The Rev. Dr. George K. Beach

The Rev. Dr. George K. Beach, the Rev. Dr. John Buehrens

2059 James Luther Adams and the Transformation of Liberalism

Speakers: the Rev. Dr. George K. Beach, the Rev. Dr. John Buehrens, the Rev. Dr. Robin W. Lovin

Prepared for UUA.org by: Jone Johnson Lewis, Reporter; Lisa Presley, Editor

The Rev. Dr. George K. Beach's newest book on James Luther Adams, Transforming Liberalism: The Theology of James Luther Adams, was published by Skinner House. Beach began the session by summarizing James Luther Adams' life, from his childhood as son of a Baptist minister through his death in 1994. He noted the influence of Adams on so many ministry students, and asked, "Do we invoke his name because he charmed us and ignore his ideas because they challenge us?"

Beach noted that he'd organized the book around Adams' own themes. Adams himself "was not systematic but he was coherent." Adams taught that it was important to interpret the symbols of a religion in light of the present situation. He drew from the Jewish and Christian tradition on the religious idea of an original creation, a fall, and the possibility of redemption through a redemptive community, Beach stressed.

Beach also wanted this book to be a source for the stories for which Adams was famous – the anecdotes that were never mere illustrations or embellishments, for Adams believed that religious meaning is found in persons, events, and history. Beach called this Adams' "parabolic vision" and compared it to the practice in the ministry of Jesus to use parables to allow the discovery of often-surprising meaning.

Adams, Beach said, set out to transform liberalism – liberalism in the church, in social causes, in seminary teaching. Beach recalled Adams' 1940 Berry Street lecture, in which Adams pointed out that commitment is largely neglected in liberalism, and that liberals were largely uncommitted and therefore self-frustrating people.

Beach continued by saying he saw six elements in Adams' work that we should heed in transforming liberalism:

• Consider the nature of religion. The intimate and ultimate intersect where we face existential questions that call for religion.
• Consider the nature of the human condition. We have the gift to create and choose, yet we are limited, finite, and faulty. We need to transform our own hearts and minds, being born not once or twice but again and again and again.
• Consider the world age in which we live. We need to influence history and not just be pushed around by it. This means a consideration of the nature of power, and of good and evil – evil including tragedy (that our goodness is often twisted to bad ends) and idolatry (our tendency to turn over power to false objects).
• Consider ethics. Democracy and social justice are basic to the "human vocation." Adams urged that each person needs to be at the cutting edge of social issues through involvement in a group. As Adams said, "by their groups you shall know them."
• Consider the need for community. Adams stressed the idea of covenant, and the need for fellowship, friendship, marriage, family, citizenship, and "church-person-ship" as opposed to being alone, isolated. Thus, also "by their roots you shall know them."
• Consider faith and its renewal. Adams taught that everyone has faith in something, unless one is completely nihilistic or utterly despairing. Adams' simple definition of God was "the community-forming power," but also said that more important than any meaning of God is a sense of history and engagement in that history.

Professor Lovin noted that this summary of Adams' ideas is also an expression of an agenda for transformation. He stressed the idea of stance: the idea of symbols is broad, but it's important to look at the experience and think about where it fits. For example, are social divisions necessary or part of the fall? Find, he urged, a stance – or recognize that people may already have a stance.

This stance, he continued, provides the substance of the culture. He differentiated this idea from the tendency today of some religious groups to try to give legal preferred status to some religious stances; he suggested that the attempt to "legislate Christianity" is a kind of admission of failure of that stance.

Lovin suggested that today, some people live in a kind of Manichaean universe, sorting out good and evil with the sense that it's an either/or – rather than a fall/redemption model. "There's a reason there are Christians, Jews, Muslims, but no Manichaeans, for while Manichaeism is a temptation, it essentially denies the possibility of a common creation and ultimate redemption.

Lovin closed his remarks noting that Adams' idea of a transformation of liberalism is "desperately needed in church and society."

The Rev. Dr. John Buehrens began by saying, simply, "Read this book. Wrestle with it." There's a need, he said, for liberals to wrestle with the divine and with their own complacency. Liberals tend towards intellectual arrogance and an over-optimistic anthropology. He credited Beach for his efforts in this book, and previous ones, in making the ideas of James Luther Adams available.

"Adams was wise enough not to write his own version of the book," Buehrens continued. His legacy was primarily through interpersonal and intergroup relations. Why, Buehrens asked, did Adams not write his own systematic book about his thought?

First, it may have been in part Adams' character. He stayed up until late hours doing correspondence, then took an afternoon nap after watching a soap opera to make up the sleep. He left it to us, Buehrens said, to write the book.

Adams played a similar role in liberal theology to Reinhold Niebuhr's: both saw the impotence of most liberals and humanists during the Nazi era. Adams asked who provided effective resistance. Adams found that it was those who wrestled enough with theology to become self-critical – those who did not adopt a Manichaean view, but saw potential for good and evil in all.

Unitarian Universalism, Buehrens suggested, paraphrasing another minister a generation earlier, has been living off the theological and intellectual capital of James Luther Adams for two generations.

Adams , Buehrens concluded, shows that the theological and the humanist cannot be separated, because we become most human when we are awestruck and driven to human relationship. Adams invites us to "wrestle through the dark nights until we are transformed and blessed."

The Rev. Dr. George K. Beach described himself as retired from full-time ministry and now a farmer in central Virginia.

The Rev. Dr. John Buehrens is a past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, now serving First Parish in Needham, Massachusetts.

The Rev. Dr. Robin W. Lovin is Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and an ordained United Methodist minister.

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