First Parish Unitarian Universalist ChurchMedfield, Massachusetts
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church
Judy Deutsch (4/99)
Minister Emerita
• Unitarians generally were people who believed that the one god ( the one interdependent web; the one interacting whole of everything there is, was, and shall be) - can best be expressed as one, not three. Hence we are unitarians, not trinitarians.
• Universalists generally were people who believed that god is too good to damn anyone to hell, and gradually they developed a strong consciousness of the universality of at least the human race.
• By 1961, most members of both groups had decided that what is most important about religion was the way its adherents live their lives upon this earth, not what they believed about god and death. Hence, and also because of financial reasons, the two small groups came together in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), the association to which this church and about 1000 other religious societies on the North American continent now belong. They now contain about 180,000 people. There are other UU societies on every other continent except Antarctica.
• Unitarians (with a small u) have been around since at least the time of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten, who lived in the 14th century (1364-1347) B.C. and who believed in one god - Aten, and the Hebrew Moses who probably lived about 100 years later in the thirteenth century B.C. and who believed in the one god Yahweh. They were around, also, at the time of early Christianity, and by the third and fourth centuries, were put to death by the Church if they did not profess a belief in the trinity.
• Universalists (with a small u) were included among early Christians, too.
• Christian leaders of the first four centuries tried to reconcile the one God of the Hebrew Scriptures with their portrayal of Jesus as the Messiah. This Messiah was very different from the political and historical Messiah that King David had been and that the Hebrews were looking forward to having again. This was a spiritual Messiah. It was hard to reconcile this concept of a spiritual messiah with the concept of one god, and the church leaders did so by borrowing the concept of the trinity from the Greeks. By the 4th century A.D. trinitarianism won out, and salvation only-by-some won out by the 6th century A.D.. However, even under Medieval Catholicism, there always seemed to be a way open for individual Catholics to achieve salvation.
• But by the time of the 16th century when Luther and Calvin and their followers broke away form the Catholic Church (in what is called the Protestant Reformation), a strong doctrine of the salvation-of-only-a-few developed, especially among Calvinists. According to Calvin, God predestined -before birth - which people were elected to go to heaven and which were elected to go to hell after death.
• The Protestant Reformation generally accepted the doctrine of the Trinity, but there were some 16th century forerunners of Unitarianism in Poland (Faustus Socinus), Transylvania (Francis David and King Sigismund), Spain (Michael Servetus), and England (John Biddle). However, from at least the 4th century through much of the 16th century A.D., belief in a unitarian concept of God was no trivial matter. It was often sufficient cause to be put to death. as Servetus was by Calvin in Geneva 1553. By 1563, a belief in Unitarianism was no longer a reason to be put to death in England.
.• Concurrent with the Protestant Reformation was what is called the Radical Reformation, a movement emphasizing a spiritual fellowship of free spirits, little formal organization, direct communion of souls with God, and horizontal rather than vertical leadership of the group. Some of these people became Baptists. Some fed into the American Universalist scene.
Beginnings In the American Colonies and the United States: Unitarianism and Universalism developed largely out of Calvinism (New England Puritanism), the Radical Reformation, and the Enlightenment.
• Institutional Universalism had its birth in New England with the Gloucester Universalist Church being dedicated for that very purpose in 1780; John Murray was its minister. He was trinitarian. He had been much influenced by George de Benneville, a product of the Radical Reformation.
• By 1790, Hosea Ballou became convinced that Universalism was the answer to the doubts he had about God's condemning people to suffer endlessly in Hell. Afterwards, applying his reason to the Bible, Ballou also discarded his belief in the Trinity. In central Massachusetts he preached a doctrine that God is love.
• By 1885, Universalism was the sixth largest denomination in the United States; by 1926, one of the smallest. The growing lack of emphasis on damnation in mainstream Protestantism, and Universalism's lack of a centralized structure probably contributed to its waning membership
.• Universalists translated their principles into social action through the formation of schools and colleges, publishing books, opposing the death penalty, and being staunch abolitionists. Theirs was the first denomination in which a woman, Olympia Brown, was ordained by a unit larger than a single church (1863).
• The Universalist eighteenth-century physician and fund raiser for the American Revolution, Benjamin Rush, proposed a plan for a federal department promoting and preserving perpetual peace.
• The almost mid-eighteenth century revivalist movement called the Great Awakening split New England Puritanism into two streams: one of them evangelical and emotional, stressing the role of the Spirit, the other rationalist, stressing the role of the mind. It was among the latter that the precursors to Unitarians, who called themselves Liberal Christians, were found. They believed that people were born with a capacity for doing both good and evil; they insisted that what people do in life has a real bearing on their salvation; and they believed that the Doctrine of the Trinity was against reason and that it was not to be found in the Bible.
• By 1785, King's Chapel in Boston become Unitarian, and was the first church in this land to do so.
By 1830, what is now First Parish Unitarian Universalist of Medfield voted to come under the Unitarian Covenant. It had been started as a trinitarian church society and town meeting house in 1651. Its first building was built in 1653. Our present church, the third building, was built in 1789. The Baptists separated themselves out from it in about 1782, and the Orthodox separated themselves out from our church in 1827 (the latter probably because the minister had become Unitarian as did a sizeable number of ministers at that time from their own reading of the Bible and from the influence of German Biblical scholars). Although the Unitarians and the Universalists Associations merged in 1961, this church didn't start listing Unitarian Universalist on its letterheads until the 80's.
• In 1825, The American Unitarian Association, an association of ministers, was formed.
• In 1829, William Ellery Channing preached that the trinitarian doctrine was unscriptural.
• In 1834, Ralph Waldo Emerson began to formulate his transcendentalism, the concept that truths of religion and morality are direct intuitions of the divine.
• Unitarians sought to put their religion into practice in educational institutions, prison reform, literature, the founding of orphanages, the peace movement, and in helping the poor. Some of the Unitarians who worked in these fields that you may know of are Horace Mann, Dorothea Dix, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Unitarians were on both sides of the slavery question.
• Probably because of the influence of scientific revelation and methodology, the period just after World War saw a strong growth, perhaps a dominance of humanism among Unitarians. UUism's Judaeo-Christian background has gone on to be further supplemented by eastern, Native American, and religions, as well as by the women's movement. UU's are generally white and fairly well-educated, middle class, and not wealthy. They may be humanists, theists, agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Christians, s, etc..
• Unitarian Universalism has a strong social action component fostered by yearly resolutions for study and action, the Unitarian Unversalist Service Committee, the UUA's Department of Faith In Action, and the Unitarian Universalists for Economic Justice. There are also UU Christian and Buddhist groups, as well as the UU's for Jewish Awareness, the Covenant of UU s, the Women's Heritage Society, the Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation, etc..
• The UUA has long stood for family planning and choice and for non-racism. It probably has been anti-sexist for about 25 years and for the rights of gay, lesbians, bi-sexual and transgender people for about 15 years, Once again, during the last 10 years or so, it has been on a vigorous path to remove racism from its midst and the land and to help bring about more economic justice in the nation .
• The UUA is divided into 23 districts. Representatives of our societies meet in those districts annually and for specific purposes throughout the year. Representatives of the member societies of the UUA meet in a General Assembly once a year. Then and in-between, members and societies try to carry out the UUA principles as well as they are able. Always, the individual societies and the individual persons remain supreme. And individual societies, as well as the districts and the continental association, are run democratically. Furthermore, the individual societies have what is known as congregational polity. What that really means has been a course of discussion for a long time.
First Parish is a Welcoming Congregation to all persons
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