The Divinity School Address, and a Quarrel About Miracles

The movement began as a quarrel inside Unitarianism, which had itself been the liberal wing of New England Congregationalism, and the quarrel had a precise subject. Unitarian theology rested the authority of Christianity on the miracles: the reported events authenticate the messenger, and the messenger authenticates the teaching. Emerson and those with him held that this makes religion depend on testimony about the past, and that the soul has direct access to the divine now.

Emerson had already resigned his Boston pulpit in 1832 because he could not administer communion in good conscience. In 1838 he was invited to address the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School and told them that historical Christianity had erred by dwelling with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus, and that the preacher who speaks from tradition rather than from experience speaks of a dead thing. Andrews Norton, the senior Unitarian scholar, replied in print under the title The Latest Form of Infidelity, and Emerson was not invited back to Harvard for thirty years.

Theodore Parker took the argument further in a sermon on the transient and the permanent in Christianity, distinguishing the doctrines and rites, which change, from the truth of the teaching, which he held would stand even if it could be shown that Jesus had never lived. Parker remained a working minister and was ostracised by most of his Unitarian colleagues for it.