Horace Bushnell

Horace Bushnell , 1802-76, American Congregational minister, b. Bantam, Conn. Bushnell became (1833) pastor of the North Church, Hartford, Conn. He wrote Christian Nurture (1847) and God in Christ (1849). Because of certain views of the Trinity allegedly expressed in the latter, unsuccessful attempts were made to bring him to trial for heresy. Bushnell's dignified reply was made in Christ in Theology (1851). His repudiation of the austerity of Calvinism and his stress on the presence of the divine in humanity and nature had profound influence in shaping liberal Protestant thought. Ill health obliged him to retire from the active ministry in 1859, but he continued to write. His works include The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866), in which he developed the well-known "moral influence theory" of the atonement; Sermons on Living Subjects (1872); and Forgiveness and Law (1874).

Bibliography: See the Life and Letters, ed. by his daughter, Mrs. M. B. Cheney (1880, 1903; repr. 1969); biographies by T. T. Munger (1899) and W. R. Adamson (1966); studies by A. J. W. Myers (1937), B. M. Cross (1938), and William A. Johnson (1963).

Bushnell, Horace (1802–76), American Congregationalist. Pastor to a church in Hartford, Conn., from 1833 to 1859, he was a pioneer of liberal theology in New England. On the ground that language was essentially symbolic, he held that while the doctrine of the Trinity might be true for man in that God was experienced under three different aspects, it did not provide real information as to the inner nature of the Godhead or require the existence of eternal distinctions in His Being.

Bushnell, Horace (1802–76), religious thinker, as pastor of the North Church (Congregational) of Hartford, Conn. (1833–59), propounded a gospel attacking the harshness of Calvinism, upholding the oneness of deity and the goodness of man, accepting intuition as a basis of theological knowledge, and emphasizing the New Testament. His books include Christian Nurture (1847); God in Christ (1849); The Age of Homespun (1851), depicting the rural New England of his youth; Nature and the Supernatural (1858), attacking Transcendentalism; and The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866). His writings were collected (1876–81), and The Spirit in Man was published in 1903.