BUSHNELL, HORACE
(14 April 1802, Bantam, CT-17 February 1876, Hartford, CT). Education. B.A., Yale College, 1827; attended Yale Law School, 1829-31; B.D., Yale Theological Seminary, 1833. Career: Teacher and journalist, CT and NY, 1827-29; tutor, Yale College, 1829-31; minister, North Congregational Church, Hartford, CT, 1833-59; writer while in semiretirement, 1859-76.
While studying divinity at Yale in the 1830s, Horace Bushnell was frustrated by the dry rationality of systematic theology. He had abandoned the study of the law after a heart-felt conversion experience drew him to religion. But academic divinity bore little relationship to his sense of the spiritual life. Great theologians often trace their insights to the influence of a single book: Bushnell found his intellectual liberation in Aids to Reflection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The work opened before him "a whole other world somewhere overhead, a range of realities in a higher tier."
Bushnell concluded that theologians worried too much about words, trying to capture eternal truths in a changeless body of philosophical principle. Words, he argued, are culturally conditioned. They should be regarded as metaphors, evoking meaning, not as "timeless truths." Accordingly, theological disputes tended to obscure the spiritual truths affirmed by both sides. In his many works J3ushnell tried to write in a language close to human experience. His influence was enormous: he has been called the foremost liberal theologian in America, and he is often ranked along with Jonathan Edwards* and Reinhold Niebuhr as one of the three great American religious thinkers.
In all his writings Bushnell stressed the continuity between the spiritual and secular realms of life. The natural and supernatural, he argued, were "consubstantial" rather than separate realms; the miraculous and the mundane existed side by side in daily life. Christ's sacrifice was effective not because it changed God but because it exercised a "moral influence" on man. Even conversion need not be experienced as a radical departure from daily life: through "Christian nurture" a child could be brought up within the world of the spirit.
Such thoughts were comfortable in an industrial age that enjoyed the exercise of human control over the physical world. During the twentieth century liberal theologians would be accused of making religion so accessible that smug self-confidence could be confused with true spirituality. But in writers like Bushnell liberalism was a theology of the heart as well as the mind.
Bibliography
A: Barbarism the First Danger (New York, 1847); A Discourse on Christian Nurture (Boston, 1847); God in Christ (Hartford, 1849); Christ in Theology (Hartford, 1851); Nature and the Supernatural (New York, 1858); Sermons for the New Life (New York, 1858); Work and Play (London, 1864); The Vicarious Sacrifice (New York, 1866).
B: DAB 3,350-54; DARB, 79-81; NCAB 8,303; NCE 2, 190; NIT 18 February 1876,4; RHAP, 12-13; SH 2, 318-19; Mary B. Cheney, Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (New York, 1880; 1969); Theodore T. Munger, Horace Bushnell: Preacher and Theologian (Boston, 1899); Barbara M. Cross, Horace Bushnell: Minister to a Changing America (Chicago, 1958); William A. Johnson, Nature and the Supernatural in the Theology of Horace Bushnell (Lund, Sweden, 1963); H. Shelton Smith, ed., Horace Bushnell; Twelve Selections (New York, 1965); Fred Kirschenmann, "Horace Bushnell: Orthodox or Sabellian?" Church History, 33 (1964),49-59; Horace A. Barnes, "The Idea that Caused a War: Horace Bushnell Versus Thomas Jefferson," Journal of Church and State, 16 (1974), 73-83; Howard A. Barnes, "Horace Bushnell: Gentry Elitist," Connecticut History, 19 (1977), 1-24; Edward Robert Peterson, "The Horace Bushnell Controversy: A Study of Heresy in Nineteenth Century America, 1828-1854" (Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1985).
While studying divinity at Yale in the 1830s, Horace Bushnell was frustrated by the dry rationality of systematic theology. He had abandoned the study of the law after a heart-felt conversion experience drew him to religion. But academic divinity bore little relationship to his sense of the spiritual life. Great theologians often trace their insights to the influence of a single book: Bushnell found his intellectual liberation in Aids to Reflection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The work opened before him "a whole other world somewhere overhead, a range of realities in a higher tier."
Bushnell concluded that theologians worried too much about words, trying to capture eternal truths in a changeless body of philosophical principle. Words, he argued, are culturally conditioned. They should be regarded as metaphors, evoking meaning, not as "timeless truths." Accordingly, theological disputes tended to obscure the spiritual truths affirmed by both sides. In his many works J3ushnell tried to write in a language close to human experience. His influence was enormous: he has been called the foremost liberal theologian in America, and he is often ranked along with Jonathan Edwards* and Reinhold Niebuhr as one of the three great American religious thinkers.
In all his writings Bushnell stressed the continuity between the spiritual and secular realms of life. The natural and supernatural, he argued, were "consubstantial" rather than separate realms; the miraculous and the mundane existed side by side in daily life. Christ's sacrifice was effective not because it changed God but because it exercised a "moral influence" on man. Even conversion need not be experienced as a radical departure from daily life: through "Christian nurture" a child could be brought up within the world of the spirit.
Such thoughts were comfortable in an industrial age that enjoyed the exercise of human control over the physical world. During the twentieth century liberal theologians would be accused of making religion so accessible that smug self-confidence could be confused with true spirituality. But in writers like Bushnell liberalism was a theology of the heart as well as the mind.
Bibliography
A: Barbarism the First Danger (New York, 1847); A Discourse on Christian Nurture (Boston, 1847); God in Christ (Hartford, 1849); Christ in Theology (Hartford, 1851); Nature and the Supernatural (New York, 1858); Sermons for the New Life (New York, 1858); Work and Play (London, 1864); The Vicarious Sacrifice (New York, 1866).
B: DAB 3,350-54; DARB, 79-81; NCAB 8,303; NCE 2, 190; NIT 18 February 1876,4; RHAP, 12-13; SH 2, 318-19; Mary B. Cheney, Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (New York, 1880; 1969); Theodore T. Munger, Horace Bushnell: Preacher and Theologian (Boston, 1899); Barbara M. Cross, Horace Bushnell: Minister to a Changing America (Chicago, 1958); William A. Johnson, Nature and the Supernatural in the Theology of Horace Bushnell (Lund, Sweden, 1963); H. Shelton Smith, ed., Horace Bushnell; Twelve Selections (New York, 1965); Fred Kirschenmann, "Horace Bushnell: Orthodox or Sabellian?" Church History, 33 (1964),49-59; Horace A. Barnes, "The Idea that Caused a War: Horace Bushnell Versus Thomas Jefferson," Journal of Church and State, 16 (1974), 73-83; Howard A. Barnes, "Horace Bushnell: Gentry Elitist," Connecticut History, 19 (1977), 1-24; Edward Robert Peterson, "The Horace Bushnell Controversy: A Study of Heresy in Nineteenth Century America, 1828-1854" (Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1985).