THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
"Listen Louder !"
An Introduction to Theological Diversity
by the Reverend Mike Young
(An expanded version of the sermon
preached on September 17, 1995)
When it comes to matters theological, we Unitarian Universalists tend to be like the college sophomores sitting around debating the existence of God. One student points with his metaphorical finger and says, "There ! That's what I mean." Where upon the others look at his finger and pronounce his manicure inadequate, his fingernail dirty, and he's using the wrong finger anyway.
But none of them looked where he was pointing.
Theological diversity: We say we affirm it; but we have little language for articulating that affirmation, few congregational patterns for reinforcing it and no coherent rationale for why we should. It often sounds like the affirmation of theological diversity is merely a declared truce which periodically breaks down, or a declaration that religious seriousness is actually trivial.
We once joked that the UUA was for people who had lost their religion but couldn't break the habit of going to church. And, indeed, a previous generation of UUs found in our brand of humanism a respectability for their rejection of traditional piety. They have in common with our current crop of Boomers the desire to be honest. But the Boomers are looking for a way to take the human religious experience with a seriousness that previous generations of Secular Humanists spurned.
My purpose here to articulate a coherent rationale for theological diversity persuasive to Secular Humanist, Liberal Christian and Neo-Pagan, etc. alike; to give us a way of talking about our differences that moves them toward reconciliation and understanding rather than conflict.
The minimum position on theological diversity is tolerance. No one in our tradition has the job of determining whether another's religious opinions are right. This is essentially a rejection of the arrogance of saying not only that I am right, but it is my job to stand in judgement of the religious experience and expression of another. Membership in the religious community cannot be based upon correct opinions because, even if there are right and wrong opinions, there is no one in a position to execute that judgement.
A mid-position is affirmation. The affirmation is two-fold. First, we are affirming the value of the person irrespective of their opinions; and second, we are affirming the possibility of spiritual growth which can only occur if people are permitted to be honest. The only way to affirm spiritual honesty and spiritual growth is to refuse to make correct opinion a gate keeping function.
The full position goes farther. This position cherishes theological diversity as a positive good. Like the tolerators, it declines to sit in judgement. Like the affirmers, it honors spiritual honesty as the only way to grow. But it goes on to insist that only where honest diversity is valued, cherished and celebrated can the kind of communities that keep us alive and growing be created. Even one who is finally wrong may have a gift for me unavailable anywhere else.
When I speak of theological diversity I assume we are talking about religion at a deeper level than mere table manners; about religion that has some existential weight to it. Nor do I mean a diversity of "religions." A practicing Christian, Buddhist or Wiccan is certainly as welcome in our communities as a Secular Humanist. They are even welcome to proselytize, as far as I am concerned, so long as they do not attempt to close the door to another. But to understand theological diversity in this way is to miss the point of our heritage.
When I speak of theological diversity I mean, rather, a diversity of religious experience and expression. I am talking about a habit of mind reflected in institutional practice that listens behind the differing words that people use to give voice to the common human experiences.
THE METAPHOR OF METAPHORS AND
THE CONCEPT OF
CONCEPTUAL MODELS
Return in time with me and recall the Ptolemaic conception of the universe. The earth was in the center with the sun and moon circling. The stars were as if lights on a sphere rotating around the earth just slightly more than once a year so that the equinoxes precessed. Ptolemy knew all of this because he looked ! It was based upon careful observation.
But the planets misbehaved. Each circled the earth as if fixed upon its own sphere. But then each, at a certain point, went retrograde; that is, went backwards. These Ptolemy called epicycles, like wheels within wheels of the turning cosmic engine. And again, all of this was based upon careful observation and measurement within the limits of the technology of the time.
I want to point out that Galileo pointed his new Dutch toy, the telescope, with the aid of Ptolemy's conceptual model and calculations !
Copernicus had the same observations to work with as Ptolemy. But he made a leap of imagination into a different conceptual model. He placed the sun at the center instead of the earth. Suddenly, the epicycles disappeared. Copernicus' conceptual model was MORE right than Ptolemy's; but it was, in fact, less useful for some important things. Because he assumed orbits to be circular (elliptical orbits awaited Kepler getting over his idealism) Copernicus still needed Ptolemy's conceptual model to aim his telescope ! And neither conceptual model would have worked to guide a space craft.
Both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican conceptual models of the universe were empirical; that is, based upon observation. And both were wrong ! Yet, both were useful. Ptolemy's for pointing telescopes, and Copernicus' for finding a better, less wrong, conceptual model.
And, before we moderns get too self-satisfied, it is worth noting that WE have to keep checking things against the observational data, too, due to the mathematically intractable three-body problem. As a result of which, even Carl Sagan cannot predict what's going on among the dirty snow balls of the Saturnian rings.
Using this notion of relatively wrong but useful conceptual models, I want to draw some related distinctions in the realm of religion and theology.
Some religious ideas or conceptual models are based entirely on ideology; on what we may wish were true; on abstract ideas untied to observation or human experience. They may be fun as speculation. They may be appropriate propositions for testing. But, unless and until they tie back to human experience, they deserve the label: superstition. When absolutized--easy to do because they tend to be unfalsifiable--they become idolatrous. USF religion professor Darryl Fasching makes a nice distinction between those who are religious about religion VS those who are religious about life.
But much that gets labeled superstition derives from very careful observation and human experience. For example, much Shamanic practice is so derived; but in metaphor and image unfamiliar to us and from within a conceptual model most of us would find alien. We hear the unfamiliar language and assume superstition because we have not entered into the universe of discourse, have not courted the relevant experience, nor listened for the experience back of the language.
The human response to experience is to make a conceptual model, to construct a model of the universe that gives the relevant human experience a plausible and familiar context. But the experience is primary, not the model. And the experience is already experienced in metaphor and image. We, therefor, talk about all of this already at two levels of remove from the primary experience. This can be useful, if done in full awareness of what we are working with. But finally, it is almost inevitably wrong !
Theology, or religious language, is not only about the description of human experience. Its use and purpose is also to evoke particular human experiences. The first we have called religion. The second--the evocation of religious experience--we have lately been calling spirituality. But in neither case is it appropriate to get hung up debating the truth or falsehood of the conceptual models and metaphors. Remember those sophomores. Look where the finger points. Not at the finger.
THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGES
Why should theological diversity be an issue for us ? What is it about our liberal religious heritage that keeps us trying to maintain an openness to diverse theological languages in our societies ?
A major theme of the early Reformation history that gave shape to our Unitarian Universalist heritage had to do with the locus of religious authority. They wouldn't have said it this way then, but the core insight was that, if God exists, he knows whether you are putting him on. Only what you really do believe can make any difference; not what you are told to believe, or even think you should believe. If religious authorities attempt by however subtle means to coerce the statement of belief--even if by some miracle they are right--they are still suborning perjury. This is the religious center of our heritage of religious freedom.
Theological language speaks about human experience, there being nothing else humans can speak about. That human experience is mappable in (theoretically) an infinite number of ways. And, as the semanticists are fond of reminding us, the map is not the territory. No single map of human experience can catch all the nuances. All language is an abstraction from experience. Every abstraction leaves something out. Each is in-and-of-itself wrong, at least to the degree of being incomplete. The only complete mapping would be recapitulation.
Theological languages, images and symbols are metaphors, or--at least--participate in the limits of metaphors. We humans have a tendency to draw inferences from our metaphors without bothering to check the inference against the experience back of the metaphor. Multiple metaphors tend to lead us into fewer inappropriate inferences.
Among the purposes of a religious community is to keep its members spiritually alive and growing. At least in our tradition, we do not assume that there is some "it" you can get and quit. Due to the limits of human knowing, it is always incomplete. Tomorrow's experience may prompt change. The community most likely to keep us alive and growing is not one in which we all agree; but rather one that tolerates, affirms, even cherishes the broadest, richest diversity. Not because there is no final truth, but because there may be and our own incompleteness suggests we may not have it yet. Not because it does not matter what you believe, but because it does and the only way to keep belief alive and growing is to be free to actually believe what you do believe. And even someone who is quite wrong may have something to teach me.
Not all theological language is equally adequate One is not just as good as another, and all are at least incomplete. Some metaphors are more apt than others. Each abstraction, in leaving something out, leaves out things of differing significance. What is left out at any given time as not relevant may, at a later time, with more experience, be seen as crucial.
Ideas, and the metaphors and images in which they are expressed, have a history. They accrue nuance and connotation not present in their original encoding of experience.
All theological languages are not alike, not parallel, do not encode experience in the same ways. For example, even within the same religious language system, devotional language and systematic theological language are often incommensurable. Much of the Humanist/Theist controversy derives from the failure of both to distinguish devotional from descriptive theological language. Poetry, myth, story and descriptive narrative are not the same in the ways in which they encode experience. They MEAN differently. Darwinian evolution and Genesis 1 are not alternative truth statements, one true and the other false; but alternative ways of communicating human experience, each appropriate to a different context.
To misunderstand the above is to turn religious statements into allegations about the ontological structures of the universe cut off entirely from the context, human and historical, in which they were made. The result is to mistake religious language for a one dimensional set of competing propositions. A mistaking of the human religious experience for ideology. This is the mistake of all fundamentalisms: Christian, Islamic, Secular Humanist, Neo-Pagan, etc. alike.
All authentic religious language arises from and in response to human experience, and connects back to human experience as evocation, description, and/or etc. What is intended to be evoked is religious experience, not mere intellectual assent. In the Old Testament, the prophet Nathan confronts King David with a story about a rich man's abuse of power. David condemns the man and is then told by Nathan, "Thou art that man." What was evoked in David by the story was not merely an opinion on moral behavior but a mirror in which to see his own deep-self.
Where, therefor, the experience pointed to and intended to be evoked is what theological language is about, it is inappropriate to debate the truth or falsehood of the pointers. This does not mean that religious language is above critique. Only that no particular language is given privileged status merely because it is that particular language. We should, indeed, debate the adequacy of our language. Clear thinking will give us better description, more likely to be heard well and rightly, and better evocation of the intended experience.
My Aikido Master once told me, when I was resistant to the incessant bowing in the Dojo, "No one is my master. Anyone may be my teacher." Perhaps "may be" in both the permissive and the potential sense.
Incidentally, the UUA Pamphlet Series, "Can a (Christian, Theist, Atheist, etc.) Be a UU ?" misses the flavor of this entirely. At our best and clearest, we all draw from the second half of the UU Principles; not just any particular segment we wish.
Trust and commitment, what I take it we mean by "faith" (or, better, faithing), is not an unreasoned intellectual assent to ideological propositions. Religious surrender is not to a language or belief system, or it is mere credulity. Such surrender is to put my attention on that in my life where transcendence--the more-than-me and what pushes me to become more than me--is experienced as breaking in.
The Catholic heresy of Fideism is the notion that, if I commit myself to this and only this religious language, someday that language will evoke in me the correct religious experience which will validate my initial hope. The Catholic Church rightly branded it heresy. I, and they, do not say that this does not happen; only that its happening is not proof of the exclusive truth of the language. That it can happen with any powerfully evocative theological language only proves that the human mind can be powerfully moved by symbols.
The map is not the territory, and neither is the conveyance that carries us into the territory.
HANDLING THEOLOGICAL DIVERSITY
People come to us typically looking either for affirmation of their preferred theological language, a cure for their theological indigestion, or just a respite from the culture's theological imperialism. The leap of imagination we ask of them is quite literally unprecedented. No surprise, then, that we get "You can believe anything you want." Of course, you can't without totally trivializing both belief and religious experience. You must believe what you do believe. There is no other way to grow. It is also no surprise that we get an inappropriate absolutizing of whatever theological language helped free them from theological indigestion and imperialism.
At the 1987 International Association for Religious Freedom World Congress, the topic was theological foundations for religious dialogue. One UU said, "All paths lead to the same place." A small Japanese man rose, waited to be recognized and said, "You know, I don't think it is true that all paths lead to the same place. Our differences are real. But, you know, it may be true that we all get lost in the same territory."