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.