Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reforming Religion

Hershey Julien
November 26, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Before I talk about reforming religion, I hope that you will agree with me on a definition given by Carlo Dela Casa, an Italian philosopher: “Religion is a total mode of interpreting and living of life.” Note that this definition says nothing about religion necessarily involving belief in a supernatural being called god. This is important, because popular authors like Richard Dawkins, a British biologist; Daniel Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University; and Sam Harris, author of a book titled The End of Faith; all define religion as Dennett does in his book, Breaking the Spell. He writes, “Tentatively, I propose to define religions as Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” That is really a definition of theism: it is too narrow to encompass religions in general, because it excludes classical Buddhism, which has no doctrine of god, and it excludes the non-theistic, non-credal religion of humanists and many Unitarian Universalists. In Breaking the Spell, Dennett affirms his devotion to justice, life, love, and truth. That devotion, it seems to me, gives meaning to his life and makes him a religious man.

Religion as humanity’s search for meaning has a history. It begins with primitive animism, when people thought of natural objects and forces such as wind as being energized by spirits. These spirits then became the gods of Greek religion and other polytheisms. In the period from about 800 to 300 B.C.E., called The Axial Age by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, this polytheism was abandoned and other reforms effected by leading religious thinkers all the way from Greece to China, including the prophets of Israel. For lack of time I skip over those reforms and go to those of Jesus, who recalled the reforms of Israel’s prophets: that true religion is a way of life, not dogma and ceremony, including sacrifices. Consider the following:

Jesus abandoned Jewish dietary laws when he said, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile” (Mark 7:15). When questioned about this, he elaborated as follows: “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Mark 7:18, 19). Mark then adds an explanatory comment: “Thus he declared all foods clean.” In accord with this relaxation of dietary laws, when Jesus sent out disciples to preach, he advised, “[In] whatever house you enter … Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide” (Luke 10:5-7). In other words, don’t be finicky about dietary restrictions.

Jesus was relaxed about Sabbath observance. By his time the third commandment, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy,” had been augmented by a number of rules that made sabbath-keeping a burden. Contradicting them, Jesus said, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

Jesus refused to sanction the death penalty for adultery. John’s Gospel has a story about scribes and Pharisees bringing to Jesus a woman caught committing adultery and asking him whether she should be stoned as Jewish law commanded. You know the story, Jesus said that one who was sinless among them should cast the first stone. Hearing that, the accusers left without doing anything. The story shows us that Jesus refused to sanction the law in this matter. This story is judged by the Jesus Seminar scholars to be fiction, but it is what Bob Funk, founder of the Seminar, called a “true fiction”: although it didn’t happen, it truly represents the position of Jesus in such a case: another example of his not insisting on biblical literalism.

Another example of Jesus reforming the religion of his time was his acceptance of the unacceptable people of society. He was criticized for his open table fellowship: eating with tax collectors and sinners. Tax collectors were despised, because they worked for the Romans. People called sinners were not necessarily evil: they were just not observing all the technicalities of the law as interpreted by the Pharisees. Another class shunned in the society of his day was lepers. These unfortunate people did not necessarily have what we know as Hansen’s disease. Anyone with a skin disorder, such as impetigo or psoriasis, was deemed to be a leper. Jesus violated custom by touching them. Another example of his rejecting the exclusionary customs of his time involved the Jewish legal principle that a woman was unclean during her period and contact with her would be defiling. A gospel story tells about a woman suffering constant hemorrhaging, who came to Jesus in a crowd, touched him, and felt healed. Jesus asked, “Who touched me?” When the woman acknowledged that it was she, instead of being angry with her, Jesus spoke kindly to her, saying, “Take heart daughter, your faith has made you well.”

Jesus reformed traditional Jewish concepts of God. Consider the following examples:

The God of Jesus did not require sacrifice to atone for sins and bring forgiveness. The incident in the temple during the last week of his life in which he overthrew the tables of the money changers and drove out the sacrificial animals was clearly an attack on the sacrificial system. In the religion of Jesus, sacrifices were not required to obtain forgiveness. According to Jesus, one is forgiven as one forgives. This is embodied in the prayer, “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us” (Luke 11:4).

Not only did the temple incident symbolize a rejection of the sacrificial system, it also overthrew the need for a priestly caste to mediate between people and God.. The religion of Jesus is an unbrokered religion: no need for a mediator between God and human beings. To make the death of Jesus a sacrifice to atone for sins and to make Jesus a mediator between God and humans are both contrary to the teaching of Jesus. Such dogma, as Robert Funk has written, put the church into business as a franchised salvation syndicate; and salvation became going to heaven after you die instead of transformation in this life.

The God of Jesus is not militaristic. Deuteronomy promised victory in battle to obedient Israel: “The LORD will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you; they shall come out against you one way, and flee before you seven ways” (Deuteronomy 28:7). Actually, that promise didn’t even work in Israel’s history. 2 Kings 23:25 said of Josiah, King of Judah, “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him.” Nevertheless, when Josiah went out to battle against the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco, who was on his way north to attack Assyria, he was defeated and killed. Jesus rejected militarism. He said, “Blessed are the peacemakers”; “Love your enemies.” In general, he rejected violence. He declined to be made a king: a move that would bring on conflict with the Romans.

The God of Jesus does not manipulate the weather to reward obedience and punish disobedience. Deuteronomy 28 promises as a reward for obedience that “The LORD will open for you his rich storehouse, the heavens, to give the rain of your land in its season”; but for disobedience, “The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. The LORD will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed.”

In Matthew 5:44-45, Jesus portrayed a different kind of God. He said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

The God of Jesus is compassionate, not a punishing deity. Luke 6:36 quotes Jesus saying, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Compassionate would be a better translation of the Greek here than merciful. Contrast this spirit of compassion with the harshness of Exodus 20:5: “I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me.” A common assumption in the time of Jesus was that all misfortune was deserved as punishment for sin. A story in John’s Gospel has the disciples asking Jesus about a man born blind, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” The story is probably fiction, but it reflects a commonly held belief. The narrator has Jesus denying that this blindness was caused by sin to be committed in the future by the baby or in the past by its parents. Another instance of a true fiction. It also illustrates Jesus holding the concept of the compassionate, forgiving God of the eighth century BCE reforming prophets shown by Micah as follows:

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency. He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:18, 19).

With the reforming example of Jesus in view, let us not be content with religion as we know it now but press on to further needed reforms. I am thinking of such things as homosexuals enjoying acceptance with equality and justice in our society; completing the move to equality for women; abolishing poverty, hunger, and preventable diseases; renouncing the use of war; saving the earth from environmental degradation. This is not a complete list, but it shows that there is much yet to be done in reforming religion. Someone may object that my list of reforms yet to be accomplished is sociological, not religious. This objection, however, fails to recognize the nature of true religion that was brought out in the axial age and confirmed by the teaching of Jesus: true religion is devotion to a way of life that gives meaning to our existence and enhances human welfare. It is not mental assent to dogmatic propositions. True religion is not believing six impossible things before breakfast: that the Bible with all its inconsistencies and internal contradictions is the word of God, that Jesus was born without a human father, that he was a divine being, that he rose physically from the dead, that he will come again to rule the earth. True religion is what was urged by Amos, when he said, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”; by Micah when he asked the rhetorical question, “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness?”; by Hosea’s God saying, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice”; by Jesus when he said, “Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate”; by the author of the Epistle of James, when he wrote, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

My second point is that with all the god-talk in the scriptures I have quoted, I am not endorsing theism: belief in a supernatural being called g-o-d. The Hebrew prophets and Jesus were theists: that was part of their culture and they were immersed in it as children of their time. That does not mean, however, that we must follow their theism. Just as people of the axial age went from many gods to one god, we may go from one god to no god, because true religion as a way of life rather than assent to dogma extends even to the freedom not to believe that there is a supernatural being out there called god. As I say that, however, I also endorse Unitarian Universalism as a non-credal religion. We don’t hold to a creed that says either that god exists or does not exist. We are free to go either way on that matter. What is important if one does believe there is a god is the character of that god, because a true believer in god will want to imitate the character of her or his god. The question to put to a theist is, what is the character of your god? Is your god capricious, harsh, cruel, vindictive, punishing, warlike, or is your god nurturing, kind, loving, forgiving, compassionate, promoting peace and justice? As a humanist, I want to accept as my allies and fellow-seekers after true religion anyone who shares my ideals, whether they are theists or atheists.