Unitarian Universalism Quotes

Why in the world a book on Christ for Unitarian Universalists (UUs)? Less than 20 percent of us identify as Christians.1 But more than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christian, and we UUs are only 0.3 percent of America at best.2 So, primarily, this is a book to help us talk intelligently about Christ with our Christian friends. We Unitarian Universalists actually have had a lot to say about Christ over the years as well (that is, centuries, and perhaps even millennia), and we have generally done that in dialogue with mainstream Christians. But not much anymore. This book is meant to encourage us to do so again, not just by referencing our history, but also by speaking freshly as Unitarian Universalists in the twenty-first century.

Why in the world a book on Christ for Unitarian Universalists, when we virtually never use that title for the historical figure
of Jesus of Nazareth? Again, primarily because that's how the rest of the world speaks. They refer to themselves and others who stand in the tradition of Jesus as Christ-ians, not Jesus-ians. Why? Because they tend to be less interested in the Jesus of history than in the Christ of their present faith. Jesus lives with them in their daily lives now as the Christ. Christ is an honorific title that technically means "the anointed one" of God. For most Christians, Jesus is the post-Easter Christ, the resurrected Christ, who is actually with them now in real time - who companions them and comforts them and ~ Scotty McLennan

At the Unitarian Universalist Christmas pageant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it didn't matter that Mary insisted on keeping her nails painted black or that Joseph had come out of the closet. On December 25 at seven and nine p.m., three wise women would follow the men down the aisle -- one wearing a kimono and another, African garb; instead of myrrh they would bring chicken soup, instead of frankincense they'd play lullabies. The shepherds had a line on protecting the environment and the innkeeper held a foreclosure sign. No one quite believed in God and no one quite didn't -- so they made it about the songs and the candles and the pressing together of bodies on lacquered wooden pews. ~ Marina Keegan

I acknowledge myself a unitarian - Believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ derived his Being, and all his powers and honors from the Father ... There is not any reasoning which can convince me, contrary to my senses, that three is one, and one three. ~ Abigail Adams

The EU Constitution is something new in human history. Though it is not as eloquent as the French and U.S. constitutions, it is the first governing document of its kind to expand the human franchise to the level of global consciousness. The language throughout the draft constitution speaks of universalism, making it clear that its focus is not a people, or a territory, or a nation, but rather the human race and the planet we inhabit. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

I am definitively not a 'universalist'".

~R. Alan Woods [2012] ~ R. Alan Woods

There is a false ecumenism, as sentimental and vague as you please, which for all intents and purposes abolishes doctrine; in order to reconcile two adversaries, one strangles them both, which is certainly the best way to make peace.
[...]
Objectivity toward the perspectives and spiritual ways of other peoples is too often the result of philosophic indifferentism or sentimental universalism, and in such a case there is no reason to pay it homage; indeed one may well ask whether objectivity in the full sense of the word is really involved. The Christian saint who fights Muslims is closer to Islamic sanctity than the philosopher who accepts everything and practices nothing. ~ Frithjof Schuon

But out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

...the God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history have professed belief would appear to be evil (at least, judging by the dreadful things we habitually say about him). And I intend nothing more here than an exercise in sober precision, based on the presumption that words should have some determinate content.

(from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17) ~ David Bentley Hart

When we write stories that are happy, with little conflict or inference of sin, then we are creating portraits of the world that perpetuate a sort of "soft universalism," the idea that no one is truly lost but rather that all are actually saved. ~ Gene C. Fant Jr.

A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

The way in which these two practices contain each other is that it has always been possible to use the one against the other: to use racism-sexism to prevent universalism from moving too far in the direction of egalitarianism; to use universalism to prevent racism-sexism from moving too far in the direction of a caste system that would inhibit the work force mobility so necessary for the capitalist accumulation process. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

To do Mohammed justice, his main attack was against the idolatries of Asia. Only he thought, just as the Arians did and just as the Unitarians do, that he could attack them better with a greater approximation to plain theism. What distinguishes his heresy from anything like an Arian or Albigensian heresy is that, as it sprang up on the borders of Christendom, it could spread outwards to a barbaric world. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before. ~ Karl Barth

ξύλα καὶ χόρτος καὶ καλάμη ὥστε μηκέτι ὑπάρχειν - ἀδύνατον δέ ἐστιν οὕτως ἀφανισθῆναι, ἀλλὰ ᾗ χόρτος εἰσὶν ἀφανίζονται· καὶ γὰρ τὸ πῦρ τοῦτο τὸ τῆς κολάσεως οὐκ ἐνεργεῖ εἰς οὐσίαν, ἀλλ᾽ εἰς ἕξεις καὶ ποιότητας. ἀναλίσκει τὸ πῦρ τοῦτο οὐ κτίσματα, ἀλλὰ ποιὰς καταστάσεις, ἕξεις τοιάσδε.

It is impossible that wood, grass, and straw disappear in such a way as to not exist any more, but they [viz., sinners] will disappear insofar as they are grass and so on. Indeed, this fire of the corrective punishment is not active against the substance, but against the habits and qualities. For this fire consumes, not creatures, but certain conditions and certain habits. (Didymus, Comm. In Ps. 20-21 col. 21.15) ~ Didymus The Blind

[T]oday's Washington is about as attentive to the Tenth Amendment as the Unitarian Church is to the Book of Revelation. ~ Joseph Sobran

So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote. ~ Henry Adams

I do not espouse the unitarian position. President Clinton's assertion of directive authority over administration, more than President Reagan's assertion of a general supervisory authority, raises serious constitutional questions. ~ Elena Kagan

Forget what you might have heard. There are no separate corps of angels for agnostics, atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Unitarians, Hindus, Druids, Shintoists, Wiccans, and so on. To put a spin on the old saying, it's okay if you don't believe in angels.
We believe in you. ~ Cynthia Leitich Smith

I personally have always found the Unitarian faith a source of comfort and help in my daily life. ~ Leverett Saltonstall

Good, modern, civilized Western white men are so easily cowed by charges of bias and privilege that they work tirelessly to outdo each other with social displays of moral universalism - by cucking themselves in every way imaginable. Western ~ Jack Donovan

Right, I'll bet he's another vegetarian. Another Unitarian vegetarian who holds up peace signs at street corners every Saturday afternoon and aspires to live in a Mongolian yurt. ~ Elizabeth Berg

We met the next day for coffee and when I asked her what was up she said, "I think I'm having a crisis of faith." To which I thought, what the hell does that look like for a Unitarian? "Yeah," she continued, "I-I think I believe in Jesus." Oh. That's what it looks like. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

I'm walking past the Unitarian church that's not far from the cemetery where you can find Emily Dickinson's grave, when I realize that in this part of my life I've become a scarecrow. It's been like this since that day the police came to the house - I have holes in me, and wind blows through. Oh, I seem to be person-shaped all right, but I'm going nowhere. ~ Kathryn Burak

She liked the idea of a place belonging to the cows, no ownership of human ego. ~ Aporva Kala

So far Unitarian realism claiming to possess positive knowledge about Ultimate Reality has succeeded only by excluding large areas of phenomena or by declaring, without proof, that they could be reduced to basic theory, which, in this connection, means elementary particle physics. ~ Paul Feyerabend

The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations : co-immunism. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot). ~ Kurt Vonnegut

From the earliest days of Unitarianism and Universalism, these traditions have advocated for the compatibility of science and religion. Both traditions encourage the use of reason, the search for truth, and the improvement of human nature and society through learning and the discoveries of science. Some, especially those called humanists, eschew Biblical revelation and supernaturalism and believe that science and technology will eventually solve all the major problems facing humankind. ~ Mark W. Harris

May your life preach more loudly than your lips. ~ William Ellery Channing

I am anxious to see the doctrine of one god commenced in our state. But the population of my neighborhood is too slender, and is too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must therefore be contented to be an Unitarian by myself, although I know there are many around me who would become so, if once they could hear the questions fairly stated. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see. ~ Robert Dallek

Καλεῖ ἡμᾶς εἰς σωτηρίαν. τὸ "ἐπιστραφήσονται" δείκνυσιν ὅτι οὐδεὶς κατὰ οὐσίαν κακός ἐστιν, ἀλλὰ κατὰ προαίρεσιν. εἰ δὲ ἴσχυσεν τὸ κακὸν ἐλάσαι τὴν προαίρεσιν εἰς ἄλλο τι ἄλλως, ἰσχύσει τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἀνακαλέσασθαι αὐτὴν εἰς τὴν προτέραν κατάστασιν.

He calls us to salvation. The verb "they will return/convert" indicates that nobody is evil by essence, by nature, but rather by free choice. But if evil had the power to push the [human] free choice toward something else, something alien, the Good will have the power to call it back to its original condition. (Didymus, Comm. In Ps. 20-21 col. 54.20) ~ Didymus The Blind