Back to main page

"Let the good of others be felt by you to be your calling in the universe."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction to Emerson as Minister

Many Unitarian Universalists feel an affinity with the well-known American essayist of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson. His themes of thinking for one's self, developing one's potentials, living a moral life, and reverencing the natural world, continue to call to us today.

Most of us know that Emerson began his public career as a Unitarian minister. Some of us also know that the Rev. Mr. Emerson resigned his pulpit after a short time over his concerns about administering the Lord's Supper, and that, six years after his resignation from Second Church in Boston, he publicly criticized the Unitarianism of his day in a ceremonial address given before the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School in 1838.

But how many of us know what he actually preached from Unitarian pulpits in Massachusetts (and elsewhere) between 1826 and 1839? What were his primary concerns? What was his theology? his christology? his sermonic style? And, were there any themes in his Unitarian sermons that continued to occupy his attention in his later works as lecturer and essayist?

Today, we are in a much better position than any other generation since the 1830s to answer questions such as these. That's because Emerson's complete sermons are now available in print for the first time, having only just recently been published as a four-volume set by the University of Missouri Press in 1989-1992.

In Emerson's sermons we encounter a Unitarian clergyman whose traditional devotion and Christian piety is striking. The familiar Emersonian themes of the essays--the God within, self-reliance, compensation, the moral uses of nature, and the imperative of direct, first-hand experience--are all already present in his sermons but they are communicated within the context of Christian life and faith, as the logical implications of the teachings of scripture.

Many scholars, notably Conrad Wright and David Robinson, have written about early Unitarianism and its rootedness in Puritan soil. Emerson's sermons not only make their point, his sermons are almost impossible to understand without having that context and its assumptions in mind as you read them.

Some of the basic assumptions behind Emerson's sermons are: that God created the earth as a place where the daily challenges of living are designed to move us to exert ourselves and develop our potentials; that we have been given the powers of conscience, reason and emotion (as well as the Bible) to aid us in recognizing, and choosing to develop, the good and virtuous potentials of our nature and to avoid the evil and destructive ones; that with every choice we make and every action we take, we are shaping our character for good or for ill; that Jesus' life and teachings provide us with an example of how a human life can be lived on the basis of consistently choosing good and virtuous ways over selfish and evil ones, and that we should follow Jesus' lead; that to form our character in this way (by embodying virtue in our thoughts, words, and deeds) is actually to put on immortality, bit by bit; and that such a practice of moral self-cultivation is the best preparation for the world to come.

Many of Emerson's sermons follow a predictable pattern. He begins slowly, often introducing his theme with the use of commonplaces and conventional wisdom. Then, on his way to an inevitable concluding emotional appeal to his congregants to heed the lesson offered, he takes his topic apart and proceeds to examine and analyze the pieces. Then, just before reaching his emotional conclusion, he puts his theme back together again, but in a new and unexpected way that is often both sudden and breathtaking. Then comes the emotional appeal to his hearers to take to heart what they have just seen for themselves. Once you discover this pattern that Emerson tends to use, you can save yourself a lot of time. Rather than begin at the beginning of a sermon and then struggle for pages just trying to figure out what Emerson's getting at, begin instead with the end of the sermon first and read his concluding emotional appeal. Then go back to the start of the sermon and read from there, keeping in mind where Emerson is going to end up. Don't worry that you'll be spoiling the element of surprise if you do this: as you read a sermon for the first time, even already knowing where Emerson's going to end, you will still struggle to figure how in the world he's going to pull it off. Remember, we're talking about Emerson here. You already know how ingeniously his essays can unfold; many of his sermons do the same. It is no exaggeration to say that these are wonderful sermons and that the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson is in each one of them. However, as every minister knows, a sermon transcript--no matter how accurate--is always missing something essential: the actual voice of the orator filling the room.

Since sermons are meant to be heard, let me suggest that you try reading Emerson's sermons aloud to yourself. Better still, preach them, as if they were sermons from your own pen that you are rehearsing for an upcoming Sunday. I think that you will find that reading Emerson's sermons aloud not only heightens your comprehension of them, it also enables you to enter the text in such a way that you will find yourself in the immediate presence of the passion that filled the original preacher and his carefully chosen words of long ago.