UU Minute #54

The Cambridge Platform: 1648



In UU Minute number 41, we learned that religious conflict in 17th-century England was more about polity than theology. The Church of England had Episcopal polity – rule by the bishops. Dissenting congregations had Presbyterian polity – rule by groups of elders called presbyters.

In America, Puritans, criticized by Presbyterians for having no governance, eventually decided they did need to formalize their polity. It would be neither Episcopal, nor Presbyterian. It would be a polity based on covenant: Congregational polity. The Cambridge Platform of 1648 spelled out what that meant.

A church consists of those who profess faith, live pious lives, and enter into covenant together.
The covenant is both among members and with God -- and must be lived out within Christian community.
Members are not admitted to a church without due consideration, and should not leave without due consideration.
Leadership roles include pastors, who communicate Biblical wisdom, teachers, who run the schools and communicate knowledge, and ruling elders, who oversee church administration.
Each church is free to choose its own officers, and call and ordain its own minister.
Although churches are autonomous – each distinct and equal – churches are also bound to each other in a covenant – a communion of churches shown in six ways:

• taking thought for each other's welfare;
• consulting and advising each other;
• admonishing concerning church offenses;
• allowing members of one church to fully participate and receive the Lord's Supper in another church;
• sending letters of recommendation when a member goes to a new church; and
• financially supporting poor churches.

The Cambridge Platform of 1648 is the foundational document of Congregational Polity – the polity we still follow today.

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UU Minute #53

Our Puritan Roots



Joseph Priestley founded the Unitarian Church of Philadelphia in 1796 – the first church on American soil to bear the name Unitarian. But that church was a bit of a historical cul-de-sac: it didn’t lead to a denomination and didn’t generate any other Unitarian churches. The Unitarianism from which we today descend came out of Boston, not Philadelphia, and it came from Puritan congregational churches around Boston adopting Unitarian theology.

The Plymouth colony, begun in 1620, and the Massachusetts Bay colony, begun in 1630, consisted of religious separatists without a strong political tradition other than the sense of being bound in covenant, as modeled in the Bible. These Puritans felt need for neither a creed nor a specific structure of church governance – after all, they were God’s people bound together by covenant, and that was enough.

We have certainly come a long way from the Puritan Calvinist theology. Where Calvin saw total depravity, we see inherent worth and dignity of every person. Where Calvin taught predestination, we emphasize freedom. For Calvin, the central problem of being human is an inner corruption called sin. For us, the central problem is disconnection in need of loving relationship.

But we retain from those Puritan settler colonists a sense that we are a people of covenant and not of creed.

There was a dark side of the Puritan covenant: namely, that the colonists believed that that their covenants with God made them God’s chosen people and therefore justified exterminating the indigenous people who were outside of the covenant. Still, creedlessness and covenant – albeit an open and welcoming covenant – continue to be central to Unitarian Universalism today.

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UU Minute #52

The Priestley Riots



You’ll recall that Theophilus Lindsey founded England’s first Unitarian church in 1774, in London. In 1780, the Birmingham New Meeting called Joseph Priestley to be its minister. Under his ministry the congregation became England’s second Unitarian congregation. Priestley was 47.

In 1782, Priestley published A History of the Corruptions of Christianity. He argued that primitive Christianity had been Unitarian, that Jesus Christ was a mere man who preached the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of a nonexistent soul.

With Priestley now the leader of the Unitarian dissenters, Unitarianism was a revitalized movement. Congregations began springing up around England.

Then came the French Revolution. Unitarians supported the political upheaval across the channel, seeing in it the prospect of humanity freed from despotism and superstition. Conservative leaders in England, however, were horrified by French peasants overthrowing the social order. As England grew increasingly frightened by the turmoil in France, Unitarians were attacked for supporting the revolution – denounced as enemies of church and state. Hostility to dissenters broke out in the Birmingham Riots of 1791, also called the Priestley Riots, since he was a central target of the rioters’ ire.

Rioters attacked or burned four Dissenting chapels, twenty-seven houses, and several businesses. As the rioters approached the Priestley house, he and Mary, his spouse, barely had time to evacuate. They fled from dissenting friend to friend. Priestley's valuable library and his laboratory were looted and razed to the ground, his manuscripts lost in the flames.

Joseph and Mary Priestley fled to London, and three years later – 1794 – sailed for America where, as we have seen, Joseph Priestley established a Unitarian Church in Philadelphia before settling in Northumberland.

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UU Minute #51

Phlogiston: The Element that Wasn't



The phlogiston theory of combustion, first proposed in 1667, said any flammable substance contains an element called phlogiston, and burning releases it. When a log is all burned up, the fire stops because all the phlogiston has been released out of it and absorbed by the air. Growing plants then absorb this phlogiston from the air, which is why plant matter burns so well.

The phlogiston theory also explained why a fire in an enclosed space would go out: because the air in that space had absorbed all the phlogiston it could, so no more could be released into the air.

Pretty cool theory. Explains a lot. Completely wrong. We now know the process of combustion is just the opposite: when something burns, it’s not releasing something into the air, it’s taking oxygen out of the air and oxidizing with it. Which bring us back to Joseph Priestley, a founding figure of Unitarianism and famous for discovering oxygen.

Preistley focused sunlight on mercuric oxide in a glass tube, which released a gas. Priestley noted that candles burned brighter in the gas and that a mouse was more active and lived longer while breathing it. After breathing the gas himself, Priestley wrote:

"The feeling of it to my lungs was not sensibly different from that of common air, but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light and easy for some time afterwards."

Joseph Priestley had discovered oxygen! Only he called it “dephlogisticated air.” You can see what he was thinking: that candles burn brighter because this special dephlogisticated air could better absorb phlogiston released from the candle.

Have you ever encountered something new and delightful – but got completely backwards what it was and how it worked? If so, you’re in good company.

The path of discovery, whether in science or in our spiritual lives, is a collective enterprise. We do it together. We need each other.

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NEXT: The Priestley Riots

UU Minute #50

New Meaning



Here’s something for you: Joseph Priestley believed in Phlogiston – his whole life, apparently.

Let me set the stage. Ashuman ideas and concepts change and evolve, we redefine what words mean. Take the case of “planet.” The word originally meant wandering star. When we learned that those objects we’d been calling planets weren’t stars at all, we might have said, so there’s no such thing as a wandering star, no such thing as a planet. Instead, we redefined the word to fit our new understanding of those objects in the sky to which we’d been referring.

Or take the case of “atom.” The word originally meant “indivisible.” When we learned that they were divisible after all, we might have said, “those things we’ve been calling atoms aren’t atoms.” Instead, we redefined “atom” to fit our new understanding of those objects to which we’d been referring.

This process fascinates me because many of us reach a point in our religious life where we make that sort of choice: either conclude that there’s no such thing as something – God, or freedom – or we redefine the word, and adjust our conception of it. Usually, in the history of evolving human beliefs, we take the route of redefining terms. It is rare that we opt to say something simply doesn’t exist. For instance, even though the humors theory of health and temperament is thoroughly discredited, we don’t say there’s no such thing as blood, phlegm, or bile. We just reconceptualized the role of these bodily fluids.

But for phlogiston, science collectively took the unusual step of declaring it just plain doesn’t exist.

And we’ll have to pick up from there in our next thrilling episode.

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UU Minute #49

Joseph Priestley, part 3



The Unitarian spirit arises from curiosity, learning, and the quest for truth. Experience and evidence are our authorities – not the words of authority figures. Joseph Priestley exemplified our Unitarian spirit.

At age 32, Priestley met Benjamin Franklin, who encouraged an interest in electricity, which led, two years later – 1767 -- to publication of The History and Present State of Electricity, a 700-page tome which included reports of some of Priestley’s own discoveries.

Priestley anticipated the inverse square law of electrical attraction, discovered that charcoal conducts electricity, and noted the relationship between electricity and chemical change.

Priestley’s democratic values connected with his approach to science. His book on electricity used history to show that scientific progress depended more on the accumulation of “new facts” that anyone could discover than on the theoretical insights of a few geniuses. For Joseph Priestley, prejudice and dogma of any sort was an obstacle in both science and religion, and his emphasis was on facts over doctrine, whether in science or in religion.

The same year, Priestley moved with his family from Warrington to Leeds to be minister at Mill Hill Chapel. On the side, he began intensive experimental investigations into chemistry.

He was 35 when his second child, Joseph Junior, was born. At age 36 he met and formed a friendship with Theophilus Lindsey, then Vicar of Catterick. Of Lindsey, Priestley would write,

"I never chose to publish anything of moment relating to theology, without consulting him."

He was 38 when his third child, William, was born. At age 39, Priestley published the first of what would be six volumes published over 18 years on Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. That’s where he published his findings later recognized as the discovery of oxygen – Priestley’s greatest claim to fame.

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UU Minute #48

Joseph Priestley, part 2



Joseph Priestley, founder of Unitarianism in both England and America, was a prodigious theologian and scientist.

1752: At age 19, Joseph Priestley attended Daventry, a dissenting academy, where his theology shifted further leftward. He became, as he would later say, a “furious freethinker” and a Rational Dissenter – a school of thought emphasizing rational analysis of both the Bible and the natural world.

Having already abandoned Calvin’s doctrine of unconditional election, he now renounced Calvinist doctrine of original sin, and atonement, rejected the Trinity, and embraced the Unitarian teaching of human perfectibility. At Daventry, the goal that would occupy Priestley’s life began to take form: to construct a Christian philosophy in which both religious and moral "facts" could be scientifically proven.

He became a minister, continuing scientific studies and experiments on the side. At age 22, he began serving a dissenting congregation in Suffolk. At age 25, he accepted a call to serve a congregation in Cheshire. There, he established a school, which succeeded well enough that, at age 28, he was offered a teaching position at Warrington Academy.

At age 29, he married Mary Wilkinson, and the next year they had a daughter, Sarah.

During this period, he wrote histories, narrating an optimistic story of humankind continually progressing both scientifically and ethically. For Joseph Priestley, the study of history was a moral imperative because it allowed people to perceive and to advance this progress. Everyone needed to understand this, so Priestley promoted the education of middle-class women, which, in mid-18th century England, was unusual.

The Joseph Priestley story continues in our next thrilling episode.

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NEXT: Joseph Priestley, part 3