Nature and the Supernatural, as Together Constituting the One System of God

Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) was a minister in the Congregational church. A prolific author, his Christian Nurture established his reputation, and some scholars have asserted the work’s singular importance to American Protestant Liberalism and Christian education in the nineteenth century. This work, first published in 1858, exemplifies Bushnell’s importance and influence in nineteenth-century Protestantism and discusses ‘the great question of the age’. Controversially defining the supernatural as extant outside the realm of the divine, Bushnell argues that the human is an example of the supernatural, human freedom which makes this so: man acts both within and without the chain of cause and effect; mankind is part of both nature and supernature. Controversially, then, Bushnell places the supernatural within ‘the one system of God’. For theologians and scholars of religious history and the history of ideas, this work will be of great interest.