My God

This past winter and spring, I've been offering a set of sermons about theological options for Unitarian Universalists. We've talked about Liberal Christianity, Transcendentalism, Humanism, Atheism and Agnosticism, Pantheism and Panentheism. We've covered a lot of territory. I have established, I hope, that in this church a variety of beliefs are not only tolerated but valued for the richness that various perspectives can give us.

Therefore, I hope that no one will be threatened to hear what I believe, and that you will remember that you are under no obligation to agree with me. This is not the kind of church where the minister dictates what the people believe -- quite the contrary. It is up to you to decide whether or not this way of looking at God makes sense to you and would serve your life.

I was a Humanist through my youth. I believed that religious freedom meant freedom from freedom from the creeds, rules, and trappings of religion which my friends embraced. I believed that it was foolish to believe in things which science couldn't prove and reason didn't recommend. I didn't believe in God and I was a tad contemptuous of those who did. I believed that when you died, you died. I believed that human beings had glorious possibility and that human history was a history of ever increasing wisdom, freedom, justice, and wealth. I wasn't entirely blind to the problems of society and the evil in individuals, but it seemed to me that progress was being made and that potential was unlimited. The task of humanity was to create a heaven on earth, in my opinion, and that seemed religion and philosophy enough.

In my early 20's, I discovered that this was not very satisfying for me and that I needed more of a sense that there was a transcendent dimension to my life. I came to realize that human history had not always been a matter of progress upward and onward forever, and that with our nuclear weapons we were endangering the very survival of this human race upon which I was pinning all of the meaning of my life. At the same time, events in my life forced me to recognize the darkness and yes, even the evil, in the core of my heart and the hearts of others. My own self-righteousness was punctured; but worse, it seemed that everything I had believed in and lived for was coming apart, was inadequate, or unworthy. This kind of experience is sometimes called, "the shipwreck," a time when all the things that held you up suddenly break apart and leave you grasping for planks in an infinite and dangerous sea. Many of us have experienced a hard or mild form of shipwreck sometime in our lives. It is very painful, and yet the precursor of growth.

The next couple of years were times for me of wondering what I should do with my life, what values to live for and how to find sustaining meaning. It was not an easy time, but, in some ways, it was a wonderful time, for rays of intellectual and emotional and even spiritual light regularly blessed the general grayness.

For a few years, everything seemed open, and new ideas and new possibilities were on every hand. I remember listening with fascination to the reports compiled by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross of near-death experiences, so alike and so consistent with other kinds of mystical experiences. I realized that it was unscientific to reject those accounts just because they did not fit my old theories. Suddenly it seemed as if there must be something which survived after death, at least for a while. For me, this was a window into the realm of the things which could be guessed at and even experienced, but not proved. I began to believe that there was more to the universe than met the eye. Hard on the heals of this new understanding came a book, picked up by chance in the college library, which introduced me to new and exciting ideas about God which were not simplistic or absurd or contrary to reason.

The book was called The Divine Creativity. I picked it up because I recognized the publisher's logo on the spine. It was the same one that was on the hymnal used in UU churches in those days: Beacon Press, publisher of quality academic paperbacks and books on pressing social issues, owned by the Unitarian Universalist Association. They're still at it, by the way, they made a bundle of money for us a year or so back with Marian Wright Edelman's The Measure of Our Success. But anyway, that day in the library, I picked up The Divine Creativity by Henry Nelson Wieman. I took it home, read it, and re-read it, and found myself transformed. In the pages of that book, I found a God I could believe in.

Henry Nelson Wieman began his work in the 1920's, a time when older theologians were quite seriously trying to prove the existence of God by logical and other means. Wieman diverged from that trend, saying that the question, "Is there a God?" is the wrong question. He defines God in such a way that God exists by definition, and goes immediately to the question of what we can know of the nature of this God. He further states that the divine can only be known insofar as it is involved with our lives, but he believes that we humans can discern the workings of God in and among ourselves.

Henry Nelson Wieman says that God is the Something in our environment, however defined, upon which humans are dependent for security, welfare, and increasing abundance. The question is, therefore, not "Is there a God?," but "What is the character of this Something upon which humans are dependent?" Wieman wished to make the question of the reality of God a moot point so that we could concentrate on defining, knowing, and living for God.

The theological questions, then, are not philosophical as much as they are personal. Forget, for a moment, the ontological argument, and even the Bible, and think on these things: