Towards becoming a Unitarian-Universalist

As the first decade of the twenty-first century went along my self-identity began to shift again from being Humanist, and a Humanist who happened to go to a Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship, towards thinking of myself in terms of being a Unitarian-Universalist.

First was meeting my wife April. April is a Biblical scholar and I was surprised when we first got to know one another that she was not an atheist. My only relationships with women previously had been with atheist/agnostic science types. I had a hard time believing, at first, that a smart scholar could also be a person of faith. We had some long discussions about it and what I learned from her was that there was more than just a fringe group of very liberal Christians out there - that there was in fact a large number of Christians to whom much of Bible could be taken as metaphor and for whom the Bible didn't have to be viewed as the inerrant "Word of God." More than that she taught be, through being the person she is and by example, that it was senseless to live your life allowing others to define your limits. I had always thought that since such a large percentage of the people I had encountered who were religious had a particular view of religion in mind when they asked me things like "do you believe in God" that I had to answer it in their terms or be hypocritical. She taught me that you just don't have to give a rat's a** about what other people think about what you believe. You have to do what seems right and works for you - if others come along for the ride, great, and if they don't that is fine too.

Once she opened up that thought to me I found my way to books that helped me think about these things in ways that worked for me. Borg and Spong were suggested along the way, but to be honest, they are still a bit too traditional for my tastes. The ones that really caught my imagination were John Hick, Paul Tillich, and , very recently, Gordon Kaufman.

I've blogged on Hick, Tillich, and Kaufman before and I will not waste much space just repeating what I said before, but I found particularly important the book The Philosophic Challenge of Religious Diversity with regards to Hick. From him I found a philosophic framework and justification for my foundation belief that religion must be pluralistic. There is an excellent on his official website called "Believable Christianity" which I find helpful too. My first encounters with Tillich were The Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be which I have blogged a lot on (and will continue to in the future). They presented me with ways to view Christianity that didn't conflict with my world view and (and this was the tricky part) still seemed packed with meaning and usefulness. My only problem with Tillich was that (at least in what I was reading of him) he seemed to leave little room for the type of pluralism I wanted to have as part of any religion I could wholeheartedly relate to.

Then I encountered Gordon Kaufman's In Face of Mystery and I am still mulling it all over, but it seems to have everything I was looking for in a systematic theology. It was Christian in form, did not conflict with my humanistic world view (and in fact seems informed by it), still contains meaning and value, and it acknowledges that it is a choice among many, not the only correct choice, and seems to me fundamentally pluralistic.

Next time a few words on how all of these influences seem to be leading me to a new self-identification with Unitarian-Universalism.