RW Emerson: Heart vs. Mind in Religious Exploration

RW Emerson is justifiably famous for his pithy one liners, although they appear strewn like nuggets of gold in a field of dense pyrite, at least to modern readers.  Here are a few you may recognize but not have realized he was the author:

Hitch your wagon to a star.  To be great is to be misunderstood.   Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. All mankind love a lover.

And this last one, which I love from an author: Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.

He was a lecturer and writer of history, biography, and science, as well as a poet, but I want to focus on his religious and philosophical views today because the conflict he felt in religion is one that you may feel, too, pulled between heart and mind, intellect and emotion. By looking at some of his decisions, and considering the context of those actions, we can reflect on our individual and congregational values about the heart and mind of our faith. 

Unitarians sometimes forget that, although he was a Unitarian minister, in what amounted to a nine generation family business, Emerson quit the job after only 3 years.  Ostensibly it was over his discomfort in celebrating the Eucharist, but really, according to his journals and other writings, it reflected broader reasons that many of us have experienced, too, as we have church shopped through our lives, trying out different denominations, and various congregations within them.  After he left, he neither referred to himself as Reverend nor expected others to do so.   I think he’d be rather embarrassed to have a Unitarian church named after him, because he purposefully left the denomination, explaining that one’s relationship with the divine was better found outside any church than within.

Roman and Jewish Context of Early Christianity

When I taught 7^th grade years ago, I heard the tail end of an argument between two girls.  The penultimate line was, “Then what religion was Jesus?” To which the other girl hurled with confidence, “Jesus was Baptist.”  We laugh, knowing that Jesus was Jewish, but I think many of us are rather vague on the historical context that gave rise to the Jesus movement, especially if we read the Bible in a vacuum, or rely on those religious movies that appear, without fail, every Easter.  So this morning, I thought it would be useful to summarize the position of Judaism in the Roman Empire between 100 BCE and 135 CE, then focus on the religious conflicts within Judaism itself, and the implications for the early years of Christianity, when it segregated from its root religion of Judaism.

Our images of first century CE Jews as a small band of poor people limited to Palestine, dressed in striped blankets and wearing burnooses is misleading.  First of all, they didn’t wear that Arab headdress.  Second of all, during the first century BCE, Jewish populations thrived throughout the Roman Empire.  They were not some marginalized population crowded only into the eastern Mediterranean hinterlands.  For example, although Rome was obviously the political capital, Alexandria, Egypt was the cosmopolitan and intellectual city (maybe like the different perceptions of New York City and Washington DC for America, today).  In Alexandria, Jews accounted for about 40% of the city’s population (and it was supposedly one of the Ptolemy pharaohs who commissioned the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament, a few centuries earlier).  Throughout the empire, Roman records calculated a Jewish contingent upwards of 10%, often in cities and in positions of business, educational, and political leadership. By contrast, do you know the percentage of Jews in the US today?  Less than 2%.  Furthermore, the Romans granted Jews favored status during that century.  They had full freedom to practice their religion, including not working on their Sabbath, not worshipping at Roman religious sites, and practicing circumcision.  Had the influential Greek population of the eastern empire been in power, they would likely have outlawed what they regarded as that barbaric act of self-mutilation.