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Sermon Index

BEYOND CRITICAL THINKING

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 21st of May 2000

We gather this morning, as we have for 182 years, in a structure built as a temple to reason, its only original ornamentation a larger-than-life Angel of Truth above the entrance. Some would say that sort of austerity is the perfect symbol for a denomination that prides itself on its claim to reason, a denomination seen as the folks who have thrown out the Bible, dispensed with Jesus, given up on God, addressed their prayers (if any) to whom it may concern FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> in short, a denomination of negative thinkers.

Its possible to get such a bad rap that you begin to believe it yourself. Sometimes I think that has happened to us. How hard we find it to answer this question: What do you believe?

Yes, Channing preached from this pulpit a famous sermon staking out the Unitarian claim to the use of reason in interpreting the Bible. Yet Unitarianism had barely emerged when Emerson insisted that we dont really need the church FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> we have the capacity as humans to intuit divinity directly. This earned him the label of Transcendentalist. Passionately resisting the Transcendentalist claims was Andrews Norton, one of Emersons teachers at Harvard. Nortons magnum opus was a treatise that insisted that the miracle stories are the essential foundation for the gospels FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> reject the miracles, and Christianity falls. So where are reason and rationalism on either side of these early Unitarian quarrels?

And then there was Theodore Parker, one of the younger transcendentalists. His famous sermon on the Transient and the Permanent in Christianity proclaimed that even if scholarship should someday prove that Jesus never lived, it would not matter, for humans could intuitively recognize the abiding values of Christianity.

Reason has always been but one strand in our Unitarian tradition FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> and even reason has often carried meanings quite different than todays. To be sure, in his magisterial history of Unitarianism, going back to its origins in Europe, Earl Morse Wilbur found three controlling principles at the core of our movement: complete mental freedom, unrestricted reason, and generous tolerance of [religious] differences. But even he cautioned that these are not the final goals of religion, but only conditions under which the true ends may best be attained. The true ends of Unitarianism, as of all religions, he said, are personal and social transformation. (Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism: [Volume 2] In Transylvania, England and America, 486-87). Freedom, reason, and tolerance are the values that originally made us different. Personal and social transformation are goals we share with all religions. Our question, then, is how we relate reason to the other strands that form our heritage.

The illusion that ours is an essentially negative approach to religion may owe its persistence to 20th century humanism, with its sometimes angry attacks on the Christian story; in the heat of controversy, it can be easier to see what we have rejected than what we have retained. Still, I call it a bum rap to paint us as essentially negative. Its hope more than reason that binds us together.

To be sure, reason is a valued tool. Coupled with freedom and tolerance, it provides an essential context for our religious quest. But even these three together are far from enough to transform our lives and our society. We must couple heart with head if we are to move beyond detachment to a life of commitment and action. Otherwise, we remain irrelevant to the world, a club for intellectual exercise and entertainment.

It is when we connect with others, at a deeply personal level, that we find ourselves transformed. It is when we connect with others who are different that we begin to feel a stake in the worlds injustice and to find ourselves moved to transform the world. That is why, in this congregation, we seek to build community and to reflect the worlds diversity, that we may understand what it is like to walk in each others shoes.

We develop this connection as we hear each others stories FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> our individual stories, the stories of each others cultures, and the metastories that have come down to us across the generations FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> sometimes as scripture, sometimes as sacred tradition (like the stories of the great rabbis and the ancient pagan legends), often simply as folk stories, from the Arctic and from Africa and from Asia, indeed from every culture. Its in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, so much more accessible to us than other traditions, that we encounter the stories so deeply embedded in our religious and cultural history, our language and art and poetry.

It is not that we should become Jews or Christians. We may find greater meaning in other traditions or in some path of our own construction. What I invite us to do this morning is to understand that we need not linger in the world of deconstruction. Deconstruction is but a stage on the road to reconstruction FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> a stage that can open doorways for us to a deeper truth than we could ever know, had we not first studied their history and their context.

It helps to remember that to call these stories myths is not to dismiss them as unhistorical. Its to say that they yield their meaning at a deeper level. Kathleen Norris says that a myth is a story that you know must be true the first time you hear it. As a 5-year-old said, its a story that isnt true on the outside, only on the inside. (Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith,120)

The key is to do our critical homework first. When we know a storys origin and context and know how much of it is history, we can set aside the fear that someone is putting something over on us. We can open ourselves to the deeper level of mythic truth.

No group has done more to demythologize the gospels than the Jesus Seminar. Its member Marcus Borg sums up, for me, the theology of reason that I seek. Both scholars and their critics in the churches, he says, have tended to see the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the gospels as conflicting images, demanding that we choose between them. Borg insists that it need not be either/or. Both images matter, he insists. Both can be normative (Marcus Borg, A Vision of the Christian Life, in Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, 247).

How can we hold them together? He invites us to approach the gospels, and indeed all of the Bible, in a state of postcritical naivete. By this, he says, he means a stage that lies beyond the childhood stage of precritical naivete and also beyond the adult stage of critical thinking FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> the stage at which many of us, I imagine, would place ourselves. For Borg, there is a further stage, which he describes this way:

Put simply, postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the ... stories ... once again as true stories. Importantly, postcritical naivete is not a return to precritical naivete, for one knows that the stories may not be historically factual. But one also knows that their truth does not depend upon their historical factuality 248) ... A postcritical reading does not disavow the critical, but brings the critical with it (249).

This sort of approach can help us live with, even live in, the stories FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> the whole range of sacred stories FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> without feeling that we have dishonored our commitment to reason. We simply look for the meaning of the stories at a deeper, nonhistorical level.

But finding the freedom to enter into the worlds religious mythology is but a beginning, as we move beyond deconstruction to reconstruction on our personal spiritual journeys. Moving from intellect to story will deepen our understanding and self-awareness but may not be enough to bring us to commitment. We face the challenge of building a personal religious faith, strong enough to sustain us when times are hard, vivid enough to call us to action, and deep enough to keep us engaged whatever obstacles and failures confront us.

Here I speak of faith not as our intellectual swallowing of something that we know is not true. I speak of faith not just as an intellectual act but as commitment, a commitment of the heart, indeed of the whole person. That kind of faith begins with a relationship of trust in life itself.

In the case of our Unitarian Universalist faith, it is a trust in the ultimate value of reason, yes; but it is also trust in the lifes possibility for goodness, even in the face of all the tragedy and evil that we see around us. It is trust, not necessarily that good will overcome evil, but that it can FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> if we choose the way of goodness and love. It is trust in the potential goodness of human nature, in the full knowledge that we also have the potential for terrible evil.

It is, in the end, saying Yes! to life in the face of despair and discouragement. It seems to me that in this sense, all of us here are potentially people of faith, for we are, after all, here. It is this sign of our common faith in lifes potential for goodness that gives me hope. As long as we show up, ready to walk together in the ways of love, there is hope.

What is the content of our faith? It is not about shared content; it is about shared relationship. It is about covenant. The content is for us, as individuals, to shape. To embody our covenant and help in finding content, we will begin, this Fall, an ambitious new program of adult religious and spiritual growth, which we have called Journeys of the Mind and Heart. Almost every Sunday morning, well begin with a before-church lecture, discussion, and conversation FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> the first six focused on the role of the church in the city. Later, well explore with some of our individual members the spiritual foundations and passion for life that keep them so deeply engaged in the larger world.

We also will offer two more in a network of covenant groups, small groups focused around a variety of interests, but committed to building community. Well begin with a group for women, offering a place of spiritual intimacy and support, and also with a mixed group going deeper into issues of Unitarian Universalist history and identity. Both groups will commit to a link with the congregation as a whole and to sponsoring a new group on down the road. Phyllis and I will lead these first two groups, and offer leadership training for facilitators. During this first year, they will meet monthly, as last years Odysseys group continues to do.

For a growing number, we hope that these small groups will offer a safe and challenging setting for religious growth, both intellectual and spiritual, and the personal experience of the love of this community FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> of feeling accepted, welcomed, and affirmed; of feeling supported, in our times of need; of feeling called to respond by reaching out to others within the community, and to the larger community.

Truth has always been for me an elusive concept, caught up in the image that two plus two equals four and only four. But perhaps I have been stuck in literalism. Perhaps I have understood our Angel of Truth too narrowly. Look again at the cover of your order of worship: You will see that the angel carries a shield that proclaims, in Greek, our dedication to the one God. This is not about two plus two FONT-FAMILY: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; symbol; Symbol"> it is a proclamation of religious faith and trust. In God, all truth and all people are one.

Human behavior as a whole, and often our own individual behavior, does not fully reflect this faith, yet at our best, we long to do so. Thats why we show up here, Sunday after Sunday, that we may see our way more clearly, find courage, do better.

Once upon a time (myths, for me, are onceupon-a-time stories), there was a lad named Fondo. Fondo was lonely, so lonely that he found friends only among the geese and the few regulars who came to the lake in downtown Oakland. Yet such was Fondos faith in his oneness with the universe, in the sun, with the creatures of the air, that in the end, he took wing and flew away with his beloved geese.

Not likely an historical account, I suppose. But true? Have we ever longed so deeply for something that, in the end, our faith made it happen? Thats what has brought many of us here. Thats whats happening, right now, in this church now surrounded with a labyrinth of scaffolding, as we faith our future into reality. In the end, faith is the only thing that enables us to transcend the seeming reality of the world. And the only thing that ever has.

Hang on to your reason. But listen to the sun, let your imagination roam free, and trust in your wings. Life is calling.

May we all say Yes!