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Horace Bushnell: Orthodox or Sabellian?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Fred Kirschenmann
Fred Kirschenmann
Affiliation:
Yankton College
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Extract

In 1848 Horace Bushnell delivered a lecture at Yale College entitled “The Divinity of Christ,” in which he set forth, for the first time, his views on the doctrine of the Trinity. A year later, this lecture and two others (“The Atonement” and “Dogma and Spirit”) appeared in a book entitled God in Christ. The book was prefaced with a preliminary dissertation on language. Almost immediately the critics assailed Bushnell for his Sabellian views on the Trinity. The Christian Observatory charged him with rejecting the “… commonly received doctrine of a proper Trinity in the Godhead, substituting for it a Pantheistic form of Sabellianism.” The Bible Repertory and Princeton Review, concurring in this judgment, indicated that “This, true enough, is the Sabellianism of Schleiermacher—a threefold revelation of God in the world, in Christ, and in the church.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 49 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1964

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References

1. Review of God in Christ, By Bushnell, Horace, Christian Observatory (June, 1848), p. 244.Google Scholar

2. [Hodge, Charles], Review of “Bushnell's Discourses,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review (April, 1849), 280.Google Scholar

3. Foster, Frank H., A Genetic History of the New England Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1907), p. 409.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., p. 410.

5. Cross, Barbara M., Horace Bashnell: Minister to a Changing America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 105–106.Google Scholar

6. Hodge, Princeton Review, op. cit., p. 279.

7. Bushnell, Horace, God in Christ (Hartford: Brown and Parsons, 1849), p. 112. (Italics mine)Google Scholar

8. This critique on Sabellius was translated by Moses Stuart and published in two parts in the Biblical Repository (April, 1835, and July, 1835) with elaborate notes and introductions plus a translation of a small section of Sehleiermacher's Glaubenslehre. This is likely the only work from Sehleiermacher's pen that Bushnell ever read since he did not know German. (Cf. Cheney, Mary B., Life and Letters of Horoce Bushnell, p. 140).Google Scholar

9. Bushnell, God in Christ, op. cit., p. 147. (Italics mine)

10. Ibid., p. 148. (Italics mine)

11. Bushnell, Horace, Christ in Theology (Hartford: Brown and Parsons, 1851), p. 177.Google Scholar

12. Bushnell, God in Christ, op. cit., p. 175.

13. Mead, Sidney, “Church History Explained,” Church History, XXXII, 1 (03, 1963), p. 18.Google Scholar

14. Bushnell, Christ in Theology, op. cit., p. 117.

15. Ibid., p. 130.

16. Ibid., pp. 119–20.

17. Ibid., p. 120.

18. Ibid., p. 142.

19. Ibid., p. 143.

20. Brownson was almost an American prototype of Newman. He was originally ordained a Presbyterian minister, but shortly thereafter he became a Universalist, then a Unitarian, and in October, 1844, he became a Roman Catholic. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism he devoted practically all his writing to a defense of the Roman Catholic faith.

21. Brownson, Orestes, Works, ed. Brownson, Henry F. (20 vols.; Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1882–1901), VII, p. 32.Google Scholar

22. ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 34.

24. Ibid., p. 45.

25. Bushnell, Christ in Theology, op. cit., p. 143.

26. Ibid., p. 12.

27. Ibid., p. 177.

28. Ibid., p. 180.

29. Bushnell, Horace, “The Christian Trinity A Practical Truth,” The New Englander, Vol. XII, no. 48, pp. 485–509Google Scholar. Althongh this article was reprinted in volume III of Bushnell's Literary Varieties (Building Eras in Religion, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881, pp. 106–49)Google Scholar, no one, to my knowledge, has scrutinized it with regard to the problem of Bushnell's doctrine of the Trinity. This may, in part, account for the fact that he has so long been misinterpreted. One of Bushnell's critics who does refer to this article is Clever, C., in “Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian,” The Reformed Church Review, 4th series, Vol. 4, 01, 1900, p. 75Google Scholar, where he mentions this article and claims that it clarifies Bushnell's view of the Trinity. He then quotes from what he claims is this article, but in reality he takes the quotation from Bushnell's Christ in Theology, p. 177. In any ease Clever does not try to show how that article clarifies Bushnell's views. Williston Walker also mentioned the article in his address before the General Association of Connecticut on the centennial of Bushnell's birth. He said that Bushnell's doctrine of the Trinity in God in Christ was “indeed a modified Sabellianism.” He proceeded to recognize that there is a modification in Christ in Theology and that Bushnell “moved yet farther in the direction of conformity with historic orthodoxy” in his article on “The Christian Trinity a Practical Truth.” But then he dismissed the whole matter with the judgment that the later development was “relatively unimportant.” Bushnell Centenary (Hartford Press: The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1902), pp. 27–30.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 488.

31. Ibid., p. 489.

32. Ibid., pp. 489–90.

33. Ibid., p. 490.

34. Ibid., p. 494

35. Ibid., p. 495.

36. Ibid., p. 497.

37. ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 498.

39. Ibid., p. 500.

40. ibid, pp. 500–01.

41. Ibid., p. 501.

42. ibid.

43. ibid.

44. ibid.

45. Ibid., p. 502.