Szabó Árpád (szerk.): Isten és ember szolgálatában. Erdő János emlékezete (Kolozsvár, 2007)
John A. Buehrens: A House for Hope. Liberal Theology and the Challenges of the 21st Century
liberal house are the good people, while those without are the evil ones. And this would be ironic, since the Universalist side of our tradition begins with discomfort with the idea that God pre-ordains some souls to enter God's eternal home and casts others outside into eternal torment. Robert Ingersoll, the great infidel orator of 19th century America, once said that the Universal ist God was like a patient and forgiving parent who „leaves the latch-string out until the last wayward child has come home." But it is easy to assume that we, within our theological house, are already good, because of our idealism. Such a soteriology tries to solve the problem of human evil too quickly. It is like roof that is likely to leak, or to come crashing down in disillusionment. Just after 9/11, the UU World ran an issue focused on liberal theology and human evil. One of the people interviewed was my one-time parishioner Dr. Lois Fahs Timmons, a psychologist and daughter of the great liberal religious educator Sofia Lyon Fahs. Timmins said that when she grew up in liberal religious education „we spent 95 percent of our time studying good people doing good things, and skipped very lightly over the bad parts of humanity. [...] I was taught not to be judgmental, not to observe or report on the bad behavior of others. Consequently, because of my education, I grew up ignorant of bad human behavior, incompetent to observe it accurately, unskilled in how to respond to it, and ashamed to talk about evil.” When Rebecca Parker asked Gordon McKeeman to explain Universalism to her, he replied as succinctly as Hillel: „It’s simple. Universalism is the belief that we're all meant to end up together in heaven, so we might as well learn to get along with each other now.” Fine. But the question, „Why can’t we all just get along?” can be either naive or go deeper. When it was voiced in America by Rodney King, an innocent African American man whose needless beating by Los Angeles police was captured on videotape, I noticed that it was white liberals who most immediately ceased on the question. It was an easy alternative to examining more difficult questions of privilege. The privileged, of course, never want to know or see that they live protected in structures of oppression. Our real hope lies in the hard work of deconstructing those structures, including he asking of deeper questions about privilege and power. But privileged children of the Enlightenment too easily believe that we are the children of light, and have no sin in us. And so we deceive ourselves. We run the danger of being as Manichean as the pseudo-Christian imperialists who are now so eager to wage jihad against „the evil-doers,” without any inclination to examine the beam in their own eye. A more thorough-going universalism would recognize that while the privileged and protected always have a vested interest in denying their own complicity in structures of oppression, 176
