ological
department of Yale College, and in 1833 was ordained pastor of the North
Congregational church in Hartford, Conn., where he remained until 1859,
when on account of long-continued ill-health he resigned his pastorate.
Thereafter he had no settled charge, but, until his death at Hartford on
the 17th of February 1876, he occasionally preached and was diligently
employed as an author. 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 in the university
of California in 1869), the presidency of which he declined. As a preacher,
Dr Bushnell was a man of remarkable power. Not a dramatic orator, he was in
high degree 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 man's
spiritual nature. He had a vast 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 may be accepted,
with reservations, as the true one: "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 man 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