Theodore Parker (August 24, 1810 – May 10, 1860) was an American Transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. A reformer and abolitionist, his own words and quotes he popularized would later influence Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Biography
Early life
Theodore Parker was born in Lexington, Massachusetts,[1] the youngest child in a large farming family. His grandfather was John Parker, the leader of the Lexington militia at the Battle of Lexington. Most of his family had died[2] by the time he was 27, probably due to tuberculosis. He was educated privately and through his personal study until he attended Harvard College and graduate in 1831. He then entered the Harvard Divinity School and graduated in 1836.[1] Parker specialized in a study of German theology. He was drawn to the ideas of Coleridge, Carlyle and Emerson.
Career
Parker spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German. His journal and letters show that he was acquainted with many other languages, including Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Coptic and Ethiopic. He considered a career in law but his strong faith led him to theology. Parker held that the soul was immortal, and came to believe in a God who would not allow lasting harm to any of his flock. His belief in God's mercy made him reject Calvinist theology as cruel and unreasonable.
Parker studied for a time under Convers Francis, who also preached at Parker's ordination ceremony.[3] In the 1830s, Parker began attending meetings of the Transcendental Club and became associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, and several others.[4] 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.[1]
While he started with a strong faith, with time Parker began to ask questions. He learned of the new field of historical higher criticism of the Bible, then growing in Germany, and he came to deny traditional views. Parker was attacked when he denied Biblical miracles and the authority of the Bible and Jesus. Some felt he was not a Christian, nearly all the pulpits in the Boston area were closed to him,[5] and he lost friends.
In 1841, he presented a sermon titled A Discourse on the Permanent and Transient in Christianity, espousing his belief that the scriptures of historic Christianity did not reflect the truth.[1] In 1842 his doubts led him to an open break with orthodox theology: 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 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 it is in that individual experience that people should center their religious beliefs.[1]
Parker accepted an invitation from supporters to preach in Boston in January 1845. He preached his first sermon there in February. His supporters organized the 28th Congregational Society of Boston in December and installed Parker as minister in January 1846.[2] His congregation, which included Louisa May Alcott, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, grew to 7000.[7]
Parker was a homeopathic patient of William Wesselhoeft and he spoke the oration at his funeral [8] He also supported Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's Foreign Library where many intellectuals gathered.[9]
Death
Theodore Parker's tomb in Florence
Parker's ill health forced his retirement in 1859.[7] He developed tuberculosis and departed for Florence, Italy where he died on May 10, 1860, less than one year before the Union split. He sought refuge in Florence because of his friendship with the Brownings [Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning], Isa Blagden and F.P. Cobbe, but died scarcely a month following his arrival. Frances P. Cobbe collected and published his writings in 14 volumes; a headstone by Joel Tanner Hart was later replaced by one by William Wetmore Story. Other Unitarians buried in this cemetery include Thomas Southwood Smith and Richard Hildreth. Fanny Trollope, who is also buried here, wrote the first anti-slave novel and Hildreth wrote the second. Both were used by Harriet Beecher Stowe for Uncle Tom's Cabin. Frederick Douglass came straight from the railroad station to visit Parker's tomb. [10] After Parker's death, his ministry continued until 1889.
Parker's grave is in the English Cemetery, Florence.[11]
Social criticism and beliefs
As Parker's early biographer John White Chadwick wrote, Parker was involved with almost all of the reform movements of the time: "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" though none became "a dominant factor in his experience" with the exception of his antislavery views.[12] Parker's abolitionism became his most controversial stance, at a time when the American union was beginning to split over slavery.[13] He wrote the scathing To a Southern Slaveholder in 1848, as the abolition crisis was heating up.
Parker defied slavery[14] and advocated violating the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a controversial part of the Compromise of 1850 which required the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Parker worked with many fugitive slaves, some of whom were among Parker's congregation. As in the case of William and Ellen Craft,[15] he hid them in his home and, although he was indicted, he was never convicted.[5]
During the undeclared war in Kansas (see Bleeding Kansas and Origins of the American Civil War) prior to the actual outbreak of the American Civil War, Parker supplied money for weapons for free state militias. As a member of the Secret Six, he supported the abolitionist John Brown, whom many considered a terrorist, and wrote a public letter, "John Brown's Expedition Reviewed," defending John Brown's actions after his arrest, defending the right of slaves to kill their masters.
Legacy
Boston's Unitarian leadership opposed Parker to the end, but younger ministers admired him for his attacks on traditional ideas, his fight for a free faith and pulpit, and his very public stances on social issues such as slavery. The Unitarian Universalists now refer to him as "a canonical figure—the model of a prophetic minister in the American Unitarian tradition."[2]
In 1850, Parker quoted and made popular the words of John Wycliffe in his prologue to the first English translation of the Bible [16] to use the phrase, "of all the people, by all the people, for all the people" which later influenced Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
In words made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr. a century later, Parker predicted the success of the abolitionist cause: "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one… And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice."[17]
Further reading
References
- ^ a b c d e Hankins, Barry. The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004: 143. ISBN 0-313-31848-4
- ^ a b c Dean Grodzins. "Theodore Parker" (html). Unitarian Universalist Historical Society. http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/theodoreparker.html.
- ^ Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007: 117. ISBN 0-8090-3477-8
- ^ Buell, Lawrence. Emerson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003: 32–33. ISBN 0-674-01139-2
- ^ a b "Theodore Parker" (html). Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Theodore_Parker.
- ^ "History of the Theodore Parker Church" (html). http://www.tparkerchurch.org/about/history.htm. "Established as a Calvinist Protestant church, the congregation adopted a conservative Unitarian theology in the 1830s and followed its minister, Theodore Parker, to a more liberal position in the 1840s. When the First Parish of West Roxbury merged with the Unitarian Church of Roslindale in 1962, the congregation decided to name their new community in memory of Theodore Parker."
- ^ a b "Parker, Theodore" (html). Columbia Encyclopedia. http://www.bartleby.com/65/pa/Parker-T.html.
- ^ William Wesselhoeft (1794-1858) - Pioneers of homeopathy by T. L. Bradford
- ^ Elizabeth Peabody's Foreign Library
- ^ Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.1893. Autobiographies. NY:Library of America, 1994:1015
- ^ Official guidebook written by Pastore Luigi Santini, published by the Administration of the Cimitero agli Allori in 1981. "American Tombs in Florence's English Cemetery" (html). http://www.florin.ms/americantombs.html.
- ^ Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007: 248. ISBN 0-8090-3477-8
- ^ Paul E. Teed. "" A Brave Man's Child": Theodore Parker and the memory of the American Revolution" (html). Historical Journal of Massachusetts Summer 2001 issue. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3837/is_200107/ai_n8989233. "Theodore Parker's 1845 pilgrimage to Lexington was a defining moment in the career of one of New England's most influential antislavery activists. Occurring as it did in the very midst of the national crisis over Texas annexation, Parker's mystical connection with the memory of his illustrious revolutionary ancestor emerged as the bedrock of his identity as an abolitionist.
“While other abolitionists frequently claimed the revolutionary tradition for their cause, Parker's antislavery vision also rested upon a deep sense of filial obligation to the revolutionaries themselves."
- ^ "The Slave Power" (html). EServer.org. Digitized in XHTML, PDF and Microsoft Office Word by the Antislavery Literature Project. http://antislavery.eserver.org/treatises/slavepower/. "First collected edition of the antislavery writings and speeches of abolitionist Theodore Parker. (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1910.) Editor: James Kendall Hosmer (1837-1927), professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, president of the American Library Association."
- ^ Charles Stephen (25 August 2002). "Theodore Parker, Slavery, and the Troubled Conscience of the Unitarians" (html). http://www.secondunitarianomaha.org/sermons.cgi?id=58.
- ^ Theodore Parker (29 May 1850). ""The American Idea:" speech at N.E. Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston" (html). Bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/100/459.html. "A democracy,—that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness’ sake I will call it the idea of Freedom."
- ^ Manker-Seale, Susan (2006-01-15). "The Moral Arc of the Universe: Bending Toward Justice". http://www.uucnwt.org/sermons/TheMoralArcOfTheUniverse%201-15-06.html. Retrieved on 2008-02-29.
External links
- Works by Theodore Parker at Project Gutenberg
- Links to Theodore Parker biographies, works, quotations, articles, etc.
- "Primitive Christianity" on University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) digital commons. Originally published in The Dial for January 1842. Reprinted from The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of Theodore Parker (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1843), pp. 222–247.
- Parker review (1840) of D. F. Strauss's Life of Jesus on UNL digital commons. Published originally in the Christian Examiner for April, 1840. Reprinted from Crit. and Misc. Writings pp. 248–308.
- Caleb Crain, "The Good Boy; or, Is Christ Necessary?", a review-essay of Dean Grodzins's American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism
- Theodore Parker Church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts
"Parker, Theodore". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
