Note: This was my final paper for EN 841B: Transcendentalism, a seminar I took in the Fall of 2005 with Laura Dassow Walls, now of Notre Dame. It was a fascinating class with an excellent professor and a great text. I enjoyed writing this paper and in the process learned a lot about a topic that was of great personal interest at the time–America’s ideological history. The Fall of 2005 was a crazy semester in which I bit off far more than I could chew, so I took an Incomplete on this course and didn’t finish this paper till a year later in the Fall of 2006.
In recent years the ongoing revolution in American cultural life has become increasingly apparent. Best-selling books like Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior (and the controversy surrounding them) have underscored the increasing secularization and liberalization of a culture that was once decidedly Judeo-Christian in moral tone and worldview. And while this revolution has dramatically increased in rapidity and scope in recent decades, any student of American letters knows that cultural controversy and change is not a new phenomenon in America. Indeed, between the 1631 ruling of the general court of the Massachusetts Bay colony “that no man [should] be admitted to the freedom of [the] body politic, but such as [were] members of some of the churches within the limits of the same” and the 2003 ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court “that barring an individual from . . . marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution,” one can trace an almost regular series of controversial moments that have become landmarks in the history of America’s cultural revolution: the Half Way covenant of 1662, the print debates between Jonathan Edwards and Charles Chauncy in 1743 and the accompanying schism in Congregationalism, the 1805 appointment of Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, Emerson’s 1838 address at the Harvard Divinity School, Charles Briggs’ 1891 inaugural address at Union Theological Seminary and his subsequent heresy trials, the 1925 Scopes trial, and the Supreme Court rulings on the Bible and prayer in the public schools in 1962-3. It is no coincidence that almost all of these controversies have been wholly religious in nature; before cultural practice can change, ideology must change. Change in belief paves the way for change in behavior. Neither is it a coincidence that the conservative faction in most of these crisis moments has espoused an ideology virtually identical to that of the Puritan divines of 1631 Massachusetts. For in a real sense, the history of America’s cultural revolution is the story of how the conservative Christian orthodoxy[1] of Massachusetts Bay (with its concomitant rules of behavior) has been gradually moved from the halls of power to the margins of society, challenged in each new generation by new foes in new spheres until finally those who will and can claim their ideological inheritance from the original Puritan divines are a fringe few, increasingly seen as narrow and extreme even in Christian circles.
But theirs is only half the story. The story of America’s cultural revolution is not merely the story of Puritan defeat; it is also the story of liberal victory. Another look at our list of controversies shows that it is largely a list of names: Chauncy, Ware, Emerson, Briggs, Scopes—each a champion in his own age for freedom from the chains of ideological oppression. So while one could write a history of the American cultural revolution by simply writing the histories of each successive controversy, it would be wise not to neglect the lives of the controversial figures themselves; for before the revolutionary moment that caught the public eye and moved the nation, a revolution had already taken place in the heart of each one of these men. New thoughts broke the old mold, were harbored, fostered, and only then championed.
Such a story would be fascinating to write. A combination of biography and simple history, it would be the work of fruitful years, even decades. But one cannot always wait for decades, and a potion of the tale can be briefly told in much less time. And there is no better way to begin than in medias res, in Transcendental Massachusetts, where the Puritan ideology as a state-sponsored power was gasping its last desperate breaths. It was a time of rapid ideological change which saw the rise of one of the first widely-respected men in American history to openly disavow most Biblical teaching: Ralph Waldo Emerson[2]. Emerson, however, has been often studied, and his role as a cultural revolutionary is well understood. Less recognized, at least in recent times, is the importance of his contemporary and associate, Theodore Parker. Parker is a good figure to begin with because he is a transitional figure in his own right, a man with a foot in two camps. Like Emerson, he was a Unitarian minister before the rise of Transcendentalism; unlike Emerson, he remained one after. Even when many Unitarians condemned his teaching as “vehemently deistical” (Grodzins 360, 363) and longed for him to retire from their ranks, Parker continued to preach as one of their number. Even his eventual departure from Unitarianism in the middle 1840s was designed to further his pulpit ministry—so he could found what was to become by far the largest church in all of Boston. His story is interesting because of the startling contrast between the relative novelty and subsequent importance of many of his religious ideas on the one hand, and the lack of influence he himself had in sending those ideas to posterity. Some of his ideas have become very influential, but few if any trace them back to Parker. Furthermore, his story illustrates the continuously evolving nature of the liberal cause. In every generation the Puritan ideology has found its champions, but in each new generation the liberals have become more liberal, and the middle-ground between the two camps has come to be inhabited by a range of groups, each of which, like the Unitarians, was the liberal voice in its day, but was to be challenged later by some of its own, more liberal successors. The nature of Parker’s teaching and influence, and an understanding of why he is so little known today, can best be had by situating him, and the controversy he caused, in his own time.
In the opening decades of the nineteenth century the Puritan ideology had suffered several heavy setbacks. Harvard, a crucial ministerial training ground, had fallen to the liberals in 1805 with the confirmation of Henry Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity and Samuel Webber as the college president. As a result, a generation of theologically liberal ministers and theologians poured forth, and by 1819[3], a new liberal denomination was beginning to break off from the rest of New England Congregationalism. This new branch of congregationalism, Unitarianism, would quickly become very influential, especially among the intellectual elite of Boston.
The theological differences between the Unitarians and their conservative foes had primarily to do with their respective views of the nature of Jesus Christ and his role in the salvation of humankind. Trinitarians held (and hold) to Christ’s deity as the Son of God and His essential equality as deity with the Father. The Unitarians downplayed or even denied his divinity and certainly denied his essential equality with the Father, hence their denial of his place in the Trinity and of the Trinity itself. The Unitarians also “reject[ed] original sin” (Grodzins 456) and the Calvinistic emphasis on the total depravity of humankind. With these differences in Christology and Anthropology came natural differences in Soteriology (the Doctrine of Salvation); if Christ were not divine and humanity were not hopelessly depraved, Christ’s death could offer no especial benefit to humanity as a payment for sin, and people wouldn’t need it in the first place; hence the Unitarian deemphasis of Christ’s atoning death. In addition to their departures from conservative theology, the Unitarians were characterized by a difference in attitude, by a much more liberal idea of Christian fellowship. Having been themselves the victims of harsh polemics from the conservatives on account of their doctrine, they were as a group opposed to “theological despotism” and the use of a creed as a standard of fellowship or cooperation (Grodzins 254). Members of the Unitarian Society were “‘independent ministers of independent churches, [and] to his own particular church, and to his divine master, each pastor st[ood] or f[ell]’” (Grodzins 256-7)[4]. As was to become extremely clear during the debates that swirled around Parker, there was no place for excommunication in Unitarianism.
But underlying both the theological differences and the difference in attitude was a more fundamental difference that was often overlooked or misunderstood at the time: the Unitarians and the conservatives had different views about the nature of scriptural authority. This facet of disagreement is developed with precision and grace by Jerry Wayne Brown in his excellent book, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars.[5] As Brown explains, the conservatives held to the inspiration and authority of the literal text of the whole scripture. Every part and passage, from Genesis to Revelation, was equally reliable because God was the ultimate author of all. Interpretation, therefore, was a matter of bringing together with equal authority the many disparate passages relevant to a topic, even if the passages seemed to contradict one another. Any apparent contradiction between texts had to be resolved in such a way that all texts were granted the authority of divinely inspired truth. As Moses Stuart, Chair of Sacred Literature at the newly founded conservative Andover Seminary put it, “‘The decision of one text . . . is as authoritative as that of a thousand” (Brown 65). Hence, when one passage speaks of Jesus in human terms and another in divine, they concluded that he was both. When one passage declares that God is one, and others speak at different times of the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in divine terms, they concluded that God is one and three.
But the Unitarians rejected this fundamental conservative belief in the equal inspiration and authority of the whole text of scripture. Instead of looking to the biblical text as their authority, they looked to specific men behind the text. William Ellery Channing, a leading Unitarian, explained in his famous and controversial sermon, “Unitarian Christianity”: “Jesus Christ is the only master of Christians, and whatever he taught, either during his personal ministry or by his inspired Apostles, we regard as of divine authority, and profess to make the rule of our lives” (Brown 62). But what Jesus and his inspired apostles taught does not always correspond directly with what the received text says. Jesus and his messengers are the authority; the text itself is not. Interpretation, therefore, is more complicated than simply bringing texts to bear on an issue because any given text may or may not accurately represent what Jesus and the apostles taught. The interpreter must discern which parts of the text actually represent what the authoritative men taught; he must “establish a canon within the canon” (Brown 62). And the key to this process of interpretation was human reason. Brown summarizes from Channing:
“Revelation is addressed to us as rational beings.” Reason must be used to select the proper meaning of a scriptural text within the context of the proper understanding of a writer’s situation. Reason must be used to detect the “general strain of Scripture.” Finally, reason must be used to harmonize Scripture with “the known character and will of God, and with the obvious and acknowledged laws of Nature.” (63)
The source of spiritual truth, therefore, and of religious authority was not sola scriptura, but rather scripture filtered through reason and tested by reason against a person’s understanding of nature and the will of God.[6]
This rationalistic view of scriptural authority was influenced by the rational epistemology of Locke and by European higher criticism of the Bible, critical studies published throughout Europe from the late seventeenth century onwards that applied the same critical tools to the Bible that literary scholars were applying to other classical texts. Collectively, this long series of scholarship dismantled the previously almost universal notion that the Bible was God’s inerrant word. Critics identified contradictions, multiple authors and editors in supposedly unified books, secular sources, and many other components that made the Bible seem much more a work of generations of human ingenuity than a divine monologue. The Unitarians drew upon these techniques in their battles with New England orthodoxy (Brown 7). But they only went so far. While practicing biblical criticism to a degree themselves (as Channing’s sermon illustrates), the Unitarians, and in particular Andrews Norton, their chief biblical critic after he assumed the Dexter Professorship of Sacred Literature at Harvard in 1818, were actually deeply wary of the advanced biblical criticism propounded by later German critics.
The Unitarians sought a return to “a simple scriptural Christianity” free from complex and unnecessary doctrines like the Trinity (Brown 61). They believed that the Orthodox had made doctrine overly complicated by misunderstanding the nature of divine revelation. As Channing explained in Baltimore, humanity had progressed over time, and “the Bible was rightly to be seen as a record of ‘God’s successive revelations to mankind’” as the human race progressed (Brown 62). Therefore not every part of the Bible was relevant to modern believers, and to treat every part of Scripture with equal weight would lead to mistakes in interpretation. It was for this reason that Unitarians like Norton were willing to apply German critical techniques to some parts of Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. In this way they could prove the irrelevance of those portions and undermine the support behind Orthodox arguments. But they were unwilling to treat the Gospels in the same way because they believed that much of the New Testament, and the Gospels especially, really was God’s word to humanity. With Locke, they believed that “the Gospels represented the principal locus of Christian revelation because they record the historical facts of Jesus of Nazareth, substantiate his life and message with fulfilled prophecy and miracles, and propound the one essential tenet of Christian faith: Jesus is the Messiah” (Brown 21). The emphasis on the miracles as a substantiation of the teaching is a natural corollary to Locke’s denial of innate ideas and emphasis on sensory experience as the only source of knowledge. A person could not intuit the truth of Jesus’ teaching on his own. It had to be confirmed by external, sensory, historical proofs. It was out of this view of the authority of the Gospels that Norton’s massive life work (for which he left the Divinity School in 1830) came: The Genuineness of the Gospels, a work that “attempted to prove that the four canonical Gospels were written by the authors to whom they had been attributed and that they had remained ‘essentially the same’ as the original autographs” (Brown 82). So the Unitarians, while more liberal theologically and more critical in their handling of the Scripture than the Orthodox, were actual significantly more conservative than fully developed German biblical criticism. Early forms of this criticism (especially as found in Locke) did lead them to distinguish between the text and the word of God contained in the text, but, as we shall see, fully developed German theology and criticism led Theodore Parker even further.
Parker, like Emerson, was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School after the lines between the conservatives and the Unitarians were well established. He was the product of an institution that, without professing an official Unitarian creed, was nonetheless the greenhouse where future Unitarian ministers grew ripe for their pulpits. And when he began his studies there in the spring of 1834, Parker’s personal theology “would have provoked no objection from even quite conservative Unitarians” (Grodzins 42). He believed
in the Bible, although he thought the writers of the Bible were not inspired at all times. He believed in “one God” (not in the Triune God), who is “almighty—good and merciful—will reward the good and punish the wicked—both in this life and the next.” This punishment “may be eternal.” He believed that Christ was “the Son of God, conceived and born in a miraculous manner,” that He “came to preach a better religion by which mankind may be saved,” but not that “our sins will be forgiven because Christ died.” Parker did not believed in total depravity, “or that Adam’s Sin will be imputed to us”; rather, he thought that “if a man leads a good and pure life he will be accepted with God. (Grodzins 42)[7]
But this unremarkable creed was soon to change; Parker grew ripe during his years at the Divinity School, but not for Unitarianism. It was there, rather, that he first imbibed the ideas that lead him to become an important Transcendentalist and Unitarianism’s greatest thorn.
The chief influence that lead to Parker’s change of view was German biblical criticism. In the fall of 1835, Parker who already was a reader of German literature, began an extracurricular project for a student group called the Philanthropic Society. The project was a “Report on German Theology.” It took him nine months to prepare, and he presented it to the group on May 31, 1836 (Grodzins 67). In the process of writing it, he worked his way through more than sixty volumes of German theology and biblical criticism, and that exposure was to prove a major turning point in his life. Parker was drawn to a school of Rationalist German theology that “den[ied] any supernatural agency of God in producing Christianity.” While “Christianity was a divine beneficent dispensation,’ . . . [and] Jesus was ‘a messenger of divine Providence,’ and . . . the . . . Scriptures [do] contain ‘a true and eternal word of God,’” (69) none
of it was uniquely an expression of God’s truth for humanity. Any spiritual truth expressed by Jesus or found in the Bible was simply another statement of the spiritual truth that God had already made available to each person within his or her own soul. Therefore no external verification was needed for the truth of religion. The miracles which the Unitarians so heavily relied upon as the apprehensible seals of true revelation were extraneous. To see the truth of Christ’s doctrine, one need merely look within one’s own soul.
The Rationalists were divided into two camps as to where exactly in the soul the naturally revealed religion was to be discovered. Parker devotes most of his attention in the report to those who held that “religion originates in the ‘understanding” (69), but as his later writings were to show, his own affinity was with those who believed that every human could find the source of religion in the “feelings.” His conclusion in the report was that “the fact that religion does originate in the feelings is one of the grandest discoveries of modern times” (70). Shortly after he presented the report, he graduated from the Divinity School. He wrote in his journal, “What an immense change has taken place in my opinions and feelings upon all the main points of inquiry since I entered this place!” (73). His main philosophical departure was from the Lockean epistemology of his Unitarian peers. Parker was no longer convinced of the need for external or historical proofs for Christianity or of the distinction between revealed religion and natural religion. True religion was innate, natural. Any revealed religion, if true, would have to agree with the religion already sensible in his own soul, and that agreement would be its best and ultimate proof. In “blur[ring] the distinction between natural and revealed religion,” Parker was beginning to display “a basic characteristic of Transcendentalist theology” (73). And a natural corollary to this shift in religious epistemology was an increased willingness to follow the techniques of German biblical criticism to their logical end. If the miracles and resurrection of Jesus were unnecessary to validate his message, why be any more willing to believe in them than in Noah’s flood or Jonah’s whale? As events would prove, he wouldn’t be.
In the same year that Parker was finishing his report and graduating from the Divinity School, Transcendentalism was sliding onto the scene. Emerson’s Nature was published that year, and the Transcendental club began meeting in September. Because of the changes in his thinking during his time at the Divinity School, Parker was in sympathy with the “new views” (Grodzins 103). In summer 1837, he began attending Transcendental club meetings, which he found to be a “refuge” (102). He began to go to hear Emerson lecture as often as he could. And when in the summer of 1838 Emerson delivered the Divinity School address, Parker was there, and he was enthralled (113). Emerson’s address was a turning point for Transcendentalism; it was an audaciously public pronouncement of an ideology that most Unitarians could not accept. Before that address, Transcendentalism was largely a religious movement within Unitarianism, a movement composed mainly of Unitarian ministers and interested largely in religious reform. The Transcendentalists were understood to be primarily interested in shifting emphasis from the historical proofs of Christianity (miracles) to the internal, spiritual proofs (the resonance of its teaching with the soul). It was seen as a way of moving people’s interest in religion from the head to the heart, primarily for the spiritual benefit of believers (124-5). Many were sympathetic with such a goal, and among Transcendentalists there was much optimism that wholesale religious reform would be brought about within the denomination and that many of its most shining lights, such as Channing himself, would partake in the cause (127). But after Emerson’s address at the Divinity School, things changed. People began to understand that the Transcendentalists were not simply trying to shift attention away from miracles for spiritual reasons, but that many of them actually rejected the historicity of miracles. They were not simply trying to emphasize the internal proofs of Christianity as an aid to increased piety; internal proofs were the only kind they would accept for any religious truth, and they rejected any kind of special divine revelation rooted in historical events. These distinctions did not become clear overnight, but as they did become clear, the controversy increased. Old-school Unitarians, led by Andrews Norton, became fiercer in their polemics, and Unitarian journals began to be closed to the Transcendentalists[8] (128).
Parker remained firmly invested in the new movement through the risings and fallings of its first years. But whereas many of the Transcendentalists moved farther and farther and eventually altogether away from Unitarianism and the Bible as it became clear how strongly the Unitarians opposed them, Parker remained stubbornly in the Unitarian ranks, and he remained deeply committed to Biblical study—especially study in the form of German biblical criticism. The summer after his graduation from Divinity School, Parker began what was to be the one great scholarly work of his life: a translation and expansion of Wilhelm De Wette’s Introduction to the Old Testament that would take him seven years to complete. When he began the work, Parker was an unknown, un-ordained minister-to-be. By the time he finished he had become one of the most controversial, well-known, and listened to preachers in New England. And while during that time both his Transcendental views and his expression of those views matured, his fundamental commitment to De Wette and German criticism remained unchanged. The concepts in De Wette and his contemporaries had been the impetus for Parker’s own change of views, and when it was finished, his translation “provide[ed] a massive buttress of data to support [his] skeptical position on the authority of Scripture” (Grodzins 373). It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of De Wette in this regard. Just as the fundamental difference between the Unitarians and the Orthodox was their view of Scriptural authority, so the primary difference between Parker and his Unitarian detractors was his acceptance of De Wette’s arguments. It is no coincidence that when Andrews Norton wrote “an essay attacking the ‘modern German school of infidelity,’ [he] singled out De Wette because ‘no theologian of the German school had more direct influence on opinion out of Germany’” (Grodzins 71). Parker’s Transcendentalism was different from contemporaries like Emerson in this key respect: his beliefs were consistently rooted in a thorough and intense scholarly engagement with German biblical criticism.
But despite this key difference he was still, especially early on, united with them in the common cause of breathing a fresh breath of reform into the stale air of Unitarianism. And as the hue and cry grew louder, the unknown new minister who labored in his study on German biblical critics began to enter little by little into the fray himself. His early offerings, though in many ways they were ideologically the same as his later ones, were greeted with little controversy, probably because the full extent of what he and his fellow Transcendentalists believed was not yet fully understood. An early experiment was his preaching in January of two sermons on “The Contradictions in Scripture” to his little congregation at Roxbury. He had actually written the sermons in 1837, but had decided not to preach them on the advice of an experienced layman whom he had consulted, who said, among other things, that “if you undertake this never so carefully, YOU WILL HAVE ALL THE CLERGY ABOUT YOUR EARS” (Grodzins 155). But the sermons were not necessarily that radical; even Norton discounted much of the Old Testament and denied the absolute and total authority of the New. Parker’s attention in these sermons is devoted almost entirely to the Old Testament. He avoids any technical or scholarly treatment of critical questions like authorship, and instead he focuses on specific ways in which Old Testament narratives contradict either Reason or other parts of Scripture and what the proper response is to those contradictions. He treats, for example, “apparent contradictions to morality, above all when immoral and evil acts are attributed to God” (153). He argues that it is proper to discount such stories because the counsel of the heart which declares the wrongness of the act is a sure guide to true religion. And herein lies Parker’s newness, in his “argu[ing] that the ultimate standard of truth and morality lies in the soul, not in the Bible” and thereby “calleng[ing] the authority of all Scripture” (155).
The calm way in which these sermons were received by his congregation when he finally did preach them in the January of 1839 made the preaching of them a decisive moment for Parker. “‘My eyes were at once opened,’ . . . ‘I saw that intelligent men & religious men had not built their faith on mere authority as I had all along been taught.’ . . . ‘I did not wait thirteen months again before I . . . exposed a theological absurdity, or ventured to preach a truth not preached before’” (Grodzins 164). Indeed his courage must have been strengthened, for shortly after his preaching of these sermons he wrote a sermon on “Evidences of Christianity” which he delivered in August of 1839 to no less an audience then the gathered Unitarian clergy of Boston at one of the regular Thursday Lectures of the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers. In it he “anticipate[d] . . . many of [the]points [of the] . . . sermon on the ‘Transient and Permanent in Christianity’” which was to spark so much controversy later. Yet he does not seem to have sparked much controversy on this occasion. In January of 1840 he delivered another Thursday Lecture, a challenge to the idea that Jesus was uniquely inspired above other men. He argued instead that each human has equal access to God’s natural revelation to the human soul. This time he did get a reaction; a fellow minister accused him of “impiety” afterwards, and Parker left feeling hurt (184). But he was indefatigable, and in April his first pamphlet, “perhaps the clearest short statement of the Transcendentalist theological case” (Grodzins 194), was published—anonymously. In it he states a position that was to remain a recognizable theme throughout the coming controversy: “the primary and essential truths of all religions . . . are a belief in the existence of God, and a sense of dependence on him,” and these truths are “innate,” “a natural and essential sentiment of the soul” (Parker, “Blodgett” 264). Parker’s pamphlet was a salvo on the side of George Ripley and Emerson against Andrews Norton in a battle of words that had begun with Emerson’s Divinity School address. Norton had responded a year later with his own address at the Divinity School which had been subsequently printed. Ripley had responded to Norton who then re-responded, and it went back and forth until Parker waded in. But although the exchange had been heated on both sides up to that point, Parker’s “pamphlet received comparatively little notice, and its author remained anonymous” (Grodzins 198).[9]
These were not the only Transcendental speeches or publications that Parker produced in the two years before 1841, but they are representative. By and large, Parker was making controversial statements without attracting too much personal controversy. By early 1841, a few Unitarian ministers had begun to decline the opportunity to exchange pulpits with him, and an Orthodox journal had gone so far as to label him an “infidel,” but that was about it (Grodzins 238). Things were to change dramatically in the spring of that year. Parker’s sermon at the ordination of Charles Shackford on May 19, 1841 can justly be called one of those landmark moments in America’s cultural revolution. Its significance is not necessarily in the novelty of the ideas he expressed, for he had expressed many of them before in other venues; its significance lies in the furor that resulted. Parker’s audience that day included, as was not unusual at an ordination, ministers from across the spectrum of New England Christianity, Orthodox as well as Unitarian, and in the months that followed the Unitarians were to come under immense pressure
from the Orthodox to elucidate whether or not “they acknowledged Parker to be a Christian teacher” (248). The result was a kind of identity crisis for Unitarianism. Parker himself became the subject of intense scrutiny; he was offered much wider venues to express his views; and he came to have an influence that he had not had before. And although his views were reviled by many, there were also many who defended his ideas and his right to be heard. By the time the dust settled, Parker “pastored a ‘Congregational Society’ that was the largest free church in the country and the largest church of any kind in Boston. . . . [A]lmost three thousand people went weekly to hear him preach (nearly 2 percent of the population of the city)” (ix). It may fairly be suggested that with Parker America acquired the first truly successful religious enterprise in its history that finally and explicitly rejected the authority and importance of Christ and the Bible—surely a significant battle in the culture war. And it began with Parker’s sermon on May 19, 1841.
Parker’s theme that day was “what is Transient in Christianity, and what Permanent therein” (Parker, Discourse 342). What made the message so opprobrious to many of those assembled was that Parker identified as transient most of the things that they thought not only permanent in, but absolutely essential to true Christianity. The Old Testament was transient: “Modern Criticism is fast breaking to pieces this idol which men have made out of the Scriptures” (350). The New Testament was transient: “Which Apostle of the New Testament . . . ever claims infallible authority for himself or others?” (351). Even Christ himself was transient: “If it could be proved . . . that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, still Christianity would stand firm. . . . If it rest on the personal authority of Jesus alone, then there is no certainty of its truth” (354). In these statements, and there are many like them in the sermon, Parker displayed the fruit of German biblical criticism on his thinking. To trust the written record of Scripture as a source of spiritual authority would only be misleading: “An idolatrous regard for the imperfect scripture of God’s word is the apple of Atalanta, which defeats theologians running for the hand of divine truth” (351). In place of Scripture, Parker once again offered the fruit of German Rational theology, a dependence on spiritual truth directly revealed by God to each individual human soul. “The great truths of morality and religion, the deep sentiment of love to man and love to God, are perceived intuitively, and by instinct” (348), and the Scripture was valuable only insofar as it accorded with that natural religion. The pious reader, therefore, must learn to judge the scripture by the innate standards revealed by his own Reason and Conscience.
Some men have regarded [the Bible] as the heathen their idol, or the savage his fetish. They have subordinated Reason, Conscience, and Religion to this. Thus have they lost half the treasure it bears in its bosom. No doubt the time will come when its true character shall be felt. Then it will be seen, that, amid all the contradictions of the Old Testament; its legends, so beautiful as fictions, so appalling as facts; amid its predictions that have never been fulfilled; amid the puerile conceptions of God, which sometimes occur, and the cruel denunciations that disfigure both Psalm and Prophecy, there is a reverence for man’s nature, a sublime trust in God, and a depth of piety rarely felt in these cold mortal hearts of ours. Then the devotion of its authors, the loftiness of their aim and the majesty of their life, will appear doubly fair, and Prophet and Psalmist will warm our hearts as never before. (354)
There, in a nutshell, is Parker’s Transcendental religion. The question for many of his hearers that day was, “Is it Christian?” For the Orthodox and, indeed, for most Unitarians the answer was clearly no. But it took the Unitarians several years to decide whether or not they could actually make that point publicly. They did, after all, reject creeds as a test of fellowship. And many did recognize his “sincerity and high moral character,” in other words his Christian mode of life (Grodzins 369). But they abhorred the way that he, as one of them put it to Parker himself, “was trying to ‘do away with’ Christianity; [how] he ‘did nothing but pull down’ [and] ‘revil[e] the church, the Bible &the clergy’” (361). Eventually they found they could do little more than refuse to exchange pulpits with him and ask him repeatedly to withdraw from the Boston Association. He never officially did, although his departure from his Congregational church eventually accomplished the same thing (489).
In the immediate aftermath of the Shackford ordination, Parker’s influence unquestionably increased. In the fall he gave a series of five lectures on “Religion” to packed-out crowds at the Boston Masonic Temple (site of Emerson’s lectures on “The Times” that winter). He then gave the same series in lyceums all over Massachusetts. “He later estimated that altogether, between the beginning of October [1841] and the end of February [1842], thousands of people had heard him” (Grodzins 268). The lectures were then revised into book form for publication by “one of the most respectable publishing houses in the United States” in 1843 (275). And although there were many times during the years of controversy following the ordination sermon that Parker was reduced to tears by the pain of ostracism at the hands of his Unitarian peers, most judicious observers would in retrospect conclude that he was not exactly the martyr he sometimes made himself out to be. He was disparaged and ostracized by some, but embraced and praised by others. He had won “a congregation of two thousand persons to hear him preach every Sunday, enthusiastic reverence and love from hosts of friends, large audiences in other places wherever he goes” (491).
So much for Parker’s immediate influence. What then of his long-term influence? In his career he explicitly tried to forward the two streams of though he had first begun to embrace at Harvard: German biblical criticism and German Rationalist theology. The criticism he encapsulated in his translation of De Wette, the Transcendentalist theology in the book form of his five religion lectures, A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion.
His De Wette was unquestionably designed to have a lasting impact. It was not a mere translation, which Parker felt would be lost on the average reader. It was, rather, an expansion designed to provide the would-be student of biblical criticism with everything he would need to assimilate De Wette’s ideas.
Where De Wette provided quotations only in the original tongues, Parker provided translations; where De Wette indicated with citations that the reader should compare two biblical passages, Parker provided the full texts of each . . . placed in parallel columns to make the comparisons easier. He inserted . . . translated excerpts from all relevant scholars and sources he could find, modern and ancient; he also added his own commentary and, in an appendix to the first volume, several original catalogues and essays. (Grodzins 373)
But despite all of this teacher-like care, the work ultimately did not succeed in introducing biblical criticism to a wider American audience. It certainly was not a smashing bestseller. It “received some notice (although never a long review in America), and it sold about as well as cold have been expected, going through three editions in fifteen years” (374). But beyond the mere statistics, it certainly can be judged a failure by the controversy aroused fifty years later by another student of German biblical criticism.
In January of 1891, Presbyterian minister and theological author, Charles Augustus Briggs, delivered an address at Union Theological Seminary that caused an uproar—and his eventual defrocking by the Presbyterian church. In it he advanced the argument that higher critical studies of the biblical text made belief in the inerrancy of the scriptures an untenable position, and he did it in terms that compared to Parker sound almost cautious: “It is not a pleasant task to point out errors in the sacred Scriptures. Nevertheless, Historical Criticism finds them, and we must meet the issue whether they destroy the authority of the Bible or not. . . . I shall venture to affirm that, so far as I can see, there are errors in the Scriptures which no one has been able to explain away” (Satta 3). Briggs recognizes the implications of applying critical methods to the Bible—that they might in fact call into question the authority of scripture as divine revelation. But he by no means explicitly rejects biblical authority. Parker had gone far, far beyond Briggs in his teachings a half century before. Not only had he embraced the German criticism, he had followed its implications to their fullest extent. Yet Briggs’ address was treated as if his ideas were unheard of. As Brown points out in the conclusion to his book on The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, this is very strange indeed.
The strangest feature of American critical biblical studies in th[e] early period is the fact that they vanished so quickly and made so little impact on the development of American religion after the Civil War. When Charles Briggs . . . pronounced his agreement on certain points of German higher criticism, it was generally thought that something new had been introduced to America. . . . [E]ven the most recent historian of the Briggs affair seems to feel that Briggs was the first to introduce higher criticism to America. (180)
Why this proved to be the case almost certainly had less to do with Parker and more to do with current events like the rise of abolitionism as a serious liberal cause and the turmoil created by the War Between the States. But regardless, Parker would have almost certainly been tremendously disappointed to learn that the scholarly labor on which he expended so much energy and love would do so little to free people from the evils of bibliolotry he preached so often and so fervently against.
Parker was not to prove any more successful in disseminating for posterity the influence of German Rational theology and the Transcendentalist doctrine of innate religion. He remained an exceedingly popular preacher for the rest of his life, but upon his death, his large church rather quickly lost its way. And although the nation as a whole continued to move to the left, radical liberals like Whitman were going to be far less appreciated then men like Longfellow for a long time yet. It was not until the twentieth-century that a Parker-like brand of religious liberalism truly became mainstream. And even then, its primary resemblance to Parker’s thought lay in its skepticism of biblical authority.
The reason Parker’s theology failed to catch on, and the reason why later liberals did not trace their ideological heritage to him, is much easier to identify than the reasons his biblical criticism failed to catch on. Parker’s theological ideas were developed before Darwinism, and the truly mainstream religious liberalism of the twentieth century grew directly out of the conflict between biblical religion and claims of Darwinism. In 1922, a Baptist minister named Harry Emerson Fosdick, preached a sermon at First Presbyterian in New York City that was subsequently published in several journals and widely distributed in pamphlet form. In that form it was entitled “The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith,” and it raised the question of how professing Christians were to reconcile their beliefs with Darwinism, which was essentially the consensus of the scientific community. Debate over the issues he raised was fierce and ultimately led almost every major protestant denomination in America to split, with the mainstream camp invariably siding with the liberal solution to the intellectual dilemma: rejection of the miraculous claims of Scripture regarding origins and the life of Christ.
We can never know for sure, but it is possible that Parker would have welcomed the rise of Darwinism. Parker was a theist. One of his earliest disagreements with Emerson was on how properly to characterize God. In the wake of the Divinity School address, “Parker read Emerson as saying that not only were people like God, they were God” (Grodzins 115). Parker wanted the distinction kept clear. He also believed that God is in some sense personal. “Emerson could describe obedience to spiritual laws as being God, because he portrayed God as impersonal, made up of these laws. By contrast, Parker was committed to describing God as a Father” (116). He believed that because God is omnipresent, He is immanent in Nature and “the powers of Nature . . . are but modes of God’s action” (Parker, Discourse 173). Parker rejoices in Newton’s “One cause, eternal, and infinite, who rules the all” (106, note 1), and makes as an assumption for some of his argument about man’s innate religious nature that “man [is] always the same” (54, note 1). But despite these beliefs which are possibly out of sync with pure Darwinism, Parker does show hints of a kind of pre-Darwin thinking in some of his writing. He ascribed to an evolutionary view of culture (186) and suspects the same of religion (112-8). He accepts that the “known facts of science” mean creation took not six days but “millions of years” (Grodzins 153). And he is familiar with the idea that “man may have arisen from an embryo with human qualities, in the slime of the sea” (Parker, Discourse 115, note 1). Parker’s reliance on Reason lead one to suspect he might have embraced Darwinism, or certainly a form of theistic evolution, and with it the modern liberal theology.
In the final analysis, Parker may not have been the direct father of modern religious liberalism. But the fears of his foes came to pass as surely as if he had been. How prescient was Moses Stuart’s comment to William Ellery Channing in the days following his “Unitarian Christianity” sermon: “I am well satisfied, that the course of reasoning in which you have embarked, and the principles by which you explain away the divinity of the Saviour, must eventually lead most men who approve them to the conclusion, that the Bible is not of divine origin, and does not oblige us to belief or obedience” (Brown 68). If only the Unitarians could have seen Parker coming.
Secondary Bibliography to Date
Brown, Jerry Wayne. The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1969.
Grodzins, Dean. American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002.
Myerson, Joel, ed. Transcendentalism: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Parker, Theodore. Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, A. 1842. Rpt. New York: Arno P, 1972.
Parker, Theodore. “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity . . .” Rpt. in Myerson. 341-64.
Parker, Theodore. “Blodgett, Levi” “The Previous Question . . .” Rpt. in Myerson. 261-79.
Satta, Ronald F. “The Case Of Professor Charles A. Briggs: Inerrancy Affirmed.” Trinity Journal 26:11, 69-90. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2005.
[1] A historically-appropriate overarching title is difficult: “Calvinism” is a natural option but today seems too theologically specific. “Fundamentalism” is relatively recent term. But both have are correct during specific periods.
[2] Other men, like Thomas Paine, had disavowed Biblical teaching and were infamous for it.
[3] Year of William Ellery Channing’s Baltimore sermon “Unitarian Christianity.” The American Unitarian Society was formed in 1825.
[4] Grodzins is quoting here from a letter written in defense of Parker by Nathaniel Folsom, a Unitarian minister who participated in the South Boston ordination in which Parker delivered “Transient and Permanent.”
[5] A must-read for anyone interested in the rise of Unitarianism and the subsequent birth of Transcendentalism. For all parties concerned the fundamental issue was the source of spiritual knowledge, and this book covers with fascinating precision the men and moments that led to the defeat of the conservative point of view.
[6] One side effect of this view of scriptural authority was the placing of a heavy emphasis on the intellectual qualifications of the interpreter. Andrews Norton was fond of doing this, as when in his appeal for a position teaching Biblical criticism at Harvard he “suggested that most liberals could not be sufficiently trained to defend their own position . . . and must turn to some authoritative teacher” (Brown 34).
[7] Grodzins is summarizing a letter Parker “wrote to his nephew . . . the day after he moved into Divinity Hall” (42).
[8] Who founded the Dial as an alternative.
[9] A reviewer of Parker’s later comprehensive exposition of his views on religion Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1843) would even cite “an obscure pamphlet by one Levi Blodget [sic]” as one of Parker’s sources (Grodzins 198).