Sermons

  

"THE BOSTON HERESY"

UNITARIANISM IN AMERICA

By the Rev. J. Frank Schulman

The founding of Unitarianism in America is an exciting story. There are heroes whom we should admire for their courage. We should know their sacrifice and share their joys while we bear witness to their bravery. At the conclusion I want to list four beliefs they held in common, beliefs which bind us into a great family, not only with each other but with those noble people who founded our religion. We have a history going back over 200 years in America.

I.

New England until 1755 was entirely in the hands of the Puritans, those stern Calvinists who believed in the depravity of human nature, salvation of the elect, and predestination. They said there was no hope for anyone, that we are all born depraved. Before our birth it was decided by God who among us would roast forever in Hell-that would be most of us-and which few would go to Heaven. In that gloomy climate came the first man in America we may call an outspoken Unitarian. Not many know of him and his story needs to be celebrated more than in dusty annals of history books..

The man in America we may call the first Unitarian was the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew. He was the son of the Calvinist preacher, Experience Mayhew. What delightful names they had in those days. Jonathan Mayhew was the minister of the West Church in Boston. He was known as a heretic and embraced the Unitarian belief. So hated was he that no Boston minister would exchange pulpits with him. He was not invited to join the ministerial association. He was shunned by the clergy. But his congregation grew. No minister in Boston had nobler, broader, more humane qualities.

Mayhew's main quality was freedom of inquiry. He taught freedom and toleration everywhere. He said,

How much soever any man may be mistaken in opinion concerning the terms of salvation, yet if he is practically in the right there is no doubt but he will be accepted by God.

No speculative error, he said, however great, will keep a good person out of heaven. Grace is available to all. He preached the essential goodness of human nature. He was a rationalist, a defender of freedom. His sermons were plain, direct, vigorous, and modern. He taught humanitarian religion, genuinely ethical. The important thing in religion, he said, is not doctrines, creeds, or beliefs, but to love God and our neighbor, to have piety of heart, to be righteous and just, holy and charitable. He insisted on the strict unity of God. Jonathan Mayhew said to his congregation,

There is nothing more foolish and superstitious than a veneration for ancient creeds and doctrines as such, and nothing is more unworthy a reasonable creature than to value principles by their age, as some men do their wines.

By 1786 several Unitarians in Boston gathered to discuss their common theology and how to confront the Calvinists. They were aided by a misfortune across the ocean. In 1787 Joseph Priestley's home in Birmingham, England and his church were burned. Priestley came to this country and founded Unitarian churches. He was a learned and pious man. He attracted many great names to his church in Philadelphia. Regular attenders in his congregation included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine.

The movement grew. In 1787 Dr. James Freeman Clarke wrote a friend,

I cannot express to you the avidity with which the Unitarian publications are sought after. Our friends here are clearly convinced that the Unitarian doctrine will soon become the prevailing opinion in this country. Three years ago I did not know a single Unitarian in this part of the country besides myself; and now… a decent society might be collected in this and the neighboring towns.

As the 19th century opened Unitarianism had grown enough that it represented an ominous threat to the Calvinists. The Calvinists could scarcely contain themselves. The controversy broke into full war in 1805 when the Rev. Henry Ware, Sr. of Hingham was appointed to the chair of divinity at Harvard. He was the first Unitarian to occupy that high place. And then all the faculty of the divinity school became Unitarian, and Calvinists gnashed their teeth. Lyman Beecher, leader of the orthodox, said,

Unitarianism was fire in my bones. My mind was all the time heating-heating-heating.

He anticipated the day when "victory will be achieved, and Unitarianism cease to darken and pollute the land." That sentiment was shared generally. There was a Methodist hymn written by Charles Wesley at that time that included these lines:

Send down thy wrath, thou triune God,
The Unitarian fiend expel,
And chase his doctrines back to Hell.

Unitarianism in all its forms was regarded by the Calvinists as a deadly foe of human happiness whose result, they said, would be to prevent true conviction and conversion, stop revivals, and leave men in the hands of Satan.

Unitarianism was accused of denying the divinity of Christ, the total depravity of man, and the vicarious atonement. They said that would stop the work of salvation. Beecher thundered that the Unitarians "with their power of corrupting the youth of the Commonwealth by means of Cambridge"-he meant taking over Harvard-were "silently putting sentinels in all the churches, legislators in the halls, and judges on the bench, a scattering everywhere physicians, lawyers, and merchants." They "sowed tales while men slept and grafted heretical churches on orthodox stumps."

Unitarians were accused of undermining revealed religion, particularly because they did not believe in human depravity, the Trinity, and the revelation of scriptures. At least they didn't believe those things as the Calvinists did.

II.

The Unitarians went on the offensive and attacked the Calvinists. William Ellery Channing said,

Unitarianism is Christianity stripped of those corrupt additions which shock reason and our moral feelings. It is a rational system, against which no man's understanding, or conscience, or charity, or piety revolts. Can the same be said of that system which teaches the doctrine of three equal persons in one God, of natural and total depravity, of infinite atonement, of special and electing grace, and of the everlasting misery of the non-elected part of mankind?

It was a war of the pamphlets. Henry Ware, Sr. titled a pamphlet, Letters to Trinitarians and Calvinists. He said,

If the doctrine of depravity… cannot be perceived by us to be consistent with the moral perfection of God, then presumption is very strong, that it is not true. Depravity is inconsistent with God's love and justice because it means that mankind is damned without giving them any choice in the matter.

Leonard Woods spoke for the orthodox. The main fight was over the question of total depravity. He wrote,

That men are by nature destitute of holiness; or that they are objects of an innate moral depravity; or, in other words, that they are from the first inclined to evil, and that, while unrenewed, their moral affections and actions are wholly wrong.

Ware said that was inconsistent with the moral perfection of God. Man, he argued, as he is born into the world comes from the hands of God innocent and pure, free from all moral corruption.

Man is by nature [wrote Ware] no more inclined or disposed to vice than virtue, and is equally capable in the ordinary use of his faculties and with the common assistance afforded him, of either.

Leonard Woods accused Channing of having misstated the Calvinist position. Woods defended the doctrines of total depravity, vicarious atonement, and election. Ugly as those facts are, he said, they are true. Channing and Ware replied by citing orthodox authorities, including Calvin himself, so clear and definite that they could not be evaded or explained away.

The Unitarians made their appeal to reason, conscience, and human experience. Ezra Styles Gannet, a leading proponent of Unitarianism, said the charges reduced themselves simply to narrow insistence that one must swallow the whole of Calvinism. Francis Greenwood said that Unitarianism simply would not be committed to "a timid creed-bound theology."

III.

So the "Boston Heresy," as it was known, spread rapidly. A radical change was taking place in Boston religion: a great change, and quickly. To turn Calvinism into Unitarianism, to substitute William Ellery Channing for Jonathan Edwards, to see Ralph Waldo Emerson gracefully climbing the pulpit where once Cotton Mather presided, was a rapidly-effected change. The orthodox saw Unitarianism as a movement to be expunged.

Then church after church converted to the new religion, all over New England. The famous King's Chapel, the first Anglican church in this country, took the tenets and the name Unitarian. So did the church of the Pilgrim Fathers in Plymouth. So did hundreds of churches in towns throughout New England.

Unitarians worked for disestablishment. They were against state support of the churches, an idea that then was universally accepted. The Unitarians did not want any exclusive rights, as did other denominations when they gained power. The Unitarians wanted only equality.

Unitarians identified with the American revolution, which had a liberalizing influence on religion. It broke old customs and required religious freedom. In open and free debate the Unitarians were confident, so long as the flames could not be set to dissenters, so long as damp prison cells did not await heretics.

The war of the pamphlets continued. Scholars scratched away in the small hours of the night. John Sherman wrote his pamphlet, One God in One Person. Hosea Ballou wrote his Treatise on the Atonement.

In 1799 William Emerson, father of Ralph Waldo, became minister of the First Church in Boston, the most hallowed and ancient church in that venerable city. In 1803 Channing was called to the Federal Street Church. Channing was a man of profound piety and scholarship. He came to liberalism because of his love of freedom, his lofty spiritual nature, his tolerant cast of mind. He gave spiritual and intellection direction to the movement.

Unitarians published widely and they became intellectual leaders of the nation. They founded The Monthly Anthology, The General Repository and Review, The Christian Register, The Christian Disciple, and The Bible News. They founded many charitable institutions.

The fire was building. In 1815 Dr. Jedidiah Morse, a leading Calvinist, accused the heretics of being nothing more than Unitarians. The term then was one of hatred and was not accepted by the liberals, who still were Congregationalists. Morse aimed to force them to declare themselves or renounce their heresies. The Unitarians were reluctant, mostly because they did not want to form another sect.

But then the skies darkened and the clouds gathered. From 1815 to 1819 the Unitarians remained on the defensive. Then in May 1819 the full fury of the storm broke. One Jared Sparks was to be ordained in Baltimore. He asked Channing to preach the sermon. Channing took for his text, "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." That sermon, Unitarian Christianity, one of the two most famous sermons ever preached in this country-the other being Emerson's Divinity School Address-was a powerful and scholarly attack on the Trinitarian doctrine. Channing called on the Unitarians to embrace the new doctrine and name.

The response was electric. Church after church followed Channing's lead until finally there was not a church in all Boston that was not Unitarian. So many were they that on May 25, 1825 a group of prominent Unitarian ministers met in Boston to organize themselves into an association. They undertook to provide services and publish tracts for the spread of pure Christianity. There were then 125 Unitarian churches within 25 miles of Boston and a few as far away as New York and Washington.

There were many prominent and beloved men among the leaders, names we ought to remember: Dr. Charles Chauncey; Ebenezer Gay; William Hazlitt; Ezra Styles Gannett; James Freeman; Edward Everett; Henry Ware; and Andrews Norton. Henry Adams wrote of those people,

Nothing quieted doubt so completely as the mental calm of the Unitarian clergy. In uniform excellence of life and character, moral and intellectual, the score of Unitarian clergy, who controlled society and Harvard College, were never excelled.

IV.

This, then, is a brief history of our movement and our heritage. We conclude with a statement of the four doctrines that bound them. These four beliefs held the movement together. It is what we can call normative Unitarianism. These are the beliefs that summoned the consciences and minds of a great people, which fired them with enthusiasm and set the stage for rational religion.

First, the unity of God. "One God in one person" was the motto. There is one God without rival or competition. It is our obligation to imitate the perfection of God, to grow in God's image and likeness.

Second, the innate goodness of all people. Every person is born with a capacity for goodness, which it is the job of the church to enhance. We all are created in God's image. We have one God of all people and we are brothers and sisters to each other. Jesus, too, was our brother and in him we have an exemplar and teacher.

Third, the appeal to reason in matters of belief. The Unitarians knew their Bible and they sought inspiration from it. They studied it thoroughly, in the light of historical and textual criticism. They opened the study of world religions. They championed the growing knowledge from science and humanities. But all religious teaching and instruction must appeal to our highest faculty, the intellect.

Fourth, the duty of people to do justice, to take seriously the command to love our neighbor as ourselves. The church is committed to the establishment of the Kingdom of God here on earth. It is within our reach. There is much you and I can do to speed its coming. We have laid on us the moral obligation to virtue, to duty, to responsibility for the common good.

The Unitarians stressed all those points. They spoke of salvation by character, not vicarious atonement. They believed in the leadership of Jesus, not recitation of creeds. They talked of the goodness of people, not our total depravity.

Those four beliefs we may take as the legacy delivered to us: first, the unity of God; second, the innate goodness of all people; third, the appeal to reason in matters of belief; and, fourth, the obligation of duty and moral responsibility.

That is the heritage of those great and valiant people who suffered so, who gave up honor and fortune that we might worship in freedom, in spirit and in truth. That is what is meant by the term "normative Unitarianism." That is why we have stood these years and what made us strong. We have grown when we adhered to that legacy and those principles.

Let our hearts and minds and souls be taken captive by their vision. We have the holy task of spreading that message. Thus may we and our children, and our children's children, also know the way that leads to righteousness. So shall we become a holy people unto the Lord our God.