The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell (Library of Religious Biography

by Robert Bruce Mullin

"Horace Bushnell (1802-76), the much maligned 19th-century liberal pastor/scholar/ theologian, is here vindicated as a deeply conservative Puritan and misunderstood intellectual of his time. In this biography, Mullin (General Theological Seminary) considers Bushnell in the context of his time and milieu. While calling him a "flinty character," Mullin argues that Bushnell was quintessentially a Yankee and a Puritan, seeking innovation yet all the while sustained by a bedrock trust in the values and continuity of the Puritan tradition. Mullin places great emphasis on Bushnell's European travels as well as his writings (published as well as unpublished) from 1846 to early 1849, where he finds him working through his concerns for the lost unity of the Puritans. These ideas fed into Bushnell's sense that "the fractiousness of American political life was an outgrowth of the New Light piety," an evangelical piety that stressed individualism over community. Sophisticated, well informed, and challenging, this first biography of Bushnell in 50 years requires some awareness of American religious history. Recommended for all religion and early American history collections." - Library Journal

312 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2002

Reviews

[Daniel]

Horace Bushnell was an odd, contradictory figure. He was a professed evangelical who was heavily influenced by German Romanticism, which had a serious impact on his theology. For instance, his biographer alleges that Bushnell was a Sabellian in his view of the Trinity. He was an opponent of revivalism, yet was a close friend of Charles G. Finney. Whatever this theological radicalism in certain areas, he held quite conservative views on the Christian Sabbath, abolitionism, and women's suffrage.

All in all, this biography was very good. My main complaint with it, as with all the volumes in Eerdmanns' Library of Religious Biography, is the lack of specific references via footnotes on endnotes. Instead, there is a bibliographic essay at the end pointing you to sources relevant to each chapter.

[David Saxon]

Very interesting biography. Bushnell was a remarkably complex character who defies easy categorization. Mullin mines his writings to portray the originality and complexity of Bushnell's thinking. Bushnell's antipathy to dogma and his refusal to embrace traditional (orthodox) formulations of the Trinity and the atonement confirm his identity as the "Father of American Liberalism." However, he scorned other liberals' treatment of Jesus as just a good role model; and he emphasized the miraculous (in his own unique way), so that Mullin argues persuasively that Bushnell was actually a forerunner of Pentecostalism.
In addition to making Bushnell come alive, Mullin gives many valuable insights about nineteenth-century American Christianity, especially in New England. It is fascinating to locate Bushnell relative to the Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Taylorites in New Haven, revivalists (especially, Finney), and Old Calvinists (Tyler in New England and Princeton).