Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

Freeman, Channing, and Sparks:
Conflict between Tradition and Reason
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

There was no Unitarian denomination until 1825, but there were a great many ministers and congregations by 1819 whose convictions were Unitarian. One of the leaders among these was a remarkably able minister, James Freeman, a Harvard graduate. He had led a distinguished old Episcopal church in Boston, King's Chapel, into Unitarianism. King’s Chapel had been established originally in 1686, but, a hundred years later in 1787, it became the first Unitarian church in America. It is still Unitarian today, and is one of the historic churches on the Freedom Trail in Boston.

In 1816 James Freeman (while still minister at King’s Chapel) traveled to Baltimore, hired a hall, and spoke to a large crowd of people from the area, spoke on three successive Sundays. The following year, The First Independent Church of Baltimore was organized as a result, and by the Fall of 1818 it had a large and handsome new church building. That same Fall, a recent graduate of Harvard, Jared Sparks, was called to be the first minister of the church; and in the interval between the time he was called and the time he was settled, the president of Harvard College, John T Kirkland, served as interim minister. It was on Kirkland’s initiative also that Harvard Divinity School was then in process of development. It was the Unitarians at Harvard who organized it as a non-sectarian institution: which it still is, though, even now, the largest number of students preparing for ministry there are Unitarians. Some 40 different denominations, however, also have students at the School.

Sparks was ordained by the Baltimore congregation on May 5th, 1819 at 10:30 on a Sunday morning. That was 182 years ago. The principal speaker at the ordination was a Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, who had been Sparks' mentor at Harvard, and was highly regarded among Unitarians at the time, as he still is today. He was minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston, and also taught at Harvard.

Sparks and Channing were both Unitarians, and on this Sunday in 1819, they were joined by other Harvard faculty members and New England ministers, also Unitarians, who traveled to Baltimore to attend. It was a full week's journey at that time. The occasion was one of high importance, for the Unitarians had chosen it as the place to make a public stand in defense of the new religious perspective. It had been under heavy attack by the old Calvinist orthodoxy that then still dominated religion in New England.

Channing spoke, and spoke brilliantly to 500 people, for an hour and a half on the subject, "Unitarian Christianity." The title defined the identity of the developing movement: it was then, like the Universalists, liberal Christian in form. The sermon was printed and reprinted again and again, spread all over the country; and the course of religious development n America was markedly altered. It was a turning point.

II. The God of the Puritans
"The old, Calvinist orthodoxy" -- what was that? It was a set of ideas about God and humanity preached in Switzerland by the sixteenth century Protestant reformer, John Calvin, and it came to define religion in the Congregational churches in colonial America. Calvinism was the dominant religion in the colonies.

These Puritans, first of all, saw God as the imperial ruler of the universe, a stern judge who had long ago decided to condemn the majority of humankind to an eternity of torture in the fires of hell. This God, with his all powerful will, had predestined some people for an eternity of happiness and joy , others for an excruciating, unending agony in hellfire. God chose a few people to be members of an elect group who would receive salvation as an unmerited gift of the Almighty’s love and goodness. All other human beings were destined for unceasing torture in the fires of hell.

This might sound harsh and arbitrary at first sight, but actually, as the Calvinists saw it, it was fully justified because all human beings were born totally depraved, innately sinful, owing to the original sin of the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. In addition, the Puritans understood that God's nature contained three persons and was at the same time one person: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They were three distinct beings, and at the same time were one being.

This was the accepted, established, orthodox religion in colonial America throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Unitarian religion rejected this bleak old theology, and asserted a more humane, rational set of conceptions to replace it. William Ellery Channing was the first major defender of this new rational emphasis in religion, after it began to be fiercely attacked by orthodox Calvinists in the late 18th and early 19th century.

III. The Free Mind
Physically Channing was a small man. He was only about five feet tall, weighing no more than a hundred pounds, in poor health all his life; and yet, the force of his mind, his being carried him through forty years of a distinguished career as one of the country's leading ministers. By sheer personal force, by his eloquent speaking and writing, he changed the development of religion in this country.

Channing was born in 1780 in Newport, Rhode Island. His father was a successful lawyer and US District Attorney, and the family attended the Second Congregational Church in Newport, one of the old Puritan churches. At 14, young William went off to Harvard, and did extremely well. He was Phi Beta Kappa, president of his class, and the major student speaker at commencement.

In spite of these achievements, Channing had very little confidence in his own abilities, and wasn't sure what vocation to choose for himself. He taught for about two years, and at the same time pursued a program of independent study that he laid out for himself. Out of this period of study, the resolution grew to become a minister; so he went back to Harvard as a student, and then in 1803 became minister of Federal Street Church in Boston. He remained in that post for 30 years, as was the custom in those days. During this period, Channing emerged as a leading advocate for the then emerging Unitarian religion. He was a vigorous partisan for rational religion, for the liberation of the human spirit. His powers and his reputation grew.

"I call that mind free," Channing said, "which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no one master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven..."

IV. Who Wrote the Bible?
Jared Sparks, a young man, was called to be minister of the new and thriving church in Baltimore. He had studied at Harvard, and had many riends at the college, as well as in the Boston area. Many of these were Unitarian ministers and professors, and this group dominated both the major pulpits of Boston and the administration of Harvard College.

So, when Sparks returned to Boston after candidating in Baltimore, and met with his Unitarian friends, they began laying plans to make Sparks' ordination in May an especially significant occasion. They decided to draw on outstanding Unitarians in New England to speak at the ordination; and they asked William Ellery Channing to give the principal address, asked him to defend the new Unitarian approach to religion from attacks by the orthodox. It was planned as a major statement, a confrontation between traditional religion and rational religion.

This planning meeting was held in February 1819. The date for the ordination was set for May 5th. This gave Channing time to develop a sermon that was to have an extraordinary impact. Channing stayed on a few days after the service to revise the sermon for publication; and Sparks arranged to have it printed in less than a month. A second Baltimore edition was called for almost immediately; and two editions were also quickly put in print in Boston. The demand for the sermon was greater than for any other previous printed address in the country, apart from Tom Paine's "Common Sense," written at the time of American revolution.

The demand for it was so great, I believe, because it was a strong and striking assertion of a new and more humane form of religion: a conscious, rational religion, abreast of contemporary understanding, taking in all relevant evidence, all available information, in arriving at religious convictions. Until this time, religious beliefs had been shaped by long-standing tradition. Reason was used only to prove the validity of traditional truths, believed to have been revealed by God to humanity centuries ago.

Channing’s address in 1819 was the first clear, widely known statement in America of the principles of a largely rational religion as opposed to a traditional religion. That the statement was made on the occasion of Sparks' ordination was not an accident. It was the considered act of a group of individuals, centered around Harvard, who shared this new approach to religion. Channing spoke, not for himself alone, but out of a community of like-minded thinkers. It was their intention to make a statement that would be heard throughout the religious community in America; and it turned out to be at least as sweeping in its impact as they had hoped it might be.

Channing's Baltimore sermon was divided, broadly, into two parts: the first, the shorter of the two, is perhaps the more important, as it discussed the principles Unitarians had come to use in interpreting the Bible. This was a clear, forceful assertion of a rational approach to understanding the Bible, and in 1819 such an assertion was revolutionary. Today, however, every theological school in the country, apart from the fundamentalists, uses this approach to Biblical studies. The Unitarians were abreast of developments in the new critical scholarship in Biblical studies that had emerged in European universities, and this had broadened their perspective, had inspired them with an enthusiastic conviction that rational criticism of the Bible would strengthen religion.

The longer, second section of the sermon applies the insights gained in the first section to some of the traditional Christian doctrines: the unity of God as opposed to God as a trinity; the humanity of Jesus; the true meaning of holiness; and the nature of human nature. Channing rejected the Calvinist doctrines of the total depravity of human beings, the election of a few for salvation, and eternal torture in the fires of hell for all the rest. It appeared to him, he said, that this is not the kind of behavior we would expect from a moral, loving person, and surely not from God — as the Universalists had been teaching for many years.

But let's return to the first section and consider what Channing said about the Unitarian approach to the Bible. "We are... accused," he said, speaking for the group of Unitarians in America, "of making an unwarrantable use of reason in the interpretation of Scripture. We are said to exalt reason above revelation, to prefer our own wisdom to God's. Loose and undefined charges of this kind are circulated so freely, that we think it due to ourselves, and to the cause of truth, to express our views with some particularity."

"Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for people, in the language of people, and its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.... Now all books, and all conversation, require in the hearer the constant exercise of reason.... We profess not to know a book which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible." Its writing style is not precise but poetic. "Its language is singularly glowing, bold, and figurative, demanding more frequent departures from the literal sense... and consequently demanding continual exercise of judgment."

Furthermore, Channing continued, the Bible was written by individuals who grew up in a particular society, at a particular point in history long ago, and, as a result, their thoughts were inevitably colored by local, historical conditions. As a result, the teachings may often have little or no application to our own time. For example, in the same book of the Bible that lists the Ten Commandments, we find the following additional commandments: "You shall not eat anything that dies of itself; you may give it to the alien who is within your towns... or you may sell it to a foreigner... You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk."

With our views of the Bible, Channing said, "we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit.... We indeed grant, that the use of reason in religion is accompanied with danger. But we ask any honest person to look back on the history of the church, and say, whether the renunciation of it be not still more dangerous.... Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature, and will call us to account for it."

V. A Powerful Liberating Force
There are many more dimensions to Channing's religious thought. He spoke and wrote on an extraordinary range of topics: theological issues, social issues, ethics, philosophy, literature, religious education. He spoke out vigorously against slavery, against war, pointed to the corrosive presence of poverty in a country of growing wealth. He was a gentle man, had little appetite for the harsh public clashes and conflicts that went with social activism. Still, his passion for truth propelled him into it.

Channing's influence reached out beyond America: Goethe, Tolstoy, and Gandhi read his work. When Ginny and I visited the Unitarians in Rumania some years ago, we learned that Channing's thought had heavily influenced them in the 20th century. They found in him a kindred and prophetic spirit.

Channing's religion was life-affirming — richly, intensely so. As he put it himself: "Life is the great thing to be sought in a human being. Hitherto most religions and governments have been very much contrivances for extinguishing life in the human soul. Thanks to God, we see the dawning of a better day."

Channing was, you see, a powerful liberating force in the history of the species. He vigorously and ably asserted the importance of individual reason and conscience in religion, over against the weight of centuries of tradition. The old Calvinist doctrines on which Channing cast the light of reason are no longer taught by the Congregationalists, and have not been for over 100 years. The rational religion for which Channing spoke out has continued to affect the traditional forms of Western religion, has greatly altered the course of their subsequent development.

Channing was frail, sensitive, small, gentle; and at the same time a powerful force for the liberation of the human spirit from the limiting impact of tradition. He left a creative mark on the development of religion and of human consciousness.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com

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