THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT


May 19,1841 is one of the most significant dates in liberal religious history. 
On that date Theodore Parker delivered the sermon at the ordination of the 
Rev. Charles C. Shackford in the Hawes Place Church in Boston. To 
understand its importance it is necessary to begin the story with the delivery 
of another sermon, this one by William Ellery Channing, also at an 
ordination service. Both of these events took place at a time when 
Unitarianism was still very much a part of Christianity. 

The so-called Baltimore Sermon of 1819 was the Manifesto for Unitarianism 
in America. For some decades a group of liberal-minded Congregationalists 
had been preaching and teaching theological Unitarianism, the idea that God 
is one and that Jesus is not God but a moral exemplar. Conservatives were 
outraged by this heresy and were constantly pressuring the liberals to leave 
Christianity.

Finally, in the closing years of the second decade of the 19th century, the 
liberals decided to act and to act decisively. The Unitarian 
Congregationalists nominated Dr. Channing to deliver a clear message of  
Unitarian Christianity. The occasion chosen was the ordination of the Rev. 
Jared Sparks in the Baltimore Congregational Church. 

Channing pointed to the Unity of God as opposed to the traditional notion of 
the Trinity and of the Unity of Jesus as opposed to the traditional idea of 
Jesus as a man/god entity of two natures. He also argued for the use of 
reason and rationality in reading the Bible. The notion that humanity was 
depraved and that most of us were predestined to eternal damnation was  
vigorously rejected.

These distinct Unitarian ideas helped to lay the foundation for the 
establishment six years later of the American Unitarian Association, 
consisting of congregations whose ministers and members shared these 
views.

Several years after the Baltimore Sermon, in his Dudleian Lecture, Channing 
spoke in defense of the miracles of Jesus as reported in the New Testament. 
He believed that these miracles were evidence for the supernatural basis of 
Christianity. He knew that science denied the suspension of the laws of 
nature involved in miracles and he agreed that the claims for them had to be 
examined more closely than other assertions of religious truth. But Channing 
said that God has the power to suspend the laws that the Deity has made in 
order to instruct humanity. He said that when Jesus was born pagan 
superstition so infected the human race that miracles were necessary to 
confirm the authority of Jesus. People believed his message because he 
could heal the sick, enable the lame to walk, raise the dead, and drive out 
evil spirits.

One of Channing's admirers was the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, a student 
at Harvard at the time of the Baltimore Sermon and in attendance at the 
Dudleian Lecture. A decade later, though, Emerson had so changed his 
views that he wrote that  "once Dr. Channing filled the sky. Now we become 
so conscious of his limits and of the difficulty attending any effort to show 
him our point of view that we doubt it be worthwhile. Best amputate."

What Emerson was writing of was the ferocious debate then raging, and 
continuing to rage until the end of the Civil War, among Unitarians over the 
question of the authority of religion. 

On the one hand were those who with Channing leaned towards a special, 
revealed religion, Christianity, with Jesus as a unique religious leader whose 
authority as teacher was established by the miracles he performed. 
Christianity for these folk was a supernatural religion in the sense that it was 
of God.

Opposing them were those who believed that religion is a matter of an 
intuitive grasping of truth.

On July 15,1838, Emerson delivered an address at the Divinity School at 
Harvard which brought these differences boldly into the open. He denied in 
the clearest possible terms that Christianity was based on the authority of 
Jesus as God's unique revelation. Christianity, he said, is an expression of a 
fundamental religious dimension in every human being. Each person is 
capable of a direct relationship with the Divine. We are not dependent on 
what Jesus did or who he was.

Emerson, following Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called this sense by which we 
grasp the Divine, Reason. This is the power that enables us to grasp the 
Moral Nature behind all appearances of reality. Emerson said "It is an 
intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not 
instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he 
announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject."

What Emerson wanted was for people to understand through Reason the 
infinite beauty and virtue in nature. Each of us can do this if we choose to do 
so. We do not need mediators, teachers, or guides.

Emerson thought of Jesus as a man who had a vision of deity incarnating 
itself in human beings, thus elevating humanity in worth and power.  
Regrettably the centuries had covered over what Jesus had taught. Rather 
than listen to Jesus's message people had chosen to worship him and his 
miracles. 

The Christianity of the 19th century, in Emerson's mind, was a false religion 
because it taught that revelation is something that happened in the past and 
cannot happen any more. True Christianity—a faith like that of Jesus in the 
infinitude of the human race—had been lost. 

Emerson, already mostly inactive as a minister, gave it up altogether and 
became instead a writer and lecturer, the Sage of Concord.

His ideas about religion lingered among the Unitarians. They were defended 
and expanded upon most particularly by Theodore Parker. 

Parker was a remarkable individual. A native of Lexington, Massachusetts, 
the 11th and last child in his family, the grandson of a Revolutionary War 
hero, he was a man of prodigious energy, enormous intellect, and profound 
social conscience. He began as a farmer, then became a teacher, and spent 
the last two decades of his life as a minister.

His first church was in West Roxbury, where he served from 1837-1845. He 
then spent 14 years as minister of the 28th Congregational Society in Boston. 
Hundreds and then thousands came to hear him every Sunday. He wrote 
books, articles, and pamphlets. He lectured. He agitated, especially for the 
abolition of slavery. He wore himself out in his labors, dying at the early age 
of 50.

Parker attended Emerson's Divinity School Address and called it "the most 
inspiring strain I ever listened to." He became its most vigorous defender. 
His chief opponent was the widely respected and eminently respectable,  
Andrews Norton. 

In an address to the alumni of Harvard Divinity School, Norton argued that 
Emerson's "infidelity strikes directly at the root of faith in Christianity, and 
indirectly at all religion, by denying the miracles, the divine mission of 
Christ." Norton claimed that certainty could only come from evidence not 
from intuition. The miracles were that evidence of God and of God's power 
and of God's concern.

Norton also attacked the newly imported Biblical scholarship from 
Germany, which undermined the true authority of Christianity by 
questioning the infallibility of the Bible. Norton was joined in this attack on 
Emerson by a number of others. 

Finally Parker entered the fray, insisting that the point of Emerson's talk had 
been lost, namely that "Christianity rested not on scholarship but on great 
universal moral truths." Parker prepared an essay entitled "The Previous 
Question Between Mr. Andrews Norton and His Alumni Moved and 
Handled in a Letter to All Those Gentlemen, by Levi Blodgett." Blodget 
was, of course, Parker. His argument was that if religion is innate, then no 
miracles are needed to bolster it; if it is not innate, miraculous proofs 
contrary to reason can hardly be accepted.

When it was learned who Blodgett was, his colleagues turned upon him with 
fury, a hostility that did not end till he died. Friends of former days snubbed 
him on the street. Pulpit exchanges were cancelled. Even his closest 
associates became cautious about meeting him. 

In response to this social ostracism, Parker prepared a sermon  for the 
ordination of Charles Shackford on  The Transient and the Permanent.It is 
unclear why or how he was chosen as the ordination speaker since his views 
were well known and they were not shared by those planning the service nor 
by the man being ordained. 

But preach he did and he set off a storm!

His fundamental assertion was that in all aspects of human life there are 
permanent elements and there are transient elements. The permanent 
element in Christianity, the only permanent element, is its assertion of a 
moral universe. "Christianity is simple, very simple. It is absolute, pure 
Morality; absolute, pure Religion; the love of man; the love of God acting 
without let or hindrance."

Christianity, Parker said, is one of many expressions of a primary religious 
impulse. It is identifiable with Absolute Religion because Jesus attained a 
perfect oneness with God. He was special in achieving this moral oneness 
with the Deity, not in being able to do so. We are all able to do so.

This element of permanence was not entirely alien to his Unitarian 
ministerial colleagues. His description of the transient elements was. 

One of these was the insistence that Scripture was infallible, the literal, 
inspired Word of God. People had been killed and many had suffered lesser 
punishments for pointing out the contradictions of the Bible. To claim the 
text was without error was nothing less than idolatry, said Parker. Where in 
the Bible are we instructed to believe every word contained therein without 
examination or testing in our own lives?

Parker denied that Christianity draws its authority from the Bible. 
Christianity uses "this collection of books for the historical statement of its 
facts. In this we do not require infallible inspiration on the part of its writers, 
any more than in the record of other historical books."

The Bible must be subject to reason and reasonableness, not be judged by 
claims of literalness and infallibility.

Secondly, Parker attacked the notion that the truth of Christianity rests on 
the nature and authority of Jesus. He pointed to a number of false and foolish 
doctrines that flowed out of the assumption that Jesus is the ultimate basis of 
truth: that Jesus is God, that Jesus is God and human, that Jesus was born a 
human being but was elevated miraculously to divine status, and others. 
Defenders of these and other dogmas said that if these doctrines are not true, 
then Christianity is false, and that therefore they must be believed.

To all such assertions Parker responded, "It is hard to see why the great 
truths of Christianity rest on the personal authority of Jesus, more than the 
axioms of geometry rest on the personal authority of Euclid or Archimedes. 
The authority of Jesus, as of all teachers, one would naturally think, must 
rest on the truth of his words, and not their truth on his authority."

The purpose of Christianity, in Parker's mind, was not to encourage all 
people to think alike, but rather to encourage all people to think, honestly 
and piously, and thereby draw as near to God as possible.

Those who emulate Jesus in his oneness with the Divine will know all they 
need to know of doctrine. Each person must walk his own path. Each person 
must strive for God in the way she finds most natural and helpful. Each 
person has as much potential to experience the Divine as any other.

"The great truths of morality and religion, " said Parker, "the deep sentiment 
of love to man and love to God, are perceived intuitively, and by instinct, as 
it were, though our theology be imperfect and miserable."

Parker thought he was defending Christianity. The perhaps unintended 
consequence of his thought was to point beyond Christianity. If every 
individual must find a path that is right for that person, any path might do, 
not just the Christian path. What matters is to know that love is the one deep, 
permanent truth and value of life. All else is temporary and ultimately 
unworthy.

Parker expanded on these ideas in a book the next year, DISCOURSE 
PERTAINING TO MATTERS OF RELIGION. He argued that the human 
being is by nature religious. It is through instinct, conscience, emotion, and 
reason that we learn the truths of life. Not the Bible, not the Church, but our 
judgments of what they teach and affirm based on these inward guides will 
bring us to a sense of the truth. 

As for Christianity, Parker stated explicitly that it should be judged as all 
other expressions of the primary religious impulse are judged. He assailed 
the Church as a perverter of Absolute Religion. He declared that the miracle 
stories were little more than legends. As in his sermon, here too he said that 
the truths of Christianity were not tied to the authority of Jesus. The 
authority of Jesus derives from his awareness of the moral truths he taught.

Already the cause of great turmoil among his Unitarian colleagues and the 
cause of consternation among Christian ministers of more orthodox views, 
Parker was now brought to task before the January, 1843 meeting of the 
Boston Association of Ministers. 

The Association claimed that Parker was not a Christian. To remain with 
them he must affirm the miracles and the authority of Jesus. He refused.
He told his colleagues that they were violating the heritage of free 
association without theological uniformity. 

They had hoped he would resign. When he would not do so, they backed 
down, willing, as one of them put it, "to take the principle of free inquiry 
with all its consequences." No serious challenge to freedom of belief has 
threatened our movement since that moment.

This is a not inconsiderable achievement, since heresy trials and 
excommunication decrees are part of Catholic and Anglican and 
Presbyterian and Methodist and Lutheran and other religious communities 
into the 21st century.

Parker's sermon was a watershed in liberal religion. Before he preached it, 
Unitarians were without question Christians. After he preached it, many 
began looking beyond Christianity to a wider religious fellowship and 
understanding. 

Had not slavery become such a burning moral and national issue, eventually 
resulting in war, Parker might have taken the lead in this theological battle. 
Instead, he devoted his energies to abolition. Only after the Civil War were 
the threads of his thought picked up and followed to the natural conclusion 
of a Unitarianism that was to all intents and purposes beyond Christianity, a 
religious movement of its own.

What came to be viewed as permanent was, as Parker had said, a 
commitment to a  sense of that which is Highest, Best, Noblest, True, and 
Good, call it by whatever name. 

That which is transient came to be seen in the many forms of belief, ritual 
practices, and even organizational structures that characterize religious 
movements, our own and others.

Christianity. which Parker had at one time seen as a form of Absolute 
Religion—although he modified this view—was understood by his disciples 
as simply one among the many religions of the world. Each religion was a 
transient form of the primary religious need and capability of humanity.

That message remains central to the Unitarian Universalism of our own 
time. We too need to seek that which endures and recognize those things that 
are only of the moment. In a world as fraught with danger and as rich in 
potential as ours is, we need to know the difference between that which is 
permanent and that which is transient.

Surely Parker was right to assert that love is a value that endures, without 
which we cannot live.

Without love there can be no peace. Without love there is no cooperation. 
Without love there is no justice. Without love there is no happiness. 

The love that endures is a love for the highest ideals, the deepest truths, all 
the ways in which we experience beauty and create it, are moved by awe and 
touched by wonder and surprised by joy. Love is in the heart of all the good 
things of life. 

Love is the glue that holds together families and communities, without 
which we would be in despair in our isolation and loneliness.

Love is permanent.

So is hope.

Hope is part of what drove Parker to such furious engagement with the 
demons of his time, most notably the demon of slavery. He died before 
slavery was ended in this country, but he lived in the hope that it would be.

We all need hope whatever our circumstances.

We need hope to get through the crises that dot our lives, from a child's 
sadness at a friend's moving away to the anxious time when we seek our 
first job out of high school or college to the moment when we are confronted 
with a crippling or mortal illness or accident.

Hope certainly drove Martin Luther King, Jr. Today is the anniversary of his 
death in 1968, a death at an assassin's hands he had known for a dozen years 
would likely be his fate. He lived in hope, hope that the segregation that was 
so disabling to African Americans would be ended, hope that the dream of 
equality embedded in our Declaration of Independence would be made real, 
hope that the poverty he saw as such a crippling factor in the lives of 
millions would be overcome, hope that the world would learn in time that 
violence does not work and that love of our enemies as well as our neighbors 
is the path out of the morass of war and aggression and hatred. 

Dr. King knew, as Theodore Parker knew, that hope endures.

Faith is also a permanent element. 

The faith that Parker had and that we have is a faith in humanity. It is a faith 
that human beings, far from perfect, often foolish, sometimes cruel, 
nonetheless have the capacity to transcend our worst  faults and do good in 
the world. 

It requires faith to build a religion around freedom and tolerance and the 
right of every individual believer to follow her own path. To say as we do 
that every person must build his own theology means that we have a deep 
faith in the individual person to do that in a sound way. To say that we 
respect every person's right to do this means that we are not afraid of 
differences, indeed we celebrate them. Faith is about not knowing what the 
future holds but trusting in our capacities—my capacity and yours and his 
and hers and theirs—to work things out for the best. 

"Faith, hope, and love abide, these three," said the Apostle Paul, and he was 
right. So say all the religions of the world and the great philosophers and 
thinkers and the ordinary men and women whose names will never be 
known. 

Faith, hope, and love endure when all else falls.

We are living now in a time of great transition. The world is confusing, 
frightening, violent, and very uncertain. It is a time to renew our 
understanding of what faith and hope and love mean so that we can face the 
challenges of this age with intelligence, vision, and courage.

It is a time of transition in our own religious community as well. 

In the past few years we have come to this new location, built one structure 
and are building another, tried to get acquainted with the vast acreage we are 
responsible for, and undertaken the task of devising new modes of 
governance at both professional and volunteer leadership levels. 

In the next few years there will be more changes in membership, in 
leadership, in programming, and in other aspects of congregational life.

These are but transient phenomena which we can easily survive if we hold 
on to the permanent elements of faith, hope, and love. Letting those elements 
guide us as we confront change, sometimes even giving up something we 
have become accustomed to and like, we will build a stronger congregation 
and do each other and the world a great deal of good.

We are indebted to Theodore Parker not just for the title of a sermon, but for 
the important reminder that there is a difference between what which  is  
permanent and that which is transient. Not only did he teach us that 
difference, but he taught and he lived the truth that we can make the 
transient elements in our lives worthy only by infusing into them  those 
values that endure, faith and hope and love. 

If we live that way, whatever happens all will be well.











                                             BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.	David B. Parke, THE EPIC OF UNITARIANISM. This is a 
documentary history that contains portions of the three important 
addresses mentioned in this sermon.
2.	Theodore Parker, A DISCOURSE OF MATTERS PERTAINING TO 
RELIGION. This is the book that Parker wrote in the wake of his 
controversial sermon on The Transient and the Permanent to explicate 
in greater detail the ideas he announced in the sermon. 
3.	(Introduction by Conrad Wright), THREE PROPHETS OF 
RELIGIOUS LIBERALISM: CHANNING-EMERSON-PARKER. 
This slender volume contains the complete texts of the three 
memorable addresses mentioned in the sermon with an introductory 
essay to give them historical context.
4.	Conrad Wright, THE LIBERAL CHRISTIANS: ESSAYS ON 
AMERICAN UNITARIAN HISTORY. A splendid review of some of 
the issues mentioned in this sermon by one of the pre-eminent 
scholars of liberal religion.






Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved









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