This morning I want to talk about the roots of what is usually called "liberal religion." In the first century of the current era, there arose a new mystery religion called Christianity, which was actually only a cult of the extreme Jewish faction known as Essenes or Nazarenes.
A man called Paul (or Saul) took this minor regional cult, combined it with Greco-Roman-Egyptian-Asian concepts and created a non- Judaic cult with strong overtones of Mithraism, gnosticism and other current religious concepts.
The new religion grew rapidly, but in many different directions. What we know as Christianity today is a distillation of two thousand years of constant change. Today's Christian is as unlike a first-century Christian as the English language is to Koine Greek.
In the beginning, each member of this new cult was allowed a great deal of latitude in belief. Slowly, bureaucrats such as Jerome and Constantine began narrowing the scope of Christianity, limiting it to their own small concepts.
This morning, I want to talk about some of the very early thinkers within the growing church, rebels all, whose influence helped shape the later Unitarian Universalist movement.
The early church -- because of the irregularity of its founding and because its earliest writings (being Jewish) didn't agree with the later dogmas -- was torn by factions of all kinds.
There were, of course, the more Jewish elements who resisted any attempts to alter essential Essenism. James and the Jerusalem community ("church") opposed Paul's attempt to bring Gentiles into the new religion. The Nazarene Christians insisted upon strict Jewish observance of the law -- including circumcision -- as requirements for membership! They were, in effect, Essenes.
Others -- among the Gentile converts -- wanted Christianity to separate even further from Judaism. These included the full gnostics (those who wanted the entire religion to be essentially a mystic conceptualization), and the Mithraists, who wanted Christ identified openly with the sun-god.
Slowly, the church changed. Circumcision was dropped because it interfered with missionary work among the Gentiles. Sunday became the holy day to appease the Mithraists.
Christianity began slowly to take shape. But there were dissenters.
Alexandria, on the north African Coast, was Greek capital of Egypt and one of the largest cities of its day. It contained probably the largest library then existing. At the time of the first expansion of Christianity, Alexandria contained a huge Jewish population and one tending already toward gnostic and hellenistic ideas.
Alexandria quickly became a major center for the emerging cult of Christianity and its bishop easily rivalled the bishop of Rome. In fact, had not Islam arisen and Alexandria been taken by the Arab invasion, Alexandria could very likely have been the Papal seat today!
Origen was strongly influenced by Greek and gnostic thought, so his ideas were considerably different from those of the later church. Because his ideas came before the official description of the heresies, Origen is referred to in the church as having been "in error" rather than having been heretical.
Origen taught that souls must have existed before birth. ("Eternal," after all, means "all-time," so logically we can't have eternal life after death without having lived eternally before life.) He accepted universal salvation, that all human beings are saved, not just believers. Origen could not accept the logic of loving God condemning any person to everlasting torment.
Origen was persecuted both by the government of the time, and by the European Christians. During his life, he was forced to flee to Palestine to escape certain death in Alexandria. After he died in 254 C.E. (as a martyr to persecution by the Emperor Decius), he was officially condemned by the church.
His ideas on universal salvation were similar to those of later Universalists -- who acknowledged him (and his heresies) as fore- runners of their ideas.
Arius insisted that Jesus was only a human and that Jesus was different from God, not a God at all. Arius admitted that Jesus might be the most perfect creation of God, but insisted that Jesus was not God himself. Arius' views were widely held within the church and Arius became the focus of a major schism in the movement.
About the time of Arius, the Emperor Constantine had decided -- as a political move -- to convert to Christianity in order to help firm up his shaky empire. He required his army -- and eventually the entire empire -- to convert to Christianity (baptizing them wholesale with buckets of water).
By focusing the entire empire on one goal -- Christianity -- Constantine hoped to stop the disintegration of the Roman system. One cult. One creed. One emperor. It would work as long as everyone believed the same thing.
Then along comes this upstart Arius and his heretical ideas. Making waves is not appreciated in dictatorial regimes.
Constantine called together a great council, in Nicaea, in 325 C.E., to decide on one creed for all Christianity. The question was this: was Jesus homoousios, of the same nature as God (as Constantine and Athenasius believed), or was he homoiousios, of a similar nature to God (as Arius believed)?
The Council (surrounded by Constantine's troops and under threat of punishment) decided against Arius and annunciated the doctrine of the trinity. Arianism was outlawed. But the empire was still too shaky to risk revolution so Constantine never enforced the outlawing of Arianism! A later council, in fact, (Tyre, 335 C.E.) declared Arianism to be the correct belief of Christianity!
Both Arianism and Athenasianism were accepted (off and on) until the Emperor Theodosius I called a Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 381 C.E. At this time (also under coercion) the Creed of Nicaea was reaffirmed. Arianism was declared a heresy. Arians were forbidden to meet publicly, their churches were confiscated and they were forbidden the right to inherit property. By 438 C.E., Theodosius II declared death for all anti- trinitarians.
Do you understand why these early Christians -- like the converted Roman emperors -- were so desperately opposed to Arius and his ideas? Why was it so important to them that Jesus be a God? The answer lies in the Roman concept that if a God could become a human, then a human could become a God. Under the Roman system, an emperor began as a human and became a God before his reign was over.
To the pure Greek thinker, however, such a thing was unthinkable, for the Greeks stressed the unity of nature. God could be only God. Humans could be only human. Arius, a Greek theologian, could not accept the mystical connotation of a God becoming human (or vice versa). The Roman Christians, however, desperately needed the assurance that they themselves might somehow become Gods.
And they did, many of them. Sainthood is a status no different essentially from that of the Roman lares or ancestor gods. A saint can be prayed to; a saint exists forever and keeps watch over the earth. Saints are the church's institutionalization of polytheism.
Pelagius (360?-420? C.E.) was a colorful character and infuriated most of the leading theologians of his day. Both Jerome and Augustine were sworn enemies of Pelagius.
He was a wandering monk, though he eventually settled (like Origen before him) in Palestine. Pelagius preached a strange doctrine called "Free Will." Each person, he believed, could work out her/his own salvation by the exercise of free will alone.
Pelagius denied original sin. He rejected baptism as a requirement for salvation. He refused to follow an ascetic or monastic life. His writings denied the sanctity of virginity (a major church emphasis by this time.) And the followers of Pelagius were accused of the grievous sin of "venality." That is, they enjoyed sex.
About this time, Augustine (354-430 C.E.), bishop of Hippo, was developing the ideas that would eventually become the central dogmas of the Catholic Church: election of believers, original sin, no salvation outside the church.
Palagius' ideas were dangerous in that they denied all these doctrines so necessary to the growth of the church. He had to be stopped.
Jerome (c 340-420 C.E.) called together another council, the Synod of Diospolias, composed of 14 bishops, and asked them to condemn Pelagius. The bishops could read only Greek, however, and Pelagius wrote only in Latin. The Council decreed that none of its members had ever read any heresies by Pelagius! Pelagius was absolved of heresy. During most of Augustine's life, he attacked Pelagius.
Finally, in 416 C.E., Pelagius was condemned as an heretic, but his ideas live on. Not only we, but also Methodism and all the non- Calvinist Protestant churches, owe much to the ideas of Pelagius. (One of Pelagius' later followers, Arminius -- a Dutch Protestant named Jacob Harmenson, 1560-1609 C.E. -- was a major opponent of John Calvin and brought the concepts of free will into modern Christianity.)
These three theologians brought to us the major elements of our modern movement:
From Origen, we got the universalist ideas of a loving deity and a rejection of eternal damnation.
From Arius, we got the concept of Jesus as only another human being, and not as a god.
From Pelagius, we received the doctrine of free will and the ability of each person to find her/his own religious path.
By the time of the Inquisition, believers in free religion were prime targets of the established Church. Miguel Servetus, a Spanish physician, was burned at the stake in Geneva, and the large unitarian community in Poland and Hungary was largely annihilated by a combined Catholic-Zwinglian army.
Before that happened, in the 15th century, the Polish Brethren published their only creedal statement, the Act of Horodlo:
Nor can that endure which has not its foundations upon love; For love alone diminishes not but shines with its own light; Makes an end to discord, softens the fires of hate, restores peace in the world, brings together the sundered, redresses wrongs and injures none. And whoso invokes its aid will find peace and safety, and have no fear of future ill.
Later, the unitarian preacher Francis David became advisor to Hungarian king Sigismund and induced him to issue the first modern law of religious freedom. David's most famous words were: "We do not have to believe alike, to love alike." Francis David, by the way, was condemned as an heretic and died in prison in 1579. Liberal religion -- the belief that each individual has the right to determine and follow her own religious path -- has a long and often painful history.
Today, there are many -- particularly in the religious right -- who would like to see the "good old days" of religious intolerance return. The major goal of the so-called "moral majority" is to make the U.S. a "theocracy" and have Christian theology enforced by law. The anti-abortionists have said they will stop at nothing -- including murder -- to do just that.
It is important that we remember our roots of liberal or free religion. For freedom is a fragile possession at best, and can be easily broken. Take away the Santeria rights to have animal sacrifice today, and our right to an independent meeting place may be taken from us tomorrow.
Blessed Be!