Theodore Parker is without a doubt one of my favorite ancestors on the Unitarian side of my spiritual inheritance.
Not very popular among his colleagues in his day, I admit I may not have liked him as a person, either. But, my goodness, where he stood and how is a witness before the world. The famous arc of history line paraphrased by both Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama was his, first. Quoting Wikipedia’s quote of the historian John White Chadwick, Parker was an advocate sometimes a fierce advocate of “peace, temperance, education, the condition of women, penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, the physical destitution of the poor,” he opposed the Mexican war and was a radical abolitionist. His sermons on that subject were so strong and the reactions so violent that he came to keep a brace of pistols in his pulpit (something I’ve thought about over the years…). He was also a member of the Secret Six, who supported John Brown’s insurrection.
He was also a transcendentalist. And his most famous contribution to theology is without a doubt his sermon On the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, where he rejected a slavish appeal to the scriptures which he saw as the product of human minds and written by human hands. He delivered that sermon on this day in 1841.
It was one of those sparks that led to the next great turning of the Unitarian way…
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