William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker

1.         William Ellery Channing, a theologian and minister not only changed the history of Unitarianism, but provided a new version of liberal American theology.  While Channing helped to found the Transcendental Club, and died during the height of the Transcendentalist movement, his views had a direct impact on philosophers and theologians who followed.  In his ground breaking sermon Unitarian Christianity, Channing said the Bible was a book “written for men, in the language of men, whose meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.” This and other claims in Channing’s sermon embodied the impulse behind Emerson’s Divinity School Address and Transcendentalism in general.

            Excited by transcendental ideas of the German Romantics and Emerson's Nature, he began sending Emerson his poems, and Emerson obligingly published them in The Dial.  As a poet, Channing could be fluent and pictorial, and his early poems were full of Transcendental abstractions.  Although Channing participated in some of the earliest meetings of the Transcendental discussion groups he eventually decided that their views were too extreme for him.   His theology developed into Unitarian Universalism, which is still active today. 

            The central views of Transcendentalism were soon linked to this liberal form of Unitarianism, and its connection to social reform movements.  Many Transcendentalists developed an even more liberal version of Unitarianism that led to later ideas o secular individualism.  Among New England Unitarians Channing was accepted and debated by radical Transcendentalists and their conservative critics.  Some referred to themselves as “Channing” Unitarians.  His influence continues in the modern denomination.

2.         Theodore Parker was one of the most practical and active of the Transcendentalist group in causes ranging from the reform of parish ministry to widespread social activism.   Parker’s own theological evolution paralleled that of many Transcendentalists.  He helped turn Unitarianism away from its strict Calvinist origins toward a liberal theology that encouraged social activism.  Parker’s theology fit well with ideas of early Transcendentalist thinkers.  Included in the first gatherings held by the Transcendental Club, he contributed regularly to The Dial the most important Transcendentalist periodical.

            In 1840 Parker published a pamphlet, The Previous Question which he wrote in the voice of a fictitious ordinary Unitarian believer named "Levi Blodgett." Here he vigorously laid out the Transcendentalist position on inspiration, miracles, and religious authority.  Parker emerged as a major Transcendentalist spokesman in May 1841, when he delivered A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity at an ordination in South Boston.