Unitarian Expansion & Transformation through Consolidation: 1850 - 1961 1 Timeline • Emerson’s Nature & beginning of Transcendentalist Revolt (1836) • 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) Timeline • Western Unitarian Association founded (1852) • Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell ordained (1856) • Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species (1859) • U.S. Civil War (1861-1864) • Ordination of Olympia Brown (1863) • Free Religious Association founded (1867) • James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions (1884) • World Parliament of Religions at Chicago World's Fair (1893) • “Plessy v. Ferguson,” legalizes racial segregation (1896) • Beacon Press established (1902) • Starr King School for the Ministry established, Berkeley, CA (1904) Timeline • U.S. Involvement in WW I (1917-18) • Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (1917) • Clarence Skinner, “Universalist Declaration of Social Principles” (1917) • 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote (1919) • Prohibition (1919-33) • Scopes Trial (1925) • Stock market crash, start of the Great Depression (1929) • First Humanist Manifesto (1933) • Universalists consider merger w/ Unitarians (1937) (also in 1899, 1925) • Unitarian Service Committee organized (1939) Timeline • U.S. Involvement in WW II (1941-45) • Norbert Capek dies at Dachau (1942) • Church of the Larger Fellowship organized (1944) • Unitarian Fellowship Movement founded (1949) • Brown v. Board of Education (1954-55) “Most influential minister in mid-19th century America” • Minister of the 28th Congregational Society • Largest free church in the country • Largest church of any kind in Boston • In the 1850s, almost 3,000 people went weekly to hear him preach (2-3% of the population of the city) • ~50,000 listened to him lecture every year, in lyceums from Maine to Illinois. • Thousands more bought his published sermons and addresses…which found readers on both sides of the Atlantic. • Scholars and thinkers took his work seriously • Read more than twenty languages. Theodore Parker (1810 - 1860) Theodore Parker (1810-1860) • Parker’s Election sermon in 1846: “government of all, by all, for all” • Helped inspire President Lincoln’s conclusion to his Gettysburg Address 17 years later: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” MLK: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 8 Theodore Parker • Dr. King’s version was chosen by President Obama to weave into the rug in the Oval Office. • Origins lie with the nineteenth-century abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. • neither tall nor handsome; his big head was bald, and the features on his long face were plain…. • [H]is voice was deep and resonant, but not especially strong…. • His impact came instead from the force of his complex personality, the exciting power of his prose, the strength of his ideas…. (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) Significance: (1) hard questions of theology (2) risks for racial justice • For nearly a century after his untimely death at age 49, in 1860, interest in him remained high around the world. • Two collected editions of his works were published, a 14-volume set in London and a 15- volume edition in Boston.” • Translated into German, Swedish, and Japanese. • Multiple biographies about him in English. Biographies were also written about him in French, German, and Dutch. • 1910: centennial of Parker’s birth marked by major celebrations • Began to be forgotten by the middle of the twentieth century [neo-orthodoxy] Further Significance: Radical Thought w/in congregation • Emerson left his pulpit after only a few years for the lecture circuit. Parker stayed. • Transcendentalism was about much more than Thoreau living alone on Walden Pond • Also about infusing progressive religion into existing congregations. Theodore Parker (1810-1860) • 1810: born in Lexington, Massachusetts. • “Baby”: last of 11 children, with 9 surviving sisters and brothers, ages 4 to 26. Father was 49 and his mother 46. • Grandfather (Captain Parker) commanded the Minutemen on the nearby Lexington Green: “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they want to have a war, let it begin here” • Seeds of being a radical — of being willing to use violence if necessary to bring about social change — were planted early in young Parker’s psyche. Theodore Parker (1810-1860) • Supporters of using violence to end slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War were much closer historically to the Revolutionary War than we are to the Civil War. • Only 84 years had passed from 1776 to 1860, whereas more than twice as much time (more than 160 years) has passed from the Civil War to today. • Parker and the other members of the Secret Six saw themselves as extending the fight for freedom begun at during the American War for Independence. Theodore Parker (1810-1860) • 1819: Parker was 9 years old when William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) preached his sermon “Unitarian Christianity” • 1938: Parker was in the audience for Emerson’s “Divinity School of Address” • 1842: Channing died the year after Parker’s landmark sermon on “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” (1841) Theodore Parker (1810-1860) • As late as 1832 during his early twenties, when he was employed as a school teacher, he was still a biblical literalist • Over the course of a decade, he became increasingly liberal theologically, particularly in regard to how he viewed the Bible — influenced by a local Unitarian minister • 1836: graduated from Harvard Divinity School, doubts had increased significantly about traditional teachings of Christian orthodoxy, particular in regard to miracles [Transcendentalism’s “miracle year”] Theodore Parker (1810-1860) • Began asking increasingly bold questions, some of them at first only privately in his journal, but some of them he was also starting to weave publicly into his preaching: • “How is Christ more a Savior than Socrates?” • “Why did the world need a Savior?” • “The Resurrection — why was the body of Christ raised? — why “carried up?” How is the resurrection of matter proof of the Immortality of Spirit? Is not the material Resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ unspiritualizing? (Beacon Press, 1960) Theodore Parker (1810-1860) • Dove deeper into German biblical scholarship, such as David Strauss’ Life of Jesus: “Is not Strauss right, in the main, when he says the New Testament is a collection of myths? No doubt he goes too far, but pray tell me where is far enough”? • Title of “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” is an allusion to Strauss’s article “On Transiency and Permanency in Christianity.” • 1840: “I intend in the coming year to let out all the force of Transcendentalism that is in me, come what will come” (1808 - 1874) Theodore Parker (1810-1860) • Strauss was fired from his professorship for his pathbreaking scholarship • But despite the widespread controversy Parker’s sermon generated, no one in his congregation left or turned against him • Parker’s sermon “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” (1841) caused widespread controversy because he preached it not from the safety of his home congregation, but at the ordination of a new Unitarian minister. • 1843 “Heresy trial” before Boston Association of Ministers (refused to resign) and cut off from almost all pulpit exchanges. • 1846 left West Roxbury for 28th Congregational Society. (1808 - 1874) 28th Congregational Society [I invite you to] imagine you are in Boston some summer Sunday morning in the mid 1850s. You decide to go hear Theodore Parker, the famous Transcendentalist minister, preach to the 28th Congregational Society. Having never been, you arrange to accompany a friend who attends regularly. As the two of you turn the corner from Tremont onto Winter Street, you are struck by the sheer size of the crowd gathered there. The sight of nearly three thousand people massing for a routine religious service is a novel one. You go down a narrow, dark alley to the entrance of the Boston Music Hall. Inside, you pass through into a large, airy, and elegantly decorated chamber. 28th Congregational Society Before you is a low stage on the back of which stands a large bronze statue of Ludwig van Beethoven, reminding you what the room is used of the rest of the week. On the stage is the preacher’s desk. On it sit a Bible and hymn book, red velvet cushion ready for the sermon manuscript, and a vase of fresh cut lilies. Mr. Parker was the first minister in Boston to have flowers on his pulpit. Others think flowers on the pulpit irreverent. You are not used to seeing black and whites, laborers, merchants, and threadbare foreign scholars sitting side by side. As a group they seem inappropriately noisy, and you note that many of them are reading books and even newspapers. A wave of silence starts from the front of the hall. Mr. Parker has come in. He is a small man, plain featured, with a high forehead, dressed in a carefully tailored dark suit. He recites from memory the “lesson” (which includes not only Scripture, but a poem by Longfellow), then a hymn, in a strong, clear, deep voice. Music follows, provided by an organ and a choir of professional singers. The sermon lasts exactly an hour. Although there is a scriptural text quoted at the beginning, you quickly realize there is to be no exposition of it; it is to be used only as a motto. His oration — about how our goal in life