American Unitarianism and the Protestant Dilemma by Willsky-Ciollo Lydia;

Author:Willsky-Ciollo, Lydia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 5

A Practical Spirit

Frederic Henry Hedge and the Universal Church

The decades immediately following Parker’s eventful 1841 entrance on the scene were characterized by Unitarian experiments with religious authority. Describing the full array of such experimentation would be impossible in the space remaining. Instead, this chapter and the next explore, respectively, the mainstream Unitarian approach to religious authority and the multiplicity of alternative approaches abounding. As a moderate, seeking a way to reconcile the warring factions within Unitarianism after Parker, Frederic Henry Hedge is representative of the mainstream approach (of which the AUA Executive Committee that caused Parker so much ire is also representative). Though a devoted Biblicist during his lifetime, Hedge understood that for Unitarianism to survive, the Bible could no longer stand on its own. Instead, in the years following the Parker controversy, he focused his efforts on establishing a new source of authority within Unitarianism: the Unitarian Church itself. Arguably, and besides his friend Henry Whitney Bellows, no individual was more ecclesiastically focused than Hedge in the years between 1841 and 1865.1 Establishing a definitive, liberal Christian Church, one that could (hopefully) respect the requirements of free inquiry, while retaining a sustaining set of church forms and structures, became Hedge’s goal in those tumultuous years following Parker, when Unitarianism was compelled to confront its crisis of identity. In Hedge’s understanding, the Church did not have to be a cold place hostile to new ideas and unyielding to reform, but a place to seek guidance and refuge against critics and that served as the authoritative channel of both the Bible and the Spirit.

In many ways, Hedge was the perfect person to confront the war brewing between the Transcendentalists and the more conservative Unitarians. First of all, Hedge had a foot in both camps—a fact that often perplexed and infuriated his friends. Emerson and Ripley claimed him for the radical cause and fellow Unitarian preachers Convers Francis and Henry Ware, Jr. identified him as conservative. Both sides believed his views to be aligned with theirs, and both would experience periods of disappointment, feeling Hedge had betrayed them by reneging on his “true” or “original” views.2 In truth, Hedge defied any one means of definition—a characteristic common to all four of the figures examined in this work. For his part, Hedge felt he had always straddled both worlds and felt no urgency to remedy this fact. Writing about his views on the precipitousness of the early Transcendentalist campaign for a “new church,” Hedge recalled, “I had no belief in ecclesiastical revolutions to be accomplished with set purpose; and I seemed to discern a power and meaning in the old, which the more impassioned would not allow. I had even then made up my mind, that the method of revolution in theology is not discussion, but development.” Citing his “historical conscience” as the ballast for his “neology” or his promotion of the newer, Transcendentalist ideology, Hedge described himself as “ecclesiastically conservative, though intellectually radical.”3 He was a moderate—and at that time, no

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