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
ments of religious enthusiasm. They believed that the gift of reason is also a gift of the Spirit, to be used in discernment. But it is significant that it was in this period that the Unitarian movements in Britain and America really found their earliest form. They took institutional and covenantal form, however, only during the Second Great Awakening, following American and French Revolutions. Martin Buber once said that at the beginning of the modern age, at the time of the French Revolution, the ideals of liberty, equality, and what was then called fraternity walked hand in hand. Today we might better call the last the spirit of kinship, the sense of all being sisters and brothers, children of one great Mystery. But as revolutions spread west and east, something happened. The three became divided. The spirit of liberty went west, and changed its character on the way. It became mere freedom - to do as I please, freedom to exploit the land, to exploit my fellow human beings. The spirit of equality went east - and became the faceless equality of the gulag, of people all waving the same little red book. While the spirit of kinship, the religious spirit, the one needed to bind the other two together, went missing from the dominant houses of power and of intellect, taking refuge chiefly in the homes and hearts of oppressed people everywhere. Only in our time has it emerged again: as leaders like Dr. King brought the religious spirit to the secular west, in the service of a deeper dream of freedom and broader equality, at least of opportunity; and as leaders like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel brought the yearning for transcendence to the secular east, to restore to its vaunted equality some sense of the inherent worth and dignity of the human spirit and its quest for self-transcendence. The late James Luther Adams, whom I revere as perhaps the most important theologian in our tradition in the last two generations, sometimes called himself „a unitarian of the third person” meaning that he regarded the Spirit that brooded over the waters at the creation, the Spirit that blessed and inspired Jesus and the prophets, and the Spirit that leads a truly prophetic religious community to be not merely democratic but pneumocratic - all to be the same Spirit. In our age, sadly, a church that is democratic without sufficient discipline to discern what Spirit it is follow can degenerate into a search for the lowest common denominator of consumer preference. But worship in a truly prophetic religious community of our tradition is led by theologically reflective leaders who invoke, often against the grain of the preferences of their own people, the challenges and inspiration of that Spirit that renews life, transforms hearts, and leads to lives of deeper compassion, discernment and service. Mind you, this Spirit appears in various names and guises. The young ordinând at the service I attended is a practitioner, in his own spiritual life, of Zen meditation. He did his internship 183 A L t t i h h H b e e o e u r C 2 $ a h 1 e I a s rene ° g n H l e t P g r e y o y f a n d
