The Unitarian Universalist Church,
The Church Of The Enlightenment
Sermon presented by Lowell Brummett
Unitarian Universalist Church
July 2008
[The history of religious freedom in Western Europe and North American]
The Enlightenment was a reaction to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries in Western Europe and the Divine Right of Kings, the idea in the Early Christian Church was Unity, even going back to the words of Christ found in the Gospels, "that they all may be one, just as you are in me and in you, there will be one fold and one shepherd."
Even though this has never been true, not even in the Early Christian history, there have always been splinter groups of Christians:
- The Gnostic Christians who said Christ was God and only seemed to be human
- The Jewish Ebounite, Christians who said Christ was human and the Messiah, but not God,
- The Arian Controversy in the 4th century who said Jesus was human and was promoted by his righteousness, and
- The Nicean Creed of 325 set the terms for Orthodoxy, meaning true faith.
All outside these beliefs were heretical that Christ was the true God and true man.
The beginning of the Divine Right of Kings goes back to Saint Augustine - 354 to 430 C.E. [Common Era] - who is regarded as the greatest Christian theologian since St. Paul. His thought dominated the Middle Ages, the good and the bad alike in the 16th Century, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter Reformation.
In St. Augustine's Multi-.volume, "City of God" Augustine envisions two cities: one of this world and the other, God's city in Heaven to Augustine. The symbol of the heavenly city is the church, the earthly city is embodied in the state...that Christian state must maintain peace and order so that human beings can lead lives that will obtain them access to the heavenly city, the beginning of the idea in the Catholic Church and Secular state being united...the Multi-volume City of God is one of the greatest works of the early church, was in many ways a Blueprint for middle Ages in Western Europe.
In the Ancient World every state had its own gods, and the Roman Emperor had been one of them. No one separated religion from politics. When Constantine, the first Christian Caesar, in 312, brought Christianity to the Roman Empire as its favored religion, that connection brought the sacred and the secular together in the Catholic Church.
Even after the Latin speaking Roman Empire fell in the West in 476, many people clung to the idea that there should be a Christian Empire. But who would lead it? Would authority lie in the hands of an emperor...or the Pope? By the middle of the 8th Century, the papacy had become powerful, yet it still had not achieved the goal of restoring order to Western Europe.
In 754 a document called The Donation of Constantine would attempt to keep alive the idea of a Roman Empire in the West. According to The Donation ... the Roman Emperor Constantine had moved to Byzantium in the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire and the renamed the city Constantinople, the City of Constantine. The Emperor Constantine had purportedly bequeathed the Western Roman Empire, to the Bishop of Rome, the Pope.
The Donation of Constantine was a forgery. This came to light in the 15th Century when a Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla showed, from its style, that it could not possibly date from Roman times.
In the year 771, Charlemagne became king of the Franks, one of the German tribes. He defended the Pope against his enemies, especially the Lombards in Northern Italy. Charlemagne was crowned Emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800 by Pope Leo III, to become Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the West...which was neither Holy nor Roman. His capital was never in Rome, but Aachen in modern day Germany.
The authorities claimed that existence had been established by God: "Romans 13:1 - Political sovereignty passed from God to Christ, from Christ to the apostle Peter, on whom Christ said he would build His Church, from Peter to his successors the Popes, and from Popes to emperors and kings...the establishment of the Divine Right of Kings."
Charlemagne, Charles the Great, is one of the most important people in European history. His influence continues to this day. Charlemagne was the first ruler in Europe to think of Europe as one nation.
In the 20th Century, President Charles de Gaulle of France, along with Chancellor Conrad Adenauer of West Germany in the 1960s, formed the basis for the European Union, then called The Common Market. The Charlemagne prize is the European Union's highest award for people who have done the most to prompt the spirit of European friendship and unity.
Pope Innocent III was the most important church council and the most powerful Pope in church history. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was the same year of the Magna Charta in England proclaimed that the King of England was not above the law.
Pope Innocent III wanted the papacy to control both the affairs of church and state. He said the pope was a mediator between God and man, below God, but beyond man. Salvation hinged on obedience to the authority of the Catholic Church, the great dispenser of Grace through the Seven Sacraments form birth baptism to death's last rites. The Catholic Church held the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. If a person disobeyed the Catholic Church, they could be excommunicated, lose the rites to the Sacraments and thus heaven. If a prince or king disobeyed the Catholic Church, the pope would issue an interdict, and the people in the kingdom could lose the rites to the sacraments and a Christian burial.
Pope Innocent III equated heresy with treason to the church. If anyone does not remain in me, meaning Christ, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches, meaning people, are picked up and thrown into the fire and burned. John 15:6.
The Catholic Church, as well as the Lutheran and Calvinist burned a lot of people at the stake because of this verse from John's Gospel...also from the 4th Lateran Council and Pope Innocent III. Catholics believed that outside the Catholic Church there was no salvation. This was not changed until the Second Vatican Council in 1963, to Separated Brethren. In these and other decrees of Pope Innocent III created an institution that would last throughout the centuries.
The Wars of Religion in Western Europe, religious conflict had plagued Europe since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter Reformation, beginning with the Spanish Inquisition and the German Peasant War. At the time of Martin Luther in 1525 and Bloody Mary, the Catholic Queen of England, the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre of the Protestant Huguenot Minority in Paris in 1572.
The Enlightenment was a reaction to one of the most destructive religious wars in history...the 30-Years War from1618 to 1648. The Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church upheld the peace of Augsburg in 1555. Everyone should follow the Princes' religion. If the Prince of Bavaria is Catholic, the people are Catholic. If the Prince of Saxony is Lutheran, the people are Lutheran.
Calvinist preachers in Germany believed that if your prince was ungodly, meaning not a Calvinist, you shouldn't follow him, you should kill him. Both Catholic and Lutherans rejected Calvinism and its doctrine of predestination --- the idea that whether you went to heaven or to hell was predetermined before you were born. Calvinists were in the Palatinate area in Western Germany around Heidelberg where they were the majority. They were prepared to help fellow Calvinists anywhere in Europe.
The bloodiest religious war in history began in Bohemia, the Modern day Czech Republic, in 1618. The Bohemians were firm believers in religious toleration. King Rudolf of Bohemia signed the letter guaranteeing freedom of religion for Calvinist. Emperor Ferdinand II of the Holy Roman Empire the Catholic Hapsburgs, which Bohemia was a part of, rejected the letter toleration for the Calvinist. In May, 1618, a group of Bohemian Protestants marched to the royal palace in Prague, grabbed two of the most hard line Catholic deputies, and threw them out the window. This was the cause of the 30-Years War. It began as a religious war and ended as a political war...fought in four phases: the Bohemian phase, the Danish phase, the Swedish phase, the Danes and Swedes. They were there to support the Lutherans against the Catholics and Calvinist. Catholic France supported the Swedes until King Gus tophus Adolphus was killed in battle.
The French phase from 1635 to 1648 had a goal that France was to break up the Holy Roman Empire of the Catholic Hapsburg and to keep the German speaking areas of Europe from uniting, making France the predominant power in Continental Europe for the next 200 years.
The 30-Years War killed twenty percent of the population of the principalities of Germany. At that time the estimated population was twenty million people. Some four million people were killed. For the people of Germany, this war in the 17th Century would be compared to World War II in the 20th Century. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 ended the war and the Holy Roman Empire which began with Charlemagne in the year 800.
The public bonfires of Central and Western Europe, with a steady stream of often quite willing heretical martyrs and the killing of the so-called witches, were charged with being in a league with Satan.
Led by earnest congregations of Christian true believers, combined with the fervency of their shared convictions, had the zeal to impose those sacred truths on the world at large. It was this combination of dogmatic, unswerving true belief with the zealous urge to proselytize and impose it. That made pious Christians eager perpetrators and victims of savage religious persecution and war.
The struggle against this enthusiasm was the central project of the Enlightenment. It was the first intellectual effort to contain the religious ferment that was infecting European politics.
Historians often date modern history from the 18th Century, not just because this period was the American and French Revolution, but because at this time a fundamental change took place in the way people thought. Writers at the time felt that they were emerging from a period of darkness and ignorance into the light of knowledge and Reason.
The Enlightenment was to have huge consequences...not just for philosophy and science but for politics and the way people were governed. At the time, faith in God
was running very low, especially after a large earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal, on November 1, 1755. Lisbon was almost destroyed in a catastrophic earthquake and tidal wave. Lisbon's elegant building crumbled into rubble and something like 40,000 people were killed.
If you believed in a benevolent God who had created the world and who looked favorably on man's efforts to create a civilized, harmonious society, then how are you able to explain this act of appalling destruction? For those who believed that this world was the best of all possible worlds, the destruction of Lisbon took a lot of explaining. Many people found their faith in God running very low.
The Roots of Enlightenment thinking goes back a very long way...before the 18th Century. The Humanist scholars of the 15th Century Italy went back to the Renaissance, a rebirth. It rejected everything that the middle ages represented in areas as diverse as philosophy, literature, society, art, religion, and science. The Renaissance was inspired by the ideals and culture of the ancient Greek and Romans rather than the teaching of the church.
By the 17th Century looking and thinking for yourself had spread to observational science. The 16th Century Polish scientist Nicholas Copernicus had noted that the earth appeared to go round the sun and not vice versa. A hundred years later the Italian astronomer Galileo was to demonstrate from his own observations and from mathematical calculation that Copernicus had been right. This discover was not welcome news to the church which had the sun merely a sort of light switch placed by God in the heavens so He could see what Adam and Eve were up to.
At the time of the writings of Genesis, and later at the time of Christ, most people believed in a flat Earth and a domed sky and the heavens above and God above the heavens.
At the time of Copernicus in the 16th Century, Europe believed in a geocentric universe...with the earth at the center of the solar system. Copernicus and Galileo proved that it was a heliocentric universe...with the sun at the center of the solar system. Galileo got into trouble with the Inquisition, though. He probably wasn't tortured, as people believed for a long time.
The Catholic Church could not turn back the way scientific thinking was going...close observation and deduction with precise mathematical calculation were rapidly replacing faith in the Greek and Latin classical authors. Might they even replace faith in God and the Church?
Some of the Enlightenment philosophers of the 17th and 18th Century Europe were ... in France - Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Voltaire; ...in Germany, Gottfried Von Leibniz, and Immanual Kant; ...in Switzerland, Jean Jacques Rousseau; ... and in the Netherlands, Baruch Spinoza. In England, where the Enlightenment began, there were Francis Bacon, Jeremy Bentham, and John Locke.
What these Enlightenment philosophers have in common was reason over faith and scientific observable empirical knowledge over the dogmatic belief of the Christian Churches, such as the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ...which cannot be proven.
Here, I am going to concentrate on the English philosopher John Locke. Locke was born in Wring ton, England, in 1632. He lived until 1704. He was educated at Oxford University where he received a bachelor's degree in 1656 and a master's degree in 1658. As a young man he was very much interested in science and at 36 was elected to the Royal Society. John Locke was the first writer to put together in a coherent form the basic ideas of constitutional democracy and religious freedom.
His ideas strongly influenced the founding fathers of the United States. Locke maintained that the State should not interfere with the free exercise of religion. Locke extended the principle of toleration to non-Christians. Neither Muslims, nor pagans, nor Jews ought to be excluded because of their religions.
However, Locke believed that this tolerance should not be extended to Catholics because he believed that they owed their allegiance to a foreign potentate, nor to atheists. By today's standards he would be considered intolerant.
But it is reasonable to judge him in relation to the ideas of his own times. Today, thanks in part to John Locke's writing, religious toleration is extended even to those groups that he would have excluded. Locke firmly believed that each human being possessed natural right, and that these included not only life, but personal liberty and the right to own property.
In fact, John Locke coined the term "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property." Jefferson changed it to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Locke asserted that this was the main purpose of government--protecting life, liberty, and property...rejecting the notion of the Divine Right of Kings.
Locke maintained that governments obtained their authority only from the consent of the governed. It is evident that John Locke had expressed virtually all the major ideas of the American Revolution almost a century before the event. Locke's influence on Thomas Jefferson is particularly striking.
Thomas Jefferson was born in Albemarle County, Virginia, on April 13, 1743. He lived until July 4th, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Also John Adams, who was a Unitarian, died on the 4th of July, 1826. He was 90 years old.
Thomas Jefferson had written on his tombstone, not that he had been the first Secretary of State under President George Washington, or the second Vice-President under President John Adams, or the 3rd President of the United States from 1801 to 1809, or that he was the president responsible for the Louisiana Purchase from France that doubled the size of the United States. None of these were on his tombstone.
What Thomas Jefferson wanted to be remembered for were three accomplishments:
- the authorship of the Declaration of Independence;
- the founding of the University of Virginia;
- and, the Virginia Statute for religious freedom.
The statutes were a truly radical document that would eventually influence the separation of church and state in the United States Constitution. The first amendment was the beginning the Bill of Rights..."Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" - Establishment Clause; "No state church, as in Europe; or prohibiting the free exercise" --- the Exercise Clause.
The federal government will not interfere in your right to attend any church you want to or start your own church. This all goes back to Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statutes of Religious Freedom which was passed by the Virginia State Legislature in 1786. Jefferson rejoiced that there was finally freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian, and the Muslim, the Hindu and the Pagan --- freedom for every denomination.
Thomas Jefferson, in my opinion, reflects the Unitarian Universalist Church. What were Thomas Jefferson's religious beliefs? He was a deist, the Latin word for God, who believed that God created the Universe and did not interfere in it. God gives the universe its freedom and natural laws, and gives human beings their freedom to do good or evil.
Thomas Jefferson believed in the existence of God, the God of Nature. He explicitly rejected the Biblical God, the God who interfered in the lives of human beings, performed miracles, wrote the Bible, or had a son. Jefferson did not believe in Divine Revelation, the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, the incarnation of Christ, the belief that Christ was God in human form...all the fundamental theological underpinnings of Christianity.
Jefferson's "Watchmaker God" did not answer prayers. The existence of God was more a matter of logic than science -- the universe exists; it had a beginning. If there is a creation, there must have been a Creator. For Jefferson, the Deist God was the God of the Enlightenment.
Thomas Jefferson maintained that if another person's inquiry led that person to the opposite conclusion, that person should follow his reasoning and not believe in God. Jefferson trusted in people.
Thomas Jefferson considered himself a deist and a Unitarian. In 1822 he wrote the following: "I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither king nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one God is reviving, and I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian."
Jefferson was a product of the Enlightenment and critical reason. It would seem that Jefferson regarded the Unitarian Church as the counterpart of the Enlightenment because the Unitarian Church's belief in one God, the denial of the Trinity, and the human Jesus. This is what Thomas Jefferson would love about the Unitarian Church, the church of the Enlightenment, the church of religious freedom.
The first king in Europe to grant religious freedom and the only Unitarian king in history, King John Sigmund of Transylvania, North Western Romania in 1568. Just 22 years after Martin Luther's death, King John Sigmund issued the Western World's first edict of religious freedom and toleration.
It reads, in part, "...Preachers shall be allowed to preach the Gospel everywhere, each according to his own understanding of it. If the community wish to accept it, well and good. If not, they shall not be compelled, but shall be allowed, to keep the preachers they prefer. No one shall be made to suffer on account of religion since faith is the gift of God. King John Sigmund was a person of the Enlightenment.
What I am going to do now is to go through a list of what I believe most Unitarian Universalists believe about God, prayer, the Bible, Jesus, heaven and hell.
GOD: Unitarian Universalists believe that all persons decide about God for themselves. There are agnostics, humanists, and atheists, as well as Wiccans, pantheists, deists, and those who affirm a personal God in the Unitarian Universalist Church.
God has so many meanings. The God of Oral Roberts would be different from the God of Albert Einstein. There is no special virtue in being able to declare, "I believe in God."
PRAYER: Prayer is less a matter of who is listening and more a concern with the aspirations expressed, whether spoken or silent. Prayer is an expression of feelings of gratitude, regret, hope, and rededication. Its purpose is not to influence God, but to discipline the mind or spirit in prayer or meditation.
THE BIBLE: The Bible is a library of books written by many different people over a period of a thousand years. It is inspired in the sense that it presents their most profound insights, but it also represents the changing and conflicting ideas of those who wrote, amended, edited, and compiled the Scriptures. Today some portions are more valuable than others, and all are subject to interpretation in the light of modern knowledge and personal experience.
JESUS CHRIST: Do Unitarian Universalists believe that Jesus was divine? In a sense every person is divine. That is, there is goodness and worth in everyone. Some call it "a divine spark of human dignity." However, Unitarian Universalists see no need for the concept of Christ being God or requiring the sacrifice of Christ to atone for human sin. Unitarian Universalists are inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus as an extra-ordinary human being.
HEAVEN AND HELL: Heaven and hell are states of mind, created by human beings. Hell is created in injustice, violence, tyranny and war. Heaven is created in compassion, mercy, liberty, and love. Our task is not to get people into heaven, but to get heaven into people.
Most churches find their bond of union based on uniformity of professed theological belief in scripture or creed, usually accompanied by some required rite or ritual. Unitarian Universalists believe that people can work together for the betterment of character, the advancement of spiritual life, and the improvement of society without conforming to a set pattern of theological doctrines.
In fact, we go well beyond this to express our convictions that differing theological views are natural and healthy. And that attempts to enforce religious conformity are potentially destructive. History is witness to the horrors of religious intolerance.
Unitarian Universalists are people who cannot leave their religious beliefs in the care of "experts." Those who differ with us argue that people must be directed by infallible religious guides, the church, or the Bible.
But when we begin to examine closely the infallible religious guides, what do we discover? The church which claims authority to dictate beliefs is a human institution and its "final truths" are no more that the conclusions arrived at by earlier human leaders. The same is true of the Bible. It was written by mortal men, no creed exists that was not originally hammered out under pressure by human beings.
Churches, Bibles, and creeds are the creation of men who once exercised their freedom to create creeds. The distinctive characteristic of the Unitarian Universalist Church is the insistence that we will not bind our present and future in religion to the teachings of the past. We will attempt to learn all that the past can teach us, but we will do our own thinking about current matters of faith and belief.
"As democracy is man's freest form of social life, so is religion. It depends upon the separate thinking of every Unitarian Universalist to give it significance and vitality. In a Unitarian Universalist congregation an agnostic may sit beside one who believes in a personal God.
The Unitarian Universalist Church is an ethical, rather than a doctrinal, religion with individual freedom as its method and with reason as its guide. The path of the Unitarian Universalist's religious journey leads from freedom through reason to a third fundamental principle: a generous and tolerant understanding of differing views and practices.
The Unitarian Universalist Church is the church of the Enlightenment.
