"Theodore Parker: American Heretic"

Rev. Dr. Joshua Snyder, January 30, 2005

READING

A life supported by the principle and quickened by the sentiment of religion, if true to both, is always the same thing in Nazareth or New England. Now that divine man received these truths from God; was illumined more clearly by "the light that lighteneth every man"; combined or involved all the truths of Religion and Morality in his doctrine, and made them manifest in his life. Then his words and example passed into the world, and can no more perish than the stars be wiped out of the sky. The truths he taught; his doctrines respecting man and God; the relation between man and man, and man and God, with the duties that grow out of that relation, are always the same, and can never change till man ceases to be man, and creation vanishes into nothing. No; forms and opinions change and perish; but the Word of God cannot fail. The form Religion takes, the doctrines wherewith she is girded, can never be the same in any two centuries or two men; for since the sum of religious doctrines is both the result and the measure of a man's total growth in wisdom, virtue, and piety, and since men will always differ in these respects, so religious doctrines and form  will always differ, always be transient, as Christianity goes forth and scatters the seed she bears in her hand. But the Christianity holy men feel in the heart – the Christ that is born within us, is always the same thing to each soul that feels it. This differs only in degree and not in kind, from age to age and man to man; there is something in Christianity which no sect from the "Ebionites" to the "latter day saints" ever entirely over- looked. This is that common Christianity, which burns in the hearts of pious men.

Theodore Parker
The Transient and the Permanent  

SERMON
Recently our Church, with the wonderful initiative of the Finance Committee, has begun to sell T-shirts and mugs with the names of famous UUs printed on them.  These are actually pretty common throughout the UUA, and have been for a number of years.  It is sort of our version of Mt. Rushmore; you know you have made it as a UU if they print your name on a mug or a T-shirt.  But how well do we know the lives of the people printed on these items?  As Elaine Bettis from the show Seinfeld might ask, what makes one mug-worthy?  Who are these people?  It is good information to know, to be able to say something about the famous people who have shared our liberal faith.  It gives us a sense of pride in who we are.  You might also want to read next month’s newsletter very closely for more information on a famous UU.

Well I don’t know if one would call Theodore Parker famous exactly, though he did enjoy a certain amount of fame in his day.  He certainly was historically significant in a way that few Unitarian clergy ever are.  Once in a sermon Parker described America as being “Of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  Abraham Lincoln’s old law partner in Illinois was a Unitarian and kept a correspondence with Parker.  Many historians trace Lincoln’s use of this phrase in the Gettysburg Address directly to Theodore Parker.

So who was this man, who rose to such prominence, and infamy, within his religious denomination and the country as a whole?  Theodore Parker was born on August 24, 1810 (he died in 1859).  But to tell his story one really needs to begin by telling the story of Theodore’s grandfather: Captain John Parker.  John Parker lead the American forces at the battle of Lexington, the so-called “shot heard ‘round the world”, the very first battle of the Revolutionary War.  This made Captain John Parker a hero to the people of Lexington, and his family was deeply proud of his legacy.  Theodore would often invoke the image of his grandfather going off to battle when he would talk about his own crusades and causes.  Theodore Parker kept the musket that his Grandfather used in that battle displayed in his study.

Theodore himself was the last of four children raised on the family farm in Lexington Massachusetts.  His mother died when little Theodore was quite young.  He was raised by his father, who was a very affectionate man.  Soon it became evident that Parker had a very keen intellect and excelled at school.  He quickly outstripped the one room schoolhouse in which his education first began.  In his teens he earned money teaching, and after he went to Harvard he earned a living on the side tutoring other students in Latin.  He had a knack for languages, something I have always been impressed with, and was particularly interested in Biblical Scholarship.  Had he wanted to, Parker probably could have made a name for himself as being one of the first Americans to translate and fully understand the newly blossoming field of Biblical Criticism that was just at that time coming out of Germany.  However, as well shall see, Parker was not content with just being a first class biblical scholar.  His interests were much more varied.

Parker went to the Harvard Divinity School to become a Unitarian minister, which he did.  Shortly after he became the minister in West Roxbury in Boston, he attended the graduation ceremonies of the HDS class of 1838.  This just so happened to be the famous “Divinity School Address” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Much could be said about the content of this Address, but the effect was that Emerson, with one speech, ushered in a whole new argument among the Unitarians that has come to be known as the “Transcendentalist Controversy.”  One could read the history of early Unitarianism in America as just a series of Controversies!  Parker was enthralled by Emerson’s presentation.  He came down quite squarely in the Transcendentalist camp, though at that time Transcendentalism was a rather undefined group, and Parker’s ideas are not easily classified.  In opposition to the Transcendentalists were the Unitarian Christians.  The faculty of the Harvard Divinity School was mostly Unitarian Christian, which explains why it was over fifty years before Emerson was ever invited back to Harvard to speak!  These Unitarian Christians believed that the miracles described in the Bible actually occurred, and that these miracles established the authority, though not necessarily the Divinity, of Jesus as a religious leader and the founder of the Christian religion.  It might strike us as a rather un-Unitarian thing to believe in, but we must be careful not to read our own ideas back into history.  The fact was that the Unitarian Christians differed with the Transcendentalists on at least two points: belief in the miracles of Christ and his unique religious authority.

Well on May 19, 1841, while this Transcendentalist Controversy was still raging on, Theodore Parker was invited to give the ordination sermon in South Boston for a new minister named Charles Shackford.  Like Channing who delivered his famous “Unitarian Christianity” sermon at the ordination of Jared Sparks, Parker used the occasion to lay down some of what he saw to be the foundational ideas of the Unitarian religion.  His sermon title was “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” though it later would become known simply as “The South Boston Sermon.”  Interestingly Shackford was not himself a Transcendentalist, so no one really knows why Parker was asked to give the ordination sermon, but at the time Parker was a rather well liked fellow so there was no reason not to have him.  Additionally, there were South Boston clergy who were present for the ordination of their new colleague.  A Methodist, Congregational, and a Baptist minister were all there.  No doubt on their way to a bar somewhere to set up the premise for a joke.

In his sermon, a portion of which was today’s reading, Parker lays out his understanding not only of Unitarianism, and not only of Christianity, but of religion in general.  Parker claimed that there was Natural Religion and there was Absolute Religion.  Natural Religion was the ever-changing, imperfect historical religions that we all know of, but he paid specific attention to Christianity.  In contrast there was Absolute Religion, which consisted primarily of moral teachings and ethics.  The way one arrived at Absolute Religion was not through reason, though that certainly had its place in

Parker’s view, but for him it was “intuition.”  By intuition he meant something like religious experience, but really it is a sense of the divine that is inherent in all thinking creatures.  This was an idea he got primarily from Kant, who was a significant influence on many Transcendentalist thinkers.  Parker writes, “I can find nothing interposed between Conscience and God, or between Him [sic] and the religious Sentiment; we border closely upon God everywhere; here we touch and he interpenetrates us, if I may so speak.”  Thus, Conrad Wright observes, “No external authority, no authentication by miracles, is required to convince us of the essential truth of religion: the existence of God, on whom we are dependent.”  

Parker claimed that most of what we understand to be Christianity, salvation by faith, original sin, the trinity, baptism, the divine nature of Christ, and so forth fall squarely in the Transient category of Christianity.  He reasoned that all of these doctrines are not original to the teachings of Jesus, since they all come about as a result of Councils and Papal Decrees.  At one point he says that he is looking for the religion of Jesus not of Luther and Calvin.  The only thing that is Permanent, and Parker goes so far to say that you can throw the rest away so far as he was concerned, was the moral teachings and examples of Jesus.  Even that, he says, we might have figured out on our own through the use of “intuition” since it belongs to Absolute Religion.

The reaction to Parker’s sermon initially was very tame.  Conrad Wright claims that lots of people came up to him afterwards and sort of said they agreed with him, they liked the sermon.  The Unitarians present did not hear too much that they disagreed with, it seems.  It sort of sounded like they were what my northern colleagues have come to call “Minnesota nice.”  While this is a phenomenon certainly not restricted to Minnesota, it means they were nice to his face only because they were brought up to say something nice or nothing at all.  I like to imagine that he got a lot of compliments on his tie.

Well it seems that the orthodox Protestant clergy who were present to hear this sermon were the instigators of the controversy.  They thought that they had just witnessed the Unitarians airing their dirty laundry and asked publicly in print, “Do the Unitarians really believe all that?  Are they really that far outside the mainstream?”  Nowadays we would unhesitatingly say “Yes!” but back then it caused more of a stir.  The Unitarian Minister’s Association got together and denounced Parker to his face.  They agreed with Parker on some points, he did after all claim to be a Christian of sorts, but he also denied the miracles and the unique authority of Jesus.  So, the orthodox clergy asked their Unitarian neighbors, is there room for Parker within the Unitarian tent?  The Unitarian ministers at this conference were not all convinced there was.  Many hoped that this public humiliation would embarrass Parker so much that he would quit the ministry, just as Emerson had, and they could avoid the question all together.  But Theodore Parker decided to stay in the ministry.  He did not fold in the face of confrontation or tension, and as hard as it is to be a prophet sometimes, he took to it quite often.  The end result was that the Unitarians did not kick him out, but they also refused to exchange pulpits with him; which in those days was a not-so-subtle form of ostracism.  But he was still a Unitarian minister.  The Unitarians decided that yes, the tent is wide enough for Parker’s Transcendentalist theology.  Conrad Wright relates the following:

“Ezra Stiles Gannett spoke their mind when he declared that such measures would be contrary to the spirit and practice of the denomination.  The very fact, he suggested, ‘that for months the Unitarians have been urged from without and from within to denounce, or renounce, Mr. Parker, and yet have not found out how to do it, shows that it is strange work for them.’  It is not our way, he said, to pass votes of ecclesiastical censure.  ‘We are willing…to take the principle of free inquiry with all its consequences.’”

So too were Unitarians and Universalists of later generations when faced with similar crises.

But Theodore Parker was not content to be a fly in just the Unitarian ointment.  No he was very much concerned with the social issues of America in his day.  By far the issue that roused his passions more than any other was slavery.  Parker was probably the most vociferous Abolitionist in Unitarian history, and that is saying something.  Parker is famous for hiding slaves in his Church as they escaped their Southern masters.  At one point he took to keeping a loaded revolver in the desk in which he wrote his sermons, lest anyone find out about his illegal activity.  Here he felt that the fight to end slavery in America was just as important as the battle for freedom that his grandfather had initiated on the Common in Lexington Massachusetts.

When the fugitive slave Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston in 1854, Theodore Parker was outraged.  The Fugitive Slave Law passed by Congress said that if a slave escaped from their owners, and were caught in any state including the ones in the North, they had to be returned.  This law outraged many Northerners because they saw it as an encroachment of slavery onto the Northern states, not to mention that the South was asserting itself on them.  Parker organized a protest and spoke out against the arrest at Faneuil Hall.  He also started a committee that made an unsuccessful attempt to sabotage the voyage back to Virginia, where Burns was being returned.  Parker was arrested for obstruction of justice; a martyrdom which he greatly relished.

Theodore Parker was also one of the financiers of John Brown’s unsuccessful raid on Harper’s Ferry Virginia.  Brown met Parker, and Parker was inspired by John Brown’s passion for freeing slaves at any costs.  Brown wanted to attack one of the South’s key military targets and inspire a slave riot.  He led his band, which was quickly demolished, but the idea of a slave riot inspired fear in Southerners and hope for Northern Abolitionists.  It was one of the key escalations that lead to the Civil War.  After Brown’s raid was put down, the conspirators behind it were discovered and arrested.  Parker however was in Rome for health reasons at the time.  Sadly Theodore Parker died in 1859 in Florence Italy of consumption; better known to us as Tuberculosis.  

Lucy Van Houghton of the cartoon Peanuts once told her friend Schroeder that Beethoven was not really so great because his picture was never on a bubble gum card.  “How can you say someone was great if you never saw their picture on a bubble gum card?”  Well hopefully we do not hold such high standards.  Wright sums up Parker’s temperament this way: “But Parker, who was in attitude and temperament much closer to conservative Unitarianism than Emerson, could not be so easily set aside.  He remained a persistent irritant within the Unitarian community; and he suffered the customary fate of nonconformists who decline to withdraw politely, despite pointed suggestions that they are not entirely welcome.”

I think that we as a religious tradition are richer precisely because Parker refuse to be set aside.  He stayed in the Church, and his brand of Transcendentalism within the Unitarian institution took hold in the next generation of ministers.  “Parkerism” became a synonym for institutionalized Transcendentalism that held to the theology of Emerson and others but believed that it should remain a part of the Church as a viable theological option, not just a personal preference of one individual.  History has answered those orthodox clergy who first heard the South Boston sermon: yes, Unitarianism can absorb and be inclusive of Parker’s Transcendentalism.  It is this answer that eventually would lead Unitarians to be inclusive of “Parkerism” and eventually pave the way for the inclusion of Humanism.  Indeed it may very well be that without Parker the Unitarians might have adopted a form of subliminal or unacknowledged creedalism; in which case there would be no room for Buddhists, Pagans, or anyone who deviated from their peculiar flavor of Christianity.  Thank goodness that he had the courage to withstand the heat and scorn of his peers for the sake of history.  Maybe someday he will even make it onto a bubblegum card.  Amen, Blessed Be.

Recommended Reading:
Commager, Henry Steele. Ed.  Theodore Parker; an Anthology
Grodzins, Dean.  American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism
Wright, Conrad. Ed.  Three Prophets of Liberal Religion; Channing-Emerson-Parker