Religion: Man Who Stayed to Preach

Forty years ago, a gentle-faced young minister came to serve Boston’s Unitarian First Church until the congregation could find the right man. Charles E. Park, an India-born missionary’s son, was sure his new post would be only temporary—for one thing, he did not even hold a Bachelor of Divinity degree. But humble Parson Park proved to be exactly the “right man” for his church. Today he is recognized as the Grand Old Man of U.S. liberal pulpits.

This year Unitarian Park, bald-pated at 73, retires at last from the active ministry. He will spend more time with his eight grandchildren and further develop his amateur virtuosity at printing (“I am an old-fashioned type plugger”), carpentry (“I stick to plane surfaces, straight lines, and right angles”) and photography. But he and his wife plan to remain in Boston. “Whenever the congregation wants me,” said he last week, “they’ll just have to whistle.”

Spiritual Rights. Churchmen will not have to whistle to get the benefit of Charles Park’s Unitarian theology. The current issue of the Unitarian Christian Register carries an example of the Parkian unorthodoxy that may be expected to continue coming from his typewriter. Writing on the Apostles’ Creed, he claims it is a present day anachronism composed expressly to combat the medieval Gnostic heresy that the world was not created by God, but by a lesser, coarser deity, and that Christ, the Incarnate Word, did not truly live, suffer and die like a man, but only seemed to do so. He calls it a “Bill of Spiritual Rights, claiming for man the privilege of . . . establishing firsthand acquaintance with Deity in the person of an intimate, ever present God, and a genuine unpretending Christ.”

Life Principle. Nevertheless, says Park, Unitarians cannot use the Creed without “a number of interlineations which render it grotesque for purposes of worship.” Grotesque sample:

“I believe in (a single, eternal, all-inclusive, all-pervading Life Principle whose source and perfect embodiment is God, who finds varying degrees of embodiment in all forms of life, who is the prototype of every grace, power and nobility found in his creation, and whom I call) God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth; and in Jesus Christ (not), His only Son (for whose son am I? But), our Lord (because he is a, more nearly perfect embodiment of the Life Principle than any one I know;). . . .”

Surprisingly, Grand Old Man Park, unlike some of his Unitarian brethren, is not chary of Christology. Says he: “The type of sermon I’d rather write and read than any other is one which has to do with the life and spirit . . . of Christ.”