Five Smooth Stones of Religious Liberalism: The Legacy of James Luther Adams
A Sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons and Cynthia L. G. Kane

This afternoon at 3:00 a memorial service will be held at Arlington Street Church for the most influential Unitarian Universalist thinker of the 20th century, James Luther Adams. I think we should know something about this man and his ideas, and at the same time Cynthia and I hope to use JLA's ideas as an introduction to some of the essentials of liberal religion and Unitarian Universalism. Coming here on Sunday mornings, you soon discover we're interested in Transylvania, and we are concerned about world population and we believe in the United Nations and a million other things - but what is the soil out of which these things grow? As you will see, one of Jim's maxims was that you can't just be "spiritual" without having specific beliefs any more than you can have architecture without buildings or poetry without poems. What are our basic beliefs?

At the outset, however, I must admit that Jim isn't an easy read; he asks us to think, which probably isn't so bad once in a while. I am reminded of what one of my professors once said about The Divinity School Address given in 1838 by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most important lecture - the watershed event - in American liberal religious history. Perhaps 80% of the people who were there and who listened to Emerson with their own ears had not the slightest idea of what the great man was talking about. I have sat at the feet of JLA, and indeed he spoke here from this platform in 1990, and I know that I, at least, was often led to intellectual waters way over my head. Cynthia and I will do our best to simplify and translate some basic premises, but I want first to introduce you to this man and his work.

It's been said that the way to become more intelligent is to hang around with people more intelligent than yourself. James Luther Adams was the most intelligent person I have ever hung around. He was not only book-smart beyond belief; he was also wise: open, always-learning, compassionate, caring, a sweet sweet man. JLA was a UU minister, scholar, theologian, and professor of Christian Ethics at Harvard Divinity School. He died at his home in Cambridge last July at age 92. For 57 years he was a teacher at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and at Andover-Newton Seminary.

Jim was one of the few top-rank academic theologians who were UU's. His influence, however, went far beyond our denomination. He called himself a Christian, but his theology was broad and inclusive. For him the prophetic tradition was the most important part of our Judeo-Christian heritage.

He variously defined God as "that which ultimately concerns humanity," "that in which we should place our confidence," or even "the community-creating power."

He insisted that ethics must deal not only with one-to-one relationships but the structures of society. A favorite slogan of his was the paraphrase of Jesus I put at the top of the order of service, "By their groups ye shall know them." He would never let us take for granted the precious power of voluntary associations - groups freely gathered - such as political parties, and advocacy organizations, and free churches.

The principle which wrested power away from the priests of the Reformation was called "the priesthood of all believers," but Jim insisted that even more important was "the prophethood of all believers." You should be a prophet; I should be a prophet. Each of us has an obligation to prophesy, to name what is wrong in our society and call us to love and justice. To criticize the "powers and principalities" of society and to insist that our own ideas and practices be equally subject to criticism is the radical genius of liberal religion.

Adams promoted what he called "radical laicism" - a concept with which we in this lay-led Bedford congregation, ought to be familiar. With dry humor, he quoted an old maxim, "Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you, Jesus was not a parson." Jim was a radical, a leftist, but totally undogmatic.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said that a minister in the 20th century ought to preach with the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other and that is what Adams did. In the 1930's, as a young minister, he traveled in Europe carrying what was then a new invention: a hand-held movie camera. He interviewed the leading theologians, particularly in Germany, and documented the conflict between those churches that resisted Nazism and those who collaborated. Many churches felt they could be independent of politics, "spiritual," inner-directed - and I still feel the shame of Adams' observation that the only 3rd Reich newspaper with a Unitarian name was a Nazi newspaper. For his inquisitiveness, Jim was briefly detained by the Gestapo, and his films and stories of that era remain classic warnings against totalitarianism for the present as well as the past. One of the last times I visited Jim at his home was with John McCulloch, three years ago, when he showed his films to a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America.

As a result of his travels, Adams translated and introduced to an American audience the writings of Paul Tillich, a German refugee theologian, who was to become one of the leading religious figures of this century. He also initiated an ongoing seminar in ethics at the Harvard Business School.

He had an amazing mind that could remember a reference, even to the page, in some book written in 1926, in French. He was also an ardent correspondent who would respond to a postcard with an immediate lengthy dissertation, suggesting further avenues of thought far beyond that initially suspected.

Jim's work was at the heart of the theological interface with history, art, politics and culture - but it is also amazing to see how far he ranged. Knowing that Jim relaxed by watching soap operas, I once sent him a news clipping that noted Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall's affection for the soaps. Jim wrote back with a copy of a recent monograph he had written about the social implications of soap opera as well as his thoughts about Marshall and the rightward tilt of the Supreme Court.

I have recently come across a delightful essay Jim wrote entitled, "In Praise Of Sleep," in which he notes that the 18th century court preacher in London, Dr. Robert South, "interrupted his sermon to awaken the prime minister and warn him that if he did not moderate his snoring he might awaken his majesty, the king."

In every era, Adams was at the cutting edge. Though it is embarrassing to imagine a racially segregated Unitarian church board, in the 40's Jim forced the integration of the board at his church in Chicago. He told the story of arguing with one segregationist on the board until 2 in the morning, pummeling him with questions about the purpose of the church until at last, exhausted, the man relented by saying that the purpose of the church was to "change narrow-minded people like me"

I met Jim when I was a teenager and had been hired to help the Adamses pack up their house in Chicago to move back to Cambridge. I remember dozens of piles of papers and books strewn on the floor all about the house, and when asked to move something to the pile about "the significance of the grotesque in art" or "the works of William James," Jim talked non-stop about this or that research, engaging me as though I were his peer.

In later conversations, he discussed the work of Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, and acknowledged that he had tried LSD as part of Leary's research - which was akin to discovering that Moses took acid. And I recall his fascination with the TV series "Kung Fu" - because it was an early attempt to integrate eastern and western cultures.

When I came to Boston to attend college, I recall one Sunday morning at Arlington Street Church when Jim rose during the joys and concerns to note the death of Steven Biko, the S. African student activist, at the hands of the S. African police. It was the first time I had heard Biko's now-famous name.

And when Sue and I were married, it was Jim who raised the wedding toast, quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins and wishing us "the dearest freshness deep down things" - a wish I have often repeated at similar occasions.

One of Jim's most famous essays was called "The Five Smooth Stones of Religious Liberalism." They are an excellent summary of beliefs which, I think, hold us in common. Cynthia and I will try to bring these stones to life, but I will first introduce our offering with JLA's observation about the offering:

SMOOTH STONE #1

The first smooth stone is that "religious liberalism depends on the principle that "revelation" is continuous. Meaning has not been finally captured. Nothing is complete, and thus nothing is exempt from criticism."

Last week when we held an orientation for newcomers, someone described their previous religious affiliation by drawing a box. Many religious traditions try to limit our understanding of what's important: you'll be saved, you'll be happy, God will be pleased if you adopt this creed, perform this ritual, revere this book, obey this man. "Don't look behind the curtain. This is the Mighty Oz!"

Religious liberalism begins with the premise of human freedom; we are not in a box. Important though creeds and rituals and books and people are, history proceeds, neither Jesus nor the latest issue of the Scientific American has pronounced the last word. Reality is more vast than our imagination, and even as the island of knowledge expands, so too does the shoreline of mystery. We are part of purposes and processes far greater than those we know. Some would call these purposes and processes "God" - Adams was comfortable using that word though he acknowledged how laden it is with unacceptable connotations that it often causes more confusion that it resolves. Anyway, the very point of a term like 'God' is to point out that nothing is finally resolved - ours is an expanding universe.

This is not merely an intellectual point. Many of us are caught in the tug of war between optimism and pessimism, between hopefulness and despair, between the very good questions, "Is life worth living?" or "Is it not?" Some religions give easy yes or no answers to those questions. "God loves you" say the smiling believers; "God hates you" say those who are quick to judge God's taste in matters of race or sex or class or politics; "God couldn't care less about you" say the agnostics. Adams would say that we can never know enough to justify any of these positions - not ultimate optimism, nor ultimate pessimism, nor ultimate indifference. Revelation is continuous; we never know what's around the next corner; curiosity - therefore - is the genuine liberal stance. What's going to happen next?

And, if you hear this point clearly, it also suggests that we do not simply place faith in our own human judgments. We acknowledge the reality of what Adams called "the inescapable, commanding reality that sustains and transforms all meaningful existence." Ours is not merely a relativist stance, justifying whatever opinion we may happen to hold at the moment. Call it "God" or call it something else, but we stand in relation to a reality larger than ourselves. If revelation is continuous, therefore, we are called to be both curious and humble.

SMOOTH STONE #3:

Religious liberalism affirm the moral obligation to direct one's effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community. It is this which makes the role of the prophet central and indispensable in liberalism."

Let me continue, briefly, with Adams' words: "A faith that is not the sister of justice is bound to bring us to grief. It thwarts creation, a divinely given possibility; it robs us of our birthright of freedom in an open universe; it robs the community of the spiritual riches latent in its members; it reduces us to beasts of burden in slavish subservience to a state, a church or party - to a self-made God."

Religious liberalism says that if we worship anything less than God (now remember to translate this if you need to: anything less than full human freedom, anything less than that which ultimately concerns humanity, anything less than our largest purposes and processes) - to worship anything less is idolatrous; anything less substitutes some small thing for that which is truly vital. And it is easy to substitute such smaller things: worship of nation or church or fuhrer or class or sect or self.

As it is so often understood, religion is a private matter. But if religion becomes simply a matter of "keeping one's own nose clean," it can easily become pietistic and quietistic, uninterested in social matters; at worst it becomes diabolic, perpetuating evil. Religion, to Adams, is both private and public: justice, he said, is but love writ large.

SMOOTH STONE #5:

Finally, liberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism.

Jim is sometimes called "the smiling prophet" but he was no Pollyanna. Notice he does not say that immediate optimism is in any way justified. Awfulness abounds. What distinguishes liberal religion, however, is an awareness that history is moving and that the potential is ever-present for the future to be better than the present. In the words of a hymn, "we revere the past, but trust the dawning future more." Some orthodox religions are stuck in history: gimme that ole time religion. Some religions live solely for the present moment. Zen and many eastern traditions, and earth-centered and neo-pagan movements fit here as well. Adams suggests that the true spirit of religious liberalism is distinguished by hope. Not the perfectibility of humankind, not progress onward and upward forever, but hope - eyes-open-aware-of-what's-awful hope nevertheless.

Adams would balance hope with some mood of penitence, for there's ample evidence that we've screwed up aplenty. And he would insist on an imperative mood, too, 'cause "if wishes were horses then beggars would ride."

But hope is like a river's current - without it there would be stagnation; in excess there would be destruction; but a current refreshes and renews and leads on. Martin Luther King said it, "The arc of history is long - but it bends toward justice."

Revelation is continuous.

Relations between persons ought to rest on free consent and not on coercion.

We have a moral obligation to work toward the establishment of a just and loving community.

Good stuff doesn't just happen; we make it happen.

With what the universe provides and all that we can do, ultimate optimism is justified.

With these five smooth stones, David the underdog slays Goliath the heavy every time.

© Rev. John E. Gibbons & Cynthia L. G. Kane, October 23, 1994
First Parish in Bedford
On the Common
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