Through the Flaming Sword

This is Theodore Parker, taken from an essay titled “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” dated 1841. Parker was another Unitarian minister, a second-generation Transcendentalist. Like Emerson, he’s pushing back on mainstream Unitarianism and got pushback in return. But in the mid-1840s, in spite of this establishment resistance, he moved to Boston and built one of the largest congregations in New England.

It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as Religion. And undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man. Religious forms may be useful, and beautiful. They are so, whenever they speak to the soul, and answer a want thereof. In our present state some forms are perhaps necessary. But they are only the accident of Christianity; not its substance. They are the robe, no th angel, who may take another robe, quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another none. Yet both may be equally Christian, in spite of the redundance or the deficiency. They are a part of the language in which religion speaks, and exist, with few exceptions, wherever man is found. In our calculating nation, in our rationalizing sect, we have retained but two of the rites so numerous in the early Christian church, and even these we have attenuated to the last degree, leaving them little more than a spectre of the ancient form. Another age may continue or forsake both; may revive old forms, or invent new ones to suit the altered circumstances of the times, and yet be Christians quite as good as we, or our fathers of the dark ages. Whether the Apostles designed these rites to be perpetual, seems a question which belongs to scholars and antiquarians, not to us, as Christian men and women. So long as they satisfy or help the pious heart, so long they are good. Looking behind, or around us, we see that the forms and rites of the Christians are quite as fluctuating as those of the heathens; from whom some of them have been, not unwisely, adopted by the earlier church.

Again, the doctrines that have been connected with Christianity, and taught in its name, are quite as changeable as the form. This also takes place unavoidably. . . . Now there can be but one Religion which is absolutely true, existing in the facts of human nature, and the ideas of Infinite God. . . . Now it has often happened that men took their theology thus at second hand, distorted the history of he world and man’s nature besides, to make Religion conform to their notions. Their theology stood between them and God. Those obstinate philosophers have disciples in no small number.

As Emerson does, Parker speaks of Nature in parallel terms, seeing correspondences between natural law and divine law, and, to a degree, science and religion. In the middle of this excerpt, where I have inserted ellipses, he discusses how different observers and philosophers will come to different theories about Nature, just as the divines do about Religion; yet:

“the true system of Nature which exists in the outward facts, whether discovered or not, is always the same thing, though the philosophy of Nature, which men invent, change every month, and be one thing as London and the opposite at Berlin. Thus there is but one system of Nature as it exists in fact, though many theories of Nature, which exist in our imperfect notions of that system, and bu which we may approximate and at length reach it.”

These Transcendentalists are never very far from their consideration of Nature, no matter how deep they get into the theological weeds.

Tagged: bible, Christianity, god, nature, religion, theology