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5.0 out of 5 stars
A sadly extinct kind of book--but perhaps not for an extinct kind of reader, December 7, 2008
Theodore Parker preaches true religion in these sermons, but it is certainly an unfamiliar sound: a timeless view of natural religion, with which everyone should be familiar regardless of their beliefs, and yet at the same time a historical curiosity, a lost possibility, a very dated glimpse of the most enlightened opinion of mid-19th-century Boston.
Parker's fervor is fed by his own position, a scoffer at the law for his resistance to the law of slavery, a heretic for his fidelity to the spiritual truth taught to him by his human nature & reason. (Even the Unitarians in Parker's world, he says, demanded belief in the miracles of the New Testament.) He unapologetically weighs his contemporaries by the religious truth he has deeply felt: that piety is for the mind to seek God in truth, for the conscience to do so in justice, and the affections in love of our fellow-human beings. (Parker does not omit a fourth, specifically religious, excellence of soul, a holiness that includes and goes beyond all this & is a bit difficult for me to do justice to here.) Parker sees all these combined in a "love of God" that "is no mystical abstraction, no dreamy sentimentalism, but the normal action of the entire man."
Parker is absolutely withering about the empty forms of religion that are usually substituted for a complete alignment of one's life and faculties with their God-given nature: the outward forms of Catholic and Protestant worship, supposed proofs of the piety of the excellent and wicked alike; religion as the flatterer of all the world's popular sins; religion that puts itself above the "carnality" of reason. Religion, says Parker, must be the fulfillment of human nature, and not a burden carried fearfully (in his sermon on joy, he excellently demonstrates that many men's religion, and much of the Christian tradition, are, per se, things the faithful would be happier to avoid). Again and again, Parker returns to the fact that natural men seeking the natural, moral, and joyous fulfillment of their faculties, will look upon religion that denies them this, and facilely declare themselves irreligious. This seems quite timely today, when much discourse about religion is polarized between Bible believers and doctrinaire atheists. Both camps should read this book, but neither will: too heretical for orthodox Christians, too religious for the atheist. Yet a book like this one is a better challenge to each camp's measure of the value of religion than the normal diet of ideas. So I suppose the "lost possibility" to which I've referred is simply Parker's quest to save religion from itself. (In his insistence on worthy and "manly" religion, some readers may even occasionally be reminded of Nietzsche.) But I'm taking this too far if I make Parker seem an exotic free-thinker; again, as a man surrounded by fellow-citizens who saw slavery and dared not confront it--such weak citizens as we are all and ever shall be, mutatis mutandis--he is on very strong ground in making his test of true religion and empty religion, and he has been abundantly confirmed in every practical point he ventures to make (though this is mainly an abstract book, an exhortation, not a how-to).
In a world where faith still commonly depends on habit and dogma, Parker's sheer confidence in the specifically RELIGIOUS truth he preaches can be breathtaking. He explains pretty fully why there is such a thing as "the true idea of God," and that it is so even if it is completely ungrasped by the churches. He has a (functionally humanistic) view of Providence that is more than merely wishful doctrine. It is impressive to see a man put together religious truths out of something besides religious tradition--this is the lost art exemplified in this book. Parker is fascinating to us now, I believe, because he propounds all the beliefs of the humanists, and yet at the same time argues that everything cherished and developed by the progressive humanist is a dead end without religion.
Speaking of Providence, though, many readers will feel that the twentieth century was not kind to Parker's prophetic certainty of progress in mankind's spiritual growth. This is an entirely other sense in which Parker should be read as a sign of a "lost possibility": a window into the ardor and energy of the great 19th century reformers of Old and New England, on which we sometimes seem to have improved so little. "Natural desire is the prophecy of satisfaction," Parker writes, and he believes that all the right aspirations human beings can form will be realized. He says, think clearly one single kind of true justice ignored by the world, and say it out loud: it will irresistably come about. Parker's third sermon in this book is the direct source of Martin Luther King's famous line, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Parker also seems a signpost pointing to an unaccomplished future in his intellectualism. For him, to study Laplace and Newton is to worship God, and our otherwise full enjoyment of our faculties is marred, not only by the fact that the orphan is hungry, but by the fact that our neighbor may not have had the opportunity to appreciate Homer and Dante. (One is reminded of Matthew Arnold's confidence in 1880: "The future of poetry is immense...More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry.")
Parker is not a Christian by this day's definition--"The general Christian belief, that Jesus was the Son of God, is now no spirital sacrament...Nay, all these stand in the way of the human race, and hinder our march." His bold departures (God as "Infinite Motherliness") and pessimism about the state of the church (if he saw third-rate hacks and hucksters in the pulpits then, what would he say today?) will lamentably turn off some Christians. And yet one sees at the same time that he is a closer follower of the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels than is often met with. The book is chiefly recommended to our age precisely because Parker is resolutely not a scoffer at religion, but one determined to propose a religious faith whose truth is self-evident, and which oughtn't to be scoffed at.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A sadly extinct kind of book--but perhaps not for an extinct kind of reader., November 21, 2008
Theodore Parker preaches true religion in these sermons, but it is certainly an unfamiliar sound: a timeless view of natural religion, with which everyone should be familiar regardless of their beliefs, and yet at the same time a historical curiosity, a lost possibility, a very dated glimpse of the most enlightened opinion of mid-19th-century Boston.
Parker's fervor is fed by his own position, a scoffer at the law for his resistance to the law of slavery, a heretic for his fidelity to the spiritual truth taught to him by his human nature & reason. (Even the Unitarians in Parker's world, he says, demanded belief in the miracles of the New Testament.) He unapologetically weighs his contemporaries by the religious truth he has deeply felt: that piety is for the mind to seek God in truth, for the conscience to do so in justice, and the affections in love of our fellow-human beings. (Parker does not omit a fourth, specifically religious, excellence of soul, a holiness that includes and goes beyond all this & is a bit difficult for me to do justice to here.) Parker sees all these combined in a "love of God" that "is no mystical abstraction, no dreamy sentimentalism, but the normal action of the entire man."
Parker is absolutely withering about the empty forms of religion that are usually substituted for a complete alignment of one's life and faculties with their God-given nature: the outward forms of Catholic and Protestant worship, supposed proofs of the piety of the excellent and wicked alike; religion as the flatterer of all the world's popular sins; religion that puts itself above the "carnality" of reason. Religion, says Parker, must be the fulfillment of human nature, and not a burden carried fearfully (in his sermon on joy, he excellently demonstrates that many men's religion, and much of the Christian tradition, are, per se, things the faithful would be happier to avoid). Again and again, Parker returns to the fact that natural men seeking the natural, moral, and joyous fulfillment of their faculties, will look upon religion that denies them this, and facilely declare themselves irreligious. This seems quite timely today, when much discourse about religion is polarized between Bible believers and doctrinaire atheists. Both camps should read this book, but neither will: too heretical for orthodox Christians, too religious for the atheist. Yet a book like this one is a better challenge to each camp's measure of the value of religion than the normal diet of ideas. So I suppose the "lost possibility" to which I've referred is simply Parker's quest to save religion from itself. (In his insistence on worthy and "manly" religion, some readers may even occasionally be reminded of Nietzsche.) But I'm taking this too far if I make Parker seem an exotic free-thinker; again, as a man surrounded by fellow-citizens who saw slavery and dared not confront it--such weak citizens as we are all and ever shall be, mutatis mutandis--he is on very strong ground in making his test of true religion and empty religion, and he has been abundantly confirmed in every practical point he ventures to make (though this is mainly an abstract book, an exhortation, not a how-to).
In a world where faith still commonly depends on habit and dogma, Parker's sheer confidence in the specifically RELIGIOUS truth he preaches can be breathtaking. He explains pretty fully why there is such a thing as "the true idea of God," and that it is so even if it is completely ungrasped by the churches. He has a (functionally humanistic) view of Providence that is more than merely wishful doctrine. It is impressive to see a man put together religious truths out of something besides religious tradition--this is the lost art exemplified in this book. Parker is fascinating to us now, I believe, because he propounds all the beliefs of the humanists, and yet at the same time argues that everything cherished and developed by the progressive humanist is a dead end without religion.
Speaking of Providence, though, many readers will feel that the twentieth century was not kind to Parker's prophetic certainty of progress in mankind's spiritual growth. This is an entirely other sense in which Parker should be read as a sign of a "lost possibility": a window into the ardor and energy of the great 19th century reformers of Old and New England, on which we sometimes seem to have improved so little. "Natural desire is the prophecy of satisfaction," Parker writes, and he believes that all the right aspirations human beings can form will be realized. He says, think clearly one single kind of true justice ignored by the world, and say it out loud: it will irresistably come about. Parker's third sermon in this book is the direct source of Martin Luther King's famous line, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Parker also seems a signpost pointing to an unaccomplished future in his intellectualism. For him, to study Laplace and Newton is to worship God, and our otherwise full enjoyment of our faculties is marred, not only by the fact that the orphan is hungry, but by the fact that our neighbor may not have had the opportunity to appreciate Homer and Dante. (One is reminded of Matthew Arnold's confidence in 1880: "The future of poetry is immense...More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry.")
Parker is not a Christian by this day's definition--"The general Christian belief, that Jesus was the Son of God, is now no spirital sacrament...Nay, all these stand in the way of the human race, and hinder our march." His bold departures (God as "Infinite Motherliness") and pessimism about the state of the church (if he saw third-rate hacks and hucksters in the pulpits then, what would he say today?) will lamentably turn off some Christians. And yet one sees at the same time that he is a closer follower of the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels than is often met with. The book is chiefly recommended to our age precisely because Parker is resolutely not a scoffer at religion, but one determined to propose a religious faith whose truth is self-evident, and which oughtn't to be scoffed at.
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