BOOK REVIEW:
Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell. By Robert Bruce Mullin. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. 296 pp. ISBN 0802842526.

It is not easy to coherently explain a man like Horace Bushnell. Converted in the revival of 1831 and an admirer of Charles Finney, yet his seminal work, Christian Nurture, was a stealthy attack on revivalist methods of goading religious conversion. He found spiritual affinities with Roman Catholicism yet feared the growth of that church and challenged the Pope; in the 1850s he found the possibility of miracles like healing entrancing when other prominent liberals were trying to disabuse Christians of the notion that the Bible contained any; he attempted to unite the disparate wings of Congregational family, and claimed as one of his most intimate friends a Unitarian pastor, yet by his writings he fomented a higher level of suspicion and alienation among these factions. The dilemma comes in trying to show both his theological creativity and his consummate conservatism in a way that lifts up seeming inconsistencies without unduly straining to categorize him.

Robert Bruce Mullin, professor of history, world mission and Anglican studies at General Theological Seminary, has done an admirable job in settling on two lenses, that of the religious frame of traditional New England Puritanism and that of the social frame of the New England Yankee, through which to view Bushnell’s life and thought. Bushnell was able to use the tools of one (Yankee ingenuity) to attempt a transformation of the other (Puritan or Congregational orthodoxy) in an era when both were undergoing radical changes. While one might question the term Puritan, it works here. More properly Bushnell was jousting with a caricature of New England Theology. But as a type, Mullin uses it to illustrate a way of theologizing that honored the tradition of a certain character and culture rather than a systematic presentation of doctrine. This explains Bushnell’s passion for forging a new depiction of Puritan as a sober conservative intent on improving the country in the rapidly shifting demographics and the cataclysmic effects of a nation divided over slavery. It was his aim not to throw out the doctrines but to “tinker” with them, to re-form them in a way that took into account the views of God and Christ, conversion and atonement, that no longer fit the modern sensibilities.

Mullin is able to take Bushnell’s corpus of unsystematic and sometimes illogical theological treatises and recast them in such a way that even the most ambiguous are made comprehensible. He has managed to couch these ideas and the facets of Bushnell’s life within a plethora of invaluable primary material that, rather than obscuring them, makes them sparkle. Here Mullin is at his best. Bushnell is seen against a much larger and more illuminating backdrop than Congregational doctrinal squabbles for which he was so well known. This is  primarily an intellectual biography; what I missed was a little more on Bushnell as pastor. Did this “tinkering” find its way into the day-to-day activities of his congregation? When his theological meanderings took him far enough afield to warrant charges of heresy against him, the church took a substantial step by voting to remove itself from the fellowship of the association as a sign of support. What was his appeal? How much of his ever evolving speculative theology found its way into his pulpit? Was he cherished for his theological ideas, or merely defended because he had an inalienable right to hold them? Another small quibble. The book contains a lengthy summary of bibliographical sources, but no footnotes. While editorial policies of this series have no doubt dictated the format, as an inveterate footnote reader, it was maddening to have to consult an archived copy in another state to track down a quote.

Bushnell butted up against one of the “two grand pillars” of Congregationalism in America—the liberty of private opinion—and in doing so challenged and changed the theological heritage of New England Calvinism (albeit a Calvinism that Calvin himself would not recognize). His forays into a variety of doctrinal issues rightly earned him the reputation in his lifetime of “a chartered libertine.” Mullin does us a great favor by not tying up too many of the loose ends. Instead he sets out in some unique and intriguing ways the paradoxes of a man who could be considered proto-liberal and proto-Pentecostal, radical and conservative—in short, a man who defied the labels. Perhaps that is his continuing appeal in the 21^st century.

Sharon Taylor
Director of the Library
Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Centre, MA