My topic this morning is our humanist heritage. I learned this week that three other ministers  recently had spoken on the same thing, so I guess this is a popular topic among UUs. One of the ministers spoke of humanism as one of Unitarian Universalism's tent poles, by which he meant, one of the core beliefs that holds up all of the others. As he put it, in the 19th century, the Unitarian tent pole was liberal Christianity, in the 20th century, it was humanism, and in the 21st century, it is pluralism. I think that's a pretty good analysis. The only distinction I would make is that one pole is not replacing another. Rather, we have enlarged our tent enough to have three poles down a center line supporting all the rest.

        Humanism is a much misunderstood term. Think about the areas of study we call the humanities-literature, art, music, philosophy, and my college major, history, to name a few. All of these areas of study are in some way the study of humans. A modern phrase for this might be self-improvement, or more broadly speaking, the fulfillment of human potential. Speaking from experience, as one who is educated in the humanities, I regard my college experience as very fulfilling.  A liberal-arts education enlarges the world, engages the spirit, and connects humanity. Of course, I had to go to law school for three more years to get a job, but that's another story. I wouldn't trade my education for anything, because every other field of study is just job training, and as I also know from experience, jobs and careers come and go with the ebb and flow of our economy.  To be fully realized as a human being, or at least as much as one can be, is something that no one ever can take away.

        So, what does this have to do with religion? Well, in that brief monologue of my experiences, I have touched on all of the theological themes associated with humanism.  Why are we here? Is it just to bide our time until we go to heaven (or not), in which case human development in the form of education is not only meaningless but a distraction from the real work of worship and pious living. Do we exist for our capacity to function in this world, in which case education's most important role is the aforementioned job training?  Are we here so that we might smell a rose and know beauty and appreciate in a way no other living thing can appreciate all that is good and noble and worthy in our world?

        Of course, our choice is not so stark. Today, education hardly is an all or nothing thing. Science majors have to take core courses in the humanities, just as I had to take core courses in the sciences. In terms of our aptitude and abilities, each of us as a different mix, a different set of gifts.

        What we take for granted today, though, was not so in the 13th and 14th centuries. Here's a very short description of knowledge in western civilization.  The great leap in knowledge produced by the likes of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato in the 4th century b.c.e. was smothered centuries later by the Church among many reasons because of a general distrust of worldly knowledge and that led us into the so-called dark ages.  By the 8th and 9th centuries, the monastic movement-with some orders dedicating their lives to the study of the bible-let a little light back in. That led in the 12th century to the scholastic movement-the era of Thomas Aquinas for those who know him-and the birth of the modern university.  In its infancy, though, the university was just for the study of theology.  It would the Italians in the 14th century who planted the seed of humanism-study for the sake of study, knowledge for the sake of human development. The early scholastic movement revived the study of ancient Greek and Hebrew texts as a way of studying the Bible, which had for centuries been widely available only in the official language of the church, which was Latin.  What the humanists added was the idea of critical inquiry. They didn't just study the ancient texts, they critiqued them. They didn't just revive the ancient Greek texts of the Bible; they revived the great works of Plato and the writings of Homer.

        As you might guess, many in the Church felt threatened by this movement, and they were right. The seeds the humanists planted led to the Reformation, but I don't want to go there today. There's a larger point to be made here.  There's a conservative to liberal continuum in all religions that is reflected in their respective values about education. The movement today to keep Harry Potter out of public libraries is the same movement that tried to suppress the Iliad and the Odyssey in the middle ages. As they might put it, the very existence of stories of other gods and mystical events merely confuses the faithful and undermines church teachings. This argument has been going on for 800 years.

        Our UU ancestors, as you might guess, come from the end of the continuum that values knowledge and critical inquiry. Among the earliest of these proto-Unitarians was Michael Servetus.  I say proto because the Unitarian label had not come into use yet. Servetus wrote a text titled, On the Errors of the Trinity, for which he was ordered by John Calvin himself to be burned at the stake with his books tied to his body. That was in 1553. Over the next several centuries, those who came to be known as Unitarians increasingly called for the use of reason in faith. In response to the Enlightenment-this was the era of Newton, who was a Unitarian-Unitarians argued that the miracle stories in the Bible were metaphors and shouldn't taken literally.  You see in the development of our faith a rejection of supernaturalism in favor of naturalism with a couple of very big exceptions. Early Unitarians, as well as many today, still believed in a creator God who is outside the Universe, unbounded by natural law. Yet, in every other respect, they were and are humanists. Put another way, one can be both a Christian and humanist. Here's a description from one of my seminary texts:

        "One should remember, however, that there is such a thing as Christian humanism, so that the term humanism should not be considered a rival to Christianity. Christian humanism is the view that human culture is valuable to the Christian life. . . . The theological foundation of Christian humanism is that human beings are made in the image of God. As creatures, we have natural goals which are valuable, and which can only be properly achieved within a culture which recognizes, even if only implicitly, the sovereignty and graciousness of God."

        So, to qualify my earlier metaphor, the tent pole of liberal Christianity is a form of humanism that nonetheless is centered in the life and teachings of Jesus.  Humanism, though, as a movement, had and has its own life and direction. Let's jump ahead to 1859, the year Charles Darwin, who was a Unitarian, wrote The origin of the species.  As an aside, I have skipped over a major, transformative era the history of our faith, and that's the Transcendentalist movement of the early 19th century that we associate with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and that crowd. They shared the humanist value of knowledge, but not the dedication to empirical science of Unitarians like Darwin. They were mystics within the natural world. That's a whole other topic, and one that is on our planning calendar for June 10. So, put a mental bookmark here, and we'll come back to it.

        Now, back to Darwin and 1859. To put a bookend on this era, let's use 1933, which is when the Humanist Manifesto was published.  It was in this era that humanism began to reject all supernaturalism.  Not only were Unitarians openly stating they no longer were exclusively Christian in their orientation, many were saying they were atheists, that they image of a creator God was outdated.  Which begs the question, whey did they keep going to church each week? The answer is moral improvement and social reform. The Unitarians who were Christian humanists believed in the resurrection, but preached from the social gospel of Jesus: what you do to the least of these you do unto me.  It was a very human-centered message. By the end of the 19th century, though, Unitarians and Universalists increasingly were teaching the Sermon on the Mount and actively denying the resurrection and other doctrines that could not stand the challenge of empirical proof. Preachers began to ask the question, "can you have religion without God?" and increasingly, the answer was yes.

        Here, a little humility is in order. We sometimes think that western civilization is the be all and end all. The eastern traditions have had religion without God for 3000 years. Most forms of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism have no deities at all. Humanists did not invent the idea of religion without God, but the Unitarians at the turn of the 20th century certainly embraced it.  Though the humanist movement of this era was bigger than Unitarianism, many of its leaders were Unitarian ministers. By 1933, they produced the Humanist Manifesto, which reads in part:

        Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. [M]an is a part of nature and . . . he has emerged as a result of a continuous process. . . .[T]he nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values. Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. . . .Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man's life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. We assert that humanism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few.

        I bet there are a lot of people here for whom those passages resonate. As you might guess, there were a lot then and now who disagree.  This statement does not purport to embrace all forms of diversity; it affirmatively denies what it does not believe, and that includes God.  Don't think all or even most Unitarians and Universalists embraced this in its entirety. There's an ebb and a flow to these things, and they never sweep everyone in their wake. Just think about the political parties and compare the Democrats or Republicans of one era to another. In fact, humanism was the dominant thought in Unitarian Universalism through the 1960s. For the last 30 years, the pendulum has been swinging back towards spirituality and to a greater awareness of the limits of empiricism and with that, a greater acceptance of mystery.  We never leave anything behind though, it just becomes part of us, and theism and humanism both are a part of who we are.

        Unitarian Universalism has struggled with this tension now for over 100 years, and we're still growing and we're still strong.  People often talk about the theist-humanist divide in our congregations, and I hope at the very least today you will see that that is a false division.  We all share a commitment to the value of human life, to our own moral development and those of our children, and to the betterment of the world at large. Some of us see this form of self-fulfillment and social development as just another stage in evolution; others see this as the purpose of our creation by a loving God who wants us to care for ourselves and one another.

        We agree that we need not agree on that which can not be known or which may only be experienced as a matter of faith.  We agree that we need each other, that we must live together, that on some level we share the same needs and yearnings as every other human.  We often talk about the so-called elevator speech, that is, how we would describe Unitarian Universalism to someone if we only had the time between two floors to do so? I have a variety of them, depending on the setting. I'll close with this one from the Rev. Marta Flanagan taken from one of our brochures intended to introduce Unitarian Universalism to newcomers and which I believe reflects our theist and humanist traditions:

        "Unitarian-Universalism is a liberal religion born of the Jewish and Christian traditions.  We keep our minds open to the religious questions people have struggled with in all times and places.
 
        We believe that personal experience, conscience and reason should be the final authorities in religion.  In the end, religious authority lies not in a book, person, or institution, but in ourselves.  We put religious insights to the test of our hearts and minds."

        May it always be so. Blessed Be.