Theodore Parker

← Encyclopedia

Theodore Parker was an American Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, and abolitionist whose theology located the ground of religion in the human capacity to apprehend God directly, without proof from miracle or text. Born in Lexington, Massachusetts, on 24 August 1810 — the youngest of a farmer’s many children, on the ground where the first volley of the Revolution had been fired — and dead of tuberculosis at forty-nine in Florence on 10 May 1860, he was among the most learned clergymen of his generation and, for much of his career, among the most distrusted by his own denomination. He read more than a dozen languages, built one of the largest private libraries in New England, and spent his short life forcing the New England pulpit to confront a question it had hoped to defer: whether anything in religion was binding beyond what the soul could find within itself.

Theodore Parker photographed around 1855 — Boston Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The making of a scholar-preacher

Parker came up poor and largely self-taught, passing the Harvard entrance examinations without the means to attend in residence, then working his way through the Divinity School and into a country pulpit at West Roxbury in 1837. What set him apart from his colleagues was the apparatus he brought to the work. While American Christianity still treated the Bible as a settled object, Parker was reading the German higher criticism in the original — Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette, whose Friedrich Schleiermacher-era philological dismantling of the Old Testament canon Parker translated and enlarged into a two-volume English edition, A Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament (Boston, 1843), seven years in the making. He absorbed David Friedrich Strauss’s mythical reading of the Gospels and the wider apparatus of source-criticism, and concluded that the documentary record of Christianity was historically conditioned through and through — a record of how particular ages had spoken about the sacred, not a deposit of fixed and infallible facts. That conviction, scholarly in its origin, became theological in its consequence.

The learning was prodigious and the appetite ecumenical. Parker taught himself to read across the classical and modern European languages and into Hebrew and other tongues of the ancient Near East, accumulating a working library of many thousands of volumes that he treated as instruments rather than ornaments. He read the Greek and Latin fathers, the German theologians and philologists as they appeared, and the scriptures of traditions outside Christianity, looking in each for the same permanent core under the changing forms. This comparative range underwrote his central claim: that the religious sentiment was universal, native to the species, and that the historical religions were so many local dialects of one inward fact. It was an unfashionable thing to bring into a Boston pulpit, and it cost him.

Engraved portrait of Theodore Parker — Collier’s New Encyclopedia (1921), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Transient and the Permanent

The turning point was a single sermon. On 19 May 1841, at the ordination of Charles C. Shackford in the Hawes Place Church in South Boston, Parker preached “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” Its argument is the hinge of his whole career: the permanent element in the religion was not its doctrines, its scriptures, or even the historical person of Jesus, but a set of moral and spiritual truths the soul could verify for itself; the rest — creed, ritual, the authority of the canon, the miracles — was the transient packaging of a particular age. Forms fall away, Parker held, while the truth they once carried remains accessible to anyone who looks inward. He pressed the point to its edge: were every word attributed to Jesus proved spurious, were the historical figure to dissolve under criticism entirely, the truths he taught would stand undiminished, because they were true in themselves and not because he had spoken them.

That was a thing his denomination could not absorb. Unitarianism was itself the liberal wing of New England Protestantism, having already loosened the Trinity and softened the harsher Calvinist doctrines — and it recoiled from a man who proposed to loosen the historical Jesus and the authority of scripture as well. The episode became known in New England as the Transcendentalist controversy, and its heat is a measure of how far Parker had moved: orthodox papers branded him an infidel and a denier of the faith, and even sympathetic colleagues who privately conceded the force of the German criticism judged it ruinous to say so from the pulpit. The address effectively read Parker out of the Unitarian fellowship. Boston’s ministers would not exchange pulpits with him; the standing custom of clerical exchange, by which a settled minister vouched for a colleague by lending him his pulpit, was withheld as a public censure. Parker kept preaching anyway. In the winter of 1841–42 he expanded the argument into a course of lectures published as A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842), his fullest systematic statement; and in 1845 a body of sympathizers organized the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of Boston around him, installing him as minister in January 1846. The congregation met first in the Melodeon and from 1852 in the Boston Music Hall — a theater, not a church — where it grew to be one of the largest in the city, some thousands gathering on a Sunday to hear a man no respectable pulpit in Boston would receive.

Intuition as the ground of religion

Parker’s religion belonged to the Transcendentalist current that ran through Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Concord circle — the conviction that the divine is known by immediate intuition rather than inference, and that this knowing is native to the human mind. The vocabulary was post-Kantian: the distinction between the understanding, which reasons from sense data, and a higher faculty of direct apprehension owed its American currency to a reading of Immanuel Kant by way of Coleridge and the German idealists, even where the reading bent Kant’s careful limits on what intuition could reach. Where Emerson drifted toward essay and the lecture circuit, Parker remained a preacher and a working scholar, importing the conclusions of continental criticism into the American pulpit decades before they were welcome there.

He held three things as given facts of consciousness, as certain in their way as the data of the senses and needing no external authority to license them: the idea of God, the sense of moral obligation, and the expectation of immortality. These were not inferences from the design of the world or conclusions argued from testimony; they were intuitions the mind already carried, the bedrock on which argument itself stood. From this Parker built what he called absolute religion — religion stripped of the accidents of any one tradition and reduced to the worship of God expressed as love of God and love of neighbor. Where the older rational theology had labored to prove God from the order of nature, Parker dispensed with proof: a faculty that apprehends God needs no demonstration, just as the eye needs no argument to license what it sees. This was a different move from the demonstrative natural theology of the previous century — the project of men like Samuel Clarke and William Whiston, who had tried to ground belief in reasoned proof from the world’s design — and a different move again from the deistic appeal to a “religion of nature” common to all peoples that John Toland had pressed a century before; Parker’s ground was neither the cosmos nor a creed but the immediate testimony of the inward self. His relation to the evangelical revivalism of his century, the heart-religion of John Wesley and his heirs, was oblique: he shared the appeal to inward experience and rejected the dogmatic apparatus that the revival kept.

Two registers met in his thought without his ever fully reconciling them. As a critic he was a thoroughgoing rationalist, dissolving the supernatural scaffolding of scripture; as a religious man he spoke the language of immediate communion with the divine that runs through mysticism and, behind it, the Neoplatonist conviction that the soul carries within itself a direct line to the source of being. His God was no remote first cause but an immanent presence the conscience could touch. What in the older schemes had been revelation handed down from outside — the deposit of truth committed to prophet and apostle — Parker relocated inside: revelation was continuous, available now, and addressed to the individual soul rather than sealed in a closed canon.

The single argument: conscience and slavery

That same intuitionism drove his politics, and the two halves of his life were a single argument. If the moral law was written in the human constitution and known by direct apprehension, then no statute, no precedent, and no text could be allowed the last word against it. Slavery, on this reasoning, was not a question on which scripture or the Constitution could overrule the conscience — it was a violation of a law the soul read off itself. Parker became one of the most militant clerical opponents of slavery in the North. He helped lead the Boston Vigilance Committee, which worked to protect fugitives from re-enslavement after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; he sheltered escaped slaves in his own house, kept a loaded pistol on his writing desk while he composed sermons, and threw himself into the failed efforts to free Thomas Sims (1851) and Anthony Burns (1854) — indicted for his part in the Burns affair, though never tried. And he was one of the Secret Six, the small group — with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns — who financed John Brown’s plans, including the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. He preached abolition not as a prudential policy but as a religious duty: obedience to the moral law was, for Parker, the whole of practical religion, and a church that counseled accommodation with slavery had abandoned the one thing in religion that was permanent.

John Brown in 1859, the year of the Harpers Ferry raid that the Secret Six, Parker among them, helped finance — attributed to Martin M. Lawrence, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Scholarship and the texts

Parker’s standing as a scholar rests on a body of work only partly recovered by later readers. His translation and enlargement of De Wette’s Introduction to the Old Testament (1843) was among the first sustained American applications of the German higher criticism, and it is the document that grounds his reputation as more than a controversialist; the Making of America digital edition hosts the full text (Univ. of Michigan, vol. 1). His systematic theology lives in A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842) and in two later collections, Ten Sermons of Religion (1853) and Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology (1853). The fullest modern scholarly account is Dean Grodzins’s American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (UNC Press, 2002), which reconstructs the Transcendentalist controversy from the manuscript record and won the Allan Nevins Prize; it is the standard biography of his formative years. His occasional sermons and political addresses were gathered posthumously into a multi-volume Collected Works, and a substantial run of his primary texts circulates in the public domain through digital libraries (Online Books Page index). The South Boston sermon itself is hosted in a critical edition by the Voices of Democracy project at the University of Maryland (full text).

The diffused afterlife

His afterlife is mostly diffused, surviving less as a system than as a handful of cadences that outran his name. Two in particular fixed themselves in the American political language. In a sermon, “Of Justice and the Conscience,” printed in Ten Sermons of Religion (1853), Parker wrote that he could not understand the moral universe and that the arc was a long one, beyond the reach of his sight, but that from what he could see he was sure it bent toward justice — the seed of the phrase about the long moral arc that bends toward justice, condensed by later hands (Martin Luther King Jr. among them, who quoted it as an adage already in circulation) into the form now widely known. And in an 1850 address to the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, “The American Idea,” Parker defined the idea as demanding a democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people — a government, he added, after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God. The cadence recurred across his speeches in the years that followed. William Herndon, who reckoned Parker the greatest thinker of the age, corresponded with him, bought his pamphlets and reported showing them to his Springfield law partner; the partner was Abraham Lincoln, and one of the marked pamphlets carried, underscored in pencil, Parker’s line that democracy is direct self-government over all the people, by all the people, for all the people. Three years after Parker’s death the threefold phrase surfaced at Gettysburg. Whether Lincoln drew it from Parker, from a related figure in Daniel Webster, or from the common stock of antebellum oratory is contested among historians, and the rival antecedents are real; what stands is that Parker had carried the words for a decade and welded them to the abolitionist meaning that Lincoln’s sentence would inherit.

As theology, his work fed the liberal and modernist Protestantism that followed, and his insistence that the religious sense is something the mind already carries places him in the wider nineteenth-century turn toward an inward, experiential account of faith — the turn Schleiermacher had opened in Germany and which Parker naturalized in America. He died abroad, the disease he had carried for years finally outrunning him, dictating and writing to the last; his final long letter to his Boston congregation, an “Experience as a Minister” composed in Italy, reads as a man preaching by post because he could no longer preach in person, still insisting that the only thing in religion worth keeping is the truth the soul can prove for itself.

→ Related: Christianity · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Immanuel Kant · Friedrich Schleiermacher · Neoplatonism · John Toland · John Wesley · Mysticism · Revelation · Samuel Clarke · William Whiston