Theodore Parker and the arc of the moral universe

"May we join the human race in daring to live in the prophetic spirit: seeking inspiration like the seers and sages of this and other lands, judging the past as they, acting on the present like them, envisioning a new and nobler era of the spirit.

May we have communities for the whole person: truth for the mind, good works for the hands, love for the heart; and for the soul that aspiring after perfection, that unfaltering faith in life, which like lightning in the clouds, shines brightest when elsewhere it is most dark."

Words of Theodore Parker

Theodore Parker was born in 1810 in Massachusetts, the youngest child of a large farming family. He trained for ministry at Harvard Divinity School, where Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address made a big impression on him. Emerson was one of the leading lights of the Transcendentalist movement, whose members saw the divine as immanent in nature and emphasized individual freedom of conscience. Emerson's remarks in his address doubting the veracity of biblical miracles were deeply shocking at the time and led to him being denounced as an atheist. He was not invited to speak at Harvard for another 30 years. Parker would go on to be even more controversial. 

Parker's life was marked by grief and sadness. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was 11 and he'd lost his father and 7 of his 10 siblings to the disease by the time has was 30. He was unable to have children with his wife, which caused them both much pain. Throughout his life he maintained a deep and abiding faith in a God who was a personal all-loving presence and immanent in everything. His faith led him to speak out against injustices. He campaigned for the abolition of slavery and for women's suffrage. His words and actions inspired Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. He died in 1860, aged 49, from tuberculosis. 

The inscription on his grave reads, “Theodore Parker, the Great American Preacher. Born at Lexington Massachusetts, United States of America, August 24th 1810, died at Florence, Italy, May 10th 1860. His name is engraved in marble, his virtues in the hearts of those he helped to free from slavery and from superstition.”

In his autobiographical work 'Letters on Experience as a Minister' Parker recalled the following experience from when he was about four years old,

“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-hold, .. where I spotted a little tortoise sunning himself in the shallow waters .. I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile, for although I had never killed any creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds, squirrels and the like.. 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 this involuntary but inward check upon my actions... I hastened home and told the tale to my mother and asked what it was that told me it was wrong? She wiped a tear from her eye, 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 always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear and 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.” 

The day after I had my first Covid vaccination, I wasn't feeling up to doing much except reading. So, as a lovely treat to myself, I decided to read out loud the first sermon that saw Theodore Parker in trouble with his Unitarian brethren, 'The Transient and Permanent in Christianity', delivered at the ordination of Rev. Charles Shackford in the Hawes Place Church, Boston, on May 19th 1841. It took me 1 hour and 20 minutes! If you have a spare 100 minutes sometime you read the sermon here.

Acknowledging that my necessarily concise framing cannot possibly do the depths of his thinking justice, I shall do my best to give you a short summary of the essence of the sermon:

The doctrines and outward ritual forms of Christianity, along with belief in the miracles in the Bible as literal truths, are transient and therefore unimportant. The permanent truth of Christianity lies in the ethical teaching of Jesus, as recorded in the sermon on the mount and his parables. Everyone has direct access, as Jesus did, to oneness with God, as an inner guiding light for life.

An extract from the sermon reads, 

“Real Christianity gives men new life. It is the growth and perfect action of the Holy Spirit God puts into the sons of men. It makes us outgrow any form, or any system of doctrines we have devised, and approach still closer to the truth. It would lead us to take what help we can find. It would make the Bible our servant, not our master... It would make us revere the holy words spoken by "godly men of old," but revere still more the word of God spoken through Conscience, Reason, and Faith, as the holiest of all... It would have us make the kingdom of God on earth, and enter more fittingly the kingdom on high. It would lead us to form Christ in the heart, on which Paul laid such stress, and work out our salvation by this. For it is not so much by the Christ who lived so blameless and beautiful eighteen centuries ago, that we are saved directly, but by the Christ we form in our hearts and live out in our daily life, that we save ourselves, God working with us, both to will and to do.”

Now this may not sound very controversial to us today, because eventually these ideas and those of Parker's contemporaries in the Transcendentalist movement became accepted in Unitarianism, and we are the heirs of those ideas today, but at the time his sermon caused a huge storm. He was ostracised by the Unitarian establishment, who, considering him at best an embarrassment and at worst a dangerous heretic, advised him to withdraw from the Boston Association of Minsters. He refused, on the grounds that the Association had no right to censor its members. However, it soon became too difficult for him to maintain a Unitarian pulpit and, with the help of friends in the transcendentalist movement, he started his own independent congregation, the 28th Congregational Society of Boston.

Parker took the teaching of Jesus to “love your neighbour as yourself” very much to heart. His God was the God of Universal Love, who saw all people as equal, and he lived out this truth in his life. Parker's definition of democracy as “government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people” during a speech at New England Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston on 29 May 1850 was paraphrased by Abraham Lincoln is his Gettysburg Address in 1863. Lincoln couldn't quite commit to Parker's radical vision of equality and removed the “all” from his speech.

Parker embodied the maxim 'deeds not creeds'. His actions expressed the deepest values of his inner spiritual life and in courageously speaking truth to power he became an inspirational model of the prophetic Unitarian minister for the generations that followed in his footsteps.

Almost all of the social justice work of Unitarians can be traced back to Parker, from gender equality and racial equality to penal reform and education. His rejection of the authority of the Bible and Christian tradition also laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Unitarian movement into a pluralist movement that recognises and values truths from many different sources. 

In our emphasis on freedom of conscience and shared values rather than beliefs, we are the inheritors of Parker's convictions that the heart of the spiritual life lies in ethics rather than doctrine, and the importance he placed on personal integrity. 

In a sermon published in 1853 he said, 

“Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. Be true to your own mind and conscience, your heart and your soul. So only can you be true to God.”

The 28th Congregational Society of Boston soon grew so large that they had to meet in the Boston Music Hall to accommodate all the 2,000 people who flocked to hear him every Sunday. Among his congregation were women who became leading lights in the fight for equal rights for women, including writers Louisa May Alcott (author of Little Women), Julia Ward Howe (who wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (author of The Women's Bible), who called his services “soul-satisfying.” He was one of the first Unitarian ministers to refer to the divine as feminine as well as masculine, something that we may take for granted today, but again this was unheard of amongst male Protestant clergy of his time. He invited women to speak from his pulpit and supported women's rights, working with other reformers to campaign for changes in the laws regarding property and divorce.

Parker also took a very active part in the campaign for the abolition of slavery, preaching vociferously against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the slaver and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate. With members of his congregation, he formed the Boston Vigilance Committee, which helped hide escaped slaves. He harboured some of these fugitive slaves in his own home, writing his sermons with a pistol on his desk, in case he needed to defend his house-guests from capture. He was indicted several times, but never convicted. As a result of the work of the Boston Vigilance Committee, from 1850 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861, only twice were slaves captured in Boston and transported back to the south. On both occasions Bostonians staged mass protests. 

Parker knew he was on the right side of history and that slavery would eventually be abolished. In a sermon published in 1853 he said, 

“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. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.” 

One hundred years later Martin Luther King Jr. would use the phrase, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” in several speeches, as he continued the fight for racial justice.

Sadly, Parker did not live to see the emancipation of slaves as a result of the American Civil War. He wore himself out with hard work and stress, was forced to retire from the pulpit in 1859, after suffering an attack of bleeding from the lungs, and died a few months later in 1860. In his farewell letter to his congregation he wrote, 

“I hope that you will not forget the contribution for the poor, whom we have with us always. I don't know when I shall again see your welcome faces... may we do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God, and his blessing will be upon us here and hereafter, for his infinite love is with us forever.” Amen.

Being branches of the tree of life

 “I waited for the present season; that … I might lead you by the hand into the brighter and more fragrant meadow of the Paradise before us.” Cyril of Jerusalem, 4th Century

Many ancient cultures have legends of a land of peace and plenty, free from suffering and strife, and a great tree, which connects the worlds of the living, the dead, and the gods – know variously as the world tree, the cosmic tree, or the tree of life.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, whose creation stories were based on those of the older Sumerian cultures, the tree of life is located in the Garden of Eden, which was translated into Greek as paradeisos, from an old Iranian word referring to the walled gardens of the first Persian empire.

“And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.” Genesis 2:8 - 10

In Sumerian legends, paradise was known as Dilmun and was thought to be located on a mysterious sacred mountain to the East. It was a place of fresh, flowing waters, thick forests, and beautiful gardens, without conflict, disease, hunger, or sorrow. Genesis places the Garden of Eden in a mysterious Eastern location on the earth.

What meaning might these legends have for us today? The myths and stories that have grown around these archetypes reveal much about how human cultures have understood human nature and our place in the cosmos. 

In Christianity, the legend of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden has been used to justify much oppression – women are still suffering from the legacy of Eve being painted as the villain of the story of the Fall – when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and were banished from paradise.

The story inspired St Augustine to develop the doctrine of original sin, which has been used to wield the weapon of guilt ever since. And our culture has taken literally the invitation in Genesis 1:28, “Be fertile and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

And yet, despite all the problematic elements of this story, I still feel it has meaning for me today. I interpret the Fall story in psychological terms - the knowledge that Adam and Eve obtained from the tree was the development of the human ego, the illusion of separation that causes us to live as though we are separate from the Creator and the rest of creation, separate from Nature and from each other.

The early Christian church taught that, through the resurrection of Jesus, and the blessing of the Holy Spirit, given to the disciples at Pentecost, God had restored harmony to the world and humanity was returned to paradise. The Christian community sought to embody this restored paradise. Their central ritual was a celebration of the abundance of earthly paradise – a communal meal in which all shared in earth's bounty. Rich and poor, male and female, master and slave ate together, a radical equality that was deeply subversive in the Roman Empire. Christians dedicated all their material belongings to the community to be held in common. The walls, ceilings and floors of their sanctuaries were covered in images of paradise – lush green meadows, blue skies, the tree of life in the centre, filled with sheep and the figure of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, tending the sheep.

The imagery of the tree of life from Genesis reappears in the last book of the Christian New Testament, “Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of the city, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Revelation 22:1 - 2

In Saving Paradise, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker examine the rituals, images, and theology of Christianity, to show how the emphasis shifted over time from paradise on earth to a focus on the crucifixion. 

Much of Jesus' teaching was about resistance to the empire of domination. The early Christians were pacifists and were often persecuted by the Roman empire. With the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in the 4th century, empire and the Christian religion began to merge. Over the next few centuries, the Christian church became more enmeshed with empire and, by the middle ages, had begun to sanction violence and domination in the crusades, and the colonization of indigenous lands and peoples by Europeans. 

Paradise was no longer imagined on the earth, but was equated with heaven, the realm of the righteous in the afterlife. The communion feast had become a re-enactment of the sacrificial death of Jesus, which was now seen as atonement for sin, a theology created in the 11th century by St Anselm. Christian imagery began to reflect its theology of sacrifice, death and judgment, and crosses and scenes of the crucifixion and judgement day came to dominate church art. 

Brock and Parker traced the appearance of the first crucifix to the Rhine Valley in the 10th century, an area that had been subject to a brutal colonization by Charlemagne, over three decades around the turn of the 9th century. The Saxon form of Christianity blended the Christian story with their earlier pagan practice, honouring Jesus and Thunor and Woden, in sacred groves of trees and around holy springs. 

The Frankish empire, led by Charlemagne, invaded Saxon territory, cutting down their sacred trees and deforesting the countryside. They forced the Saxons at sword point to be baptized into the Frankish Latin version of Christianity. The Saxons rebelled, but ultimately lost the wars. Their descendants carved that first image of Jesus on the cross and joined the first crusade. The tree of life had become the tree of death.

The story of the destruction of the sacred Saxon trees made me sad. And yet, there was a hope in it that I held onto – for the spirit of the sacred trees hasn't died – it lives on in the people today who view the earth and all life as sacred. Paradise is the earth, and the tree of life can be, as we heard in Revelation, 'for the healing of the nations', if we take to heart its lessons about interconnection. Recent research has shown that the existence of the 'Wood Wide Web' – a forest is a vast network of trees, fungi, plants, and insects, in symbiotic relationship, operating more as one organism than as a collection of separate entities. 

Brock and Parker invite us to reconnect with a vision of community as earthly paradise. They write, “We come to know the world as paradise when our hearts and souls are reborn through the arduous and tender task of living rightly with one another and the earth. Generosity, non-violence, and care for one another are the pathways into transformed awareness. 

Knowing that paradise is here and now is a gift that comes to those who practice the ethics of paradise. This way of living is not Utopian. It does not spring simply from the imagination of a better world but from a profound embrace of this world. It does not begin with knowledge or hope. It begins with love.”

I like to think of paradise as another name for the beloved community – let us be about its work of love. Let us value the individual gifts we bring to benefit and bless the whole. Let us practise radical hospitality, honouring the inherent worth and dignity of everyone. Let us resist the forces of oppression and domination that try to separate us from each other. Let us work for justice and peace. Let us water the tree of life that shelters the whole community of every living being of the earth under its lush green canopy. Amen.