A revealing tract written by Alice Blair Wesley, a retired UU minister, called Our Unitarian Universalist Faith: Frequently Asked Questions. As the title suggests, the tract attempts to anticipate and answer various questions regarding UU history, theology and doctrine, and practice, including what UUs believe about the Bible. Wesley writes, “We do not…hold the Bible—or any other account of human experience—to be either an infallible guide or the exclusive source of truth…We believe that we should read the Bible as we read other books (or the newspaper)—with imagination and a critical eye.”
Another UU tract called Unitarian Universalist Views of the Bible, edited by Tom Goldsmith, collects short pieces by six UU ministers and congregants. Laura Spencer, a religious educator, writes, “While the Bible contains many valuable lessons, I read it with caution and sensitivity. It helps to have a sense of the time in which it was written and the many alterations and translations it has undergone in reaching its present form.” Mark Christian, another congregant, writes that though Bible stories are full of “archetypal truths” and “compelling insights” into the human condition, “Interpretations of the Bible can be outmoded, sexist, racist, and excessively violent” and thus it is integral to “explore the Bible free of traditional interpretations.” David McFarland, a reverend in Pittsburg, acknowledges that the Bible is part of the UU’s collective “heritage,” such that the “UU Principles and Purposes are saturated with biblical concepts and ideals,” but the Bible itself, again, must be approached critically and cautiously.
In the words of one of the more famous UUs, “And so on.”
These testimonials are consistent with Dennis Hamilton’s take on the creation myth of Genesis, and in both cases the notion of “critique” or “secular criticism” seems to be central to the approach. But what does it mean to criticize the Bible?
In the introductory chapter of The World, the Text, and the Critic, Edward Said glosses “criticism” as that which is “always situated; it is skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings. This is by no means to say that it is value-free” (p. 26). By using Said’s definition here, I do not mean to suggest that First UU Springfield is operating under Said’s definition of critique. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that Said’s definition balances the idea of critique as “skeptical,” “secular,” and “open” (creating the necessary distance between the critic and the object of critique) and at the same time affirms the subjective values of the critic (establishing a fixed but reflexive and amendable point from which the critic views the object of critique). This dual responsibility of “criticism,” to be seemingly impartial yet not neutral, is apparent in the approach to the Bible exhibited at First UU Springfield.
Said’s definition of criticism also helps to illustrate what Talal Asad, following the pioneering genealogical work of Foucault, has called the “critical attitude” of modernity: “In some areas in our modern life, there is the insistent demand that reasons be given for almost everything.” The “critical attitude,” then, is “the relation to knowledge, to action, and to persons that results when this demand is taken as the foundation of all understanding.”[1] While this claim might seem like an overstatement, I think Asad does develop a key insight here into a specific aspect of post-Enlightenment Western culture, a shift in practice that allowed for the establishment of new modes of thinking and critical discourse about previously sacrosanct, untheorizable religious objects.[2] Thus, the approach to the Bible espoused by First UU Springfield is not really all that distinctive or innovative if it is placed in the hypercritical social context of modernity; indeed, as Asad has written elsewhere, “If the Bible is read as art (whether as poetry or myth or philosophy) this is because a complicated historical development of disciplines and sensibilities has made it possible to do so” (p. 9). Such historical developments cannot be overlooked for their influence and continued resonance in Unitarian Universalist congregations, especially in the critical approach to literature in general, and the Bible specifically, at First UU Springfield.
NOTES
[1]
Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Wendy Brown et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 55; emphasis original. In Unitarian Universalist Views of the Bible, Jack Conyers, a congregant, mentions a similar characteristic of the UU tradition, which he calls “the UU tendency to challenge damned near everything.”
[2]
For a discussion of the advent of historical (“higher”) biblical criticism in the eighteenth century and its relation to the development of secularity, see Asad’s Formations of the Sacred: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 37-45.
[1]
Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Wendy Brown et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 55; emphasis original. In Unitarian Universalist Views of the Bible, Jack Conyers, a congregant, mentions a similar characteristic of the UU tradition, which he calls “the UU tendency to challenge damned near everything.”
[2]
For a discussion of the advent of historical (“higher”) biblical criticism in the eighteenth century and its relation to the development of secularity, see Asad’s Formations of the Sacred: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 37-45.
