has been asking “Is God Real?”; and the Universalist, journal of the Quaker Universalist Group, has run pro and con pieces. I have been asked to talk about SOF at this year’s Quaker Universalist Group conference, and the Quaker Theology Group has commissioned a paper on “non-realism” from another of our members. There’s a SOF buzz in the S of F!
If George Fox and his fellow men and women on the Reformation Left were concerned to “bring power down from heaven and disperse it into human hearts”, that’s also at the very heart of the Sea of Faith project. Our annual conferences usually contain Quaker “worship”, not for sectarian reasons but because the democracy, openness and spontaneity of the Quaker ritual is clearly appropriate to SOF universalism. Similarly, our steering committee meetings open with silence and try to appropriate some of the consensual methods of Quaker decision-making (not always successfully, but that’s just as true of the Quakers!).
SoFers for whom the greatest appeal of religious culture is the glory of the music, poetry and art of the great traditions would probably find Quakerism drab. But there are no Popes, no Bishops of Chichester, and therefore no Anthony Freemans in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
SoF and the Roman Tradition
The second in our series on some of the streams which feed the Sea of Faith, written from within the tradition in question. John Challenor is Chair of Catholics for a Changing Church, which works for change and renewal “as envisioned by the Second Vatican Council”
A young RC priest came to the 1994 SoF conference. Two senior priests who read about this in the Sunday Times wrote forceful letters of complaint to Cardinal Hume… This tells us there are catholics for and catholics against SoF. (Sadly, there are many more who have never heard of it). The story also reveals one face of catholic authority – the doleful man (always a man, up to now) in the cross-fire between opposing parties. Catholics are a mixed lot, and we can be very disputatious.
Most SoF members, sitting on the beaches of their Sea, reading their magazine, will look behind at the distant landscape of catholic tradition and see a waterless wilderness of rock and sand and scorching winds. At one level, they will be right. There is precious little thinking in the statute-book of official pronouncements.
At another level, they will be wrong. Official pronouncements have their place, of course. But in Thatcher’s Britain, social and community life went on, and in John Paul II’s church religious and intellectual life go on. Conditions vary, from more favourable to less – but the opposition, the minority, carries on. A second look reveals the streams we are looking for, running half hidden in valleys, sometimes even underground.
The principle stream is called the Negative Way. We can speak of God truly, literally, only by using negatives. God is not this, not that, not any thing we can know. If we say God is love, or our Father, using affirmative language, we are far away in the realm of metaphor, image and analogy. So there is an inescapable element of agnosticism here, and on this basis there is within Catholicism a tradition of apophaticism, or verbal silence, which calls God ineffable (a negative, beyond words) – and acts accordingly.
Denys the Areopagite was the early spokesman for the apophatic mystical tradition. Denys was a sixth century Greek or Syrian monk who gave his writings extra weight by purporting to be the man St Paul converted in Athens (Acts XVII.34). For Denys, God is not an object or distinct reality but a mystery, beyond words and reasoning. A ninth century Celtic monk, Erigena, spread Denys’s teaching in Western Europe. Abbot Symeon (early eleventh century) took it further in the East, saying we know God not as an objective fact but as a subjective personal enlightenment.
The Church’s division in 1054 into Eastern “Orthodox” and Western “Catholic” was caused in part by the Eastern stress on apophaticism and their deep dislike of Western rationalistic, university-based Scholasticism. In particular, the West had decided that the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the Father only but from the Son as well (Filioque) – as if to know the private life of God. Easterners were outraged.
Scholasticism declined, monastic theology re-emerged in the West, and mysticism flourished again between 1300 and 1600 in Eckhart, Gertrude, Tauler and Suso in Germany; in Rolle, Hilton and Dame Julian of Norwich in Britain; in Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross in Spain. The mystics, as “workers at the coal-face” in the matter of knowing God, deserve to be listened to. They journeyed to the outermost edge, and to the innermost centre, suffering long and painfully, and they reported finding darkness, emptiness and silence – together with ecstasy, tranquillity and love. The official church harassed them as subversives. Eckhart was on trial for heresy when he died in 1327. He was rehabilitated by the Roman bureaucracy in 1980.
The Reformation, by its successful protest, put the Roman Catholic Church on the defensive. Whereas before about 1550 the catholic leadership had welcomed the new cultural movement of the Renaissance, and promoted a more humanist version of Christian teaching, after 1550 it rejected Galileo and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth. With John Paul II, a Pole from a culture which experienced the coming of modernity only at second-hand, the church is still busily defending the old order, the supernatural, and the Supreme Being Out There.
That said, the Second Vatican Council of 1962-5, called by Pope John XXIII, did agree on a change of course for the Catholic Church. Catholics were to abandon their defensive mentality, value non-Christian religions positively, respect the rights of conscience and religious freedom, and – observing the “signs of the times” reformulate beliefs in a way the modern world could understand. The programme has not yet been put into effect. Pope John fell sick and died in the Council’s first year, and his project was resisted by a determined minority opposed to change. But a General Council of the Church represents a powerful stream of tradition, even if for a time it is forced underground.
In a lecture entitled “Rediscovering God” given in Leuven, Belgium, in 1990, the catholic theologian Hans Kung said that for many catholics now suffering in our institutional crisis, the mystical way is the way forward. “It seems to be the way to escape from the doctrines which paralyse traditional religion, the institutional weight of inherited Christianity, without giving up religion. It looks like an opportunity to abandon traditional Western religion without sinking into a spiritual vacuum”. The upsurge of courses in self-awareness, relaxation, spirituality, meditation and so on is significant. Meditation is leading us “not into a religious world ‘above’ or ‘behind’ reality but into the inner world, the depths… to fullness, in Hinduism, or emptiness, in Buddhism”.
Kung’s generalisations can be illustrated by a particular example – the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. He was, from 1941, a Cistercian, based in a monastery in Kentucky, USA. He became, with special permissions, a hermit, an author of best-selling books, and a travelling lecturer. Born in Europe in 1915, he died in Thailand in 1968, electrocuted by touching a faulty table-lamp. In sharing with the world the fruits of his contemplation, he and his abbot were following the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, who said the highest form of Christian life is not contemplation alone, or action alone, but a combination of the two – what some Catholics today call praxis.
In his biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Michael Mott records that Merton was in Asia building bridges between his own apophatic mystical tradition and the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism. One of the best and clearest expositions of the apophatic tradition is given in Merton’s essay “D.T.Suzuki: the Man and his Work”, printed in “Zen and the Birds of Appetite”.
Was Merton on the way to the Sea of Faith when he met his sudden death? Discuss, with reference to his works!
SoF and the Humanist Tradition
The third in the series of articles looking at the relationship between SoF and other religions is by Margaret Chisman, a member of several humanist organisations and author of ‘The Weekend Haiku Book’
One of the streams that feed the Sea of Faith is itself quite a large river. Humanism is a system of belief and behaviour which developed in the West from the philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome, the modern Renaissance and Enlightenment, the scientific and political revolutions, and the growth of liberty, equality and fraternity. Its theory is based on the assumption that this life and this world is all we know and on the assertion that the most important factor in all our thought and action is our common humanity. Its practice is based on the steady decline of organised religion and the general secularisation of society.
Various organisations have been formed at different times calling themselves secularist or rationalist or ethical or humanist and filling various functions within the general area of free-thought. These – now all under the same roof in Bradlaugh House, Theobalds Road, London WC1 – are linked by a strong liaison committee.
Of the four main humanist organisations the Ethical Society is the oldest. It developed from a radical religious congregation in the late 18th century, gradually abandoning theism and religious forms and eventually acquiring the status of a non-religious charity. It is now a cultural social organisation whose chief objects are the study and dissemination of ethical principles, the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of education in fields relevant to these objects.
Its meetings comprise classes and discussions and a traditional Sunday morning talk at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1, by one of its Appointed Lecturers and guest speakers as well as the annual Conway Memorial Lecture. Other activities include the Sunday evening chamber-music concerts and acting as host to other humanist organisations. Its journal The Ethical Record appears monthly.
The Ethical Society invited Anthony Freeman to give a personal testimony at Conway Hall about his experiences as a result of the publication of his book God in Us: a Case for Christian Humanism. One of his phrases I found particularly helpful was that he practised “reverent agnosticism” .
The committee of the Ethical Society also invited the Central London SoF group to hold its monthly meetings in one of the rooms at Conway Hall free of charge.
The National Secular Society, formed in the l9th century, aimed to unite the various secular societies which had developed from the Owenite and Chartist movements. It still retains some of the robustness of their down-to-earth character as the most militant element in the humanist movement.
It campaigns for the promotion of free-thought, civil liberties and rational ethics, for the rights of minorities, race and sex equality, and on many other urgent social issues. It publishes a monthly magazine, The Freethinker.
The Rationalist Press Association was formed in 1899 by a group of freethinkers as a publishing organisation producing magazines, books, pamphlets and leaflets on all subjects of interest to the general cause of free thought. Its distinctive feature is its commitment to the principle of rationalism – defined as the mental attitude which accepts the primacy of reason – and it aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority. It publishes the quarterly New Humanist and an occasional Rationalist Review.
The British Humanist Association, formed in the 1960s and recognised since 1981 as a non-religious charity, is concerned with moral issues from a non-religious point of view and with the achievement of a more open, just and caring society. It seeks to put an alternative moral view of current personal and social issues.
Among the BHA’s most influential work since its formation has been that in the field of religious education, and much has been done to encourage progress away from dogmatic instruction and towards an objective, fair and balanced system.
The BHA also plays an important part in arranging humanist naming ceremonies, weddings and funerals. It holds a well-attended annual conference and publishes Humanist News quarterly. There are many local groups. Most meet at least once a month for intellectual or social activities.
In most human groupings, members’ beliefs and activities fall between the ends of a spectrum. The humanist movement is no exception: it is sometimes humorously stated that if there were ten humanists in a room there would be eleven different opinions. However, most are in agreement that there is no god or gods, that we have to solve our human problems by our own efforts, and we must seek meaning and purpose for ourselves. Life should be lived with the aid of reason, not relying on any supernatural aid.
Members’ interests and activities are varied, some concentrating on seeking to obtain full freedom for and acceptance of atheism, others preferring to contribute to working parties gathering data for presentation to appropriate government committees. Yet others are keen to train as officiants for the ever-increasing demand for humanist funerals, weddings and naming ceremonies.
I have been a member of all four organisations for over 30 years and have done my stint on various committees, having at one time the responsibility of organising the annual Summer School for the BHA. Being a humanist has invigorated my outlook and brought me many deep and lasting friendships. In 1965 I felt the movement needed a world-wide symbol and a resolution was passed at the BHA AGM calling for a competition. The winning entry, based on the letter H, has won international recognition and is sometimes known as “the Happy Humanist”.
The question is, What attracted me to the Sea of Faith? Indeed, this can also be asked of church attenders! Is it that we feel that something is wrong or lacking in our long-standing affiliations? Or is it even more difficult to describe: a wordless feeling of something about to come to life?
I feel that what SoF is providing is not in conflict with my humanist views. It can be likened to going beyond the range of the spectrum and seeing ultra-violet or infra-red as different colours – or as if echoes of some new and vital insights are sounding just out of hearing range.
I see a similar dawning awareness of something waiting to be born in discussions in other organisations about the nature of spirituality. This ferment reminds me of the work a distinguished humanist, Margaret Knight, did thirty-odd years ago in her book and broadcast Morals Without Religion.
She pointed out that the ecclesiastical establishment arrogated to itself the entirety of morality. All morality was church morality and non-believers were ipso facto without morals. Along with some other humanists, I am contending that the concept of spirituality must be seen in the same way as Margaret Knight saw morality.
Our struggle is more difficult because there are two different words available: religion and morality. We, now, have to hack our way through a jungle of religious spirituality and non-religious spirituality. In fact, the situation, ironically, is that many humanists view spirituality much as churchgoers viewed morality – as if there were no secular equivalent.
I contend that humanists must insist that spirituality is not the exclusive terrain of the churches and religion. To refuse to acknowledge that this aspect of our lives applies equally – if not more so – to humanism is to ignore an essential component part of the intrinsic nature of all humans.
What is the way forward? We have the enormous task of constructing a non-religious spirituality. I meet many people who are not consciously either humanist or religious, and I gather that they too feel that something new, fresh and life-giving is needed to combat the stale and engulfing climate of consumerism. Many agree that we need to devote deep and urgent attention to the development of a non-religious spirituality. I believe that the Sea of Faith Network is one of the most promising and helpful groupings to aid us in this search.
SoF and the Buddhist Tradition
Mark Rivett offers a very personal view
At the end of an inter-religious conference, the chairperson made his final speech: “We have shared a great deal of information during our time together, and I am sure that everyone here will now go back to their communities and seek to do God’s will in their own ways. I will of course continue to do His will in His way”.
From its beginnings in “the debate about Christ” to Don Cupitt’s stunning TV series I have watched with interest as a non-realist interpretation of faith emerged within Christianity. As an outsider, hearing and reading the Sea of Faith thinkers I have almost been able to see how the label “Christian” could once more apply to myself.
I say “outsider” and “almost” because ten years ago I converted to Buddhism. On reflection my search for a personally meaningful spirituality had many of the same drives that have led radical Christians to reinterpret their religion in a humanist, non-supernatural way. Now, I can begin to appreciate that in my own understanding of my religion I am using, more and more, the insights derived from these radical Christians. Not surprisingly, I would welcome the chance to share with these Christians who are endeavouring a similar pursuit.
I must add, however, that these are purely personal musings and although my religious practice stems from Zen Buddhism I would not claim that my views are orthodox. Nor am I a theologian and those who are more studied in these matters may disagree with my interpretations. However since the whole thrust of radical Christianity is the creation of religion, moment by moment, into a personal instrument for meaning, I will not apologise on this score. I should also state that my comments about Buddhism may imply uniformity within the religion. This is obviously not so. Indeed the varieties of Buddhism may exceed those of Christianity.
Don Cupitt has written that “Western thought has nowhere left to go except towards Buddhism – but we must get there from Christian premises”. There are a number of intrinsic features that make Buddhism as a religion much more open to a radical interpretation than Christianity. Firstly, historically the Buddha insisted upon his humanity and denied any theistic interpretation to his life. His role was of a teacher or guide; he did not come bearing other-worldly promises of salvation.
What persists in bemusing Christians was the Buddha’s total indifference to the existence of “God”. Indeed the Buddha believed that talk about God was like a man shot with an arrow who, rather than pulling it out, wanted to know who shot him, why and from where. Thus the facts of this existence demanded an earthly response and only human beings relying on their everyday experience could make this response.
Lastly, although the Buddha described ways for human beings to cope with the meaninglessness of life (I would argue that Buddhism is a truly existentialist religion), he consistently put the onus of this onto the individual. On his death bed he exhorted his followers to find their own answers: “Seek out your own salvation with diligence!”. A similar theme suffuses Zen: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”.
In the first SOF magazine, C.B Spurgin reported a definition of a radical Christian in ways that can apply equally to a Buddhist. Both regard supernatural notions as valueless, are uninterested in how the world began, do not believe that “souls” endure or exist and regard religion as a human creation. On Spurgin’s other points: that a radical Christian denies all concept of other-worldly punishment or reward and that inspired writings are written by ordinary human beings, I believe Buddhism can begin to learn from radical Christians.
The doctrine of “Karma” can easily be interpreted as an instrument to demand consciousness of personal responsibility now just as we can interpret Jesus’ “Kingdom of Heaven” theme as a here and now oriented theme. But what about two other Buddhist themes: enlightenment and meditation. Surely these have been conceived of as supernatural and extraordinary?
Certainly these have been imbued with an other-worldly interpretation often, perhaps especially in the West where “results” matter so much. Yet from a radical perspective Enlightenment could be the ideal for which human beings can aim. An ideal where selflessness and compassion are the sole motivations. I can find much that supports such a view. Zen asserts that enlightenment and ordinary life are one and the same, and that “it” does not exist but is a process of becoming. Indeed at times enlightenment seems to have more to do with acceptance of imperfections than with trying to achieve anything.
Similarly meditation need not be perceived as a mystical practice but as a time when we open ourselves to looking at how our minds work and helping selfish concerns fade away in the struggle to find meaning in our lives. These are just some ideas about how a radical interpretation of religion can be broadened from Christianity to other religions. Perhaps as these humanistic and non-realist themes percolate through religious discourse the bind described in the opening story will become unnecessary. “Truth” need no longer be in dispute, “interpretations” can be respectfully appreciated.
SoF and the Unitarian Tradition
David Dulley, a retired lawyer and author of the “Mona” books, contributed this article to the UK SoF magazine shortly before his death in mid-1997
Unitarians began centuries ago as protesters against the illogicalities of the Christian dogma of the undivided Trinity and we have our heroes and even martyrs. But history has put us in the pigeon-hole labelled “Dissent”. The controversies out of which our denomination grew now seem meaningless or idiotic to most people; and what could be less inspiring than mere dissent? Yet we survive. In the United Kingdom there are probably more than 5,000 full members and a few thousand “attenders” who come and go as the mood takes them, or as the local group changes.
There are also a few hundred isolated members who keep in touch by writing or through our magazines or our Internet site.
Why have we not turned to dust in our pigeon hole, and what have we now to offer? My own answer after ten years of “attending” and another ten of membership is that we are a religious bran-tub at which one can pick or reject as one likes, uniquely valuable now, when politically powerful religious fundamentalists are so ready to destroy each other, and the rest of us if necessary, for the sake of their certainties.
We don’t do much religious dissenting nowadays and we need a new label. Perhaps “Religious Free-Thinkers” would be the best. We are non-credal in the sense that we can “believe” anything or nothing; but we differ from secular free-thinkers who take the observable and understandable universe as their datum and distrust those who try to look beyond it. Daphne Hampson, not a Unitarian as far as I know, expresses what religious free-thinkers have in common — and it is a very strong bond — very neatly: “There is more to reality than meets the eye”. More ponderously, we recognize a spiritual dimension or space in our cosmos. Most of us would agree with Karen Armstrong, summing up a long line of thought beginning apparently with Parmenides twenty-five centuries ago, that it is very odd that anything at all should exist, and that this sense of mystery is the origin and the basis of valid contemporary religious experience.
This freedom to believe or disbelieve was not really threatened when in 1928 we joined forces with the followers of James Martineau and became “The General Assembly of Unitarians and Free Christians”. I do not know from what chain-gangs Martineau had liberated his Christians but the result is that we have among us people who are glad to call themselves Christians but reluctant to join any specifically and exclusively Christian church. They don’t expect the rest of us to be Christians, though I think most of us, “Free” Christians or not, regard Jesus, so far as he can be seen through the fog that surrounds the records, as the greatest of all religious teachers. Many of us also think that the word “God” has ceased to be a useful tool of discourse save as a synonym for love in the widest sense, and that in this widest sense there was more of God in Jesus than in anyone else.
The Punishing God, the all-good, all-powerful and also all-knowing Creator of the Universe, is by definition a logical absurdity and a fabulous monster. He would have been free to create anything he wanted, and would inevitably have foreseen all its consequences; but nevertheless he created a planet on which pain and misery, whose reality we cannot evade or deny, flourish exceedingly. The extinction as a credible entity of this monstrous God is essential to the survival of a world endangered by religious intolerance; and it is not surprising that many intelligent people now regard religion as a mere pest, an unholy muddle of priests, sin and hell which survives through its power to blackmail us by trading on our fears for the future, in this world or any other.
But if we accept the secularist view that religion and God are words to be forgotten except as awful warnings of how our minds can take wrong turnings, we have no safeguard against the short-termism and mindless selfishness which makes a nightmare from which we may never wake. Where else except among the Unitarians can we find the recognition of the essence of religion combined with complete freedom? All other religious institutions, even if they are creedless, seem artificially constrained in some way, even if only by custom, authority, or “holier-than-thouishness”. We have ministers to preach, take services and help the members as best they can; but none of them would claim the authority of the priest or shaman with his special relationship to the numinous. It is not a job to attract the careerist, and in my experience they generally have a more than average degree of insight, genuine humility and altruism. There are more congregations than ministers, who often serve several congregations.
“God as love and not as Creative Monster” is not an easy notion to preach. It is explicit in Christianity and implicit in all humane religions, but it is untidy, inconvenient and dangerous, often difficult to disentangle from its enemies: cruelty, hate and jealousy. However, it is the only indestructible signpost we have. It points to a wide and continuous spectrum, with mystical ecstasy at one end, cheerful but kind procreation somewhere in the middle, and at the other end that happiness which Gerd Sommerhof, the distinguished humanist who collaborated with Medawar on the relation of mind and brain, must have been thinking of when he wrote: “I regard the doctrinal recognition of the power of love to bring order out of chaos as a milestone in the history of human civilisation”.
“Love is in and out of Time”, as Tennyson wrote. It is not only professional mystics who can get glimpses of its power to over-ride the limits of time and space. Through it we can occasionally perceive the possibility of a timeless universe in which consciousness of oneness, of one’s isolated self, vanishes and a more vivid life replaces everyday living. Most of us would settle for that as Heaven.
There is a lot in all this to disturb the credal religions, but nothing to disturb, and much to encourage, the religious free-thinker. Unitarians are free from the doctrinal, and to some extent from the organisational and customary, straitjackets which are strangling the grand religions, save when some formidable personality or some racial, economic or political situation gives them a dangerous popularity.
The lack of dogma doesn’t leave us in a void. Love, especially at Dr. Somerhof’s end of the spectrum, is in the thick of the sharpest social, economic problems, local and national. Peace, for instance, involves the removal of the causes of war, such as the increasing gap between rich and poor and the reduction in the exponential growth of the world’s human population. The religion of love cannot turn its back on such issues. It can hope to raise the level of controversy, and reduce its brutality, often at great sacrifice.
This is just one English person’s view of Unitarians and their function and it ignores the wider world. There are long-established congregations in Eastern Europe — there was once a Unitarian King in Transylvania — who have maintained their traditions through centuries of persecution; and there are much newer groups in Western Europe, Australia and Africa. By far the largest numbers, about 300,000, are in North America. They are certainly religious free-thinkers, and mostly label themselves Unitarian Universalists, referring to an early nineteenth-century conviction that eternal damnation was nonsensical blackmail and salvation universal, for everybody. We in England have benefited greatly from the visits and settlements over here of American ministers and members. We have always been an argumentative denomination; and there is a creative culture-clash between American triumphalism and admiration for personal success and the British respect for democratic debate, however long-winded and our tendency to look for a burrow in the past and make a nest there.