CHRISTIAN NURTURE REVISITED

Elizabeth C. Nordbeck

[Portions of this article were presented as part of the 1999 Brueggemann lectures at
Eden Theological Seminary.]

Exactly how does a person ‫ ״‬become a Christian?" And how does

Christianity itself increase? In the middle of the nineteenth century,
most evangelical Protestants would have answered these questions,
"by conversion." Bom in sin, unable to wrest themselves from its grasp
by any human means, Christian men and women were presumed to
be the fortunate, if passive, recipients of supernatural intervention. The
unconverted had little they could do about their lot but wait, pray, and
hope. Children were no exception to this rule. They, too were lost in
sin, and neither baptism nor a pious Christian upbringing offered them
any assurance of salvation. Instead, boys and girls in Christian families
typically learned to pray that conversion would eventually occur when
they were old enough to understand it. Revivals—periodic, localized
episodes of heightened religious excitement and clustered conver-
sions—commonly provided the occasion to harvest new souls for the
churches. But revivals by their very nature occurred outside the regular
rhythms of family and church life, and some Protestant leaders, like
John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff, were highly critical of the
emotionalism and excessive individualism they encouraged.
Another such critic was Horace Bushnell, pastor of Hartford's North
Congregational Church. In 1847, he published a small book that chal-
lenged prevailing views about original sin, conversion, revivals, church
membership, and education. Bushnell's Christian Nurture was a land-
mark in American religious thought, as influential in its way as any-
thing written by Jonathan Edwards or Reinhold Niebuhr. Still read
today—not as a quaint historical document, but as a contemporary
manifesto for the religious education of young people— Christian Nur-
ture permanently changed the way many American Protestants under-
stood entrance into and propagation of the faith.

The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth C. Nordbeck is Dean of Andover Newton Theological School,
Newton Centre, Massachusetts.

25
26 PRISM: A THEOLOGICAL FORUM FOR THE UCC

Horace Bushnell's primary concern was with the Christian upbring-

ing of youth. Insistence on the necessity of conversion,1he argued, had
led to widespread neglect of the ordinary means of grace, including
both infant baptism and family nurture. This concern was not un-
founded. By the mid1800‫־‬s, denominations practicing infant baptism
had witnessed a precipitous decline in numbers of child baptisms. For
Presbyterians, the rate had dropped to approximately five baptisms
per hundred children, and in Bushnell's own Congregational churches,
the rate was a dismal two per hundred. This was not surprising in
view of the prevailing expectation about conversion. What, after all,
was the point of infant baptism or Christian upbringing if children still
had to wait anxiously for the uncertain gift of a "new heart?"
In offering an alternative understanding of the nature of saving
faith, Bushnell did not deny that God sometimes works through reviv-
als and cataclysmic conversions. But he argued that the routine, daily
life of a Christian family may itself be a conduit of grace, a natural
channel for the converting work of the Holy Spirit. Just as his Congre-
gational forebears had understood preaching and the study of scrip-
ture to be the normal means by which God tenders regenerating grace,
Bushnell now insisted that the Christian home offered its own "ele-
ment of saving power." In his view, entry into the faith was less a
momentous event than an elongated process, a lifelong turning toward
God that was appropriately begun in earliest childhood under the in-
fluence of Christian parents. Thus, in Bushnell's famous words,
the child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being
otherw ise.. . . In other words, the aim, effort, and expectation should be,
not, as is commonly assumed, that the child is to grow up in sin, to be
converted after he comes to a mature age; but that he is to open on the
world as one that is spiritually renewed, not remembering the time when
he went through a technical experience, but seeming rather to have loved
what is good from his earliest years.2

Bushnell's understanding of Christian formation has often been

called "organic." In today's language, we might say that he believed
the Christian life to be a process of becoming—a journey, rather than
a destination. Anticipating later developments in child psychology, he
argued that ordinary influences, not forces extrinsic to daily life, inter-
act to shape the emerging Christian self. For Bushnell, moreover,
Christian selfhood and formation had more to do with character, with
ways of being and doing, than with doctrine or dogma. The latter can.
be taught. Character, however, cannot be inculcated or communicated
with words. Rather it derives mainly from the pervasive "spirit of a
house." Like the air they breathe, children absorb it unknowingly. This
 CHRISTIAN NURTURE 27

is true of all family nurture, not only that which is explicitly Christian.
"If the family subsist by plunder," Bushnell wrote, "then the infant is
swaddled as a thief . . . and, in due time, he will have the trade upon
him, without ever knowing that he has taken it up, or when he took it
up."3 This was all the more reason, Bushnell insisted, to be mindful of
the environment necessary for proper child-rearing.
Public response to Christian Nurture was slow in coming, perhaps
because the inherent radicalism of the volume was disguised by Bush-
nell's eloquent and logical prose. When the firestorm eventually came,
it nearly cost Bushnell his pastorate, and unleashed a controversy that
raged until his death in 1876. In time, however, his arguments pro-
foundly affected the ways in which many Protestants believed and
practiced their faith. Indeed, so thoroughly were Bushnell's ideas even-
tually accepted among mainline churches, that today it is difficult to
see why such a graceful and reasonable book once engendered such
heat.
But in fact, Christian Nurture was a revolutionary text for its time.
Most obviously, it dealt yet another death-blow to the Calvinistic un-
derstanding of original sin, already endangered by the liberalizing
tendencies of men like Nathanael Emmons and Samuel Hopkins. Ac-
cording to this traditional view—long held by Congregationalists,
Presbyterians and others in the Reformed tradition—by the imputed
sin of Adam, all human beings are bom utterly "depraved," incapable
of choosing the good without God's regenerating work on their hearts.
Bushnell himself did not deny the inherent sinfulness of all, even chil-
dren. But, he argued, through careful nurture, the goodness that is
also present in each individual child may, over time, be evoked and
strengthened. This happens by the agency of the Holy Spirit, working
not through sudden and startling conversions but through the familiar,
homely interactions of family, church, and social life.
In the same way, Bushnell's understanding of the developmental
nature of Christian faith undercut the necessity of revivals, a staple on
the American religious scene at mid-century, and the subject of bitter
controversy among many Protestants. About this matter, Bushnell was
very clear. There were not one, but two means for extending God's
kingdom: conversion and family propagation. The contemporary prob-
lem was not with any essential impropriety in revivals; rather it was
with the emphasis on them, to the exclusion of what Bushnell called
"the out-populating power of the Christian stock." Bushnell proposed
"to restore, if possible, a juster impression of this great subject; to show
that conversion over to the church is not the only way of increase."4
The world, he was convinced, would not finally be subdued for Christ
28 PRISM: A THEOLOGICAL FORUM FOR THE UCC

"by conquest"—that is, by adult conversions. Instead, it would be won

by "the populating forces of a family grace in the church."5
Bushnell's insistence on nurture as a conduit of grace also had far-
reaching consequences. For one thing, it effectively revived lagging in-
terest in infant baptism, since this might now be seen as an important
element in the ongoing process of Christian formation. Bushnell's own
understanding of the rite was characteristically distinctive. Baptism, he
said, is not "magic," imparting salvation to a child simply by the oper-
ation of the act itself; nor is it merely signatory, a public reminder of
God's promises to the covenant faithful. Rather, baptism is "presump-
tive" in its effect. Like the civil state's presumption that a child is a
real citizen—even before the child understands or can appropriate the
privileges of its citizenship actively—baptism presumes the child's
growth in grace and maturation in faith. Thus, baptism is a public seal-
ing of the child into the environment of family and friends, home and
church, which together will foster and support this grace-giving
process.
Not least important, Bushnell's emphasis on the crucial connection
between family and church led in time to the emergence of a brand-
new discipline: Christian education. Earlier religious instruction had
focused on catechetical or doctrinal teaching, typically led by pastors.
Thanks largely to Bushnell, in Sunday Schools and special programs
around the country, churches now began to instruct young people
more holistically, involving them in Bible study, worship, and personal
devotions.6 The Christian education movement was thus a logical and
essential complement to the new imperative for Christian nurture.
Both within the home and outside, the intent was to promote a faithful
Christian lifestyle, not simply to teach about Christianity.

Today, more than 150 years after its publication, the residual influ‫־‬
enee of Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture is inescapable, although
relatively few pastors or even Christian educators think much about it.
Among churches of the Protestant mainstream, revivals are a faded
memory. Most people who supported them defected decades ago to
form their own denominations. The language of "surprising conver-
sions" has largely dropped out of the discourse of faith. Even more
rarely is conversion the object of sustained conversation, let alone insti-
tutional effort. Christian education provides the paradigm for youthful
formation, and its offspring, adult education, presumably offers more
advanced encounters with the faith to mature believers. "Depravity"
describes axe-murderers and terrorists, not ordinary men and women;
 CHRISTIAN NURTURE 29

and the latter, regardless of their states of grace, struggle daily with
real choices between good and evil. Horace Bushnell would be pleased.
Or would he?
In part the allure of Christian Nurture in the mid-nineteenth century
was that it spoke a necessary word for its time. To a people fixated on
human sinfulness, Bushnell spoke a word about the innate potential
for human goodness. To a people enamored of God's explosive inter-
ventions, Bushnell spoke a word about God's daily and predictable
presence. To churches with their eye on the whole world as a mission
field, Bushnell spoke a word about home. But the times have changed.
And ironically, Bushnell's words have gone unexamined and unques-
tioned for too long. This is ironic because Bushnell himself was no
hoary dogmatist, writing once and for all times. He was above all a
pastor, a man of pious and practical sensibilities who wrote books for
the struggling churches of his day.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the inheritors of those
churches may well need to hear a new word for their own day. The
assumptions about home, church, and society on which Bushnell's
once-revolutionary conclusions rested have all changed dramatically.
Yet in many of our churches, the Christian nurture model of education
and "propagation" still subtly shapes the way we operate and under-
stand ourselves.
It is well known that the United Church of Christ, for example, has
lost significant membership over the last several decades. In part, this
is because—like other mainline Protestant churches—the United
Church of Christ has a low birth rate per capita. We are not, in other
words, "propagating" at the same rate as we are dying off or defecting.
Nevertheless, "conversion" is not part of our mission vocabulary. Most
of our new members are not converts at all—at least in any traditional
sense of the word. Instead they are refugees from other Christian com-
munions—attracted sometimes by theology or style, more often by
proximity or good preaching or a lively music program. In the United
Church of Christ, we are increasingly adamant about incorporating
children into our worship experiences—including communion—but
this has more to do with general convictions about inclusivity than
with any coherent program of Christian nurture. In the United Church
of Christ, we use up-to-date Christian education curricula—the holistic
sort of which Horace Bushnell would approve—to train up our young
people, but only a few young people stay with the church through
college. Often we welcome back these wayfarers when their own chil-
dren are of an age for baptism or Sunday School, and many of them
return as men and women whose sincerity is genuine, but whose expe­
30 PRISM: A THEOLOGICAL FORUM FOR THE UCC

riential grasp of the faith, let alone their intellectual one, is limited. We
invite them—perhaps—to a month's worth of new member classes, in
which we cover two thousand years of church history, the polity and
ethos of the United Church of Christ, and the mission, program, and
structure of our local congregation. We grant them full privileges, al-
though an earlier generation might have made them "halfway mem‫־‬
bers." They are, in the words of one Puritan saint, acquainted with
‫ ״‬the forms but not the godliness" of the faith. Nevertheless in their
homes, Christianity will be "propagated;" the next generation will be
raised up.
Is this what Horace Bushnell had in mind?
Horace Bushnell knew, of course, that not all Christian homes were
perfect. Abuse, ignorance, and apathy are not new problems. Even so,
Bushnell's model of Christian nurture assumed the steady influence of
parents whose lives clearly and unambiguously mirrored their Chris-
tian convictions. Husbands and wives capable of Bushnellian nurture
were "muscular Christians." Mature faith and secure knowledge
shaped their behavior, values, ethics, and daily decision-making in
transparent and explicit ways. These hardy Christian parents knew lit-
tie of the upheaval of divorce, company downsizing, or two-parent job
searches. They were stable and settled folk, linked "organically" to
their churches and neighborhoods by commitment, engagement,
and—not least—longevity. They knew Jesus and they knew about him.
Moreover, in the communities in which they lived, Christianity was
normative and pervasive. There was no ACLU to ensure that the man-
ger stayed off the green, no parents' groups to keep the graduation
prayers silent.
The sort of Christian home that Bushnell took for granted—and on
which his theories about Christian nurture depend—is a vanishing
species. Today the "organic" connection between a family and a partie-
ular church or community is often disrupted by divorce or job transfer
or merely by mobility. Mixed marriages—of Christian with atheist, ag-
nostic, or non-Christian believer—are common, and homes in which
multiple values and lifestyles co-exist—and sometimes clash—are in-
creasingly the rule rather than the exception. Even in self-identified
"Christian homes," regular religious observance is likely to be one op-
tion in a Sunday smorgasbord that includes soccer and shopping
among the competing choices. If, as Bushnell believed, home life is the
primary medium for transmission of the faith, then several generations
of young people have already received a mixed message.
As Horace Bushnell himself could have predicted, these shifts in the
patterns of Protestant family life have had their counterparts in both
 CHRISTIAN NURTURE 31

church and social life. In 1861, Bushnell penned a description of the

sturdy and pious laypeople in his home congregation in Connecticut.
"They think of nothing," he wrote,
save what meets their intelligence and enters into them by that method.
They appear like men who have digestion for strong meat, and have no
conception that trifles more delicate can be of any account to feed the
system. . . . Under their hard and . . . stolid faces, great thoughts are
brewing, and these keep them warm. Free-will, fixed fate, foreknowl-
edge absolute, Trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity—give them
anything high enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will
be climbing sturdily into it; and if they go away having something to
think of, they have had a good day.7

No wonder Bushnell was bold to write that Christian character should

be of paramount concern; he could take his parishioners' Christian
knowledge for granted. Of course, it will not do for us overly to romanti-
cize the nineteenth century. Not every Christian man or woman rei-
ished the Sunday morning delivery of doctrine like Bushnell's tough-
minded Connecticut Congregationalists. Yet unlike many church mem-
bers today, Christians of that earlier generation did have more than a
passing familiarity with the content of their inherited faith. In diaries,
letters, notebooks, and newspapers they talked earnestly about bap-
tism and communion, sin and grace, as if these things really mat-
tered—as if something, maybe even life itself, depended on their
knowing. They would not have understood the appeal of refresher
courses on "Christian basics" for lifelong believers, and the indiffer-
enee of contemporary churchgoers to weighty matters of doctrine and
creed would have mystified and appalled them.
No doubt Bushnell's congregation would also have been mystified
by the disappearance of strong Protestant values from the culture at
large. In the mid-nineteenth century, many Americans still entertained
a lively hope that they would see the growth of Christian civilization—
not only in their communities and country but around the world. From
the 1830s on, Protestants created a sprawling network of social agen-
cies for the twin purposes of advancing Christendom and transforming
society. These dealt with a host of perceived needs and problems, from
the promotion of temperance reform and the abolition of slavery to
domestic urban sanitation. Such projects—and the passionate kingdom
visions that undergirded them—completed the circle of Christian nur-
ture, supporting and servicing the training that young persons re-
ceived in home and church. Today, however, the presence of both many
religious values and no religious values in our highly pluralistic and
secular society makes any such comprehensive system of education
32 PRISM: A THEOLOGICAL FORUM FOR THE UCC

impossible. Except among some ethnic and evangelical subcultures,

where close-knit community and vibrant religious life still prevails, the
arena for Bushnellian formation has shrunk dramatically. Like a stool
without its third leg, Bushnell's organic system of Christian nurture no
longer stands up.

Nothing is easier than putting new words in the mouth of a de-

parted saint, who cannot protest the violation. Still, if Horace Bushnell
were alive today—practical Yankee pastor that he was—it is not un-
likely that he would challenge the churches again, much as he did in
1847.
I suspect he would challenge them first of all to reconsider the mat-
ter of conversion. If churches in the mid-nineteenth century over-
stressed the importance of conversion, today's churches almost
certainly are guilty of the opposite sin. Conversion, after all, need not
be understood narrowly as a single, cataclysmic event outside the
boundaries of daily religious experience. Bushnell's own Puritan an-
cestors knew well that the Holy Spirit cannot be confined to a single,
predictable schedule; and even Jonathan Edwards himself had not one
but several life-changing experiences of the divine. Today, when the
foundations of traditional Christian nurture have crumbled, and it is
no longer likely that many in our mainline churches will grow up and
be "never not a Christian," there is need for a new emphasis on meta-
noia, on a conscious turning toward God. When even self-proclaimed
Christians no longer comprehend the basic elements of their faith,
there is need for an identifiable time of learning and commitment and
repentance, after which one may honestly say, "I once was lost but
now am found." And this is true not only for millions of unchurched
seekers, but also, sometimes, for the churched whose family inheri-
tance is an attenuated and diminished faith.
To accomplish this daunting task, Horace Bushnell might also chal-
lenge the churches to reconsider the matter of education. In Bushnell's
own day, the fundaments of Christian belief—the nature of God and
humankind, of sin and salvation—were typically taught in the home
as well as preached from the pulpit. Today, few mainline churches dare
assume that a majority of their members have even read the Bible thor-
oughly, let alone that they are well-informed about Christian beliefs
and practices. But the deep hunger of many adult believers for "reme-
dial Christianity," for learning about the claims their inherited faith
actually makes, suggests the importance of a new and different educa-
tional agenda. Such an agenda will need to assume that there is no
reliable formational link between home and church, or between church
 CHRISTIAN NURTURE 33

and culture; it will have to begin at the beginning. This, in turn, de-
mands a renewed understanding of the pastor as preacher and teacher,
not simply as caregiver or facilitator or "empowerer." It requires
Christian education curricula that are graded according to partici-
pants' actual experience and knowledge of the faith, and not only by
their age. It suggests new-member classes that do not assume candi-
dates transferring membership always bring with them real knowl-
edge and experience of the faith. And it means educational programs
that are not only experiential and reflective, but also catechetical and
doctrinal.
Horace Bushnell's views about Christian nurture, about church and
home, society and country, were—as are all such views—highly con-
textual. In 1847, Bushnell addressed himself to churches that still drove
the powerful missionary engine of a far more homogeneous, largely
Protestant America. Today, those same churches—the ones that sur-
vive—are more like mission outposts, struggling to redefine their role
in a nation that is both increasingly secular and increasingly non-
Christian. Perhaps it is now time to reconsider the question that Bush-
nell answered so eloquently for his generation—but no longer so
clearly for our own: Exactly how does one become a Christian? And
how does Christianity itself increase?

NOTES
1. James Hasting Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff
at Mercersburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 238.
2. Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture, ed. Luther Weigle (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1967), 4.
3. Ibid., 89.
4. Ibid., 166.
5. Ibid., 169.
6. One manifestation of this new emphasis was the rise of youth organiza-
tions, both denominational and interdenominational, in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century.
7. Horace Bushnell, ‫ ״‬The Age of Homespun/' in Work and Play (New York,
1861), 387.
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