Notebook

---

August 21, 1996

Religious absolutes and liberal religion

Robby S. quoted a theologically conservative friend:

"A basic UU principal is to accept all religions. Does this mean that when two different religions believe conflicting ideas, they are both right? Thinking about it more, my real question is do you believe in a set of absolute moral rights or wrongs? Is there a certain unwritten code of acceptable and unacceptable behavior?"

I just read a helpful approach to this question. Von Ogden Vogt, minister of First Unitarian Church in Chicago almost sixty years ago, wrote a fine book called The Primacy of Worship. In it, he suggests that all religions share three "religious absolutes." Even though each religion understands these absolutes differently, the impulse is the same in each, and each religion also recognizes on some level that its understanding of the religious absolutes is never quite complete.

The absolutes are: the love of truth, the love of goodness, and the love of beauty. Each religion knows that the Truth is larger than our ability to comprehend totally, but the desire to know the truth animates every religion. Each religion also attempts to understand the best way to live, even though the goodness of God (for instance), is always greater than our own; the love of goodness is therefore fundamental to all religion. And each religion celebrates beauty, which provokes us into creating more beauty and to see wholeness and harmony as religious values.

What I find interesting in this idea is the humility of seeing human doctrines and practices as attempts to reach toward the ultimate rather than as final definitions of the ultimate. To believe in absolutes is different than to believe that my beliefs are absolute; as a liberal, I believe, for instance, that the mercy of God is far greater than my own mercy, which inspires me to try to be more merciful. This is not the same as believing that I know the limits of God's mercy.

Often people seem to fear that scepticism about the One True Path leads to a complete relativism of values, or the acceptance of all ideas as equally true. But liberalism does not need to take such a position. Instead, if we say that Jesus really can't be taken literally when (as the Gospel According to John reports) he said "I am the way, the truth, and the light," we are really trying to point out that the virtues Jesus taught and embodied — mercy, humility, sacrifice — are saving virtues even when they are practiced by someone who has never heard of Jesus.

For some, the example of Christ is so compelling that it seems to approach the status of an absolute value in and of itself; but it is important to remember that Christ too valued the teachings of others, seeing himself at many times as the student of the Hebrew law and prophets. Even he was a student and a disciple of the absolute.

Religious absolutes, then, are the dimly-perceived goals of our efforts to understand the truth, do the right, and cultivate beauty. The absolutes are not our ideas, but are instead the things we hope to serve with our ideas. The real absolutes, you might say, are like the moon; our beliefs and ideas and rituals are like the finger we use to point to the moon. When we try to point someone's attention to the moon, we do not mean to keep their attention focused on our finger.

As Jesus said, "by their fruits ye shall know them," and this is good advice in understanding all religious ideas and values: if someone's actions and thoughts and values seem to be moving in the right direction, however tentatively, we can hail them as a fellow traveler and fellow disciple.

UUS-L 8.21.96