"Dr. Kerr’s Breakaway"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

04/10/05

We have been focusing attention on the cloud of witnesses who have bequeathed this church to us as a trust to enjoy and to steward. There is one member of that cloud of witnesses whose role is so exceptional that I believe it deserves special attention. I speak of my distinguished predecessor in this pulpit, Dr. Thomas Kerr.

First some background. Institutional histories are complex. I speak of the history of this church as dating back to 1841 – that is both accurate and inaccurate.

Thatcher Blake, a Unitarian, settled on the West side of the Rock River in 1834. Daniel Shaw Haight, a Universalist settled on the East side in 1835.

On February 3, 1841, a meeting was held to form a Unitarian society. Ten days later, Richard Montague, Issac N. Cunningham, Francis Burnap, Ephraim Wyman, and James M., Wight were elected trustees. Later that month The Rev. Joseph Harrington came out from Chicago to preach to the Unitarians at the court house. Apparently some wandering Unitarian ministers came to town occasionally over the next two years, but not much happened organizationally.

Also in 1841, a dynamic Universalist minister, The Rev. Seth Barnes, came to Rockford. On April 24^th, Daniel Shaw Haight held a meeting in the brick schoolhouse in East Rockford to organize a Universalist Church to which Mr. Barnes could preach. The Universalists immediately set out to build a building to which James Wight, one of the Unitarian trustees, contributed a thousand feet of lumber. The Rev. Mr. Barnes, founded a Universalist newspaper, The Better Covenant. Apparently he became more interested in the paper than in Rockford, and early in 1843, he moved to Chicago. The church building was never completed.

In March of 1843, Dr. Harrington returned for a week long Unitarian revival, at the conclusion of which the church was organized by some of those involved in 1841, and others. They tried to buy the incomplete Universalist church, but Haight would not sell to them. The Rev. Buckminster Fuller came to Belvidere to found a school, and he reported to the American Unitarian Association that “the prospects [in Rockford] are so good that I think a decided experiment should be made.” For reasons which are not clear, the Unitarian reorganized again in 1845. It was not until 1849 that the first Unitarian minister, The Rev. Herman Snow was settled. He resigned a year later for health reasons, although he remained in the congregation and later became Sunday School Superintendent. He was succeeded by the Rev. John Windsor from 1850-54; The Rev. John Murray from 1854-57; and The Rev. Augustus Conant, 1857-61. The Rev. Fred May Holland lasted only one year, 1863; the ministry of The Rev. William Nowell managed only to survive 14 months from 1864-65. The Rev. Daniel Reed, a Universalist, was the most successful minister of the Unitarian Congregation, which he persuaded to change its name to The United Unitarian and Universalist Church. He served from 1865-1870, resigning for what were reported as health reasons, although he lived another 20 years, in Rockford.

It is clear from the historical records that it was a very conflicted church. Some of the ministers were driven out because of their radical theological ideas. The church seemed very healthy at the time of Dr. Reed’s resignation, but, for reasons about to be made clear, it never had another minister.

Thomas Kerr was born in Aberdeen, Scotland on May 24, 1824. He attended Gordon College and the University of Aberdeen. He came to the United States in 1845, at the age of 21, and took some science courses at Columbia University in New York City.

In 1850, Dr. Kerr graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in medicine, and set up a practice in Elgin, where he was reportedly very popular. He had a curious mind and an interest in religion, so he apparently studied by mail while practicing medicine because in 1857 he was ordained as a Baptist minister.

He served congregations in Dundee and Waukeegan before being called on June 1,1860 to the First Baptist Church in Rockford. After serving for a year, he was given a three-month vacation so he could travel to Palestine, which he later reported was a major life event. Dr. Kerr served the Rockford Baptists until 1856, when he moved to a larger church in Hannibal, Missouri. His successor in Rockford was not his equal, and so the Rockford congregation enticed him back in 1869.

Something had happened to Dr. Kerr in the meantime. He had been impressed by the writings of Charles Darwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker (all Unitarians). The sermons he delivered to the Baptists were not fulfilling for the Baptists. He wrote later:

I well remember the time when I first heard of Emerson . . . As I had been brought up after the straightest sort of religious denominational ideas, this man was obnoxious to me, for was he not a perverter of the truth, an enemy of the faith once for all delivered to the fathers? At this rating, his very name was an offense to my soul. What shall I say? How shall I express my glowing gratitude for the experiences by which . . . I became aware for the first time of such a temper, attitude, and movement of thought, understanding and feeling as had their representation in the man for whose name and reputation I had entertained such an aversion. Who and what Emerson was came in upon my mind and spirit as the first blush of morning fins its way to dissolve the darkness. Reading his works for the first time, Emerson became to me what I can illustrate by no better figure. As my religious life had taken on to me so strange and confusing a phase, I found that sense of things in his method that calmed my anxieties and hushed my fears.

Well, Emersonian ideas may have calmed Dr. Kerr’s anxieties and hushed his fears, but when they were expressed from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church, along with evolutionary ideas, they elevated the anxieties and fears of many of the Baptists.

After fourteen months back in the Baptist pulpit, on August 28, 1870, Dr. Kerr delivered a sermon he called “Religious Discrimination,” in which he clearly articulated a theology well in line with Emersonian and Parkerite ideas, but far afield of anything acceptable to Baptists. The manuscript of that sermon, in Dr. Kerr’s hand, is in our archives, and I delivered it from this pulpit many years ago, made up to look like Dr. Kerr. It was clearly a 19th century sermon, written by someone who was still immersed in the Christian tradition, but the ideas would be no more acceptable in the First Baptist Church today than they were in 1870.

He told the Baptists that the ideas that Jesus expressed were like seeds that might not bear fruit for generations. The early Church leaders simply did not understand all of the implications of what Jesus was saying.

The idea implied in Christ’s parable (of sowing seeds) is more than just Divine Truth yielding seasonable and expected returns, but really its growth and products are such as may not manifest themselves until occasion, time, circumstances, advancing experience, life’s discipline, may, as it were, be necessary to our recognizing what harvests Divine Truth has brought forth in our mind and in our heart.

. . . When these developments of truth are presented to us, arriving at them in the silence of our own contemplations; finding them in the books we read of others’ experiences; seeing them, as for the first, in the page of scripture; or hearing them put into living words by some fresh-mouthed man; however these developments of truth, or whenever they come into shape and expression, so we find we can understand and accept them because they are really to us the harvest which the vital principle of the Word of God has itself wrought in us!

Lest the language and the imagery confuse you, what Dr. Kerr told those folks was that the truth of Jesus’ teachings was not necessarily comprehended by those who organized the churches – in fact, the real implications were only becoming clear almost 1900 years later. What sounded like heresy was, in his mind, really the truth that was implicit in the words of Jesus.

Dr. Kerr insisted that the exercise of discrimination, by which he meant discernment not prejudice, was essential in religion. “What,” he asked, “seems now more prudent, or more interesting, or more appreciative of Christ’s teachings, than the interrogation of the religious through the sincere and conscientious use of candor, sense, and all practical observation.”

Dr. Kerr insisted that what distinguished humans from animals was not Protestant or Catholic beliefs – “no special belief in religion nor specific practice of its requirements, but simply and essentially from possessing a capacity for religion.”

“The true rendering of the religious consciousness which is the natural one in distinction from the artificial” lay in living a life “whose conscience is void of offense and whose love is supreme toward God and unselfish toward men!” The point of religion was not to change human nature, but to bring it out, to develop what was natural and good in people.

If religion were presented to me as that mere, rude, exacting externality which our fixed and exclusive systems assert it is; if those things which are called “religion” were presented to me; and I were told that they were all there is to it, I would reject them! I would not take them! My soul would find no food in them!! And I am ready to say that the religious is not confined to these artificial things! I call [people] to the [religious] life independently of them. I invite to a higher, truer, stronger, nobler Christian character than they are capable of recognizing!!!

I ask you dear brethren and friends, to test thoroughly the influence of this developing discrimination. Test it, I mean, by its effects upon your own practical character. As it settles your soul as upon pillars of strength; as it stimulates you: to virtue, tenderness, and all trueness; as it sets you more and more in love with purity and all holy tempers: as it confirms you in the hate of the selfish, vulgar and sinful; so let it have your fuller confidence, your devouter gratitude and your readier service.

And at the conclusion of his declaration of what religion should really be, Dr. Kerr submitted his resignation as minister of the First Baptist Church.

Later that week, 48 members of the Baptist Church met with an equivalent group of the members of the United Unitarian and Universalist church, which you will remember was then without a minister since the resignation of Dr. Reed in June, and they formed a new, non-denominational church which they named “The Church of the Christian Union.” It was explicitly not Unitarian, Universalist, or Baptist. And on October 8^th, 1870, Dr. Kerr delivered his first sermon to the new church. The Unitarian Universalists never looked for a new minister, and there was, in fact, talk about using their then empty building, which the new congregation was to do briefly, later. The Unitarian Church did not go out of existence on paper until 1890, twenty years later, but the new church was the manifestation of liberal religion in Rockford with a power and impact it had not known before, and it was in reality an expansion of the Unitarian and Universalist congregation with the addition of liberal Baptists and a formerly Baptist minister.

By the way, the Baptists had a problem with what to do about Dr. Kerr. On October 13^th, the Baptists held a council to consider what to do about the heretical doctrines espoused by Dr. Kerr, and his followers. He was invited to attend, but declined. The council reported:

The case is made somewhat peculiar by the fact that what is charged against the individuals named relates so much to what might be regarded as simply matters of opinion. It is deemed proper to say, in behalf of the members of this council, that they have been strongly predisposed to leniency in their judgement and their action, by the high esteem in which Dr. Kerr himself has been held by us and our earnest desire in no way whatever to prejudice unnecessarily his position before the community, or his usefulness as a minister and a public man.

The problem was, what he was preaching and advocating was not Baptist and there way no way around that.

If fellowship is withdrawn from one who has stood with others upon . . . common ground, but now standing there no longer, it is simply saying, “He is not of us. Let him go out from us. There can be no continuation of this fellowship for the very essential principle of it is destroyed. Let him seek those whoa re like-minded with himself. There is in this no blow aimed at his freedom of opinion, or freedom of utterance. He believes and teaches still what he pleases, responsible to God for his honesty and uprightness therein, but it is doing him no wrong to say that he shall not continue a recognized teacher in the fellowship of those whose faith he discards.

Under Dr. Kerr’s leadership, Liberal Religion in Rockford blossomed like never before, and I could honestly question whether it has since. The congregation went for 18 years with no building of its own, meeting most often at Brown’s Hall. It was finally decided that a structure of their own was in order, and land was purchased and a building constructed at the corner of Main and Mulberry streets. At the laying of the cornerstone in 1888, Dr. Kerr observed:

As we look back on those 18 years, it is to be discerned that [our] movement commenced just about the time that, in a general fashion, the characteristic thought and method of inquiry, that mark the present day, began to be discerned and understood generally. New methods of thought in literature, new methods of thought in scientific inquiry, new methods of thought in historic study, methods that had not been reached before, to the same precision, and which worked like a leaven . . . through christendom. . . . It was a stir of the mind, a movement of fresh inquiry; and from it there came to many a gradual falling away of those things that seem to lose in upon religious thought, to the exclusion of whatever might be supposed to be unfavorable or inimical to the traditions and authority of denominational religion.

As I look back upon these 18 years, I am able to discern the gradual influence of this stir of thought upon our minds. We have been moved by it; and have brought the religious idea to the light of modern inquiry . . . to the light hats that spread from the scientific research of these years, which has opened the way to a larger and broader conception of the nature of things past and present; to a larger and broader conception of the history of humanity in its various moods and relations; to a larger and broader conception of those fundamental principles that enter into . . . . personal character. These larger and broader conceptions led us outside the limits of religious traditions and names.

. . . Instead of religious ideas in any sense claiming to have a specific commencement And purpose, and having their origin in some mysterious and preternatural source, we find that their origin is in reality a matter of historic knowledge and that no religious conception has any other source, than the conditions, capabilities and experiences of the human heart and soul.

This belief was summarized in a Sunday School lesson paper from 1891 in which in response to the question of the origin of religion, Dr. Kerr responded, “In the nature of man, a man’s religion should be in his highest intelligence, his noblest conduct, and his purest feelings.” To the question of the authority of rational faith, he replied, “The same as civilization or the progress of the world goes by. The fullest understanding of things as they are made manifest to [us] by observation, experience, and knowledge.”

The congregation gave Dr. Kerr the time and money to go to the World Exposition in Paris in 1889. He attended the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, where he was really in his element.

There was a major observance of his 70^th birthday in 1894 with pages and pages of the newspapers devoted to tributes to his ministry, but he kept on keeping on.

I feel there was a certain level of distortion in the claim that this was an independent congregation. When it came to the laying of the cornerstone of the church, there were many honored guests, all Unitarian ministers. There was a special hymn written for the event, by a Unitarian minister. The hymns the church used were Unitarian hymns. The Sunday school used Unitarian Sunday School materials. Many of the leading members were Unitarians. Dr. Kerr attended Unitarian conferences and was in fellowship with the American Unitarian Association. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . . come on, now.

Now I discovered something interesting which I share with you only if you promise that you will not take it for anything more than it is - an historical factoid. This is not a hint of any kind. It had been my understanding that Dr. Kerr retired from the ministry to this congregation in 1900, when he was 76 years old. In fact, according to the records, in June of that year he mentioned from the pulpit that he realized that his ministry was somewhat dated and he was not sure he could keep up. A special meeting of the congregation was held on November 21^st at which a letter from Dr. Kerr was read:

I wish to present to you . . . a formal statement of what I said in June last at the closing of public service before vacation. I have reached an age which entitles me to relief in the work of the church. The great, immanent, and unfolding work which our church has done for religious thought and character, and has for these many years represented and advocated, ought to have a leader with youth’s full measure of energy and devotion . . . . My desire is that I be relieved of the sole and unassisted Pastorage of the church . . . I do not desire to be severed from my ministry nor desire any such things as a discharge; nor to be separated from those who, for the many years of my pastorage. . . have faithfully and devotedly sustained me in my many responsibilities.

So the church went shopping, in Unitarian circles, for an assistant. Dr. Robert Bryant came in 1901 and worked with Dr. Kerr. The truth was that Dr. Kerr could not preach often, but he remained the senior minister until his death on January 3, 1904.

He had suffered a stroke a few weeks before and, according to the Daily Register Gazette:

After weeks of patiently waiting for release, Dr. Thomas Kerr passed into the life beyond at an early hour this morning. The end came at 12:58 as he was surrounded by his wife, children, and grandchildren. About the middle of November, Dr. Kerr was stricken and for some days his death was almost momentarily expected. But he rallied and lived to see the dawn of a new year.

Dr. Kerr was in the 80^th year of his age. His last birthday was passed in the observance of the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson which occurred the same day.

Rev. Robert Bodman, minister of First Congregational church wrote in the newspaper:

I was saddened to learn this morning of the death of Dr. Kerr. The presence in any community of such a man raises the value of everything. It increases the worth of life; makes securities doubly secure; justice increasingly certain; liberty many times more sweet. The whole great world was his country and every man was his neighbor. To Dr. Kerr, his pulpit was never anything less than a splendid opportunity; and his message was ever reenforced and backed up by all the power of a life, in which the message had been antecedently incarnated. No preacher was ever more wholly devoid of cant, or more truly in touch with reality. Dr. Kerr was characteristically full of wholesome good feeling; looking leniently upon the foibles of his fellow men but relentlessly upon his own. With something of the high dignity, sweet serenity and beautiful nobility of the man of Galilee, he moved sublimely through various and trying situations and ordeals. . . . In the passing of this good man, the City of Rockford would be incalculably poorer were it not that “No accent of the Holy Ghost is ever lost.”

When we speak of the “cloud of witnesses” who paved the way for the church which means so much in our lives today, there is none that stands above Dr. Kerr who was viewed not only by our predecessors in this church, nor only by the Rockford community, but also by the contemporary leaders of Unitarianism as one who was leading the way to understanding the depths of liberal religion. Surely Dr. Thomas Kerr is to us, an inspiration to “run with perseverance the race is set before us.”