Horace Bushnell

Born: Litchfield; April 14, 1802
Died: Hartford; February 17, 1876

Entry by James P. Walsh

The nineteenth century was the great age of Romanticism. In literature especially, but in all aspects of human thought, belief flourished in forces that could be felt if not described. In the hands of Horace Bushnell, Romanticism became a tool for reshaping theology.

Although his parents were not members of the Congregational church, Bushnell joined that church when he was 19, and two years later enrolled at Yale in order to become a Congregational minister. Eventually he did so, after overcoming doubts about his worthiness. In 1833, he was ordained pastor of the North Church in Hartford.

Bushnell gradually became dissatisfied with the highly intellectual theology he studied at the Yale Divinity School. He was influenced by Romantic poets like Coleridge to believe in the power of divine forces that flowed around and through human beings, and he searched for a theology that reflected his semi-mystic propensities. In 1849, he finally enjoyed the kind of profound "conversion" that he had long desired. It was, he said, as if he had passed through some sort of boundary. He now knew that faith was not an intellectual matter having to do with a set of doctrines, "but the trusting of one's being to a being...."

Bushnell wrote volumes explicating his ideas and their ramifications. He made many interesting observations about the function of language in human understanding, but he was especially important in developing new theories of child rearing. Bushnell rejected the notion that children were born sinful; he encouraged parents to think of their children as innocent and pure. Bushnell's ideas were important within the Congregational tradition because he shifted emphasis from sudden, dramatic, adult conversions to long-range, life-long education. He is important in terms of general American culture because he gave a religious foundation to the child-rearing practices that were becoming popular among middle-class Americans in the nineteenth century.

In 1861, ill health forced Bushnell to retire from the ministry, but be remained active in the intellectual and civic life of Hartford. Even as he lay dying, he led a drive to transform the town dump into the park that now commemorates him. It is indeed appropriate that his most enduring monument should be a park in the middle of a busy city, for he believed that man should search for God, not in books, but in nature and in human activity.

For Further Reading

Barbara M. Cross has written an excellent intellectual biography: Horace Bushnell: Minister to a Changing America (Chicago, 1958).

* Entry under revision.