Here's something fantastic about Unitarianism: we're reingaging with the Bible. But not only that, we're offering an alternative way of interpreting the Bible. When I listen to Bill Darlison in Dublin or Robert Hardies in Washington, D.C. I hear Unitarians engaging with the Bible, and offering intepretations of biblical stories based on allegory rather than literalism. Insteading of seeing stories as literal and historical these people are showing how stories can be metaphors for spiritual truths. This is offering the world a different way of engaging with the Bible. And restoring a practice that was very much used in the early Christian church. Previously Unitarians would have been embarrassed by stories like Jesus walking on water, and would try to explain them away or edit them out (a la Thomas Jefferson). But today we're seeing these stories as deeply important and worth engaging in. This offers a real alternative to fundamentalism, which is something to be celebrated.
When I started this blog nearly 4 years and nearly 300 posts ago one of the labels I used for it/me was "radical." Perhaps I used it a little unreflectively. Recently I've been pondering what radical means. A couple of things have made me think of this. Firstly this blog series from my friend Jeremy, which explores a distinction between "radical progressives" and "rational progressives." There is also this definition of radical, liberal and conservative from Terry Eagleton quoted at Young Anabaptist Radicals : “Radicals are those who believe that things are extremely bad with us, but they could feasibly be much improved. Conservatives believe that things are pretty bad, but that’s just the way the human animal is. And liberals believe that there’s a little bit of good and bad in all of us.” What interests me is finding a way to express the tension I feel sometimes between myself and the wider Unitarian movement. One way to express this is to say I tend
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