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Transcendentalists • Tuesdays, May 12 - June 9/16?, 2015 (5-6 sessions), 7:00 - 8:15 p.m. • Emails: add to list? • Slides: frederickuu.org/UUHistory • $5/session, requested but not required (for UUCF Operating Fund to cover building expenses, childcare, etc. which allow these classes to be offered — not to the instructor.) • Fall 2016? • Banned Questions about the Bible 1 of 4, • CSAI: Wealth Inequality, • Ethics (Peter Singer) Covenant • Use “I” statements: speak from your own experience. • Ask permission before sharing other participants’ stories outside the group. • Step-up, step-back: be conscious of the level of participation that you bring to the conversation. Allow everyone a chance to speak before you speak again. • You always have permission to “pass.” Unitarian Roots in U.S., part 2 3 Standing Order • Church/State relationship in colonial New England • Towns and parishes were legally required to support public worship through taxation. • Generally a property tax on all residents supported building/maintaining meeting houses and the minister’s salary. • “Good” for those would benefitted (established Congregationalists) • Onerous on Baptists, Universalists, Anglicans • //: SCOTUS on prayer at town council meetings in Greece, New York: nytimes.com/ 2014/05/06/opinion/a-defeat-for-religious-neutrality.html First Parish Beford, MA Standing Order • SCOTUS conservative majority: allow sectarian prayer nearly always from a Christian “chaplain of the month.” • Precedent (Kennedy): Marsh v. Chambers (1983) upheld Nebraska Legislature’s chaplain’s prayer as “deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country.” • Dissent (Kagan): town-hall meeting “need not become a religion-free zone.” And “legislative prayer has a distinctive constitutional warrant by virtue of tradition,” dating back to the first session of Congress. • But: unlike the Nebraska case (elected legislators), the town hall meetings involved ordinary citizens, requiring “special care” to “seek to include, rather than divide” and reinforce that citizens of all faiths are equal participants in government. • Nearly all the prayers at the Greece town meetings contained purely Christian references (as in, “We acknowledge the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross”). By contrast, the chaplain in the Nebraska case, a Presbyterian minister, refrained from making references to Jesus Christ after a legislator complained. • Skirted the constitutional principle of religious neutrality and caused some residents to feel like outsiders. Dedham Decision (Baker v. Fales, 1818) [Channing’s “Unitarian Christianity” (1819)] • Parish (all town voters): elected liberal minister • Trinitarian majority of [two!] church members (made confession of faith / assented to church covenant): disagreed (17-to15) • Custom: candidacy would end • Parish: legally contracted with minister • Ecclesiastical council (dominated by Unitarians): upheld parish’s decision • Minister ordained in October 1818 • Church: • refused to allow a liberal minister • withdrew from parish • took records, communion service, trust deeds, and securities Dedham Decision (Baker v. Fales, 1818) [Unitarian v. Trinitarian deacon] • Remaining “Minority” of Church Members: elected their own deacons and sued for return of the property (which they claimed rightly belonged to the parish) • “Unitarian Controversy” from theology to polity (autonomy of congregation, choice of ministers, control of property) • Verdict: Parish created the church; therefore, remnant in church should retain property. (Congregational church apart from parish has no legal existence and can’t hold property) • Across state, liberals & orthodox declared differences. Minorities formed new societies. • 20 years later: 1/4th of Congregational churches in Massachusetts were Unitarian. 3 Phases of Unitarian Controversy endpoint, 1825-1835 • Turning Point: May 25,1825 organization of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) • Special meeting following annual meeting of Berry Street Conference of ministers, formed 5 years earlier (door leading to vestry of Channing’s Federal St. Church on Berry St.) • [Berry Street Conference - oldest Unitarian organization still in existence.] • AUA association of individuals until 1884, after which churches could b/c members. [Channing declined presidency] • 1835: Unitarian Controversy “ended” after about thirty years with Unitarians as a community by themselves. • 1836: Emerson’s Nature & beginning of Transcendentalist Revolt! 1998 For further reading 9 Discussion Questions • How do we know when the divine has been revealed? Is truth derived from experience or intuition? Head or heart? How do you know what is true? What role does reason play? • How do we choose to introduce children to religion? (Forrest Church and Jefferson Bible.) What stories from our history do you want to pass down? • Why don’t we do pulpit exchange more today? Movement vs. “Cult of Personalist” [Pulpit-palooza] • Compare and contrast Dedham Decision to contemporary SCOTUS on prayer at town council meetings in Greece, NY. Primary Source Discussions The Transcendentalists (Theodore Parker next Unitarian lecture) 12 Timeline • Second Great Awakening (c. 1790–1840) • Louisiana Purchase (1803) • Jefferson Bible (1804) • Henry Ware, Sr. appointed Professor of Divinity, Harvard (1805) [Ware Lecture] • Dedham Case (1818) • Channing preaches "Unitarian Christianity," Baltimore, MD (1819) • American Unitarian Association founded at Channing’s Federal Street Church, now Arlington Street UU in Boston (1825) —————— • 1836: Emerson’s Nature & beginning of Transcendentalist Revolt • Emerson preaches "Divinity School Address” (1838) • Parker preaches "Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841) • Margaret Fuller, Women in the 19th.century (1845) (d. 1850) • Seneca Falls Convention (1848) Transcendentalism • Liberal Christian Unitarians (Channing’s Unitarian Christianity): rational biblical criticism and historical tradition • Transcendentalists: more spiritual, seeking intense religious experience (more than cold, intellectual, formal Unitarianism as they knew it) • David Robinson: “extenders” more than rebels • Larger Context: • Age of Reason (dry rationalism) of the Enlightenment (1650s to the 1780s) • Romantic movement (started late 18th-c., peaked 1800-1850), seeking immediate/ emotional/intuitive response to life 14 Transcendentalism Kant: all knowledge from transcendental forms inherent in mind/consciousness (gain knowledge through intuitive/immediate experience, especially through nature) • German Idealism, Plato’s forms (“nature”) Contrast: John Locke’s sensationalism (knowledge through the senses) • British Empiricism, Aristotle’s tabula rasa (“nurture”) Caputo: “The wages of Kant are Barth, the wages of Hegel are Tillich.” [Unitarians to 3rd-person of Trinity] 15 1788 For Further Reading 16 Transcendentalism: Influences • Groundwork laid by Channing (“Likeness to God,” “Moral Argument Against Calvinism,” etc.)…gave reading lists to the young Emerson: • human dignity/potential • indwelling God • spirituality / self-culture • Also: • Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle • Schleiermacher (feeling/experience, father of modern liberal theology, 1799 On Religion), • Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Koran, Buddhist sutras, Confucius 17 Transcendentalism: Influences • before Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) • Encountered Asian religions through texts not through practitioners • Plundered for insights for themselves more than original intent (but not necessarily doing injustice to text) • Emerson’s interest in Asian religions increased over time, Thoreau’s decreased. (Not much in Fuller.) • Later Transcendentalists: interest in universal religion based on common ethics (East-West correspondences) • [Compare: Karen Armstrong’s Ware Lecture (2011), “The Challenge of Compassion” ] 18 Colonialism • 1783: earliest translation of Hindu texts read in U.S. by Joseph Priestley • Missionary Impulse: throughout the 19th- century, the AUA believed that within the scope of its financial limits, it should propagate its form of Christianity among those not ordinarily able to hear it. • Brahmo Samaj: monotheistic reform movement within the Hindu tradition, starting in the mid-19th century. 19 Transcendentalism • 1829: ordained minister of Second Church in Boston, marries Ellen Tucker (Sept. 10) • 1831: Ellen dies (February 8) of tuberculosis, barely age 20. • 1832: • March 29: 28-year-old Emerson opens tomb of young wife (buried a year and two months earlier). Still writing in journals as though she was alive. • Had to see for himself firsthand (direct/ personal/unmediated, original relation to universe) • mid-July: decides to resign pulpit (trouble believing in personal immortality, Communion, historical accuracy of Bible) 20 1836: Transcendentalists’s annus mirabilis • #1: Emerson publishes Nature, manifesto of movement: “Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and no tradition , and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history theirs?” • #2: first meeting of Transcendentalist Club • #3: Alcott’s Conversations with Children on the Gospels • #4: Brownson’s New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church 21 Transcendentalism: Miracles Controversy • #4: Ripley publishes that Jesus’s miracles not performed to validate his teachings (and don’t have to believe in them to be a Christian) • Andrews Norton: responded harshly out of concern for Unitarian’s reputation (miracles only evidence supporting Christian
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