Paralleling the new frontiers of Unitarian organization, there has emerged in addition a new frontier of faith. It has no name; it is not a party; it desires not controversy but the truth. In seeking an adequate religious faith in the present age, it seeks first of all to understand the realities of the present age. Therefore it is conceived not in optimism but in the chaos, suffering, and anxiety of the modern world. Believing that the traditional liberal answer of humanity's primary and ultimate dependence on its own powers to solve its problems has proved inadequate, it is willing to explore new sources of power and truth, most notably Christian theology, Existentialist philosophy, and the social and personality sciences.

A forerunner of this new movement of faith is James Luther Adams, professor of Christian Ethics at the Harvard Divinity School and for twenty years a teacher at the Meadville Theological School in the Federated Theological Faculty of the University of Chicago. Dr. Adams (with Christian presuppositions) affirms God to be the living, transforming reality in the lives of men and women and the reconstruction of society. His essay, "A Faith for Free Men," published in 1946, is recognized as an outstanding statement of contemporary liberal faith.

The question concerning faith is not, "Shall I be a man of faith?" The proper question is, rather, "Which faith is mine?" or, better, "Which faith should be mine?" for, whether a person craves prestige, wealth, security, or amusement, whether he lives for country, for science, for God or for plunder, he shows that he has faith, he shows that he puts his confidence in something.

The faiths of the twentieth century have been as powerful and influential as any that have ever been. They have created its science and its atom bombs, its nationalisms and its internationalisms, its wars and its "peace," its heroisms and its despairs, its Hollywoods and its Broadways, its Wall Streets and its Main Streets, its Gestapos and its undergrounds, its democracies and its Fascisms, its socialisms and its communisms, its wealth and its poverty, its securities and its insecurities, its beliefs and its unbeliefs, its questions and its answers.

We must not believe every "pious" man's religion to be what he says it is. He may go to church regularly, he may profess some denominational affiliation, he may repeat his creed regularly, but he may actually give his deepest loyalty to something quite different from these things and from what they represent. Find out what that is and you have found his religion. You will have found his god. It will be the thing he gets most excited about, the thing that most deeply concerns him. But speak against it in the pulpit or in the Pullman car, and he may forget what he calls his religion or his god, and rush "religiously" to the defense of what really concerns him. The veins on his forehead will be distended, his eyes will flash, he will begin to raise his voice. What moves him now is more important than his creed or his atheism; it gives meaning and direction to his life...

As creatures fated to be free, as creatures who must make responsible decision, what may we place our confidence in? What can we have faith in? What should we serve?

The first tenet of the free man's faith is that his ultimate dependence for his being and his freedom is upon a creative power and upon processes not of his own making. His ultimate faith is not in himself. He finds himself an historical being, a being living in nature and history, a being having freedom in nature and history. The forms that nature and history take possess a certain given, fateful character, and yet they are also fraught with meaningful possibilities.

Within this framework man finds something dependable and also many things that are not dependable. One thing that is dependable is the order of nature and of history which the sciences are able to describe with varying degrees of precision...

Whatever the destiny of the planet or of the individual life, a sustaining meaning is discernible and commanding in the here and now. Anyone who denies this denies that there is anything worth taking seriously or even worth ~king about. Every blade of grass, every work of art, every scientific endeavor, every striving for righteousness bears witness to this meaning. Indeed, every frustration or perversion of truth, beauty or goodness also bears this witness, as the shadow points round to the sun.

One way of characterizing this meaning is to say that through it God is active or is fulfilling himself in nature and history...

God (or that in which we may have faith) is the inescapable, commanding reality that sustains and transforms all meaningful existence. It is inescapable, for no man can live without somehow coming to terms with it. It is commanding, for it provides the structure or the process through which existence is maintained and by which any meaningful achievement is realized...It is trans-forming, for it breaks through any given achievement, it invades any mind or heart open to it luring it on to richer or more relevant achievement; it is a self-surpassing reality. God is that reality which works upon us and through us and in accord with which we can achieve truth, beauty or goodness. It is that reality which works in nature and history, under certain conditions creating human good in human community. Where these conditions are not met, human good, as sure as the night follows the day, will he frustrated or perverted...

This reality that is dependable and in which we may place our confidence is, then, not man-in it man lives and moves and has his being-nor is it a mere projection of human wishes; it is a working reality that every man is coerced to live with. In this sense the faith of the free man is not free; man is not free to work without the sustaining, commanding reality. He is free only to obstruct it or to conform to the conditions it demands for growth...

The free man's faith is therefore a faith in the giver of being and freedom. Man's dignity derives from the fact that he participates in the being and freedom of this reality. If we use the terms of historical Christianity we may say, man is made in the image of this creative reality. Under its auspices he becomes himself a creator. . .

The second tenet of the free man's faith is that the commanding, sustaining, transforming reality finds its richest focus in meaningful human history, in free, cooperative effort for the common good. In other words, this reality fulfills man's life only when men stand in right relation to each other. Man, the historical being, come most fully to terms with this reality in the exercise of the freedom that works for justice in the human community. Only what creates freedom in a community of justice is dependable. "Faith is the sister of justice." Only the society that gives every man the opportunity to share in the process whereby human potentiality is realizable, only the society that creates the social forms of freedom in a community of justice (where every man is given his due), only the freedom that respects the divine image and dignity in every man are dependable. As Lincoln put it, "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it."

A faith that is not the sister of justice is bound to bring men to grief. It thwarts creation, a divinely given possibility; it robs man of his birthright of freedom in an open universe; it robs the community of the spiritual riches latent in its members; it reduces man to a beast of burden in slavish subservience to a state, a church or a party-to a man-made God. That way lie the grinding rut and tyranny of the Vatican line, the Nuremberg line and the Moscow line, different though these lines are from each other in their fear and obstruction of freedom...

Jesus uses the figure of the seed to describe this power. The power of God is like a seed that grows of itself if man will use his freedom to meet the conditions for its growth. It is not only a principle by which life may be guided; it is also a power that transforms life. It is a power we may trust to heal the wounds of life and to create the joy of sharing and of community. This is the power the Christian calls the forgiving, redemptive power of God, a power every man may know and experience whether or not he uses these words to describe it...

The third tenet of the free man's faith is that the achievement of freedom in community requires the power of organization and the organization of power. The free man will be an unfree man, he will be a victim of tyranny from within or from without, if his free faith does not assume form, in both word and deed. The commanding, transforming reality is a shaping power; it shapes one's beliefs about that reality, and when it works through men it shapes the community of justice and love.

There is no such thing as poetry without poems, art without paintings, architecture without buildings, and there is no such thing as an enduring faith without beliefs. The living spirit, says the poet Schiller, creates and molds.

There can be no reliable faith for free men unless there are faithful men and women who form the faith into beliefs, who test and criticize the beliefs and who then transform and transmit the beliefs. This process of forming and transforming the beliefs of the free faith is a process of discussion; it is a co-operative endeavor in which men surrender to the commanding, transforming reality. The only way in which men can reliably form and transform beliefs is through the sharing of tradition and new insights and through the cooperative criticism and testing of tradition and insight. In other words, men must sincerely work with each other in order to give reliable form and expression to faith. This is the only way in which freedom from tyranny can be fulfilled in freedom with justice and truth....

The free church is that community which is committed to determining what is rightly of ultimate concern to men of free faith. It is a community of the "faith-ful" and a community of sinners. When "alive," it is the community in which men are called to seek fulfillment by the surrender of their lives to the control of the commanding, sustaining, transforming reality. It is the community in which men are called to recognize and abandon their ever-recurrent reliance upon the unreliable. It is the community in which the living spirit of faith tries to create and mold life-giving, life-transforming beliefs, the community in which men open themselves to God and each other and to commanding, sustaining, transforming experiences from the past, appropriating, criticizing and transforming tradition and giving that tradition as well as newborn faith the occasion to become relevant to the needs of a time...

Today we are living in a time of sifting. No mere "return to religion" in the conventional sense will give us the vision or the power to match the demands. "Return to religion" as usually understood restores only the ashes and not the fires of faith. In a time when we must determine whether we will have "One World or None," only a costing commitment to a tough faith in the commanding, sustaining, transforming power of God will even start us on the steep path towards a world in which there will be room for men of a free faith. If we can get such a world without a struggle for justice, it will, like an unexamined faith, not be worth having. In fact, we shall not have it for long-for the Lord of history will not fail nor faint till he have set justice in the earth, until he have burst the cruel yoke asunder and given liberty to the captive and to them that are oppressed. This is the Lord of whom it is commanded, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. Would any other Lord, of any name or no name, be lovable? If the men of a free faith do not love that commanding, sustaining, transforming reality, what else in heaven or earth could they or should they love? What else could they or should they have faith in?