Universalism is the new Christian orthodoxy
In a First Things combox discussion about Catholics who become Baptists, Terry Mattingly asks:
On your second point: Is it safe to say that the post-Vatican II Church is functionally Universalist? Might that play a role? This would apply to most Mainline Prots as well. Yes, also far too many Orthodox parishes.
Sherry Weddell, the terrific Catholic educator and catechist, responds:
Tmatt:
I’d estimate that 95 – 98% of all the Catholics – including pastoral leaders – that I’ve ever worked with are functional universalists. Meaning that concerns regarding the personal salvation of anyone never cross their mind or affect their pastoral decisions and priorities. Roughly the same number are de facto Pelagians.
Step back for a second and think of that. Sherry was a Baptist who became a Catholic, and founded the St. Catherine of Siena Institute to help lay Catholics understand their faith and to create discipleship programs in their parishes. She’s been at this for 14 years. And she’s saying that nearly every Catholic she’s worked with is a functional universalist.
Wow.
“Universalism” in this context means that all paths to God are equally valid, and that everyone will eventually be saved. It is a basic assumption of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
People who work in ministry, and who study religion professionally, are probably not going to be shocked by universalism’s prevalence in American religion today. People who live in bubbles of relative religious orthodoxy will be. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam relates a telling anecdote in his book “American Grace.” Research shows that the vast majority of American Christians agree with the view that anybody who is a good person may go to heaven (the implication being that belief in Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation — a point of view completely at odds with the Gospel and with Christian tradition). Putnam tells of giving a presentation before a group of Lutheran Church Missouri Synod pastors, and passing that information on. They reassured themselves that the LCMS faithful don’t believe any such thing. Putnam immediately produced the data point showing that 86 percent of LCMSers did, in fact, believe just that. Said Putnam, ”The theologians were stunned into silence. One wanly said that as teachers of the Word they had failed.”
Now, to be fair, I would probably answer “yes” to that question, but only with the strict qualification that if anyone who is not a Christian is saved, then he will only have been saved through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and by the extraordinary mercy of God the Father, who judged him based on what he knew. That’s why we must never say that anybody is in Hell; we just don’t know. But we must also say that we will be held responsible by God in the final judgment, and that Hell does exist.
Having said that, it’s a thin and porous line between believing that all may be saved, and that all will be saved. You can see why taking the position that commitment to Jesus Christ is not required for salvation would weaken the church in all kinds of ways. This is why I posted the other day wondering if it was possible to maintain a culture of religious orthodoxy in a broader culture that is not only heterodox, but is heterodox in such a way that it cannot conceive that there’s any such thing as orthodoxy to oppose. What does it mean even to talk about orthodoxy among Christians who don’t even believe there is a such thing, or a need for one?
An example:
Yesterday I was reading the blog of America Magazine, a Jesuit publication. They posted a story about the Jesuit high school they run on a South Dakota reservation.
The Catholic priest who taught at the high school boasted about how the high school had worked hard at preserving and passing on Lakota spiritual traditions to their students. Now, he wasn’t talking about just knowing about their religious past–he was talking about the Jesuits helping the Lakota Sioux maintain their traditioanl religious beliefs and identity.
Can you believe that? WTF?
I think what the orthodox are not emotionally prepared for is a world where they make the claims of orthodoxy and, instead of agreement from most and argument from others, being sort of patted on the head and told, “That’s nice. Now go play in the sandbox and stop bothering the grownups.”
See here is the situation. You have a heterodox culture because only by being heterodox can you maintain civil peace. After all, you may know that Catholics are all going to hell, but you can’t treat your Catholic neighbors that way. You have to act in a way that all beliefs are created equal. So first you modify the belief and say that just because the Catholic Church is an inferior communion (and yes, two can play that game) they are still going to get into heaven, if only through the servant’s entrance.
Well, that isn’t going to hold up. So pretty soon you are in Heaven in the hot tub with Jesus and the Pope drinking pina coladas. And after that is not difficult to let everyone else in and pretty soon Hell is empty and there goes the neighbor hood.
So yes you are right. The very language has changed in ways that makes it impossible for orthodoxy to function as a cultural dominant. It can exist in closed groups, but it cannot effectively break out of those groups.
The giant US Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Forum asked respondents to pick one of these two statements: “My religion is the one, true faith leading to eternal life, OR: many religions can lead to eternal life.” 36 percent of Ev Prots (which I think included the LCMS) and 34 percent of black Prots picked the exculsivist position, compared to 12 for mainline Prots, 16 for Catholics, and 20 for Orthodox. I wonder if some Christian respondents were confused about whether the question meant other Christian confessions or all religions. Is there a survey which asks self-identified Christians a no wiggle-room, “Jesus: yes or no?” sort of question?
I won’t dispute research with sound methodology, but the findings to which Rod refers leave me scratching my head as I doubt seriously that universalism would command majority support in my own PCA congregation.
Can you believe that? WTF?
Well, Jesuits. Yeah.
An Evangelical friend told me years ago that he was in Latin America (I think Guatemala) doing missionary work when he visited the Catholic parish in a village. While the priest said Mass, a shaman made pagan sacrifices at the back of the church. This was open, and was in fact welcomed by the priest.
The Evangelical was shocked. If that’s what was going on in my village, I would hope that I would have the presence of mind to go worship with the Evangelicals.
“Now, to be fair, I would probably answer “yes” to that question, but only with the strict qualification that if anyone who is not a Christian is saved, then he will only have been saved through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and by the extraordinary mercy of God the Father, who judged him based on what he knew. That’s why we must never say that anybody is in Hell; we just don’t know. But we must also say that we will be held responsible by God in the final judgment, and that Hell does exist.”
Rod, I hope you don’t mind my quoting this full paragraph. I just wanted to thank you for it. This is exactly what I believe, but I rarely have heard it articulated so clearly.
Except for a small remnant I can believe just about anything about the Jesuits, and I’m a practicing Catholic. It is interesting though that Father Thomas Reese was asked to step down at America, which he did do.
The hue and cry that is going around “progressive” Catholic circles over the new Missal translation is a hoot. They are absolutely flummoxed that the literal Latin translation that Christ’s blood was poured out for “many”, not for “all” has been restored, with a view to the fact that although Jesus did indeed die for all men not all will accept the salvation he brings.
I suspect that orthodox Christians in all denominations are going to be living in exile within their respective communities for some time to come.
The older I get, the more the words of the apostate priest in Shusaku Endo’s Silence seem to describe our own country as well.
When I read Terry’s comment on First Things (repeated later on your post), it struck me that it did not go far enough. If by “functionally” he meant (as he does, I think) that Catholics simply have adopted the view that all are saved without reference to the teachings of the Church. But, in fact, the post-V2 Church is prescriptively universalist: the documents Nostra aetate, Unitatis redintegratio, Dignitatis humanae promote not only universalism but indifferentism if not explicitly then implicitly by the ambiguity of their wording. Some maintain that that ambiguity was purposeful so that the ecumenist agenda could be advanced. (This, incidentally, is a major stumbling block for the regularization of the FSSPX.)
If the lex credendi is (subsists in) the lex orandi then the heresy of apocatastasis is advanced in many vernacular translations of the Consecration itself with the linguistically and theologically mendacious for all for pro multis. To be sure, the Latin version of the novus ordo service has pro multis but where is that ever heard?
This seems like an inevitability to me. Exposure to different religions will eventually lessen most people’s claims of an absolute solution.
Unless you have no interaction with people of other religions, how are you to avoid the ultimate question – is my neighbor, is my friend, is my fellow Steelers fan going to be sent to Hell? (Browns fans already live in football hell).
Charles Cosimano, on November 17th, 2011 at 10:51 am pretty much explained the situation.
Once you learn to play nice with everyone else in this world, it tends to follow that everyone expects to play nice with everyone else in the next.
Well, in the NM pueblo Indian culture, there’s been 300 plus years of feast days of Catholic saints celebrated in an adobe church, and then a procession out to the middle plaza with a statue (in the case of Zia pueblo, where I’ve been to one feast, a doll-like statue of the Virgin Mary) carried on important pueblo officials’ shoulders and placed in an evergreen bower, then after an hour’s gap, dancers coming out of the kivas dressed in traditional pueblo Indian garb. They go dancing for the rest of the day (with different groups taking turns) around the plaza, then as each group ends its dancing the members process by the statue, leaving offerings of corn meal sprinkled in front of the statue. I’ve been to some of these, and it’s a beautiful and moving experience, and I don’t have any syncretistic shivers going on. But I have Hopi traditional friends (the Hopi got rid of their Spanish missionaries, often in violent ways fairly early on, around 1700) who shake their heads and say, “I just don’t understand how those Jemez, Zia, Santo Domingo, etc, manage to fit their beliefs so that they can do the Christian thing too.”
Christianity has often borrowed and baptized elements of preexisting cultures; it did this in St. Paul’s days with the unknown God; it did this with Aristotle with Catholic scholasticism; and it’s being done in a somewhat reversed way with many native communities, whose members seem to see Christianity as part of some larger reality.
So, while I understand people’s fears of universalism, might there be respectable and illegitimate versions of it? Might the “transcendent unity of religions” crowd be onto something, which is different in kind from a casual, ultimately secular indifferentism?
To develop an idea further: might it not be a serious and thoroughly legitimate question that Christians have to ask, “Where do other religious traditions come from?” if they want to encounter the full gamut of the world instead of living in religious-intellectual ghettos? Might we really need to ask what Christ meant by saying “I have other sheep that are not of this flock?”
The older fashioned view, both Catholic and protestant, was that other religious traditions were demonic. The Catholics probably had a more flexible view from much earlier on than protestants did, what with Matteo Ricci (Jesuit again; Rod, I can see you eye rolling) and others of his ilk. But the question where other religious traditions come from is a legitimate one; and “from the devil” seems to be a dangerous answer for a whole bunch of reasons, both religious (pertaining to ideas about God’s goodness and mercy) and practical.
Rod,
As a graduate student in theology, but also someone who works in the Church, I would concur that a superficial or unexamined universalism is quite prevalent in American Christianity, whatever one’s particular tradition. It can cause dismay for those of us who believe in the unique power that the distinctive witness of those who follow Christ has for individual and communal transformation. Universalism in its superficial or unexamined forms is in many ways a consequence of the processes of modernity, which a number of theologians and philosophers (Hauerwas, MacIntyre, Milbank) have been pointing out for some time now. The demographic data is just confirming this.
Yet in some ways I can’t help but think that the petty and vicious forms which the requirements for salvation took in pre-modern Christianity helped bring about this moment we are in. The Lakota example is a case in point. While the pendulum of embrace may swing too far an the uncritical direction, there was a time when Lakota and other peoples in the Americas, were asked (often forced) to forsake every bit of their cultural heritage, in all its complexity in order to become legitimate Christians. Politically influential parts of the Church made Christianity in the image of one set of cultures and the modernist push back was a selective embrace of many cultures. While I don’t think its great theology, I can understand why its happened this way.
Rod, two questions:
in your definition – was CS Lewis a universalist ?
http://bensonian.org/2011/03/09/c-s-lewis-on-hell/
in your ongoing pursuit of MTD, would you define hell as
“Gehenna” in the New Testament where it is described as a place where both soul and body could be destroyed
Greek verb “ταρταρῶ (tartarō)”, which occurs once in the New Testament (in 2 Peter 2:4). It is almost always translated by a phrase such as “thrown down to hell”.
Funny thing about hell – we always imagine others being sent there. Not us & the good folks we love. Hitler – definitely. Ghandi – not so sure.
As someone who teaches theology, I’d say that her numbers are about correct, most especially with regard to the functional Pelagians. The sad part, of course, is that if you live that way, then you live a life that doesn’t require grace. And a life without grace seems to me to be an impoverished one. Or maybe I’ve just needed more of it than others…
The implications of this topic are far, far reaching. I’ll limit this post to the socio-political realm.
In a pluralistic society, there is no room for a dogma that requires its believers to assert that all non-believers are wrong. This is a very, very rough row to hoe, as evidenced by the many decades it took to remove religiously motivated restrictions on the strictly secular aspects of certain activities: commerce, employment, marriage, etc. It remains strongly in place in some areas, illustrated by Noah’s complaint (I have a comment for that, at the end of this post). At its heart is the notion that Our One Right Way will be imposed on all, regardless of their desires or choices.
Noah, human history shows us time and time again that the best of intentions can lead to the worst of results. Neither your example nor Rod’s Latin America example occupy the extreme ends of that spectrum, but they offer an excellent comparison. On the worse results side, you can read the literature of the destruction of the Lakota culture, whose spiritual beliefs were as embedded in their culture as — if not more than — many examples of Christianity. Your WTF question has an easy answer: Because the Christians who forcibly converted them did so in direct violation of the concept of free will, and that high school is doing the least it can do to atone for that. On the better result side, that priest is doing what has also been done successfully over several centuries: Give the people a choice, and they will exercise their free will individually either immediately or over time, and they will preserve their culturally roots quite naturally as well as cause their culture to change from the inside as they assimilate more and more to Christianity.
I submit to you, as a lifelong Pagan with no stake in your response, that the individual reaction ranging from your WTF right up to revulsion and anger is yours and yours alone, and you must reconcile it with your God in your heart. Once you act on it, once you step over the line from respecting free will into aggressive proselytizing, my stake in that both as a Pagan and as a US citizen is very clear, and please forgive the passion here but I’d be dishonest to state it any other way: over my dead body first.
To echo a subject line from a previous post by Rod: The Jesuits get it right… to which I append, with some admitted snark, that the shocked Evangelical has got it completely wrong.
As someone with a lot of experience in Evangelical and Fundamentalist circles (although admittedly mostly in the South) I can say with certainty that most Evangelicals are not universalists in the all roads lead to Heaven sense. In fact, that is part of what makes them Evangelicals. The need to evangelize arises from the belief that all roads do not lead to Heaven and that lost people need to be converted to Christianity. I am sure that there are people who sit in Evangelical pews who are closeted universalists, but the leadership and the official stance of the churches are not (certainly not openly). One could not generally embrace universalism in an Evangelical Sunday School (where a lot of theological discussions take place), for example, and not get called out ar at least get some harsh looks. It would be understood that that isn’t the official position.
I think it is a fair criticism that Evangelicals are theologically shallow, but they do generally know Evangelical soteriology because it is such a prominent part of what makes them Evangelicals.
One last note: for those interested, I strongly recommend the Paulist Press volume “Alaskan Missionary Spirituality” edited by an OCA–Russian Orthodox priest who also taught (and perhaps still teaches) at the University of Alaska. The Russian church was far more open minded in its take on Inuit customs and beliefs than the Spanish Franciscans were. Someday, I’ll write a comparative article on this, I hope; but I’m fascinated by the difference which is quite striking.
To clarify, they were not universalist. But they were charitable and flexible, and the introduction to this volume shows that this tradition among Alaska orthodox priests has continued.
Mr Dreher,
Might people actually be giving an answer closer to your variant of universialism (with its distinct caveats) than the definition that you gave first (all paths equally valid, all people will eventually be saved)? If so, is that not to some extent mere intellectual honesty? And to the crowd I guess: as a non-Catholic on the path towards Catholicism in no small part because of Jesuits (Οἷα Saxa indeed), what exactly is it with the Jesuits that bothers so many?
Thanks,
Reid Kelley
I think the best response to ‘universalism’ was found in Fr. Barron’s series “Catholicism.” It’s a very beautiful series about the Faith.
In the film, he basically restates what JP II said: while the many world religions have some elements of the truth, the fullness of truth is found in Jesus Christ. It is precisely because Jesus said “I am the Way, the Truth…” that universalism is false and salvation is exclusive.
Rod – That story of the shaman in Latin America is shocking! And with the full acceptance of the Priest!? In the church!? Wow…
In my opinion the problem is basically unsolvable once the Christian idea of salvation is reduced to “going to heaven.” Since only God knows who will go to heaven, one may well insist that “someone” will go to hell, or at least that hell is a possibility Like Rod does), but it really does not make much of a concrete difference.
The truth, however, is that the Christian doctrine of redemption is not only (perhaps not even primarily) eschatological, but has to do with present experience. If that’s the case, if Christianity gives you an experience of heaven here and know (which, according to Catholic doctrine is a requirement in order to gain the fullness of that experience after death), then the danger of universalism disappears immediately.
The reason for modern universalism has been that in large swaths of the planet Judeo-Christianity “redeemed” (to some extent) social and individual life, so that people could take Christian civilization for granted and attribute its fruits to some “universal” human values. In a few generations this will probably look very stupid.
I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned intermarriage as a factor, particularly in the U.S. It’s not just that we don’t want to say that our neighbors are hellboun –; I only wish the average Christian had that visceral response of love of neighbor! — but it’s often that we don’t want to say that those we live with might be.
Even in my (quite orthodox) CCD class, I go easy on the teaching of the One True Church and the requirements for salvation; I know several of my students in any given year have parents who are Protestant or non-Christian, and young children do not need to be wrestling with “Is Daddy going to hell?”
Franklin,
I think that you were responding to Dean’s comment, not mine.
The Catholic Church has always taught that all may be saved, but this is much different from teaching that all will be saved or that all paths to heaven are equally valid. The Feeneyite heresy that only baptized Catholics could be saved was condemned well before the Second Vatican Council. How could the Church contend to the contrary when Christ himself states that at the judgment of the nations, men will be saved or damned depending on how they treated others unaware that they were actually either accepting or rejecting Christ by their actions?
Well, Rod, all due respect to Sherry Weddell, but I’ve disagreed with her before on this, and will continue to do so.
You can’t label Catholics in America “functional Universalists” without understanding both the influence and the damage done by Feeneyism in the generation preceding the Second Vatican Council. Fr. Feeney taught an extreme version of “extra ecclesiam nullam salus” which pretty much condemned anybody who had not received the Catholic sacramental baptism by water to Hell. This view, although condemned by the Church, was more influential at the level of the people than may be realized–I know that I’ve heard from older Catholics who insist they were taught in their Catholic schools that all non-Christians and most Protestant Christians were going to Hell, even though that is a deep misunderstanding of what the Church actually teaches and has taught through the centuries.
I covered what the Church teaches here (even though Roland will probably note that I’m referring to some of the evil VII documents–but that’s because I see them as part of the hermeneutic of continuity)–and I apologize for being HTML illiterate:
http://redcardigan.blogspot.com/2011/08/hellfire-and-damnation.html
So, what’s going on at the parish level? I think that lots of Catholics understand at some level this teaching of the Church’s on “extra ecclesiam,” but because of the absolutely terrible, horrible, deficient catechesis of the last 45 years or so many of them can’t articulate it at all well–especially those who, in their youth, were solemnly told by the nuns who taught them that every sweet little baby born today in China would spend eternity in Hell if they didn’t raise enough money for the missions. So they will answer questions like the one posited in the survey with the “many religions” option out of fear of falling back into Feeneyism (even if most of them never actually heard the word “Feeneyism” and couldn’t explain what it is).
As to the “de facto Pelagians” point, I get a bit confused: does Sherry mean that most Catholics are similar to followers of Pelagius who denied the doctrine of original sin and believed that man could conquer all personal sin on his own and thus had the strict duty to do so? Or are they like the Italian Pelagians who were essentially the Catholic Church’s version of the Quietists? I have to say that I’m not really seeing many of either at the parish level.
First, while MTD may be universalist, it doesn’t follow that all universalists are functional MTD-ists.
Second, I agree with John E. that Charles pretty much nails the situation on the ground in a pluralistic society. Remember, in the early 19th Century when there was less interest in “maintaining civil peace” and more interest in orthodoxy as culturally dominant, they were burning Catholic Churches, murdering Joseph Smith, and literally riding Mormons out of town on rails in this country. If functional universalism and vapid MTD is the price for getting rid of such things, I’m not sure it’s not worth it.
Third, the unspoken but obvious rider in the lament about functional universalism is that it’s a Bad Thing. If this is indeed true, it must be for one of two reasons:
1. Hoardes of people are going to go Hell who otherwise would not have because the cultural milieu is such that they don’t take that possibility seriously enough. In short, millions of souls may suffer eternal punishment and perdition because of our society’s laxness.
2. Whether or not they go to Hell, people need to be threatened with it so they’ll behave morally in this world.
If you phrase it like this, the unpleasantness of these views becomes clear.
Consider the traditional Christian view of Hell:
1. Hell is well-populated.
2. In fact, it is likely that the vast majority of humanity is in Hell, suffering eternal punishment and eternal separation from God.
3. Many in Hell are there for what would outwardly seem to be trivial reasons. For example, raditionally, the Catholic Church has defined deliberately missing Mass or deliberately eating meat on an day of abstinence as mortal sins–that is, sins that if not repented will cause one to be damned eternally. Likewise, most Christian churches have traditionally said that a Hindu, e.g., who lives a morally exemplary life but worships “false gods” is also doomed (I realize the idea of “baptism of desire” and “invincible ignorace” go back a long way, but not all Medieval theologians subscribed to them, and the generally held belief of the masses was that non-Christians weren’t saved, period. It’s only in recent decades that this has somewhat changed).
4. God is love and wants everyone to be saved.
It doesn’t take too much thought to see how 1-3 and 4 are totally contradictory. I’m also aware that complicated, tortuous arguments can be made as to why missing Mass or masturbating or being Hindu will plunge one into eternal fire as much as being a mass murderer; but I have to say that none are convincing to me. They don’t seem congruent with the God of love proclaimed by Christianity.
Yes, as Rod says, “we must also say that we will be held responsible by God in the final judgment”–but does that entail infinite punishment, infinite exile from God, for finite sins? After all, the sins of the worst human sinner are still finite. I’m not saying Hell doesn’t exist–Christ is very clear, as are many other religions, in fact, and I’ve had too much experience of human nastiness to write the Inferno off–but perhaps the idea of its eternity is incorrect. Maybe, in addition, we don’t know as much about the criteria for entrance–or avoidance–as we think we do.
I’d also point out that many of the Church Fathers and saints held some form or univeralist views, e.g. Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzus, Macrina, Basil, Jerome, and Eusebius of Caesarea. I don’t think they’re bad company in which to be.
I’m not saying we should be complacent or presumptious, btw, or that we won’t be held responsible by God for our actions. I’m just saying that I don’t think a functional universalism is necessarily bad, or that it’s better than what seems to be the alternative (e.g. burning churches, killing members of other faiths, etc.).
My great uncle, long since departed, said that when he was at a Catholic school as a child in the 20′s, if a kid misbehaved badly enough, the nuns would take him down to the basement to the old coal-fired boiler that heated the school, put the kid’s hand to the metal just long enough for them to feel the heat without getting more than a blister from the burn, and scream, “Hell is like that for eternity, and that’s where you’re going if you don’t straighten up!” Is that the kind of model we want? Is that better than MTD (which, understand, I’m not promoting)?
Right you are, Noah, and thanks for pointing it out. Even so, I’d be grateful if you had a response.
Dean, are you still reading?
Rod, the AC server feed was very wonky for the last hour-plus. I did misread who wrote what, but my display was very odd even so. Shrug. Maybe it was because the moderator took extra time approving my post. I really do need to learn brevity better.
Franklin,
It is clear that as a Pagan, you do subscribe to the universalist agenda in that you are content as long as no one’s “free will” is violated. But let me propose a scenario. I am a, let’s say, conquistador who with my band of stout-hearted defenders of the Faith and Western Civ comes upon an indigenous religious rite transpiring in a jungle village. I have two choices. I can “forcibly” convert the heathen or I can inculturate their religious liturgy into the Catholic Mass. I presume you will opt for the inculturation so that their unique tribal customs, chants, praxis etc. may be preserved for posterity. My question is, at what point during the Mass does the shaman bring up offering of the basket of human hearts and the buckets of blood to the Lord God? And do we save the children’s hearts for the children’s Mass?
Merely a hypothetical, you understand.
There’s still plenty of non-universalists about, at least among the Protestants. I was raised in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), in a congregation in suburban Philadelphia (one you’re already familiar with, Rod). I can assure you that this church relished the old Calvinist doctrines, and preached hell and damnation with gusto. As a child I was taught the Limited Atonement, and that the vast, vast, vast majority of human beings past and present are either already in or are racing toward an eternity of horror and terror.
Granted, the PCA ain’t the biggest denomination, but nor is it trivially tiny or altogether unrepresentative of the continuing popularity of damnation in American Protestantism.
I think there is, besides the societal forces, another thing which seriously militates against taking orthodoxy seriously. We see the universe a lot differently than folks did even a hundred years ago. I remember one night, about 3:30 in the morning, getting into a sort of religious argument with a new girlfriend who was a very very serious Roman Catholic at the time. Fortuantely it was a very warm night and the neighbors were in bed, because in a fit of absolute frustration I dragged her not very dressed body into the back yard, pointed up to the starry heavens and said, “Look! Do you really think that the intelligence capable of creating all that would care what anyone believes about it?”
My theological response… such as I can offer, having admitted my outsider-looking-in position.
I believe Rod has taken several large steps in drawing a line between the Moral Therapeutic Deism he and I both reject (for very different reasons, of course) and the theoretical and practical conflicts between personal revelation (I term it experientialism) and doctrine or dogma.
Everyone can breathe, because my point is very short: Spirit takes work. It takes hard work sometimes, but it is a lifelong endeavor. MTD is the label I use to dismiss those who believe that they’ve “made it!” to the few and only important milestones, and can rest on their laurels from then on.
I stand by the lifelong work statement, but do admit to a fairness caveat: the vast majority of people just don’t have to make it hard work to be both confirmed believers and satisfied in their beliefs. I suppose I see it as the difference between the everyday life of an ordinary person, who is enriched, consoled and/or uplifted by his or her faith depending on the circumstances; and the rare person whose intensity of faith must have an outlet, whether from the personal devotions each day or to applying to and joining the clergy. It is a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. I have neither criticism nor scorn for people on any point of that spectrum, and indeed in keeping with my first post’s comments about free will, I can easily see every choice as admirable.
Did I really say “very short” up there? Sorry, there’s one more thing. The writings of Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell together lead me to firmly assert that the human experience is at its core One Thing, but being human also means wide and extensive variation. Every One True Way argument, I submit, is one of semantics, not one of truth. The simplest way to make my point here is the room with the elephant in it surrounded by blind men. All of them report their truths, none of them know the full truth, and if the concepts of compassion and love have any truth for humans, we should all see ourselves as those blind men with sight restored, still not able to see the entire elephant all at once, but capable of sitting together and sharing our individual parts of it. That other human trait, the impulse to satisfy our egos, is I opine the biggest obstacle.
“While the priest said Mass, a shaman made pagan sacrifices at the back of the church. This was open, and was in fact welcomed by the priest.”
While this is shocking, is it really any different than some of the many pagan customs that have crept into Christendom over the centuries?
For instance Christmas and its many customs and practices were originally based on the birthday celebration of the Roman God Sol and the Persian God Mithra celebrated on December 25 the winter solstice according to the Julian calander.
As far as Easter The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible says that it was “originally the spring festival in honor of the Teutonic goddess of light and spring known in Anglo-Saxon as Eastre,” or Eostre.
In fact the The Catholic Encyclopedia admits: “A great many pagan customs, celebrating the return of spring, gravitated to Easter. The egg is the emblem of the germinating life of early spring. . . . The rabbit is a pagan symbol and has always been an emblem of fertility.”—(1913), Vol. V, p. 227.
Roland, I always enjoy your posts, even when they gently draw my blood with polite barbs.
I can answer you on several levels. I’ll summarize them and let you pick which of them, if any, are cogent.
1. It is absurd to posit that a culture that practices human sacrifice would make room for a Catholic mass, unless one smart Aztec priest decided that the Crucifixion somehow works as an analogy. That’s baldly put, and I mean no provocation or disrespect… but it really looks absurd to me.
2. The implied source of your example fails as a support for it. I have a general knowledge of the shamanic aspects of the indigenous religions in Latin America. There are many assumptions to make, but the one I settle on is that the Jesuit would not be approving if the sacrifices were also cruel to humans. Many such practices use the sacrifice as a prelude to the animal “victim” being the entree at the feast later. At worst, in that case, one might be upset with a public butchering by the cook.
3. It is a universal belief — except in those religious hierarchies that practice it — that human sacrifice is evil. Your example has a case in point behind it. The Conquistadors acquired many allies against the Aztecs, neighboring peoples who jumped at the chance to stop being the donors to their bloody altars. Many Aztec warriors were killed in battle in their astonishment that Spaniards would keep fighting after being wounded, instead of waiting meekly to be collected for later sacrifice.
4. It is at best disingenuous to assume that those Latin America shamans were offering their sacrifices to the Christian God. It would be equally ridiculous to say that a Sioux elder and a Baptist minister taking turns offering prayers at a multifaith convention were both praying to the same deity. I cited semantics above. I do not mean to denigrate or minimize it.
It’s not happening for just the practical/pragmatic coping reasons Charles Cosimano points out. The identity-based pressures and justifications for particularism are eroding fast.
The Orthodox, for example, are seeing ethnic adherents leave- which isn’t fatal per se- and converts come into the group under convincement by conscience or doctrine, not via marriage in, which is also not fatal per se. But in sufficiently large proportions of either or both the linkage between being born into the religion and the ethnic group obligation to sustain it (as the ethnic group’s cultural focus and historical project) breaks up. And with it the significant group motivation for particularist belief.
The core doctrine of traditonal Christianity, Original Sin, is probably not a sustainable doctrine in liberal democratic societies. The historical group traumas, scores, and guilts settle and fade away with the generations. The level of violence and violent criminality and criminality generally drops to some baseline as poverty declines, and with those individual trauma diminishes. Average neurotypical people start to find ever less good evidence on which to sincerely convict themselves of Sin or regard themselves as bearers of an innate or historical burden of Sin. And not exonerating themselves has deleterious consequences. Convicting themselves of having perpetrated much more serious offenses than they actually had leads to gross insecurities and disabling social dysfunctions. Catholic Guilt being a familiar one.
In the long run that leaves not so neurotypical people whose relationships with others largely or often go bad in abusive forms as the last to resort to Original Sin as the meaningful explanation for the condition of the Self and the social condition at large.
Why, Charles Cosimano, how unromantic of you! You might have told her that the intelligence capable of creating all that also had the love to create the beautiful specimen of stardust that she is.
Mica, mica, parva stella,
Miror quaenam sis tam bella!
Bella et tu quae iuxta me
Sempiterne amabo te.
John T., I am one of the perhaps few modern Pagans who see the blending of Pagan ritual and practice in Christian celebrations a natural consequence of assimilation — with the slight remnants of those Pagan roots barely visible today — rather than a symptom of “theft” or appropriation. The example of Halloween is an annual reminder that some of those Pagan sensibilities should not have been lost. Samhain was a memorial to those loved ones who had passed away, and respect to the ancestors who just might be around watching and disapproving of their heirs’ foibles or departure from traditional values.
Franklin and Roland,
Re: human sacrifice and the Catholic mass.
You both could consider reading Anthony Burgess’ immense novel, “Earthly Powers,” in which at the end in a fictionalized Africanization of the Mass human flesh is offered.
Don’t read it if you are too easily offended; it’s the pseudo biography of a gay novelist whose life describes the arc of the 20th century to about the late 1970s; but I kind of like it for many reasons, even though the bit above has struck me as a little too much.
Franklin,
As always, being the gentleman and scholar that you are, you respond graciously to my (facetious) barbs.
To each point in turn:
1. The culture in question has been conquered. It is the Catholic priest who must decide to allow the native ritual alongside the Mass. I was thinking of the direct analogue of the Dean’s WTF Jebby only with a starker native ritual.
2. But the example was meant to be hypothetical. I’m not sure the Jesuit would be adverse to human sacrifice in the right context. The liberation theology buffs had no compunction about sacrificing the youth to the Marxist Moloch. Substitute an inquisitorial Dominican if you like.
3. I agree. That human sacrifice is evil is a universal belief, except when it isn’t. But is it evil because it violates the victim’s free will? What of the willing Iphigenia? But not Polyxena? Or Christ, the willing Victim? Without His sacrifice, there would have been no salvation (in the Christian scheme of things). To stretch the strictures of etymology, should Good Friday be Bad Friday?
4. They certainly would not be offering their sacrifices, before or after conquest, to the Christian God. No more so than do the Santería priests or that African voodoo priest recently at Assisi. The idea of inculturation is that those practices must be accommodated.
But all that aside, I think the world would be better off if everybody had joined the church we dreamt up on Rod’s old blog. It was beautiful in its minimalism. No liturgy, no prayers, no chants, no homilies, no sacrifices. Just a collection solemnly collected. It’s too bad it ended in schism as neither of us really trusted the other with the proceeds.
It’s good to see you here. I have read you on Alexandria off and on as well. Quite an eclectic group of bloggers there!
My reaction to this debate is amusement. No one has seen anyone in Hell, or can present any evidence that it exists. At least the universe exists which is supposed to be God’s handiwork, so the theism/atheism debate has some grounding in reality. But Hell only has humans claiming special knowledge about it, but they can’t agree on who goes there or why. So there is less reason to believe in Hell than the existence of God. So it should be no big shock that people are becoming universalists.
Turmarion, I find reason 2 pretty useless. People who claim to believe in hell can act immorally and people who claim they don’t can act morally. So it seems like a steering wheel on a kiddie car, not particularly useful.
It’s very good to see you too, Roland. If we still can’t agree on the proceeds, perhaps we could divvy up the laurels or take turns resting on them.
I’m very happy to be a contributor on Alexandria, being the devotee of eclecticism that I am.
1. Concedo.
2. The “Marxist Moloch” reference went “whoosh” over my head. Please point me to a source? I can posit one example of a “right context” with similarity to human sacrifice, being the druidic Celt practice of ritually executing their criminals.
Wikipedia general entry on druidic sacrificial practices.
Some modern scholarly references. The Life and Death of a Druid Prince by Anne Ross is both interesting and well written.
Insert usual caveats about Wikipedia entries.
3. I have a personal problem with willing human sacrifice to or in the name of a deity, any deity. One might speculate that this problem is the main reason for my aversion to Christianity. That also makes any reply to the connection to free will problematic, at least in its necessary egregious length as I work my way through the labyrinth it represents (to me). I might make an exception for martyrdom (other than Jesus’), but even that by itself requires much thought.
4. We seem to be close on this one. I would posit accomodation as a part of the process of assimilation, rather than a solution. I would impose a practical view on it, where the hypothetical priest must needs judge how long one can tolerate those aspects that need to be changed. I would just add that both Santeria and Voudon practices include cooking and eating the sacrificial animal in their rituals. I suppose, at least in that context, that I am at least implying accomodation.
It might be a more peaceful world if fewer people fought wars with others they think are going straight to hell.
Re: Or Christ, the willing Victim? Without His sacrifice, there would have been no salvation (in the Christian scheme of things).
Christ was only a human sacrifice in that, being God he became also human, and therefore subject to mortality. Which yes, is a big, big deal, but a world apart from Iphigenia.
All of us are mortal and going to face death someday– but no one would say we are all human sacrifices. Christ could have died in bed (and someday would have), and salvation would still have been effected, the key aspect of the situation being that he had to die and enter the Realm of Death (Hades in Greek, sometimes translated as “Hell”) so he could break the chains of sin and death by which humanity was bound. The Crucifixion shows the lengths he was willing to go to achieve that end, but was not necessary. Nor did his crucifiers have any notion that they were committing an act of human sacrifice.
Re: many customs and practices were originally based on the birthday celebration of the Roman God Sol and the Persian God Mithra celebrated on December 25 the winter solstice according to the Julian calander
Careful John T. While the Romans certainly did have a Solstice Festival in December (just about every non-tropical culture has one), the Mithra connection is a recently-concocted myth that doesn’t stand up to serious historical inquiry*. Yes, Mithra was worshipped in the Roman Empire contemporaneous with Christianity, but the so-called parallels with Christianity (generally with implication that Christianity borrowed, if not stole, from Mithraism rather than the reverse) are mainly latter-day inventions which are unfounded in the actual sources from antiquity.
* At most Roman Mithraists celebrated the Solistice Festival just as everyone else at the time did; it was not closely associated with their own god however.
Re: As far as Easter The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible says that it was “originally the spring festival in honor of the Teutonic goddess of light and spring known in Anglo-Saxon as Eastre,” or Eostre
Oh good grief, not this silly old chesnut again! You are aware that Christianity did not originate in England, or in any country inhabited by Germannic or Celtic people? That the Feast of the Resurrection was celebrated centuries before the first Anglo-Saxon was baptized? Maybe even that the more general name of this feast is “Pascha”, or some variant thereof, derived from Hebrew “Pesach”, for “Passover”?
Yes, the Anglo-Saxons had a goddess named Eostre (cognate with Aurora and Eos and the compass direction East by the way). Yes, she had a springtime festival, and the name of that festival stuck around and became attached to Christian Pascha. But that’s it. The Feast of the Resurrection is no more some Germannic goddess’ feastday dressed in Christian drag, than atoms are in fact indivisable because, hey, that’s what “atomoi” means in Greek. If you want to seek Christianity’s roots they are staringly obvious: ancient Judaism primarily, and secondly, Greco-Roman Neoplatonism.
[...] am not a theologian. The following is a reflection prompted by Rod Dreher’s post: ” Christian Universalism Is The New [...]
Well, Rod we’ve had a, for America, longstanding, popular, “born again” theology which says if you “accepted Christ” then murdered, you were still “saved.”
Universalism can include restitutionism which implies plenty of payoff for sins before salvation. It does not have to mean “all paths” are equally valid, or have the same speed
getting there.
Iphigenia
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Connie,
I am not sure whether you are directing you remark to the lady (the word?) herself or to the risible laudator temporis acti that am I. My curiosity having been piqued however, I would ask (a) what do you think that I think that it means, and (2) why do you think I think it means what you think I think it means, (3) what do you think it means, and (4) what does it actually mean.
I am eager to be corrected if I am in error (which I confess I am all too often). You may reply at your leisure in the common vernacular of this blog or in classical Attic if it is more concordant with your classical proclivity.
Post Vatican II the Catholic Church has seemed to embrace a form of universalism. While they don’t embrace something quite as crass as “all roads lead to Heaven” they do believe that salvation is possible for non-Christians. A better term theologically for this would probably be inclusivist rather than universalist, so I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised that Catholic lay people embrace universalism. Why wouldn’t they?
Evangelicals reject inclusivism because Scripture rejects inclusivism. Evangelicals consider inclusivism a heresy.
@ Jon F
The point is there is no scripturral basis for celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25. The scriptures indicate that Christ was probably born in the fall when the shepherds would have been in the fields at night.
As mentioned December 25 was an important pagan Roman hoilday the Sol Invictus. Just do some research on all the customs involved such as the giving of gifts (Which by the way according to the scriptures the wise men were not present at the birth of Christ but showed up much later). Even in early America in the Massachucetts Bay Colony Christmas was banned for several decades because of its pagan origins.
As far as Easter goes: silly old chestnut? How do you explain the egg and rabbitt which clearly are pagan symbols. Easter has also been linked to the worship of the Phoenician fertility goddess, Astarte, who had as her symbols the egg and the hare. Statues of Astarte have variously depicted her as having exaggerated sex organs or with a rabbit beside her and an egg in her hand.
Please don’t feel that I am saying that Christianity had its roots in pagan traditions. I think there is a vast difference between Christianity and Christendom. After Constantine, Christianity was recast and refashioned to become the universal or catholic religion of the empire. As a result it incorporated many popular pagan beliefs. Thus the example cited of the shaman is not anything new.
Red Phiilips:
refresh your Church history: the whole discussion about salvation for non-Christians took place in the 1500 after the great geographical discoveries. The Catholic position was cemented in a series of doctrinal declarations (including one at Trent, if I remember correctly) centered around the notion of “baptism of desire.” Essentially Vatican II added nothing new.
As for Scripture rejecting “inclusivism,” that’s quite an oversimplification of a complex question.
I did refresh my history before I posted my comment. The Catholic Church maintains that Vatican II did not change anything, but it requires a whole lot of mental and verbal gymnastics to do so. The simplest reading is that their position has changed because there are a lot of official statements from the past that read as plainly exclusivist.
John T: I agree that the December 25 date is not Scripturally sound. However it was the result of a probably erroroneous attempt to derive the date from clues in Scripture and Jewish records. The Gospel of Luke links Christ’s birth to John the Baptist’s, and John’s priestly father is mentioned as entering the sanctuary around the time of his conception, something that would only be done on certain high holy days. This is how the December date was derived, and yes, it was probably wrong and also probably tweaked a bit to fall on the Roman solar feast.
You mention gift giving– but that was not associated with Christmas originally, but rather with St Nicholas, whose feast day is Dec 6. The shift to Christmas occured in much later times. There’s still an old country Orthodox custom of sticking money or sweets in children’s shoes on St Nicholas Day. And yes, in some places gift-giving was done on the Epiphany (Jan 6), where that day was celebrated as the Visitation of the Magi.
Re: How do you explain the egg and rabbitt which clearly are pagan symbols
They are much later accretions, not original Paschal customs. There’s Christian accounts of them too: the egg harks back to a reported miracle of Mary Magdalen before the emperor Tiberius, when he flippantly told her to turn his hard-boiled breakfast egg red with her prayers– and she did. (Orthodox churches still give out red eggs on Easter) The rabbit is really a hare, which was imaged in medieval bestiaries as an animal archtype of Christ, because it supposedly sacrifices its life to save its young when a predator attacks. But again these are later additions, and you can hardly build ay sort of critique of the holiday based on minor folk customs. Astarte by the way was an old Phoenician goddess whose worship was no longer in vogue by Christian times (Isis and Kybele being the main Mother goddesses of the Roman Empire).
Re: After Constantine, Christianity was recast and refashioned to become the universal or catholic religion of the empire
What about Christianity outside the Roman Empire? There were Christians in Persia and India. Christianity became the dominant and official religion in Armenia and Ethiopia too. Did Constantine somehow exert magical powers over those Christians too? He certainly had to no political power in such distant places. And if you examine those non-Roman Christianities, there are differences, yes (including some plenty of alternate folk customs) but they are pretty similar to early Catholicism and especially Orthodoxy.
Re: No one has seen anyone in Hell, or can present any evidence that it exists.
MH,
Actually, many, many people _purport_ to have seen Hell. Visions of hell are one of the most common subject matter of religious experiences, and they’re legion. If one places any credence at all in the argument from mystical experience, e.g. ‘something supernatural must exist because so many credible people claim to have experienced it’ (and personally, I think that’s one the strongest arguments for the existence of God), then it’s logical to believe in hell as one of the best-attested supernatural concepts around.
Le sigh. This Pagan is ironically amused by the whose holiday came first debates in general. Modern Pagans are, if anything, more guilty of assertion from scant to no evidence than the scriptural purists, but that’s not really saying much.
Modern connotations of syncretistic trends point to it being a conscious and deliberate process. That is true, but not always. The Celts were noted for their willingness to adopt and assimilate cultural and spiritual practices and beliefs during their migratory phase, and it shows up later in their history after settling in northwestern Europe and the Isles (probably because they ran out of land to traverse) around Roman culture and religion as well as the later Christian hegemony making its way there.
There is evidence of assimilation and syncretism, but little to no literature for how and why. Originalism is very shaky even for “established” things like the Greco-Roman spiritual traditions, with a similar blend of evidence and scant corroboration that they got their beliefs from the Etruscans, enough even so to cause disciplined anthropologists to raise eyebrows and ask questions.
Anyway, most people are unaware that Zoroastrianism* was the first monotheism, and its influence can arguably be found in all of the Abrahamic traditions. Mithraism found its way to Rome via mercantile traffic, Isis was very popular there after the conquest of Egypt, and Mithras had its heyday and most prominent popularity with soldiers, not a very good recommendation for its being a “source” for Christmas.
* Connections to a masked Spaniard in the New World are best left to the imagination.
Hector, as a hard boiled skeptic, claims of mystical experiences don’t impress me as they are not subject to verification.
Frankly a deeper problem with hell is that the universe is enormously un-freaken-believably huge, and we are specs on a spec orbiting a spec. It’s really hard to believe that our actions are of any concern to any being capable of creating something that big.
Jon F: I think we can go back and forth on this but I think we agree that there was obviously an influence because of the influx of people into Christendom. Ancient Roman Saturnalian festivities began on December 17 and concluded on the 24th, when gifts were exchanged. Homes and streets were noisy with banqueting, heavy drinking, and riotous behavior.
There was a dispute in the early church over when Pascha should be celebrated. The Quartodeciman churches in Asia celebrated it on Nisan 14. About 155 Polycarp of Symrna visited Rome to discuss this problem but there was no resolution. Polycarp based his position on the authority of the apostles (See Eusebius, Book 5, chapter 24)
It was not until the council of Nicea that the issue was finally resolved and the decree was issued for all to conform to the Roman usage. Part of the argument was it was not worthy to have such a holy festival follow the custom of the Jews.
From then on, the Quartodecimans were censured as heretics and schismatics and were persecuted. The Council of Antioch in 341 C.E. decreed that they were to be excommunicated.
I don’t think that Constantine exerted magical power but I do know that any that disagreed were ultimately persecuted and eliminated.
The point is there is no scripturral basis for celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25. The scriptures indicate that Christ was probably born in the fall when the shepherds would have been in the fields at night.
It is always difficult to convey to someone who operates on a sola scriptura basis why the eldest Christian traditions have incorporated “pagan” practices, which were given a Christocentric “baptism”, so to speak.
Yes, Jesus probably was born in the Fall, so what? Easter (or Pascha), the Feast of the Resurrection was being celebrated before Christmas observances were established. Nor is it any secret that when Constantine legalized Christianity a lot of hangers-on entered the Church because it became socially advantageous to do so. But then, according to the Gospels, “wheat and tares” will always be part of the Church in this world. I’ll leave the sorting of the sheep and goats to the One who alone is qualified to do so.
““Now, to be fair, I would probably answer “yes” to that question, but only with the strict qualification that if anyone who is not a Christian is saved, then he will only have been saved through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and by the extraordinary mercy of God the Father, who judged him based on what he knew. That’s why we must never say that anybody is in Hell; we just don’t know. But we must also say that we will be held responsible by God in the final judgment, and that Hell does exist.”
Yes, I understand this is what you believe, and this has been the “orthodox” Christian belief for a long time. I don’t believe it, however, and not only that, I think it’s simply false, and I don’t think it’s even what Jesus taught, though accounts vary. But I can respect an internalized group that believes this about themselves, as long as they don’t expect everyone else to take it seriously. There are plenty of people in this world who think that they just happen to have been born into or chosen the one and only true way to God, and they take either compassionate pity on the rest, or they think the rest are going to hell, etc. This is their faith, and it gives them some kind of comfortable reassurance about the predictability of the world.
For me, I think that kind of religious belief is for humans on earth, not spirits in heaven or the afterlife or whatever you wish to call it. We take religion seriously here because this is a bewildering place that is hard to get through without some kind of foundation of belief and commitment to anchor oneself to. That’s valuable, whether you are a Christian or Hindu or Taoist. But it doesn’t actually have to be literally true to be valuable in that regard. And I think that in the afterlife we find out very quickly that not much of that is true. Some of it is metaphorically true, or morally true, but not literally true. Nobody goes to “hell” for having the wrong set of beliefs, or even being a self-indulgent fool. That too is an invention of earthly minds.
What is actually true about life and death is a “spiritual truth”m and it isn’t the focus of much of religion, which is more concerned with earthly life and creating a notion of the afterlife which can be used to promote particular earthly habits and customs.
In that sense, one can certainly be spiritual without being religious, as that I think is how the afterlife actually works. There are no religions in heaven, no structure based on these earthly belief systems. Jesus and Saint Peter are not in control of it, it just doesn’t work like that. And “heaven” is not really Heaven in any case either. It’s a helluva lot better than this place, but it’s not some final resting place either. One continues to do spiritual work and grow spiritually, as on earth.
It’s good that you admit that you just don’t know if anyone is in hell. It would be better if you’d admit that you don’t even know that there is a hell. Belief in hell works for some people to keep them from straying from their path, and that can be important. But turning that into an objective reality you actually think the universe of God works by is going to be of limited value in understanding God. God is not persuaded by the intensity of our beliefs in how God works. He is not a hired servant of our religions, who carries out its edicts. God works by grace, and good luck comprehending how that functions.
John Paul also was something of an eschatological heretic when he said in a Parade interview that God still wanted the Jews to own what is now called Israel, that the land promise of the Abrahamic Covenant was still in effect.
A violation, however minor, of millenia of direct and indirect Church tradition on the subject.
Ken,
I don’t know I would call JP II’s opinion heresy– that’s a strong word and should be reserved for serious departures from established Christology and the like. But yes, it is counter to tradition, and ought be labeled “heterodox” as such. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a Jewish state, but does mean that its justification should be sought in prudential concerns for the modern international order, not in ancient prophecies.
Conradg,
We know there is Hell in this world. And that being the case it seems quite likely that people take it with them into death. I do not think that death grants any new grace or wisdom, and if one walks in darkness here, that same darkness will accompany one Elsewhere.
Unitarian Pelagian Universalism: my faith in a nutshell.
Caveats: I am not a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, which originally was know as the Unitarian Baptists. I simply don’t consider dividing all God into three parts to be fundamental to faith, conscience, or established Truth. I also don’t assume that EVERY possible path leads to God — I do believe that there is only one God, and no established religious institution has a particularly plausible claim to a complete and perfect understanding of what THE path to God consists of.
Siarlys, your synopsis of UUA origins, starting with the not-quite accurate replacement of that final letter in the acronym with “Fellowship”, prompted me to refresh my own memories of attendance to Sunday school and regular services at a Unitarian church that joined the UUA during my membership.
http://www.uua.org/publications/pamphlets/introductions/151249.shtml
By their own accounting, American Unitarians were spiritual cousins of the original sect in Europe but started instead in the Calvinist congregationlism of colonial New England, while the Universalists came to prominence in more southerly places including Philadelphia where a Calvinist preacher organized a Universal Baptist congregation that included Benjamin Rush.
Anyway, I gently nitpick your accuracy. There was never an organization called UU Fellowship except as that was and is used by individual congregations, and there was an organization for Universal Baptists but not Unitarian.
Franklin, I may have transposed the name of the LOCAL UU “Fellowship” I briefly associated with at the age of 16 — my Presbyterian mother had announced that as long as I was living under her roof, I was going to church on Sunday, but I was old enough to choose which church for myself. At that age, I might have chosen one of a couple of varieties of pagan, but no such option was available. There was a single self-styled Satanist in town, but that didn’t attract me — I know that Satan worship is an offshoot of Christianity, not an indigenous faith.
I stand by the statement that Unitarians in New England were known as Unitarian Baptists. A self-serving pamphlet giving a brief summary is not the be-all and end-all of The Truth, as any Unitarian or Universalist should know. In North America, incidentally, the Baptist faith was brought to Virginia and the Carolinas by missionaries from New England — who were breaking away from the Congregational monopoly also.
The pamphlet inexplicably neglects to mention that Michael Servetius was burned at the stake on the orders of JOHN CALVIN, as good a reason as any NOT to consider myself a Calvinist. (I also accept C.S. Lewis’s description, in The Screwtape Letters of the fallacy of predestination.)