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
the separate town of Wellesley, they put the meetinghouse up on log rollers, hired teams of oxen, and moved it across town to the new center of Needham, across from Town Hall, and placed it on a new foundation, which was replaced in the 1920s, when they dug out a parish hall to go underneath the meetinghouse itself, for theatricals, civic meetings, and educational events. „A religious center with a civic circumference,” the sign now says; all under a bell in the steeple cast by Paul Revere. The Framework of the House: Covenantal Ecclesiology What the metaphor suggests, however, I believe our theological history bears out. In American Unitarianism, the most enduring part of our theology is our framework, our ecclesiology, which we take from Puritan forebears who formed their churches not on the basis of creedal questions (What form of words do we all profess in common?) but rather on the basis of covenant (What spiritual hopes do we share?) The first of these covenants, in Salem, in 1629, spoke of „walking together [...] in the ways of God, known and to be made known." Their faith was not to be fixed in form but open to new insight. As the Rev. John Robinson said to the Pilgrims just before they sailed, „If God should reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it as ever we were to receive any truth by my Ministry. For I am very confident the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy Word.” Out in the Berkshire hills, the founders of the First Congregational Church of Lee, Massachusetts, declared in 1780 that „It is the aim of this church to present a religion as considerate of persons as the teachings of Jesus; as devoted to justice as the Old Testament prophets; as responsive to Truth as science; as intimate as the home; and as indispensable as the air we breathe.” That covenant is still in use, by a congregation that is not Unitarian Universalist, but a part of the United Church of Christ, the liberal denomination with which the UUA has the closest cooperative relations in America. And just as the relations between the locally autonomous congregations of the UUA are best characterized as covenantal, so are the relations between the members groups of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, and out relations with other religious groups, all in shared hope for this world — „one, as covenants can build it,” as one of our hymns puts it. [„One World,” SLT Nr. 133, words by V. Silliman.] Both Dr. Parker and I have followed the late Dr. James Luther Adams in saying that too often modernist liberals have tended to take our covenantal relations for granted. We have allowed them to weaken and fray under 174
