Theodore Parker: Pistol-packin' Preacher

Rev. Peter A. Friedrichs

January 24, 2010

Reading

From Theodore Parker's 1841 Sermon, The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity:

To turn away from the disputes of the Catholics and the Protestants, of the Unitarian and the Trinitarian, of Old School and New School, and come to the plain words of Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity is a simple thing; very simple. It is absolute, pure Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of [others]; the love of God acting without let or hindrance. The only creed it lays down is the great truth which springs up spontaneous in the holy heart - there is a God. Its watchword is, be perfect as your Father in Heaven. The only form it demands is a divine life ; doing the best thing, in the best way, from the highest motives ; perfect obedience to the great law of God. Its sanction is the voice of God in your heart ; the perpetual presence of Him, who made us and the stars over our head…All this is very simple ; a little child can understand it ; very beautiful, the loftiest mind can find nothing so lovely. Examine the particular duties it enjoins ; humility, reverence, sobriety, gentleness, charity, forgiveness, fortitude, resignation, faith, and active love ; try the whole extent of Christianity so well summed up in the command, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind - thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ;" and is there anything therein that can perish ? The end of Christianity seems to be to make all [people] one with God as Christ was one with Him ; to bring them to such a state of obedience and goodness, that we shall think divine thoughts and feel divine sentiments, and so keep the law of God by living a life of truth and love.

Sermon

For the next few minutes, I invite you to step out of the present time. To let go of your current concerns and your everyday worries. I'd like you to travel back in time with me, back about 150 years or so, to the middle of the nineteenth century. We're in Boston, the center of the Unitarian universe. Recall that, at this time and age, religion was the central, unifying practice of society, and the prevailing religion of the day was a brand of Calvinism, with its strict doctrinal requirements and its sure system of reward and punishment. Heaven and hell were very much on peoples' minds. Everyone knew that some would make it to the Pearly Gates, while others would be cast into the flames forever. But no one knew which fate they were destined to face.

Enter the Unitarians. In the second decade of the century, William Ellery Channing, an influential preacher from the Boston Brahmin society, delivered what is now called the "Baltimore Sermon." This was the great preacher's declaration of independence from the more conservative, Congregational, Calvinist Christians. It was the Unitarian Manifesto, as it were. In this sermon, Channing explicitly broke with the prevailing theology and, for the first time, outlined the tenets of our liberal faith. This was no warning shot across the bow of the so-called "orthodox" Christians. It was a full-on frontal assault. First, Channing declared that the meaning of the Bible "is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books." By this, he explained, the words of the Bible must be interpreted in light of human experience and human reason. And he advocated that the teachings of the Bible must be harmonized with what he called "the obvious and acknowledged laws of nature." Unitarianism is faith based in reason, he said.

The second salvo from Channing's Baltimore sermon came from his characterization of the nature of God. Taking aim directly at the heart of the Christian tradition, Channing declared the belief in the Trinity - that God is made up of three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost - to be "irrational and unscriptural." Channing went on to refer to trinitarianism as a "corruption of Christianity, alike repugnant to common sense and to the general strain of the Scripture."

Channing then took on the prevailing Calvinist doctrine of heaven and hell, called the "Doctrine of the Elect," which stated that God has predetermined the destiny of every person. That even before we are born we are marked by God as either worthy of salvation or condemned to eternal damnation. Channing declared that his God, the God of the Unitarians, was neither vengeful nor judgmental. Here is what he said: "We believe that God is infinitely good, kind, benevolent, in the proper sense of these words; good in disposition, as well as in act; good, not to a few but to all; good to every individual as well as to the general system. We believe, too, that God is just; but we never forget that his justice is the justice of a good being, dwelling in the same mind, and acting in harmony, with perfect benevolence." Channing's God is a God with universal love for his creation.

Having already disposed of the notion that Jesus is God and God is Jesus, Channing declared that Jesus was not our redeemer, that he did not die for our sins. Rather, Jesus was sent to us by God "to effect a moral, or spiritual deliverance of mankind." Jesus accomplished this through a variety of methods, most notably through his example of moral and ethical living. He concludes his manifesto with the assertion that you will know a true Christian not by his beliefs alone, but by his works, by his deeds. True piety, he said, requires love of God, love of Jesus, and loving action for the benefit of one's fellow human beings.

So, that was Channing in 1819. About twenty years after the Baltimore Sermon, we find Ralph Waldo Emerson and his infamous "Divinity School Address." This speech, which was delivered on the occasion of the graduation of a new class of ministers from Harvard Divinity School, was something of a Transcendentalist Manifesto. The Transcendentalist movement was, in essence, the "second wave" of religious liberalism to sweep through Boston. In his Divinity School Address, Emerson claimed that each of us possesses the divine within us, what he called the "oversoul." He reminded his audience that "within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One." Emerson claimed that we do not need to be taught to be religious, but that we are inherently so. Further, he declared that humankind does not need Holy Scriptures, such as the Bible, to teach us what is true. Instead, truth and God can be found in our natural surroundings and through our own sensory perception of the world.

Emerson attacked the Christian church and its preachers as distorters of the teachings of Jesus. "Historical Christianity," he told his audience, "has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. It dwells with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus." By becoming the religion about Jesus, Emerson said, the church had lost sight of the fact that we are all like Jesus and that we all have the capacity to live the life he lived. Emerson espoused a natural, innate theology that is possessed by every human being. "[Faith] is an intuition," he told his audience. "It cannot be received at second hand." And finally, Emerson proudly proclaimed the presence of the Divine in all of us. He urged all of us to see ourselves in Jesus, as Jesus. To see that through us, as through Jesus, God acts and speaks in the world.

Theodore Parker was a contemporary and colleague of Emerson's. Having graduated a year earlier from Harvard Divinity School, Parker was among those who attended Emerson's address, and Emerson's words inspired Parker to begin to formulate his own theological perspective. Parker was what one might call an "uber-intellectual." At the age of 19 he was admitted to Harvard University, but he couldn't afford the tuition. So instead he read the entire Harvard curriculum on his own. He also taught himself Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and German, and eventually claimed to be conversant in 20 languages. He eventually gained admittance to Harvard Divinity School, despite his lack of an undergraduate degree, and he graduated from the School in 1836. He was called to a small parish in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a small town outside of Boston.

Like Emerson, Parker was a transcendentalist. He believed that human beings are by nature inherently religious, that they are made to be religious, in his words, "as much as an ox was made to eat grass," and he claimed that we all have an "instinctive intuition of the Divine." For Parker, Jesus was "the perfect moral and religious incarnation of God," but he was not God himself, and Parker believed that the religion of Jesus (as opposed to the religion about Jesus) was the perfect expression of humankind's religious impulse.

Like Channing had in Baltimore several decades earlier, Parker used the occasion of the ordination of a colleague into the ministry to proclaim his independence, both from orthodox Christianity and from the "old-line" Unitarianism that was, as he saw it, mired in reason and devoid of intuition. The year was 1841, three years after Emerson's Divinity School Address, when Parker preached the sermon he titled "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity." You heard a small portion of it in today's reading. In a nutshell, Parker proclaimed that the religion preached and lived by Jesus is the one, true religion, that it reflects our highest moral aspirations and our inherent connection to God. That which is "permanent" in Christianity is "the love of man, the love of God, acting without let or hindrance." So far so good. The old guard Unitarians, and even the orthodox Christians could agree with that. But then Parker went on to declare that which is "transient" or untrue and unworthy of belief in Christianity: the man-made institutions that have sprung up around religion, including all the doctrines and rituals that have been handed down through the ages. And those aspects of religion, he claimed, have overshadowed the true nature of religion. "It must be confessed," he wrote, "that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as Religion. An undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul, love to God and love to man." He went on to say that "the Christianity of Jesus is permanent, though what passes for Christianity with popes and catechisms, with sects and churches, in the first century or in the nineteenth century, prove transient also."

Parker took issue with two particular manifestations of these man-made institutions: the declared infallibility of the Bible and the divine nature and authority of Jesus. He attacked the "idolatry of the Bible" practiced by Christian traditions through the ages, claiming it was nothing more than another man-made distortion of true and permanent religion. You can imagine the ruckus that that started, even among Parker's Unitarian colleagues, whose particular brand of Christianity was still biblically-based. Parker also rejected the church's elevation of Jesus to divine rank as another fabrication unsupported by and unnecessary to the faith itself. He rejected the authority of Jesus conferred by the Christian church, stating instead that Christ's authority rested simply in the life he led and the example he set.

Thus, Parker urged his listeners to reject all that is transient in Christianity, meaning its doctrines, its rituals and the supernatural authority of Jesus, and to hold on to what is true and permanent. Christianity, he said "is not a system of doctrines, but rather a method of attaining oneness with God. It demands, therefore, a good life of piety within, of purity without, and gives the promise that whoso does God's will, shall know of God's doctrine."

On its face, Parker's theology seems no more controversial than that of Channing or Emerson. But what made him an outcast among his peers and within Boston society was how he lived out his faith. Parker was an outspoken advocate for the poor and uneducated. He was among the few liberal clergy in New England to speak out early and often against the institution of slavery, years before it became fashionable. In fact, it was Parker who eventually convinced Channing himself to speak out against the moral repugnancy of slavery. As an abolitionist, Parker harbored fugitive slaves from the southern states in his home and worked hand in glove with the Underground Railroad. In 1851 he spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that required northerners to turn over runaway slaves to the government so that they could be returned to their masters. In a speech to his colleagues, Parker revealed that he provided refuge for fugitive slaves in his home and in his church. "I have been obliged to take my own parishioners into my house to keep them out of the clutches of the kidnappers," he said. "Yes, I have been obliged to do that; and to keep my doors guarded by day as well as by night." He then went on to tell his colleagues that he writes his sermons with a pistol in his desk - loaded and ready for action - and a drawn sword within reach.

Parker's support of the anti-slavery movement went so far as to include raising money to buy weapons for free-states militia, and it is alleged that he was a member of a secret committee that supported John Brown's failed attempt to spark a slave insurrection in Virginia in 1859. After Brown was arrested, Parker wrote a letter supporting Brown's insurrection and advocating that slaves had the right to kill their masters. To the genteel members of Boston society, these actions were both outrageous and threatening to the stability of the community. At one point Parker was indicted on Federal charges, although they were dropped on a technicality.

I bring you the story of Theodore Parker today for a couple of reasons. First, it is important to know the history of our faith and of the people who helped to mold it. Along with Channing and Emerson, Parker was one of the central figures who shaped the direction of our movement as it emerged in the nineteenth century, and some claim it's most influential. Hopefully you now know a bit more about this faith that you claim, or that you are exploring, than you did before you came here this morning.

But more than that, I offer up Parker's story in the hope that it will inspire you. Because, you see, our faith is a moving, growing, organic thing. It is always evolving. We say that "Revelation is not sealed." That means that it is not held sacred and secure in any ancient text that is taken down off the shelf to check for accuracy or verification. My friend and colleague Rev. Roger Peltier has aptly pointed out that most religions, and more specifically Christianity, have one coherent narrative, once central story that has been handed down through the ages. Unitarian Universalism is not like that. Our story has emerged over centuries, dating back to the time of Michael Servetus in the 16th century right up until today, this moment. Our story, and our faith, continues to unfold. You and I are called, as Channing and Emerson and Parker were called, to shape this faith. Just as Theodore Parker critiqued the Christianity of his day as "transient," and just as he sought out the truth of his faith as best he could, so are we asked to do the same. When we say that Revelation is not sealed, it means that we can write in the holy books, just as the scribes and the prophets did in ages past. The great gift of our faith, and its great challenge, is to engage in the quest for the permanent in religion. The truths that endure and sustain us. The principles that guide us. The values that ground us and connect us, each to the other. The free faith that has been handed to us down through the ages and the generations, from Michael Servetus to Theodore Parker to Joseph Priestley to James Luther Adams to me and to you asks nothing less of us than this: To discover its core as each of us sees it. And upon discovering that core, to live out its principles as Parker did, with the courage of our convictions, in the hope of creating a more just and sustainable world.

May it be so.

Closing Words

These words by Theodore Parker have been used by, and often inaccurately attributed to, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and you heard them spoken by President Barak Obama during his campaign for the presidency:

"Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long."

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