UNITARIAN THEOLOGIES OF THE SPIRIT: An Introductory Consideration of Pneumatology in Unitarian Tradition, Worship and Praxis.
With thanks to my Advanced Diploma Study of Religion, dissertation supervisor Dr. Justin Meggitt, Senior Fellow, Divinity Faculty, Cambridge University, and to Susan Killoran, Fellow Librarian at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.
INTRODUCTION:
“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Gen 1:2
Unitarianism as a distinct religious denomination exists in Britain as the collective of congregations adherent to the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian churches. In America, where the Unitarian denomination successfully merged with the Universalist denomination in 1961, it is known as the Unitarian-Universalist Association. The dual nomination evident in both cases, signified by ‘and’ or hyphen, also points to a pluriform genesis; Unitarianism is heir to a multiple theological inheritance. This plurality combined with the rejection of creedal formulations has sometimes complicated the precise demarcation of the boundaries of Unitarianism and definitional analysis remains a sensitive task for the researcher.
Patrick Collinson (1983, p.527) notes that the origins of the dissenting tradition have often been examined as a vertical genealogical line. He proposes instead a more ‘horizontal’ treatment, investigating points of contact and interrelationships between concurrent theological strands. Michael Bochenski (2013) drawing on recent research on the “multiple origins…” [and] “coherent core” of early Anabaptist belief develops this proposal and is also able to perceive and affirm “connections between the movements inspired by Anabaptism and… [modern phenomena such as]… liberation theology” (p.5). The connections between Anabaptist and Liberation theology were in fact first noted by the Unitarian historian of the radical Reformation George Hunston Williams (1962, p.20). Liberation Theology was a development of the Roman-Catholic tradition, but many of its hermeneutical approaches have been eagerly appropriated by religious liberals such as Unitarians. Discovering and asserting links between radical Reformation theology and contemporary liberal theology may be seen to be one expression of a Unitarian impulse to reinforce its sometimes precarious sense of self by establishing an externally validating theological genealogy.
Despite the persistence of Socinian and Arian theology within Presbyterian and Independent non-conformity since the great ejection of 1662 (when all those clergy unable to follow the forms and rites prescribed by the 1662 Act of Uniformity were obliged to leave their positions within the Anglican Church), it was within the conforming Anglican clergy that mostly Arian theological ideas informed debates, controversies and disputes. The union of two leading lights of these two ecclesial strands in 1794 is usually taken to signal the initiation of the Unitarian denomination in Britain: Theophilus Lindsey, an Anglican who had been compelled by conscience to resign from his living at the parish of Catterick and Joseph Priestley, a former Congregationalist non-conformist, founded a new church together in Essex Street off the Strand (where the head-quarters of the current Unitarian General Assembly still stands). Their church was characterised by a rationalistic and enquiring outlook which has come to characterise the Unitarian story of itself, and historians like John Seed have pointed out that narrative is key to understanding the Dissenting tradition (2008). Again taking a cue from Collinson, I would like to approach the subject laterally, considering the manifold ways in which the theology of Unitarianism has been influenced, including its development from some sources which were inspired by the Anabaptist, pietist and puritan spiritual traditions. Unitarian scholars including Bonet-Maury (1884), Morse Wilbur (1956), Hunston Williams (1962) and John McLachlan (1972) among others have identified these early spiritual sources and these sources have exerted an influence to varying degree as spiritual and mystical Unitarian thinkers and tendencies have returned to them to balance against the more generally prevailing rationalist emphasis.
As a Unitarian worship leader I encounter indications of a recognisable, if sometimes obscured or implied, pneumatology which I aim to investigate in this short essay. Historically a fugitive theology at best, pneumatology may be most reliably established with reference to textual sources, tradition, experience and practice ( Karkinnen, 2002, p.16). Such sources within Unitarianism include traditions such as those of the Polish ‘Minor Church’ and the Transylvanian Unitarian Church; early non-trinitarian communities which emerged in the 16th century as a direct response to the “warm evangelical rationalism” (McLachlan, 1972, p.116) of Italian thinkers such as Bernardo Ochino, Faustus Socinus and the Spaniard Miguel Servetus. In turn these churches and writers strongly influenced Collegiant and Remonstrant theologies and these influences may be detected also in British Unitarian and proto-Unitarian history in the complex interplay between the ideas of ‘Independent’ and ‘Presbyterian’, ‘General Baptist’, ‘Latitudinarian’, and ‘Seeker’ thinkers. Later more mainstream Anglican non-trinitarian thinking would influence the recognisable ‘figure-heads’ of early British Unitarianism; Priestley, Lindsey, Bentham, Price and later still the Unitarian ‘spiritualisers’; Taylor, Martineau, Thom and others. I will also examine living experience and contemporary practice to articulate the continuing diversity and persistence of a Unitarian pneumatology, agreeing with Alastair McIntosh who, defending ‘Celtic spirituality’ against ‘Celto-sceptics’ claimed that the issue is not whether … “Celtic spirituality ever existed, but that a living spirituality … manifestly can and does exist” (2004, p.19).
CHAPTER ONE
“…where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” 2 Cor. 3:17.
Rational mysticism and humanist piety; the historical networks, development and conceptual basis of a humanistic spirituality.
Sarah Mortimer (2010) acknowledges the “indispensable foundations for study [of Socinianism] created by Unitarian scholarship…” (p.4). Mortimer, however, also criticises the denominational bias of this scholarship, suggesting that Unitarian academics such as Wilbur, Williams and McLaghlan had an interest in emphasising characteristics of Socinian thought and theology which corresponded with their own, and marginalising some aspects which did not. By this means they could, she suggests, not only understand but “re-shape” (p.2) their own tradition. In fact, as her own book often indicates, Socinian thinking has always been a means by which its interpreters can re-shape and validate (or invalidate opponent’s) theologies or philosophies, and Mortimer’s implication that Unitarians are not justified in claiming kinship with Socinianism could be misleading; the relationship between Socinianism and Unitarianism can not be convincingly disputed; Thomas Nye’s A Brief History of the Unitarians also called the Socinians (1691) was; “The first book in which the term Unitarian appears on a title page” (McLachlan, 1951, pp.320-321) and John Biddle, often called the Father of English Unitarianism (see eg; Enyclopedia Brittanica) in texts collected under the title Faith of One God, published 1647 and reprinted 1691, also uses the appellations Socinian and Unitarian interchangeably. Whilst it seems probable that twentieth century historians did emphasise certain Socinian features which had a mid-twentieth century Unitarian appeal – especially the separation of religion and state (secularism), and a humanist reliance on reason, Mortimer also emphasises these same elements herself in support of her own academic commitments including her twenty-first century alignment with rationalist political discourse.
A rationalistic political discourse has always been of concern to Unitarian thinkers; some Unitarians who helped establish Lindsey’s church (like minister Richard Price) were republicans in contact both with revolutionary France and America; visitors to the church there included Unitarian Benjamin Franklin and ‘free-thinker’ Thomas Paine, (for more on the rationalist and republican tendencies of Unitarianism of this period see Morse Wilbur pp.306-315). It is important to note though that the Unitarian (and Socinian) promotion of tolerance and egalitarianism also has theological sources (and not only the enlightenment rationalism foregrounded by contemporary rationalist academics). These theological sources, including the conception, emphasised by Ochino and others, that the Spirit of God is active throughout human affairs, and “that the inner voice of the Spirit is superior even to the written word of scripture” (qtd. In McLachlan 1972, p.116) have continuing (and increasing) resonance in contemporary Unitarianism, as it seeks to affirm inclusiveness of religious diversity within a pluralistic religious and philosophically rationalist framework.
A spiritual tradition in which individual, unmediated experience of the divine has not necessarily been anti-trinitarian, indeed many mystics have relied on the security of doctrinal orthodoxy, but as Sarah Mortimer notes, the mystical vision is one which “implied a kind of spiritual egalitarianism” (2010, p.168) – because such experience is direct and not dependent on administration by church or clergy.
For this reason manifestations of mysticism have sometimes been perceived as a threat to the exclusive doctrinal authority of a centralised ecclesial power. Movements such as the thirteenth century Joachimites, the pan-European ‘Movement of the Free Spirit’, the Beguines and Beghards and others were swiftly suppressed by the Catholic Church, but their influence and appeal may have contributed to a popular receptivity to the ideas of religious toleration and freedom of conscience characteristic of the early reforming traditions. (see e.g: Bochenski 2013, Brunn and Burgard 1989, Vanegeim, 1989).
Karkainnen (2002) considers the Anabaptist tradition one which unites the individual experience of the Spirit with the rational interpretation of scripture. He traces the development of the pneumatology of Anabaptist and other “free church traditions” from a clear demarcation between God and human spirit towards “a much more intimate and unmediated influence of the Spirit of God on the human spirit”. This is a theological development which implies or anticipates a more liberal “immanent pneumatology” (2002, p.57).
Unitarian historian Wilbur identifies the earliest Anabaptists who originated in Switzerland as “…mystics, fervent in piety,…[with] little regard for doctrinal theology. Their primary concern in religion was practical.” (1946, p.19). The Anabaptist historian and theologian Bender may be somewhat partial when he asserts that Anabaptism was “the first religious movement to advocate religious tolerance based on freedom of conscience” (The Anabaptist Vision 1943 qtd. in 2013, p.3). Anabaptist survivors of attacks from Calvinist, Lutheran and Roman Catholic forces had strong reasons to advocate ecumenical toleration, but the subsequent focus on freedom of conscience which was to become even more evident in Socinian thinking, constituted a significant shift in the religious landscape as a whole, as clergy from across a spectrum of denominational traditions recoiled from the excesses of Calvinist repression in central Europe.
Freedom of conscience as a spiritually libertarian ideal carried the Anabaptist reform movement beyond national boundaries; it spread from Switzerland to Northern Italy, from Poland to Transylvania and Holland.
Simultaneous with this diffusion of Anabaptism in central Europe, the Spanish theologian Miguel Servet (Servetus) published his Errors of the Trinity (1531) in Strasbourg. Servetus was, like many of the Anabaptist and other reformers, initially inspired to renew or enlarge upon Catholic doctrine rather than oppose it. In Errors of the Trinity, Servetus gives considerable attention to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, although he appears at times to hold contradictory opinions on it; he is concerned to demonstrate that in scripture Spirit is not distinct from God but is synonymous with the power of God, (although he is also keen to distinguish between the figures of angels and ministering spirits and other apparitions of divinity in the Bible (in Book II, section 23)). He summarises his views saying: “And to make few words of it, every breath, every breathing and impulse of the mind through which God breathes, is called holy, and accordingly the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit of God.” (tr.1932, p.99).
As demonstrated by Earl Morse Wilbur (1952) the Unitarian denomination has clear connections with the Italian theologian Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604, known as Socinus) and the Polish Minor Reformed Church in which he was involved (from around 1579) and where he contributed to the development of the Racovian Catechism (1605), a systematic summary of the non-trinitarian position (see Hewett, 2004, p. 59). Socinus rejected the traditional doctrine of atonement, advocating instead a rational humanistic soteriology which affirmed human salvation gained by following the ethical teachings and example of Jesus, who, in Socinus view, was conceived and inspired by God’s Spirit but was not co-substantial or co-eternal with God. Socinianism placed great emphasis on reason and individual freedom of conscience. According to Sarah Mortimer Socinus “extensive and complicated project” [involved] “reworking almost every aspect of contemporary Christianity.” She notes that “Socinus consistently emphasised that both religious and virtuous actions must be voluntary” and that “Religious faith had nothing to do with nature, natural instinct or any human concept of an immortal soul.” (2010, pp.15-17). Socinus’ radical idea of religious conviction freely chosen according to conscious rational discernment enshrined a principle of freedom of conscience and individual self determination which became central to Socinianism. His reinterpretation of traditional doctrine rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and affirmed the right to freedom of choice between denominations, and in matters of doctrinal dispute.
The Polish Minor Church resisted any identifying label other than ‘Christian’ according to the entry on Unitarianism by J. Estlin Carpenter in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (1922), although in Racovia; an early liberal religious community (2004), Philip Hewett suggests that it was over time known as Arian, Antitrinitarian, Socinian and “during the last period of their existence they began to use the Unitarian name” (p.24).
The church in Transylvania lead by Francis David (1510-1579), which Socinus had strongly influenced, came to describe itself as Unitarian – perhaps from its affirmation of the unity of God – the first recorded use of the term was at the Diet of Lecfalva in 1600. The spread of Socinian or Unitarian ideas west from Poland and Transylvania was hastened after the abdication and death of King John Zapoloya in Transylvania ended the period of religious toleration he had overseen there, and the collapse of the Racovian community in Poland left both communities of Unitarians vulnerable to repression by the resurgence of, particularly Jesuit, Catholicism (Hewett, 2004, p.69-86). The United Dutch Provinces provided a place of relative safety for heterodox religious ideas at this time in Continental Europe and were a haven for refugees from religious persecution. The Socinian emphasis on the ethical dimension of Jesus’ teaching and example was shared by many clergy of the Remonstrant Church (who followed Jacob Arminus in his resistance to the Calvinist doctrines of predetermination and election) in the United Dutch Provinces. There is an interplay of influence between Remonstrant, Collegiant, Socinian and Unitarian ideas, including the central concepts of religious toleration and freedom of conscience which may be seen to develop through the works of Episcopus, Grotius, Limborch and others as Mortimer outlines (2013, pp.26-31). The Remonstant and Collegiant movements in the Provinces were to provide safe harbour for Socinians, Unitarians and an Anabaptist remnant, and this was to be a point of departure from mainland Europe to Britain for these theological strands of radicalism in the intellectually fertile period of the Civil War. (Preus, 1998, p.8).
Wilbur’s two volume works (1945, 1952) are scarcely sufficient to encapsulate the complex interplay of political, cultural and ecclesial forces which ensured the interpenetration of non-trinitarian, Anabaptist, Socinian and other ideas in Europe during the seventeenth century. Wilbur, Mortimer and others also detail the complex routes of transference of these ideas from Europe to Britain, sometimes via manuscripts (such as works by Acontius, Crellius, Grotius, Ochino) which were translated and published privately and circulated widely. The intellectual group of ‘Latitudinarians’ including Ralph Chillingworth, John Hales and others, centred on the alternative academy established at Great Tew, near Oxford, are known to have handled and published such texts (Orr, 1967 p.37). Also influential were personal interactions between clergy and other theologians who were able to meet and exchange ideas in the relative freedom of ‘The Strangers Church’ in London. Initially instituted in 1548 by Thomas Cranmer to provide a place of worship for refugee protestants in London, the first church of this name was founded and lead by the Italian theologian Bernardo Ochino (whose Spirit based theology is referred to above) and because of its culturally liminal position it was a meeting point and cover for a wide spectrum of European religious and political dissidents. According to Mortimer:
Several Englishmen insisted that Christ’s experience was not inaccessible to others because the Spirit of God which had animated Christ was also present in the saints… Importantly such a mystical version of Christianity seemed highly subversive, for it implied a kind of spiritual egalitarianism… (2010, pp. 167-168).
Such a subversive egalitarianism was evident in the Socinian influenced Saltmarsh whose influential Free Grace (1645) promoted the idea that the Spirit directly mediated between God and human. “A theology which was based …on the direct spiritual experience of the individual seemed to have little room for …the Trinity, and as such was aligned with key Socinian tenets” (2010, p.171). Such ideas were also evident in the unorthodox ‘Seeker’ theology of Erbury (McLachlan 1972, p.233). These mystical, puritan theologies have significant similarities with emerging groups of ideas which were to be foundational to enlightenment liberalism. The Collegiant group in Amsterdam were, according to Preus, “hospitable to all sorts of religious ‘refugees’ – people who for one reason or another had lost their homes in established religious communities” (1998, p.9), they participated in the flow and counterflow of Socinian, Unitarian and puritan mystical thinkers from England to Europe. Voogt (2005) notes that [the] “…roots of Collegiantism in the spiritualist tradition have regularly been noted in the literature.” (p.415) and he also emphasises the influence of anti-trinitarians Servetus, Acontius and Castellio on Remonstrant and Collegiant thought.
The Amsterdam Collegiants were interested in Judaic culture and hospitable to Jewish refugees and marginalised Jewish religious dissenters. According to Richard Popkin, Adam Boreel the leader of the Collegiants, was a Hebraist who had instigated ‘Judeo-Christian’ projects; translations etc. before Collegiant Jarig Jelles introduced his friend Baruch Spinoza to the group. The interaction between Spinoza and the Spiritual mystics involved in Collegiantism was to have a wide ranging and far reaching influence on the liberal enlightenment generally and Unitarianism particularly. Popkin (2004) suggests that Spinoza would have participated in Collegiant spiritual activities, (p.40) and outlines the ways in which the lives and activities of Spinoza and other members of the group became entwined. He points out that Samuel Fisher, a former Baptist and influential voice among the exiled Quakers in Amsterdam, and Spinoza, (who were also collaborating together on the translation of Quaker texts) both published works of Biblical criticism, and Popkin suggests that “the metaphysical foundation of moral certainty that Spinoza presents in his Tractatus can be discerned…” in a pamphlet on which Spinoza also collaborated in 1661 called The Light upon the Candlestick (p.42). This work was later attributed to another former Baptist William Ames – although it was probably written by spiritual Collegiant Peter Balling. The Light upon the Candlestick has been identified with Quaker theology since it was collected and published with Sewell’s History of the Quakers (1722) but it is clearly rooted in the wider movement of Anabaptist, Socinian and mystical thought and emphasises the inner experience of the divine as universal and divinely inspired in typical passages such as:
We direct thee then to within thyself, that is, that thou oughtest to turn into, to mind and have regard unto that which is within thee, to wit, The Light of Truth, the true Light which enlighten every man that cometh into the world… we exhort every one to turn into the Light, that’s in him (We give it rather the appellation of Light, than anything else, otherwise it’s all one to us whether ye call it, Christ, the Spirit, the Word, &c. seeing these all denote but one and the same thing) … In fine, and lastly This Light in every man is the means to come to the knowledge of God.
Jonathan Israel (2010, pp.181-202) acknowledges the complex relationships between Collegiant rationalist-philosophical and “deeply pious and sincere” theological tendencies and describes between them; “an area of compatibility sufficiently extensive to ground what proved to be a long term intellectual and tactical association with far reaching historical implications.” (p.183). Israel accepts that the “exact boundary between this tendency [rationalistic Socinian] and clandestine Spinozistic Christianity was far from clear” but he is nevertheless able to affirm that between them Collegiant Spinozist Socinianism evidenced “not only…marked affinities… but what can be said to be integrally part of the same wider shift that in the eighteenth century generated a politically and socially radical strand of Unitarianism, especially in England” (p.190) and he goes on to examine the ways in which this strand of thinking is identical with the Unitarianism of Joseph Priestley, including Priestley’s “strongly theological component and fervent trust in Divine Providence” (p.192). Israel recognises the ‘one substance’ theory of nature uniting Spinozist and Priestley’s Unitarian religious rationalism and the Socinian strategy of invoking the Holy Ghost as ultimate arbiter in Biblical interpretation, which, he notes, may have been a legacy of the Anabaptist roots of Socinian thinking.
Israel also suggests that Spinoza’s alliance with the Socinians was grounded in his philosophy and theory of religion: it is evident in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that Spinoza considers that providing a serious and coherent critical examination of the Biblical sources and theological tradition of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is important. He takes care to translate and explain his understanding of the Spirit of God and his interpretation of the Hebrew word; Ruach, in a lengthy passage of the first chapter of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In this passage Spinoza contends that the Spirit or breath of God is synonymous with the power, mind, intention and affect of God as perceived by human faculties and in so doing prepares the conceptual ground on which to propose that God and nature are coterminous.
Whilst Jonathan Israel fails to discover the mechanical routes of transference linking Spinoza’s thinking with Priestley’s, Priestley can clearly be seen to struggle with Spinoza’s conception of God in his Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit (1777), and later, the Romantic poet Coleridge, also briefly a Unitarian minister, was to struggle with Spinoza’s account of the relationship between finite beings and the infinite divine. In Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason (2007) Richard Berkley points out the fruits of this struggle, especially in The Eolian Harp (1796) with its distinctly pneumatological overtones:
“And what if all animated nature
be but organic Harps diversly fram’d,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze
At once the soul of each and God of all?’ (Qtd. in Berkely 2007, p. 16)
The influence of so many of these thinkers; Servetus, Socinus, Ochino, Arminus, Spinoza, Coleridge and Priestley, and schools of thought (like Collegiantism), on the development of a liberal religious tradition may not be exhibited in a linear or clearly articulated set of doctrines, but rather may be recognised in mutually supportive ‘area[s] of compatibility’ (Israel qtd. above). The idea of the immanent Holy Spirit perceived as the active principle of God working through human affairs has theological implications for a denominational stance on human justice and equality (as foregrounded by Mortimer and Israel). These implications continued to shape the traditions of the denominational groupings which most relied on them. Karkainnen (qtd. above) traces the influence of Anabaptist thought through independent denominations like Unitarians towards an “immanent pneumatology” (2002, p.57). Such a pneumatology would continue to influence theology and practice, not as a secretive, suppressed or underground network, but as a contextual background. A background sometimes so familiar as to practically disappear from view, only remarkable when individuals or groups chose to foreground it, and at other times predominated by prevailing rationalist ideas and philosophies which overwhelmed its influence and visibility .
CHAPTER TWO
“I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” Ezekiel 37:5
Definitional boundaries and the emergence of a recognisable pneumatological theological tendency within contemporary Unitarian thought and practice.
According to Pope emeritus Joseph Ratzinger, “there is a certain difficulty in speaking of the Holy Spirit – even a certain danger. He withdraws from us into mystery…” (1998 p.324).
This sense of the Holy Spirit as a ‘fugitive doctrine’ is characteristic of much pneumatology, and it is a commonplace to describe the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as the least developed of the three doctrinal personae of the trinity see e.g: McGrath (2001). Other writers like James Dunn have traced complex trinitarian patterns in which Pneumatology appears to be an experiential form of Christology (1998 Spirit and Holy Spirit in the New Testament pp.3-22, The Spirit of Jesus pp.329-343). Feminist theologian Elizabeth A. Johnsnson remarks that such triune symbolism and thought may have “become unintelligible and religiously irrelevant on a grand scale, appearing as esoteric doctrine that one could well do without” (1994 p.192).
Ratzinger articulates a traditional formula by which the experience of the Spirit may be ‘trusted’; first that the experience should be “interpreted and communicated”, in other words be a part of an extended tradition, written and discussed. Second that it should be tested against tradition so that “one’s own spirit does not take the place of the Holy Spirit”. Third that it should not be a private, individual experience but a public one “standing in the context of the whole…entirety of the church”. Although it is unlikely that Ratzinger would include the Unitarian church in that “whole entirety”, it is useful to adopt his theological guidelines in working towards a functional definition of a Unitarian pneumatology.
Published twice a year at Harris Manchester College, Oxford (one of the two training colleges for Unitarian ministry in Britain) Faith and Freedom describes itself as “A journal of progressive religion” (inside front cover). Since its first publication in 1947, Faith and Freedom has described fairly accurately the trajectory of post-war Unitarian academic and theological thought. While the predominant aspect of this thought is rationalistic, humanist and sceptical, a brief scrutiny reveals that pneumatology has been a sustained subject of enquiry, with articles on the topic appearing with regularity throughout its publication. Steers (2001) in his editorial essay; ‘The Unifying Role of the Holy Spirit’ identifies five key ways in which the Holy Spirit can be recognised as acting within the development of liberal Christianity;
- By emphasis on reason in faith;
- By an open and thoughtful approach to the Bible;
- Through a preference for unity and dialogue;
- By individual responsibility for faith; and
- By an insistence on religious tolerance and freedom of conscience.
Although these ‘key ways’ seem strikingly congruent with Socinian, Spinozist or Collegiant principles, as a minister of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland, Steers is identified with the more spiritual and traditionally Christian tendency within contemporary Unitarianism.
An earlier contributor to Faith and Freedom, CH Bartlett is typical of many Unitarians of his time in seeking validation from psychoanalysis and natural science. He begins his paper The Psychological Background of the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (1968) with a swift dismissal of the definitional ambiguities which can surround consideration of his subject: “The Holy Spirit is most generally used in Unitarian Churches to refer to the Indwelling God…without therefore implying any doctrine of the trinity” (p.49). It is interesting to compare Bartlett’s perspective from the mid Twentieth century with Servetus’ view from the Sixteenth;
Our spirit dwelling within us is God his very self; and that this is the Holy spirit in us…is shown by the Apostle, saying ‘The Spirit of God is in us’ … Hence I always say that the Holy spirit is the activity of God in the spirit of Man (1531 qtd. in Lingwood 2008, p.134).
In Beliefs of a Unitarian (1962) Alfred Hall expresses exasperation with a doctrine so elusive that “So far it has evaded definition” (p.63). Hall is perhaps conscious of the opinion of Servetus quoted above when he says “…to the Unitarian the Holy Spirit is the ever present living God himself, who dwells in the inmost spirit of man and not a separate activity or person of the Godhead” (1962, p.36). A year later Arthur Long wrote in Faith and Understanding:
The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit is one of the most exciting and significant of all the official Christian Doctrines and ought to be especially dear to the hearts of Unitarians… in a sense it is the one basic and essential Unitarian doctrine and one which renders a large part of Christian dogmatics quite unnecessary … (1963, p. 58-63).
Long, a former Principal of Manchester College, echoes here a characteristically Socinian pre-occupation with distilling Christian doctrine to its most essential components.
It could be objected that these visions of the Holy Spirit removed or abstracted from traditional Christian trinitarian theology make it impossible to distinguish God’s Spirit indwelling in us from our own spirit. Alternatively it might be said that the Spinozist conception of ‘God or Nature’ downgrades the Spirit from the divine realm, making it identical with ‘life force’ or some other physical agency, de-sacralising and ‘domesticating’ God’s Spirit. Both of these objections are in some senses the same and are referred to as “a problem of God-world relation” by Philip Clayton (2004, pp.73-95). His ‘panentheist analogy’ seeks to resolve this tension by suggesting that:
1. we extrapolate from the qualities of spirit known through the natural world and through [human encounters], augmenting them to the level appropriate to divine spirit and
2. we seek to conceive the nature of Infinite Spirit based on our experience as embodied agents (p.194).
Clayton suggests that it may simply no longer be possible to distinguish “between the transcendent and immanent dimensions of Spirit” (p.199). Clayton identifies a development from the ‘one substance’ Spirit theology of Spinoza and others, in which all things are ‘modes’ within a single substance, and traces its influence on idealist and especially liberal theological philosophers such as Shleiermacher, to its evolution as a Spirit theology in which, although God and world are non-separable, neither are they the same, but instead they imply relationship, diversity and community.
GWH Lampe (1976 p.182) describes “the fruit of the Spirit [as] including…social justice and social co-operation as the form which love and freedom take when they are translated into terms of social ethics…”. Lampe was not a Unitarian but an Anglican theologian, but throughout God As Spirit he describes a theologically unitarian understanding of the nature of God. The Reform theologian Jurgen Moltmann seems to imply the same understanding in his critique of the influential liberal theologian Schleiermacher, which Moltmann titles The Unitarian Concept of Fellowship (1992, pp. 221-225). Moltmann asserts; [Schleiermacher] “thinks that the spirit is only ‘the union’ of the divine essence with human nature. The form of this union is the ‘common spirit animating the life in common of believers’ ” and he continues (p.223); “the inevitable result of this is a unitarian concept of community, which threatens to abolish the differences between the persons.”
Unsurprisingly the concept of community has in many ways become a dominating theological concern for Unitarians who strive to find uniting principles within a non creedal context of theological diversity. Community was the subject of Being Together; Unitarians celebrate congregational life (Smith 2006) in which twenty-two contributors, many of them ministers or lay leaders, considered the crucial importance of the community and relational ethics, in ways which tend to foreground the life of the congregation, as an end in itself, over its devotional focus. The concept of congregation as “beloved community”, an almost talismanic phrase uniting Unitarians across theological (or a-theological) divisions, is employed by writers such as Towle (2004) and Courtney (2007). Prioritising ‘beloved community’ could be seen to be a humanistic alternative to theistic Unitarian worshipping priorities until we recognise that this concept has performed a kind of theological Mobius loop; “beloved community” was originally a description, by the pentacostal minister Frank Royce, of the role of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity (see website 2007). Paraphrasing Moltmann then, we can say that the Unitarian concept of community threatens to abolish the difference between the human community and the divine spirit, and it is possibly in this abolition of boundaries between the human and divine that we are able to perceive most clearly the theological points of contact between Anabaptist, Liberation and contemporary Unitarian pneumatologies.
Forsey and Kent (1998) emphasise the continuity of Unitarian core values between Seventeenth century Anabaptist ancestors and contemporary Unitarianism. These values they list as; individual responsibility for spiritual life, the central importance of reason, freedom of conscience, and “the continuation of the spirit, which was in Jesus…”(1998, p.34).
Writing in Unitarian – What’s That? (1999), a denominational publication aimed at introducing newcomers and potentially interested seekers to basic Unitarian background and ethos, Cliff Reed, an experienced Unitarian minister and influential liturgist states:
The Spirit, for many Unitarians, is the divine mystery moving among us and within us as we work and worship. Indeed for many, God as loving, creative spirit, is the primary concept of the divine. (p.11)
Unitarian theological ideals of community and spiritual values of social equality are evident across a range of culturally disputed areas such as racial, gender and sexual equality, and pneumatological doctrinal formulae which continue to represent these ideals and values continue to be widely apparent in the contemporary Unitarian denomination as I will endeavour to show in the following chapter.
CHAPTER THREE
“The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit…” Rom. 8:16
The origins and development of ‘applied’ pneumatology in Unitarianism; the practice of the Spirit in theology and the development of religious plurality and comparative religion. Social activity as ‘contextual spirituality’.
Priestleian rationalism was at the heart of the new cause which Theophilus Lindsey founded with Joseph Priestley in 1794. As discussed earlier this rationalism had much in common with Spinozist and Socinian thinking but it retained a strongly devotional aspect and, whilst hospitable to Deism and ‘Free-thinking’, resisted outright atheism. This Unitarianism, although still illegal and clandestine, was transmitted powerfully by preachers including Richard Price and Iolo Morganwg, both descendants of Welsh dissenting ministers, writers like Thomas Belsham, and ‘The Unitarian Society for promoting Christian Knowledge and the Practice of Virtue by the Distribution of Books’ ( or ‘Unitarian Book Society’). From the outset, the emerging theology of these pioneering Unitarians was engaged with recognisably Socinian precepts: freedom of conscience and toleration of a diversity of doctrinal emphasis. Echoing a Polish Minor Church focus on “Christianity in its simplest and most intelligible form”, the Unitarian ‘Hibbert Trust’, founded in 1847, states its intention to uphold “the unfettered exercise of private judgement in matters of religion” (2013) and is typical of Unitarian emphasis before and since. In order to maintain its own denominational cohesion such precepts immediately demanded of the Unitarian movement a reliance on relational ethics, and the call for the concept of ‘community’ to over-ride concerns arising from divergent doctrine, liturgy or procedure. As with the Collegiant group, whose explicit disavowal of the inspiration of the Spirit (Preus 1998, p.10) was undercut by deeply pious religious inclinations, so were these Unitarian’s rationalism coloured from the first with explicitly spiritual sensibilities. These sensibilities intersected with the Romantic movement; William Hazlitt’s memoir of Coleridge’s sermons (undertaken while Coleridge was candidating for a ministerial position at Shrewsbury Unitarian Chapel in 1798) describe Coleridge’s extraordinary verbal fluency; “Like an eagle dallying with the wind” (1928, p.3) and convey a sense of worship far removed from the coldly scientistic. According to Richard Berkley, Coleridge’s conflicted criticism and defence of Spinoza, and long struggles with Spinozist principles, derived from “this resemblance of Spinoza’s God to his own” (2007, p.46). Far from the remote and rationalistic abstractions of any supposed High Enlightenment ideal, these Unitarians were engaged in romantic struggles, sentimental insofar as they were deeply felt expressions of inner experience of God. John James Tayler (1797-1869) was a friend of Wordsworth who walked with him in the Lake district. Tayler, the son of a dissenting minister, became a Unitarian minister and later Principal of Manchester College, where he wrote: “There is no doctrine of scripture more unspeakably important, none…more misunderstood…as much by the rationalising as by the enthusiastic…than this doctrine of the spirit.” (1877, p.55). His consciously spiritualised reading of Unitarianism was to influence succeeding generations of ministers and lead to the brief formation of the Free Christian Union 1867-1870, an attempt to galvanise an ecumenical, non-doctrinal, liberal Christian movement (see J Estlin Carpenter 1905 pp.456-462), which is still apparent in the full title of the Unitarian and Free Christian General Assembly. J. Hamilton Thom’s book of posthumously published sermons: A Spiritual Faith, (1908) begins with a sermon titled ‘God is a Spirit’ in which Thom (1808-1894) argues a direct and intuitive relationship with God similar to that found in The Light upon the Candlestick (1663), and sets out an understanding of the indwelling Spirit of God which shows correspondences with Spinoza’s concept (common to Aquinas) of Natura Naturans – defined by Coleridge as “Nature in the active sense”. Thom writes:
Theology is man’s thought of God in a symbolised form; it is therefore unavoidable that it should present God in the intellectual image of man. Theology is not God but man’s philosophy of God; and as a substitute for the teaching of the Holy Spirit, it is fatal to religion… (p.10)
Thom speaks of “the universal spirit limitless in all His being…” (p.11) and of the “unfathomable depths of nature…the sense of the infinite come upon us from the spiritual aspects of the Temple not made with hands” (p.14).
Tayler and Thom were joined by James Martineau (1805-1900) as leading lights of the new movement of theologians within the Uniarian denomination who sought to situate inner conviction, intuition, conscience and reason as the ultimate sources of authority in religion as against the hardening conservatism of a more traditional nonconformist, Presbyterian view which held Scripture alone to be the source of authority. Martineau displays the influence of Spinoza (Ethics, prop.30) when he writes “we…decipher the Universe as the autobiography of an Infinite Spirit repeating itself in minature within our finite spirit.” (qtd in Hall, 1950, p.48) and in Hours of Thought on Sacred Things Vol. 1 (1848) he writes; “If you believe that God exists, and understand your words when you call God ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’, you cannot expect God to be a ‘thing’, rather God must be a Spirit in all; … ” (p.118)
This group, active as ministers and academics, were encouraged by the support of the popular American radical Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, whose reforming sermons, emphasising a broad and inclusive Church based on an essentialist distillation of Christianity to its most simple and intelligible form, are echoed by their British counterparts. Reinforced by these newest American theologies then, Martineau and his colleagues were to steer Unitarianism away from both secular naturalist and presbyterian conservative doctrinal tendencies towards an explicitly spiritual ‘Free Christianity’ which was often to emphasise its Pneumatological basis. Martineau in particular devoted considerable energy towards foregrounding the idea of divine agency, “the Divine Life in our humanity” and the sovereignty of the conscience where “spirit is present with spirit” (1905, p.582) within Unitarian theological consideration in academic and pastoral contexts. Martineau was also to publish (in 1868) an influential defence of Spinoza in which he acknowledges Spinoza’s links to Collegiants, his ‘mystical attraction’, and influence on Schleirmacher and Coleridge. (1882 pp.16-19, pp. 327-330).
Martineau was to popularise German and American transcendentalism in Britain and modern Unitarianism’s religious pluralism may be seen to derive more from the spiritual-naturalist theology of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) than from any other single influence (see eg: Shmidt, 2011, Geldart, 1993). Emerson’s evolving theological position, described by literary critic Harold Bloom as “a fusion of Enthusiasm and a native Gnosticism” (website 2003) strongly emphasises individual spiritual autonomy. In his celebrated essay ‘Nature’ (1838) Emerson writes: “That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself.” Unlike British reformers, Martineau, Thom, Emerson was eventually to abandon Unitarianism completely, but he was to profoundly influence the American Unitarian Association and the development of Universalism. An early abandoned poem ‘I will not Live out of Me’ (qtd. in Bloom 2003) ends: “Whence then did this Omniscient Spirit come? From God it Came, it is the Deity” and this sentiment is typical of Emersonian spirituality which recognised an ‘oversoul’ reflected in the human inner soul or experience and explicitly acknowledges the awareness of this unity as the experience of the ‘enthusiasm’ (or inspiration of the Spirit) common to Boehme, Fox, the Moravians and Quietists amongst others. (The Oversoul 1841).
According to Singh (1991), Emerson read Rammohun Roy’s translation of Ishopanishad (1820) and “Hindu thought had a tremendous impact on him”. Emersonian Transcendentalism was to popularise the Unitarianism encounter with Hinduism, in part introduced to Unitarians by Roy (who was regularly reviewed in The Monthly Repository, a Unitarian journal founded by Robert Aspland. Roy was to become close friends with Unitarian minister and teacher Lant Carpenter). This development was to confirm American Unitarianism on its course towards a universalistic pluralism and growing divergence from the liberal Protestant Christianity which had until then defined it.
In some ways this trajectory, from an initial hospitality to the equal validity of all religious claims to the eventual denial of any to divine inspiration, is similar to the rationalist Collegiants of Seventeenth century Netherlands who, according to Andrew Fix (qtd. in Preus 1998), eventually came to deny the claims of each of the dissenting religious groups to inspiration of the Holy Spirit and renounce all such claims as spurious. Likewise the American Transcendentalist tendency began to influence a cultural shift within Unitarianism away from purely Christian spirituality and towards a pluralist or essentialist recognition of the equal validity of all religious forms. This shift would, over time, influence the transition to a rationalist secular Humanism, culminating in the announcement of the ‘Humanist Manifesto’ in 1933, seven of the thirty four signatories of which were Unitarian ministers (Taverner 1968).
The emphasis of Unitarians in Britain on the other hand to a developing interest in the emerging theologies of universal or pan-religious meta-religion was to display the influence of preceding traditions of emphasis on the Holy Spirit as the active principle of divinity within all (and especially human) nature. Joseph Estlin Carpenter (son of minister, and friend of Roy, Lant Carpenter) was to contribute significantly to the development of the study of Comparative Religion, publishing the first work of that title in 1913 and setting a template for Unitarian consideration of religion which was committed to the principle that all religious traditions were evidence of divine revelation, and none had a monopoly of spiritual truth.
Sidney Spencer studied for Unitarian ministry and took an honours degree in the newly formulated academic subject category ‘Comparative Religion’ initiated by Estlin Carpenter at Manchester College, Oxford. Later a Unitarian minister, (and wartime conscientious objector), Spencer eventually became Principal of Manchester College himself. Whilst Principal (between 1951-56) he taught a course of lectures entitled; ‘God and Man in Mystical Religion’, this series was later published as Mysticism in World Religion (1963). In it Spencer asserts: “Mysticism is of the utmost importance to religion and so to the future of mankind…”. In his chapter Protestant Mysticism, Spencer postulates a genealogical succession of reformist and heretical mysticism which includes Boheme, Franck, Weigel, Schwenkfeld, Everard, Bauthumley, Smith, and Law (whose The Spirit of Love Spencer edited). Spencer asserts that despite the diversity of traditions from which they came, (he includes Anabaptist, Anglican, Collegiant, Digger, neo-Platonist, Quaker, Ranter, and seeker, although curiously he makes no mention of either Socinianism or the Unitarian denomination); “the main fact which strikes us when we review their teaching is its essential unity” (p.274), a unity which he summarises as the; “emphasis on the universal immanence of God in the human soul.” (p.340). He also remarks: “Mysticism…cannot be confined by any bounds of church or creed. It has therefore an inherent trend to universalism” (p.338). In The Deep Things of God; essays in Liberal Religion (1955), Spencer writes;
It is characteristic of the Unitarian movement today that its adherents feel an increasing interest in Mysticism…Since we have discarded the belief in miraculous revelation and the final authority of the written word of scripture or the creeds of the Church it is natural that we should find authority where the mystic finds it …in the light of the Spirit shining in illuminated souls. (p.50).
Spencer’s great contribution to Unitarian thinking in the post war period was to unite the two main strands of twentieth century Unitarianism: an essentialist, interfaith universalism with a radical spiritual mysticism. Spencer proposes that the evidence of divine revelation in all religious traditions is to be discovered in the record of the experiences of their mystics, the unity of which he describes as a; “profoundly impressive testimony to the reality of God” (1963, p. 51). He affirms that the particularly Unitarian approach to other religious traditions; assuming that ‘revelation is not sealed’ and recognising that no one tradition contains the monopoly of spiritual truth, is honouring, de facto, the universal presence of the Holy Spirit in all traditions.
Spencer also by this same means proposes an emphasis on the inner purpose which motivates social action and identifies this as the Unitarian Christian understanding of the presence of the Spirit of God in human affairs, an understanding which motivates compassionate solidarity and underpins action for social justice.
The development and acceleration of the Humanist Unitarian tendency which originated in America, coincided with Spencer’s explicitly theological approach to social responsibility and action. Humanist Unitarians also foregrounded social concern but from the opposite perspective, tending to consider that having removed the obligation for religious observance the new focus of Unitarian energy should be the social obligations of religious community and social interaction. For both obligations Unitarian humanists tended to enlist the inspiration and celebration of the human spirit and were often able to re-utilize language of the Spirit in a desacralised context.
Perhaps of even greater importance for the recent development of the Unitarian denomination has been the way in which the language of Spirit has been instrumental in providing a space for the witness of women. In a denominational report on feminist theology Growing Together (1985) Ann Arthur (later Revd. Dr. Ann Peart, principal of Unitarian College Manchester) notes that “Unitarian emphasis on the unity of God resulted in the loss of the mothering images of Jesus and Mary, and often produced a monolithic paternalism” but she also notes the importance of female aspects of God in the Bible especially in the Wisdom literature:
Ruach, … is used to describe the spirit of God … Hokma or Sophia, meaning wisdom in Greek, is a female image of God found frequently in the Bible…Shekinah’ originally meant dwelling or resting, but came to represent the presence of God, and took on a numinous- connotation of the presence of God on earth. In the Haggadah, Shekinah is associated with ruach hakodesh, the holy spirit, and with bath kol, the daughter of the voice, all female aspects of God indicating the presence of God in the world and God’s closeness to humanity.
Peart suggests that feminist re-readings of scripture are vitally part of liberation strategies and associates these strategies with feminist Unitarian witness, despite her robust critique of the general absence of women’s voices in Unitarian theology elsewhere (see especially her 2005 Phd. thesis Forgotten Prophets: The Lives of Unitarian Women, 1760 – 1904.)
More recently other Unitarian ministers, notably Sheena Gabriel, Jane Barraclough, and others have developed a consciousness of the pneumatological potential for inclusive and feminist worship through their own homiletic practice, interweaving Biblical and other sources with denominational dialogue on the subject of the Holy Spirit in a non-trinitarian context.
The importance of Pneumatology for the development of a genuinely liberal religious tradition cannot be overstated. From Socinus and Ochino onwards Unitarians have seen the action of God as a spiritual force within and throughout nature and human culture, and therefore to identify the Spirit with progressive, emancipatory and liberating political initiatives. More recently in an age concerned with clarifying the links between linguistic and political realities the gender freedom of a non-personified vision of God as Spirit has aided a retreat from patriarchal or doctrinally constrained limitations.
CHAPTER FOUR
The spirit of the Lord speaks through me, his word is upon my tongue. 2 Samuel 23:2
Pneumatology apparent in liturgy, hymnody, ecclesiology and ‘material culture’.
In their book Worship that Works (2008) published by the Unitarian Universalist Association press Skinner House, Arnason and Rolenz contend that:
“This is what we must invoke when we gather for our common worship each week: the recognition and creation of holy time and space where we can encounter the spirit of life, that invisible fountain which bubbles up within our lives and in the world around us, quenching our thirst for beauty and meaning.” (p.38)
Consciously or not, their choice of words recall the careful theological neutrality of Rudolf Otto’s use of the term ‘holy’ in the early years of the academic study of religion (Der Heilige 1916). ‘Holy’ is a term which can be applied by those from different denominational and faith traditions and is thus valuable for a denomination which places high value on inclusivity and its stated intention to provide hospitality to those of all faiths and none. In referring to the ‘spirit of life’ they are also cautious to avoid explicitly Christian terminology, despite linking this image to “that invisible fountain…” which obviously recalls New Testament metaphorical imagery (eg John 4:14, Rev. 22:16-17) also found in Dante (eg Paradiso, Canto 30). They go on:
If the purpose of liturgy is ‘to make the invisible, visible’ [the phrase, unattributed, is Peter Brook’s. (1968, The Empty Space)] the invisible realities that are present when we gather for worship must be invoked, invited and embodied from the very beginning of a service (p.38).
Since the Unitarian denomination in Britain has followed the American tendency to disassociate from its explicitly Christian roots, such invocation must by its nature be contentious; in its desire to encourage encounter with the divine or sacred to such a broad range of perspectives, it has been difficult to maintain any theological or philosophical clarity, and with the growth of religious humanism and religious atheism this has become even more problematic. Some Unitarians resist the overtly masculine theism of ‘Dear Lord’, others find ‘Earth Mother’ or similarly paganistic address alien, but most, albeit not all, find the commonly utilised formulae: ‘Eternal spirit’ or ‘Spirit of Love and Life…’ (see eg: Hill. 1993B, Celebrating Life. 1988. Celebration) is sufficiently broad to be inclusive while maintaining a personal mode of address which is not antagonistic to a Christian perspective. This can serve as the opening of worship or prayer and a hymn; Spirit of Life, by Carolyn McDade (herself an American non-denominational Christian writer) has become widely celebrated as a mission statement by many congregations on both sides of the Atlantic, according to Kimberly French;
“No other song, no other prayer, no other piece of liturgy is so well known and loved in Unitarian Universalism as Spirit of Life by Carolyn McDade. It is our Doxology, or perhaps our ‘Amazing Grace.’ Many congregations sing it every Sunday, or at least enough to know the words by heart. ..”
(UUA website accessed 04/03/2014).
Even more explicit reference to a theology of the Spirit is to be found in those Unitarian blessings or prayers, which, echoing Socinian antecedents, conclude with the words: “… and this we ask in the name of that spirit which was in Jesus”. (see eg: Brown and Morgan, 2007, p.20,36,37,109).
Martineau’s phrase that Unitarians; “believe in incarnation not of Jesus exclusively but man universally and God everlastingly” (qtd. in Hall, 1950) appears to have a continuing significance linking the traditionally ‘low’ Christology of Socinian and Arian influenced non-conformity with the spirit based religious naturalism of those who perceive divine incarnation in everyday life which is brought into particular focus in regular acts of devotional worship.
In their influential report on the ‘subjective turn’ to non-traditional and ‘new age’ religion The Spiritual Revolution (2005), sociologists of religion Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead categorise the Unitarian congregation as a congregation of ‘experiential humanity’. Experiential humanity they define as a religious form which emphasises the human inner experience of the divine above scriptural or sacramental external forms (a definition strikingly close to McLachlan’s description of the theology of Bernardo Ochino above). Describing Unitarian worship they report:
Instead of there being an external check on what counts as spiritual, it is only within the depths of personal experience that the Spirit can be encountered – indeed the Spirit is these depths, depths in which individual life is found to connect with all other life (p.21).
This analysis recalls James Martineau’s insights discussed earlier and expressed most fully in The Seat of Authority in Religion (1890).
Despite Martineau’s recognition that the only reliable source of authority was the individual ‘s conscience, the Free-Christian movement within Unitarianism which he co-authored with Tayler reflected the desires of the denomination to integrate with other denominations. After the 1813 ‘Doctrine of the Trinity’ act had made it legal for Unitarians to worship and the 1844 ‘Dissenting Chapels’ act secured the legal rights of trustees over their chapels, the Unitarian denomination began to build new places of worship. In order to emphasise their decisive break with a former, Presbyterian Unitarianism and reinforce their allegiance with the newer ‘spiritual’ Unitarian Free Christianity, these places discontinued the traditional, austere beauty of the meeting-house style chapels and tended instead to copy the prevailing Anglican styles of building. These new chapels (built from the 1840’s onwards) are described as Dissenting Gothic because of the variations in style from the pure gothic revival architecture of High-Gothic Anglican neighbours. Motifs of the Spirit; doves, angels and flames, are widely prevalent, often as theological substitute for more familiar icons and often visible in windows, screens and other areas (see appendix images).
The hymns of this period also reflect the extraordinary theological developments that Martineau was able to synthesise, according to Horton Davies;
…he expressed a blend of Biblical faith and insights of the day derived from …his deeply ethical sense, and from the love of nature and a conviction of the basic unity of mankind emanating from German and American versions of Transcendentalism… (qtd. in Wykes, 2011, p.185).
Unitarian denominational historian Alan Ruston suggests that:
[Martineau’s] Hymns for the Christian Church and Home (1840)… [and]… Hymns of Praise and Prayer (1874) constitute a major contribution to Unitarian Hymnody which reached far beyond the confines of his own denomination (qtd. in Wykes, 2011, p.182).
It is significant that between the publication dates of these two hymnals Martineau encountered American Transcendentalism first hand, meeting the radical minister Theodore Parker in 1844 and Samuel Longfellow in 1851. His hymnody reflects his developing theology: in the index of the 1840 hymnal, seven hymns are listed under the subject heading Spirit; in the index of the 1874 hymnal there are twenty three. Martineau’s influence was also to extend beyond his death in 1900: of 594 hymns in Hymns of Worship (1927), 350 are common to Martineau’s collections. Hymns of Worship was to be the predominant denominational hymnal of the twentieth century, being many times reissued and revised. Explaining the “clear principle” on which choice of hymns can be based, its 1927 preface notes: “…there is one sole object of worship to whom prayer is directed, the One eternal, ever present quickening Spirit, the Source and Giver of all life God our Father.” (1927, p.vii).
In the twentieth century theological division is evident between those Unitarians loyal to Free Christian tradition and the humanists keen for a fresh transfusion of post-transcendentalist American secular energy. These divisions are expressed in the publications of the, broadly speaking, humanist Hymns for Living in 1985 and of the Free Christian Songs of Faith and Freedom in 1991. Hymns for Living offers an index heading ‘The spirit within’, in which it lists 15 hymns, while Hymns of Faith and Freedom offers a whole index page entitled ‘Holy Spirit of God’, under various sub headings of which, ‘Spirit of God’, contains about seventy songs. Both books retain Longfellow’s ‘Holy Spirit, Truth Divine’ introduced by Martineau in 1874. The most recently published hymnal, Sing Your Faith, 2009, has no subject heading containing the words Spirit or holy, but does carry unequivocally Spirit focused songs such as Gathered Here, a sample lyric of which runs:
“Gathered here in the mystery of the hour … Spirit draw near” and ‘Spirit of Life’ as noted above, with lyrics; “Spirit of Life, come unto me. / Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion. / Blow in the wind, rise in the sea/ Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice./ Roots hold me close; wings set me free; Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.”
It is instructive to set the lyrics of Longfellow’s 1864 hymn ‘Holy Spirit, Truth Divine’ beside it to recognise how imagistically and conceptually close they are:
“Holy Spirit, Truth divine /Dawn upon this soul of mine! Word of God and inward light wake my spirit clear my sight … Holy Spirit Peace divine / Still this restless heart of mine! Speak to calm this tossing sea, Stayed in thy tranquility.”
It is not only through Unitarian hymnody that an enduring, howsoever intermittent, pneumatological inclination can be discerned. According to Gretchen Buggein
Many studies that consider both architects and theology in depth treat buildings as expressions of belief as understood by the architect and materially realized in buildings that overflow with theological meaning. (2011, pp. 421)
An awareness of the burgeoning academic study of ‘material culture’ allows us to recognise that other elements of religious ‘matter’ than the architectural can be as expressive; hymn books, service sheets and orders of worship, vestments, altar cloths, stained glass windows, interior screens (see appendix 1) and exterior signage (appendix 2) may also articulate belief in ways which, “overflow with theological meaning”. After the Dissenting Chapels act ushered in an era of church building or re-building, the next such phase of building would not occur until the late fifties and early sixties when churches damaged by enemy action in the 1939-45 war were re-built. These chapels; amongst them, in London; Effra Road Brixton 1962, Unity Islington, and Croydon (architects David Evelyn Nye and Partners, 1959), share a plain and functional style with an open, light aspect. Above the dias and behind the pulpit at Croydon hangs a mural which according to the congregation’s website is “intended to represent the emphasis in our free faith on the reality and power of the spirit or inner light.” (Croydon website). Designer of the mural artist Lawrence Lee (1909-2011) elaborates;
The design of the mural is meant to suggest a canopy or tent (to represent the passing world) sustained by the eternal spirit. The eye should be drawn to the Centre of the Light, then immediately projected out again to its various manifestations. Light, being a kind of energy, is the nearest we can get to the essential nature of the Spirit. (Croydon website).
Lee’s point that light is as close a visual image as it is possible to achieve as a correlative of spirit is an important one when considering the comparatively recent introduction of the use of a lighted ‘chalice’ as the distinctive Unitarian symbol. The transference of this symbol into liturgy, as the lighting of a chalice candle which very often occurs as the opening rite of worship, has been widespread in Britain since the 1980’s. This ritual has come to be affirmed by most Unitarians as the primary identifying element of contemporary Unitarian liturgy. The symbol has now even been adopted as a logo or ‘brand’ image, (UUA website 2014). Both elements of this image; a flame, and a chalice or grail, reference recognisably Christian and pneumatological imagery. The modern image was designed by Hans Deutch for use by the American Unitarian Service Committee during its humanitarian efforts in World War two. As Deutch had no previous experience of Unitarianism, these references are presumably coincidental. The flame symbol has been adapted for Pentacost/Whitsun services, shown intersecting with the white Dove of the Holy Spirit on for example the service sheet of A Whitsun day Communion Service sheet prepared by Cliff Reed at Cambridge Unitarian Church (date unknown, approx 1980’s)[see appendix 3]. Indeed the Unitarian engagement with ‘pentacostal fire’, in Eliot’s phrase, is older indeed than 1943; the image of the flaming brand or beacon is visible in chapel decoration (eg. Sidmouth Unitarian Chapel, pulpit) and in the badge of Harris Manchester College (two beacons crossed) representing the spiritual illumination which Unitarianism has always sought.
CONCLUSION
Because the spirit of the Lord has filled the world, and that which holds all things together knows what is said… Wisdom 1: 7
Writing in 1955 Sidney Spencer conceived God as; “…the Spirit immanent in the whole of being, while immeasurably transcendent.” (p.63). Although he was writing for a new readership who he aimed to introduce to Unitarian ideas it is arguable that Spencer was not significantly adding to the ideas of Spinoza which Priestley and Coleridge had found could be absorbed into their theological conceptual framework in the eighteenth century and which allowed them to initiate an enduring strand of ‘rational mysticism’ into the denominational dynamic which had until then been dominated by a presbyterian reliance on the complete authority of scripture. They were followed by other Unitarians, esoterics like Emerson who spoke of the indwelling Supreme Spirit in his infamous Harvard Divinity School address (Geldard, 2001, p.27), and humanistic pietists like Martineau who argued that the ‘seat of authority’ in religion was the inner prompting of the Spirit.
In the Twentieth Century John F. Heyward has said that secular liberalism has absorbed this language, transmuting it; “into a religious worship of the Human Spirit.” (1962, p. 71).
If this is so it confirms the thesis of John D. Caputo who, in his book of dialogues with Gianni Vattimo, After The Death of God (2007), asserts that his ‘Spectral Hermeneutic’ – the hermeneutic of the Holy Ghost – perceives kenosis (the Pauline concept of the ‘outpouring’ of God from Jesus) as:
not a one time only event…kenosis is the becoming nothing of God as a transcendent deity… This process Vattimo calls ‘secularisation,’ which means not the abandonment or dissolution of God but the ‘transcription’ of God into time and history. (p.74)
Both Capputo and Vattimo come from a Roman Catholic tradition as does Charles Taylor whose secularisation theory is expounded in “A Secular Age” (2007). These theorists perhaps miss the closeness of their arguments to the secularisation implied by Socinianism and developed by Collegiants in the 17th Century and Transcendentalists and Unitarians in the 19th and 20th.
The theology and hermeneutics of the Spirit in Unitarianism derive from Sixteenth and Seventeenth century Anabaptism, and the Christian humanism of Rennaissance Italy; both implied an underlying tolerance which could be found within Christian doctrine despite the contemporary battles and immolations which suggested the contrary.
The reworking of Christian doctrine by Socinian and other proto-Unitarian theologies to emphasise human agency, the primacy of the will and sovereignty of the conscience, were later subsumed and appropriated into overtly rationalist and humanist traditions.
These sources may infuse Unitarian alternatives to a trinitarian Christianity, patriarchal monotheism and authoritarian neo-liberalism with enduring values and implied theological ideas; a gender neutral divinity, an emphasis on relationality and a high value on egalitarianism, which continue to be influential within Unitarian thinking.
What Spencer described as a Unitarian Christian understanding of the presence of the Spirit of God in human affairs may, in a contemporary religious setting, be broadened to include Unitarian non-Christian understandings of the Spirit in human affairs and throughout nature. This understanding, which recalls Priestlian rationalism as well as Martineau’s spiritual mysticism, may point towards a post-atheist, ‘rational-mystic’ pneumatological perspective. In this dissertation I hope to have shown that this perspective is already present as a lived reality within worship, hymnody, liturgy and material culture within a contemporary Unitarian denominational context.
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A Space of possibility 