Monday, April 14, 2025

It is the 14th of April 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

A very happy Monday- we are not in the mailbag today as we had the AMA (ask me anything) on Thursday that became the weekend edition and the questions I didn’t get to will come up on next weekends show- so I decided to get back into the grind of biography and today’s character doesn’t disappoint when it comes to thinking about how we do theology in a modern context.

Let me start with an admission that will become an analogy. I don’t care for the motion picture ratings site called “Rotten Tomatoes.” At least, I don’t give much weight to their seemingly scientific responses that such-and-such a movie is “73%” Fresh. Because they often take complex reviews of movies- themselves often reduced to a score or number of stars- and declare a review as providing a “fresh” or “rotten” score. The world is then divided into fresh and rotten and thereby flattened. It reminds me of some modern theology (I’m a historian, so I mean since the 19th century) obsessed with “flattening” the world into “conservative” or “liberal.” Listen, they are not meaningless or unimportant, but they can oversimplify and draw us into opposing camps instead of dialog.

All this to say- the modern liberal/conservative divide has proven especially unhelpful when trying to decipher, to understand, one of the greatest American theologians: Horace Bushnell, born on this the 14th of April in 1802 in Litchfield Connecticut. He would be raised on the family farm and at the congregational church in New Preston and at the age of 19 he “owned the covenant”.

This is a peculiar but important language. As he developed as a thinker and then pastor (he took 4 degrees in 10 years at Yale), he opposed what he saw as the excessive emotionalism of what was then the Second Great Awakening. “Owning the Covenant” wasn’t an emotional conversion experience but rather the natural progression of a Christian child, baptized, coming to see God's promises for them.

From 1933, when he took the pulpit at North Congregational Church in Hartford, he did all of his writing and speaking as a pastor—and his concern was pastoral—for the people of his church and beyond who felt caught between the bickering Scylla and Charybdis of liberal and conservative. He would, to no one's surprise, be attacked by both sides.

For his time, it was his “Christian Nurture” that made him popular amongst the crowd looking to make improvements to education and life in general amidst the tumult caused by urbanization and industrialization in the 19th century. The book can be read as an end around against the prevailing revivalism by arguing for a gradual faith formation through education. But, at its best, it argues that kids in Christian homes become Christians when they are treated as if they are, not as some kind of “outsider”.

He would write 12 books, and amongst Christian Nature was his more curious 1866’s “The Vicarious Sacrifice,”- which sought to understand the sacrifice of Christ along the lines of those who saw the death and resurrection of Jesus as less about a punitive transaction and more about showing us God’s love and desire to reconcile with his people.

Part of what got him in trouble with this work and others was his rather loose interpretation of what language could do- and I think this is key in understanding him as a “middle man” between the conservatives and liberals. In many ways, he was not trying to accommodate modernity- he was trying to preach and teach from the Bible. But he believed that all language was analogous, and thus, we might as well try to use and play with as many words as possible, some being better than others. As you might imagine, when he tried taking this “use many words, some different” to the doctrine of the Trinity, it got him into more trouble.

But unlike the Unitarians of his day or the actual liberals who succumbed to modernity in losing all supernatural elements of the faith, when pressed, Bushnell found himself amongst the conservatives. He would write a later book clarifying his position on the Trinity and was seemingly always fighting a battle on two fronts- exhausting, I’m sure- but seeking a middle way usually is. It’s not always right, of course, but it’s helpful to find some trying to find bridges between camps we may have thought to be airtight and insular.

Also, Bushnell Park in downtown Hartford was in-part designed by him and is America’s first public park… A pastor from 1833 to 1859 he died on February 17th 1876, born in 1802 Horace Bushnell was 73 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary for Monday of Holy Week from Hebrews 11:

But when Christ came as high priest of the good things that are now already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not made with human hands, that is to say, is not a part of this creation. He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 14th of April 2025 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man whose favorite middle things include the note C, the letters D in the word Middle, lunchmeat and Malcom- He is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who knows It just takes some time/Little girl, you're in the middle of the ride/Everything, everything'll be just fine/Everything, everything'll be alright, alright, I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.