Ralph Waldo Emerson: Divinity School Address

This is another refreshed (i.e. rewritten and reposted) post from the first version of Transient and Permanent, looking once again at the classical roots of Unitarianism. There probably aren’t many UUs who aren’t aware of Ralph Waldo Emerson; but on the other hand, there also aren’t that many who’ve made it all the way through his Divinity School Address. For all those who haven’t and aren’t likely to try, here’s some thoughts about what’s going on in that historic text:

In the last post, I referred to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Transcendentalist errand into the wilderness.” This occurrence, symbolized most strongly by his address to the 1838 graduating class of Harvard’s Divinity School, represents the most significant assertion of Unitarian theology following Channing’s Baltimore sermon 19 years earlier. It is particularly significant because it represents a kind of opposition Unitarianism, a second way of being Unitarian that owed its being to Channing’s form yet as often as not coalesced around perceived inadequacies in that system. With Emerson, we can longer talk about Unitarian theology in the singular anymore: we already have multiple, overlapping and competing, Unitarian theologies, with many more to follow in the breach Emerson made.

Perry Miller made famous the Puritan motif of the errand into the wilderness. This trope involves a religious group that partially splits off from its main parent body and intentionally relocates itself to an open, untamed space (either literally geographic or, in the Transcendentalist case, metaphoric). The movement into the wilderness serves several functions: a) it separates the saints (at least temporarily) from those who have begun to lose their way, b) it provides a fresh start with which to build a new, perfected community, and c) most importantly it gives the breakaway group the chance to model their perfected religion back to the old guard, demonstrating the way true religion should look (and can, if the old guard will only heed the lessons of this new dispensation). Thus, the errand into the wilderness is always conducted while looking over one’s shoulder at the abandoned community, moving away to some degree in order to establish the necessary distance to critique and thereby hopefully reform the parent organization. The classic model is the Puritans, who left England for the wilderness of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they set up their ideal community. They didn’t want to separate permanently from the Church of England; rather, they wanted their new group of saints to shine as a city on a hill for their brethren in England to see and emulate. Once the homeland had taken the hint, they could return in glory to a renewed England crowned by their more authentic version of Christianity.

All of this is set-up to explain what is going on in the Divinity School Address. The point here is that Emerson’s Transcendentalism was a Unitarian heresy, an alternative Unitarianism that carved out a separate space for itself while continuing to operate in a n overt relationship with mainstream Unitarianism. Religious Transcendentalism in the United States always operated in close relationship to church Unitarianism, a fact often obscured by romantic latter-day accounts.

And now a breakdown of the sermon itself, which begins inauspiciously with perhaps the most purple prose Emerson ever produced: “In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” But overblown as this opening line it, it accurately reveals the direction of Emerson’s thought. For Emerson nature and the soul are the sources of true inspiration–there are no direct quotes from the Bible at all in the address. This is a shocking fact which nearly 170 years of further developments shouldn’t obscure for us. For a Protestant minister of this time not to make even a brief gesture toward the Bible was highly unusual. This includes Unitarians: recall that Channing’s 1819 sermon was largely centered on the issue of how the Bible is to be interpreted, on the way in which it is authoritative, and it led, not with reflections on the season, but with a quote from Scripture. For Emerson, that pressing issue of how to interpret the Bible is already passé: the Bible has disappeared from view, replaced by 19th century understandings of nature and the soul as the true source of revelation. It should be pointed out that these two are not on equal footing: nature is subordinate to the soul in the economy of revelation.

Emerson tells us that virtue is its own reward; vice is its own punishment. “Virtue” here did not yet have the Victorian connotation of sexual purity that we ascribe to it today. Emerson understands virtue to be the perception of and joy in the divine laws that undergird reality. This leads to his next point: he advocates a pantheistic view of God as an infinite mind that penetrates and ensouls all things in the universe. This universal nature of God has practical effects, including the fact that people and the world are primarily good–evil is secondary, partial, and temporary, marked by the absence of the good rather than by its own internal force.

There are points where Emerson’s use of language can confuse modern readers. Like Channing and other Unitarians, Emerson asserts that reason is the core of religion. However, this reason is not the post-Humanist faculty of rational analysis that we are familiar with. Rather, the closest corresponding concept we have today is that of intuition. Religion for Emerson in the Divinity School Address is an intuition, universal and inherent, and perceived by the individual. It cannot be monopolized by any church institution; indeed, such institutions more often than not kill the spirit by adherence to formalism of dogma and rite.

In 1819, Channing proclaimed the goodness of Unitarian Christianity. Now Emerson, an ordained Unitarian minister delivering a sermon to graduating Unitarian seminarians and a former member of Channing’s own church, declared the evils of Christianity. These he saw as comprising two main points. The primary evil of Christianity is that by deifying Christ it eclipses all other individuals–this is wrong because it is to your own self that you must look for inspiration. It is not surprising therefore that Emerson proclaims that Jesus was a man, superior in perception but not in nature. The second evil of Christianity is its putting of revelation in the past–this is wrong because revelation is not contained in a book but in every human heart.

The errand into the wilderness is not the only Puritan motif that must be unpacked if we are to understand this diatribe properly. The Unitarians were the direct (though not sole) descendants of the Puritans, and Channing, Emerson, and Parker can easily be located in the stream of Jonathan Edwards and his forbearers, much as that might have horrified those early church fathers. Over time, and despite their original intentions, the errand into the wilderness (a term that implies temporariness) began to look like a permanent resettlement in America, and England proved unwilling or uninterested in duplicating their great experiment. Naturally enough the Puritans began to experience considerable anxiety over their reason for being. This was expressed in a genre of sermon called the jeremiad. A jeremiad is a sermon that excoriates the modern day by comparing it to an imagined earlier golden age. Those who deliver jeremiads see sin advancing all around and warn their listeners that great peril looms unless they repent and return to the right way of things. For the Puritans, the jeremiad served to chasten second and third generations that seemed to be moving away from the noble errand of their ancestors.

As an inheritor of the Puritan tradition, Emerson was well able to employ the jeremiad against his own Unitarian compatriots. The Divinity School Address is basically a lament that Unitarianism has become formalized and lost its power, both its eloquence of speech and the fire of the soul. As with the Transcendentalist errand into the wilderness, this Unitarian jeremiad is meant to wake up the upcoming generation to problems in their midst and steer them back toward an imagined purer time when people lived in harmony with the universe. This address is not a parting shot from a disgusted ex-Unitarian, it is a declension narrative that seeks to re-mold Unitarianism along lines seen as both both authentic and more relevant.

These Puritan-derived declension narratives and jeremiads persist among us today. Much of the Unitarian-Universalist fretting over our small numbers, lack of influence, incoherent theology, and watered-down ritualism smacks of classic Puritan approaches to religion. This isn’t meant to suggest that there aren’t real problems within contemporary UUism. It just seems worthwhile to keep an eye on the historical context of our hand-wringing. Worrying about the state of the denomination and expressing angst over our waywardness is a venerable Unitarian tradition, an inheritance we’ve retained from our Puritan ancestors even as we’ve thrown out the Calvinism that drove such a worldview in the first place.

William Ellery Channing: Unitarian Christianity

This is a refreshed version of a post that ran on the original version of Transient and Permanent, part of a series that looked at classic sources in Unitarianism. For some students of UU history these are probably a bit tired at this point, but there are still so many UUs unaware of them that it seems worthwhile to go back to the well again:

Many men who have sparked revolutions did not do so intentionally, and the first moment of their stepping into the stream of history cannot be precisely determined. This is not the case, however, for William Ellery Channing, the founding father of American Unitarianism. When he strode up to the pulpit at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore, 1819, he set in motion a carefully orchestrated set of events designed to permanently plant a stake for liberal religion in the United States. On hand were ministers (and journalists) from around the country brought in specifically to witness this historic moment, and within hours of Channing’s speech the sermon had been reported in newspapers and soon thereafter went to the printing presses. With a single sermon, Channing launched a movement that would rapidly become the darling of the country’s ruling elites and continue to produce many of the nation’s greatest writers, scientists, teachers, businessmen, and activists up until the present day–and even some notable ministers as well.

Because it was specifically written as a manifesto, impressively encompasses Channing’s religious views, and because he did not move significantly beyond it in his thinking over the remaining twenty-three years of his life, his “Unitarian Christianity” is an uncommonly complete presentation of the theology of a major Protestant thinker. It is useful, therefore, to spend some time unpacking what this famous essay has to say. Channing begins, as a good Protestant, with the Bible. His first concern is to treat of the nature of the scriptures. For Channing, the Bible is often poetic and metaphoric; it is a work of divine literature, not science. Furthermore, it is historically bound. While many American Protestants wanted to claim the Bible as a universal book whose instructions applied equally to all times, places, and situations, Channing recognized that it was the product of particular eras and peoples, and that the text was influenced not only by God but also by the human beings who wrote it.

Moving from the fact of the Bible to its proper hermeneutical approach, Channing begins to slowly wade out toward doctrines of a more specifically Unitarian provenance. The over-riding element in Channing’s thought is the use of reason. This in fact was the core of Unitarianism. Too often the name “Unitarian” has obscured even as it revealed, causing an excessive focus on the non-Trinitarian nature of Unitarian beliefs. For Unitarians, God’s singleness was a secondary aspect of their religion, a conditional derivation from their primary concern: the systematic application of human reason to the Bible and the doctrines of Christianity. This should not suggest that other sects lacked the use of reason, or that they rejected reason as a tool for religion. But the fact remains that for those denominations that affirmed some role for reason in their theology, reason itself was always a secondary aspect of their beliefs, with primary concerns swirling around such other issues as the nature of human sinfulness, God’s sovereignty, faith vs. works, or the literalness of the Bible. For Unitarianism, reason in religion was its raison d’etre. All of the other aspects of Unitarianism flowed from this single central concept. Naturally, therefore, Channing rated reason as a positive faculty given to humanity purposefully by God for our use in religion.

After establishing that reason is a gift and that God wouldn’t give us revelations we could not understand or instructions we could not carry out, Channing begins to rattle off the famous list of beliefs that struck the orthodox as heresies. Channing proclaims the unity of God, against the idea of the Trinity. He likewise affirms the unity of Jesus, against the notion of his dual nature as god and man. Jesus is held to be the greatest of all human teachers and a moral paragon, certainly uniquely special but less than truly supernatural. Channing’s God is revealed to be a loving parent, not a stern judge or a jealous tyrant. Against the ideas of complete depravity, original sin, and predestination Channing stresses human goodness and the inherent moral faculties that prevent the need for any irresistible grace from God. Finally, Channing proclaims the Unitarian beliefs in tolerance, open-mindedness, and non-dogmatism, and the conviction that revivalistic enthusiasms are errors that degrade the virtuousness of authentic piety.

Throughout Channing’s sermon it is easy to discern the religious context against which he is reacting. Channing’s Unitarian Christianity is in many ways a sort of inside-out Calvinism–though he arrived at his views through a long process of thought and Biblical study, he could’ve simply taken prevailing Calvinist views, made a list of their opposites, and arrived at his theology by a much quicker route. Channing’s thinking is a clear internalization of Enlightenment thought, as he stresses the orderliness, reasonableness, and intelligibility of the universe and its maker. He also possesses the Enlightenment optimism in human abilities and the belief in positive progress of ideas, religion, and nations through time, sentiments made even bolder by the rapid expansion of the vital young nation that declared its freedom just four years before his birth. Noteworthy also is his attack on revivals. 1819 was smack in the middle of the Second Great Awakening, whose tumultuous displays disturbed the rationalistic Unitarians (perhaps too they were put off by its association with the middle and lower classes–Unitarians were nothing if not blue-bloods). We might note that, while they are not called out by name, the Universalists were engaged in revival fervor during this very period.

To speak of Channing as the founding father of American Unitarianism does some injustice to forbearers such as Joseph Priestly and other earlier liberals, some of whom were explicitly connected to the British Unitarian church. Yet Channing really was the single individual who for the first time claimed the mantle of Unitarianism, codified a set of beliefs, and put in motion the wheels of denominational organization. Indeed, his peers saw him as the leader of their movement, and following generations of Unitarians have often looked to him as the font from which their own understandings originally flowed. His central ideas–reason, Biblical metaphoricalness, unity of God, humanity of Jesus, and goodness of humankind–would become the rallying points for mainstream Unitarians for the next 150 years.

Yet, before closing this brief overview of Channing and his thought, it is necessary to make a final remark about the rather Weberian irony of subsequent Unitarian history. Just as Calvinism sowed the seeds for secularism, and the American evangelical confidence in the Bible as the ultimate glue of Protestantism gave birth to the greatest flourishing of separate sects in history, so too Channing’s attempt to stake out room for reason, tolerance, clarity, and human ability swiftly led to sentimentality, de facto heresy trials, intuitionism, and eventually post-Christianity. Less than twenty years later Ralph Waldo Emerson would rise in the Harvard Divinity School chapel and deliver his scathing Unitarian jeremiad, touching off the Transcendentalist errand into the wilderness.

UU Trivia Question of the Day #4

OK, running off to class, going to have to make this a quick one.  The issue of presidents and moderators of the UUA came up yesterday, and it was pointed out that the president is a paid position that has always been occupied by ministers.  So here’s the question, which has only a few possible answers (and thus should be easy to just guess):

The Unitarian Universalist Association was formed from the combination of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America.  Was the president a paid position in a) both the AUA and the UCA, b) the AUA but not the UCA, c) the UCA but not the AUA, or d) neither the AUA or the UCA?

Universalist Quote of the Day #35

“But if I understand what the Gospel is, it is good tidings of great joy that was to all people, kindred, nations and tongues, and when the wise men who had kept time of the prophesies of the Prophets of the time that Christ was to make his appearance in the world, the wide men discovered a star in the east and they followed it and in passing some shepherds that was lying on the plains watching their flocks at night, and seeing strange evolutions in the elements, great fear fell upon them and when those heralds or angels returned, they brought good tidings of great joy, which was the Gospel. . . Then the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy, and no fire or brimstone was used in the proclamation of the Gospel, for Christ was heir of the world, for God give it to him, and he says he did not come into the world to do his own will, but the will of the Father who sent him–and then declares that it is God’s that all men should be saved. Now, will God’s will be done–’I did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world’–will he do it?”

–Joseph Gault, Georgia Reports: Justice’s Courts and Miscellaneous Cases 1820 to 1846 (fourth edition), 1873: 53-54.

Universalist Quote of the Day #14

“Consider, further, how is it possible for good men to whom the happiness of heaven is promised, to have any enjoyment of that happiness themselves, if those for whom they cannot but have the strongest affection, especially their children and other near relations and friends, be, I do not say consigned to everlasting torments, but even annihilated, or in any other way only excluded from all possibility of attaining such a state as will make their existence a blessing to them?  If David lamented as he did the death of his rebellious brother Absalom, what would he have felt in the idea of his utter destruction?  A parent myself, allow me to speak to the feelings of others who are also parents.  But is not God the true parent of us all?  Are not our children as much his as they are ours?  And is an earthly parent who is deserving of the name incapable of wholly abandoning any of his children?  And will God, whose tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm cxlv. 9), and whose love and compassion far exceed ours, abandon any of his?”

–Joseph Priestly, Unitarianism Explained and Defended.  Philadelphia, 1796: 475.

Thoughts on 19th century Unitarian writings about Buddhism

Reading through works on Buddhism by 19th century Unitarians and their liberal religious kin is a humbling exercise. Their hermeneutical tunnel vision is at times painful to behold, particularly because it raises obvious doubts about our own understandings. The only consolation can be that in the modern academy we at least attempt a form of self consciousness and positioning. In comparison these pioneers of the American encounter with Buddhism didn’t merely wear tinted interpretive lenses–frankly, they often seem to have donned glasses made of lead.

The artist who originally crafted these glasses was Luther. Most 19th century essays and books by Unitarians that deal with Buddhism begin with fully formed a priori assumptions that are quintessentially Protestant in nature. The most obvious is that the Buddhism of the Buddha is the true Buddhism, the only authentic expression of the Buddhist impulse. Later developments in Buddhism are treated as degradations, whatever they may be. American Protestants of the 19th century were obsessed with the idea of returning to primitive Christianity, so it is little surprise that they likewise prefer what they imagine as primitive Buddhism.

Another prominent feature of these early writers is that they sought this primitive Buddhism exclusively via texts–the older the better–which conveniently can be appropriated and employed by Western scholars and critics. Again, there should be no surprises here–the Bible was the center of all Protestant religion, even the Unitarianism of the time. The result, of course, was that virtually nowhere in the Unitarian “encounter” with Buddhism were actual living Buddhists consulted. Buddhism was first constructed from Western readings of ancient manuscripts, and then interrogated using Protestant categories and concerns.

A third central feature of such essays that derives from Protestant, especially Unitarian, assumptions is their near universal respect for Buddha the man. Even the most vehement opponent concedes a certain grudging admiration for the reconstructed historical Buddha. But regardless of the level of appreciation shown, it all flows from a single source: esteem for the Buddha’s morality. The cosmology and complex of praxis that supports and flows from this morality is largely dismissed, but Buddha himself is spoken of almost as a little brother to Christ: pure, chaste, self-abnegating, kind, pacific. It’s just too bad he was such a pessimist, you can hear these writers saying, since it resulted in a soul-crushing nihilistic dream of escapist self-obliteration.

Buddhism for 19th century Unitarians and similar liberal Protestants really only came into focus when it was assimilated to previously understood phenomena. Of course the prevailing question was whether or not Buddhism is or is not like Christianity. But the most interesting thing to observe is when and how Buddhism is similar to what type of Christianity. When looking at Buddhist praxis, these commentators were quick to point out the parallels to Roman Catholicism, usually to Buddhism’s detriment. But when looking at philosophy or morality, Buddhism suddenly appears to them as a species of Protestantism, and their regard increases. However, even when Buddhism is being treated relatively sympathetically, there is a common anxiety about the number of Buddhist adherents in the modern world. Unscientific estimates range wildly in the texts–400 million seems to be a particular favorite–but all guesses include a certain alarm that a religion at once so familiar and yet so alien has captured such a large portion of the planet, and may even be poised to pounce upon America.

On a final note, there is the interesting question of Buddhist-related language that has now passed out of the American discourse on Buddhism. How different would our understanding of Buddhism be today if the once popular term “enfranchisement” had won out over “enlightenment,” or “sublime” had continued in the place of the four “noble” truths? Observing early alternative language for common Buddhist concepts partially reveals the value-laden and historically-situated nature of the very words we ourselves use today, even in academic discussions of Buddhism.

Individualism as a Corporate Identity: a brief look at the Free Religious Association, Reform Judaism, and Ethical Culture

The post-bellum period in 19^th century America saw the rise of several important strands of religious liberalism. For Unitarian-Universalists, the most significant is the Free Religious Association, largely founded and run by Unitarians. It was a fascinating experiment with total freedom in religion, one that was not entirely successful.

Every association is composed of individuals, but it was the distinction of the Free Religious Association to be composed of individualists. Not surprisingly, this was not the recipe for a cohesive, enduring organization. In reading through the history of the Free Religious Association it can be maddeningly difficult to determine precisely what they believed in, which of course was in some ways the point. The Free Religious Association seems to have been less about the content of belief as about its absence, less an affirmation of any doctrine as the negation of any possibility of dogma. Just as freedom is essentially a negative connoting the lack of bondage, sympathy with the Free Religious Association consisted mainly of earnestly lacking the ability to remain comfortable within the fold of even the most liberal sectarian Christianity.

If a common core can be discerned in the Free Religious Association, it consisted of a commitment to individual conscience in religion, a universalism that expected that all religions reflect a certain measure of truth, a commitment to rationality (variously understood), and a general optimism about the future. If these sound similar to the commitments cherished by Unitarians of the time, that’s because they are the same. In an odd way, the Free Religious Association, and the Transcendentalists before them, represent a sort of Unitarian errand into the wilderness. Like the Puritans fleeing the Church of England the better to reform it, the Free Religious Association slipped away from the new National Conference of Unitarian Churches, and then proceeded to use essentially Unitarian thinking to argue for a rather post-Christian conception of religion. Much of their writing follows in the familiar vein of the Jeremiad, decrying the declension which they have finally fled, the better to hold to the spirit of true liberal religion. And like the Transcendentalists, they failed to sustain themselves as a movement, and ultimately had their largest impact on future generations of avowed Unitarians, who folded their ideas back into the denomination. This laid the ground for yet another Unitarian heresy that would appear in the next century: religious humanism.

Meanwhile liberal rumblings had been developing in American Judaism since the antebellum period, and it is not so surprising that Reform Judaism of the day, at least in the vein of Isaac Wise, looked rather like Jewish Unitarianism. The Jewish Reform movement was nothing if not an attempt to rationalize religion, making it modern, reasonable, and respectable. But the situation was complicated by Reform’s roots in Europe and its development in several different parts of the world. This is not a simple story of Americanization, even if the role of America can not be removed from the history of Reform. Therefore, it forces a re-evaluation of other Americanist narratives: how much of the change that we perceive in other religions in the United States is truly Americanization as Americanization, and how much is general adaptation to new situations that can be observed operating in parallel in other countries? Reform Judaism was far more successful than the Free Religious Association, and today is one of the largest and most vital Jewish denominations. One reason for this difference in fate would seem to be that while the Free Religious Association fled all tradition and lacked a cohesive core, Reform Judaism operated in the specific boundaries of a particular religious heritage, at times dramatically rethinking and paring the tradition, yet always in overt relationship to a shared body of ritual, text, story, and community.

Those who found even Reform Judaism too constrictive helped to fuel the creation of the Society of Ethical Culture. The emergence of Ethical Culture seems to be the basis for testing a general hypothesis: reformist movements in religion, especially those including an emphasis on individual conscience, will always generate their own dissatisfied reformers. Unitarianism reformed Protestant Christianity and in the process spawned the Free Religious Association; Reform Judaism reformed the Jewish religion and in the process beget Ethical Culture. The irony of such developments is that their adherents typically display a concern for corporate action and a desire to unify people, often through seeking a lowest common denominator in religion–yet the inability to retain people through a lowest common denominator approach to religion, both because it fails to meet all the needs of devotees and because no one can agree on what is common in the first place, means that such groups always contribute to the further splintering of the community and fail to develop large masses of adherents. The Free Religious Association and Society for Ethical Culture can rightfully claim that they have had an important and disproportionate impact on American religion and culture, but their small numbers prevented such movements from ever achieving their ambitious goals on a truly significant national scale.

Supernatural Rationalists: Precursors to the Unitarians

Conrad Wright’s 1970 collection of essays The Liberal Christians is a classic of American church history, especially for those of us who work on the more liberal streams of the tradition. Wright is a major historian of Unitarianism in particular, and it is with the Unitarians that The Liberal Christians is concerned. Perhaps most important is Wright’s opening essay on rational religion, which is of great importance for understanding the world of eighteenth century American Christian thought. Wright’s major achievement in this essay is the highlighting of an awkward but nonetheless highly useful term, supernatural rationalism, describing a phenomenon that is otherwise hard to discern. Supernaturalism and rationalism seem like opponents to the modern reader, so the term is helpful in pointing away from anachronistic approaches to the subject.

Wright calls attention to a middle way between Deism and Christian enthusiasm which appears to have been widespread. In so doing, he not only points out a common attitude but also draws the Deists and revivalistic evangelicals into sharper focus. The supernatural rationalists shared with the Deists an appreciation of reason and natural religion, while they also shared with the evangelicals a belief in the Christian revelation. For them, natural religion serves as the launching point for the special revelation of Jesus Christ, which not only doesn’t oppose reason, it is confirmed because of its accordance with reason. Christianity for them is rational, not mysterious: even miracles are basically the logical actions that an orderly God would take to intelligently demonstrate his intentions to humanity. One could call it a theology that promotes the reasonableness of the miraculous. Christianity thus functions to guide people in a Newtonian, Lockian universe, discernible through the senses and intelligible to the mind that approaches it empirically. Natural religion sets the stage, and revealed religion becomes the star performer.

The term is especially important for historians of Unitarianism and for Unitarians wishing to understand our history. Wright is a major historian of Unitarianism and as he points out in The Liberal Christians, it is these supernatural rationalists, not the vaunted Deists, who are our direct forebears. It brings to mind Channing’s intention in entering the ministry, which was not to fight the conservatives but rather because he was alarmed by the growing levels of non-belief in the United States and Europe.

A few excerpts from Wright will help illustrate his main points:

“There were, in short, two kinds of rationalism in religion in the eighteenth century. One was Deism, which maintained that the unassuming intellectual powers of man can discover the essential doctrines of religion: the existence of God, the obligations resting on men of piety towards their Creator and of benevolence towards one another, and a future state of rewards and punishments. For the true deist, these tenets of Natural Religion were enough, without any doctrines of Revealed Religion. The other kind of rationalist agreed with the deist that there is such a thing as Natural Religion, but denied its adequacy, insisting that it must be supplemented with additional doctrines which come to us by a special divine revelation of God’s will. We shall never understand the religion of the Age of Reason until we recognize that, from the point of view of that century, the difference between these two kinds of rationalism was simply tremendous. We have been led to suppose that because both groups believed in Natural Religion, they were, after all, pretty much alike. It is historically much more nearly correct to say that because one group accepted the Christian revelation, while the other did not, the gulf between them was considered to be unbridgeable.”

“[From the point of view of our supernatural rationalist forebears] Revealed Religion is as rational as Natural Religion, not in the sense that its principles are discovered by the bare use of reason, but in the sense that reason accepts them and approves them as soon as they are known.”

“Here, then, are the essential principles of what we have called–for lack of a better name–‘Supernatural Rationalism.’ Like the deists, the supernatural rationalists asserted the validity of Natural Religion, arguing for the existence of God largely in terms of a Creator who set the heavenly bodies moving harmoniously in their orbits. Unlike the deists, they also asserted the validity of Revealed Religion, which may present doctrines that are above reason, but not contrary to it. Like the deists, they assumed that acceptance of the claims of a particular religion to be a divine revelation is solely a matter of historical evidence and logical analysis. Unlike the deists–and skeptics like Hume–they were persuaded by the historical evidence for Christianity, especially the miracles. Other bases for Christian faith were set aside; its claims do not rest on religious experience, or on tradition, or on the authority of the Church, or on the witness of the Spirit, which had once assured the Puritan that the Bible was truly the Word of God.”

William Ellery Channing: Born Again Unitarian

William Ellery Channing was one of the founding fathers of American Unitarianism, and is among the three or four most important figures in the history of Unitarian-Universalism. His nephew, the Unitarian minister William Henry Channing, published a large biography of W.E. Channing in 1880 on the centenary of his birth. Among the interesting events that W.H. Channing narrates is an account of his uncle’s experience of “new birth.” Born again experience doesn’t get a lot of attention in UU circles, including those that focus on our spiritual ancestors, but Channing’s was hardly the only such instance. Here’s is the account taken from “The Life of William Ellery Channing, D.D.” Note not only the content and circumstances of the new birth, but also the curious gendered turn Channing’s mind took immediately after the experience. On the one hand it is a reflection of the sexism of his times; on the other, he seems to have been born again into a sense of himself as needing to, on some level, embody and carry forth decidedly feminine religious virtues.

The Life of William Ellery Channing, D.D., The Centenary Memorial Edition. By His Nephew, William Ellery Channing. Published in Boston by the American Unitarian Association. Printing by University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. Copyright 1880. pp. 32-33 (from the copy bought in May 1880 by the Unitarian minister Samual Devens):

And this leads to what was his most vital experience in college. The more his character and mind matured, the more earnestly did he devote himself to aspirations after moral greatness. He read with delight the Stoics, and was profoundly moved by the stern purity which they inculcated. But the two authors who most served to guide his thoughts at this period were Hutcheson and Ferguson. It was while reading, one day, in the former, some of the various passages in which he asserts man’s capacity for disinterested affection, and considers virtue as the sacrifice of private interests and the bearing of private evils for public good, or as self-devotion to absolute, universal good, that there suddenly burst upon his mind that view of the dignity of human nature which was ever after to “uphold and cherish” him, and thenceforth to be “the fountain light of all his day, the master light of all his seeing.” He was, at the time, walking as he read, beneath a clump of willows yet standing in the meadow a little to the north of Judge Dana’s. This was his favorite retreat for study, being then quite undisturbed and private, and offering a most serene and cheerful prospect across green meadows and the glistening river to the Brookline hills. The place and the hour were always sacred in his memory, and he frequently referred to them with grateful awe. It seems to him that he then passed through a new spiritual birth, and entered upon the day of eternal peace and joy. The glory of the Divine disinterestedness, the privilege of existing in a universe of progressive order and beauty, the possibilities of spiritual destiny, the sublimity of devotedness to the will of Infinite Love, penetrated his soul; and he was so borne away in rapturous visions, that, to quote his own words, as spoken to a friend in later years, “I longed to die, and felt as if heaven alone could give room for the exercise of such emotions; but when I found I must live, I cast about to do something worthy of these great thoughts; and my enthusiasm at that age, being then by fifteen, turning strongly to the female sex, I considered that they were the powers which ruled the world, and that, if they would bestow their favor on the right cause only, and never be diverted by caprice, all would be fitly arranged, and triumph was sure. Animated with this view, which unfolded itself with great rapidity and in many bearings, I say down and wrote to this lady,” –laying his hand upon his wife’s arm, who was listening by his side–”But I never got courage to send the letter, and have it yet.” This holy hour was but the first wind-flower of the spring, however, the opening of a long series of experiences by which he was to be led up to perfect consecration. It is a significant fact, that in this time of exaltation, when the young moral knight-errant took his vow of fidelity and was girt with the sword of love, his heart should have instinctively sought the concert in action of woman. This faith in her power of disinterested virtue, so early felt, grew always stronger; and if disappointment in the characters and deeds of men made him ever falter for a moment in this generous aims, he found his hope and heroism renewed by woman’s purity and earnestness.

A Few Words Missing From the Bible

Religious liberals of the past often argued that they were returning Christianity to the Bible after it had been corrupted by non-Biblical dogmas. They were keen to point out how much of Christianity has no clear Biblical sanction, not because they mocked Christianity, but because they respected the Bible and wanted to save it from layers of erroneous medieval interpretation. Here’s a short list of Christian keywords absent from the Bible:

Trinity

Original Sin

Inerrant

Infallible

Literal

Immaculate Conception

This list could be made much longer.