Theodore Parker

American cleric and social reformer

• Born: August 24, 1810
• Birthplace: Lexington, Massachusetts
• Died: May 10, 1860
• Place of death: Florence, Italy

A scholar with a strong social conscience, Parker was an influential Transcendentalist who helped shape American Unitarianism and was a leader in the abolitionist cause during the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War.

Early Life

Theodore Parker was born into a Massachusetts family with a history of patriotic activity, including service at Lexington and Bunker Hill during the American Revolution. Parker grew up on stories about this heritage and often referred to it when he was crusading for the liberty of black Americans. His parents John and Hannah (Segur Stearns) Parker inspired many aspects of his life. The youngest of eleven children, Parker was a bit spoiled by his mother, who often read the Bible to him and who encouraged the development of his strong conscience.

Books were readily available in Parker’s home as his father frequently purchased them and had access to a lending library. At school, although he could not attend full-time, Parker quickly showed his scholarly potential but was terrified by the theology of divine retribution found in the primers of that day; it was an interpretation he later rejected totally. The loss of his mother when Parker was thirteen years old left him with more and more work to do at home, and his formal secondary education ended three years later. Parker spent the next seven years teaching school and trying to accumulate enough money in order to attend the Harvard Divinity School.

In 1832, with the help of an uncle, Parker was able to open his own school at Watertown, Massachusetts. The school was quickly successful, so that, while he was still aiding his elderly father, Parker’s financial situation improved. At his boardinghouse, he met Lydia Cabot, his future wife. She was the sort of woman he preferred: loving, cooperative, and supportive. Although he was often to work with strong-minded, intellectual women, Parker was never comfortable with them. Parker became friends with the Reverend Convers Francis, who provided books and scholarly guidance. Francis introduced the young Parker to the antislavery movement and to the idealistic philosophy of scholars such as Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, which strongly influenced his thought. He also began to explore modern biblical criticism. In 1834, Francis found a scholarship for him, and Parker sadly left Watertown for the Harvard Divinity School. Over the next two years he earned a degree and a reputation for frugal living, hard study, lightheartedness, and theological radicalism.

Life’s Work

It took Parker a year to get a pulpit after he was graduated. Perhaps he was tainted with Transcendentalism or, as Unitarian ministers often were, perceived as too intellectual. Perhaps his awkward bearing, prematurely balding head, square frame, and large hands hardened by farm work resulted in a poor impression. Whatever the cause, Parker used the time to fill temporarily empty pulpits, to marry Lydia, and to begin his translation of and commentary on W. M. L. De Wette’s Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1806; A Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament , 1843). It was on this book that his scholarly reputation was grounded. Parker was among the first Americans to study and apply the higher biblical criticism that was being developed by German scholars.

In May, 1837, Parker accepted a call from a church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Over the next decade, Parker worked on developing his philosophical and theological ideas. He was already in the Transcendentalist school with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, for he was convinced that sensory data confirmed only limited phenomena. The great moral truths, he believed, being self-evidently true, transcended such confirmation. These were known to the human conscience and depended on no outside authority. In May, 1841, he preached a sermon entitled “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” arguing that all the supernatural trappings of the religion and even Jesus himself might be proven false or nonexistent without weakening the essential truth of Christianity. Each person must find the Kingdom of Heaven within himself, he argued.

Unitarianism, which was still largely a branch of Congregationalism, supposedly rejected creeds, but these ideas that Parker elaborated in subsequent years outraged many. After his 1841 sermon, Parker could find few ministers who were willing to exchange pulpits with him, and the friends who did, including those who did not agree with him, faced congregational protests and even withdrawals. Undaunted, Parker criticized his colleagues freely, and eventually he was asked to resign from the Boston Association of Congregational ministers, a demand that he refused.

Convinced of God’s enduring love—eternal damnation was, he believed, impossible, for it would make eternal life a curse—he renounced the religion of guilt and retribution that had tormented his childhood. A good man, a kind man, a just man, a loving man was a Christian regardless of whether he believed the traditional theology of that sect. Reason was a God-given tool, but in religion, as in Transcendentalist philosophy, intuition carried man to greater truths. With this emphasis on the individual’s discovery of truth within himself, it should have been impossible for Parker to argue that anyone’s beliefs were wrong. However, he often did.

Although becoming controversial among Boston’s ministers, Parker was also becoming known as a Transcendentalist philosopher. His articles and reviews appeared in many journals and were a staple of the Transcendentalist organ The Dial, which first appeared in 1840. In this same period, Parker’s friend George Ripley founded the utopian community Brook Farm . Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Parker chose not to join. Many who did also joined his West Roxbury congregation, and Parker often visited the farm. This exposure to intellectuals stimulated Parker’s thought, which appeared as seven lectures that constituted the book A Discourse on Matters Pertaining to Religion , published in 1842. Writing—he had finished the two volumes on De Wette and another volume of collected articles—lecturing, preaching, parish duties, and disputes took their toll, and in September, 1843, he and Lydia left for a year in Europe. He spent this vacation visiting scholars and philosophers whom he admired.

Upon his return from Europe, Parker, more convinced than ever that Transcendentalism was the only feasible form of religion, intended to prove his point. The demands of his congregation and calls for lectures that had to be written quickly always prevented him from doing the scholarly work he wanted. The old controversies were quickly renewed when, in December, 1844, he suggested the possibility that God might send humanity greater Christs in the future. His piety and respect for Jesus were undeniable, yet he was willing neither to limit God’s love and power nor to assume that the revelation of one age was adequate for another.

More and more, Parker was heard with respect, and early the next year a Boston group created a church for him. Although sad to leave friends in West Roxbury, Parker was eager to be part of the intellectual ferment of the city, and the new Twenty-eighth Congregational Society, under his leadership, became the largest parish in Boston and possibly in the United States. Parker made many new friends, including such luminaries as William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Julia Ward Howe, and Horace Mann, and became mentor of a few young Unitarian ministers such as Starr King.

In Boston, the childless Parker family was enlarged by the adoption of a young, distant cousin of Lydia. Parker also worked on his beloved library, which was becoming one of the largest private collections in New England, though increasingly during the 1850’s lecture fees that had bought books were diverted to support the needs of fugitive slaves. From 1847 to 1850, Parker wrote for and helped edit The Massachusetts Quarterly Review, a new Transcendentalist journal. Although never the intellectual force that its founders intended it to be, the Review did give Transcendentalists, including Parker, an outlet for their ideas.

During the 1840’s, Parker moved into the general social reform movement of the mid-nineteenth century. The cozy, self-satisfied, formulistic rut that even Unitarians had fallen into was not for him. He spoke of the virtues (though against the state imposition) of temperance, the importance of equality for women, the evils and unchristian nature of the Mexican War, and the need for penal reform as well as many other reforms.

Increasingly, however, justice for black Americans came to dominate not only his reform impulse but virtually all of his efforts. In 1845, Parker joined Emerson and Charles Sumner in refusing to speak at the New Bedford Lyceum because black people had been refused membership. He was driven by the memory of his forebears’ fight to win liberty from Great Britain to make liberty a reality for all. Although he did not know the peculiar institution at first hand, he recognized its transcendent evil quality just as he recognized the transcendent virtues of Christianity. He amassed a powerful statistical argument that slavery was not economical, but his true power as an abolitionist came from his fervor in invoking the higher law of morality in opposing slavery. Did the Bible accept slavery? he asked, and if the answer was affirmative, he insisted, then the Bible was wrong. On the issue of slavery, as on theological issues, the intuitive truth was not to be denied. Parker would do as he believed Jesus had done: reject statute in favor of what he knew to be right.

Galvanized to greater effort by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Parker became a leader of the Boston Vigilance Committee organized to prevent return of escaped slaves to the South. He called for resistance in the same spirit that the Stamp Act had once been resisted. Men who came for William and Ellen Craft, runaway slaves who were parishioners of Parker, were driven from Boston by abuse and threats. When he married the Crafts, Parker, with an eye for the dramatic gesture, presented to William a Bible for the care of their souls and a sword for the care of his wife’s freedom. It would be a sin to hate those who would reenslave them, he told the Crafts, but not to kill in order to preserve their freedom if no other means were available.

Parker’s radicalism grew. When Thomas Sims was being taken back to Georgia in 1852, Parker eloquently denounced the “kidnaping” in public and urged the Vigilance Committee to attack the ship on which Sims was confined. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 only made matters worse, and Parker, in May of that year, helped organize an abortive raid on the courthouse where the recently arrested fugitive Anthony Burns was held. After Burns was taken away, Parker was indicted along with several others who had supported the raid. Parker was delighted with the idea of presenting his own defense and prepared quite a speech for that purpose. When the indictment was quashed on technical grounds, he had to be satisfied with publishing the defense.

Although he refused to attend a secessionist convention called by radical abolitionists, Parker was increasingly convinced that only war could eliminate slavery, and war was more acceptable to him than slavery. Although saddened by the violence of John Brown’s antislavery victories in Kansas, he supported Brown and was a member of the secret Boston Committee of Six that provided moral and financial support for further efforts. He was out of the country at the time of the catastrophic raid on Harpers Ferry but wished he were home to defend the right.

As the 1850’s passed, Parker’s once-robust health declined, while his activities increased. In addition to his duties as minister of a congregation formally numbering some seven thousand, he continued writing and antislavery activism. He was delivering approximately one hundred lectures each year all over the East and North. In 1856-1857, he was slowed by pleurisy and other respiratory problems to a mere seventy lectures, but after a vacation in the spring of 1858 and an operation for fistula, he seemed on the road to recovery. He was back to work too soon, and although he managed to preach for New Year’s Day of 1859, the next Sunday the congregation gathered only to receive a note that because of a serious lung hemorrhage Parker would not be able to come. Parker was suffering from the greatest killer of the nineteenth century: tuberculosis. His congregation sent him overseas in the hope that better climates would help, but as was so often the case before antibiotics, the disease could not be stopped. He died May 10, 1860, in Florence, Italy.

Significance

Theodore Parker’s life reflected much of the American spirit of reform and practicality. As a Transcendentalist, he was part of the first truly American school of philosophy, and his essays have been favorably compared with the work of Emerson. Parker never reached the poetic heights of Emerson, but he was better at clearly and systematically laying out the framework of his thought. He also injected a theme of empirical testing into the intuitive scheme of Transcendentalism. Parker was too good a scholar to accept the miraculous blithely. The less likely an event, the more proof he wanted before he would accept it.

Parker was also an important force in the development of liberal religion. His thought was critical and concrete rather than abstract and metaphysical. He rejected creeds and regarded atheism as impossible, except as the denial of the existence of higher law. Divorcing the essentials of Christianity from all authority but the individual’s reason and conscience was clearly a step toward modernity and today’s Unitarian-Universalist position that a sincere desire to find spiritual truth is the only requisite for membership.

Parker’s reform efforts were also part of the reform tradition that has reappeared periodically throughout American history. His belief that the church should be a driving force in political reform might seem to defy the Jeffersonian tradition of separation of church and state, but Parker did not favor imposition of morality by legislation. The church was to lead by its example and show the society how much better it might be. Parker’s reform spirit also had American democratic and egalitarian qualities. Even Abraham Lincoln seems to have learned from him, for Parker used a number of variations of the famous phrase about government of, by, and for the people. At least one example of this was communicated to Lincoln by his law partner, William Herndon, a friend of Parker. As he worked himself to death in the cause of abolitionism, Parker showed many of the finest characteristics of American reformers.

Bibliography

Albrecht, Robert C. Theodore Parker. Boston: Twayne, 1971. A short but reasonably handled biography.

Chadwick, John W. Theodore Parker: Preacher and Reformer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. Written by a Unitarian minister who knew and was inspired by Parker, this biography is rather uncritical but is important for its discussion of Parker’s role in the development of Unitarianism.

Chesebrough, David B. Theodore Parker: Orator of Superior Ideas. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Examines Parker’s rhetoric and rhetorical techniques and how his oratory affected mid-nineteenth century theology. Includes three of Parker’s speeches, with introductions placing them in the proper context.

Collins, Robert E. Theodore Parker: American Transcendentalist: A Critical Essay and a Collection of His Writings. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973. After a long interpretive essay by Collins, selections from Parker’s writings are included for comparison with works by Emerson on similar subjects. Collins’s conclusion that Parker was a more important Transcendentalist than Emerson is an overstatement.

Commager, Henry Steele. Theodore Parker. Boston: Little, Brown, 1936. Commager sometimes lets interpretive passages obscure the basic chronological structure of his book. He does a superb job, however, of setting Parker’s life and work in context.

Grodzins, Dean. American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Focuses on the first phase of Parker’s career, when he rose from poverty to become a major Transcendentalist prophet. Explores the religious roots of Transcendentalism and the ideas of Parker and Transcendentalist colleagues Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott.

Parker, Theodore. The Slave Power. Edited by James K. Hosmer. Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1916. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. This is a collection of Parker’s abolitionist writings and is the most convenient source in which to find the text of his most powerful antislavery orations.

Wilber, Earl M. A History of Unitarianism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1977. A standard work on the subject; the section on American Unitarianism is very useful.