WHERE REASON AND RELIGION MEET

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

February 3, 2008

READINGS

From “Unitarian Christianity” by William Ellery Channing.

We grant that the use of reason in religion is accompanied with danger. But we ask any honest person to look back on the history of the church, and say whether the renunciation of it be not still more dangerous. . . . The true inference from the almost endless errors which have darkened theology is, not that we are to neglect and disparage our powers, but to exert them more patiently, circumspectly, uprightly;  the worst errors, after all, having sprung up in that churchwhich proscribes reason and demands from its members implicit faith. The most pernicious doctrines have been the growth of darkest times, when the general credulity encouraged bad men and enthusiasts to broach their dreams and inventions, and to stifle the faint remonstrances of reason by the menaces of eternal perdition. Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature, and will call us to account for it.We may let it sleep, but we do so at our peril.

From "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman.

Lord Asrial opened the Bible turned to Chapter Three of Genesis, and read:“And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and your daemons shall assume their true forms, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to reveal the true form of one’s daemon, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.And then the eyes of them both were opened, and they saw the true form of their daemons, and spoke with them.But when the man and the woman knew their own daemons, they knew that a great change had come upon them, for until that moment it had seemed that they were at one with all the creatures of the earth and the air, and there was no difference between them;And they saw the difference, and they knew good and evil; and they were ashamed, and they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness.”

And then Lord Asrial closed the book.

SERMON

If you have been attending this church for a while, you have heard me say at one time or another that ours is a tradition of memory and hope. I use that phrase as a way of reminding us that, while the day-to-day work of this congregation is centered in the here and now, we are grounded in an approach to the religious life that both stretches far back into human history and points toward a hopeful future, a future that we can shape with our individual lives and in this gathered community.

This year as we are engaged in a strategic planning process aimed at helping us clarify our ideas for the future of this church I have sought to identify what I think are some of the key traits of this church community that describe both who we are and who we hope to be. So far I have suggested that as a religious community we gather to learn to live what love teaches, that we invite and make room for the experience of wonder and the holy, that we regard ethical living and service to justice as religion’s truest witness, and that we welcome all. Today, I want to add to that list that we affirm the reasoning mind.

Of all the propositions I have offered so far, this one has the sharpest edge. For it places us firmly in one camp in the spectrum of religious perspectives. Nearly every religious tradition, at least in the West, makes claims about the reasonableness of its doctrine. But in the end nearly every one also sets a limit beyond which it insists reasoning cannot go, that is the province of faith alone. In those traditions, the religious journey is defined as the journey toward faith, toward a heart-felt adherence to the tenets of that tradition that cannot be swayed by argument or doubt. In such traditions, questions of those tenets are not only discouraged, they are disdained, and those who persist in asking risk being dubbed heretic, fool, or corrupter.

Listen closely to Channing’s words in the passage that Sam read earlier and you can hear his response to precisely that perspective. Yes, to be sure, the use of reason in religion poses a risk. Pull a thread in any tightly woven argument and you never know where it may end. The entire garment may collapse around you. And yet, isn’t the horror story of religious oppression across the ages testimony enough to the wisdom of using our powers in this most intimate part of our lives? The worst errors, the most unforgivable atrocities occur when no one dares speak up, when, in Channing’s words, the church proscribes, that is, condemns, the use of reason and “demands from its members implicit faith.”

Such times, he says, encourage “bad men,” those drawn to power who seek to leverage the church’s authority for their own ends, and “enthusiasts,” those consumed with emotional fervor who can be manipulated to do the church’s bidding. Meanwhile, those who object or disagree are stifled with menaces of a fiery end awaiting them.

Channing’s words were shaped not only by what he knew of history, but also from his experience. He and other religious liberals at the start of the 19th century had been troubled by a growing conservatism among Boston clergy. The dispute was centered in the Calvinist doctrine of election, the view that all people are born in sin, but that a select few are chosen by God to be saved. For them, the only path to salvation was faith.

The liberals insisted that humans were not inherently depraved, that by living moral lives they could be saved and that their reason was an important guide to a moral life. Their theological disagreement settled most directly on the question of the trinity, that God is tripartite: father, son and holy spirit. The conservatives insisted on affirming the trinity as a matter of faith. The liberals insisted it made no sense. And so it was as Unitarians, as against the Trinitarians, that the liberals became known.

At the same time, the liberals were troubled by the rage of revivals that was moving through rural New England. The fire-and-brimstone preaching and exuberant emotion of those tent meetings seemed to them to be more about egotistical expression than religious feeling. Real religion, they felt, could be measured better in the moral lives of people than in emotional excess.

Channing’s sermon in 1819 at the ordination of Jared Sparks, a recently graduated seminarian, the first minister to serve a new church in Baltimore, Maryland, also launched a religious movement. And at the center of that movement was the proposition that when you come to church, you don’t leave your mind at the door, that religion should not be a matter of conforming your beliefs to fit someone else’s, that religion arises from what your own mind and heart discover, that religion should make sense.

In that way, those emergent American Unitarians aligned themselves with a strain of religious thought that stretches back certainly to the earliest days of the Christian church, and arguably much farther. It was Earl Morse Wilbur, the great 20th century historian of the Unitarian church, who argued that more than any form of doctrine, what has characterized the liberal religious way for two millennia has been, what he called, “the steadfast and increasing devotion to three leading principles”: freedom of belief, unrestricted use of reason and “a generous tolerance of differing religious views.”

The heroes that our tradition names, people ranging from Michael Servetus to Francis David, Faustus Socinus, Joseph Priestley, William Ellery Channing, and many more differed in their specific theologies, but each argued for approaching religion as a journey not to encounter received truth but of discovery through the lenses of our own minds, senses, intuitions and experiences.

Our Universalist predecessors followed a similar path. The movement was born of a reasoned study of the Bible that concluded that a loving God would never consign his creation to hell. In time the movement evolved beyond Christianity to embrace a vision of a truly universalized religion that sought religious wisdom from across many cultures. These two strains embody the tradition that we carry on today.

As Ken Patton said, the way we worship, the way explore and attend to that which we find to be of greatest worth, is not in bowing down with closed eyes and stopped ears, but by opening all the windows of our beings with the full outstretching of our spirits, by feeding our eyes on the mystery and revelation of each other’s faces, aware that all life flows into a great common life, by loving the world through heart and mind and body. It is a way that does not fear reasoning, honest dissention and doubt but embraces it as the path to wisdom and understanding.

The passage that you heard Virginia Ramig read comes from The Golden Compass, a novel by the British author Philip Pullman. Some of you may have seen the recent film based on that book, the first in a trilogy that tells the story of a girl, Lyra Ballaqua, whose task is to try to heal the universe. Lyra occupies a parallel world to ours, which explains the “daemons” in the passage Virginia read. Daemons, in Pullman’s books, are animal figures that are paired with humans and serve as their souls.

The passage you heard comes near the end of the first book where Lord Asrial, who Lyra has recently learned is her father, attempts to explain the source of the troubles with which Lyra is struggling. Asrial reads a variation of the narrative from Genesis – the Adam and Eve story – and interprets it in a way that we recognize, that with their act of disobedience sin, shame and death entered the world. Yet, in this parallel world something else also happened at that moment that offers a hint of how Pullman reads that ancient story. It was the moment when for the first time Adam and Eve saw their daemons in their true forms.

For the Magisterium, the all-powerful church in Pullman’s books, this moment was regarded the awakening of sin in each person. In the story, the church also comes to learn that when they come of age people are bathed in a kind of haze of energy particles called dust. This the church equates with the taint of sin.

Yet, Lyra eventually learns that the truth is quite different. The settling of one’s daemon, rather than awakening sin, marks the moment when people come into themselves, when they are capable of knowing their own minds and their own passions. And dust, rather than the stain of sin, is in fact life-giving energy that feeds and sustains the universe, and it comes into being when conscious, living things come of age, when they become aware of themselves.

Pullman’s narrative echoes a strain of Biblical interpretation that is very different from conventional Christian theology. This reading of the Adam and Eve story suggests that rather than a “fall” the eating of the forbidden fruit and banishment from the garden was a step up, a move out of dependency and the immature view that the world exists for our comfort.

As in Lyra’s case, on leaving Eden Adam and Eve come into true knowing and like all adults learn that they must make their own way in the world and must rely on their own native wit to survive. In this model, the way to salvation is not obeisance to some higher authority, but, as Channing preached, learning to live a moral life.

Throughout Pullman’s books Lyra relies on her clever wit and rich imagination to escape the church’s efforts to destroy her and the source of dust. Yet, ultimately it is her awakening to the power of truth telling, to herself and her daemon’s true form and to the truth of passion that helps her achieve the salvation she has sought, to heal the rifts in the world and make a living home for love. As in Genesis, there is a bitter side to her learning, but there is wisdom in it as well.

As I mentioned earlier, we in this religious tradition stand in an unusual position as against many others in our affirmation of reason. We lay down no principle that we say that those who join our communities must simply accept on faith. And yet, while that is true, I also must confess that I’m afraid that in framing things that way I may have set up a false distinction. So, I want to turn for a minute to this word, faith.

Over the course of much of Western history faith has been understood as something that one received from the church. The church declared what it claimed to be the eternal truth and it was up to the believer to align her- or himself to it. In that framework, a person’s faith was understood to be the profession that he or she received from some church, and the journey of faith to be the path that the believer traveled to convert those words from mere formulas to personal belief.

One of the tenets of our movement is that this framework is fundamentally flawed. The theologian Paul Tillich said it best more than a half century ago: “There is no command to believe and no will to believe can create faith.” Faith is not something that someone gives us or that we can somehow lose. It is a fundamental human response to the world and it comes from that place where our hearts rest.

Faith in one form or another guides all of our lives. We may or may not frame it in terms conventionally defined as religious, but it guides us all the same. Part of what we hope to do as a religious institution is to help each of us identify, affirm and deepen the faith within us and let it carry us into deeper relationship with the world. If we here can be said to share a faith, it is not a doctrine but more along the lines of a working premise: that we are each utterly worthy, that we are capable of discerning the true and the good by our own powers, that all things are connected and that we can trust in love as our motivating force.

And along the way our reasoning capacity, the bunk detector encased in our skulls, is one of our most important guides. There is nothing sacrosanct or beyond question here. Challenge it, test it, confront it. But also, leave yourself open to the feedback, influence and insight of others – even if sometimes it may be what sounds like a child’s impertinent question or the strain of music that when first heard we can only recognize as noise – for it is there that we learn, that we grow.

As this church’s advertising motto proclaims, ours is a place where reason and religion meet, and in fact not only meet but embrace. For we understand that our journey to make meaning of the world, to discover that which connects us and all things, that helps us live moral lives guided by love is strengthened and enriched by the wit that is our native inheritance. It can occasionally make for testy times among us, but we can take it. It is in any event better than numb acquiescence. As William Ellery Channing warned, our history shows that we may let our minds sleep, but we do so at our peril.

One in hope and one in love.