Our Radical Affirmation of Human Nature

January 23, 2000

How good are you, anyway? It may seem a strange sort of question, but really it is a personal way of asking, "How good is human nature?" The Psalmist wrote that we are "little less than God." In Proverbs it is written in a much disputed passage, "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord."

These texts were seized upon by theological liberals in the 19th century and before in support of a positive view of human nature. Unitarians and Universalists throughout our history have taken an extremely optimistic stand on human nature. Thomas Starr King is supposed to have made the famous quip that Unitarians believed human beings were too good to be damned by God.

Early Universalists like John Murray denied the existence of hell, claiming that God was too good to damn humankind to eternal punishment, and that ultimately all of us would be saved.

Unitarian William Ellery Channing, perhaps the most articulate defender of human nature that our movement has ever known, wrote in his great sermon Likeness to God that

. . .true religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being. Its noblest influence consists in making us more and more partakers of the Divinity. . . . Religious instruction should aim chiefly to turn [our] aspirations and efforts to that perfection of the soul, which constitutes it a bright image

of God.

In opposition to those who clung tenaciously to a doctrine of Original Sin, to the total depravity of the human soul, and to the idea of predestination or election, Channing preached the doctrine of moral perfectibility. Later Unitarians would encapsulate this doctrine in the familiar affirmation, "onward and upward forever."

Emerson, a little later than Channing, would encourage us to "acquaint [ourselves] at first hand with Deity," claiming that we were "part and particle of God." Following the lead of the 17th century neo-Platonists, Emerson would claim that human beings contained a spark of the divine.

Both on the Unitarian and the Universalist sides of our heritage, then, it was the harmony and the perfectibility of human nature that was stressed, not its inherent sinfulness and depravation. One has to remember just how liberating this message would have sounded to those in whom all goodness and divine potential had been denied, in order to understand how revolutionary was this positive view of human nature.

The optimistic view of human nature has been one of our most cherished liberal religious affirmations. It is embedded in the Purposes and Principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association in the very first principle, which celebrates "the inherent worth and dignity of every person."

So the question, "How good are you?" is an important one not only in the history of our religious movement, but in the history of western religion at large. Theology, we remember, is interested not only in the mysterious nature of God, but in the nature of human beings,--who, after all, are the ones doing theology. I need hardly remind you that our collective answer to the question has been a distinctive one, though not the dominant one. Original Sin still prevails. Have we been too optimistic?

There is probably no religious question that I find myself grappling with more frequently than the problem of evil. One does not have to go much beyond the front page of the daily newspaper to find ample food-for-thought regarding this problem.

No contemporary liberal theologian did more to reopen this age-old question of evil than James Luther Adams. Writing in an essay entitled "A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust," Adams wrote in 1981 that ". . .we require a more adequate conception of human nature, than was characteristic of the sweet gloss of old-fashioned liberal religion." As early as 1942, following a pre-war visit to Nazi Germany, Adams had written about what he called the "lopsidedly optimistic" nature of liberal religion. Claiming that the "old beliefs in harmony and perfectibility still serve as the groundwork" for the liberal faith, Adams nonetheless believed that liberal religion has tended to neglect the "tragic factor of history." He continued,

We ought to be more willing to take the risk that we would incur by giving more serious consideration . . . to the sinful side of human nature, and even to the biblical myth of the Fall as a description of the contradictions in human nature.

Much of the groundwork for a serious reconsideration of our liberal religious optimism about human nature has already been done by theologians such as Adams, Henry Nelson Wieman, and Paul Tillich.

All have grappled with the problem of evil and its origins, and all agreed that evil is not some external power that gains control over our lives--the traditional view of a devil or Satan who is maliciously active in the world. Rather, these theologians believed that evil results from characteristics and potentialities within human nature itself.

For Adams, it was "the abuse of freedom [that ] is the tragic destiny of humankind--and God." Significantly, Adams held to the idea of human freedom--another of the cardinal principles of liberal religion--but he found the roots of human evil in that very freedom .

Adams followed the lead of the Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas, an exile from Nazi Germany, who said "that in making unlimited freedom possible for the human being, God has taken a great risk, has made a wager. Therefore, it is for us to accept the challenge of attempting to vindicate God’s wager. In a sense, God is betting on us."

If we are free at all, then it is in the sense of the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, who said that we are "condemned to freedom." We are free to commit good or evil.

Paul Tillich, perhaps the greatest 20th century liberal theologian, found the origin of human sinfulness or evil in what he called "estrangement." He wrote,

Existence is estrangement. Man is estranged from the ground of his being, from other beings, and from himself. [This estrangement] is implied in the symbols of the expulsion from paradise, in the hostility between man and nature, in the deadly hostility of brother against brother, in the estrangement of nation from nation through the confusion of language, and in the continuous complaints of the prophets against their kings and people who turn to alien gods.

This estrangement seems to result from our freedom to turn away from that which we truly are. Like Adams, Tillich took seriously the all too evident brokenness, alienation, and division in human nature, and placed the responsibility for it on us.

For another contemporary liberal theologian, Henry Nelson Wieman, "evil [was] the inner conflict by which the self is divided into parts which war against one another. . . . This conflict within the total self may drive a person to acts of cruelty or to self-destructive passions."

Along with inner conflict, he lists as other aspects of evil futility or meaninglessness, guilt, and loneliness. "The concentration camps of the Nazis and other evils of like sort occurring throughout the expanse of human history," he wrote, "are the outward manifestations of this inner condition of the human heart. [my emphasis]."

The problem of religion, Wieman continued, is to discover what will deliver humankind from this evil deep laid within the human personality or , if it cannot be cast out, then somehow to bring it under control and, if possible, make it the servant of good. In religion [we] seek to commit [ourselves] to what has the power to master the evil within [us] which [we] cannot master [ourselves].

What distinguishes these liberal thinkers from the earlier ones like Channing is their more realistic view, born out of the horrors of the 20th century, of the inherent contradictions within human nature. For given the tragic excesses of the last hundred years and the continuing violence of the society in which we live, the old notion of human perfectibility has been called into serious question.

We have no choice but to try to come to terms with our human capacity to commit evil. But just how much can or should we expect of human nature? Is our situation hopeless, or is there still room for a hopeful and guardedly optimistic view of human nature?

If we take Adams, Tillich, and Wieman at their word, and accept that human beings are (tragically) free, then I believe that there is still room for hope. But it is a hope which places tremendous responsibility on the human capacity for good. In other words, we are the ones who must use our freedom to make the correct choices. All three of the theologians I have cited would agree that God cannot do it for us.

We need to look hard and long at the many causes of estrangement in our society and in our own lives. What are they, and what part do we have in perpetuating them? Can they really be overcome?

One of the problems that Adams posed is that, for relatively comfortable and well-off people like us, our very security stands in the way of the change of heart necessary to overcome the sources of estrangement which beset us. Because to overcome the injustice in the world which is the major source of our estrangement will require just such a change of heart. And as Adams warned, "[The] element of commitment, of change of heart, of decision, so much emphasized in the Gospels, has been neglected by religious liberalism, and that is the prime source of its enfeeblement. We liberals are largely an uncommitted and therefore self-frustrating people."

What we must begin to do, then, is to exercise our God-given freedom to bring about a change in ourselves. Because from the perspective of our standards of living and our levels of education, human nature may very well look to be perfectible. What we must begin to do is to look at how the very things which make life so positive for us may make it totally untenable for somebody else. We must overcome the prejudice of privilege.

And if evil is the result of brokenness, alienation, estrangement, and division within and between human beings, then what are the sources of wholeness, forgiveness, self-acceptance, and reconciliation?

How can we work to make these the dominant factors of the society in which we live?

Among other things, we are back to the old question of community, and how to make it. How do our own lifestyles contribute to the brokenness we see around us? To what extent are the structures and institutions of our society--particularly the economic structures which have been kind to so many of us--responsible for the tragic misuse of freedom to which James Luther Adams points?

The need that is upon us, it seems to me, is the need to accept our collusion in many of the problems which afflict our society, to look, for example, not just at the criminals’ misuse of their freedom, but of our own. And it is just this acceptance of responsibility which, Adams was suggesting, it is so hard for most of us make.

But because I take my religion’s radically affirmative view of human nature seriously, and because I believe that human lives are ultimately redeemable and that they do have inherent worth and dignity,

I believe we must accept that responsibility. The changes for the better that we so desperately seek will not be forthcoming until we, too, have undergone a change of heart: until we have looked at the way we live and at the barriers to true community that we construct; and until we have looked at the hardening of our own hearts to the plight of many in our own community and in the world beyond, which causes them too often to act destructively and to commit the crimes that all of us abhor.

And so, I hope that you will agree that the question, "How good are you?" is one of desperate urgency, one which religious liberals can no longer take for granted, or glibly answer in the affirmative, as has been our custom throughout most of our history. We need to take that old, old question of evil and its origins seriously once again.

In closing, let me note that we often fail to read far enough in Channing. We tend to focus on his positive affirmations and to ignore his negative warnings. For in that same sermon to which I alluded at the beginning of my remarks, Channing wrote:

. . . the likeness to God, of which I propose to speak, belongs to [our] higher or spiritual nature. It has its foundation in the original and essential capacities of the mind. In proportion as these are unfolded by right and vigorous exertion, it is extended and brightened. In proportion as these lie dormant, it is obscured. In proportion as they are perverted and overpowered by appetites and passions, it is blotted out. In truth, moral evil, if unresisted and habitual, may so blight and lay waste these capacities, that the image of God in [us] may seem to be wholly destroyed.

The key to Channing’s optimism, as to mine, is that what seems to be is not necessarily what is. The image of God still resides within us, but it is for us to uncover it and let it shine.

It is good to remember that something great is still expected of us if our fondest hopes are to be realized in this world. We all have work to do. May we do it with faith and hope, with realism and with optimism.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock