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Dear Reader.
The following sermon was written to be
spoken. It may not follow the conventions of documents which were written to be
read. It also will not reflect the energy and nuances of the speaker.
If you
can embrace these caveats, please, read on.
Pastor Jef
Sermon
My sermon today and next week focus on the American Humanist John Dietrich
and his transition from Christian minister to Humanist Unitarian minister.
This week I will talk about the intellectual curiosity of the time he lived,
1878 to 1957, specifically prior to and during the time he evolved his humanist
thought.
When I was in seminary I had a New or some say Second Testament
professor who began with a lot of the history surrounding the writing of the
many books in the Second Testament. I wondered why we didn’t just dive right
into this sacred text of Christianity. Once we got the flavor of the times and
then began to dive into the texts, the texts began to make sense because we knew
what was going on around the writing.
Dietrich was born into a time
when Biblical criticism was flowering. Biblical criticism is different from
criticisms of the bible, which has been going on much longer.
Both
Old Testament and
New Testament criticism
originated in the rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries and developed
within the context of the scientific approach to the humanities (especially
history) which grew during the 19th.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_criticism
Charles Darwin
published Origin of the Species in 1859. His theory directly challenged
those who believed that the world was created in six days. Darwin’s work grew
from the application of the scientific method, which as many of you know takes
this approach
Ask a Question
Do Background Research
Construct a Hypothesis
Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
Analyze Your Data and Draw a
Conclusion
Communicate Your Results
It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. A "fair test" occurs
when you change only one factor (variable) and keep all other conditions the
same.http://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentoring/project_scientific_method.shtml
John Dewey, American Philosopher wrote in the 1930s about the scientific
method.
“Not by consulting sacred writings or ancient oracles, but by
rational investigation and by observable experiment do we come to fresh and
significant understanding.” P300*
I think we can agree that
applying scientific method to questions of the humanities is tougher than
questions in science, however, it can be done and it certainly was being used to
challenge the bible. The bible was being challenged intellectually,
scientifically and the church establishment was not happy about it.
Not
to get ahead of myself here, but I can’t help but notice that here in 2009 we
have people virulently promoting texts from the Bible, a set of books written to
people living over two thousand by people living over two thousand year, to
justify oppressive, bigoted and reactionary decisions. Just this week I read a
story of a judge who sided with a hospital that denied a dying gay partner the
right to be with her partner, who had power of attorney, during the final hours
of her life. If I were not with us here today, you can bet your hiking boots and
flannel shirt I’d be in Washington marching with our six from RE.
Ok so
I digressed, however, the Biblically based resistance to equality we feel today
was nothing like the resistance that was put up over a hundred years ago to
anything, which challenged Biblical authority.
This was time of
modernism. The idea that the world was made up of causes and effects and if one
applied clear thought, the scientific method, then there was nothing we could
not know. The flip side was that if it could not be scientifically proven, then
it could not be given the same weight as fact.
Hmm let me think. Virgin
Birth. Walking on water. Big Fish swallows guy and three days later burps him
back up, intact. Oh yeah, and that business of a fellow being dead and then
walking around with his friends after his body disappears.
If your
institution is built on these stories and those very stories are being
challenged by scholars, even some church scholars, you might get a bit
exercised.
Pope Pius X in 1907, dismissed modernism as repugnant,
horribly misplaced secular learning. P313*
Somebody’s ox was
getting gored.
This was a time when the church was conservative and it
soaked the fabric of American culture. By 1900 the Unitarians and the
Universalists had been preaching, for about a hundred years, a more mindful,
less rigid, less scary version of American religion, but I’m guessing that if
any one of us was thrust back to even the late 1800s, we’d be too liberal, too
radical for any of our Unitarian or Universalist congregations.
With
Biblical criticism, as well as slowly improving communication and with the
accompanying dissemination of information, the message of the mainstream
churches was softening up, however they were still righteously and rigidly
Trinitarian and righteous in their defending and promoting, what John Shelby
Spong correctly points out was “a pre-Copernican view of the universe.”
Scientific method be damned.
So now we get to John Dietrich
Born in 1878 in Pennsylvania, 20
years after the Origin of the Species had been published by Darwin in England.
Dietrich was brought up in the Reformed Church, one of the protestant
faiths originating out of the reformation. Church history tells us that the
reformed church was severe in outlook and deeply Calvinist in Theology.
You remember John Calvin, he was the guy that claimed the bible taught that a
few were going to heaven and the rest of us would complain about the heat for
eternity.
After college, Dietrich went to work for Jonathan Thorne in
New York City and occasionally attended services at All Souls Unitarian in
Manhattan. In the pulpit, our old friend Reverend Ulysses G. Pierce. What?
You’ve forgotten him already? Ok, I hadn’t heard of him either.
Once
Dietrich had earned enough money he went to Seminary. Reformed church seminary.
In his graduation speech, speaking to a very conservative audience, he planned
to postulate Jesus died the death of a martyr. That his death had nothing to do
with atonement for the sins of humankind. I think there’s something about this
boy we’re gonna like.
Dietrich ultimately caved to the wishes of his
professor and softened his message and he graduated in 1905. Think of the times.
He was hearing the call of modernism in spite of attending a seminary steeped in
rigid Calvinist thought. That’s the trouble with seminary, they make you think,
and students who think may not buy the company line.
So he was ordained
into the reformed church, began a successful ministry in Pittsburgh, until the
theological hardliners figured out the liberal message he was preaching. . . and
he was defrocked in 1911. They concluded he did not believe in the infallibility
of the Bible, or the virgin birth, or the deity of Jesus. He accepted the theory
of evolution and incorporated secular readings in the worship service among
other things. And don’t get them started on the fact that he invited a Rabbi to
speak in his church. P55**
The Unitarians in Pittsburgh knew about
Dietrich and offered him ministerial fellowship after the Reformed Church kicked
him to the curb. They also offered him a slot at First Unitarian in Pittsburgh,
however he decided against it because he felt it would be dishonorable to locate
near his old Reformed church, in which, by the way, he was very popular.
P55**
So the same year he was defrocked and embraced by the Unitarians
he became the minister of the Unitarian Society in Spokane Washington a small
church of about sixty. When he left, five years later the congregation had grown
to more than fifteen hundred. He had a message people were ready for. p56**
During his time in Spokane he began to question his liberal view of Jesus
as the greatest spiritual leader of all history. He moved to a belief that the
world benefitted from the teaching of the Buddha, Confucius, the Hebrew prophets
and the Greek Philosophers. He also embraced the scientific method as an
effective means for arriving at the truth. In his sermon “What I Believe” he
wrote, “ I believe in the scientific method. I do not believe everything
that is taught under the name of science, but I do believe in the supremacy of
the scientific method, of if you choose, the experimental method.” He continued
to use secular readings in his services and his sermons evolved to hour-long
lectures. In 1914 he challenged the Comstock Law in a sermon titled “The Right
To Be Well Born.” The Comstock Law of 1873 was a federal law that made it a
crime to sell or distribute materials that could be used for contraception
http://law.jrank.org/pages/5508/Comstock-Law-1873.html
It was also
during his ministry in Spokane that he began to refer to his faith as
humanistic, that is, he blended elements of renaissance humanism, a belief and
trust in the human effort, and a commitment to social effort which he called
naturalistic humanism.p56**
The popularity of Dietrich’s message grew
and he moved to Minneapolis to take another church. During his time there he
began to preach his liberal naturalist humanism over WDGY radio which brought
howls of complaints from Catholic and Protestant clergy. They said the
liberal message was wrong for the community and, oh yeah, congregants were
staying home to listen to his services. This was before tape recorders, so
everything was live.p57**
And what was his evolving message? He believed
it was possible to develop a religion independent of the existence of god. Up to
that point in the west, if one was religious, one believed in one or three gods,
if one did not, one was not religious. He believed it was possible to be
religious in the best sense of the word without hitching one’s wagon to god.
P59**
When I was a kid learning to sail in a sunfish on lake Michigan I
had a moment of theological education. As many of you know a sunfish is not much
more than a surfboard with a sail on it. It is a hoot to sail and a fine little
boat for a lad to learn the basic points of sailing. The particular year I was
learning to sail, lake Michigan was unseasonably cold and the weather blustery.
And while I was a rookie at sailing I took to it easily and quickly went from
being a tense sailor to at least a less tense sailor. You learn that the boat
will forgive you small mistakes, however, anything larger and you will flip
over. The boat is easy to right and you can get right back in and away you’ll
go. So here I am sailing this boat, flying through the water courtesy of the
unusually windy summer and constantly threated with the possibility of flipping
and a dipping in a very cold Lake Michigan. and I realize the universe doesn’t
care. It doesn’t care that I am sailing, it doesn’t care that the water is cold
and it certainly doesn’t care how cold I will be if I flip over, or how hard it
might be, due to the wind to right the boat. It was a very short leap for me to
go from the universe not caring to god not caring. The Episcopal church of my
youth told me god cares, my sail that day in the sunfish told me something else.
If any caring is going to happen it’s up to me.
Dietrich believed
there was one law in the universe, and that was nature. The idea that there was
a duality of nature and the supernatural was simply foggy thinking and not
supportable by observation.p62**
In his 1934 sermon “What I Believe” he
said, “I believe that what we call matter and spirit are two aspects of the same
substance, and that spirit is the functional aspect of different combinations
and organizations of matter. In other words, I am a monist, and not a dualist in
my philosophy.”
“Is there a Moral Law?” 1928 he wrote “There really is
no such thing as a law of nature, in the sense that natural laws were once
formulated and then natural forces obey them. What we call laws of nature are
merely human statements of the ways in which we have discovered certain forces
act.”
“These forces at work, the laws of constancy in nature we have
observed,” he wrote in the Supreme Discovery of the Ages ‘“Law and order reign
everywhere. Curses do not bring storms and prayers do not avert them. Curses do
not make people ill, and prayers do not make them well. Curses do not bring wars
and prayers do not end them, Storms come and go as the result of
well-established laws. Disease is the result of well-defined laws of the
physical body in its relation to the environment, and wars are the result of
well known laws of social relationship. Every department of the universe has its
own laws and conditions, and events are controlled soley by these, Nothing can
be done in disregard of these laws.”
As we heard in our reading,
“No my friends, we are not at the mercy of either a just or unjust God; we are
in an indifferent universe to which we must accommodate ourselves.
In
spite of how Dietrich sounds in my portrait of him and his times, he was a
religious man. He wrote in his sermon “What Does It Mean to Be Spiritual?” “To
be spiritual is simply to be nobly human, it is to be sincere, honest, reverent,
high-minded, just, and noble in all our dealings.”
Next week I will be
giving a cut down version of Dietrich’s sermon “What Does It Mean to Be
Spiritual?”, which he preached in 1929 in Minneapolis. Trust me, you want it cut
down. It’s over five thousand words.
See you next week for part 2.
*Gaustad & Schmidt, The Religious History of America: The Heart of the
American Story from Colonial Times to Today, Harper Collins, 2002
**Olds, Mason, American Religious Humanism, HUUmanists Association, NFP, 2006
©2009 Jeffrey Gamblee
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