Clarence Russell Skinner was born today in 1881.
One of the last wave of great Universalist divines, Skinner served most famously as professor of applied Christianity at Crane Theological School, where he also served as dean. Skinner was also founder and for many years “leader” of the Community Church of Boston.
A socialist and pacifist Skinner suffered a certain amount of persecution for his politics.
And he is considered a central influence in the development of contemporary Unitarian Universalist theology.
What caught my attention was the concluding paragraph in the UU scholar Charles Howe’s biographical sketch at the online Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography.
Skinner’s thinking evolved significantly over his lifetime, from the optimism of the Social Gospel to a realism that recognized that the attainment of a united humanity depended on human choices. In his later years he came to emphasize what he termed “the unities” and “the universals.” By “the unities” he meant “the coherence of what may seem to be separate into a oneness, an operative harmony, a functional relationship which belongs to all parts of a whole”; by “the universals” he meant that which had an absence of limits, “the antithesis of the limited, the opposite of the partial.” “The unities refer to things as they truly are; the universals refer to things as they ought to be.” To expand human understanding and actions to embrace “the universals,” was, Skinner asserted, the essential human task. “[We must] so expand our spiritual powers that we vastly increase our understanding and sympathy. There is no middle way. It is greatness— universalism—or perish.”
It is my continuing thesis that Unitarian Universalism is part of an emerging western liberal spirituality, in fact the largest single institutional expression of that spirituality.
And this spirituality is based in two intuitions expressed nicely in the contemporary Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes. The first calling attention to the preciousness of the individual and the second how we are completely woven out of each other and completely dependent upon each other. (As an interesting footnote on this, the draft P&Ps; shift the language of the 7th Principle, the one calling us to “respect” for the interdpendent web, in the draft language now to “reverence” for the web is a powerful move toward acknowledging the sacred nature of these statements…)
Howe’s quote is an expression of this twin intuition in the first half of the twentieth century. We are, of course, continuing to divine what these twin observations about the nature of the human heart and the world itself means. This is an ongoing process. We who have shared this intuition look at it from many different angles, and have a communal responsibility to publish those angles as we move toward a coherent expression of what is a saving vision.
I’m part of the Buddhist contribution to this conversation which has brought among the range of insights, those of Nagarjuna and the Prajnaparamita literature (via Zen) into the dialogue. One facet of a jewel that is both ancient and most contemporary.
And there’s something moving for me in noting how this insight was being articulated two generations before there was an active Buddhist presence within Unitarian Universalism.
Thank you, Clarence!
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