"A UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST JESUS"

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, December 8, 2002

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

It is interesting to speculate what the result might be if a Unitarian had composed one of the gospel accounts of Jesus' life. If the New Testament had been written by a Unitarian, I imagine that the Sermon on the Mount would have been followed by open discussion, that Jesus would have questioned God's authority, and that the nativity story of the birth of Jesus was really metaphor about something like the oneness of humankind. Certainly, if a Unitarian had written the Bible, there would be an appended bibliography that would direct the reader to "further sources" for study.

When this holiday season rolls around, we hear calls for us to pay attention to Jesus, for Christmas, it is said, is his holiday. I listen to this call, and this time each year I do think a bit more about Jesus and his history and his legacy. As I do so today I observe that it would be interesting to speculate what the result might be if a Unitarian had written one of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life.

Actually, though it is doubtful that a Unitarian wrote the Bible, all the speculations I mentioned earlier are true. The Sermon on the Mount was filled with general discussion; there were questions and answers by those present. Jesus did question God's authority at the crucifixion when he asked, "my God, why have you forsaken me?" And the nativity story: actually "stories" because there are two very different ones, written and carefully crafted as metaphors to present Jesus as a politically non-threatening person to both Jew and Gentile, including the Romans, and thereby to help make Jesus' teachings safely acceptable to all races and classes -- a metaphor involving the fellowship of all humankind. And, as for the appended bibliography, there wasn't any; however the gospel stories are filled with quotations from the Hebrew scriptures that would encourage the reader to refer back to them in understanding the New Testament.

Actually, we don't have to speculate too abstractly on what might happen if a Unitarian composed the gospel account of Jesus' life. In fact, a Unitarian did do this -- sort of. Thomas Jefferson, while he was President, edited the Bible to produce a booklet he called "The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth." When it comes to how a Unitarian might look upon Jesus, this is probably the most useful document we have.

It happened, more or less, like this.

For many years Jefferson's most involved conversations about religion were carried on with two very close friends from Philadelphia: Joseph Priestly, a Unitarian minister, and Benjamin Rush, a prominent physician and leader in the Universalist Church. Among the three of them, they all agreed that the history of Christianity had corrupted much of Jesus' teachings, and each suggested that someone ought to write about Jesus' genuine teachings rather than the teachings that arose in the church that followed him. Jefferson volunteered to write such an essay, but put it off for some years. He was busy, for example, running for President.

Eventually, Jefferson returned to the task. He sent early drafts of his effort to both Priestly and Rush. Here is part of what he had to say about Jesus:

"According to the ordinary fate of those who attempt to enlighten and reform mankind, Jesus fell an early victim to the jealousy and combination of the altar and the throne, at about 33 years of age, his reason having not yet attained of its maximum energy....

"Hence the doctrines which he really delivered were defective as a whole, and fragments only of what he did deliver have come to us mutilated, misstated and often unintelligible.

"They have been still more disfigured by the corruptions of schismatising followers, who have found an interest in sophisticating and perverting the simple doctrines he taught by engrafting on them the mysticisms of a Grecian sophist, frittering them into subtleties, and obscuring them with jargon, until they have caused good men to reject the whole in disgust, and to view Jesus himself as an imposter. Notwithstanding these disadvantages, a system of morals is presented to us, which, if filled up in the true style and spirit of the rich fragments he left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man."

One can see that Jefferson's estimation of Jesus was complex. There was the highest praise, along with serious doubt.

In his letter to Priestly, Jefferson suggested that one could get a purer idea of Jesus teaching if one were to take from the Bible only what Jesus actually taught, and leave out the rest, largely the commentary by others who followed Jesus. In fact, Jefferson said, he planned to do this. He told Priestly he had ordered English and Greek Bibles in order, literally, to cut up and separate the good from the bad parts, or in his words, "with a design to cut out the morsels of morality and paste them on the leaves of a book."

Over some time, Jefferson worked on this project, eventually selecting and cutting sections out of Greek, Latin, French and English Bibles, and pasting them side by side in notebooks. He spoke of this project again when he began his famous correspondence with John Adams, who himself was a New England Unitarian, and formerly had been a very bitter political opponent of Jefferson's. The surprising friendship between Adams and Jefferson is one of the great stories in American history. In a letter to Adams, Jefferson told of his project:

"We must reduce our volume [meaning the Bible] to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus.... I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and by arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is distinguishable as diamonds on a dunghill."

In a later letter to another friend, Jefferson told again of his project, and this time he described Jesus' pure teachings by saying, "a more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen." This is probably a little less derogatory toward the part cut out than his earlier description of Jesus' teachings as "diamonds on a dunghill."

All of these lead one to ask, "what is so excellent in the teachings of Jesus that Jefferson wished to keep?" and "what is so distasteful about the rest that is thrown out?" The answer is, primarily, the ethical teachings, what he called the most "beautiful or precious morsel of ethics." The biblical accounts that showed what Jesus said about how to live and how Jesus actually lived as a model of morality are the jewels of the religion.

There is a sense, though, in which Jefferson got it wrong, but it wasn't surely his fault. Genuine biblical scholarship did not happen until another 30 years or so after his life. What was discovered in the biblical scholarship was that we really have no reliable sense of Jesus' life at all. The only significant accounts are the gospel stories, written by partisans and followers, making no pretense of being scholarly or even objective biographers. They were written with a purpose less of trying to narrate Jesus' life and more to promote it, publicize it, and advance it.

In short, the accounts we have of Jesus' words and life are not all that reliable. We even know that many parts of the accounts are totally unreliable, in terms of accuracy. The three synoptic accounts tell slightly different stories, putting different words in his mouth in the same situations. The fact of the matter is that we cannot know with any reliable degree of certainty what Jesus actually did and said. All we do know is what his followers said about him.

One of the great Unitarian leaders of the nineteenth century, and one who was a noted biblical scholar, was Theodore Parker, a Boston minister. His greatest sermon, which became a turning point in Unitarian history in America, was entitled "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity." Coming a generation after Jefferson's death, Parker's sermon became a scholarly look at the Unitarian Jesus.

Parker articulated what he saw to be the essence of Christianity as taught by Jesus, and distinguished that, as Jefferson did, from the commentary about Jesus that his followers constructed. The former, the essence of Jesus' message, Parker considered "Permanent." The latter, the commentary by his followers about the status of Jesus himself, he called "Transient."

The fallout from the sermon in Boston was tremendous. The occasion was a public ordination, and it was attended by three local orthodox ministers -- a Congregationalist, a Methodist, and a Baptist. These three were appalled by what they heard, wrote up a summary of Parker's sermon, then published it in their own respective journals presenting it as out-and-out heresy. Then they demanded to know whether the leading Unitarians accepted Parker's heresies.

Parker's commentary was indeed heretical, by any orthodox standard. He argued simply that Jesus taught eternal truth, and the sophisticated theological systems that were constructed in the wake of his life by others were merely transitory.

What were the eternal truths taught by Jesus? What was the "Permanent" in Christianity? For Parker, as for Jefferson, the truth is ethical; it is moral. The Permanent in Christianity, he said, "is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man, the love of God acting without let or hindrance." But Parker went a few steps further than Jefferson in this matter. Parker, who was familiar by that time with the progress of biblical scholarship concerning the unreliability of the Bible stories, went so far as to question the authority of Jesus on this matter. The orthodox had presented Jesus as the authority for truth, and claimed that these moral teachings were true because Jesus taught them. Not so, said Parker. They were true whether or not Jesus actually taught them. Here is his eloquent argument:

"If Christianity were true, we should still think it was so not because its record was written by infallible pens; nor because it was lived out by an infallible teacher. But that it is true, like the axioms of geometry, because it is true, and is to be tried by the oracle God places in the breast. If [the truth of Christianity] rests on the personal authority of Jesus alone, then there is no certainty of its truth, if he were mistaken in the smallest matter, as some Christians have thought he was, in predicting his second coming."

This great sermon of Theodore Parker's was, in fact, an extension of Jefferson's idea, and a step more radical than that. Parker's approach has become the direction Unitarians have gone ever since in their understanding of Jesus. The profound ethical teachings of Jesus recorded in the Bible are the essence and the gift of the Christian religion; all else is unimportant, or at least of debatable importance.

A hundred years after Parker's sermon, Frederick May Eliot, then President of the American Unitarian Association, would refer to Parker's sermon as a key to our tradition:

"From the very beginning, Christianity has been a vital principle housed within a shell of changing and decaying material. For us Unitarians there is a familiar formula that has peculiar force and persuasiveness. I mean, of course, the famous phrase of Theodore Parker: 'The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.' Write those words in letters of flaming gold over the pulpit of every church in the land! Make them the motto behind every discussion of the future of Unitarianism in the years ahead!

I want to identify more specifically what Jefferson and then Parker saw as the religion of Jesus. But before doing so, it is probably relevant to point out what they discarded. Basically, what they discarded was to become essential, not to Jesus, but to 2he institution of Christendom through the ages. Here is a partial list of what was discarded:

Original Sin

The Virgin Birth

Apostolic Succession

Atonement

Final Judgment

Hell

The Trinity

The Resurrection

Biblical Inerrancy

The Sacraments

All of those doctrines are incidental to the essential teachings of Jesus. In fact, Jefferson and Parker would say, these seem to have become for much of Christianity far more important than the religion itself. Here is how Jefferson distinguished them:

"It is the innocence of Jesus' character, the purity and sublimity of His moral precepts, the eloquence of His inculcations, the beauty of the apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire.

"Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples."

What, then is left of Jesus' religion, of his eternal message? What is the gold, the beautiful morsel, the diamond in a dunghill?

If the whole of Jesus' ministry were to be reduced to a single principle, it would be love and acceptance of others. Period. In fact, this is not mere speculation. Jesus was asked what was essential in religion, and that was precisely his answer. "Two commandments I give unto you," he said. "Love God and love your neighbor as yourself." There was no creedal requirement here. There was no vast and sophisticated scheme of sin and atonement and redemption. There was nothing resembling a fanciful belief system about the nature of the Godhead or the cosmic efficacy of sacraments such as baptism.

Love God and love your neighbor.

Those precepts were often given substantial elaboration by both parable and example. The Good Samaritan Story, the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, the Prodigal Son: all these told us how to love. And Jesus' life itself elaborated on this message: his association with social outcasts, his caring for the poor and lonely, his forgiveness of those who executed him. All those showed us how to love.

It really doesn't matter much what Jesus' exact words were. It really doesn't matter much whether the biblical narratives are factually accurate. It doesn't even matter much whether Jesus actually lived. The fact is that the message we have received about his ministry, however factually accurate, has taught us something that is eternally true.

This is particularly worth acknowledging during the Christmas season when we are reminded to remember Jesus. Often that reminder comes packaged in a way that emphasizes Jesus as some cosmic monarch rather than the Jesus who lived and taught in Nazareth and Galilee. But I am here to say that this holiday is as much for us as for anyone. You do not have to believe that literal angels appeared in the sky to believe that Jesus' birth and life and death were a blessing to our lives. You do not have to believe that Jesus was born miraculously to believe that his life has been a blessing to those who seek to live more compassionately and lovingly. In fact, you don't even have to believe that he actually lived to celebrate the legacy of the stories that we inherit about him -- including the Christmas story.

I do not suggest this morning that Jesus was himself a Unitarian Universalist. I do suggest this morning, though, that Jesus' message is not far different from Unitarian and Universalist principles. I refer, of course to the teachings of love and acceptance. These precepts are part of our principles precisely because early Unitarians, such as Jefferson and Parker, were determined to identify what was wheat and what was chaff, what was permanent and what was transient in the Christian message.

At Christmas time, I find people on both sides of me, religiously speaking, who would deny me the license to celebrate the grand mythic story that commemorates Jesus' life. On one side are those doctrinaire Christians who find it audacious for one who is not doctrinaire about Jesus to celebrate what he has given us. On the other side are doctrinaire secularists who find it equally disagreeable that people can celebrate Jesus without signing on to the creedal dogma concerning his divine origin.

As a Unitarian Universalist I believe we have every legitimate right -- historically and theologically -- to claim Jesus as our religious ancestor and forbearer. He is not just ours, of course, for he belongs to a multitude of traditions which follow in his footsteps. Nevertheless, there are many in the Christian heritage, I am aware, who would resist letting us claim and have him as ours, even if we would not claim him exclusively. I am aware that many people who call themselves followers of Jesus are offended by those who, like me, accept his teachings but not his divinity. I am aware that many people who reject the creedal claim of his followers are put off by those who, like me, believe Jesus for what he taught but not for what the centuries have imagined about him.

But here is what I, as a Unitarian Universalist, would have to say to those who would deny us Jesus at this or any other time of year. I would say, simply, that you cannot take Jesus away from me.

* You can, I suppose, take the title "Christian" away. That's O.K. I don't particularly or need it.

* You can take away any claim I may have to institutional Christian authority.

* You can take away the whole history of Christian battles for supremacy -- these I surely wish to lay no claim on.

But you cannot take Jesus from me. Not Jesus the human being who taught us how to love and why to love; who showed us by example and by message the true meaning of compassion for our fellow human beings; who called us to be peacemakers, to be merciful, to be humble, to be forgiving; who called us in this way to be the salt of the earth.

This Jesus, I would tell them is mine as well as theirs, and you cannot take him away and keep him to yourself.