The Theological Value of Consent

The first use of the written ballot on the shores of the North American continent was in Salem, Massachusetts in the early 17th century, when those European spiritual pioneers elected their religious leaders. It was an act emanating from the bond of affection, the covenant, that formed them into a spiritual community. The significance in terms of church governance, polity, is palpable. No longer would the church’s leadership be determined by an ecclesiastical hierarchy, but by the consent of the governed. “Christ’s Representative on Earth” – by which clergy were known then – would be chosen not by the diocese but the denizens, not through apostolic succession but by spiritual rights. It was the culmination of what had been hinted at in the Reformation. In essence the individual stood before God with no intermediary, and it was only a finite existence of limits and conditions whereby that immediate and direct relationship was compromised. The temptation was, and is always before us to elevate things of this finite world to infinite status, including the symbolic mediators of the sacred. Human consent and responsibility – free will – is an awesome and mighty thing perhaps because it is the evidence of something more.

The theological ramification is revolutionary, but it would take another two centuries until William Ellery Channing fully exposed it. Human beings bear a Divine Likeness, and it is through individual consent whereby that likeness is borne into reality. We call God Creator, and through human consent we emulate that creativity. Humanity gives shape to the world, creates meaning in existence, and can propel creation towards its fulfillment through this coarchy with the Ultimate. And, humanity can distort and disfigure creation through activities that compound the tyranny of self and others by aligning with the principalities and powers that diminish creativity and threaten to sever our relationship with the Spirit.

The theological value of consent is that it is the evidence in human nature of God’s image, and is expressed most fully when we consent to enter into and deepen loving relationships. But we do not commonly conceive of the theological value of consent, nor act as if it is the presence of God that it is. Nor do we, who live and move within a faith tradition that harbors the theology of covenant, understand consent as part of the path that is our spiritual identity and practice. We don’t talk about it that way and haven’t learned to read our lives that way.

James Luther Adams, a Unitarian Universalist and one of the 20th century’s great theologians, pulled the brush aside on the path to our spiritual identity and practice, explaining how some concepts “become” religious concepts, words “become” symbols of something sacred:

“Human social existence requires the achievement of a means of communicating about social existence, a characteristic feature of which is the invention of concepts. Concepts do not come down from heaven; they have to be invented… [Theological] discourse… picks up a concept from ordinary experience and gives it a new and expanded meaning. A concept that originally applies to one aspect of existence is reinterpreted to explain the whole of existence. We call this process the radicalizing of a concept.” (The Prophetic Covenant and Social Concern, James Luther Adams)

Members of All Souls Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the church with whom I am in covenant as its minister, talk about “walking together” to describe the community’s spiritual life. Thus, the two words become invested with new meanings that bear upon the whole of existence and expand the possible experiences of God. Thus for me, being guided by the influence of our covenant, a stroll on a downtown street just isn’t the same again! Our spiritual forbear John Winthrop held that relationships forming spiritual community are as a “city upon the hill.” Thereafter, can your home congregation and hometown not be seen differently? Jesus likened the “kingdom of God” to a landowner hiring laborers for his vineyard, and invests ultimate meanings in “laborers” and in “vineyards” and the manner and consequence of "hiring."

Any ordinary thing in this world can be a symbol for the transformative capacities inherent in finite existence. That’s part of the history of our spiritual identity. Any ordinary thing can be a signpost for the liberating presence and possibility of Love. But our view is distinctive and enduring. The ancient Hebrews took the concept of a treaty between political entities and radicalized it into the concept of “covenant” to describe the relationship between God and the Hebrew people. And our spiritual ancestors used a covenant to gather a new community from a new relatedness proffering a new being, over against authoritarian structures of understanding and fellowship. It is part of the theological and spiritual yield of the Salem vote.

Our forbears made the first step in the exodus from authoritarianism by creating a bond of fellowship and affection amongst persons to be seen and understood as the spiritual and divine product it is. The consequence of that covenant was the possibility of freedom and the fulfillment of creation it can bring through human activity. The Catholic priest can serve mass alone. The Muslim can practice Salat by herself. The individual Jew is a Jew. But a Unitarian Universalist needs a congregation, a covenant, so much so that when she lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula hours away from any visible gathering of the faithful, the Church of the Larger Fellowship convenes regularly for worship in her mailbox!

Covenant is a concept taken from the various agreements we make everyday, from the willingness to kneel in prayer with someone we don’t know all that well, to the life partner we’ve chosen for better or worse, to the teacher to whom we entrust our child, to the boss or co-worker or employee we supervise. Agreements are ordinary things. But to us, certain kinds of agreements unlock sacred and holy dimensions to this life when their roots are in the expanse of human affection and their branches bud into the virtues of freedom. Or, as 20th century Unitarian minister Napoleon Lovely wrote, “The bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom.”

We take the ordinary qualities inherent to certain agreements - to covenants which are formed by affection and aimed at freedom - and we radicalize them. Equality and fairness make relationships spiritual, while inequality and disparity, the yield of authoritarian relationships, makes them profane. Mutuality, promises, roles and responsibilities, lines of authority, distribution of power - these qualities simultaneously contain an ordinary relevance and an ultimate meaning. Covenantal relationships prize persuasive discourse over coercive submission, the separation and balance of power, dissent and critique, and distinct individuality as necessary to and the aim of a relationship. The creation of holy bonds cherishes spoken discourse as a spiritual practice and “walking together” as a spiritual discipline. They involve God and human being together, a coarchy in the promise of creation’s future fulfillment in the liberation of all souls. A covenant of Being. A theology of covenant is our gift to the world. The spiritual life expressing that covenant is our gift to the world.

But of all these qualities, derived from relationships seen through the possibility of their sacredness, through covenant, it is individual consent that is the symbolic reflection in human nature of God’s creative intent and the arc of the moral universe. It the underlying spiritual nature of simple requests that beg the Ultimacy of human bonds: “Do you take this woman or this man in the bonds of a holy union?” “Will you pray with me?” “Can you sit with me for a while?” “Will you join the church and walk with this community?”

Individual consent is also what is most misunderstood and distorted by us. It is not to be belittled into personal preference, the self’s desires or needs or wants, the kind of “what-I-like-becomes-absolute-truth” disregard for covenant that claims a spiritual community is simply the largest number of possible private preferences fulfilled. Individual consent is not selfoatry writ large. It is not the oppression of absolute subjectivity. The devotion to self-interest that yields spiritual license is not the bonds of affection that give birth to freedom.

Individual consent is involved in sacrifice, but not the sacrifice that gives up consent and individuality; rather, the sacrifice which, by giving consent to something larger then self, brings about the prospect of the New Being through the New Relationships grounded in Love. Individual consent - that human nature contains the capacity to give consent to enter loving relationships that are the foundation of freedom and human identity - most fully expresses our divine likeness. Consent is the evidence in human nature that we emulate the Creator by our own creativity. To live inside of relationships born of that creative affection is a special, powerful gift that transcends narrow allegiances that end with self; to walk with others in this way is to live in the closest proximity to what animates all of life. Spiritual community then becomes what it is suppose to become: the Free Church! God appears in the eyes of others who all have been made in that divine image, too! So the invitation to love God and your neighbor as yourself, becomes two different ways to walk in a common direction!

The Free Pew and The Free Pulpit

In spiritual communities formed by a covenant to which individuals have consented, whose aim is freedom (and thereby, to “spiritualize” freedom), there are two “institutions” that symbolize two different facets of human nature in relationship to freedom: The Free Pew and The Free Pulpit. The Free Pew expresses how covenantal community that spiritualizes freedom, presents a “new view” of human nature itself, and thereby a view of the ontological makeup of the individual that “competes” with the conservative view of human nature represented in its quintessential form by Western orthodoxy before the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The Free Pulpit symbolizes how the existence of the covenanted community becomes a means for enlarging freedom and therefore, expands the possibilities in existence through creative novelty.

The church I currently “walk with,” All Souls Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, maintains there is no theological declaration needed to become a member of the church and share in its fellowship; the widest definition of the Free Pew. It is a spiritual discipline to maintain the Free Pew because it is terribly difficult to uphold; not to regard others first and foremost by their theological beliefs; not to conceive of religion primarily or exclusively as a set of beliefs regarding truth. It is even more difficult in a day when religion everywhere is swallowed up by political pronouncements and "certainist" ideologies, and the divisiveness and rancor they generate.

The Free Pew is a spiritual practice in conceiving of a new view of human nature. Each human being is created with the freedom of a differentiated self. Each “possesses the self,” is a living instance of individuality. Human beings don’t create the freedom the Free Pew symbolizes in this new view of human nature. This is the part that is hardest to understand. We have to discipline ourselves not to think we create it by our opinions, beliefs, or practices. Otherwise, we are only declaring that it is by the mood of any generation that freedom is created. Human nature is created free, and individuals possess an inherently emancipated individuality and a differentiated self-interest. This is what the Free Pew symbolizes, and what is theologically represented in the statement, “God creates us. We do not create ourselves.” Easy to describe, but difficult to maintain and understand.

The Free Pulpit’s aim also concerns freedom, but unlike its compliment, it is as difficult to explain as it is to understand and maintain. It is created and maintained as a socially created arrangement. It is the freedom human beings create in time; which means it is relative to a generation's faithfulness and understanding. The Free Pulpit is something more than what any generation, including this one, explicitly practices or implicity embodies. For example, the Free Pulpit does not mean the free access of the pulpit by anyone, that the pulpit is the “Open Mike at the Improv.” The Free Pulpit is guarded by the social arrangement of the covenanted community and its faithfulness to that covenant. It does not mean that the pulpit is this century’s version of the 19th century Lyceum or is the theological version of Toastmasters, where individuals “learn” to speak publicly or organize thoughts into a coherent manner. The pulpit “becomes free” over time through the bond established between a spiritual community and an individual called to serve as that community’s spiritual leader; an individual who must seek to lead by understanding what the Free Church tradition is and endeavor to have his or her life shaped by its disciplines. The spiritual community itself maintains the Free Pulpit by guarding its access through lending it only to one who, through a mutual agreement consented to, “walks” with that community in the authority given by that community, and not by any one individual or set of individuals who happen to inhabit that community at a particular moment in time. It is the product of a relationship over time. And, finally, the Free Pulpit doesn’t mean a person can say anything from it that he or she wants. That’s the most common misunderstanding of the Free Pulpit. It’s often confused with absolute verbal license, such that someone might mistakenly retort, “If a person can’t say anything from the pulpit it’s not free.”

A pulpit is free because it is the product of a spiritual agreement, a covenant, lived out over time. And a spiritual covenant is instituted as a bond of affection. Its foundation is love. And love here is distinguished from the vagaries of romanticism by the theological declaration that a covenant is a "Covenant of Being," that its origin is in God known as and through Love. A pulpit isn’t free because anything can be said from it, because that can be done from any pulpit. I’ve heard it said in contrast that you can’t say anything from pulpits in other churches without severe consequences; meaning, of course, that saying anything doctrinally blasphemous from an orthodox, creedal Christian church’s pulpit will have consequences for the speaker. But, there are consequences in every pulpit when anything is said. All relationships have consequences, whether or not they involve freedom; and especially relationships that do involve freedom because they involve consent and decision. Freedom doesn’t mean the absence of consequences. The Free Pulpit is not built on absolute verbal license. Spiritualized freedom is the yield of a bond of affection. It involves discernment by the individual who has been lent the pulpit by the community, shaped by the obligation that individual has to the bond of affection formed with the community. So a Free Pulpit is free because there exists a bond of affection between a spiritual community and a minister; a covenant that includes love and judgment, and which goes both ways. From this affection, freedom can grow from this mutuality and obligation into a possibility larger than our individual beliefs, our narrow self-interests, a Spirit that is liberated when together we aspire to and are called by an affection larger than any one of us.

If Not Metaphysics Then What

From what we suppose about the earliest fruits of the religious impulse it yielded metaphysical designs. Perhaps the religious impulse was intermingled with humanity’s fear of its demise amidst an unpredictable and dangerous natural world. Perhaps that fear found itself in an uneasy alliance with humanity’s innate curiosity. Whatever it roots, it eventuated in combining humanity’s sensitiveness to passing between the sacred and the profane worlds, with speculations as to the “true order out there.” Ancient Judaism eventually saw the universe as originating from a “unity,” hence its monotheism, carved out of the polytheisms of its various milieus. We know now that its monotheistic, unitary view of existence was a gradual process, which included the assimilation of local deities into one “Lord of History.” Christianity emerged out of Judaism with a metaphysical bent and over the centuries constructed models of how “the universe was structured.” God’s will and God’s plan were proposed, defended, corrected, and reconceived. Heaven and Hell were mapped, and the qualifications for citizenship drawn up. Perhaps this was because from its beginnings Christianity was infatuated with the end of time and Jesus’ radical reordering of society’s structures from Rome’s “human” order to the Kingdom of God. But this metaphysical thrust continued to develop, culminating in the most elaborate and sophisticated of all designs, the universe as constructed by the medieval scholastics and popularized in Dante’s classic Divine Comedy with its three-tiered, multi-leveled cosmos.

Western religion’s metaphysical character continues to our day when religionists argue with scientists over the origins of the universe, evolution of life on the planet, and the rise of human being. Modern science has not challenged religion’s metaphysical explanations as much as shown them to be an emperor without clothes. God, as the creator and origin of the universe it is religion’s role to describe, has to be re-thought because religion as a metaphysical explanation of the “true order out there” no longer holds. The religious impulse must evolve in its fruition from explanation to something more. God’s will and God’s plan cannot be used with any confidence again as referring to any knowable explanatory structure.

If, though, religion’s aim is not to explain but to find deeper ways to connect (a covenantal understanding), then metaphysics becomes the speculation it truly is; no more and no less. Science, as in cosmology for example, becomes an aid in helping us understand the layers of connection that link the present with the reasoned speculations about original time and future possibility. And God becomes a way to describe the forces immanent in existence that lend themselves to providing a deeper mutuality within creation. Or, in other words, God becomes that Spirit that moves amongst human beings in such a way that they realize their deeper connection with one another and with existence; a shared destiny amongst creation. The “Holy Spirit” moves always, but when it is received and shared by freely choosing human beings it yields a deeper love. “Love thy God with all thy heart, all thy mind, and all thy soul” is an invitation into a deeper mutuality with others and with creation, an ever-present possibility in all cultures and times. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is choosing to live here and now in a “Kingdom of God that is at hand,” ordered by the connective tissue of the Spirit. And once an individual dwells there, metaphysical explanations become the secondary speculations which at best they are.

A Covenantal Theology or Relational Spirituality Part 2: The Measurement of the Spiritual Life

When I was a student minister in 1981 I officiated at my third wedding and had an epiphany. The couple had chosen “The Wedding Song” for a musical interlude while lighting a “unity” candle, which they did simultaneously from two distinct tapers that each had in hand. They did it almost at the exact point when the singer crooned, “And a man shall leave his mother and woman leave her home/They shall travel on to where the two shall meet as one.” They blew out the individual tapers and the single, unity candle burned alone.

I had been married three years and knew the misconception. Two don’t become one. The individuality, the separateness, the differentiation that makes two distinct human beings doesn’t evaporate when married. It doesn’t happen in any relationship born of vows and declarations of faithfulness. Or, to say it another way, when a religious covenant is formed the identities of the covenanted parties remain distinct. In my experience, when a covenant is formed, as it is in marriage or any declaration leading to a union of love, there actually are three entities. In a marriage, there is the woman, the man, and the married couple. The author of “The Wedding Song” should have written, “They shall travel on to where the two are transformed into three.” Or, as I say to couples now when we talk before the religious service commences, you are about to participate in a mathematical impossibility where one plus one equals three!

We have noted something that is grossly evident in our time, although it is part of previous eras as well: The way in which human beings today avoid a realistic view of human nature, forget or ignore our fallibility, declare they possess “God’s Truth” or know “God’s Will and Ways,” and then almost gleefully inflict untold horror on others who do not believe as they do. We have noted how this propensity towards idolatry, rampant in our time, can easily leave one in despair, spiritually beleaguered. Many liberal religionists have responded to this despair by renouncing religion, declaring God dead, and leaving behind religious language and the life of faith for philosophical pursuits. Is there or is there not a God?, a philosophical question, hounds the liberal religionist because today there is no evidence of a God being believed in that is worthy of human conviction. There is no Truth that doesn’t lead to someone who holds a competing Truth being killed. The liberal religionist has countered the rant that is religion today with a rant against religion. But, it’s still a rant.

A covenantal theology or relational spirituality offers something different.

If a religious covenant, when formed, continues the distinct existence of the two entities involved in the relationship, then it is a misconception to claim that the thoughts and beliefs of one are understood completely and held absolutely by the other. Or, as the poet wrote, “love’s function is to fabricate unknownness.” To “love God,” is to recognize first and foremost the distinction between God and me! And second, it is to declare that this relationship is a ‘third entity,” something that I participate in, but is greater than just my own self-interest.

How is it greater? In part, human self-interest is towards order, predictability, sameness, a conformity of one moment to the next and a familiarity that gives continuity to identity. Religions who claim God is Truth, and in the next declaration claim to know that Truth, reveal this inclination. “Jesus the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” is a bumper-sticker declaration of it. God, the Unmoved Mover, to be adored as absolute and complete in every way, is a more formal theological way to express a similar view. But what if one’s relationship with God involved being grasped by something entirely distinct from self-interest, and being “lured” towards a transformation out of the self’s security in its desire for order, predictability, sameness, and conformity and familarity, and towards something more. What if faith is about risking the self here and now? What if faith involves a lunge towards novelty, a newness of self and world? If God is Love, then what if being in covenant with God is a way of saying I am being called to expand the breadth and depth of my love for other human beings beyond what my self-interest deems comfortable and my culture affirms is proper and correct and practical? What if being in covenant with God means I am being held accountable individually for extending a larger sense of love to others than what self-interest would warrant; and that I am obligated to hold my society and myself accountable for extending justice beyond what is in the civic self-interest, and that societally that accountability is measured by how just and loving we are to the least among us?

In other words, in a covenantal theology or a relational spirituality the measurement of the spiritual life is in terms of transformation. Will you change? Will you risk becoming a "novelty" that you are not now? Are you transformed out of your current understandings, rooted as they are in self-interest, and towards a larger love and greater justice? Will you help your culture to change, to offer the novelty of affection towards those not now in its purview or embrace? Is your culture transformed out of its societal and culture self-interest, measured by a larger love and greater demand for justice for the least amongst us? For the disenfranchised and impoverished? A liberty and justice for ALL?

A covenant, a relationship, formed by love is measured by the way we consent to be transformed by affection, into greater affection.

Perceiving the spiritual life in covenantal ways, as a relationship between an individual and God, and the spiritual community as a group formed for a spiritual purpose by a religious agreement, a walk together, requires of the individual and the group a willingness to be “led in the ways of the Spirit” which transforms entities – individuals or groups – out of self-interested complacency and into the spiritually vibrancy of an ever-expanding love and an expectation of liberty and justice for all souls.

But if the measurement of the spiritual life, covenantally and relationally understood, is in terms of transformation, a liberation of one from one’s current myopia in self-interest, and towards something greater, then the life of faith becomes the ultimate risk. Not of losing the afterlife, but of changing oneself in this one. You lose yourself as conceived of in self-interest, to find yourself in a matrix of greater affection (which, of course, is also involved in self-interest, so the transformation is to go on again and again, never ending growth into affection!). Jesus called this greater love and this expectation of liberty and justice for all, the Kingdom of God, and in the same breadth he is reported to have declared that it is at hand. That land exists at this moment hidden in the forms of existence our eyes catch as they now see. To immigrate to this kingdom requires nothing as easy as physical relocation, but something far more difficult. A change of heart, mind, and soul!

We can step into that land and live inside of a covenant with God any time as long as we have breath; therefore, it can be called a covenant of grace. But this third entity, the covenant, when entered into by one will change one towards loving deeper and broader than before, and expecting and working towards liberty and justice for those society has forgotten and culture despises; therefore, it can be called a regenerating religious experience.

O God, if it be thy will that I should live through this day, through the evening, to breath again tomorrow, give my eyes to see thy ways, ears to hear thy call, a heart to receive thy love, a will to extend and declare that larger love to others, and a courage to be transformed in the larger likeness of your affection; that I might better walk a path with others towards thee.

A Covenantal Theology or Relational Spirituality, Part 1: The Goal and Aim of the Life of Faith

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith is NOT finding the Truth? NOT finding the Truth that is God, nor discovering the One True Faith, nor finding the Truth and believing in that Truth and holding to that Truth against all other contenders? What if the goal and aim of the life of faith is NOT about Truth at all, and faith is not about believing the Right Things in the Right Way?

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith begins with this simple acknowledgement: As human beings we are so filled with self-interest and fallibility that we will mistake our own preferences for Truth, our own incomplete understandings for Truth, and we will ascribe our own distortions of the good, the right, and the true to God. It is what is so poignantly portrayed in the second creation story in the Book of Genesis. Human beings are fallible and finite. We cannot know God’s ways because they are God’s and not ours. God and man are not the same. We walk in a garden we did not create.

What if the goal and aim of the life of faith began with a realistic estimate of human nature, the nature that is shared by ALL who walk or have walked this earth? It is how the disciples are portrayed in the Gospel of Mark. Centuries later we deride them as being dull-headed and slow when it came to seeing "the Truth," but maybe in reality we are all characters in this kind of story. To walk on this earth is to see through a glass darkly, unable to know what Truth is. Or, to say it another way, none has a “God’s eye view” of things. What if the goal and aim of the life of faith began with the spiritual declaration: “I do not understand Your ways, O God.”

Then, it would be impossible to declare that the life of faith is completely or even primarily about either searching for or discovering the Truth because, armed with a realistic estimate of human nature, we would have to admit we are not able to disentangle the Truth from the self-interested fallibilities we are susceptible to. The unwillingness to admit this is especially in evidence today when people will inflict untold horror on others in the name of Truth. Today the way religion motivates human beings to treat others leaves one in despair. How can the Truth that is God, when believed in, lead one at worst to murder others, and at best assume a posture of absolute certainty concerning whom God favors with salvation and condemns with damnation? Religion today eschews a realistic estimate of human nature and builds a Tower of Babel upon a foundation of human conceit. Can religion be rescued from its own arrogance and humanity from wallowing in its own hubris?

Not unless the goal and aim of the life of faith is conceived of in a different way. The goal and aim of the life of faith is not completely or primarily about Truth and believing the Right Way.

Jesus identified the Great Commandments as love to God and loving neighbor as self. Love is a kind of relationship, and a particular kind at that. What if the goal and aim of the life of faith begins with considering the nature of relationships; relatedness, connection, ties, bonds, tethers, all those qualities that emanate from what unites us and links us and joins human beings to God and one other in the most ennobling and transformative ways? And reasoning from this, to conceive of a life which we are then called to enact faithfully. One might call this a covenantal theology or a relational spirituality.

The first observation might be this: In order to be in a relationship there needs to be two distinct entities. The same cannot be “related” to the same when they are synonymous. This ontological reality is referred to above in recounting our distinction from God as mythically embodied in the Garden of Eden creation story. Yet, it is the nature of relationships that by coming into a connection with one another each distinct entity influences the other. It’s like my father and me. We have a relationship because we are distinct. Yet, because we are related too, we share some things and have influenced each other; by blood, by shared experiences, by the way our life destinies involved obligation and consent, and even as he has been dead now for 15 years, transcends the grave (anyone who has had a loved one die knows the relationship does not end with physical absence and, in many ways, becomes even more intense!). This is one quality of Jesus’ use of the “Father” metaphor to refer to God; not as Lawgiver, or First Cause, or Repository of All Truth, all metaphors that have their uses. But, “Father” implies the distinctiveness of two entities that nevertheless have an intimate relatedness, a similarity of a kind characteristic of relationships. The two of us are different, yet related.

By virtue of our createdness, that we did not create ourselves, we are born into a relatedness with God that causes us to ask, “In what way do we resemble divinity?” We ask this in many forms. What is the right thing to do? What is the good life? What are my ultimate obligations to self and others? How do I live uprightly? We even ask, What is truth?, of course, and it is our asking of all of these that is evidence that we are seeking the way in which we resemble whatever it is that created us; the nature of what it is out of which we came. These are what might be called the “higher” questions, the “exalted” sentiments, the “loftiest” values, or most “elevated” ideals and principles. It is enough to say that we human beings are not only animals, but also possessing of a reasoning, imagining consciousness such that we ask questions that are transcendent, about something more.

We are creatures who seek to know how it is that we resemble our Creator. And the question of how humanity resembles divinity is echoed in the first creation story in Genesis, the compliment to the second, which declares human being to be made in the image of God. Image does not wipe away distinction. And an “image” is a lesser version of the real thing, which, to the undiscerning eye, can easily be mistaken for the thing reflected. But an image is "familiar" to the original. Being in part an image begs transcendence, and lures us towards thinking upon a relationship with God and how that relationship might rightfully shape our living. How can we, in broader and deeper ways, be shaped more and more like what we resemble?

And the curious thing is that in searching for our resemblance to our Creator, we find the way in which we are distinct as well. Freud was right in one way, that the religious search is the search for the Father, or the Mother, or the Parent Creator. But, to those who live the life of faith conceived of out of the idea of covenant, the aim is not explanation or reductionism so much as it is to discern right relationship. That is, becoming a human being who is in a right relationship with self, others, and God. Thus, the goal and aim of the life of faith emanates from this question: “How do I love God and neighbor as self?”

What is a Religious Covenant?

Twentieth century theologian Martin Buber described human being as the promise-making, promise-breaking, and promise-remaking creature. We have an animal’s body, an intelligence artificially mimicked, and a consciousness of our existence and surroundings that we have come to see is shared on a lesser scale with other species on the planet. We are connected to other creatures and facets of creation in a web of relationships that make us part of the organism that is earth. Yet, there are unique, distinguishing characteristics. One such part of human nature that becomes a mechanism for our capacity to shape existence creatively in this: We make agreements. We promise.

We bind ourselves to one another beyond blood ties, ethnicity, tribalism, and nationalism through voluntarily made agreements. We consent to transactions all throughout the day. We buy groceries and at the checkout counter complete an agreement with the owner with money, “promissory” notes. We drop our children off at the local school and engage in an agreement with one another as to how to raise democratic citizens, the “promise” of the future. We come home to partners whom we love in a way different from all others by virtue of having tendered vows with and to them, “I do hereby promise…” Agreements not only form the contours of our lives but they give meaning to our days and prepare us and others for the events life brings.

A covenant is an agreement between persons created by a freely given promise. A religious covenant is one where the agreement includes transcendent, symbolic meanings as an addition to the promise. A covenant is not a contract. A contract too is an agreement based upon promises, but it is bound by the parameter of reciprocity. When parties to a contract agree, it is for an exchange upon which if one party reneges, the agreement is voided. The judgment needed by the parties is defined by whether the contract has or has not been satisfied; that is, whether it is positive to the self-interest of the parties involved as they understand their own self-interest. Not so with a religious covenant. A religious covenant is an agreement that is bound by the parameter of forgiveness. When it is broken, both parties exercise judgment in assessing the nature of the relationship created by the agreement, with the knowledge that the agreement depends upon forgiveness for its continuation. Self-interest is present but it is not the sole or primary criteria for the success of the religious covenant because it is recognized by the parties involved to possess a meaning larger than what the parties alone bring to it or can know themselves. A religious covenant creates meaning and thereby enlarges creation because it is a tie that is maintained by affection and strengthened by the willingness of the parties to bear the burdens of another, towards an unknown future. Therefore, it is formed by a love and devotion shared by human beings. And the “aim” of a religious covenant is not the satisfaction of self-interest as the parties perceive it to be so, but transformation. The covenantal relationship depends upon the parties realizing it has an effect larger than what they alone can determine or surmise. Therefore, it has the element of faith to it.

In religion a covenant becomes a promise entered into by human beings whereby there is created a spiritual “people” who see their future bound up with one another. In my Unitarian Universalist faith tradition the covenant is described as a promise by spiritual seekers “to walk together,” as the form and discipline of the communal spiritual life. The promise does not necessarily suppose theological agreement nor depend upon conformity, as is the case in faith communities formed by creeds and formalized theological doctrines. But, the agreement does depend upon the maintenance of customs and practices; that is, behaviors and expectations of relationships that keep the agreement intact, deepen it for the persons involved, and maintain is transformative capacities, its transcendent and religious quality. The aim of the walk is to share a destiny with others in the faith that it is through the fulfillment of affectional bonds that human beings are transformed towards becoming freer and freer creations; that is, that individuality, and the freedom of the fully functioning self, comes into being through the transformational nature of the bonds of love.

By being the nature and basis of religious community formation, covenantal ties create a kind of community and an understanding of religion and the spiritual life that is foreign to much of what passes for religion today, with its emphasis on a Truth that is absolute and exclusive, and procured and possessed. You might ask a practitioner of the covenantal path a question that does not relate to his or her form of the spiritual life: “What does your church believe?” The answer might sound confusing, because in this form of the spiritual life, churches don’t “believe” things, individuals do. It is the aim of covenantal communities formed in this way for spiritual purposes, to liberate and cultivate the spirit; that is, to declare a unity and freedom of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls as the direction towards which the covenanted community is “walking together.”

Dr. Brent A. Smith, Minister
All Souls Community Church (Unitarian Universalist)
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Why a Duck?

The Marx Brothers’ famous bit, “Why a Duck?” puts the question of the “why?” of anything at the forefront. Why talk about something “religious” like “covenant” in relation to the heritage of liberal theology, a liberal religious faith legacy like Unitarian Universalism, and within the experience of spiritual community? I think one of the chief characteristics of our age is the way that moderns collapse religion into politics; that the line that marks the difference has become so obscured that religious declaration without political partisan position is unthinkable. In politics that is ideology, but in religion it is idolatry; that is, when one maintains one’s position (today it would have political connotations) as the will of the Almighty. In our particular culture’s “civil wars” it might be well to start with one of the remembered phrases from another time of divisive cultural disturbance: “The Almighty has his own ways.” (Lincoln’s Second Inaugural)

One of the origins of this idolatry amongst liberals is the inability and/or the unwillingness to see their perspectives within an historical tradition of theological thinking, as part of the ideas that form a life of faith, and the disciplines, customs, and practices that give shape to spiritual community. Liberalism is understood predominantly as a political “duck,” and a particular kind of political and ideological “duck” at that, “outside” of liberalism as well as “inside” it. In my 23 years of ministry within a liberal religious tradition, living in and working with congregations, this is the single most prevalent roadblock: the unwillingness and/or inability of liberals to roots themselves in a heritage of theological discourse and a legacy of religious ideas informing the life of faith. When it comes to using religious language to inform and shape experience liberals have largely adopted the disclaimer of Herman Melville’s 19th century character, Bartleby the Scrivener: “I’d prefer not to.”

Language is, of course, a vehicle for conveying meaning, and can be a “public” tether connecting us in relationship to others in our time, others of previous times, and to generations yet to be. Language seeks connections or severs them. Even though it is imprecise and leads to as much misunderstanding as illumination, language still can bind people together in fellowship as surely as does shared experiences. In conversation companionship and camaraderie can be created. In attempts to make religion and the religious “relevant” and “true” to the individual’s experience, though, liberals have tried creating new religious languages, ironically yielding an abdication of religious language. The evidence in my own faith tradition is the emphasis on developing a “language of reverence,” as if religious language can be conjured up immediately, “out of time,” and without ties to history as the accumulation of the interpretations of human experience. The evidence in the culture is the political strategy of the Democratic Party to begin “faith-talk” hoping to make in-roads in that political constituency of the religiously fluent. How cynical and ironic! By any measure these attempts cut off the very conversation that language is meant to continue. Liberals cannot talk to the culture about the varieties of religious experience. Hence, religious experience either is exclusive, or is not perceived in the individual’s life at all.

Liberals today are religiously liberal; that is, holding “religiously” to a liberal interpretation of politics and policies. But devoid of religious language, one is severed from the life of faith. There are few liberal religionists. There are few who seek the theological meanings of ideas of community which incarnate liberalis; that is, which are broad-minded, generous, and worthy of free persons. For community to evidence this, a fundamental connection needs be lifted up to which various individuals can give devotion. Liberals are severed from the legacy of faith that gave rise to, and ultimate meaning for, the fundamental connection that binds persons in free religious fellowship and union. One becomes an anomaly in seeking to live out an understanding of faith, religion, God, Jesus, and thus, human nature that is faithful to liberalis as the aim and meaning of community.

Language is a dialectical pursuit with actual experience. You can’t talk about the life of faith without living on the inside of it and the communities that help form and seek to embody it. This is as true of spiritual communities formed for liberalis as it is for those formed to maintain doctrinal purity. The woman who is by herself is not free. She is alone. And you can’t produce a religious language any more than you can share religious experiences without communicating them. The man who conceives of the spiritual life as the absence or severing of connections to family, friends, neighborhood, city, country, and world is rarely religious and doesn’t possess a spiritual identity. He exists without meaning and purpose.

Recovering a life of faith as a liberal Religionist begins with placing one’s life under "disciplines of the free spirit." And part of those disciplines includes conceiving and interpreting one’s life using the framework provided by religious language as it is language about liberalis. It can’t be language conjured out of nothing, nor just “faith-talk.” It is borne out of a continuous connection with the history and tradition where a spiritual relationship with God is sought through a liberating walk with others. To be shaped by the language of faith one needs live a life of faith. In the larger liberal theological tradition, and in the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, “covenant” is one of those “connective” words that conveys religious meaning out of walking inside a religious community and a particular faith perspective. Thus, this particular “duck” and its “why.”

Dr. Brent A. Smith, Minister
All Souls Community Church (Unitarian Universalist)
Grand Rapids, Michigan