Horace Bushnell
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Horace Bushnell
Horace
Bushnell
(April 14, 1802 – February 17, 1876) was an American Congregational clergyman and theologian.
Contents
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Life
Bushnell
was a Yankee born in the village
of Bantam, township of Litchfield, Connecticut. He attended Yale
College
where he roomed with future magazinist Nathaniel Parker Willis.[1] Willis credited
Bushnell with teaching him the proper technique for sharpening a razor.[2] After graduating in
1827, he was literary editor of the New York Journal of Commerce from
1828–1829, and in 1829 became a tutor at Yale. Here he initially studied law,
but in 1831 he entered the theology department of Yale College. In May, 1833
Bushnell was ordained pastor of the North Congregational church in Hartford, Connecticut. He married Mary Apthorp in 1833 and
the couple had three children.[3] Bushnell remained in
Hartford until 1859 when, due to extended poor health he resigned his
pastorate. Thereafter he held no appointed office, but, until his death at
Hartford in 1876, he was a prolific author and occasionally preached.
Career
A younger Horace
Bushnell
While
in California in 1856, for the
restoration of his health, he took an active interest in the organization, at Oakland,
of the College of California (chartered in 1855 and merged with the University of California in 1869), the
presidency of which he declined. As a preacher, Dr Bushnell was very effective.
Though not a dramatic orator, he was original, thoughtful and impressive in the
pulpit. His theological position may be said to have been one of qualified
revolt against the Calvinistic orthodoxy of his day. He criticized prevailing conceptions
of the Trinity, the atonement, conversion, and the relations of the
natural and the supernatural. Above all, he broke with the prevalent view which
regarded theology as essentially intellectual in its appeal and demonstrable by
processes of exact logical deduction. To his thinking its proper basis is to be
found in the feelings and intuitions of humankind's spiritual nature. He had a
marked influence upon theology in America, an influence not so much, possibly,
in the direction of the modification of specific doctrines as in the impulse
and tendency and general spirit which he imparted to theological thought. Dr
Munger's estimate was that "He was a theologian as Copernicus was an astronomer;
he changed the point of view, and thus not only changed everything, but pointed
the way toward unity in theological thought." He was not exact, but he put
God and humanity and the world into a relation that thought can accept while it
goes on to state it more fully with ever growing knowledge. Other thinkers were
moving in the same direction; he led the movement in New
England,
and wrought out a great deliverance. It was a work of superb courage. Hardly a
theologian in his denomination stood by him, and nearly all pronounced against
him. Four of his books were of particular importance:
Christian
Nurture
(1847), in which he virtually opposed revivalism and effectively turned the
current of Christian thought toward the young ; Nature and the Supernatural
(1858), in which he discussed miracles and endeavoured to
lift the natural
into the supernatural by emphasizing the supernatural nature of man; The
Vicarious Sacrifice (1866), in which he contended for what has come to be
known as the moral view of the atonement in distinction from the governmental
and the penal or satisfaction theories; and God in Christ (1849) (with
an introductory Dissertation on Language as related to Thought and Spirit), in
which he expressed, it was charged, heretical views as to the
Trinity, holding, among other things, that the Godhead is instrumentally three
simply as related to our finite apprehension, and the communication of God's
incommunicable nature. Attempts were made to bring him to trial, but they were
unsuccessful, and in 1852 his church unanimously withdrew from the local consociation, thus removing any
possibility of further action against him. To his critics Bushnell formally
replied by writing Christ in Theology (1851), in which he employs the
important argument that spiritual truth can be expressed only in approximate
and poetical language, and concludes that an adequate dogmatic theology cannot
exist. That he did not deny the divinity of Christ he proved in The Character
of Jesus, forbidding his possible Classification within Men (1861). He
also published Sermons for the New Life (1858); Christ and his
Salvation (1864); Work and Play (1864); Moral Uses of Dark Things
(1868); Women's Suffrage, the Reform against Nature (1869); Sermons
on Living Subjects (1872); and Forgiveness and Law (1874).
An
edition of his works, in eleven volumes, appeared in 1876; and a further
volume, gathered from his unpublished papers, as The Spirit in Man: Sermons
and Selections, in 1903. New editions of his Nature and the
Supernatural, Sermons for this New Life, and Work and Play, were published
the same year.
Civic interests
Bushnell
was greatly interested in the civic interests of Hartford, and was the chief
agent in procuring the establishment of the first public park in the United
States. It was named Bushnell Park in his honor by that city.
Books By Bushnell
· Views of Christian
Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (1847), Facsimile ed., 1876 ed., 1975,
Scholars Facsimilies & Reprints, ISBN
9780820111476:
text
online
· God in Christ: Three
Discourses Delivered at New Haven, Cambridge, & Andover (1849), University
of Michigan Library, 2005, ISBN
1-4255-3727-8,
1876 edition: text online, includes a
preliminary dissertation arguing that language is inadequate to express things
of the spirit.
· Nature and the
Supernatural: As Together Constituting the One System of God (1858), University
of Michigan Library, 2006, ISBN
1-4255-5865-8,
1860 edition: text
online
· Parting Words: A
Discourse Delivered in the North Church, Hartford (1859), Hartford:
L.E. Hunt, text online
· The Vicarious
Sacrifice, Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation (1866), University
of Michigan Library, 2001, ISBN
1-4181-5431-8,
1871 edition: text
online
· Forgiveness and Law:
Grounded in Principles Interpreted by Human Analogies (1874), New York:
Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., text
online
· Horace Bushnell,
Selected Writings on Language, Religion, and American Culture, David L. Smith,
ed., Scholars Press, 1984, ISBN 0-89130-636-6
Books About Bushnell
· David L. Smith, Symbolism
and Growth: Religious Thought of Horace Bushnell (1981), Scholar's Press, ISBN
0-89130410-X
· Howard A. Barnes, Horace
Bushnell and the Virtuous Republic (1991), Scarecrow Press, ISBN
0-81082438-8
· Robert L. Edwards, Of
Singular Genius, of Singular Grace: A Biography of Horace Bushnell (1992),
Pilgrim Press, ISBN
0-82980937-6
· Robert Bruce Mullin, The
Puritan As Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell (2002), Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing, ISBN
0-8028-4252-6
· Michiyo Morita, Horace
Bushnell on Women in Nineteenth-Century America (2004), University Press of
America, ISBN
0-76182888-5
· Andrew Jackson Davis,
The Approaching Crisis: Being a Review of Dr. Bushnell's Course of Lectures,
on the Bible, Nature, Religion, Skepticism, and the Supernatural (1870),
Boston: W. White & Co., text
online;
a response to lectures by Bushnell during December 1851 and January 1852 on
rationalism vs. supernaturalism.
References
· 
This article incorporates text from a
publication now in the public
domain:
Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.).
Cambridge University Press.
This article incorporates text from a
publication now in the public
domain:
Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.).
Cambridge University Press.
1.
^ Pattee, Fred Lewis. The First
Century of American Literature: 1770–1870. New York: Cooper Square
Publishers, 1966: 500.
2.
^ Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam:
Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1955: 68.
3.
^ Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of
American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977: 342. ISBN 0-394-40532-3
External links
 |
· "Two
American Divines",
in Appletons' Journal: a Magazine of General Literature, New York: D.
Appleton and Company, Volume 9, Issue: 51, Sept 1880, p. 277–280
· "Recent
Doctrinal and Ecclesiastical Conflicts in Connecticut" in The Princeton
Review, Vol. 25, Issue 4, Oct 1853, pp. 598-637
· This page was last
modified on 15 July 2011 at 20:14.
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