Mission Peak UU Congregation

M i s s i o n P e a k U n i t a r i a n U n i v e r s a l i s t C o n g r e g a t i o n

WHO CAN GOD BE...IF HE ISN'T HE...OR SHE?

God is dead! Perhaps those of you who are old enough remember the headlines and articles from the 1960s that announced the death of God. A group of Christian theologians - people like Episcopal professors Thomas Alitzer and Paul Van Buren, and Baptist William Hamilton - pronounced God to be effectively dead in the modern world. They proclaimed themselves to be Christian atheists, because although they rejected the God of their traditions, they held up the man Jesus as a model for human ethical behavior. These Christian atheists could not honestly believe any longer in the old God of the scriptures - the God who created the universe, who allows humans the freedom to commit crimes against one another, and then sits in judgment upon these same flawed creatures of his own making. The God who, as Mark Twain said so poignantly decades earlier, "mouths mercy, and invented hell - mouths compassion, and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell."

Actually, long before the "death of god" theologians came upon the scene, God was in deep trouble. The forces that led to his death in the modern world were already in motion. One force was modern science. The slow growth of information about the universe from scientific discoveries has led to a steady decay of belief in God, at least within educated circles, and to some extent outside of them as well. The philosopher Nietzsche declared that God is dead back in 1882, by which he meant the traditional Christian God, who was killed by modern science and secular society. In the light of science, God was no longer needed to explain the nature of things. Further back, in the early 1800s, the astronomer LaPlace presented his new theory of the origin of the solar system, and Napoleon asked him why God was absent from his theory. LaPlace blithely answered, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

Early in the Twentieth Century, a group of thinkers, most of whom were Unitarians and Universalists, launched an organized movement they called "Humanist," to contrast with theist. This Humanist movement focused exclusively on human values and human solutions to the world's problems, and rejected theism in any sense. (This was Humanism with a capitol "H," somewhat similar to, but not to be confused with the broad humanism of the Renaissance, which was not necessarily atheistic.) Organized atheistic Humanism rippled through the ranks of our liberal religion, leaving plenty of atheists in its wake. In 1933, a group of Humanist leaders drew up a manifesto, which extolled the value of the scientific method of inquiry and stated in no uncertain terms that there is no need for the God hypothesis in any human endeavor. The manifesto stated: "the time has passed for theism [and] deism." It proclaimed, "The universe is self-existing and not created." (Hence, of course, there is no creator).

This point of view became a dominant strain in Unitarianism and Universalism, and it is held by many Unitarian Universalists today. So, where does this congregation stand on the humanist-theist polarity? According to the results of the recent survey of this congregation, conducted by the Ministerial Search Committee, 67 of you indicated that you are humanist or have been influenced in your beliefs by humanism, which was defined in the survey as a belief that "human nature is the basis of all religion and ethics," and 42 of you identified as atheists or were influenced by atheism, defined by the statement, "the concept of deity is not helpful." However, 25 of you said you were theists (agreeing that "God or the divine is the center of faith."), but 20 of you said that theism by this definition makes you uncomfortable. Of course, theism, like humanism, can be defined in many ways. There was a choice on the survey that was labeled Naturalistic Theism, a belief that "the powers humans have traditionally attributed to a supernatural God are inherent in nature." 50 of you chose that option - so is that theism or non-theism? It's clearly all in how you define all these terms.

As an article in the UU World magazine a couple of years ago said, some humanists are unfortunately feeling somewhat marginalized within our larger Unitarian Universalist movement these days, because theism in some form is on the rise again. There is certainly room at the table of our liberal faith for a multiplicity of points of view: humanist and theist, mystic, atheist, agnostic, and many others. But there are also trends, and it does seem that the old pendulum has been swinging in our liberal religion away from an atheistic humanism and toward a variety of other points of view, for some time now.

In the last couple of decades among us, there has been a resurgence of interest in spiritual pursuits, in the study and exploration of religion and religions, and in the use of religious language and ideas, including the "G-word." So, it would seem as if God has risen again among some of us religious liberals. But, as one who personally does find the word and concept of God useful, I would venture to say that the God who has come alive among us is not the same God as the one who died in our personal beliefs decades ago.

Most of us have rejected the God that many of our atheist friends have found unpalatable - the vengeful, jealous God of traditional western religion, the omnipotent God who can stop human and creaturely suffering but does not do so, who condemns sinners to the torments of everlasting punishment, who takes sides in battle and demands obedience and loyalty.

Last spring in this congregation I facilitated a class called "Building Your Own Theology," which I base on a Unitarian Universalist Adult curriculum of that same name. Our Small Group Ministry program is considering using some of the topics and readings from that class in its program this coming year, so if you missed Building Your Own Theology, you might consider joining a small group - new ones start in February. I have offered the BYOT class in some form or others in a number of churches and Unitarian Universalist camps and retreats since the 1970s. One of the sessions is titled "Creating an Honest God," and in that session participants draw the evolution of their personal images of God in several stages in the lives: the God of their childhood, of their youth or young adulthood, of their pre-UU adulthood (for the approximately 90% of us who were not born Unitarian Universalists), and our current idea of God.

Here is a tattered copy of my own changing images - I depicted my changing God some years ago when I both facilitated and participated in one BYOT class. I show it here because it is somewhat typical of what participants generally draw.

The God of childhood for many of us is the classic robed, bearded old man like the one I depicted; the God of youth we often see through the lens of the faith we were reared in (in my case, Roman Catholic - so Jesus and Mary became more prominent). In our later years, our God images tend to expand, and class participants often resort to non-traditional depictions of what God is to them in the "drawing God" exercise - things like trees, animals, groups of people, swirling galaxies, question marks, and female or female-and-male God imagery (as in my last image). In my image, the male and female "gods" are touching, but also are pushing against one another, which was meant to convey that for me, God can't be a "he," - that old patriarchal image, but neither can I easily see God as a "she." For me, both images, because they confine God to a human form, fail to capture the essence of what I mean by "God," although sometimes using feminine imagery can be liberating, for those of us who grew up with exclusively patriarchal God imagery - and that would be most of us in this culture.

At one of the annual General Assemblies of the Unitarian Universalist Association a couple of years ago, I was handed a flyer from a group calling itself "Unitarian Universalists For Ethics of Words," a group which apparently didn't like our current use of religious language. The handout warns of a "creeping theism" among us, as if theism were some kind of disease like swine flu. The handout claimed that, "a 'fuzzy theism' becomes the de facto creed" of Unitarian Universalism when we use theological language. I beg to differ. There is no official or de facto creed, humanist, theist or otherwise, among us, and may it always be so!

I will readily admit to the "fuzzy theism" part, at least for myself; my own theism is quite fuzzy, ineffable, hard to put into words. Perhaps that's because truth is hard to grab hold of, or as Alan Watts put it: "The universe is so damn wiggly!" Poetry works better than logical discourse in my attempt to articulate what I mean by the G-word. But I don't think that a fuzzy theism is a bad thing. We Unitarian Universalists tend to be a searching, skeptical lot, always groping, often not sure of our footing. For many of us, God is a question, not a ready-made answer. You may have heard that old joke about us: Jews pray to God, Catholics pray to Mary, Protestants pray to Jesus, and Unitarian Universalists pray... to whom it may concern! Or there's that old UU prayer: "Dear God, if there is a God, please save my soul, if I have a soul."

We Unitarian Universalists may each have our hunches and personal leaps of faith, but when we're at our best, we tend to keep our minds open, and keep skepticism alive in us, and we're usually willing to consider other points of view.

So what is an honest God? Who or what can God be, if he isn't "he" or "she?" I can only speak of what an honest God is for me. An honest God, one I can believe in, must be one that is compatible with science and reason, not opposed to it. With Einstein, I embrace "a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe." An honest God, for me, is not a clever spirit puppeteer, pulling the strings of the material world, but is instead the very substance, the energy and the direction of an evolving cosmos. My honest God is not a static, omnipotent, personal being, one who fashioned the universe from some eternal realm outside of it. My honest God is the Source and Ground of Being itself, unfolding every moment in all its majesty and mystery, even in its tragedy. My honest God is the spark of love that infuses human life with meaning, it is the call of conscience and the voice of inspiration within, and the tug I feel from outside of me to be in good relationship to other people, to other beings, to all that is. My honest God does not answer prayers to win the lottery, or to make the Yankees win the World Series, but this God can lure me with gentle persuasion to be the best, most loving and most generous soul I can be. I tend to agree with the school of theological thought known as "process theology" which speaks of this lure of God, and which affirms a God that is not a static, perfect, omnipotent entity, but a changing, evolving force which co-creates the universe with us in every moment.

According to a little anecdote I once heard, the atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked by a traditional believer, "What will you reply to Almighty God when he asks you on judgment day why you denied Him throughout your long and wicked life?" "Why madam." Russell replied, "I shall say to Him, 'Sir, you should have given me better evidence.'" Logically speaking, the God hypothesis cannot be proven, or disproven. But is there evidence?

Well, through the haze of my admittedly fuzzy faith, it seems to me that evidence is all around me. As the poet Walt Whitman puts it: "I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least...I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then...I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed by God's name." The signature of what I call God is my evidence - it beams forth from the face of a loved one; it blinks and shines in the starry night sky, the fuzzy galaxy I catch a glimpse of in my telescope quietly speaks God's name, and the ocean wave that gathers power as it rolls toward the shore, rumbles it. The lives of people like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King speak of the power of God within the human soul. The incredible miracle, that from an infinitesimal cosmic seed, this vast universe burst forth, and formed galaxies, and stars and planets, and life, and consciousness, and beings who can love and wonder - well, it seems to me that the letters from God are everywhere!

Perhaps, as in the hymn we sang together, "A Firemist and a Planet," you don't call it God. You call it evolution, or longing, or consecration. Perhaps, what you or I call it is not what matters anyway. As Henry David Thoreau said, "I say God. That is not his name, but you will know what I mean." As for me, I do use the G-word, carefully, investing it with new or larger meaning, as did the late Unitarian Universalist minister Arthur Foote, whose words I close with:

All the gods, including the Jewish, Christian and Moslem, have grown out of the human experience of something divine in existence, our awareness of sacred reality. We may outgrow ancient imagery, but we still know the hunger for truth, the benediction of love and beauty, and the moral imperative within...If we are to live religiously - that is, in open responsiveness to the whole of life, sensitively, appreciatively, trustingly - we need words that can evoke feelings and give life wings. We need the language of poetry as well as of science. God is not a proposition to prove but a reality to experience; not something to define but to know in the mind's commitment to truth, in the claims of justice, in the prevalence of beauty, and in the sanctities of love.

Benediction

By Nikos Kazantzakis:

I said to the almond tree, "Sister, speak to me of God," and the almond tree blossomed.