and the Eclipse of the Spirit in Liberal Religion
A lecture given to Woodbrooke Community College as part of their series on ‘The Wisdom of Liberal Christianity’ in June 2025.
You may have been as aware as I am of the re-emergence of spirituality generally and Christianity particularly over the past few years, and you may have been as surprised as I am by this ‘re-enchantment’ given the robust and widely advertised claims of the so-called New Atheist movement in the teens of this century.
I say so called New Atheist movement because this was really a re-statement by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet and others of the position already set out exhaustively by AJ Ayer and others. The rise to dominance of atheistic humanism, especially within academic culture, also has a significant bearing on the subject of this talk, because I want to pay some attention to a rather obscure figure today, Sidney Spenser, who rose to be Principal of an Oxford College in the 1950’s and published a reference work in the well known and well esteemed Pelican books series for general readers in the early 60’s, but who is almost entirely unregarded today.
I don’t want to overstate my desire to rescue Spenser from oblivion, I think a degree of obscurity is actually appropriate for rather scholarly Unitarian ministers of the Mid-Twentieth century just as it probably is for Unitarian ministers of the present time; I don’t think anyone who commits to the reasonable approach of liberal-religion expects to be a theological celebrity, but I do think it is unfortunate that Spenser’s work co-incided with, and was overwhelmed by, a prevailing tide of academic atheist criticism which overshadowed his work and we thereby lost sight of what I think could be an important contribution to the current wave of re-enchantment.
I want to suggest first that Spencer was very much a product of a particular stream in liberal religious thought and I want to make a claim for this lineage so to speak. Because I think this lineage has conceptual roots into our shared history as Unitarians and Quakers and because this lineage still has energy for us today.
Sidney Spenser who was born on the 1st Nov 1888 at Nottingham, was a student at the college at which he later became principal. This Oxford college is now called Manchester Academy and Harris College or colloquially “Harris-Manchester” but in Spenser’s time was called Manchester College.
(picture of Harris Manchester Oxford, college Chapel)
The Principal in the time Spenser was a student was [picture; portrait J E Carpenter] Joseph Esslin Carpenter, who would himself be a very worthy subject of study and infact is much more well known, now has a library named after him and so on, because he is rightly credited with being a pioneer in the development of what was at first called ‘Comparative Religion’ and went on to be called World Religion or nowadays Study of Religion in developments that nominatively chart the recognition that Christianity is not the standard against which other religions are to be compared but rather one amongst other religious faiths of the world.
Carpenter was very much a prophetic fore-runner of this recognition, he was immersively fascinated by Judaism, which he came to through his studies of the Historical context of earliest Christianity, but he also wrote authoritive works on Buddhism (and coined the term Buddology for the study of Buddhist doctrines). Carpenter was Principal of Manchester College at the time Spencer studied for his degree, and at the time that London College, which validated the Unitarian Ministry degrees at this time, launched the first academic degree in the new subject of Comparative Religion, a degree which Carpenter designed.
We know that Carpenter’s Grandfather, Lant Carpenter, was the principal of one of the Dissenting Academies – which we can still hear echoed in the name of the current ‘Manchester Academy’. We know that Lant Carpenter was an associate of Ram Mohan Roy, who was a radical critic of the English colonial domination of India, he is credited with the birth of the Indian Renaissance he co founded the Braho-Somaj and it is difficult to determine exactly who was influencing whom in this cultural interchange but it is at least worth noting that one of the core principles of the Brahmo-Somaj which Ram Mohan Roy co-founded, is the contention that: “the most fundamental doctrines of Brahmoism are at the basis of every religion followed by man.”
And this or a version of it is to be an influential principle within Unitarianism and liberal religion generally, and it is also the idea at the centre of theological Perennialism – which we will look at later, but lets put a marker down here and now because one of the important critiques levied against Perennialism by the time Spencer was accused of his commitment to it is that Perennialism is a wholly western colonial and culturally imperialist imposition. But as I say we will return to perennialism and its critics later, for now I want to stay with this idea of lineage a little longer and tease out just why Unitarian thought is so receptive to the influence of faiths other than Christianity.
I’ve got a slide here which is a bit of a historical breakthrough: it is a photo of the back page of the second volume of a 1655 bible which was once owned by a minister called Richard Stretton. Stetton left the Bible in Leeds in 1688 and so this word clearly in his autograph must have been written there before that year so it could well be the first ever incidence of the term Unitarianism yet discovered – this was found in the Bible which is held at the West Yorkshire archive by Mr. Geoffrey Forster who was at that time working at Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds. There are incidences of the word Unitarian in print from around this time but the word was used interchangeably with the word Socinian in the 17th century. We find this word for example cropping up in Christopher Hill’s World Turned Upside Down when an eyewitness to the English Civil War declares “The Socinians are the most chymical of all our battalions” … the word chemical in this period means scientific. According to that eyewitness at least Socianians are the most scientific of the many Protestant sects represented in the Republican cause …
Socinians had taken the Lutheran injunction ‘Sola Scriptura’ to its logical conclusion; only the scriptural was valid. Seeking methodically through their Bible they found no scriptural justification for key doctrines of mainstream Christianity; they found no evidence for Trinitarianism in scripture – although it was undeniably present in the writings of later theologians, they found no claim for the co-equal divinity of Jesus again prevalent in the doctrines of the church, let alone for the doctrines of original sin or atonement which were pillars of Augustinian theology and became fundamental to Luther and Calvin.
So they rapidly found themselves on the wrong side of the increasingly vituperative Protestant and Puritan churches and as the Counter Reformation gathered momentum they were equally strongly reviled by Catholics too.
Burned alive by both sides is an uncomfortable position to maintain in a religious dispute of increasing ferocity and so Socinians were perpetual refugees in any bubble of toleration however short lived in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, beginning in Poland, migrating to Transylvania, retreating eventually to the United Dutch Federation and thence from Antwerp to Britain during the relative freedom of the Civil War and interregnum. And it is very notable that these pioneers were, even in the height of war and oppression, keen advocates of religious toleration, working alongside Jews, Muslims, and every kind of infidel and heretic, even Quakers…
I was lucky enough to be supervised in my own studies in religion by the Cambridge scholar Dr. Justin Meggit who has written extensively on the Quaker and Unitarian interactions with Islam at this time and Justin was keen to remind me that this interest in toleration was not primarily motivated by Christian brotherly love or altruistic principle: they wanted toleration so that they themselves would be tolerated. But howsoever they came by it, this principle remained a philosophical keystone of Unitarianism and liberal religion generally.
As soon as the principles of toleration are admitted it may be observed that the exclusivist claims which are usually held to be central to particular religious faith are weakened. and where such claims for particularity are strong claims, as for example the claim that salvation must come through the redemptive power of Christ in Jesus alone, then it follows that the religious counter argument for inclusivity and toleration must have to be an equally persuasively set out… and liberal religionists did earnestly make their argument, Stretton’s Unitarianism in 1688 was developed by Thomas Evelyn, Samuel Sharpe, Joseph Priestley, Anna Barbault and the Victorian theologian James Martineau who famously set out the principle which we we will see is an influential one that “the Incarnation is true not of Jesus exclusively but by man universally and God everlastingly,” (1891)
This is an argument which is framed here as Unitarian, but theologians like John Hick writing in 1977 and Sally Macfague in The Body of God in 1993 make almost identical claims from well within the mainstream of Christian theological opinion.
I’m going to return later to Spencer’s writing on mysticism but I think its worth quoting here because it accords so well with this Unitarian Christian theme:
“Mysticism is something wider than Christianity; it is an experience which men have attained on different lines of religious development. The truth for which it stands is independent of any particular historical expression—it is grounded in the inmost being of the human soul.. In principle, therefore, mysticism is incompatible with the exclusiveness which is still largely characteristic of the Christian Church. It is incompatible with the claim that Hebrew and ‘Christian tradition is the sole channel of divine revelation. But in reality such exclusive claims do not pertain to the essence of Christianity. What is essential to Christianity is the positive vision for which it stands.”
In 1938 when Spencer published the earliest of the works I’m looking at, the mainstream wasn’t quite as accommodating, and from my reading at least Spencer wasn’t in the least concerned to be so accommodated. In this short book Spencer sets out a profoundly radical but equally spiritualised and utterly uncompromising ethical perspective. It is certainly an uncensored avowal as its cover suggests and it sets out a Religious Basis for society which is ethically derived from explicitly Christian/Nazarene principles which he terms ‘The Law of Love’ and identifies as a communistic mode of social order which proceeds outwards into society from the individual in an ethical inversion of the soviet form of communism which was a present feature of Spencers contemporary experience. He repudiates a religious life which fails to see human relationships as an organic whole, pointing out that: “in the 19 C men were expelled from the Methodist societies for their sympathies with the French Revolution; they were not expelled for their support of ruthless competition and the merciless exploitation of the week and helpless…” 1938, p.25,
“The Law of Love, so far as it enters deeply into men’s souls, seeks to express itself in the whole range of their common life. It seeks to express itself above all in the utter repudiation of the barbaric violence of war, and in the vision of a constructive, world-wide Communism, in which the whole order of the world will be made new.”
Stirring stuff to be writing in 1938 – and the same stuff that was to walk Spencer straight into confrontation with the authorities. I ‘ll let an eyewitness take up the story in an account which I ve taken from the Reverend David Steers excellent Blog Velvethummingbee and which for various reasons may be of interest:
“incendiary bombs were such a menace [in Liverpool] that the government required all males over a certain age to register for fire-watching duties. The minister of Hope Street, the Reverend Sidney Spencer, an ardent pacifist, had no hesitation in fire-watching at his own church or anywhere else, but objected to doing so under compulsion of the State. He refused to register. The magistrates fined him £10 which he steadfastly refused to pay. In due course, he was sent to prison for a term of 14 days. The minister (an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi) was adamant that he did not wish the fine to be paid, but after a few days the Committee felt that he had made his point, and that somehow the fine should be paid anonymously. It was decided that, as a law student with access via the Magistrates’ Entrance to the courts on Dale Street, the Chairman’s son was best able to make the payment without drawing attention to himself. This I did. The first clerk I approached hesitated: “But Mr Spencer has said he doesn’t want this fine paid. I don’t think I can take it.” “If anyone offers us money – we take it!” declared his senior. A few hours later, the Reverend Sidney Spencer was a free man.”
from The Honourable Dr Frank Paterson, a former member of Hope Street and a very distinguished circuit judge who died in 2014, wrote his reminiscences of the Church. https://velvethummingbee.com/2015/05/17/the-church-on-hope-street/
These following quotations from Spencer’s 1947 book ‘Should we follow Karl Barth?’ (spoiler alert – he thinks we shouldn’t) perfectly articulate the fairly nuanced place that Spencer came to occupy after the war, and it’s a space I think we should occupy too.
‘Modernism, with its doctrine of the divinity of man, leads sometimes to an easy-going optimism and complacency, a superficial conception of human progress, a readiness to identify itself with the trends of modern secular civilisation, a failure to recognise the deep spiritual crisis of the modern world.’ (1947, P.10)
‘It is impossible for us to return-as Barth would have us do-to the belief of the early Church that the Kingdom of God will come by a great supernatural transformation. That belief is indeed entirely in line with the mode of thought the emphasis on miracle and divine intervention which characterises the Barthian theology. It is incompatible, not only with modern knowledge, but with the deeper insights of religious faith…’
“Should we follow Barth” 1947, P.56
Neither the rationalistic excesses of atheistic humanism which fails to acknowledge that the crisis of modern life is actually a spiritual crisis (because they fail to deal with spirituality at all), nor the irrational supernaturalism of conservative Christian orthodoxy which is incompatible with contemporary knowledge. But crucially to Spencer’s thesis such conservatism also fails to engage with the deeper insights of religious faith too – and it is these insights which his 1955 book The Deep Things of God seeks to explore: This wasn’t a new venture for Spencer – he had written extensively on Mysticism in 1946:
Traditional Christianity has taught that a unique revelation was given to Hebrew Prophets and Psalmists and to Christian Apostles. But it is the claim of the mystics of all religions that they have shared the experience of revelation. And when that claim is examined sympathetically, it can scarcely be denied.
He writes in A Unitarian’s View of Mysticism (1946 p.19)
Mystics of all religions have come to know in the centre of their spirit the all-pervading Light and Glory of God. … in the Upanishads, “dwells as the Spirit of the divine city of Brahman in the region of the human heart…”
…For the mystics-so far as they follow the logic of their own experience-revelation is not something miraculous or external. It is … the breaking in upon our consciousness of a Reality ever present in ourselves.
In the soul of man, they tell us, there is a divine and transcendent element-the ” inner Self”, the ” Spirit” p.19
But in The Deep Things of God, Spencer sets out the most comprehensive formulation of his theological thinking for a general readership – albeit this is a theological perspective which tends towards a Unitarian Free Christian world view, there are chapters which essay a sound and thoughtful Unitarian view on orthodox Christian doctrines such as the trinity, resurrection, original sin, etc. He also devotes an entire section of the book to Mysticism “Now, it is surely evident that mysticism so understood is of the greatest possible importance to the world. In the first place, its value lies in the knowledge of divine Reality which it brings. It assures us of God as the greatest of all facts. In an age of scientific doubt and widespread unbelief in God that assurance has a peculiar significance.
People no longer take it for granted that the affirmations of religion are true. They ask for ‘proofs.’ The world of the senses is the only world which many are prepared to acknowledge. It is true, certainly, that the reality of mystical experience is not a thing which can be demonstrated conclusively to the sceptic. Men regarding themselves as mystics have at times been deluded; they have been the victims of self-created fantasies. But when we have made every necessary allowance for such possibilities, the record of genuine mysticism stands as a profoundly impressive testimony to the reality of God. ‘There is nothing more remarkable, says Radhakrishnan, ‘than the agreement of the testimony of the mystics far removed from each other in time and space, race and language.’ For the mystic God is not a dogma or a hypothesis, but a living, felt reality, ‘closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet.’ The importance of his testimony lies not only in the fact that it constitutes, by its appeal to experience, the supreme proof of God. It lies also in the close and intimate relation which it establishes between God and the soul of man.” ‘The Deep Things of God’ 1955 p.51
I could keep quoting from this work, not only because the quality of thought is so clear, the prose so elegant and the arguments so sound; but time forbids much more, and this fragment offers a representative snapshot almost like a mandlebrot set in which one detail represents an image of the whole… Spencer refers to George Fox and theologies of The Religious Society of Friends or Quakers quite often and I very much recommend reading The Deep Things of God – it is short, accessible and still quite easy to purchase online.
Another quote which is worth consideration though reveals Spencer’s own awareness of the critiques which he was inviting:
“It is true that mysticism, like any form of religion, falls at times below its own true level. Sometimes it is incomplete, and stops short at the cultivation of inner feeling.
But the real essence of mystical religion lies in the utter giving of the soul to God, that it may be filled with His Light and Strength and Peace.”
The shortcoming in Spencer’s work which may most obviously date his writing to the modern reader is his sex-specific use of the word ‘men’ or ‘man’ when humanity or people would have been better. The use of sex-sensitive language is a progressive improvement and the feminist recognition that using ‘man’ when you mean to signify people ignores the experience of women as equal members of the human race, and contributes to their omission from equal consideration in public-life must seem unarguable to us now. In his defense however it should be recognised that his usage was formulaic, and was the settled norm throughout the European literature over many hundreds of years, the usage is grammatically correct and arose from the Proto Germanic word mann – which means person; so although Spencer’s work can be immediately dated by this exclusionary terminology, I don’t think it should follow that the work be automatically dismissed on this basis either.
Mysticism and World Religions 1963 is the only one of Spencers works which is not aimed at a Unitarian readership and so his tone of avuncular insider familiarity is not quite so evident in this Pelican edition. Many readers will be familiar with the look and feel of these editions and what now seems a discredited project in to provide an easy to access point of authoritative knowledge to the general reader.
A side note here is that while post-modernity generally, and literary criticism in particular aimed to decentre the authority of the writer, it seems to be the reader who actually disappeared in the end…
It is then a slightly distorted perspective that we might get if this was the only one of Spencer’s works we were to read because I think that writing to his readership within a shared, ‘insider’ pesrpective best serves his theological position and discursive style. Nevertheless Mysticism in World Religion combines all the hallmarks of Spencer’s work noted above, with a really enormous erudition and scope.
It is noteworthy that Spencer seeks where posssible to explore each of these traditions from within the expertise of its own adherents; he quotes Buber on Judaism, Suzuki on Zen, Fazil on Sufism etc,
“It is my conviction” he writes in his preface: “that mysticism is of the utmost importance to religion and so to the future of mankind. At a time when religion is met, as never before on a similar scale, with the challenge of materialist philosophy, and when the growth of scientific knowledge of the forces of Nature and the power which this brings with it are a constant temptation to men to neglect the things of the spirit, it is all the more necessary that the inner life should be quickened and renewed. But if the life of religion is to be renewed, there must be a renewal of vision and of understanding; and nothing can be of so much value from this standpoint as the study of the experience and teaching of the mystics.” (1963)
Spencer acknowledges of differences between mystic schools of thought, but makes clear his view that such differences are outliers and confirms his commitment to the Perennialism most famously articulated by Aldous Huxley in his 1945 The Perennial Philosophy but widely shared at that time by thinkers like Huston Smith, Joseph Campbell, Ninian Smart and others. That philosophical / theological approach was to suffer outright rejection by the rising wave of postmodern critics soon after the publication of Mysticism in World Religion – and perhaps this explains Spencer’s almost total disappearance even from Unitarian consideration.
Now it is not my job or my intention to repudiate the entire body of post-modern academic criticism – but I probably do want to challenge some assumptions common to most of these critics in relation to Spencer.
First of all critics were to problematise the tendency of adherents of Western philosophy and theology to identify with their own standpoint – as we have noted in the identification of ‘Comparative Religion’ for example seeming to compare other religions to Christianity which was, according to the bias of the time, the standard by which others could be judged.
Such critics would argue, with some justification, that this is to de-contextualise, and to erase differences which should really be emphasised and honoured.
But there is a problem here too: If we agree that there is no such place as nowhere and no such thing as neutral we have to recognise that the post-modern project is itself situated in a particular cultural academic and historical context; and is itself looking pretty dated and contextualised now.
The presumption of atheist critics was to confer upon their own perspective supervisory status which with the benefit of hindsight – and the arguments of scholars of study of religion from our own century – we can see was simply not justified, and fell into the same category of error.
Far better I think to study religion from within a particular faith in conscious awareness of the individual perspective, and this is most often where Spencer is at his strongest – as an advocate for, and adherent of, liberal Christian religion.
It is certainly the case that Spencer argues for a transcultural core of mystical experience, he is perennialist in outlook as a student of Esslin Carpenter, strongly influenced by Rudolf Otto and Max Muller, and he establishes a very sound body of evidence for that view.
He is essentialist in his view of religion as the outworking of human relationship with the divine and again he argues persuasively for that account.
I am an admirer of the wave of feminist theologians who criticised the disembodied and abstracted habit of mind of most Christian theological writing – the ‘self infinitising’ tendencies which Rosemary Radford Reuether (1975) identifies, and I find many of the arguments that Grace Janzen makes about mysticism, particularly in her book Power Gender and Christian Mysticism 1995 compelling.
It is undoubtedly true that the dominant discourse around Mysticism has been shaped by gender & power, but I would claim Spencer as a proto-critical Theologian whose attempt to reframe mysticism outside traditional theological dogma anticipates and supports the critiques of Jantzen and others.
The feminist contention which rightly identifies an ascetic, anti-emotional and anti physical component in mainstream Christian Theology simply never encountered the theology of Unitarian thinking because by the 1970’s that theology had pretty much disappeared from the critical frame.
In my view the surprising re-emergence of Christianity seems to be in danger of the same mistake; of not encountering radical & liberal Christian theologies. I see emerging Christians embracing Orthodoxy, perhaps because Latin liturgies create a kind of sing-song comfort, or worse perhaps as Eastern Orthodoxy represents a neo-orientalist exoticism. It would be a great failure if this renaissance in Christian theology overlooks the potential and legacies of radical-reformation thinking. I think that we have as religious liberals a shared responsibility to ensure that our voices are heard and shared.
While he is undeniably essentialist, idealist and universalist, Spencer’s commitment to marginal experience, non-orthodox frameworks, and ethical-spiritual pluralism places him closer to Jantzen, Ruether and feminist and post-modern critics generally. Spencer’s commitment to theology of incarnation the immanent transcendent shares with them a strategic affinity and Spencer is unfairly dismissed, just as those second wave feminist writers are in danger of being overlooked themselves now – much, much too quickly …
(If you’re at all interested to read more on this subject I have a chapter called In whom we Live and Move in Cherishing the Earth ed. Maria Curtis Lindsey Press 2023 which is available to buy online from the Unitarians website).
I’ll close with another quotation from Spenser’s Deep Things Of God 1955:
“…[Jesus] saw the glory of God in every star, in every grass-blade, and most in every living soul.
The ‘dualism’ which sets Nature and super-Nature utterly apart and brings them together only by a miracle is foreign to the insight of Jesus and those who share his vision. ..
It is the central truth of mystical religion that there is no such absolute dividing-line. The Life of God, as the mystics everywhere affirm, is the inmost Life of every soul; and it is the divine Life within us which underlies all our strivings after Truth and Beauty and Good. Every stirring of the spirit which makes men seekers and servants of God is a token of His indwelling Presence. The supreme possibility, therefore, is opened out to us of becoming “fellow-workers with God.” …
“The divine Spirit is, indeed, transcendent, infinite, eternal, and in that sense supernatural. We live in time and space, amid the ceaseless pressure of natural forces.
But the divine Spirit who transcends Nature dwells within it; most of all He dwells in us. His Life and Light and Love are ever present in and to our souls; and it is the end of our being to be united to Him- that He may flood us with His Light, and fill us with His Love – and use us as the instruments of His Purpose.”
Bibliography:
Spenser:
‘Is there a religious Basis for Society’ 1938
‘Should we Follow Barth?’ 1947
‘A Unitarian’s View of Mysticism’ 1948
‘The Deep Things of God’ Allen and Unwin, London, 1955
Mysticism and World Religions’ Pelican/Penguin, London 1963
‘Mysticism and Liberal Religion- Essex Hall Lecture’ 1966
Grace Jansen Power Gender and Christian Mysticism 1995
Justin Meggit https://www.justinmeggitt.info/publications
New Woman, New Earth, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Seabury Press, 1975
Note In 1891 James Martineau wrote: “The incarnation of Christ is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally and God everlastingly. He bends into the human to dwell there, and humanity is the susceptible organ of the divine”[1].
[1] In “Tracts for Priests and People” found in “Essays, Reviews and Addresses”, Longmans, Green & Co, London and New York, 1891, Vol. 2, p. 443 (i’m grateful to Rev’d A.J. Brown of Cambridge for tracking down the source of this quotation)
A Space of possibility 