A Sermon by the Rev. Daniel Charles Davis

For the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem

October 15, 2006

I remember when I met Jesus. I was 11 years old and he was on the record player in my dining room. The album had Judas asking, “Jesus Christ Superstar, do you think you’re what they say you are?”

Up until then, I did not know there was any debate about who Jesus was. Mary Magdalene sang “He’s a man, he’s just a man.” I never had thought of Jesus as human before. He had been a magic robed figure who floated through the Gospels, but to suddenly see him as human made his story more profound to me.

Who is Jesus to you? Human? God? Both?

Who is Jesus to you? Prophet? Teacher? Savior?

Who is Jesus to you? Historical figure? Fictional character?

Who is Jesus to you?

This is a question that defined early Unitarianism. Since the year 325, the official Christian position has been that Jesus is God, part of the Three in one Godhead.: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This is Trinitarianism.

Unitarians raised the questions about Trinitarian theology. If Jesus was God, did God die on the cross? Who ran the world while Jesus/God was in the tomb? If Jesus was God, why did he refer to God as a separate person?

Here are what some Unitarians said on this topic:

“An incarnate God!!! An eternal, self-existent, omnipresent, omniscient author of this stupendous universe, suffering on a cross!!! My soul starts with horror at the idea, and it has stupefied the Christian world. It has been the source of almost all the corruptions of Christianity.” (John Adams, letter to Jefferson, February 2, 1816)

“Is there not subordination to the Father manifested in the whole life of and character of Jesus Christ? Why said he call ye me good. There is none good but one that is God.” (Abigail Adams to John Quincy Adams, May 4, 1816 [referring to Mark 10:18] )

“Were man impressed as fully and strongly as he ought to be with the belief of God, his moral life would be regulated by that belief . . . To give this belief the full opportunity of force, it is necessary that it acts alone. This is Deism. But when according to the Trinitarian scheme, one part of God is represented by a dying man, and another part, called the Holy Ghost, by a flying pigeon, it is impossible that belief can attach itself to such wild conceits.” (Thomas Paine, Age of Reason,1794)

“I contend that if he is the Son of God, he is the son of himself, and is his own father; that he is no more the Son of God than God is his son! To say of two persons, exactly the same age, that one of them is the real son of the other is to confound good sense. If Jesus Christ were really God, it must be argued that God really died!” (Hosea Ballou, “A Treatise on Atonement’ 1805)

These rumblings about the problems in Trinitarian theology and how it was inconsistent with the Bible were clearly defined in an 1819 sermon by William Ellery Channing: “We challenge our opponents to adduce one passage in the New Testament, where the word god means three persons, where it is not limited to one person.” (Channing, Unitarian Christianity, 1819)

“Trinitarians profess to derive some important advantages from their mode of viewing Christ. It furnishes them, they tell us, with an infinite atonement, for it shows them an infinite being suffering for their sins. The confidence with which this fallacy is repeated astonishes us. When pressed with the question, whether they really believe, that the infinite and unchangeable God suffered and died on the cross, they acknowledge that this is not true, but that Christ’s human mind alone sustained the pains of death. How have we, then, an infinite sufferer?” (Channing, Unitarian Christianity, 1819)

“With Jesus, we worship the father, as the only living and true God.” (Unitarian Christianity, 1819)

Channing's argument is that we as humans should be like Jesus, humans pure in their worship and service to God. To him Jesus was an example of human potential, but not God. This was the Unitarian position at the formation of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. Jesus was human like us. We, because we are similar to Jesus, can get closer to God.

The notion of human potential was expanded by the Transcendentalist. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1838 Divinity School Address as he told the new Unitarian ministers:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets . . . Alone in history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and in me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou thinkest as I now think”

Here Emerson is contradicting Channing by claiming Jesus is God incarnate. But instead of reverting back to orthodoxy, Emerson was introducing a new heresy: Jesus was God incarnate. But so is every human being. Our job is to realize that we are divine.

Emerson took human potential to a whole new level: Human potential is to be divine. Emerson’s radicalism caused him to leave the Unitarian ministry, but Theodore Parker was able to preach this doctrine from the pulpit:

But still was he not our brother; the son of man, as we are; the Son of God, like ourselves? His excellence, was it not human excellence? His wisdom, love, piety – sweet and celestial as they were – are they not what we also may attain? In him, as in mirror, we may see the image of God, and go on from glory to glory till we are changed into the same image, led by the spirit which enlightens the humble. Viewed in this way, how beautiful is the life of Jesus . . . But if, as some early Christians began to do, you take a heathen view, and make him a God, the Son of God in a peculiar and exclusive sense -- much of the significance of his character is gone. His virtue has no merit; his love no feeling; his cross no burthen; his agony no pain. His death is an illusion; his resurrection but a show.

– Theodore Parker, “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” 1841

The Idea of Jesus as human served early Unitarians as a way to elevate the status of humanity.

Salvation was by character; it was not dependent upon the sacrifice of Jesus. Salvation was a matter of living by your best human impulses rather than being saved from human sinfulness.

This is a significant change. It led to a form of Christian humanism that opened the door for a secular humanism.

Octavius Brooks Frothingham is a transitional figure between the two streams of thought in Unitarianism. He spoke of God but he had a unique definition: “God is a Living force, not in a distant heaven but within the human mind and heart. God is not a man, but the human in all men.” (Frothingham, “Interests: Material and Spiritual,” sermon, 1876)

“The spirit of God has its working in and through human nature.” (Frothingham, The Religion of Humanity, 1873)

In his 1868 divinity school address he told future Unitarian ministers to “abolish the separation between things human and things divine.”

I am hoping to show how the recognition of Jesus as a human being by Unitarians evolved into the affirmation of all human beings. If Jesus is considered a divine sacrifice, it leaves humanity at the mercy of God. God is active and we are passive, but if Jesus is seen as an example of human potential, then humanity is called to act like Jesus, with compassion, healing and love.

These values become human values.

Traditional theology states that God is good and humans are inherently evil. It says that Jesus was a good human only because he was also God. A human Jesus shows that there is good in humanity. We have inherent worth and dignity as human beings. As UUs we hear that phrase so often that we no longer realize how radical it is. We say, How can anyone disagree with that?

Well, all who believe in original sin believe that humans are inherently evil. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That is the dominant view in Christianity and America today.

It is believed that Jesus came as a god to save us from our human failings. Unitarianism in its classic form says that Jesus came to show us our human potential.

The gospel of John has Jesus saying: “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 4:12)

This might mean that Jesus was the beginning of the process of humans being one with the divine. If he alone is godly, then he is the best human that has ever been. But in this passage he says those that follow him will do greater things than him.

Humanity has progressed since the time of Jesus. Jesus is recorded as raising Lazarus from the dead. Bringing people back from the dead happens all the time in hospitals in this town, across the nation and around the world. The blind see, the lame walk. Humanity is fulfilling its potential.

Perhaps Jesus was not the greatest person who ever lived. Perhaps his greatness lies in that he inspired other humans to strive for greatness. Instead of looking back to Jesus, humanity should look ahead to where Jesus was pointing. We should strive for perfection. If we call perfection God, we should be perfect as God in heaven is perfect. If perfection is the fulfillment of human potential, then we all have something greater than ourselves to strive for.

So I return to my opening questions: Who is Jesus to You? Human? God? Both?

Who is Jesus to you? Prophet? Teacher? Savior?

Who is Jesus to you? Historical figure? Fictional character?

Whatever you may believe about the accuracy of the Bible, Jesus is a mythic truth that has influenced the world. Just as the truth of the parables does not lie in whether they actually happened, the truth of the parables lies in the response they provoke in us. The truth of Jesus is determined by what he provokes in us. Who is Jesus to you? How does Jesus affect your humanity?