Address: “James Luther Adam’s
Theology in a Prophetic Key”©
The Rev. Sarah Lammert, USR,
February 25, 2007
This weekend our congregation hosted
a “con” with 100 youth from all over the New York Metro District. Being with the youth reminded me of my first
UU youth worship experience, something like 15 years ago, at a General
Assembly. Arriving a few minutes late, I
was impressed by the fact that hundreds of people had crowded into the
Convention center room assigned to the event, despite the fact that it was now
after 11:00 p.m. The youth were
struggling to get everyone to get into some kind of a line, which snaked
through the room. At one end was a basin
of water and a towel, and we were asked to remain silent.
After a time of expectant hush, it
soon became clear that the entire worship service was going to consist of
silently taking turns having our feet washed, then washing the feet of another.
It was a crazy thing to do – p
It was during a favorite argument about
who was the greatest among them that Jesus abruptly stood up after celebrating
the Passover meal, and began washing the feet of his disciples, as the story is
told in the Christian Scriptures. Foot
washing, which was a regular ritual of hospitality in 1st Century
Palestine, where dusty, manure filled streets left one’s sandaled feet slightly
less than pristine, was usually carried out by a lowly house slave. So, Jesus was making quite a statement about
the nature of true greatness when he signaled that to be truly great is to
serve, through this very intimate act.
As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “Everybody can be great because
anybody can serve... You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by
love.”
James Luther Adams – a 20th
Century scholar, minister, social activist, journal editor, author and Harvard
Divinity School professor -- loved this
kind of story writ as parable, a story whose purpose it is to reveal a hidden
truth in the guise of the ordinary, turned on its head. The story of the foot washing had particular
significance for him because it said something about the meaning of life. I’ve often quoted Jim Adams to you all, when
I’ve said that people come to Unitarian Universalism seeking intimacy and
ultimacy. Intimacy in terms of
friendships and the connections of community, but also intimacy in terms of
really occupying and knowing oneself, accepting oneself, being at home in one’s
own skin. Ultimacy represents that which
is of the highest value, worthy of reverence, worthy, even of devotion.
For Adams, the foot-washing story is
symbolic of the coming together of intimate experience and ultimate meaning –
it is through humble service that we tap the power of the greatest love. He was fond of quoting Pascal: “Practice opposite
virtues and occupy the distance between them.”
Adams was a dialectical thinker – he embraced the “both and” approach
rather than the way of “either or”:
In Shakespeare’s The Tempest [writes his biographer George Kimmich Beach] Miranda
asks, “Were they benevolent or malevolent powers that brought us to this isle?” Prospero answers, “Both, both, my girl!” From Adams we learn the necessity of saying “both,
both” – both prophetic and mystical sensibilities, both eternity and
temporality, both intimacy and ultimacy, both unity and diversity.[1]
Jim Adams had a fascinating life. He was born into a fundamentalist Christian
family in Eastern Washington in 1901. He
was raised in the strictly fundamentalist, almost otherworldly culture of the
Plymouth Brethren, which was always looking towards the rapture. He remembers a time when the family farm was
besieged with a terrible dust storm, and the family was kneeling in prayer,
their heads covered in old pillows to help filter the dust, which was
relentless, making it difficult to breathe.
Young Jim was simply praying for the calming of the winds, but he
learned later that his father was praying then and there for the Second
Coming.
In
college, at the University of Minnesota, he rebelled against his childhood
religion, embracing atheistic humanism. He
was so strident about his new ideas that he actually became completely
estranged from his parents, something he commented very little about. His friends were astonished when this so
called “raving humanist” took the advice one of his professors, a Unitarian,
who shocked Jim by suggesting that he had a call to the ministry. He
received his Masters of Divinity from Harvard, and served two congregations in
Massachusetts before accepting a position on the faculty of Meadville Lombard
Theological School in Chicago. He would
arrive a decade after Henry Nelson Wieman, and would certainly have been well
acquainted with the Process Theology school of thought, and with the metaphysics
of Alfred North Whitehead, whom he loved to quote. But it would be the liberal Christian Paul
Tillich who would most profoundly influence his own beliefs about the nature of
God, and the purpose of life.
It is important to say that before
he moved to Chicago, Adams took a year off to study in Europe. There, in Germany in 1935-6, he experienced
firsthand the merciless crushing of dissent of Hitler and the Nazi party as
they began their march throughout the continent. Using a home movie camera, Adams filled the
underground resistance movements, interviewing such notable people as Karl
Barth, Albert Schweitzer and others. He
was detained by the Gestapo and encouraged to leave or be imprisoned. By hiding his films under a portrait of
Hitler in his suitcase, he was able to smuggle out his documentation of the
clandestine Christian resistors, and well into his 80’s he
One of his students, the reporter and
author Chris Hedges, remembers well the warning Adams issued to his class in
1989, warning them that the Christian right in America were becoming a force of
fascism with which we would all have to contend:
The Nazi’s, he said, were not going to return with
swastikas and brown shirts. Their
ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible…. He saw in the Christian Right, long before we
did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi
party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social
instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of
religion, rise to dismantle the open society.
He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly
platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and
impotent. Liberals, he said, did not
understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world
worked.[2]
Adams adopted Unitarianism, and
later Unitarian Universalism, as his own, teaching scores of budding UU
ministers at Meadville-Lombard and then Harvard Divinity School, taking an
active role in his home congregations, and serving on numerous UUA committees. He lived to the ripe old age of 92, continuing
a lively correspondence with a wide group of people right until the end,
despite a debilitating spine disease that plagued him in his later years. He was an inside critic of liberal religion,
challenging UU’s to take seriously the p
Not all of Adam’s colleagues were
thrilled with his criticisms of liberal religion, and he was occasionally
challenged to leave if he found so much wrong with Unitarian Universalism, but
for the most part he came to be respected as a thoughtful and constructive
reformer, worthy of listening to.
His concerns remain relevant today, seventy
years after he began to air them. “Liberalism
is dead: Long live liberalism!” he declared as the Second World War began,
warning that excessive individualism and an anti-institutional bias were
weakening the power of liberal religion by frustrating efforts to achieve
consensus and shared commitment. He
worried that Unitarians valued pluralism over historic identity, creating a kind
of spiritual relativism that regards all beliefs as equally true. He found liberalism infected with the biased
belief that “democratic community is already achieved,” thereby partially
blinding us to the iniquities of race and class. Finally, he felt that religious liberalism
has become distorted into a faith in progressive enlightenment, with a near
idolatrous faith in the power of education to move humanity ever on a
trajectory of greater goodness and achievement.
He felt that UU’s ignored the tragic element of history, and the evil
that good people are all capable of, thus ignoring our own deep need for
spiritual and moral transformation.
Adam’s theology is best summed up in
the responsive reading we shared this morning, “I Call That Church Free.” For Adams God is that power which we
experience in the covenanted community, that binds us together in caring
trusting fellowship, and protects us from the “idolatry of any human claim to
absolute truth or authority.” The
primary purpose of the free church, according to Adams is worship, which he
defines as the renewed loyalty to the spirit of love and all its ways. Yet the language of the free church must be
flexible and not doctrinaire. “People
can die,” he quipped, “from a hardening of the categories.”
Adams was a person who believed that
ethical commitment and social relevance are the touchstones of authentic faith. He approached the mystical with what I would
call skeptical respect, and while he drew wisdom from a wide range of
philosophical and literary sources, he clearly defined his own life by a
rational approach to living the teachings of Jesus. He embraced Paul Tillich’s definition of God
as the “Ground of All Being” but abhorred what he called “lifeless abstraction.” For him, the best religious teaching came
through stories – stories which opened up new ways of thinking and imagining,
making available a transforming power.
He pulled stories from his own life,
he quoted philosophers and poets, and he had complete command of the Bible from
his fundamentalist youth. He was fond of
telling the story of the Good Samaritan, which for Adams was an attack on
stereotypes which conceal or distort reality.
He took seriously Jesus admonition to go out and do the same as the
Samaritan who risked his own life to care for his enemy:
The question could be put to us, [he writes] Who
for us today is the Samaritan? Who for
us today is imprisoned in stereotypes, I mean our stereotypes, pinned wriggling
on the wall?
“An unexamined faith” Adams was fond
of saying “is not worth having.” Adams
challenges us to continually test and discuss our answers to the great
questions of life, and also to search our own hearts for that which we would
suppress or label as other. While
religious liberalism has always been interested in the application of reason to
faith, here with Adams we begin to see the influence of the post-modern
liberation theology movement on liberalism, which asks us to acknowledge our
positions of privilege in terms of race, class, culture and gender, and
embraces an inward spirituality that is expressed through engagement with
social justice.
Adams was a believer in a lived and
living tradition. On the one hand, he
felt that abstractions alone were worthless, and that faith must be put into
action in the realm of mercy and justice.
He often challenged fundamentalists and pietists for having a “mere God”
who is restricted to inward spiritual assurance. On the other hand, he was irritated by UU slogans
like “deeds not creeds” which seemed reflect a moral smugness. If we are not servants of a higher will, he
argued, we have lost our sense of human proportion; the basis of a true
humanism.
During his lifetime, Adams was so
committed to voluntary associations, that it was said he could not resist
running to any meeting he was invited to.
Thus, he never got around to collecting his own works into coherent
books – a task that was left to a few of his devoted students, who have woven
together his essays into a coherent whole.
I’ve published a list of books from the entire February series in the
newsletter which will be mailed next week, and I encourage you to read more
about the Process theologians and the prophetic theology of James Luther
Adams.
Next fall, I will run a series on
more contemporary forms of liberation theology, which you will have an
excellent introduction to when the President of Starr King School,
For now, I leave you with an
extended version of the words we spoke together in our offertory. The only entire book Adams ever actually put
together himself was his autobiography, which he titles “Not without Dust and
Fear,” quoting John Milton from a pamphlet protesting state censorship of
publishing in England. Tied together
with Adams’ own words, they capture something of the enduring message of James
Luther Adams:
The meaning of life is fulfilled only by those who
enter the struggle for justice in history and community. Any other way is the way of loneliness, or
alienation from each other, and it leads to the feeling that “hell is other
people,” knowing the while that it is in ourselves. Let us then invoke the spirit of John Milton
when he said: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised
and unbreathed, that never sallies forth and sees her adversary, but slinks out
of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and
heat. That virtue therefore which is but
a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice
promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure.[3]
[1] Beach,
George Kimmich, Transforming Liberalism, Skinner House Books,
[2] Hedges, Chris, “The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism,” Nov. 2004, No major publication would print this essay. It can be found at www.theocracywatch.org.
[3] As quoted in Beach, p. 335.