Theodore Parker

First pastorate

Parker had spent 1836 visiting pulpits in the Boston area, but for family reasons accepted a pastorate at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1837.^[19] At first, he found the location less than stimulating and work constraining.^[20] He adapted to pastoral life, however, and preached in many pulpits around Boston as a visitor. He gained a wide reputation as an earnest, effective speaker. In 1840 Harvard awarded him an honorary master's degree on the basis of his extensive learning.^[21]

Parker delivered one especially popular sermon twenty-five times between 1838 and 1841. In it, he argued against the popular notion that religion could be reduced to morality. "The principle of morality is obedience to the Law of con[science]," he wrote, while religion required more: that we "feel naturally, allegiance to a superior Being: dependence on him & accountability to him." The theme of dependence echoes Schleiermacher, an indication of the German influence on his theology. Morality involves right acting, while religion requires love of God and regular prayer, which Parker considered essential to human life. "No feeling is more deeply planted in human nature than the tendency to adore a superior being," he preached, "to reverence him, to bow before him, to feel his presence, to pray to him for aid in times of need" and "to bless him when the heart is full of joy."^[22]

Transcendentalism

In 1837, Parker had begun attending meetings of the group later known as the Transcendental Club. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address that year had been deeply arresting to him,^[23] and he welcomed the opportunity to associate with Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, and several others.^[24] Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Parker wrote of the world as divine, and of themselves as part of this divinity. Unlike Emerson and other Transcendentalists, however, Parker believed the movement was rooted in deeply religious ideas and did not believe it should retreat from religion. All shared a conviction that slavery should be abolished and social reforms should take root.^[25]

Parker gradually introduced Transcendentalist ideas into his sermons. He tempered his radicalism with diplomacy and discretion, however. "I preach abundant heresies," he wrote to a friend, "and they all go down—for the listeners do not know how heretical they are."^[26] For years he had wrestled with the factuality of the Hebrew Scriptures, and by 1837 he was wishing "some wise man would now write a book…and show up the absurdity of…the Old Testament miracles, prophecies, dreams, miraculous births, etc.'" He was hardly alone. "'What shall we do with the Old Testament?' asked fellow Unitarian James Walker in 1838. 'That question is of such frequent recurrence among laymen as well as clergymen, that any well-considered attempt to answer it, or supply the means of answering it, is almost sure of hearty welcome."^[27] Questions regarding biblical realism and meaning, and the answers clergy increasingly found through the German-based higher criticism, formed the basis of liberal Christianity as it emerged and developed throughout the nineteenth century.

In 1838 Parker published his first major article, a critical review of an orthodox work written by his former professor John Gorham Palfrey. In it Parker broke for the first time with supernatural realism, as he also increasingly did in his sermons.^[28] To him, Christianity was natural rather than miraculous. More and more, he praised social reform movements such as those for temperance, peace, and the abolition of slavery. In 1840 he described such movements as divinely inspired, though he added that they did not fully address the spiritual and intellectual ills of society.^[29] Controversy mounted regarding these and other Transcendentalist elements in his work. So did criticism, which often saddened and distressed him.^[30]

Break with Orthodoxy

In 1841, Parker laid bare his radical theological position in a sermon titled A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, in which he espoused his belief that the traditions of historic Christianity did not reflect the truth.^[32] In so doing, he made an open break with orthodox theology. He instead argued for a type of Christian belief and worship in which the essence of Jesus's teachings remained permanent but the words, traditions, and other forms of their conveyance did not. He stressed the immediacy of God and saw the Church as a communion, looking upon Christ as the supreme expression of God. Ultimately, he rejected all miracles and revelation and saw the Bible as full of contradictions and mistakes. He retained his faith in God but suggested that people experience God intuitively and personally, and that they should center their religious beliefs on individual experience.^[1]

Parker's West Roxbury church remained loyal. Sermons and media attacked him, however, when he denied Biblical miracles and the literal authority of the Bible and Jesus. Many questioned his Christianity. Nearly all the pulpits in the Boston area were closed to him,^[33] and he lost friends. Parker reacted with grief and defiance.^[34] He remained unwilling to concede that his views placed him beyond the outer bounds of Unitarian liberalism. After this unwilling break with the Unitarian establishment, he spent two years (1841–1843) adjusting to the reality of his newly controversial and independent career and increasing his social activism on religious grounds. He began to see himself as a prophetic religious reformer.^[35]

Travel to Europe

In 1843 and 1844, Theodore and Lydia traveled in Europe. While there his theology, career, and personal life matured and steadied. He was no longer as sensitive to criticism and bore difficulties more easily.^[38] Away from extended family problems in West Roxbury, his marriage seems to have improved and become more steadily affectionate. Despite complex issues that occasionally resurfaced, he and Lydia were happier. "My wife is kind as an angel," he would write in his journal during denominational trials in 1845. His travels also seemed to stimulate a growing interest in political and social issues.^[39]

Independent Boston pastorate

Returning to the United States, Parker found Unitarianism on the cusp of a division over his right to fellowship as a minister. His controversial 1841 sermon had created a stir that ballooned into an all-out storm in 1844 at the Church of the Disciples. The debate over the nature and degree of Parker's "infidelity" caused Unitarians to adopt a liberal creed, which they had formerly declined to do based on an inclusive principle. Their position proved too orthodox to include Parker.^[40]

In January, 1845, a sizeable group of supporters gathered at Marlboro Chapel in Boston and resolved to provide Parker "a chance to be heard in Boston." Calling themselves "Friends of Theodore Parker," they hired a hall and invited him to preach there on Sunday mornings.^[41] Despite misgivings, Parker accepted and preached his first sermon at the Melodeon (Boston, Massachusetts) Theater in February. Although the arrangement was temporary at first,^[42] he resigned his West Roxbury pastorate in early 1846 (to the dismay of his faithful parishioners there). He elected to call his new congregation the 28th Congregational Society of Boston; after the Melodeon, Parker's congregation met in the Boston Music Hall on Winter Street, Boston.^[43]

Parker's congregation grew to 2,000 and included influential figures such as Louisa May Alcott, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe (a personal friend), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.^[44] Stanton called his sermons "soul-satisfying" when beginning her career, and she credited him with introducing her to the idea of a Heavenly Mother in the Trinity.^[45] Parker was increasingly known for preaching what he and his followers identified as a type of prophetic Christian social activism.

The 28th Congregational Society, now renamed Theodore Parker Unitarian Church, located on 1851 Centre Street in West Roxbury was designated a Boston Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 1985.

Reform movements and social theology

After 1846, Parker shifted from a focus on Transcendentalism and challenging the bounds of Unitarian theology to a focus on the gathering national divisions over slavery and the challenges of democracy. In Boston, he led the movement to combat the stricter Fugitive Slave Act, a controversial part of the Compromise of 1850. This act required law enforcement and citizens of all states—free states as well as slave states—to assist in recovering fugitive slaves. Parker called the law "a hateful statute of kidnappers" and helped organize open resistance to it. He and his followers formed the Boston Vigilance Committee, which refused to assist with the recovery of fugitive slaves and helped hide them.^[46] For example, they smuggled away Ellen and William Craft when Georgian slave catchers came to Boston to arrest them. Due to such efforts, from 1850 to the onset of the American Civil War in 1861, only twice were slaves captured in Boston and transported back to the South. On both occasions, Bostonians combatted the actions with mass protests.^[47]

As Parker's early biographer John White Chadwick wrote, Parker was involved with almost all of the reform movements of the time: "peace, temperance, education, the condition of women, penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, the physical destitution of the poor" though none became "a dominant factor in his experience" with the exception of his antislavery views.^[48] He "denounced the Mexican War and called on his fellow Bostonians in 1847 'to protest against this most infamous war,'"^[49] while at the same time promoting economic expansionism and exposing a racist view of Mexicans' inherent inferiority, calling them "a wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, and character".^[50][51]

Yet his abolitionism became his most controversial stance.^[52] He wrote the scathing To a Southern Slaveholder in 1848, as the abolition crisis was heating up, and took a strong stance against slavery^[53] and advocated violating the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a controversial part of the Compromise of 1850 which required the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Parker worked with many fugitive slaves, some of whom were among his congregation. As in the case of William and Ellen Craft,^[54] he hid them in his home. Although he was indicted for his actions, he was never convicted.^[33]

As a member of the Secret Six, he supported financially the abolitionist John Brown, whom many consider a terrorist.^[55] After Brown's arrest, Parker wrote a public letter, "John Brown's Expedition Reviewed", arguing for the right of slaves to kill their masters and defending Brown's actions.^[56]