Theodore Parker 1810 – 1860

Theodore Parker was an American Unitarian minister, Transcendentalist, and abolitionist and one of the leading public intellectuals of antebellum New England. His sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity in 1841 scandalized the Unitarian establishment by distinguishing the perennial moral teaching of Jesus from doctrinal accretions, and his subsequent ministry in Boston drew enormous audiences. He helped to organize the legal defense of fugitive slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act, supported John Brown, and articulated the famous formulation of the moral arc of the universe later cited by Martin Luther King. He died of tuberculosis in Florence.

Theodore Parker was born at Lexington, Massachusetts, in August 1810, the youngest of eleven children of a yeoman farmer whose father had commanded the militia on the village green at the start of the Revolution. Largely self-taught and reading in some twenty languages, he took his bachelor's degree informally from Harvard, graduated from the Harvard Divinity School in 1836, and from 1837 to 1846 served as Unitarian minister at West Roxbury. In 1846 his 'heretical' preaching led the established congregations to refuse him their pulpits; he became minister of the new 28th Congregational Society at the Boston Music Hall, which drew audiences of seven thousand a Sunday.

His works include the South Boston sermon 'The Transient and Permanent in Christianity' (1841), A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842), Ten Sermons of Religion (1853), and the late lectures Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology (1853). He was a leading abolitionist, harboured fugitive slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act, and was one of the 'Secret Six' who funded John Brown.

Parker treated Christianity as the perfect form of natural religion stripped of dogmas, miracles, and biblical infallibility; his sermons supplied Lincoln with the phrase 'government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people' and Martin Luther King with the image of an arc of the moral universe long but bending toward justice. He died of tuberculosis at Florence in May 1860.