Theopedia

Horace Bushnell

Theology can never be a science, on account of the infirmities of language.

Horace Bushnell1

Overview

Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) was an American Congregational pastor and theologian, grouped by Baptist systematician Augustus Hopkins Strong among the 19th-century “New England, or New School” theologians alongside Nathaniel Taylor and Charles Finney.2 Strong summarized his two most disputed positions in a single sentence: “Horace Bushnell held to a practically Sabellian view of the Trinity, and to a moral-influence theory of the atonement.”3 A 2024 Themelios article on 19th-century American religious thought calls him “the father of American religious liberalism” and one of the chief opponents of the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening.4

Life and Ministry

Bushnell was born in 1802 in the village of Bantam, in the township of Litchfield, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale in 1827, worked briefly as a literary editor, and returned to Yale as a tutor in 1829, initially studying law before entering Yale’s theology department in 1831. In May 1833 he was ordained pastor of the North Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut, where he remained until 1859, when poor health forced his resignation. He held no further pastorate but continued writing and occasionally preaching until his death at Hartford in 1876.5

Bushnell’s 1849 book God in Christ, which included a preliminary dissertation arguing that theological language is inherently approximate, drew charges of heresy over its treatment of the Trinity. His church withdrew from its local consociation in 1852, which removed any further possibility of formal proceedings against him. He replied to his critics in Christ in Theology (1851), arguing that spiritual truth can be expressed only in approximate, poetic language and that an exact dogmatic theology is accordingly impossible.5

Theological Contribution

The Trinity

Strong’s one-line classification of Bushnell’s Trinitarian doctrine as “practically Sabellian” stands alone; no source gives a dedicated treatment of God in Christ itself.3

Atonement

Bushnell and the Scottish theologian John McLeod Campbell are named as the 19th century’s leading advocates of a moral-influence theory of the atonement. James Petigru Boyce distinguished their version from an older Socinian one: Socinians “recognized the work of Christ simply as that of the exalted man, Christ Jesus,” while “as presented by Bushnell and Campbell, God in Christ has thus identified himself with man in his misery and sin.” On either version, Boyce wrote, the theory “maintains that there has never been any obstacle in the nature of God to the granting of full pardon upon mere repentance for sin,” and that the necessity of Christ’s suffering “is to be found only in the need or motives arising from the love thus exhibited to man to induce him to repent.”6 A. A. Hodge’s Outlines of Theology likewise grouped Bushnell with F. D. Maurice and Benjamin Jowett among the “Trinitarians” holding the Moral Influence Theory, tracing the theory itself back to Abelard.7

Charles Hodge quoted Bushnell’s own account of what the crucifixion leaves the believer without, absent the church’s traditional vocabulary of sacrifice:

In the facts [of our Lord’s passion], outwardly regarded, there is no sacrifice, or oblation, or atonement, or propitiation, but simply a living and dying thus and thus… Christ is good, beautiful, wonderful, his disinterested love is a picture by itself, his forgiving patience melts into my feeling, his passion rends open my heart, but what is He for, and how shall He be made unto me the salvation I want? One word — He is my sacrifice — opens all to me… We cannot afford to lose these sacred forms of the altar. They fill an office which nothing else can fill, and serve a use which cannot be served without them.8

Hodge observed that Bushnell, “toward the end of his book,…virtually takes it all back, and lays down his weapons, conquered by the instincts of his own religious nature and by the authority of the Word of God,” continuing to use the altar language of sacrifice and propitiation even after arguing it added nothing beyond the bare facts of Christ’s death. Hodge’s stated objection to the moral view in every form, Bushnell’s included, was that it “leaves out entirely what is essential to the Scriptural doctrine of atonement”: the Bible’s own presentation of Christ as priest, offering himself as a sacrifice for sin, bearing sin in his own body, made a curse, and given as a ransom for redemption.9 Herman Bavinck placed Bushnell within a broader 19th-century shift, alongside Campbell, Thomas Erskine, and F. D. Maurice, from an objective to a subjective, mystical account of Christ’s work: “Horace Bushnell saw Christ’s suffering as a species of the substitutionary character of all suffering love… the atonement is not legal but moral and spiritual and is not imputed to us juridically but mystically and ethically.”10

Christian Nurture and infant baptism

Strong’s Systematic Theology engaged Bushnell’s Christian Nurture (1847) directly in its discussion of the grounds for infant baptism, identifying it as elaborating “the third theory of organic connection of the child with its parents.” Bushnell, according to Strong, “denies original sin, denies that hereditary connection can make a child guilty. But he seems to teach transmitted righteousness, or that hereditary connection can make a child holy,” disparaging conversions marked by a definite “sensible experience” as merely “explosive conversions.” Strong quoted Bushnell’s own formulation of the position: “I don’t know what right we have to say that a child can’t be born again before he is born the first time.” Strong then posed an objection to his own rebuttal, asking whether John the Baptist had not himself recognized Christ from the womb (Luke 1:15, 41, 44), before answering that regeneration comes through the truth, and an unborn child cannot yet know the truth.11

Obbie Tyler Todd’s account of Bushnell’s opposition to revivalism situates Christian Nurture within the same argument: Bushnell, “disavowed the ‘extreme individualism’ of his generation” and its revivalist expectation that a child must undergo a conscious, dateable conversion rather than growing up within the Christian community never having known themselves as anything else.4

Historical Significance

Charles Hodge in 1872, Boyce in 1887, A. A. Hodge in 1879, Strong in 1907-1909, and Bavinck all named Bushnell specifically when stating and answering the moral-influence theory of the atonement, rather than treating it only as an abstract position.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), quoting Horace Bushnell. ↩

  2. Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 220. ↩

  3. Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 222: “Horace Bushnell held to a practically Sabellian view of the Trinity, and to a moral-influence theory of the atonement.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Obbie Tyler Todd, “What Republicanism Is This? An Introduction to Christian Republicanism (1776-1865),” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 111. ↩ ↩2

  5. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), s.v. “Bushnell, Horace.” ↩ ↩2

  6. James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 297: “A third theory of the Atonement is that of moral influence. Its most noted advocates in this day have been Horace Bushnell and McLeod Campbell.” ↩

  7. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 423. ↩

  8. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 568, quoting Horace Bushnell. ↩

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, 568-569. ↩ ↩2

  10. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 15, “The Servant Savior,” citing Horace Bushnell, The Vicarious Sacrifice, Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1866). ↩

  11. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1909), 847, quoting Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 9-89, 90-223. ↩