by Bill Faw
April 16, 2023
Part One: Theodore Parker, James Luther Adams and My Call to Ministry
As a Peace Studies major at Manchester College, I took my obligatory two religion courses and one psychology course, and yet, after we graduated in 1961, Martha and I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for me to attend Harvard Divinity School on a one-year financial scholarship, even though I had no plans of becoming a pastor.
But I enjoyed my first year so much that I went a second year, with no vocational focus until toward the end of that second year, during which time Martha and I were getting involved in the civil rights movement in Boston. Seeing pastors and churches becoming central to this exciting movement, I started to feel the call to inter-racial and inter-cultural pastoral ministry. That led me to take the third culminating year at Harvard Divinity, to receive what is now called a Master of Divinity – what a neat title!
This past December, I was looking through my files of sermons and sermon notes, which include a few college and seminary term papers which I thought might feed into sermons someday. I discovered a 1964 (senior year) Harvard Divinity School term paper which I had forgotten I had written, titled “’Property’ in the thought of Theodore Parker” (one of the most influential Unitarian theologians of the 19th century), for Ethics 177 (Christian Ethics) taught by James Luther Adams, who I recently discovered was one the most influential Unitarian theologians of the 20th century.
I read a lot of Parker for that paper. I wrote that “I plowed through good portions of the 13 volumes by Parker in his Centenary Edition, American Unitarian Association, Boston, 1910. (Pardon the uses of ‘men’ and ‘he’ in quotes by 1964 me and 1850 Parker.)
I ended my term paper with a 2-page epilogue that I titled “The Role of a Minister”. In it I wrote: “I am including this epilogue because in it I have a chance to talk about what will probably be found to be the most lasting effect of Parker on me. If he has inspired me in any way he has led me to a glimpse of how the Christian minister can talk to his people and the world.”
Charity vs Justice
I cited Parker’s treatment of a distinction I was hearing in the Civil rights movement: the distinction between “palliative charity” vs “remedial justice”.
I wrote that “it is in connection with this distinction that the ethicist-minister must forge his role”; quoting Parker that “we need the justice which removes causes, as well as the charity that palliates effects.” Also, (Parker) that the minister should “not only preach on the private virtues, …but likewise on the public social virtues, that are also indispensable to the general welfare”.
I then related this distinction to the 1960s civil rights movement, which I called “ the latest stage of this same battle”. I mentioned civil rights leaders’ disgust with the so-called “White liberal who is precisely the humanitarian who wants to solve the problem with charity and who may even be afraid that the struggle for remedial justice might erode the good will of his charity.” I ended these reflections with: “Let the minister today, with Theodore Parker, recommend not only palliative charity; but still more remedial justice.”
Additional James Luther Adams’ Influence
I got so much out of James Luther Adams’ Christian Ethics class that I signed up my last semester for his Social Ethics class. There I wrote another term paper which I also kept, titled: “Ethical Reflections on the Negro Revolution”, where I wrestled with the goals and methods of the Civil Rights Movement – again an important step in my growing involvement.
While James Luther Adams helped shape my early call to ministry, ironically at some point during this second class Adams almost tempted me away from becoming a pastor. He offered to recommend me for a full scholarship toward a PhD at Duke in a program combining Christian Ethics and Political Science – which would have wed my Peace Studies and Seminary degrees. With his recommendation I would be virtually guaranteed to receive that. That would have routed me to college teaching, and I probably never would have become a pastor. Instead, I went into the pastorate after graduating from Harvard Divinity. I have always looked back at my turning that down as one of the great “roads not taken” of our life.
Part Two: THEODORE PARKER ON SLAVERY AND POVERTY
For the rest of my talk, I will share some of Theodore Parker’s anti-slavery involvements and his forward-looking insights into poverty; drawing upon my term paper and outside sources, especially from an inter-library loan book of one of Parker’s 13 centennial volumes. Parker applied the basic distinction between charity and justice to the slavery and poverty of his day.
Slavery
Parker never knew if slavery would be abolished, because he died in May (10) of 1860, six months before Lincoln was elected president, and about a year before the Civil War.
The distinction between charity and justice was quite stark regarding slavery: palliative charity would have focused on making slaves’ lives more comfortable – perhaps offering medical help or education to slaves (which might have had the un-intended effect of making slavery seem more tolerable, and actually extend the length of American slavery). In contrast, restorative justice would struggle to eliminate slavery and try to “make whole” those thus freed. Parker contrasted the Christian desires and efforts to convert the slave to make him a better slave, with the anti-slavery legislation he as a minister fought so hard to get enacted.
Parker’s restorative justice efforts included extensive speaking, writing, and lobbying to abolish the “1850 Fugitive Slave Act” whereby every American had to turn over to the police any escaped slave – even run-away slaves who made it by the underground railroad to Massachusetts, which had abolished slavery before the American constitution was written.
Instead of turning them in, the Parkers helped hide out runaway slaves, and helped finance John Brown’s protests. Parker was also a good friend of the former-slave Frederick Douglass. Parker went to Florence, Italy, to spend his last days as he was dying from Tuberculosis. Later, Frederick Douglass went to Florence, and his first stop was to see his Parker’s tomb.
Poverty
Parker’s keen insights into the causes-of and solutions-to poverty are worth hearing. In my term paper I mentioned Parker’s quite helpful placing of the “poor” into three groups:
First: The temporary poor: such as students and those temporarily unemployed. This poverty group may not need either palliative charity or remedial justice: They “will soon take care of themselves.”
Second, the accidentally poor: new widows or orphans who inherit no estate; or able men reduced by sickness — such people: “can easily be taken care of by public or private charity,” not needing new justice laws.
Third: the largest class: the “permanent poor”: some of whom are “born into the midst of want, ignorance, idleness, filthiness, intemperance”, or those who become permanently poor “from lack of ability, power of body and mind”. They need both charity and laws changed.
Parker conveyed to his Unitarian congregations – and to a much wider readership — a deep understanding of poverty conditions: “The miserable only stay in the world, and do not live in the best sense”. They are most vulnerable to disease. Sometimes death seems best to them. They do not have much chance to get education, or time to read or think: “few men can think to any profit while the body is uncomfortable.” “The poor cannot watch their opportunity, and take advantage of the markets, as other men”.
Parker noted that a healthy, strong poor person might be driven to work to get out of poverty – for that person, poverty is a good, even “providential” motivator. Thus, he warned against indiscriminate charity for beggars “that does more harm than good.” He opposed charity that discourages working: “If God’s children will not work, or will throw away their bread, I do not complain that He sends them to bed without their supper.”
But the conditions of poverty make many people weak and in poor health. They are intimidated, enfeebled, and benumbed by poverty. Parker observed that even with the strong “it takes at least two generations to outgrow the pernicious influence of such circumstances.”
Parker advocated building housing for the poor at cheap rent and furnishing them with work, enabling them to buy food. Such steps would cost less than storing them in poor-houses and punishing them in jails. On a broader scale he noted “the injustice of our mode of dealing with offenders.”
On a more structural justice note, Parker lamented the fact that most citizens, even Christians, could not see that establishing laws to remove the causes of poverty – and thus lessen the causes of crime — is “sound legislation” and “pure Christianity”. Instead, most endorse “tak(ing) vengeance” on those driven to crime.
He criticized laws which grant the “right to bequeath enormous estates to individuals” as a major cause of rich families remaining rich and poor families remaining poor. He advocated changing that – and predicted that that would eventually happen.
Among the poor needing remedial justice, were non-slave Blacks in Boston and elsewhere, who “are despised and frowned down, not admitted to the steamboat, the omnibus, to the school-house in Boston, or even to the meeting-house with white men; not often allowed to work in company with the whites: and so they are kept in poverty”. And Women: Even Boston does not have justice enough “to found a high school for her own daughters, …”
Remediation is Better than Revolution
Parker warned that “if powerful men will not write justice with black ink, on white paper, ignorant and violent men will write it on the soil and illuminate their rude legislation with burning castles, palaces, and towns”.
Yet his belief in the ‘bend of the moral universe’ extended to these matters: “I believe that all evil is transient, a thing that belongs to the process of development, not to the nature of man, or the higher forms of social life towards which he is advancing. If God be good, then only good things are everlasting.”
MINISTRY
He is not to represent merely the gallows and the jail.”
What a preparation for prophetic ministry!!! Thank you, Theodore Parker and James Luther Adams! May it always be so.