Greenfield Group
Since 1927
A Unitarian Universalist Ministers Study Group
Greenfield Group, a semi-annual gathering of Unitarian Universlaist Ministers, meets to discuss papers and common readings related to a chosen topic.
A portion of this article by James Luther Adams talks about the founding of Greenfield Group and the sort of issues the ministers discussed. It is clear that a group such as Greenfield was more than a simple discussion group. It was a search for a vital and living theology in a changing world. . . .
Taking Time Seriously by James Luther Adams
V
As an active minister (which I had been from the time of my graduation from Harvard Divinity School in 1927), I began to feel an increasing uneasiness about religious liberalism. It appeared to me to represent a cultural lag, the tail end of the laissez-faire philosophy of the nineteenth century. Its competitive character and its atomistic individualism forced upon me the question of what the theological method of liberalism is and should be, and also of what its religious content actually is. Reinhold Niebohr, Walter Marshall Horton, and John Bennett had their share in pointing up these questions, if not in raising them. Especially influential at that time was T. S. Eliot's criticism of Babbitt's cosmopolitanism and the strictures of Hermenlink and Otto upon socalled universal religion.
Through these writers as well as through personal experience I came to see that religion lives not only by means of universally valid ideas, but also through the warmer, more concrete, historical tradition that possesses its sense of community, it prophets and its "acts" of the apostles, its liturgy and literature, its peculiar language and disciplines. "The spirit killeth, the letter giveth life." Not that I doubted the validity of the principle of disciplined freedom. Rather the question was: Is there a liberal church, or are there only aggregates of individuals, each claiming to search the truth—as though none had yet been found? Despite my (still existing) conviction that the empirical method is the proper one for theology, anglo-catholicism and Barthianism with their respective emphases on common faith and "church theology" served as a challenge.
These questions were the source of great distress to me. I even contemplated giving up the ministry and going into teaching. Indeed, I did later become a fulltime instructor in English at Boston University, continuing the while my work as a minister.
Some of the younger Unitarian ministers in New England had organized themselves into a study group for the purpose of working out together a critique of liberalism and also of searching for a remedy. Over a period of years this group (later to be known as the Greenfield Group) read, discussed, and wrote papers on the outstanding theologians of the twentieth century as well as on some of the earlier ones, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. They hammered out together a "church theology" that would enable them as liberals to restate in modern terms the Christian doctrines of God and the human being, of sin and grace, and of the church. Pursuing the implications of their group method, they attempted to set forward the principle disciplines that these doctrines seemed to demand. Nor did they confine their attention to the harmless concerns of academic theology. The necessity of carrying their conclusions over into the work of the church and a year spent studying books like Troeltsch's Social Teachings of the Christian Churches helped us, as F. R. Barry would say, to make our Christianity relevant. But many of us felt that we had much to do yet before we learned to take contemporary history seriously.
Although von Hugel did not meet this need for orientation in time, his influence upon me and certain other Unitarian ministers in the Greenfield Group was profound. My own interest in von Hugel I owe, like many another fruit-bearing seed, to Dean Willard Sperry of Harvard Divinity School. Von Hugel's philosophy of critical realism, his emphasis on the role of the body, history, and institutions in religion, his attack (along with Maritain's) on the "pure spirituality" of unhistorical, noninstitutional, nonincarnational religion became determinative for my conception of religion. Much of this side of von Hugel was the more impressive because of the way in which he showed how James Martineau, a Unitarian theologian, had espoused similar views. Through reading von Hugel's Letters to aNiece I found a new reality in the devotional life, especially because of his insistence that there should remain a tension between the sacred and the secular, and between Hebraism, Hellenism, and science.
I went on from von Hugel to the reading of certain other spiritual directors of history, and especially of St. Francis of Sales. Several groups of Unitarian ministers at about this time were developing cooperatively certain disciplines conclusions over into the work of the church and a year spent studying books like Troeltsch's Social Teachings of the Christian Churches helped us, as F. R. Barry would say, to make our Christianity relevant. But many of us felt that we had much to do yet before we learned to take contemporary history seriously.
Although von Hugel did not meet this need for orientation in time, his influence upon me and certain other Unitarian ministers in the Greenfield Group was profound. My own interest in von Hugel I owe, like many another fruit-bearing seed, to Dean Willard Sperry of Harvard Divinity School. Von Hugel's philosophy of critical realism, his emphasis on the role of the body, history, and institutions in religion, his attack (along with Maritain's) on the "pure spirituality" of unhistorical, noninstitutional, nonincarnational religion became determinative for my conception of religion. Much of this side of von Hugel was the more impressive because of the way in which he showed how James Martineau, a Unitarian theologian, had espoused similar views. Through reading von Hugel's Letters to a Niece I found a new reality in the devotional life, especially because of his insistence that there should remain a tension between the sacred and the secular, and between Hebraism, Hellenism, and science.
I went on from von Hugel to the reading of certain other spiritual directors of history, and especially of St. Francis of Sales. Several groups of Unitarian ministers at about this time were developing cooperatively certain disciplines for the devotional life. One of our groups (the Brothers of the Way), suspicious of the sort of devotions that aim at a cloistered virtue, included within its disciplines weekly visits of mercy to the needy, a "general" discipline of active participation in some secular organization of socially prophetic sign)ficance, and an annual retreat where we participated in discussions of social issues and in the sacraments of silence and of the Lord's Supper.
A sense for the ontological, the historical, and the institutional elements in Christianity was by now deeply formed. Still I only vaguely apprehended the relation of all these things to the history that was in the making. This statement seems to me accurate despite the fact that I had been actively involved in strikes (a minister could not live in Salem, Massachusetts, without having something to do with strikes), despite the fact that I knew something about the lot of the laborer by having worked for six years on the railroad, and despite the fact that one of our groups of Unitarian ministers had for a period used St. Francis of Sales and Karl Marx for daily devotional reading. I was not yet taking time seriously. Von Hugel, like Babbitt, had increased in me a sense of the past which gave perspective to immediate interests, but he had no theology for social salvation.
[Source: Taking Time Seriously by James Luther Adams, full text at Harvard Square Library]
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