THEOLOGICAL SITUATION
" Tertullian was a Sophist in the good and bad sense of the term. He was in his element in Aristotelian and Stoic dialectics; in his syllogisms he is a philosophizing advocate. But in this also he was the pioneer of his Church, whose theologians have always reasoned more than they have philosophized. The manner in which he rings the changes on auctoritas and ratio, or com-bines them, and spins lines of thought out of them; the formal treatment of problems, meant to supply the place of one dealing with the matter, until it ultimately loses sight of aim and object, and falls a prey to the delusion that the certainty of the conclusion guarantees the certainty of the premises - this whole method, only too well known from mediaeval Scholasticism, had its originator in Tertullian. In the classical period of eastern theology men did not stop at auctoritas and ratio; they sought to reach the inner convincing phases of authority, and under-stood by ratio the reason determined by the conception of the matter in question." - HARNACK, History of Dogma, vol. v. p. 17.
IN the year 1833 Bushnell was ordained pastor of the North Church in Hartford. He had lingered in New Haven during the autumn and winter until February, when he received an invitation to preach for a time with a view to settlement. His introduction to the church is graphically described in a sermon preached on the twentieth anniversary of his installation, which shows how he was plunged at once into the sea of New England theology, that never was at rest, and never more turbulent than at that time.
"I arrived here late in the afternoon in a furious snowstorm, after floundering all day in the heavy drifts the storm was raising among the hills between here and Litchfield. I went, as invited, directly to the house of the chairman of the committee; but I had scarcely warmed me, and not at all relieved the hunger of my fast, when he came in and told me that arrangements had been made for me with one of the fathers of the church, and immediately sent me off with my baggage to the quarters assigned. Of course, I had no complaint to make, though the fire seemed very inviting and the house attractive; but when I came to know the hospitality of
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my friend, as I had abundant opportunity of knowing it afterwards, it became somewhat of a mystery to me that I should have been dispatched in this rather summary fashion. But it came out, three or four years after, that, as there were two parties strongly marked in the church, an Old and a New School party, as related to the New Haven controversy, the committee had made up their mind, very prudently, that it would not do for me to stay even for an hour with the New School brother of the committee; and for this reason they had made interest with the elder brother referred to, because he was a man of the school simply of Jesus Christ. And here, under cover of his good hospitality, I was put in hospital and kept away from the infected districts preparatory to a settlement in the North Church of Hartford. I mention this fact to show the very delicate condition prepared for the young pastor, who is to be thus daintily inserted between an acid and an alkali, having it for his task both to keep them apart and to save himself from being bitten of one or devoured by the other."
Bushnell so well fulfilled the mediating part in this clever scheme that he avoided criticism from either side, and after preaching six Sundays, was unanimously called to the pastorate. His ordination took place on the 22d of May, no difficulties having been encountered in the preliminary examination. Evidently the force and character of the man conquered a critical situation.
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On the 13th of September, 1833, he was married in New Haven to Mary Apthorp, a lineal de-scendant of John Davenport, the first minister of New Haven. By nature and by culture she was well fitted to share the life of the young pastor. Her high womanly qualities tempered his somewhat undisciplined force, and her spirituality furnished the atmosphere by which his own was steadily fed. He is never to be regarded apart from the influence that constantly flowed in upon him from her strong personality. They spent a few weeks in New Preston, and then entered upon their united labors in Hartford.
Bushnell's theological career began so early in his ministry that it is impossible to understand it without taking a view, though necessarily a partial one, of the theological situation. In general terms it might be described not as a decadent but as a critical period in the life of the churches. There was intense activity, but it was largely the activity of antagonism. A long process had reached a point where it could go no further. The New England theology had worn itself out by the friction of its own conflicting elements. Edwards was no longer a name to conjure with. The main current of his influence had gone to feed an intellectual idealism, and his specific theology had been "improved" under so many hands and into so many differing forms that it could hardly be recognized. The general criticism to be made upon Edwards' work, as a whole, is that his
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avowed purpose was the overthrow of an alleged heresy. He thus incurred the inevitable weak-ness of the negative method. He assumed that if Arminianism were overthrown, Calvinism would hold the ground. The mistake was a fatal one, because it substituted controversy for investigation. The search was not for the truth, but for the error of the enemy, who in almost any theological controversy holds enough truth to embarrass the other side. As to the intellectual greatness of Edwards there can be as little doubt as of his exalted piety, but his life-long contention was for a system that subdued the nobler elements of his nature in order to make room for the logic of his system. One cannot read the Enfield sermon without feeling its moral degradation, however outweighed by the end in view and the nobility of that end. The same may be said of the doctrine of preterit ion; it was simply inhuman. It was a contention that grew weaker under every effort made to uphold it; that only darkened when it sought to clarify; that enchanted great minds into following only to lead them into mutual antagonisms and finally to destruction at each other's hands. This is one of those pages in church history that would puzzle, if its frequency did not indicate that it is along such paths the church pursues its way, and society itself unfolds. But no less does it show that a system, which springs out of and reflects a certain phase of society, emerges from that phase and enters upon another.
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Edwards was not contending against the self-determining power of the will, but against an impersonal force that had begun to press upon the minds of men; namely, modern thought. His followers were in one sense not followers. They stood by his system of slightly modified Calvinism as a whole, but shrank from some of its applications and inferences; and they also criticized his metaphysics. He was great enough to throw off any number of satellites as he revolved in his vast orbit, but all of them stayed within the system. Bellamy, Hopkins, Emmons, the younger Edwards, Dwight, Taylor, all agreed upon Arminianism as a common enemy, and strove to mend what they conceived to be defects in their great protagonist. Their writings are a strange mixture of dignity and triviality, of truism and absurdity; often they are on the threshold of the greatest truths, and then we find them wandering in barren wastes of mere speculation. Metaphysical conceptions, as in the early Greek Church, came to occupy relatively the same place which conceptions of natural science occupy at the present day; that is, as being the truth of God instead of one of the ways of reaching it.1
Bellamy contended that the world is more holy and happy than if sin and misery had never entered it.
This doctrine was popularly known as "Sin the
1 See Hatch's Influence of Greek Ideas on the Christian Church, p. 13.
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necessary means to the greatest good." The New England divines struck an undoubted truth in this disposition of moral evil, but they did not know what to do with it. What they saw was a universal and probably fundamental law; namely, evil, or seeming evil, the condition of all progress. They did not see the universality of the law, and so shut it up to theology, and treated it dialectically, bringing up in confusion, if not blasphemy. Dr. Taylor, in his zeal to save the character of God, said that sin was incidental, not necessary, and thus saved himself from saying that God was the author of sin. Hopkins was quite as near right as Taylor; both had laid hold of the skirts of a great truth, but knew little of its reach and place in the divine economy. It was a subject, which Christ waived; but the New England theologians waived nothing.
Bellamy was followed by Hopkins, who modified certain features of the system, such as imputation and a covenant with Adam, and made them less obnoxious. Starting with Edwards' unimpeachable definition of virtue as "love of being in general," Hopkins draws out, by a purely logical process, - as faultless as it is unconvincing, - the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, or, when practically stated, willingness to become a cast-away, if the glory of God should require it. It was held not only as a speculative doctrine, but as a test of character.1
1 The last appearance of the doctrine in public was at a Congre-
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The conception indicates a kind of sacred chivalry, but so far as it had acceptance, it worked immeasurable evil, - misery in those who believed it, and hypocrisy in those who did not formally assent to it, Emmons held that God, being Universal Cause, is the cause of sin, and that the soul is a series of exercises, - a marvelous lapse into a form of pantheism. The younger Edwards stood stoutly by Divine Sovereignty, but made room for the Grotian theory of the Atonement, and corrected his father's treatment of the Will.
President Dwight disagreed with these leaders in theology, not incorrectly finding in them traces of pantheism. He asserted the freedom of the will, defined sin as selfishness, rejected imputation, and advocated the use of means, which had been held to be wicked. All these theologians agreed and disagreed with Edwards and with each other, but all were fairly good Calvinists. They called their disagreements "improvements," but while they were thus defending the theology of their great leader with a noble fidelity, they did not see that they were paving the way for Arminianism, to the extermination of which he devoted his life. Every step had been a losing process, but
Congregational Council called to ordain the late Dr. John Lord, well known as a lecturer and writer on history. In the course of the examination, which had been somewhat harassing, a surviving Hopkinsian asked the candidate, using the rough and popular form of the question, if he was willing to be damned for the glory of God. The reply was that personally he was not, but he was willing the Council should be.
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not until Dr. N. W. Taylor made his unqualified assertion of the self-determining power of the will did it become clearly apparent that the Arminian postulate had found its way into the citadel of Calvinism. Dr. Taylor resented this conclusion, but whether true or not, it was near enough to the truth to become the occasion of as intense a theological war as the nineteenth century is capable of. It was into such a world as this that Bushnell entered when he began his studies in theology.
The careers of Taylor and Bushnell ran side by side for many years. The relation between them was close, but it was not sympathetic. Bushnell entered the Divinity School at New Haven in 1831. Three years before, Dr. Taylor had preached a concio ad clerum, in which he made clear his views on the point to which we have just alluded. It called out a criticism that led to the widest breach within orthodox lines that New England had ever experienced. It divided churches, and led to the creation of a theological seminary, whose chief vocation for years was the defense of previous views of the will and cognate doctrines, as against the views of Dr. Taylor, which it stigmatized as Arminian. Dr. Taylor stood his ground with splendid courage, quite ready to "go over Niagara," if his logic led in that direction; for he, too, defended the system by logic, and was the keenest dialectician since Edwards, over whom he claimed superiority by asserting that "a dwarf standing on a giant's shoulders can see further than the giant." He
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was surrounded by men of ability, and his pupils in classroom and pulpit sustained him with, the enthusiasm of personal admiration and doctrinal sympathy. There are still living some who respond to one if not to the other. It was the noblest period in the history of New England theology. Something of the spirit of the newfound freedom pervaded the region, and the sense of accountability that sprang from it gave an impulse to Christian living that is not yet spent.
It might have been expected that Bushnell would fall into this company and march with it. There was much in Dr. Taylor to command his admiration. His courage was as fine as that which Bushnell afterward displayed, though drawn from different sources. Each was brave by nature, but Taylor rested with absolute repose on his logic, while Bushnell fell back, with like confidence, on his insight and experience. Dr. Taylor's position also as an independent thinker and a progressive theologian, who had made a positive advance toward rational and practical views of religion, must have won the respect of the pupil. Both were men of a generous and chivalric disposition, and of absolute honesty and sincerity. But with all these grounds for sympathy, the teacher failed from the first to get any hold upon the pupil, or even to interest him. A partial explanation is to be found in the fact that the path by which Bushnell had reached his present position was not along the highway of Calvinism. He had sunk
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deep in the slough of skepticism, and when he emerged, he did not return to that which plunged him into it. He had been delivered by his heart, and henceforth he was to be guided by his heart, and not by the logic that filled the air about him. From the first he had been an alien to the school of Edwards. He was not born under its star, nor did he serve in its house except as by chance. Its method was one for which he had no aptitude and felt little interest, a steady dialectic play upon a theology defended, modified, taught, preached, and applied by formal logic. By logic is not meant that action of the mind which is the reasoning voice of the whole nature, and that agreement of thought with facts which insures consistency; but rather that use of definition and syllogism upon infinite subjects which enforces assent, such as led Professor Jowett to say that "it is not a science, nor an art, but a dodge." Dr. Taylor did not fall short of his predecessors in dialectics, and was as stout a logician as any of them. Some of his later students remember his naive account of a theological bout with Dr. Lyman Beecher, in which he (Taylor) contended that a single sin, however small, deserved everlasting punishment.1
1 Dr. Taylor's contention might seem to have the justification of Socrates' remark," God may forgive sin, but I do not see how He can; " but the remark of the Greek was based on the course of nature in its outward processes, while Dr. Taylor's was based on an implied limitation of the power of God under his own moral government. Socrates felt the possibility of the divine transcendence; Taylor believed it, but made little allowance for it; both wandered in "the twilight of the gods."
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It is easy to see that a teacher who should even raise such a question could have little influence over such a man as Bushnell. They were not within hailing distance, hardly on the same side of the planet. Hence, as often has happened in New England, the theological teacher and his brightest pupil parted company. Taylor could only see in Bushnell one who was "always on t' other side;" though he sufficiently felt the force of his book, - "God in Christ," - to rewrite at great length his lectures on the Trinity, - perhaps the most carefully wrought out and the least valuable of his works he could not understand Bushnell, who not only understood him, but so reacted from his teachings that he began to think on absolutely opposite lines. The reaction drove him into the region where his chief work was done. In his thesis at graduation we have the germ and not a little of the form of "Nature and the Supernatural;" and in another essay, written at about the same time, we find the outline of his theory of language. These essays are interesting as showing how fundamental was his dissent from the methods of his teacher, and also as pointing the way he was going. They are also prophetic of his method, a careful adjustment between destruction and construction, with strong emphasis on the latter. It may be said at the outset that Bushnell took nothing away from theology without restoring fourfold; he was always and in all ways a builder. But while he
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was out of sympathy with his teacher, he was more indebted than he knew. They never in after years actually crossed swords in debate, but each often had the other in mind in many a pungent page and pointed paragraph. If either was lacking in respect for the other, it was not Bushnell. Dr. Taylor could not understand this strange fledgling of his theological nest, and despised its vagrant ways, but the pupil did not forget the few nourishing crumbs he had received from his master's hands. It was the familiar story, the old intolerant of the new, and the new out-thinking the old.
Several years later (1844) a singular controversy was going on, or rather raging, in New England over a question involving the anti-slavery movement. It was made up of practical politics and theological subtleties of a Jesuitical hue, as that the end justifies the means, - a variation of the Hopkinsian doctrine that sin may be the necessary means of the greatest good. The question at first was whether it is right to vote for either a duelist or an oppressor of the poor for the presidency. It was aimed at a Southern candidate, who was both a duelist and a slaveholder. Under Dr. Taylor's hand the question was resolved into this form: "If two devils are candidates for the office, and the election of one is inevitable, is it not one's duty to vote for the least, in order to secure the greater good?" He contended that if this is not done, one becomes responsible for the
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evil wrought by the greater devil. Bushnell controverted this position in "The Christian Free-man" (December 12,1844), in an article of four columns, lifting the question out of the region of temporary expediency into that of morals. His main point was that to vote for bad men under the stress of such a principle would be to organize immorality into the life of the nation, and so fail of the greater good. The question was a weak one, but full of mischief. Bushnell's treatment of it was masterly. It is not contained in his collected writings, but nothing that he said on political subjects was more timely and effective. Taking a petty question for a text, he wrote a paper on the nature and authority of civil government. The point he made underlay the anti-slavery movement, the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, the outcry of the North against Webster's 7th of March speech, and entered into the thought that issued in the Free Soil party. He taught the people that the only way to secure the greatest good was along the path of absolute righteousness, and not in vain attempts to measure consequences. Dr. Taylor maintained that consequences create duty, a principle that determined political action in the country for twenty years. Bushnell contended that righteousness secures the only consequences worth having. It was this principle that carried the nation through the war and brought slavery to an end.
We have dwelt thus at length on the seminary
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life of Bushnell because it shows how radically he broke away from the prevailing habit of thought, and also how early he outlined the chief features of his later studies. He quickly discovered and adopted as a ruling idea the fact that moral action cannot be determined by a hard and fast logic. He also discovered for himself - and it was his first discovery the truth of Melanchthon and Schleiermacher, that "the heart makes the theologian." It was from such a world as this, where he had heard so much he did not believe and so little he did, that he entered the ministry. He had the advantages of a thorough education in college and two professional schools; a year of very close contact with the world as an editor in New York; an illuminating experience as a teacher of young men, and above all the memory and inwrought influence of a home in which the Christian nurture was like that which he afterward described. To this should be added an intimate knowledge of Coleridge's "Aids to Reflection." It may almost be said that it is to this book we are indebted for Bushnell. He began to read it in college, but it seemed "foggy and unintelligible," and was put aside for "a long time." He took it up later with this result: -
"For a whole half year I was buried under his 'Aids to Reflection,' and trying vainly to look up through. I was quite sure that I saw a star glimmer, but I could not quite see the stars. My habit was only landscape before; but now I saw
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enough to convince me of a whole other world somewhere overhead, a range of realities in higher tier, that I must climb after, and, if possible, apprehend."
This book stood by him to the end, and in old age he confessed greater indebtedness to it than to any other book save the Bible. We have only to quote one passage, taken almost at random, to show what a fountain of light was unsealed to him in this volume. It was an epoch-making book, but Bushnell was one of the first to turn its light upon the theology of New England.1
"Too soon did the Doctors of the Church for-get that the heart, the moral nature, was the beginning and the end; and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion. This was the true and first apostasy, when in council and synod the Divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative Systems, and Religion became a Science of Shadows under the name of Theology, or at best a bare Skeleton of Truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians. For these, therefore, there remained only rites and ceremonies and spectacles, shows and semblances. Thus among the learned the Substance of things
1 It would be interesting to ascertain, were it possible, if the lines on
the original title-page, 1825, struck fire on a nature that was all ready to be
set aflame: -
" This makes, that whatsoever here befalls, you in the region of
yourself remain, Neighb'ring on Heaven: and that no foreign land."
DANIEL.
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hoped for passed off into Notions; and for the unlearned the Surfaces of things became Substance. The Christian world was for centuries divided into the Many that did not think at all, and the Few who did nothing but think, both alike unreflecting, the one from defect of the act, the other from the absence of an object."