William Ellery Channing
1780 to 1842
William Ellery Channing was born in 1780 in Newport, Rhode Island. Second in a family of nine children, Channing was acquainted early with sadness at the death of his father when the boy was only thirteen. Despite the precarious finances of the large family, William Channing was able to continue in school and eventually enrolled at Harvard. In The Life of William Ellery Channing, D.D., William Henry Channing places his uncle's decision to enter the ministry in his senior year of college; he quoted, "In my Senior year,...the prevalence of infidelity, imported from France, led me to inquire into the evidences of Christianity, and then I found for what I was made. My heart embraced its great objects with an interest which has been increasing to this hour."
From Harvard, where he graduated in 1798, he went to Richmond, Virginia to work as a tutor in a family. The two years spent there he later remembered as both painful, for the spiritual struggle he underwent and the physical deprivation he subjected himself to, and beneficial, for the questions it gave him time to settle. Channing returned to New England, specifically to Boston, where in 1803 he assumed the pastorate of the Federal Street Church. He remained pastor there for the remainder of his life.
In his introduction to Selected Writings,
David Robinson recounts a "well-known anecdote of Channing's boyhood":
Although obviously a simplification of Channing's rejection
of Calvinist doctrine, the story is indicative of the
liberalism of his character. The liberal movement that
existed in New England in the early part of the nineteenth
century was characterized by its denial of the doctrines of
human depravity and election to grace. Despite these
differences, liberals remained a part of the church until
1819 when tension between the two groups reached a high
point. This moment marked a turning point in the liberal
movement and in Channing's career. At the ordination of
Jared Sparks in Baltimore, Channing delivered what would
become a definitive oration entitled "Unitarian Christianity."
Though the name points to the Unitarian rejection of the
Trinity, this represents only one of the movement's central
tenets. Equally important is the belief in human goodness
and the use of reason in religious matters - "we believe that
all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of man, that
is, in conscience, or his sense of duty, and in the power of
forming his temper and life according to conscience."
The 1820's were years which Channing spent solidifying his
philosophical and religious creed and administering to his
flock. The most liberal aspect of this creed was defined
in "Likeness to God." Again an ordination sermon, "Likeness
to God" gave a structure to Unitarianism's belief in man's potential to
be like God. Of this work Robinson writes "to understand the remarkable
influence of "Likeness to God" we must remember how controversial, even
heretical, the suggestion of a human similarity to God seemed to many
in the 1820's" (Robinson, 145.)
With the publication of Discourses, Reviews, and Miscellanies in 1830,
Channing moved away from the strictly theological focus of his earlier works.
Throughout the decade that followed, Channing's writing moved to social reform,
especially to slavery. Although never a radical abolitionist, Channing wrote
about the evils of slavery, and the moral corruption it wrought on both
slave and slave-holder. His 1838 address, "Self-Culture",
highlights the importance of the development of the individual, the
moral, religious, intellectual, and social aspects of character. In his introduction to
the text, David Robinson writes, "Channing's Self-Culture was perhaps
the classic definition of the idea in nineteenth-century America."
2 If nothing else it, like an earlier Channing
text, helped to put a name and a form to a developing American idea
.
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"Taken one day by his father to hear a "famous
preacher," he was introduced to the Calvinist vision of human
depravity, of lost souls in a dark universe, in desperate need of "sovereign
grace." The sombre terror of the sermon struck the sensitive boy deeply, and when his
father later pronounced it "sound doctrine," young Channing was crushed: "It is all
true then." But as the boy's anguish grew during the silent drive
home, he was jarred when his father began to whistle.
And when his father reached home and proceeded calmly to read
his newspaper, the boy realized something: "No! his father did
not believe it; people did not believe it! It was not true!"1
1. William Ellery Channing, Selected Writings,
edited by David Robinson. Paulist Press. New York, 1985. [page 9]
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2. ibid. [page 221]
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