William Ellery Channing

In May 1819 Channing travelled to Baltimore to preach at the ordination of a young minister, and used the occasion to state plainly what the liberal party in New England Congregationalism actually held. The sermon was printed, circulated in enormous numbers, and turned a loose tendency into an identifiable body.

Its method is as important as its content. He begins with how scripture is to be read: as a book written in human language, in particular circumstances, to be interpreted by reason like any other, and not as a set of propositions immune to the judgement of the mind that reads them. From that he argues against the Trinity as unscriptural and unintelligible, against the doctrine that the Father's wrath required a substitutionary sacrifice, and against the inherited total depravity of human nature.

The positive claim underneath is moral. God's goodness must mean something recognisably like what goodness means when applied to a person, or the word is empty and worship becomes submission to power. A doctrine that requires us to call good what we would condemn in a human being is, on that test, disqualified. That argument is the reason the sermon still gets read, and it is the reason it was received as an attack: it makes the moral sense of the ordinary hearer a court that theology has to satisfy.

Channing's sermon of 1828, Likeness to God, presses further than the Baltimore statement and is the point at which the older liberalism reaches its edge. Its argument is that we know God only through the moral and spiritual capacities we find in ourselves, that these are genuinely divine in kind rather than merely analogous, and that religion consists in their unfolding. Human nature, so far from being depraved, contains the material out of which any true idea of God is built.

The younger writers read that and drew a conclusion Channing did not. If the divine is known through the individual soul, they asked, what work is scripture still doing, and what is the standing of the miracles Unitarians still defended as the evidence of revelation? Emerson's Divinity School Address of 1838 answered by discarding the evidence and keeping the experience, and the Transcendentalist controversy that followed split the liberal camp Channing had assembled.

His own position on that quarrel was uncomfortable. He was sympathetic to the young men personally and unwilling to follow them, and he died in 1842 before the argument settled. In his last years he turned increasingly to slavery, publishing against it from 1835 at real cost to his standing in commercial Boston, and it is that work, rather than the doctrinal controversies, that his own denomination now tends to remember first.