Horace Bushnell

Minister to a Changing America

Barbara M. Cross

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781839744983
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The life and thought of an important but neglected nineteenth-century Congregational preacher and theologian.
"My purpose in this book has been to analyze the religious thought of Horace Bushnell and the emergence of his theology from his society and tradition. Because Bushnell had to interest and address the Protestant middle class of nineteenth-century America, the book has partly become a study of the concerns and values of this group; because Bushnell was a Congregational minister, it is also an interpretation of the adjustment of Christianity to a specific time and place. Undermined by apathy, science, republican enthusiasm, and middle-class pride, American religion in the nineteenth century faced a crisis that threatened to destroy it as a viable intellectual belief. Bushnell met this crisis so successfully that his work became a turning point in American Protestantism. I have traced here the interplay between secular pressures and religious thought; I have also tried to show how the Christian faith maintained its own challenge and imperatives during all adjustments."

A Bibliographical Comment

The following summary notes only the books that proved particularly helpful in preparation of this study. My doctoral dissertation, from which the present work was adapted, contains a complete bibliography and can be found in Widener Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Spirit in Man, edited by Mary Bushnell Cheney (New York, 1903), contains selections from the important sermons that Bushnell left unpublished. The complete manuscript of the crucial sermon “God Reigns for the Largest Love” adds valuable material, however. The five handwritten Journals of the trip to Europe, though largely dutiful records of the dimensions of churches visited, are interesting as the only record in diary form which Bushnell kept. Mary Bushnell Cheney’s Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (New York, 1880), presents his correspondence, writings, and personal life from a daughter’s point of view.

For understanding of the religious tradition in which Bushnell worked, Perry Miller’s The New England Mind (New York, 1939) and Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1949) are essential. Frank H. Foster’s A Genetic History of New England Theology (Chicago, 1907) is lucid, though rather narrowly focused on the question of free will. Joseph Haroutinian’s Piety vs. Moralism: The Passing of New England Theology (New York, 1932) traces the complex theological changes that subtly transformed the Calvinism of the Puritans into a rationalistic moralism. Two works by European scholars made it possible to set Bushnell’s contributions to theology in broader perspective. Heinrich Brunner’s Die Mystik und das Wort (2d ed.; Tübingen, 1928) discriminates between Christian faith and Schleiermacher’s mysticism, and Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros, translated by A. G. Herbert (London, 1932), brilliantly defines the disparity between Pauline agape and pagan eros.

Contemporary ideas affecting Bushnell’s thought include the theories of Unitarians and transcendentalists, the restatements of orthodoxy, and the new beliefs resulting from science. Perry Miller’s The Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass., 1950) presents and interprets the contending issues and theories cent...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Origins
• II. A Christianity for Common Sense
• III. The Preferences of the Romantic Sensibility
• IV. A Fastidious People
• V. The Security of Christian Nurture
• VI. The Expedient of Eloquence
• VII. The Experience of Words
• VIII. Science and Faith
• IX. The Law of Sacrifice
• X. The Uses of Theology
• A Bibliographical Comment