Heretical Faith
Reverend Darcey Laine
January 12,2003
Palo Alto, CA

A friend of mine works for a software company as a product tester. His job is to find mistakes in the computer programs so that the errors can be corrected. His role in the company is to poke holes, to tell them where they are wrong, where they are lacking. This is the role of the Heretic in religious community. The centering thought from Ralph Waldo Emerson at the top of your order of service emphasizes this point: "Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth."

So that we can be precise in our language, the dictionary definition of a heretic is "a professed believer who maintains religious opinions contrary to those accepted by his or her church." The notion of heresy draws a line in the sand, it says to the heretic, you consider yourself a member of this group, but you are not. Some of you who grew up in a confessing faith, remember these lines:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord

These are the first lines of the Apostle's Creed, written in 340 AD by a council of Bishops to standardize Christian theology. This creed is repeated by many Christians each time they worship. To become a minister in these traditions, one must affirm their belief in this creed. It describes a theological circle so that some are on the inside and others on the outside. A heretic would be a Christian who finds him or herself on the outside of that circle. One of the most famous heretics in our Unitarian Tradition is Michael Servetus. Many of you already know the story of Servetus , the physician who discovered pulmonary respiration and was also one of the first outspoken Unitarians during the protestant reformation. The printing press had recently been invented, and while studying law at the University of Toulouse in France, Servetus had an his first opportunity to read the bible. Servetus found that the trinity, the idea that the Godhead has 3 parts, father, son and holy ghost, was surprisingly absent from the canonical scriptures. When he subsequently published his treatise "On Errors of the Trinity," which rethought Trinitarian doctrine, his thoughts were rejected by both the Roman Catholic Church and the newly emerging protestant sects. Over the course of his life Servetus published several other texts increasingly far from orthodox thinking. He tried to present his case to Calvin, one of the most powerful and influential Protestant leaders of the time, as Calvin had not taken a particular position on the trinity. Calvin replied to each letter and treatise with growing animosity, until finally he wrote to a colleague that if Servetus ever came to Geneva, "I will not suffer him to get out alive." Somewhat obstinate, and not skilled in the ways of politics, Servetus did come to Geneva, where he was burned at the stake for his heresy.

We live now in an age where the law does not put people to death for heresy. In fact we live in an age of such heterodoxy, that it is easy to forget the gravity of crossing that line throughout much of history. I learned while preparing his memorial service that Frank Keiper's grandmother was excommunicated for marrying a Unitarian. Many of you will remember that during commemorative services after the attacks of 9-11 a Lutheran Minister was defrocked because he participated in an inter-faith worship service. The Unitarian Universalist Church was not welcomed into the World Council of Churches because we fell outside their theological circle. The Graduate Theological Union, the interfaith consortium of seminaries of which my alma mater Starr King is a part. When it was formed in the late 1960s, it was a step many denominations took with some trepidation and controversy. They were afraid to have aspiring ministers contaminated theologically during their formation. But when I was studying there to become a minister, I heard that many of the professors at other seminaries welcomed the presence of UU students, because they asked the questions no one else would asked, and brought unique perspectives to the learning process.

When our forerunners called themselves Christian and proclaimed the oneness of God, or the potential of universal salvation, they were heretics. When Humanists call themselves religious people, and repudiate the existence of God, they are heretics. Not only has the main stream Christian church historically labeled us as heretics- but we also have seen ourselves as heretics. For most of our denominational history we have defined ourselves as Christians in a community of Denominations who said we were not. Today, although we continue to stretch our understanding of the divine, and of the parameters of the human search for meaning, we find ourselves this morning in a church, at Sunday morning worship, with hymnals and preaching. By these actions we say- we are a church, and we claim our Protestant Christian heritage and culture. We stand our ground in the arena of religious communities, and say that it is not creed or even common understanding of the divine that binds us together, but a hunger for truth and meaning, and a need to continually search and question. Jonathan reminded us that the Greek root word for Heresy means "to choose." We as Unitarian Universalists choose our religious understanding rather than passively assenting to it. I am proud to call myself a heretic, one who chooses. We claim with honor our share of the heretics who have poked holes in Christian institutions and creeds. We believe that the heretic has an important role to play in the evolution of human thought. In our reading this morning, taken from the writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, a 20th century Jewish Mystic, we heard a deeply religious man insist that : "The crude complacency of imagining divinity as embodied in words and letters alone puts humanity to shame. Heresy arises as a pained outcry to liberate from this strange, narrow pit, to raise us from the darkness of letters and platitudes to the light of thought and feeling." He paints a picture of the Heretic, that I imagine captures the intention of such Unitarian heretics as Servetus and Parker, who I will speak about in a moment. Such a heretic realizes that the truth of any particular moment may be cloaked in our assumptions, the very assumptions upon which we have built our culture and intuitions. Kook continues "Whenever a corporeal aspect falls away, it seems as if faith itself has fallen, but afterward it turns out that, in fact, faith has been clarified." It is frightening and destabilizing to question our fundamental assumptions about what is true, yet a faith in truth and in the process by which it is sought leads us to a deeper knowing, a truer faith. There are many faithful Christians and Jews who are grateful for all the heretics, Unitarian, Universalist, or otherwise, who challenge their faith, who break down what is only definition and delineation, to allow the flow of what is real and important. Those who step outside the theological circle strengthen not only our tradition but also in the spiritual health of humankind.

Ambrose Vernon, while he was at Dartmouth, made a study of 60 men (this was at a time when only men would have been considered) who were pivotal in shaping Western civilization and culture. He found that 40 of the 60 were considered heretics in their own lifetime. This means the 2/3 of the men in whose debit we find ourselves, had ideas that were not accepted by the mainstream while they were alive. Backus, a prominent Humanist of the 20th Century, in his essay "The World's Debit to It's Heretics," notes that in all but revolutionary ages, the conservative outweighs the progressive, and so heretics have "fared badly," making contributions at great expense to themselves. Servetus paid such a price. So did Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister who in the 1830s and 40s began to question the necessity of Christ's divinity and miracles in Unitarian Theology. In his treatise "The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity" Parker tried to tease apart eternal truths from forms and doctrines that have a power of their own yet may not always guide us to the most important truth. It is a story often told in Unitarian churches that in the 1843 meeting of the Boston Association of Ministers, comprised mostly of Unitarians, Parker was asked to withdraw because of his theological views. The Association struggled with its professed non-creedalism, realizing that they could not excommunicate Parker and retain their liberal commitment to free expression. Instead, they shunned Parker, refusing to exchange pulpits with him. In reaction the 1853 AUA adopted a declaration affirming among other things a believe in "Jesus Christ, the everlasting Son of God, the express image of the Father, in whom dwelt all the fullness of the God-head bodily, and who to is the Way and the Truth and the Life."

In hindsight, and from our current theological perspective, it is easy to take Parker's side. Backus reminds us, however, that a stable order is necessary for security, and that sometimes the defenders of orthodoxy turn out to be closer to the truth than the heretics. Change that is too frequent and rapid can be fatal to an organism or institution. At the same time the tendency to resist change can be just as risky. All organisms must adapt to survive in a changing world.

It is one thing to recognize and honor the historical heretic. Yet how do we know which voice from the radical fringe may speak the truth; which will guide society into a new era? The heretic is truly a dangerous person, because she announces or even causes change in the world. And change is a powerful and dangerous thing. I would hazard a guess that part of the reason we are all gathered in this particular church this morning is that each of us has at some time in our life found ourselves outside of that theological circle. One of the most difficult things about growing up Unitarian Universalist is that at the time in your life when you need most earnestly to fit in for your social survival, someone explains to you on the playground, usually in less than compassionate terms, that you are a religious outsider. When yours is the radical idea, you can practically hear minds snapping shut around you, protecting themselves from the danger and instability change brings. One of the purposes of the Unitarian Universalist church in my own life has been to affirm the integrity and strength necessary to stand alone outside that creedal circle, whether theological, political or cultural.

Yet here we are, a religious institution, by definition conservative, because our role is to provide a stable island of safety particularly in the stormiest of seas. So we must ask ourselves as individuals and as a community, where in our lives are the heretics? [pause] Who are those people we encounter whose ideas or way of being in the world threaten to turn the bedrock beneath our feet into quicksand? What ideas, for each of us, cause an almost instinctive closing down out of self preservation? Do we have enough faith in our foundational beliefs to risk questioning them, to risk finding that the truth was not always where we thought it would be? Our of respect for the heretics in our tradition who at great cost to themselves spoke a truth outside the lines of what could be said, let us challenge ourselves to listen for the truth we cannot hear, because it comes to us across a circle we probably didn't even realize we have draw around ourselves. And as we honor the men and women who stretched the frontiers of thought, honor also the heretic in yourself. She may not be heard in your lifetime, but know that she is already changing the world.

Footnotes:

Random House Webster's College Dictionary, (New York: Random House, 1997)
A brief Biography of Servetus by Peter Hughes is available at www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/michaelservetus.html
Abraham Isaac Kook, "Heretical Faith," in The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism, Daniel C. Matt. (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) p. 34.
Kook, p. 35.
From Robinson The Unitarians and the Universalists p. 83.

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