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Up for sale "Theologian" Horace Bushnell Hand Signed 1.75X4.25 Card.
1802 – February 17, 1876) was an Bushnell was born in the village of Bantam,
township of Litchfield, Connecticut.
He attended Yale College where he
roomed with future magazinist Nathaniel Parker Willis. Willis credited Bushnell with teaching him the
proper technique for sharpening a razor. After graduating in 1827, he was literary
editor of the New York Journal of Commerce from 1828–1829, and
in 1829 became a tutor at Yale. Here he initially studied law, but in 1831 he
entered the theology department of Yale College. In May, 1833 Bushnell was
ordained pastor of the North Congregational church in Hartford, Connecticut. He
married Mary Apthorp in 1833 and the couple had three children. Bushnell remained in Hartford until 1859 when,
due to extended poor health he resigned his pastorate. Thereafter he held no
appointed office, but, until his death at Hartford in 1876, he was a prolific
author and occasionally preached. While
in California in 1856, for the restoration of his health, he took an active
interest in the organization, at Oakland, of the College of
California (chartered in 1855 and merged with the University of California in
1869), the presidency of which he declined. As a preacher, Dr Bushnell was very
effective. Though not a dramatic orator, he was original, thoughtful and
impressive in the pulpit. His theological position may be said to have been one
of qualified revolt against the Calvinistic orthodoxy of his day. He criticized
prevailing conceptions of the Trinity, the atonement, conversion, and
the relations of the natural and the supernatural. Above all, he broke with the
prevalent view which regarded theology as essentially intellectual in its
appeal and demonstrable by processes of exact logical deduction. To his
thinking its proper basis is to be found in the feelings and intuitions of
humankind's spiritual nature. He had a marked influence upon theology in
America, an influence not so much, possibly, in the direction of the
modification of specific doctrines as in the impulse and tendency and general
spirit which he imparted to theological thought. Dr Munger's estimate was that
"He was a theologian as Copernicus was an astronomer; he changed the point of
view, and thus not only changed everything, but pointed the way toward unity in
theological thought. He was not exact, but he put God and humanity and the
world into a relation that thought can accept while it goes on to state it more
fully with ever growing knowledge. Other thinkers were moving in the same
direction; he led the movement in New England, and wrought out a great deliverance. It was a
work of superb courage. Hardly a theologian in his denomination stood by him,
and nearly all pronounced against him." Four
of his books were of particular importance: Christian Nurture (1847),
in which he virtually opposed revivalism and effectively turned the current of
Christian thought toward the young ; Nature and the Supernatural (1858),
in which he discussed miracles and endeavoured to the supernatural nature of man; The Vicarious Sacrifice (1866),
in which he contended for what has come to be known as the moral from the governmental and in Christ (1849) (with an introductory Dissertation on
Language as related to Thought and Spirit), in which he expressed, it was
charged, heretical views as to the Trinity, holding, among other
things, that the Godhead is "instrumentally three—three simply as related
to our finite apprehension, and the communication of God's incommunicable
nature." Attempts were made to bring him to trial, but they were
unsuccessful, and in 1852 his church unanimously withdrew from the local consociation, thus removing any possibility of further action
against him. To his critics Bushnell formally replied by writing Christ
in Theology (1851), in which he employs the important argument that
spiritual truth can be expressed only in approximate and poetical language, and
concludes that an adequate dogmatic theology cannot exist. That
he did not deny the divinity of Christ he proved in The Character of Jesus,
forofferding his possible Classification within Men (1861). He
also published Sermons for the New Life (1858); Christ
and his Salvation (1864); Work and Play (1864); Moral
Uses of Dark Things (1868); Women's Suffrage; The Reform
Against Nature (1869); Sermons on Living and Law (1874). An edition of his works, in
eleven volumes, appeared in 1876; and a further volume, gathered from his
unpublished papers, as The Spirit in Man: Sermons and Selections,
in 1903. New editions of his Nature and the Supernatural, Sermons for
this New Life, and Work and Play, were published the same year.