The Problem of Evil

There is so much pain and suffering in the world - poverty, violence, war, cruelty, injustice, inequality - the sad litany goes on.

One thing I have struggled with over the years is the problem of evil - how can a loving God let such things happen? But having really tussled with this over the past couple of years, I have come to a belief that I am content with. I believe that natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, are just that - natural. I don't think that the God I believe in has the power to intervene in the affairs of the world.

So far as man-made evil is concerned, I think it is the result of human beings individually making the wrong choices, which cause them to do evil things, and separate themselves from God. Or, people standing by and doing nothing when evil is happening. Which I would call a sin of omission rather than commission.

As to how to overcome evil, God can only act through us - that divine spark that is in each one of us can nudge us into doing the right thing to alleviate or prevent suffering and make the world a better place. No one person will ever entirely succeed, but the attempt has to be made.

I'm also coming round to the concept of grace - God's love of us as an unconditional gift, being offered moment by moment to all of us, if only we had the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

So today I see God as a loving Being who is "out there" but also deep in every human being, perhaps in all sentient beings. My cat is certainly capable of love.

The God I Believe In

Every Unitarian will have a slightly different view of who or what God is, if they believe in Him/Her/It at all. So what follows is necessarily my own viewpoint.

As a child, the primary school I attended observed the cycle of the Christian year, and held an assembly every morning, so I learned all the lovely C of E hymns. I also had a very nice children's Bible, so I knew many of the stories from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Did I have a relationship with God in those days? Well, I took His existence for granted, and accepted the stories I read fairly uncritically. It wasn't something I thought about much.

After running into issues with Christianity in my teens, and having discovered Unitarianism, the God I came to believe in was loving, and omnipotent, but strangely powerless. I believe with Mother Teresa that we are God's hands in the world, and that He/She/It can only work through us, I'm not sure that I believe in God in my head, but I trust that He/She/It exists, and believe with the Quakers that there is "that of God in everyone", and that each of us is "unique, precious, a child of God." And that therefore it is up to us to treat every human being with compassion and respect.

A couple of years ago, I had a close encounter with God, while walking the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral. I had walked labyrinths before, mindfully, and had found it an uplifting experience. The experience I had at Chartres was of another quality altogether.

When I first entered the labyrinth, I realised that the people in front of me were moving really slowly, stopping every few paces to pray or meditate. My initial urge was to overtake them and carry on, but my guardian angel nudged me at the right moment, and I decided to go with the flow and see what happened.

Slowly, my mindset changed, and I began to pray; firstly the Metabhavna, the prayer of loving kindness, but then, to my surprise, the Lord's Prayer, over and over again, in whole or in part, throwing the prayer up to the heavens, in the sure knowledge that *Someone* was listening. It was the closest I had ever come to a direct experience of God, and I don't think I will ever forget it. It took me 90 minutes to get to the centre of the labyrinth, and I just wasn't conscious of the passage of time.

Since then, through an increased awareness of the sacred in my everyday life, I have come to recognise that God is everywhere: in the world, and in me. And that is good.

Name Unnamed

One of my favourite hymns in the Unitarian hymnbook Sing Your Faith is Name Unnamed, which is a beautiful song written by Brian Wren, and which tells of the many and varied attributes of the Divine. In it, the Divine is referred to as 'Maker of Rainbows', 'Spinner of Chaos', Weaver of Stories', 'Nudging Discomforter', 'Straight-Talking Lover', 'Midwife of Changes', Woman of Wisdom', 'Daredevil Gambler', and 'Life-giving Loser'.

And of course Name Unnamed.

You may guess from this that Unitarians today do not impose a particular belief about God, about the nature of the Divine, on others. It is up to each one of us to experience the Divine in our own way, spirit to spirit, heart to heart, soul to soul. This respect for the individual’s right to work out their own beliefs has resulted in a wide spectrum of perceptions of God within our denomination. In any Unitarian congregation, there will be a wide diversity of beliefs about who God is. Some are what I would call “Liberal Christians”, who would define God as a person, perhaps a loving parent; others would say that they “experience God as a unifying and life-giving spirit; the source of all being, the universal process that comes to consciousness as love in its creatures.” as Cliff Reed describes it.

Yet others, whom we might describe as religious humanists, would use the word “God” to signify the best and noblest aspects of human beings themselves, to which they aspire. And then there are some whose chief perception of God is that of the “still, small voice” within us, rather than any external power. It should also be realised that these beliefs are not mutually exclusive. Most of us would say that belief in a combination of them is where we would find God.

Over the years, Unitarians have recognised that if we are made in God’s image, as it says in the Book of Genesis, then God must be beyond gender. We have sought other ways to describe the Divine. Unitarian Universalist minister F. Forrest Church wrote: “God is not God’s name. God is my name for the mystery that looms within and arches beyond the limits of my being. Life force, spirit of life, ground of being, these too are names for the unnameable which I am now content to call my God.” 

Let us explore some different concepts of what deity is. Monotheists believe that there is only one God; polytheists believe in more than one – in other words, divine power is spread around among several deities. Pantheists believe that all the created world together equals deity. Related to this, but not the same, is animism, the belief that every part of creation – both animate and inanimate – is filled with the Divine or has a soul. Deity is equally present everywhere, but is usually not divided into parts as with pantheism. As Unitarians, we can choose which type of deity we believe in, or we can choose not to believe in a deity at all.

In conclusion, Unitarians accept that the concept of the Divine is a very complex one, and there are no right answers (or right beliefs!). The deity you believe in may be transcendent (that is, superior to everything else in the universe, and usually separate, or removed from it). He (and it usually is he!) is “up there” or “out there”, apart from humankind. Or the deity you believe in many be immanent, in other words, wholly present with creation because it penetrates creation in some fashion. The immanent divine is often perceived as feminine. As Marija Gimbutas writes: “The Goddess in all her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hills, trees, and flowers. Hence the holistic … perception of the sacredness and mystery of all there is on Earth.” 

This is echoed in the Tao Te Ching, which many Unitarians find inspirational (this lovely translation is by Stephen Mitchell):

"Every being in the Universe is an expression of the Tao.

It springs into existence, unconscious, perfect, free, takes on a physical body, lets circumstances complete it.

That is why every being spontaneously honours the Tao.

The Tao gives birth to all beings, nourishes them, maintains them, cares for them, comforts them, protects them, takes them back to herself,

Creating without possessing, acting without expecting, guiding without interfering.

That is why love of the Tao is in the very nature of things." 

Unitarian and/or Free Christian?

Our parent body is known as the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches. What do these two designations mean, and which of the two is most important to us, if either?

For me, being a Unitarian involves being “open to new light from whatever source it may come”, to use the Quaker phrase, following the tenets of total respect for individual freedom of belief based on reason and conscience, and extending a broad tolerance and acceptance towards the sincerely-held beliefs of others. But working away in a little corner of my deepest beliefs all by itself until fairly recently was the proviso “except that I can’t accept the divinity of Jesus as a valid belief – I’m a Unitarian – that is what defines me.” I still find the designation “Unitarian Christian” quite uneasy, and would much prefer my Christo-centric friends to call themselves “Christian Unitarians”, with ‘Unitarian’ being the noun and ‘Christian’ being the adjective, rather than the other way round, because I see being Unitarian as “the important bit”. And I suspect that many Unitarians would feel the same – they might not admit it, but that proviso is there, ticking away at a very deep level.

A colleague of mine, on the other hand, describes himself as a “Free Christian” or “Liberal Christian” with pride, finds the teachings of Jesus and Jesus himself of fundamental importance, and argues that the current bias against Christianity within the Unitarian movement is intolerant and non-inclusive – positively un-Unitarian, in fact. I have to admit that he has a point – many Unitarians are distinctly “anti-Christian” in a way that they are not against the beliefs of any other religion – Buddhism, Hinduism etc. I think this is because they (we) have come to Unitarianism from a Christian background, and from a position of rejecting the tenets of Christianity. So we bring a lot of sub-conscious anti-Christian baggage with us, as I discovered a while ago when I wrote an article for The Inquirer about attending a Baptist service, and was stunned by the vitriol of some of the responses. And, in spite of secularisation, this is still a nominally Christian country, and it is deep in our culture.

Like many Unitarians, I was not brought up in a Unitarian context, and spent my primary years at a little school, which held assembly every day. We followed the round of the Christian year, and sang all the lovely Christian hymns, without questioning their meaning. It was not until I hit teenage years that the doubts began to kick in. I had never attended a mainstream Christian church (except at Christmas). Then I found out that several of my friends were being confirmed. So I started to investigate Christianity a bit more deeply. With some reluctance, I realised that there were many things about being Christian that I simply couldn’t go along with - the Trinity, the doctrine of the Atonement, the Last Judgement, the exclusivity of it. And yet I still believed in God.

It was at this point that I had a long conversation with my father, who had been brought up a Unitarian, but who had not attended church for many years. He explained that there was an alternative to mainstream Christianity, which didn’t involve outraging your common sense, or requiring you to suspend disbelief. He gave me a copy of Alfred Hall’s little book Beliefs of a Unitarian, and it had a profound effect on me. So this is what it’s all about, I thought.

One of the important things that Dad and Alfred Hall taught me is that it is not necessary to throw the baby Jesus out with the Christian bathwater.  What I mean by that is that you may not believe that Jesus was the divine Son of God, born of a virgin, crucified to save us from eternal hellfire, who rose again on the third day, and will sit at the right hand of the Father on judgement day. But the importance of the man and his teachings should not be underestimated. As a pattern and an example, he can hardly be bettered.

Today there is a wide spectrum of beliefs about Jesus within the Unitarian movement. Some Unitarians have rejected Jesus completely – won’t even say the Lord’s Prayer – and are distinctly uneasy if the readings in today’s service include a passage from the New Testament. Their belief in the essential unity of God (or the Spirit of Life or whatever) is so strong that they view anything that smacks of Christianity with deep suspicion. At the other end of the scale are the Liberal Christians, who cheerfully take communion, sing many Christian hymns with only minor word changes, and reverence Jesus above all other teachers. Some, as I have now discovered, even believe that he is divine. Yet others regard Jesus as one teacher among many, and look equally to the prophets of other faiths for inspiration and guidance. And that’s great – it is one of the strengths of our Unitarian tradition that such a diversity of belief can not only be tolerated, but wholeheartedly accepted. At least that is the theory!

It wasn’t until I talked to my colleague that I truly realised how very Christian some Unitarians are – believing that Jesus is divine, for example. This is certainly not a viewpoint I could share. For me, one of the main points of being a Unitarian is that I believe with Alfred Hall in the true and total humanity of the first century Jewish prophet, Jesus.

For those of us who describe ourselves as ‘Unitarians’ on the grounds of our shared values, “mutual respect and goodwill in personal relations and constructive tolerance and openness towards the sincerely-held beliefs of others”, to quote our leaflet A Faith Worth Thinking About, this must surely include being tolerant and open towards liberal or free Christians. And according to my colleague, this means taking on board that it is not only possible but acceptable for fellow Unitarians to hold Trinitarian beliefs – which is a new idea for many of us. To which I would also add in the words of Cliff Reed:

“no honest and sincere expression of belief should be discounted out of hand. To judge another’s faith is presumptuous and dangerous. All true expressions of the religious impulse come from our encounter with the wonder and mystery of the universe. All result from the joy and pain, the highs and lows of our life-experiences in this world. … Unitarians afford respect to all sincere believers of whatever faith. We seek to learn from the witness of all spiritual traditions, but we do not do so uncritically.” 

Which includes non-theistic beliefs too.

I guess the ultimate question is – what do we care most about? Rejecting Trinitarian Christianity, or being open and inclusive and tolerant and loving? Surely there is room for all of us in our wonderful, uncommon denomination, our faith without a creed. Surely we can agree to differ on our theology, and get on with the important stuff, which is making ourselves a welcoming, inclusive and socially active religious / spiritual community. A lot of instinctive gut reactions will have to be consciously overcome, but if Unitarianism comes to be seen as a haven not only for free thinkers and spiritual seekers, but also for disillusioned liberal Christians, and we can spread the word about it, this might even help to reverse the decline in our numbers that is so worrying everybody at the moment.

It’s a thought …