Faith is the Gift of God

October 22, 2000

. . . for faith is the gift of God, this comes from hearing, which hearing is by the word of God.

--Edict of Torda, 1568

Recent events in the Middle East have once again raised the question of what to do when competing religious claims threaten to derail attempts at peace and to erupt into all out-religious war. Of course, the current situation in Israel is about more than religion: it is about ethnicity, and politics, and land. It is about employment and freedom and self-representation and what we Americans like to call "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It is about displaced peoples, both Palestinians and Jews, trying to find a home. But, unfortunately, it is also about religion. And among some of the people involved, it is about the collision of religious absolutes.

The problem is that absolutism has absolutely no room for compromise. If I am right, and right absolutely, then there is only one possibility if you disagree with me: you are wrong. For fundamentalist Muslims and Jews, there can only be one truth and one way, and that truth and that way, each would claim, is mine. To complicate matters, both religions, along with a third, Christianity, lay claim to Jerusalem as a sacred city. And because of this reality, political differences are exacerbated, and efforts at reasonable compromise are held hostage to sometimes antithetical religious visions of what constitutes the truth.

It hasn't always been this way. For centuries, Muslims, Jews, and Christians have managed to co-exist in Israel, a place which is as I noted is holy ground for all three of these major religious traditions. And as religious historian Karen Armstrong pointed out in a recent episode of "Talk of the Nation," the original dispute between Jews and Palestinians was a primarily political one. But since the 1967 war, religion has increasingly played a divisive role in the political struggle between them. And, increasingly in recent years, it is the most conservative and fundamentalist branches of each religion that have had the most negative impact on negotiations around political sovereignty and the proposed creation of a Palestinian state. Moderation gets little air time. Reason has flown out the window as unprovable claims to God's special dispensation have grown increasingly louder by both sides in recent years. One can cynically guess the extent to which religion has been used to fuel the flame of political and social unrest.

What is saddest, next to the great human suffering all of this has caused, is that religious fundamentalism is only a small part--though a growing part--of each of the religious traditions involved. One would never know it from reading the popular press in recent years, but Islam also contains a great universalistic tradition. It has a great intellectual tradition, and its theology is among the most sophisticated and what we might call "modern" of any religious tradition in the world. Orthodox Judaism, which is the most fundamentalist branch within Judaism as a whole, is only a part, albeit the fastest growing part, of the Jewish tradition. And many orthodox Jews, such as the Hasids, have traditionally been very universalistic in their religious outlook.

In recent years there seems to have been almost a revival of intolerance in the world. Ironically, as the world has become smaller, as it has become what we like to call a "global village," we have seen an upsurge in ethnic and religious conflict. Undoubtedly this stems in part from old jealousies, and in part from new fears. These fears are often fanned into flame by economic inequalities. Whatever the causes, this "new" intolerance threatens the opportunity that now exists to create a true global "community."

In light of this opportunity, my trip to Transylvania this summer was instructive. There, as in so many other regions of the world, ethnic tensions smolder just beneath the surface of everyday life, there between Hungarians, Romanians, and Gypsies. Economic hardship exacerbates the already existing distrust among these ethnic and religious groups. In some cases, that distrust has roots that are hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years old, and the situation is not made any easier by differences in language and culture.

Curiously, however, it was in Transylvania that one of the first experiments in religious toleration took place, and it was one of our own religious ancestors, Francis David [David Ferenz in Hungarian], who was primarily responsible for it happening. David, who lived from 1510 to 1579, is generally considered to be the founder of Transylvanian Unitarianism. He was an eloquent defender of minority religious rights. A tremendous debater and apologist, David's arguments in favor of religious toleration for Unitarians resulted in an Act of Religious Toleration and Freedom of Conscience, which was issued by Transylvania's King John Sigismund in 1568. This is the so-called "Edict of Torda." The Act stated that,

. . .in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well, if not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve. Therefore none of the superintendents or others shall abuse the preachers, no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone, according to the previous statutes, and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching, for faith is the gift of God, this comes from hearing, which hearing is by the word of God.

(This summer, Steve and K. C. Swallow and I visited the church in Torda where the specific debate took place which led to the issuance of this Act of Toleration.)

The tolerance which this remarkable document proclaims has become a cornerstone, along with reason and freedom, of our own Unitarian Universalist faith. Those three principles--freedom, reason and tolerance--more than theology, are the real basis today of the commonality between Unitarians in Transylvania and Unitarian Universalists in North America. While differences of emphasis exist between Unitarians in Transylvania, like those in our Partner Church, and Unitarian Universalists here, we are far more similar than dissimilar because of these underlying principles.

And, more than anything else, the spirit of tolerance found in the Edict of Torda accounts for the continuing presence in Transylvania today of the four original "protected" religions of that region: Lutheran, Catholic, Reform or Presbyterian, and Unitarian, though all four are in a minority relation to the Orthodox faith in present-day Romania. Despite the two great wars of the 20th century, and all of the geo-political upheaval they caused, Unitarianism continues to hold its own in Romania, and the spirit of toleration managed, somehow, to prevail.

The Edict of Torda was one of the first, if not the first, acts of religious toleration in the world. A little over a hundred years later, English philosopher John Locke would write A Letter Concerning Toleration, in which he claimed that matters of faith are, by definition, neither provable nor disprovable, but simply believable or not believable. As Patrick Romanell writes in an introduction to Locke's work, ". . .anyone can propose [matters of faith], but nobody has a right to impose them on others." Humans being fallible, Locke said, it is wrong to persecute others on the basis of their religious beliefs.

Although such an idea of toleration did not always hold the upper hand, it made enough of an inroad that for the most part the worst forms of religious persecution had ended by the end of the 17th century. Since then, with a few notable exceptions, religious groups have managed to live side by side in a sometimes uneasy state of truce, and until recently competing claims to absolute religious truth have not erupted into major conflicts. Increasingly, however, they threaten to do so.

Seventeen years ago, in an incident most of us have probably forgotten, Sen. Edward Kennedy was inadvertently extended an invitation to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College, strong-hold of Falwell's then "Moral Majority." Kennedy took advantage of the opportunity to deliver one of his greatest speeches. It was on the topic of tolerance.

During a reception at Falwell's house before his speech, Kennedy said, "One of the precious values in our society is open dialogue. We have to be able to understand each other, exchange ideas. We exist in a society of cliches. Our system can only function when we listen to each other."

Where another of lesser vision might have used the occasion as an opportunity for knee-jerk liberal denunciation of the Moral Majority or of Mr. Falwell himself, Kennedy offered a statement of religious and political philosophy which one of my colleagues at the time described as "expansive in charity, sensitive in perception, and refreshing in the breadth of its vision."

Kennedy said that he had come to Liberty Baptist College to discuss his beliefs "about faith and country, tolerance and truth in America." He began his speech by articulating a classic argument for religious tolerance: that although absolute truth may exist, no one may rightfully claim a monopoly on it. He argued for the need to establish criteria by which to distinguish between public interest and private morality. He reasserted the importance of the constitutional prohibition on religious tests for public office. He reminded his listeners of the importance of guaranteeing the freedom of all religion. He differentiated the principle of separation of church and state from the propriety and even the duty of organized religion to speak out critically against government policy. Kennedy reasserted the right to differ and even to be wrong. His concluding remarks are worth repeating:

In short, I hope for an America where neither fundamentalist nor humanist will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of good will look at life and into their own souls. I hope for an America where no president, no public official, and no individual will ever be deemed a greater or lesser American because of religious doubt--or religious belief. I hope for an America where the power of faith will always burn brightly--but where no modern Inquisition of any kind will ever light the fires of fear, coercion or angry division.I hope for an America where we can all contend freely and vigorously--but where we will treasure and guard those standards of civility which alone make this nation safe for both democracy and diversity.

How much this speech was in the spirit of Francis David and the Edict of Torda, I leave to your own contemplation.

During another Middle Eastern crisis, this one in Lebanon, a cartoon appeared depicting two men conversing over drinks. "There'll always be a civil war over there, 'cause they got Druse and PLO, Christians and Moslems all stuck in one country!" says one. But the other says, "Yeah? Well we got French an' English, Russians, Poles, Finns an' Moslems, Jews, Germans, Irish Catholics, Irish Protestants, Greeks, Swedes, Lithuanians . . . Turks, Armenians, Hungarians, Italians . . . Vietnamese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese . . . Black, White, Yellow, Red, and Brown all stuck in one country! And we haven't had a Civil War for 120 years!"

To me, that cartoon speaks volumes about how even an embattled tolerance of diversity can preserve at least a fragile peace among radically divergent groups and points of view. It seems almost painfully obvious, as Sen. Kennedy recognized, that it is just this tolerance which we must maintain if we are to survive as a truly democratic nation, and, by extension, if we are to survive as a global community of nations and peoples.

None of this is going to solve the present crisis in Israel, but it perhaps suggests one of the essential ingredients of a solution. If religious differences are to be overcome, it must be in the spirit of Francis David: ". . .for faith is the gift of God, this comes from hearing, which hearing is by the word of God."

Tolerance, of course, begins with each of us. It means that we must listen carefully, even to those with whom we most adamantly disagree. This, I need hardly remind you, is never easy. It is up to us to hear the profoundly simple truth contained in the words of our closing hymn.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on clover, leaf and pine;
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh, hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
A song of peace, for their land and for mine.

To act out of that conviction is to achieve the tolerance which can ultimately save us all. May it be so, for all peoples, in every country, this day and in all the days to come.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock