Sunday, October 28, 2007

"Our Roots: Part One

 Where Do We Come From?"

A Talk by Barbara Fleming

Namaqua UU Congregation

     During his short lifetime, Jesus preached of love and forgiveness. Jesus was a Jew among Jews, and we have no evidence that he ever perceived himself as anything other than a Jew. He was regarded by many of his followers as their longed-for messiah, or savior, whom Jews had been told by their prophets would someday come to them. Moreover, when we consider Jesus we have only the texts of those who knew him, and later those who knew of him, words that have been translated repeatedly into several different languages and probably lost some of their original meaning in the translation.

     After Jesus’s death Paul and other followers wrote their testimonies, which eventually became the Bible, and the Christian church grew out of those writings and the preachings of the devout. The church grew rapidly, overtaking religions that believed in many gods. The promise of an afterlife, guaranteed by Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, attracted many followers.

     However, by the fourth century dissension had begun to affect the church. Constantine, the Byzantine Emperor, declared Christianity the official religion of his empire. Yet the religion lacked a definitive creed and a focal point, so in 325 AD – or Common Era, as many prefer to call it – a council of church leaders gathered in Nicea, in what is now Turkey.

     At this council, a majority of priests overwhelmed a small minority of followers of Arius, or Arians, who maintained that – to put it in lay terms – the writings of Christianity did not include discussion of a holy spirit which impregnated Mary with the seed of God, making Jesus God’s son; therefore, the doctrine the priests had devised, henceforth called the Nicene Creed, was invalid. Despite this opposition the creed was adopted and is spoken in many Christian churches to this day. It remains a foundation of what Christians accept as true. What happened at that gathering is, of course, far more complex and theological than this very brief explanation.

      What this has to do with us is that the Arian position, rejecting the doctrine of a holy trinity or God in three persons, laid the groundwork for the Unitarian faith.

     Jesus himself, according to the writings that followed soon after his death, never claimed to be the son of God. The priests at Nicea wished to move their Christian faith away from its Jewish origins and found it politically expedient to incorporate anti-Semitism into the religion they were creating. Given the trusting naivete and ignorance of the majority of the faithful, as well as the pagan roots many converts were reluctant to give up, the priests also found it useful to the growth of the movement to build in myth and mystery, elements satisfied by the virgin birth story.

     The outvoted Arians became outcasts – heretics, which in Greek means “choice.” Though remaining Christians, that is, followers of Christ’s teachings, they chose not to accept the Nicene creed. But they were few in number, and soon a dark time descended on Europe with the rising influence of the Christian church, which had become the Catholic church, following a leader in Rome. As it grew larger this organization became increasingly corrupt, awash in power struggles, and autocratic. Most believers, unlike the early followers of Jesus and his disciples, accepted the new faith out of fear of damnation. Few could read. Being illiterate limited their understanding of the world around them and consequently their range of choices. The heretics followed and passed on their beliefs among their own group, but fear of retribution kept them silent in the wider community.

     No one, including the heretics, at this stage of religious development questioned the divinity of Jesus, the existence and power of God, the reality of heaven and hell, original sin and atonement through the death of Jesus, the actuality of the resurrection, or the presence of evil. The heretics accepted all of these precepts except the trinity. They maintained that the divinity of Jesus had come as a gift from God, not through the manner of his conception.

     The Inquisition, occurring mainly in the 13^th, 14^th and early 15^th centuries, silenced dissent in Europe for centuries because anyone questioning the church – innocent or otherwise – was tortured and usually put to death. The next voice we hear in our UU history is that of Miguel (or Michael) Servetus.

     I, Michael Servetus, dispute the concept of the trinity.

     A Spaniard, son of a judge, trained as a physician, Servetus read the Bible as a young man and realized that it differed markedly from the teachings of the church in Rome. Nowhere in the writings did he find reference to a deity in three parts, a trinity. He wrote a book, On the Errors of the Trinity, that got him into hot water with the church, so much so that he had to go into hiding to save his life. He moved to Paris, changed his name, and studied medicine. For twenty years he lived anonymously in France.

     A rising figure during the mid-1500s in Europe was John Calvin. While a reformer who protested Catholic practices as others were then beginning to do in Europe, he was equally inflexible in his own views. Protestantism had gained a foothold among the educated, but Calvin’s brand of it retained the basic dogma of Catholicism, including the trinity. Calvin, Luther and others objected to the hierarchy and corruption in the Roman church, not to the essential teachings. Anyone who held a different view was, therefore, a heretic.

     Captured once in France by Catholics, Servetus somehow managed to escape, but he could not escape his own fatal flaw – he felt compelled to speak out about his beliefs. Carefully constructing his arguments against the trinity, he sent a new treatise to Calvin in Geneva. Trustingly, he hoped Calvin would be open to logic which Servetus saw as irrefutable and would be willing to debate openly with him.

     Oh, no, Michael! Don’t go there! Don’t do it!

     But he did. Passing through Geneva on a Sunday, he decided to go to church. The Calvinists promptly arrested him. They swiftly tried and convicted him for heresy, sentencing him to death. In 1553, at 42, twenty years after publishing his book, he was burned at the stake. He did not recant before his death.

     We can’t consider Servetus a Unitarian in the sense that he had followers or a church or labeled himself as such. Nor was he a saint. But his martyrdom helped light the spark of liberal religion in Europe. 

     Gradually, the people of Europe were beginning to awaken to new ideas. More and more could read, and they could buy books, printed books, full of information that had been withheld from the masses for centuries.

     One avid reader was Faustus Socinus, an Italian heretic, who inherited the heretical writings of his father. Faustus kept the spark of liberal religion alive.

      Driven out of Italy, he went first to Transylvania, then on to Poland, where he founded the Minor Reformed Church in 1565. Many Unitarian historians consider this the first Unitarian church. The church flourished for a short time, but soon the forces of ignorance and fear doused the little light in Krakow. The church doors were closed, Socinus went into hiding, and his congregants fled the country.

     The Socinians surfaced in Italy, Holland, Denmark and England. As the era of the Inquisition faded, they spoke more openly of their beliefs, keeping the light of liberal religion alive.

     Meanwhile, in Transylvania (now Hungary), Francis David, a preacher, persuaded young

King John Sigusmund to issue an edict of religious tolerance, the first known in history. Unfortunately, upon Sigusmund’s early death in 1571 orthodox forces clamped down hard. “Religious tolerance?” they scoffed. “Who ever heard of such a thing?” David died in prison. And the light of liberal religion was snuffed out in Transylvania – although to this day one can find Unitarian churches in both Hungary and Romania.

      Liberal religion, 16th and 17th century style, was not dead, though its light was to remain dim for some time. Some Socinians who migrated to England, hoping their beliefs might find a warmer reception there, instead found themselves in a boiling cauldron of religious turmoil.

     Queen Elizabeth the First was engaged in a life and death struggle to preserve her father’s religion, a close cousin of Catholicism which had broken away from the Roman pope. Though not as violent as her predecessor, “Bloody Mary,” who burned more than 300 Protestant heretics at the stake in an attempt to impose Roman Catholicism on England, Elizabeth was determined to eradicate any hints of rebellion against the official state religion, the Church of England.

     So there was little room for dissenters in Elizabeth’s England. James the First, who followed Elizabeth, was less avid than Elizabeth about enforcing religion, but Charles the First (who was to be beheaded by Cromwellians), also did not tolerate dissent.

     By now, followers of Socinus were being called Unitarians, signifying their belief in one God rather than three, and a few daring souls were openly adopting these ideas. One 17^th century dissenter, John Biddle, who had the effrontery not only to practice but to preach and write about his Unitarian faith, spent years in and out of jail, depending on how the political winds were blowing. His book, Twelve Arguments, sought to prove the doctrine of the trinity false. Some call him the father of British Unitarianism.

     Another century was to pass before the light of liberal religion grew any brighter. In 1774, a Unitarian congregation assembled in London in an empty warehouse, with Theophilus Lindsey as its leader. Among the worshippers were Joseph Priestley, whom we met last year, and our own Benjamin Franklin. Priestley, you may recall, emigrated to America after his home and laboratory were burned in the late 1700s.  In this country he was instrumental in spreading the Unitarian faith.

     Although the seeds of both Unitarianism and Universalism were planted in Europe, most prolifically in England, both religions grew to maturity in America, and it is in America that we will explore the next chapter of our denomination’s history.

     Stay tuned.