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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 17, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
In this ongoing sermon series about differences between one historical, political, or spiritual perspective and another, this Sunday we’ll look at the differences between Trinitarians and Unitarians.
I’d like to start with a seminar question: What is the opposite of “Divine?”
In order to go more deeply into the history of Unitarianism, we’re going to go all the way back to the early days of Christianity. Rabbi Jesus had just died. Confusion reigned. What had just happened? What did it mean? Was anyone writing anything down? We think yes, possibly. What about the gospels, you might ask? There were many gospels being written. (Gospel means “good news.”) There was the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Gospel of Judas, , and nearly forty others. By the year 140, the four we have now were being used, along with the Shepherd of Hermas, and the letters of Clement, Bishop of Rome.
The final canon, or list, of the writings to be called The Bible was decided once in the year 397, and then again, a final decision at the Council of Trent in the fifteen hundreds. Even now, Roman Catholic Bibles have in them books that Protestant Bibles don’t have.
Mark was written first, around 70. Matthew next, late 70’s, early 80’s. Luke was around that same time, and then the Gospel of John was last, around 90, sixty years after Jesus died. The pictures of Jesus emerging from the four are somewhat different. The first three, called the “Synoptic Gospels,” (ie “seen from the same eye”) tell similar stories, even using some of the same words to tell the stories. Scholars think they used an early source we just call “Q.” John didn’t seem to use Q, and his vision of who Jesus is, or was, is elevated to someone who existed before history, from the very beginning, who is one with God. This is called your “Christology,” how divine you think he was, and John’s is the highest. Mark’s is seen as the lowest. In that gospel, Jesus is portrayed as mostly human, the Son of God, the Messiah. Equal to God? Not really, until John.
Christology, the amount of human v the amount of divine in Jesus Christ (Christ being the word for the divine part) was the thing early Christianity fought about most. People said he was God, and human at the same time. He was God so his death ( and resurrection) would be strong enough to save people. He was human so God would really have joined us here on this planet. That is the crux of the story, the heart of the difference between Trinitarian and Unitarian.
Teachers arose to address this conundrum and others. Our roots are with one of those teachers, Arius of Alexandria, Egypt. One teacher would say, “Jesus was both divine and human, and the way that worked was that his body was human, but his spirit was divine.”
“That’s wrong!” another would say, “Jesus was both divine and human, and the way that worked was that his body and spirit were human, but his will was divine, the same will as God’s will.”
“That’s wrong!” another would say, “Jesus was both divine and human, and the way that worked was that everything about him was divine, he just appeared to be human.”
Arius solved the problem of this dual nature by teaching that Jesus was not God, but was created by God, kind of a junior partner with God. Arianism is the name for that heresy, our heresy. “Heresy,” just means a belief that the mainstream calls an error. “Orthodoxy” is the word for what the main stream believes. At the council of Nicea, and again at church councils after that, the dogma was that God was a Trinity, One God in Three Persons. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They declared Arius a heretic and all of his followers heretics. You were in danger of being thrown in prison for disagreeing, as Arius had, with the idea of the Trinity.
Many conventions, councils, were held over the next thousand years, and this issue was one of the most contentious. Was Jesus “of the same substance” (homoousion) with the Father? Or was he, as some of the the followers of Arius were willing to compromise: “of similar substance” (homoiousion) with God. The difference between homoousion (the same substance) and homoiousion (similar substance, but not the same) one iota. See what one iota of difference can be. I hope you will bear with me for a moment when I draw a superhero parallel. When you think of Jesus as God, he is a superhero who can do anything. He is a being from another place, like Superman. He can fly, he can circle the earth so fast that time starts to run backward. When you think of him as human, he’s a superhero like Batman. Just a man with some amazing skills and equipment. One of the most frequently asked questions of UUism is “What do you think of Jesus, is he divine?” One UU way to answer is “yes, he was divine, and so are you.”
What is the opposite of divine? Remember our seminar question? For the Christians, the answer was “human.” If you have another perspective, if you believe that everything is connected, that the Earth is alive, that we are all part of one another, that there is one soul of all things, then human and “divine” are not opposites. If there is just Being, and Love, then those are part of what we might think of as “divine.” They are part of us. This is a part of Transcendentalism that derives from the wisdom of Hinduism and Buddhism. This is well within the theological tradition of Unitarianism. Hear it?
“Unitarian,” means One. God is one. No, Jesus isn’t a divine savior. We are all part of God. Trinitarianism splits God into three, with humans as the fourth, the broken piece. For some people, that way of seeing things has the most power. If you feel the need of a savior, you feel you need to be saved from something (hell? God?) or saved for something (heaven?) That savior should be powerful and loving. Why can’t God just save you, though?
You end up with a story that has God split off part of himself, give birth to a son and then kill him to satisfy some rule that was made by — God? Couldn’t God just forgive people without killing his child, or killing part of himself? Did God set up a system God can’t fix without death?
If Jesus is not divine, or is divine in the same way we are, and in the same way things are, at their heart, then it is the one-ness that we have to deal with. Lovely as long as you have a kind of dolphins-and-sunsets theology, where you sigh in awe of the beauty of it all. As you widen your view, though, you have to deal with the question of pain, cancer cells, flesh-eating bacteria, mosquitos and entropy. So if there is one soul of all things, it has to be the soul of all of the painful things as well as the lovely things. A more powerful story, but not as sweet. I don’t want you to be among the shallow thinkers who say “Oh, we believe in the oneness of everything” blithely, without thinking about that word: Everything.
We are from the Unitarians, the children of Arius and the brave dissenters against the doctrine of the Trinity, of people who wanted things to make sense. Heretics no longer, because we have formed a house of our own faith, where we are the main stream and we create our theology as we learn and grow.
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