Theodore Parker
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 22 August 2010 01:00
- Written by Polly Peterson
Theodore Parker Puts Freedom of Conscience to the Test
A Service Celebrating the Bicentennial of Theodore Parker’s Birth
Opening Words
The words of the hymn Lauren just sang were written by Theodore Parker, one of the great figures in the history of Unitarian Universalism.
Be ours a religion that, like sunshine, goes everywhere,
its temple, all space,
its shrine, the good heart,
its creed, all truth,
its ritual, works of love,
its profession of faith, divine living.
If that message sounds Transcendentalist to you, you would not be mistaken. Theodore Parker came of age during the period some have called the “flowering of New England.” He was a leading voice in the movement called the “New Views,” “Transcendentalism,” or simply “The Newness.” Unlike fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker never left the ministry. He was a very controversial public figure, loved extravagantly by his followers and reviled extravagantly by those who disagreed with his heretical ideas.
Today, in celebration of his life and legacy, I’ve chosen hymns by Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, the authors of a hymnal published in 1846 that was Parker’s favorite. He affectionately referred to it as the “Book of Sams.”
First Reading
Theodore Parker died in 1860, a few months shy of his fiftieth birthday. His bereaved parishioners published a book of his prayers the following year. In 1881, twenty years after its first publication, there was still enough interest in Parker’s prayers to bring out a new edition of the book. The Preface, written by Concord’s own Louisa May Alcott, gives us some sense of why he remained such a beloved figure.
Here is some of what she had to say:
The first time I heard Theodore Parker preach was a memorable day to me, as such occasions doubtless were to many others who “came to wonder,” and “remained to pray.” The sermon was addressed to “laborious young women,” and was full of paternal advice, encouragement, and sympathy; but the prayer that followed went straight to the hearts of those for whom he prayed,--not only comforting by its tenderness, and strengthening by its brave and cheerful spirit, but showing them where to go for greater help, and how to ask it as simply and confidingly as he did.
It was unlike any prayer I had ever heard…. It was a quiet talk with God, as if long intercourse and much love had made it natural and easy for the son to seek the father,--confessing faults, asking help, and submitting all things to the All wise and tender, as freely as children bring their little sorrows, hopes and fears, to their mother’s knee.
The slow soft folding of the hands, the reverent bowing of the good gray head, the tears that sometimes veiled the voice, the simplicity, frankness, and devout earnestness, made both words and manner wonderfully eloquent; and the phrase, “Our Father and our Mother God,” was inexpressibly sweet and beautiful. …
To one laborious young woman, just setting forth to seek her fortune, that Sunday was the beginning of a new life.
Second Reading—a recollection from boyhood by Theodore Parker
When a little boy in petticoats in my fourth year, one fine day in spring, my father led me by the hand to a distant part of the farm, but soon sent me home alone. On the way I had to pass a little "pond-hole" then spreading its waters wide; a rhodora in full bloom—a rare flower in my neighborhood, and which grew only in that locality—attracted my attention and drew me to the spot. I saw a little spotted tortoise sunning himself in the shallow water at the root of the flaming shrub. I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile; for, though I had never killed any creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds, squirrels, and the like, and I felt a disposition to follow their wicked example. But all at once something checked my little arm, and a voice within me said, clear and loud, "It is wrong!" I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion—the consciousness of an involuntary but inward check upon my actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both vanished from my sight. I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, and asked what was it that told me it was wrong? She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking me in her arms, said, "Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little voice." . . . I am sure no other event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impression on me.
Sermon
One of the most charming aspects of Theodore Parker’s sermons and prayers is their essential optimism. He believed in goodness. "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” he declared in 1853. “The arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve by the experience of sight…; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."
Martin Luther King borrowed Parker’s idea saying, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And Barack Obama borrowed the idea from Martin Luther King, when he quoted that line while running for President.
A hundred and fifty years earlier, another President took inspiration from a Parker sermon that included this line: “Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”
Democracy. Freedom. Justice. These were Parker’s themes in the 1850s, and though he did not live to see Abraham Lincoln become President, his anti-slavery work helped lay the groundwork for the Emancipation Proclamation. Parker began speaking out against slavery in the late 1840s, and soon became one of Boston’s leading abolitionists. When the United States government sharpened the fangs of the fugitive slave laws by enacting the shameful compromise of 1850, Parker helped to organize the Vigilance Committee—a group dedicated to aiding and protecting Boston’s black population from slave-catchers.
That is the Theodore Parker I focused on in a story I wrote for the Unitarian Universalist Association a while back. As some of you know, I spent most of 2009 writing a book about famous Unitarians and Universalists of the nineteenth century. The title of that book is Stirring the Nation’s Heart—and the publisher says it will be available within the next week or two. But while I was working on it, it didn’t have a title. I just called it my “roots” book.
And you won’t dig around in the roots of Unitarian Universalism long without turning up Theodore Parker. Before he turned his energies to abolition, he was hell-bent—and, believe me, many of his contemporaries would have taken that term quite literally—he was hell-bent on religious reform.
Theodore Parker was born on the 24th of August, 1810, into a poor farming family in Lexington, Massachusetts, the youngest of many siblings. Parker’s grandfather, John Parker, had been the commander of the Minutemen on the Lexington Green on that fateful morning of April 19, 1775. He is reputed to have said that “if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” His grandson inherited that revolutionary spirit.
It was clear from early on that this youngest Parker had an unusual intellect and a voracious hunger for learning. By the time he was 16, Parker had learned all that the Lexington schools could teach him, and at 17, he became a schoolmaster himself. He taught for a year in Quincy; then taught here in Concord the following year, attending Sunday services at First Parish in the waning years of Ezra Ripley’s long ministry.
Parker taught school in the winter and worked on his father’s farm in the summer. He hired himself out to other farmers, too, to earn extra money. He was a sturdily built young man, roughly clothed, hard working—and utterly brilliant. Despite all that teaching and farm work, he kept up an astonishing program of self-education. He passed the entrance examinations at Harvard when he was 19, but he didn’t have the money to pay tuition. Instead, he read the entire curriculum on his own.
Theodore Parker’s childhood was a time of great religious upheaval in Massachusetts. Every town had a tax-supported Congregational church that had been founded on a strict Calvinist theology. Calvinists believed in a three-part God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They believed that at birth, all people are depraved sinners, and most are doomed to eternal damnation.
After the war, in the early years of the new republic, many congregations chose ministers who quietly rejected those views. These ministers, known as the liberal ministers, began to preach a more hopeful gospel that omitted the notion of original sin. They also began to speak of God as one instead of three. The Calvinist ministers, known as the orthodox ministers, became alarmed by the growing strength of the liberals in the early 1800s.
In those days it was a common practice for ministers to trade pulpits with each other. This gave congregations some variety and allowed ministers to write fewer sermons. The orthodox ministers began refusing trades with liberal ministers. The liberal ministers protested this exclusion, but the orthodox ministers only became more hostile. In 1819, the liberal ministers finally accepted the division and made a clean break. William Ellery Channing, their chosen spokesperson, delivered a famous sermon called “Unitarian Christianity.” And from that time on, Congregational churches with liberal ministers began to call themselves Unitarian.
The young Theodore Parker tried out Calvinism, opted for Unitarianism, and in 1834, was admitted to the Harvard Divinity School with advanced standing, despite his lack of a college diploma. Parker had been reading the latest German scholarship on Biblical history—radical views that questioned the historical veracity of the Bible. Soon, Ralph Waldo Emerson would publish his book Nature, and a group of young ministers, including Parker, would begin discussing their new ideas about religion in a group that came to be called the Transcendental Club.
Unitarianism had replaced the grim theology of original sin and eternal damnation with a rather dry approach to religion that emphasized clear rational thought and personal responsibility. These young rebels wanted a more vital religion that spoke to the heart as well as the mind. They believed that the Divine could be understood intuitively and was imminent in all things.
In June of 1837, Parker became the minister of a small church in West Roxbury, where he continued his ambitious scholarly pursuits. The following year, Emerson made a speech to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School that was deemed so heretical and so insulting to established Unitarianism, that he was banned from speaking at Harvard for decades. Parker was present on that occasion, and Emerson’s speech emboldened him to speak out more and more about his own evolving ideas. His congregation in West Roxbury happily accepted his increasingly radical Transcendentalism.
Parker’s ideas were unpopular with most Unitarians, but serious controversy didn’t focus on him until 1841, when he delivered a sermon on The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity. He denied that Biblical miracles were factually true. He declared that the permanent and lasting truth of Christianity did not depend on doctrines and traditions—did not depend even on the Bible. All these were merely transient forms, subject to alteration throughout history.
Parker had expressed similar ideas before, but this time was different. Like Emerson’s Divinity School Address, it was not so much that he had said these things, but where he had said them. The sermon had been delivered at an official ordination, attended by many members of the clergy, including some orthodox critics, who published their take on Parker’s ideas and asked publicly whether Unitarians were all infidels like Parker. The Unitarian reputation was at stake, and, no matter what they thought of Parker, most ministers distanced themselves as fast and far as they could. In a great stroke of irony, nearly all Unitarian ministers now refused pulpit exchanges with Parker.
The Boston Association of (Unitarian) ministers tried to get Parker to resign his membership. He refused. He stood steadfastly by his right to freely exercise his mind and conscience, and he defended his view of Christianity as fully in keeping with the true spirit of Christ’s teaching. Eventually, because of their ongoing disagreements with Parker, the ministers had to decide whether Unitarianism actually did have a creed, and if so, whether it should be written down. In the end, most decided that freedom of conscience was more important.
Parker was still excluded from the pulpits of Boston.
And yet . . . many people were eager to hear him. They invited him to give lectures and packed the halls. They published his sermons and distributed them widely.
Finally, in 1846, Parker accepted an invitation to preach Sunday mornings in Boston to a new congregation that was forming with the express desire to hear him. They rented a hall called the Melodeon Theater, and people thronged to the services there.
By 1852, attendance had grown from 1,000 to 2,000, and the congregation had to rent a larger hall. Despite Parker’s popularity, the Unitarian ministers still excluded him. And many people continued to condemn Parker for heresies large and small. One of my favorite quotes is from a nineteenth-century biographer, who wrote:
“Flowers grace 10,000 pulpits in the United States every Sunday morning as the century’s end draws on apace. There was a time when Theodore Parker’s pulpit had this grace in a quite solitary manner, and my earliest recollection of his name is in connection with the flowers upon his pulpit, instanced as one proof of his awful wickedness; flat paganism and no less.”
At the time of Parker’s death, the American Unitarian Association was still hostile to him; but when the next generation of ministers came to power, they venerated him. What had been heretical at mid-century had become mainstream by the end of the century—which pretty much proves Parker’s point, doesn’t it, about the transience of dogma and forms of worship?
I believe that we today--members and friends of a self-governing Unitarian Universalist congregation—owe Theodore Parker a debt of gratitude for putting the principle of freedom to the test, for insisting on his right to seek truth earnestly, even when it led to unpopular conclusions—and for insisting that the deepest spiritual truths are not dependent on particular rituals or religious texts. These principles are the bedrock of our faith today.
Parker would probably be astonished to see how far Unitarian Universalism has strayed from its Christian roots. But he wouldn’t question our right to believe as we do or to worship as we do. As “much freedom as you shut out,” he said, “so much falsehood do you shut in.”
Parker believed that old forms must be broken to make room for evolving experience. He believed that faith is not authentic if it is not free.
And one thing more: “Religion without joy is not religion,” he said.
Freedom and joy! Flowers at the pulpit. A gender-free God who can be discovered within the human heart and throughout all of nature.
Not a bad legacy.
Thank you, Theodore Parker. And Happy Birthday!