Theodore Parker (August 24, 1810 – May 10, 1860) was an American transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his words and popular quotations would later inspire speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
Early life and education Parker was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, the youngest child in a large farming family. His paternal grandfather was John Parker, the leader of the Lexington militia at the Battle of Lexington. Among his colonial Yankee ancestors were Thomas Hastings, who came from the East Anglia region of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, and Deacon Thomas Parker, who came from England in 1635 and was one of the founders of Reading, Massachusetts.Buckminster, Lydia N.H., The Hastings Memorial, A Genealogical Account of the Descendants of Thomas Hastings of Watertown, Mass. from 1634 to 1864. Boston: Samuel G. Drake Publisher (an undated NEHGS photoduplicate of the 1866 edition), 30.Parker, Theodore, John Parker of Lexington and his Descendants, Showing his Earlier Ancestry in America from Dea. Thomas Parker of Reading, Mass. from 1635 to 1893, pp. 15–16, 21–30, 34–36, 468–470, Press of Charles Hamilton, Worcester, MA, 1893.Parker, Augustus G., Parker in America, 1630–1910, pp. 5, 27, 49, 53–54, 154, Niagara Frontier Publishing Co., Buffalo, NY, 1911.
Most of Theodore's family had died by the time he was 27, probably due to tuberculosis. Out of eleven siblings, only five remained: three brothers, including Theodore, and two sisters. His mother, to whom he was emotionally close, died when he was eleven. He responded to these tragedies by refusing to lapse into what he called "the valley of tears", focusing instead on other events and demands, and by affirming "the immortality of the soul", later a benchmark of his theology. Theodore's sisters Rebecca, Ruth, and Hannah all died before he was five; by the time he was eleven, his grandmother and loved mother had also died. His brother John and two remaining sisters, Emily, Mary, and Lydia, died while he was a young man.
Descriptions of Parker as a teenager recall him as "raw" and rough, emotional and poetic, sincere, "arch", "roguish", volatile, witty, and quick. He excelled at academics and gained an early education through country schools and personal study. He studied long and late when farm chores allowed, teaching himself math, Latin, and other subjects. At seventeen he began teaching in local schools. He continued teaching himself and private students in advanced and specialized subjects. He learned Hebrew from Joshua Seixas (son of Gershom Mendes Seixas and Hannah Manuel), whom he may have baptized in a covert conversion to Christianity.Shalom Goldman, God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew & the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 187. Also see Shalom Goldman, "James/Joshua Seixas (1802–1874): Jewish Apostasy and Christian Hebraism in Early Nineteenth-Century America", Jewish History 7:1 (1993), 65–88. He also studied for a time under Convers Francis, who later preached at Parker's ordination.Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007: 117. .
In 1830, at age 19, Parker walked the ten miles from Lexington to Cambridge to apply to Harvard College. He was accepted but could not pay the tuition, so he lived and studied at home, continued to work on his father's farm, and joined his classmates only for exams. Under that program, he was able to complete three years of study in one. He then took various posts as a teacher, conducting an academy from 1831 to 1834 at Watertown, Massachusetts, where his late mother's family lived. At Watertown, he met his future wife, Lydia Dodge Cabot. He announced their engagement to his father in October 1833. Theodore and Lydia were married four years later on April 20, 1837.For Parker's time in Watertown and engagement, see Grodzins, American Heretic, 36; an earlier and more poetic account is in Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1947), 23. For marriage, see
While at Watertown, Parker produced his first significant manuscript, The History of the Jews, which outlined his skepticism of biblical miracles and an otherwise liberal approach to the Bible.. For an account written by a contemporary describing Parker's time and writings at Watertown, including A History of the Jews, see Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Theodore Parker: A Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1880), 39. These were to be themes throughout his career.
Parker considered a career in law, but his strong faith led him to theology. He entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1834.Hankins, Barry. The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004: 143. He specialized in the study of German theology and was drawn to the ideas of Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson. He wrote and spoke (with varying degrees of fluency) Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German.For his lack of speaking fluency in French and German, despite translating thousands of pages in writing, see . His journal and letters show that he was acquainted with many other languages, including Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Coptic and Ethiopic. He completed the divinity school program quickly, in 1836, in order to marry and begin preaching without delay.Commager, Theodore Parker, 23-24.
Career Parker called the late 1830s a "period of...disappointment". Citing "home; children; & a good professional sphere", he wrote in his journal that "All fail me, & all equally." Increasing controversies in his career culminated in a break with orthodoxy in the early 1840s. The fallout from these events affected him deeply, and it took him a few years to land on his feet and move forward.
First pastorate Parker had spent 1836 visiting pulpits in the Boston area, but for family reasons accepted a pastorate at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1837. At first, he found the location less than stimulating and work constraining.For pulpit touring, see ; for his initial response to West Roxbury, see . He adapted to pastoral life, however, and preached in many pulpits around Boston as a visitor. He gained a wide reputation as an earnest, effective speaker. In 1840 Harvard awarded him an honorary master's degree on the basis of his extensive learning.
Parker delivered one especially popular sermon twenty-five times between 1838 and 1841. In it, he argued against the popular notion that religion could be reduced to morality. "The principle of morality is obedience to the Law of con[science]," he wrote, while religion required more: that we "feel naturally, allegiance to a superior Being: dependence on him & accountability to him." The theme of dependence echoes Friedrich Schleiermacher, an indication of the German influence on his theology. Morality involves right acting, while religion requires love of God and regular prayer, which Parker considered essential to human life. "No feeling is more deeply planted in human nature than the tendency to adore a superior being," he preached, "to reverence him, to bow before him, to feel his presence, to pray to him for aid in times of need" and "to bless him when the heart is full of joy."
Transcendentalism In 1837, Parker had begun attending meetings of the group later known as the Transcendental Club. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address that year had been deeply arresting to him,Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900, 77. Dorrien writes that Emerson's Harvard address "had a formative and catalyzing effect" on Parker. and he welcomed the opportunity to associate with Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, and several others.Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003: 32–33. Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Parker wrote of the world as divine, and of themselves as part of this divinity. Unlike Emerson and other Transcendentalists, however, Parker believed the movement was rooted in deeply religious ideas and did not believe it should retreat from religion. All shared a conviction that slavery should be abolished and social reforms should take root.Hankins, The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists, 28; 105; 143. On 105, Hankins notes that Parker was a Transcendentalist antislavery advocate and considered "perhaps the most important theologian the movement produced."
Parker gradually introduced Transcendentalist ideas into his sermons. He tempered his radicalism with diplomacy and discretion, however. "I preach abundant heresies," he wrote to a friend, "and they all go down—for the listeners do not know how heretical they are." For years he had wrestled with the factuality of the Hebrew Scriptures, and by 1837 he was wishing "some wise man would now write a book...and show up the absurdity of...the Old Testament miracles, prophecies, dreams, miraculous births, etc. He was hardly alone. What shall we do with the Old Testament?' asked fellow Unitarian James Walker in 1838. 'That question is of such frequent recurrence among laymen as well as clergymen, that any well-considered attempt to answer it, or supply the means of answering it, is almost sure of hearty welcome."Shalom Goldman, God's Sacred Tongue, 187. Questions regarding biblical realism and meaning, and the answers clergy increasingly found through the German-based higher criticism, formed the basis of liberal Christianity as it emerged and developed throughout the nineteenth century.
In 1838 Parker published his first major article, a critical review of an orthodox work written by his former professor John Gorham Palfrey. In it Parker broke for the first time with supernatural realism, as he also increasingly did in his sermons. To him, Christianity was natural rather than miraculous. More and more, he praised social reform movements such as those for temperance, peace, and the abolition of slavery. In 1840 he described such movements as divinely inspired, though he added that they did not fully address the spiritual and intellectual ills of society.Grodzins, American Heretic, 205. Controversy mounted regarding these and other Transcendentalist elements in his work. So did criticism, which often saddened and distressed him. records one such experience of criticism, after which he "went weeping through the streets."
Break with Orthodoxy
In 1841, Parker laid bare his radical theological position in a sermon titled A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, in which he espoused his belief that the traditions of historic Christianity did not reflect the truth.; alternate digitization at archive.org In so doing, he made an open break with orthodox theology. He instead argued for a type of Christian belief and worship in which the essence of Jesus's teachings remained permanent but the words, traditions, and other forms of their conveyance did not. He stressed the immediacy of God and saw the Church as a communion, looking upon Christ as the supreme expression of God. Ultimately, he rejected all miracles and revelation and saw the Bible as full of contradictions and mistakes. He retained his faith in God but suggested that people experience God intuitively and personally, and that they should center their religious beliefs on individual experience.