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CHAPTER 1

The Institutions and the Professors

The American universities were not constructed from blueprints shipped over on the Hamburg line.

—Carl Diehl (1978)

And what is this Maine, which produces men like these?

—August Tholuck (1850s?)

The Institutions

For my study, I have selected four seminaries or “theological departments” founded in the first half of the nineteenth century that later developed into major centers of graduate education: those at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Union.¹ These institutions’ importance in pioneering the study of Christian history in nineteenth-century America renders them central to my project. Each, we shall see, had its own denominational and doctrinal allegiances—allegiances that sometimes provoked clashes among them.

Theological study at Yale and Harvard began within their respective colleges and later moved into distinctive theological schools or “departments.” At Princeton, by contrast, the Theological Seminary was established as an independent institution in part to counter the allegedly deficient teaching of Christianity at Princeton College. Union also was founded as a free-standing seminary and had no original connection to any college or university.² Some important early nineteenth-century seminaries, I readily admit, are absent from this book: despite their significance for ministerial training, they did not develop into major centers of graduate education in the twentieth century. Of these, three deserve special (albeit brief) mention.³

Andover, the second oldest seminary in America,⁴ was founded in 1808 to serve as a Congregationalist “Maginot line against Unitarianism.”⁵ Home to the renowned scholar Moses Stuart, Andover produced over a thousand graduates by 1860.⁶ As noted in the Introduction, the study of church history had a rocky start at Andover. Although James Murdoch was appointed to teach the subject in 1819, he was forced out in 1828 and the position was redefined as “Pastoral Theology and Ecclesiastical History.”⁷ Church history never received the favor at Andover that it did at Union. Although some of its graduates (including Roswell Hitchcock, later professor at Union, and George Fisher, later professor at Yale) pursued post-seminary study, by century’s end Andover’s pre-eminence had faded, its enrollment dwindling to 23 students.⁸

The General Theological Seminary, founded in 1817 and reorganized in the 1820s,⁹ continued the Anglican tradition’s devotion to patristics. (One of its graduates, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, later Bishop of Western New York, served as editor of the American version of the Ante-Nicene Fathers series: we shall encounter him later.¹⁰) Within two decades of its founding, the Seminary was deemed the bastion of high-church Episcopalianism,¹¹ “the Oxford of American Anglicanism.”¹² General Seminary established a Th.D. program in 1926 and has remained an important force in the Episcopal Church, but it did not become a major center for doctoral education.¹³

A third nineteenth-century seminary—that of the German Reformed Church at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania—was renowned more for its two controversial professors than for the numbers of its graduates. In 1844, Philip Schaff arrived in America to teach at Mercersburg, where he joined John Williamson Nevin in promoting a “high” ecclesiology sympathetic to early Christian history.¹⁴ Throughout his career at both Mercersburg and Union Seminaries (whose faculty he joined in 1870), Schaff emphasized Christianity’s grounding in the institutional church. Despite its signal importance in American theology, Mercersburg, given its small size, German-language orientation, and geographical location, did not grow into a doctoral-granting institution.¹⁵

Although the four institutions I have chosen for my study represent only a small slice of Protestantism in nineteenth-century America, their educational and intellectual importance in the early development of theological (and later, religious) studies in America remains unrivalled. That Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and (in New England) Unitarians were leaders in education more generally has often been noted. The professors at these schools were in discussion mainly among themselves, with leaders of their respective denominations, and (apart from Samuel Miller) with European, especially German, colleagues. Other, rapidly expanding sects and denominations made little or no mark on them or their seminaries. Indeed, many of the newer Protestant groups rejected the requirement of an educated ministry so essential to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians. As late as 1880, the lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School could sneer at his institution’s appointment of a Baptist—Crawford Howell Toy—whose denomination had “discarded” him for his liberal views on biblical criticism.¹⁶

In this chapter, I first sketch the institutions on which my study focuses and their provision for the teaching of early church history. Next, I offer more detailed accounts of the professors who taught the subject. Subsequent chapters probe the emphases of their teaching and writing.

The Theological Seminary at Princeton and Princeton University

The College of New Jersey (Princeton) was founded in 1746 by evangelical New Side Presbyterians who desired a more experiential, less doctrinally rigid, approach to Christianity. A Professorship in Divinity was established twenty-one years later.¹⁷ In 1812, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, seeking to upgrade the customary apprenticeship model of ministerial training, voted to establish a seminary at Princeton—a first for its denomination.¹⁸ The Seminary’s founders, Mark Noll claims, believed that they faced a multi-faceted crisis: a short supply of Presbyterian ministers, rampant “infidelity,” and “the unprecedented dissemination of deistic, immoral, and unsound speculation.” The Seminary, they hoped, would provide a stable bulwark in the face of religious, social, and political turmoil.¹⁹

Equally important, the Seminary’s founders doubted that true Christian principles were being taught at Princeton College. In particular they suspected the orthodoxy of its President, Samuel Stanhope Smith, whom they forced out of office in 1812.²⁰ Noll argues that Samuel Miller and Ashbel Green (who would shortly replace Smith) had schemed since late 1808 to found an undergraduate “theological academy” that would render the College “entirely superfluous for the theological training of Presbyterians.”²¹ Instead of an undergraduate institution, however, Presbyterians opted for a seminary. The College’s administrators agreed not to hire a professor of theology as long as the Seminary remained in Princeton.²² This agreement perhaps delayed the creation of a separate Department of Religion within Princeton University, an event that did not occur until 1946.²³

A Professorship of Ecclesiastical History, paired with Church Government, was slated as one of the first three appointments for the new Presbyterian seminary. In 1813, Samuel Miller, minister of the Wall Street Church in New York and a promoter of the Seminary, was appointed to fill this post.²⁴ The Seminary, Miller claimed, was carrying on the work of early Christian scholars Pantaenus, Clement, and Origen in the Alexandrian “seminary” [the so-called “catechetical school”] that served as “a nursery of the church.” He exulted that American Presbyterians, at last awakened from their sleep, with “tardy” but “heaven-directed steps” were following not only these ancients, but also other denominations in America that had already founded seminaries.²⁵ Miller was the professor of church history at the Seminary from 1813 to 1849. After he retired, a succession of relatively undistinguished scholars filled the church history post.²⁶ From its founding until 1870, the Seminary at Princeton was under the immediate direction of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. The Plan of the Seminary required professors to subscribe to the Confession of Faith and Catechisms of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., pledging not to “inculcate, teach, or insinuate” anything contrary to that Confession or oppose any fundamental principle of Presbyterian polity.²⁷ By the late 1830s, the Seminary had positioned itself on the conservative, Old School wing of Presbyterianism, rejecting the “softer” Calvinist tenets that were embodied in New School Presbyterianism and the New Haven Theology, as well as cooperation with other Protestants in voluntary societies.²⁸ Old School and New School Presbyterians remained formally separated from 1837 until 1870. Bruce Kuklick argues that Princeton by mid-century had become “the arch-symbol of conservative philosophy and theology.”²⁹ (Samuel Miller, for example, deplored the “semi-Pelagian” spirit of Yale, charging that its students lacked “the meek, humble, devout spirit of the Gospel.”³⁰) Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Seminary’s conservatism manifested itself in its friendliness to Southern values and its opposition to both the New Haven Theology and Charles Finney’s brand of revivalism.³¹

Of students from the first decade of the Seminary’s existence, 25 became professors and 15, college presidents—a testimony, variously, to the Seminary’s scholarly reputation, to the lack of opportunities for Presbyterian ministerial training elsewhere, and to the few men in America with sufficient education to assume a college presidency. In 1855, Princeton stood as the largest of America’s 45 theological seminaries.³² Soon, however, its enrollment was outstripped by Union’s.³³

Development of graduate education at the institutions here studied remains somewhat confused: on this point, Princeton was not alone. Princeton University established graduate programs in various fields in 1877, with the first doctorates awarded in 1879.³⁴ Only in the early twentieth century, however, did Princeton Seminary advertise a “post-graduate department” that allowed seminary graduates to continue their studies with concentration in particular areas, including church history.³⁵ The Th.D. program established at the Seminary in 1940 was changed to a Ph.D. in 1973. As noted above, the University Ph.D. program in religion was added in 1955.³⁶

Harvard Divinity School and Harvard University

In 1805, Unitarian-leaning Henry Ware was appointed Hollis Professor of Divinity in Harvard College, an event that spurred more traditional Calvinists to found Andover Theological Seminary.³⁷ In 1819, “Divinity” branched off into a separate “Theological Department” (i.e., what became the Harvard Divinity School).³⁸ Decades later, President Charles Eliot claimed that the founding of the Divinity School showed Harvard’s commitment to “unbiased investigation”: teachers and students were not required to subscribe to “the peculiarities of any denomination.”³⁹

Church history, however, remained an “orphan discipline” at the Divinity School⁴⁰—despite Harvard College’s establishment of the first professorship of history in the United States.⁴¹ The original plan for the School called for a position in ecclesiastical history (and four others), but no funds for this appointment were forthcoming. Some limited provision was made for instruction in the subject, but the proposed professorship languished.⁴² Over the years, church history was taught by Henry Ware, Charles Follen, Convers Francis, Frederic H. Hedge (1857- 1878⁴³), and Joseph Henry Allen (1878–1882).⁴⁴

In 1854, the report of a Visiting Committee appointed by the Harvard College Overseers noted that the Divinity School had only two (overworked) Professors, one in “Pulpit Eloquence and the Pastoral Care” (with church history as a minor sideline⁴⁵), and the other in “Hebrew and Other Oriental languages”/“Biblical Literature.” The committee recommended the establishment of two more professorships, including one in ecclesiastical history. Yet again, no professorship was forthcoming. The Visiting Committee’s report nevertheless confidently announced that divinity students were advancing from “loose and unsettled notions to a well-grounded and stable faith.” The course of study, it concluded, is “well ordered, systematic, impartial, and full.”⁴⁶ “Full” might not be the word that springs to present-day readers’ minds, given the School’s inadequate staffing.

Throughout mid-century, the School remained small and somewhat lackluster. Between 1840 and 1880, Sydney Ahlstrom admits, its scholarship did not keep pace with the standards of the day.⁴⁷ When Thomas Hill was sworn in as President of Harvard in 1863, he rhetorically asked in his inaugural address: “Our Divinity School prepares its scholars to take charge of parishes; but where are our young men coming simply as lovers of truth, simply as scholars, for aid in exploring the highest realms of human thought?”⁴⁸ Apparently nowhere.

The Divinity School’s change of fortune came with Charles Eliot’s appointment as President of Harvard in 1869. Eliot, so an enthusiast later claimed, planned “to make this a university school of theology instead of a drill-shed for Unitarian ministers.”⁴⁹ In his Annual Report for 1874–1875, Eliot scored the state of Divinity at Harvard.⁵⁰ Four years later, he led a campaign to endow five new professorships for the School, to be filled by scholars trained in historical and critical methods.⁵¹ At Harvard, Eliot insisted, there should be a nondenominational theological school positioned within the university, offering courses to all students, not only to future ministers.⁵² This arrangement, he argued, would ensure that ministerial training upheld the “standards in truth-seeking which modern science has set up.”⁵³ Reorganizing the Divinity School as effectively undenominational, Eliot later claimed, was one of the most important accomplishments of his forty-year presidency.⁵⁴

At last, in 1877, the Divinity School received a gift for the endowment of the Winn Professorship in Ecclesiastical History;⁵⁵ in 1882, it was awarded to Ephraim Emerton. Emerton, a layman who had earned his Ph.D. at Leipzig in 1876,⁵⁶ was then teaching history in Harvard College. As Winn Professor, Emerton was charged with introducing new methods, including the seminar, to the study of church history, and opening church history courses to non-Divinity students.⁵⁷

Others were less pleased with Eliot’s plan, including the disappointed candidate, Joseph Henry Allen, who had provided instruction in ecclesiastical history since 1878. Although gracious in public about not receiving the coveted Professorship, Allen confided to several correspondents that Eliot arranged to pay Emerton only his regular salary as instructor in history, thus saving the Winn funds (“at a stroke $2000”) for other purposes at the University.⁵⁸ Moreover, Eliot’s promotion of “scientific theology” (in Allen’s view) was fatuous: he had no understanding of what that phrase meant.⁵⁹

According to Harvard catalogs from the 1880s and 1890s, Emerton taught all periods of church history through the seventeenth century. Now, historical approaches to divinity subjects become standard at Harvard. In 1896, John Winthrop Platner, a graduate of Union Seminary, was also appointed to a position in church history at Harvard, but after a few years he decamped for Andover.⁶⁰ Platner had little praise for Emerton’s approach. On one occasion, inviting Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Seminary to lecture at Harvard in order to “arouse more interest in the study of Church history here,” he commented that “they don’t even know what it means.… Regard the trip somewhat in the light of missionary work.”⁶¹

By 1886–1887, the Divinity School counted six resident graduate students among its total student population of 21; by the early twentieth century, more than half the School’s students were considered graduate students. At first, Master’s and Ph.D. degrees were awarded through agreement with the University Graduate School, but in 1914–1915 the Divinity School received permission to offer the Th.D. A Ph.D. in Religion, offered by the University, was added in 1934.⁶²

Yale Theological Department, Yale Divinity School, and Yale University

At Yale, as at Harvard, church history was first taught within the College. In 1778, Ezra Stiles was designated “Professor of Ecclesiastical History,” a post he retained throughout his Presidency of Yale until his death in 1795.⁶³ In the 121 years between the College’s founding in 1701 and the organization in 1822 of the “Theological Department” (which became the Divinity School), Yale emerged as a distinguished center of theological studies, with Jonathan Edwards just one of its stars.⁶⁴

The creation of the Theological Department in 1822 was prompted by fifteen students’ petition to remain at Yale College after their graduation to receive further instruction. To meet their needs, churches contributed funds to secure a new professor in theology, and some members of the existing College faculty were reassigned to divinity.⁶⁵ Historians of Yale credit both the disestablishment of Congregationalism in Connecticut in 1818 and the religious revival at Yale College in 1820 with fostering the desire for theological study.⁶⁶ A college degree (or even college attendance) was not a strict requirement for admission, and many students did not stay three years. As at other institutions, awarding the Bachelor of Divinity degree at Yale came later: in 1867.⁶⁷

The Yale Theological Department was relatively conservative in comparison to Harvard and Union.⁶⁸ Its conservatism matched that of the College as portrayed in the famous Yale Report of 1828. Called “the most influential educational statement of the antebellum period” by historian Julie Reuben, the Yale Report defended the classically oriented curriculum against proposed changes. The purpose of a Yale education, the Report claimed, was to “discipline” mental faculties and to form character, not to impart knowledge or enlarge the mind’s “furniture.”⁶⁹

Theological study at Yale (as at Harvard) faltered in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas circa 1840 the enrollment in the Theological Department had stood at about 87, by 1858 it had fallen to 22⁷⁰—in contrast to Princeton’s 130, Andover’s 123, and Union’s 114 in the same period.⁷¹ Professorial replacements were stalled and financial difficulties abounded;⁷² student interest had shifted from theology, formerly Yale’s special glory, to biblical studies, a subject not yet prominent at Yale.⁷³ The School nearly closed after the Civil War, but was saved by the fund-raising activities of the younger Timothy Dwight.⁷⁴ And with the arrival of Wünderkind William Rainey Harper at Yale in 1886, biblical studies were invigorated.⁷⁵

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators alike note the neglect of church history at Yale.⁷⁶ Although in the College, history had been made a separate subject in 1847 and a professorship established in 1865, the Divinity School lacked a permanent position in the subject.⁷⁷ Finally, despite the hardships of the Civil War era, gifts enabled the establishment in 1867 of a chaired professorship in church history, named for Titus Street.⁷⁸ The focus of Yale Divinity education now shifted from theology to biblical and historical studies, deemed the “best preparation against infidelity of the day.”⁷⁹ George Fisher, who had been appointed in 1854 as College Pastor and Professor of Divinity, assumed the new Street Professorship of Church History.⁸⁰ When Fisher retired in the early twentieth century, he was succeeded by Williston Walker, who had received his Ph.D. from Leipzig.⁸¹

The development of graduate education beyond ministerial training at the Yale Theological Department, as at other seminaries, came late—especially considering that the first Ph.D.s awarded in America were at Yale (1861).⁸² By 1876, graduate scholarships had been instituted to provide for a year of post-ministerial study at the Seminary or abroad. Professors, however, were unclear what role this extra year should play. That they still thought of these students as ministers rather than as future scholars is suggested by their questions: would churches wish their ministers to have a fourth year of education, and if so, who would pay for it?⁸³

The awarding of doctorates in religion at Yale, as noted above, had a complex history. At some point, faculty from the Divinity School and the Graduate School began to offer the Ph.D. under the auspices of the Divinity School, but when a graduate program within the University Department of Religious Studies was established in 1963, M.A. and Ph.D. work was repositioned there.⁸⁴

Union Theological Seminary

Union Theological Seminary, founded in 1836, offered a more liberal brand of Presbyterianism (New School) than Princeton’s.⁸⁵ Less tied to a hardened Calvinism and willing to work with other Protestants, especially Congregationalists, for religious and social improvement in America and beyond, New School Presbyterians found their views supported in Union’s charters. The Seminary’s Plan and Constitution stated that it would be open to “all men of moderate views and feelings, who desire to live free from party strife, and to stand aloof from all extremes of doctrinal speculation, practical radicalism, and ecclesiastical domination.”⁸⁶ Qualified men from “every denomination of evangelical Christians” were invited to attend.⁸⁷ In the Seminary’s first year, 23 students enrolled; by its fourth year, enrollment had grown to 120.⁸⁸

Although some critics deemed a large city an inappropriate location for a seminary,⁸⁹ a plot of land was leased in what is now the area around New York University—“well uptown,” a contemporary commentator wrote, “quite on the outskirts of the city.”⁹⁰ It was not a propitious moment to found a seminary in New York: the Great Fire of 1837 rendered would-be patrons unable to meet their financial commitments.⁹¹ Moreover, unlike Harvard and Yale, Union was not affiliated with a university.

New York City in the mid-nineteenth century was awash in social change. Not only had the population grown tenfold in the century’s first sixty years;⁹² “new money” had also arisen to challenge the hegemony of a homogeneous upper class who had previously imagined themselves the city’s cultural legislators. Union, Thomas Bender argues, set out to exploit the opportunities of a metropolis, capitalizing on the financial and intellectual life of the city.⁹³ The Seminary profited from large gifts given by business entrepreneur James Roosevelt (father of Franklin D.) and from banker James Brown (of the family that would later merge businesses to become Brown Brothers Harriman), establishing chaired professorships in Theology, Hebrew and Cognate Languages, Sacred Literature, Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology, Church Polity, and Mission Work.⁹⁴ As the Seminary grew, it sought larger quarters. With the financial assistance of New York’s wealthy, it moved progressively uptown: first, in 1884, to buildings on Park Avenue between Sixty-Ninth and Seventieth Streets, and then, in 1910, to its present location on Morningside Heights.⁹⁵

Union’s professors, whose meager salaries—allegedly $2500 per year, but often less, or occasionally nothing⁹⁶—distinguished them from the moneyed elite, nevertheless benefited from their relationships with businessmen and entrepreneurs. Seminary professors elsewhere joked that their colleagues in New York “lived among millionaires.”⁹⁷ Despite their relative penury, the Seminary’s professors were considered sufficiently genteel to associate with the Dutch aristocrats of old New York (the Schuylers),⁹⁸ and be financially assisted by capitalists (Charles Butler) and commercial publishers (Charles Scribner).⁹⁹ Philip Schaff was so well connected that W. H. Vanderbilt’s son-in-law, Eliott Shepard, threw a party in 1882 at his new mansion on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street for members of the American Bible Revision Committee (of which Schaff was chair) and 300 or so “friends” to celebrate the Revision’s publication.¹⁰⁰ Some Union faculty enjoyed membership in the Century Club, “headquarters for a clubbish, genteel culture.”¹⁰¹ They were invited to lunches that included thirteen artery-numbing courses¹⁰² and to dinners at Delmonico’s, the favored restaurant of New York elites.¹⁰³ Even professors who lived in rented houses had spacious enough quarters to entertain 125 of the delegates to the Evangelical Alliance meeting in 1873.¹⁰⁴ Intellectual and cultural capital, it appears, compensated for the professors’ lack of cash. Many wealthy New Yorkers were then invested in the relatively liberal brand of Protestantism that Union represented.

Unsupported by a university or a denomination, Union’s earliest years were ones of grave financial difficulty; in 1839–1840 the professors had for the most part gone unpaid. Financial agents were employed to drum up monies from various constituencies.¹⁰⁵ New York ministers who favored the Union experiment (such as George Prentiss, later to join Union’s faculty) exhorted their congregations to give to Union—perhaps even to mortgage their church buildings.¹⁰⁶ Prentiss sensed that potential patrons might deem the subjects studied at Union arcane: some, he rhetorically declaimed, will doubtless scoff, “What is the use of Hebrew roots, of Greek and Latin erudition … of the history of obsolete dogmas, and dead heresies, and extinct or corrupt churches, in our new and busy world of the Future? … ‘Let the dead bury their dead!’” Prentiss vigorously argued the necessity of these studies for fostering a strong pastorate. He compared nostalgia for a time before there were professors of “Sacred Philology and Ecclesiastical History and Exegesis” to that for an era before the invention of railroads and steamboats.¹⁰⁷

The first three professorial appointments at Union were in theology, biblical literature, and pastoral theology and church government.¹⁰⁸ There was no permanent professor in church history until 1850,¹⁰⁹ when Henry Smith joined the faculty. Earlier, Samuel Cox, a prominent local pastor and father of Arthur Cleveland Coxe, covered the subject (badly, judging from student notes).¹¹⁰

In November 1849, Albert Barnes, who chaired a committee on faculty appointments, reported to Union’s Board of Directors that a permanent position in church history was much needed. Barnes conceded that often the subject was taught in a “repulsive” fashion. But this need not be the case if the professor included “the history of doctrine, the development of the Christian spirit and the religious life of the church.” The chair, in Barnes’s view, should be filled by a man with “ample learning, a philosophical mind, and a knowledge of German.”¹¹¹

Henry Smith, selected for the new position, took up his post in the winter of 1850. He had not been especially trained in church history, although he had achieved some national renown in what we would today call philosophy of religion and philosophy of history.¹¹² Having studied in Germany, Smith brought to Union the German organization of church history that incorporated historical theology and history of doctrine.¹¹³ Some worried that Smith’s German training might lead him astray; rumors circulated that he had “publicly testified his reverence for the name of Schleiermacher.” Indeed, he had: in a lecture delivered in 1849, before joining the Union faculty, Smith praised Schleiermacher for leading the return of German theology from cold rationalism to “the fervent and almost mystic love to Christ.”¹¹⁴ Although Union had waited fourteen years after its inception to establish a Professorship in Church History (albeit not endowed until 1855), Yale waited longer—and Harvard, over a quarter of a century longer.

Smith, however, held the Professorship in Church History for less than four years before assuming the Roosevelt Professorship of Theology.¹¹⁵ Upon Smith’s transfer, Roswell Hitchcock was awarded the post in church history, now endowed as the Washburn Professorship.¹¹⁶ Hitchcock remained at Union for 33 years until his death, the last seven serving as President.¹¹⁷ Only in 1870 was a distinguished church historian—Philip Schaff—appointed to the Union faculty, but Schaff assumed the Professorship of Church History only in 1887, after Hitchcock’s death.¹¹⁸ Upon Schaff’s retirement and subsequent death in 1893, he was succeeded by his former student, Arthur Cushman McGiffert.¹¹⁹ By the early twentieth century, the historical method reigned in all fields at Union.¹²⁰

Graduate education at Union developed as slowly, and with as much complication, as at other institutions. Catalogs from the 1860s list “resident licentiates,” later called “graduate students.”¹²¹ Yet no courses were instituted especially for them. By 1879, some Union graduates were remaining for another year of study.¹²² These students were to take five hours of “exercises” (classes) every week; in 1889–1890, the requirement was added to “carry on special research in some branch of theological science, under the direction of the faculty.” Five years later, the number of required courses was raised to eight, three of which (if students so desired) could be taken at area universities.¹²³ (By 1892, Union had made arrangements with Columbia and the University of the City of New York [NYU] that allowed “superior” Union students to enroll in certain courses, without fees, at those institutions.¹²⁴) A Union circular from 1905, announcing graduate offerings for that year, listed three options: the History of Christian Thought; a Historical Training Class; and a Historical Seminar.¹²⁵

Union, like other institutions, had a rather confused history of conferring degrees. For most of the century, until 1890, no official degrees were offered. On April 1, 1890, an agreement between the University of the City of New York and Union stipulated that NYU would award a B.D. to Union students who were recommended by the Union faculty—a provision that would enable the nonsectarian NYU to offer this degree without having to mount a theology school.¹²⁶ The arrangement lasted only six years, during which time not one B.D. degree was awarded. The President of Union, Thomas S. Hastings, in 1896 informed Henry MacCracken, Chancellor of NYU, that the present arrangement should end: either the New York State Regents would grant the B.D. or Union itself would ask for the power to confer it.¹²⁷ In 1917–1918, the D.D. (then an earned degree at Union) was changed to a Th.D., requiring at least three years of residency, rigorous language study, and “publication of a substantial book.” During the 1920s, when both Columbia University and Union Seminary were well established on Morningside Heights, arrangements were made whereby Columbia would grant the M.A. in “the literature and religion of the Bible, the comparative study of Christianity and other religions, and (by 1930) Christian education.”¹²⁸ Columbia instituted a Ph.D. program in religion in 1946.¹²⁹ At Union, the Th.D. was changed to a Ph.D. in 1974.¹³⁰

Such were the beginnings of church history and the degrees offered at the four institutions here studied. I turn now to the six major professors who developed the subject at their respective institutions.

The Professors: A Sketch

The six professors who are the focus of my study, and around whom the subsequent chapters of this book are organized, need to be introduced. Celebrated in their day not only as professors of church history but also as public figures, they shaped the study of their subject for much of the nineteenth century. The surviving information on these men, however, is unequal: about some, a great deal is known, while about others, much less.

Biographies of three of the six (Samuel Miller of Princeton, Henry Smith of Union, and Philip Schaff of Mercersburg and Union), written by well-informed—if partial—family members, incorporate letters, journal entries, and other documents highly useful to the historian. Since no such biographies exist for Roswell Hitchcock of Union, George Fisher of Yale, or Ephraim Emerton of Harvard, their lives are less fully documented. Moreover, the lengthy tenures of Miller at Princeton and Fisher at Yale place disproportionate attention on one professor’s shaping of early church history at his institution—in contrast with the three church history professors at Union during that period (Henry Smith, Roswell Hitchcock, and Philip Schaff).

Class notes and other archival materials, as well as print sources, however, remain for all six. Yet even here, there is an unavoidable disproportion: the course notes given by three of the professors (Samuel Miller, Henry Smith, and Roswell Hitchcock) are far more abundant than those of George Fisher and Ephraim Emerton. As for Philip Schaff, although class notes remain in the archives at both Lancaster and Union Seminaries, he wrote so constantly and used his class preparations so extensively as aids to his published works that the extant material threatens to drown the historian. The coverage I give the six is, then, admittedly unequal.

The professors present disparate careers in other respects as well, as the following chapters will detail. Samuel Miller at Princeton and Ephraim Emerton at Harvard are in a sense outliers, with experiences and concerns different from the four professors at Union and Yale. Miller, whose long tenure at Princeton Seminary ended just as that of some of the other professors was beginning, remained untouched by German education, philosophy, and theology. He represents a distinctive Princeton approach to theological studies, inflected by Scottish Common Sense philosophy. By an accident of professional longevity, Miller kept the teaching of church history at Princeton Seminary in an older style than might otherwise have been the case.

The Unitarian Ephraim Emerton of Harvard, on the other end—the only one of the six to earn a German Ph.D. in history entirely apart from seminary training—evinced little interest in theology or biblical studies per se, unlike the Union and Yale professors. His occupation of the Winn Professorship meant that a man with quite different historical interests from those of his Union and Yale counterparts would train students at Harvard.

The rapid growth of Union in particular from mid-century onward, however, ensured that a newer understanding of church history—evangelically pious, yet colored by German historiographical and philosophical assumptions—was offered to hundreds of prospective ministers and (even) a few scholars. By the time of Philip Schaff’s death in 1893, Union was well on the way to forging a theological persona that would mark American liberal Protestantism in the early twentieth century.

Samuel Miller (1769–1850)

Born in Delaware, Miller was educated at home in Greek and Latin by his father and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at nineteen as salutatorian. He then studied theology privately in 1791–1792 with Charles Nisbet, the first Principal of Dickinson College.¹³¹ From 1793 to 1813, Miller served as minister at the Presbyterian Church in Wall Street (New York), during which time he wrote his most famous work, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century.¹³² Miller’s placement in New York afforded him frequent opportunity for criticizing Episcopalians’ “immense wealth,” “arrogant claims and high-church principles.”¹³³ As a professor of church history, his assaults on Episcopalians took the form of battles over the “original” church polity. Miller’s polemicizing against all groups except his own brand of Presbyterianism was not modified by any seeming acquaintance with German theology or philosophy.¹³⁴

Although Miller’s training in church history was nearly nonexistent, during his years in New York he had been active in the New-York Historical Society, for which organization he collected information on the early history of New York State and its environs. His questions to correspondents manifest his interest in social, cultural, and technological developments. To one correspondent, Miller explained that although his questions seemed “trifling,” they might help to uncover information from documents “indirectly gathered … which they were not designed originally to convey.”¹³⁵ His “nose” for historical investigation was perhaps better than his later deployment of patristic texts to rail against Episcopalians and other groups would suggest.

Miller agonized over leaving the active ministry to become a professor. At the time of his call to Princeton, he had already rejected the presidency of three colleges.¹³⁶ He confessed to his New York congregation that the constant exertion of a New York City pastorate made him fear for his health: apparently he imagined that a professorship would be less demanding.¹³⁷ His salary at Princeton was to be $1800 a year plus the use of a house.¹³⁸

In 1813, Miller joined the new Presbyterian Seminary as its second professor, with an appointment in Ecclesiastical History and Church Government. This position he held for 36 years.¹³⁹ Although he claimed to keep the two subjects of his professorship separate,¹⁴⁰ his teaching of church history focused strongly on polity: he aimed to show that the Presbyterian form of church government was in place at Christianity’s inception.¹⁴¹ Miller’s slant on church history was suggested in his inaugural address, a “Sketch of the … Witnesses for the Truth During the Dark Ages.” These “witnesses”—Trinitarians, Calvinists, and Presbyterians, among others—prove that “doctrines of grace were the genuine doctrines of God’s Word.”¹⁴² Miller’s long tenure at Princeton set the tone for the teaching of church history in that institution. When Miller stepped down in 1850, he was not replaced with a professor of note.¹⁴³

Although others praised Miller as exhibiting “a ripe scholarship, a minute acquaintance with the annals of the early Church, and a capacity to vindicate the primitive form of ecclesiastical government,”¹⁴⁴ Miller himself was keenly aware of his inadequate preparation. Having accepted the Princeton position, he confessed in his diary that his heart sank when he contemplated the appointment. I do not have “the appropriate qualifications,” he wrote; “I have not the talents; I have not the varied furniture; especially I have not the mature spiritual wisdom and experience, which appear to be indispensable.”¹⁴⁵ (Whether training in church history was among the missing “furniture” is not stated.¹⁴⁶) His election, he mused, was by default, so lamentably scarce were Presbyterian ministers who had turned their attention to the study of church history. Years later, as an experienced professor, he acknowledged how “very raw, and very poorly prepared” he had been. Since he had not started his studies in church history until he was forty-four, he conceded that he would never be as qualified as those who had undertaken them in their youth.¹⁴⁷

In the Seminary’s opening year, 1813, Miller and his colleague Archibald Alexander taught 24 pupils.¹⁴⁸ Miller was responsible for organizing the curriculum in church history. That Miller was not enamored of patristics in general is suggested by his critique of the “addiction” of Episcopalians and “their Papal exemplars” to the “Fathers.”¹⁴⁹ Nevertheless, he thought that budding Presbyterian ministers should know “the opinion and practice of our Fathers in all past ages.”¹⁵⁰

An unidentified (and seemingly unsympathetic) reviewer of the junior Samuel Miller’s two-volume biography of his father describes the senior Miller as not brilliant, nor a man of “great powers,” but an enthusiastic plodder who by “constant and methodical working” became a prominent scholar in his denomination. Miller, the reviewer concedes, possessed a “much larger spirit” than did many Old School Presbyterians.¹⁵¹ Nevertheless, he like other “Princeton gentlemen” had succumbed to the pressures from “the extreme and anathematizing party … rather than lose their positions or abandon the old views.”¹⁵² The reviewer pokes fun at Miller’s now-dated condemnation of dancing, novel-reading, and the shocking “New Haven view” that the six days of creation were not strictly “days.”¹⁵³ In addition to his famed Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century and numerous published articles and sermons, Miller wrote (among other books) Letters on Unitarianism (1821); Letters on Clerical Manners and Habits (1827); Letters Concerning the Constitution and Order to the Christian Ministry (1807, 1830); An Essay on the Warrant, Nature and Duties of the Office of the Ruling Elder (1831); and Presbyterianism: The Truly Primitive and Apostolical Constitution of the Church of Christ (1840).

Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877)

Henry Boynton Smith was the first full-time professor of church history at Union Theological Seminary.¹⁵⁴ A native of Maine, Smith attended Bowdoin College, Andover Theological Seminary, and Bangor Seminary.¹⁵⁵ In 1834, he converted from Unitarianism to Congregationalism.¹⁵⁶ (His zeal as a convert is amply on display in the chapters that follow.) At Bangor, Smith was instilled with an enthusiasm for German literature by his teacher Leonard Woods, Jr., son of his Andover professor.¹⁵⁷ In late 1837, he crossed the Atlantic, studying first in Paris. Arriving in Germany in spring 1838, three years after David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu had shaken the Christian world, he pursued work at the Universities of Halle and Berlin until 1840.¹⁵⁸ An American fellow student at Halle later recalled their “anxious consultation” in which Smith worried whether “he could be a student or not.”¹⁵⁹ Apparently he decided he could.

Smith’s German was strong enough to follow professors’ lectures, although the occasional sketchiness of his extant notes, now in the Union Seminary archives, suggests that he occasionally lost his way. These notes focus largely on lectures given by August Tholuck, who became a good friend—the only person in Germany who called him by his first name, “Henry,” Smith plaintively wrote to his parents.¹⁶⁰

Smith’s letters from Germany also describe August Neander’s lectures on the “History of Christian Doctrines.”¹⁶¹ He styles the erudite Neander (exhibiting a “decidedly Jewish” face) a living source of Christianity, “the father of a new era in church history.” Neander, he reports, is considered “the best exegetical lecturer in Germany”; more auditors flock to him than to any other German theologian.¹⁶² In Berlin, Smith heard Leopold von Ranke’s lectures on the Calvinist Reformation and studied Hegel with Friedrich Trendelenberg.¹⁶³ Later in his life, Smith made three return trips to Europe. On the last, he spent a year and a half in Germany, Italy, and “the lands of the Bible.”¹⁶⁴

The German university experience shaped Smith’s life and work. He, like other American students, was warmly welcomed by several German professors.¹⁶⁵ In Berlin, Smith was invited to dine with Neander and to meet with Hegel’s widow. At Halle, Tholuck explicated Hegel to him during their customary walks and took him along on a vacation trip.¹⁶⁶ Professor of Philosophy Hermann Ulrici, in whose home Smith lived for a time, also developed a warm relationship with Smith.¹⁶⁷ When Smith returned to America, he kept in touch with both Tholuck¹⁶⁸ and Ulrici.¹⁶⁹ Professor Isaak Dorner also praised Smith: “einen der ersten, wenn nicht als ersten Amerikanischen Theologen der Gegenwart angesehen; festgegründet … in philosophischen Geistes und für systematische Theologie ungewöhnlich begabt.”¹⁷⁰ Smith had, it is clear, made a deep impression on German professors and their wives.

His German education in place, Smith returned to America but had difficulty finding a permanent post. He was turned down for a chair in literature at Bowdoin; at Dartmouth for a professorship of divinity; and even at a girls’ school—and so he became a pastor by default.¹⁷¹ Yet even then, Smith pursued German scholarship, translating ten German articles for Bibliotheca Sacra during these years.¹⁷² In 1847, Smith became Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Amherst College, where he taught Mill, Hume, Scottish and English philosophy, logic, and the Baconian method.¹⁷³ The philosophy he had imbibed in Germany, it appears, had not yet secured a place in American college curricula.

In 1850, Smith was offered the Professorship of Church History at Union. He doubted the wisdom of accepting the appointment: he was not a historian by training, considered himself unsuited for a “theological institution,” and worried about Union’s viability. Pondering the offer, he wrote to a friend, “the literary character of the seminary is slight, its zeal in theological science is little, the need of a comprehensive range of theological studies and of books thereto has got to be created.”¹⁷⁴ He accepted Union’s offer, but a few years later (1854/1855) transferred to the Chair in Theology.

Despite Smith’s preference for theology and philosophy over history, George Bancroft—then considered America’s premier historian—praised Smith’s “Oration on the Problem of Philosophy of History” (presumably his Phi Beta Kappa address at Yale College in 1853¹⁷⁵). This excellent speech, Bancroft claimed, shows how the scholarly study of history can help uncover “the unity and harmony of all truth,” in which God is “always and everywhere” seen as present.¹⁷⁶ After Smith’s death, Bancroft wrote to Elizabeth Smith, praising her late husband as “the best teacher we ever had of the philosophy of history.”¹⁷⁷ Indeed, Bancroft earlier had lauded Smith: “In Church history, you have no rival on this hemisphere, and you know I am bound to think history includes dogmatics and philosophy and theology.”¹⁷⁸ Smith’s teaching of church history characteristically infused the subject with a substantial dose of doctrinal history and philosophy.¹⁷⁹

From 1866 to 1870, Smith was Chair of the Executive Committee of the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance, an international Protestant organization formed in London in 1846. In 1867, his “Report on the State of Religion in the United States of America” to the Alliance’s Conference in Amsterdam argued (among other points) that slavery, although now abolished, had been the one great hindrance to the realization of America’s ideal.¹⁸⁰ A decade earlier, Smith had written the “Resolution on Slavery” adopted by the Presbytery of New York, denouncing slavery as “a system which is essentially opposed to the rights of man, to the welfare of the Republic, to the clear position of our Church, and to the principles of the Christian religion.”¹⁸¹

At Union, Smith became active in the (New School) Presbyterian Church USA. He served as Moderator of its General Assembly in 1863 and was hailed as mediator in reuniting Old and New School Presbyterians in 1870.¹⁸² His address as retiring moderator to the General Assembly in 1864 (“Christian Union and Ecclesiastical Reunion”) warned against the “infidelity” of recent social philosophy and historical criticism, including the British Essays and Reviews, Bishop John Colenso’s books on the Old Testament, Renan’s Life of Jesus, and Strauss’s new version of his Life of Jesus; these works, Smith posited, mark the mere beginnings of a contest long foreseen, with Christianity at stake.¹⁸³ Smith’s critiques of these topics I shall detail below.

In addition to these activities and his teaching, from 1859 to 1874 Smith edited the American Theological Review, a journal that changed names several times during its history.¹⁸⁴ He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Vermont in 1850 and by Princeton in 1869. As librarian at Union Seminary, he presided over the Van Ess collection, brought from Europe to form the core of the Seminary’s library.¹⁸⁵ (The library’s growth will be charted in Chapter 2.) Always in poor health, Smith resigned his chaired professorship in 1874 (although he continued teaching) and died in 1877 at the age of 62.¹⁸⁶ At the time of his death, he was preparing lectures for a course on evolution.¹⁸⁷ His interest in politics may also be noted: he wrote searing essays against the Confederacy and against Great Britain’s sympathy (which he attributed to financial interests) for the southern cause.¹⁸⁸

Although Smith wrote frequently for journals, he did not publish many books during his lifetime. His most notable work, History of the Church of Christ in Chronological Tables (1859), however, displays his (by then) considerable knowledge of church history.¹⁸⁹ He also translated Gieseler’s Church History and Hagenbach’s Textbook of the History of Doctrine.¹⁹⁰ Smith’s posthumous volume of speeches and essays, Faith and Philosophy, edited by his colleague George Prentiss, contains much of interest pertaining to church history. Former student William S. Karr of Hartford Theological Seminary also prepared three volumes for publication after Smith’s death, based largely on his lectures: Apologetics (1882), Introduction to Christian Theology (1883), and System of Christian Theology (1884).¹⁹¹ Reviewing Elizabeth Smith’s biography, one commentator wrote, “His [Smith’s] industry was not as marvelous as that of Origen, who is said by Jerome to have written more than any other man could read; but it was almost as incessant.” Origen, however, had composed many more lines that the reviewer deemed ripe for erasure.¹⁹²

After Smith’s death, his nephew, Munroe Smith—later a professor of law at Georgetown and Columbia Universities—wrote to his aunt, Elizabeth Smith, commenting on details of his uncle’s life that he had gleaned from her biography. Never before, the young man wrote, had he ever comprehended “the utter and absurd inadequacy of the material reward” which those of “rare intellectual power” receive. Smith was at the head of his profession, a great success, yet the recompense he received for his work was “to put it bluntly—not enough to live on! I never understood before that the extra work under which Uncle Henry broke down was largely mere bread-and-butter work, to which he was forced by the inadequacy of his professional salary.” It is a “crying shame,” the nephew exclaimed, that in America a man who devotes himself to professional pursuits is not “freed from the sordid anxiety in the struggle for physical existence. The scholar must have skolê.”¹⁹³ Indeed, we know that Smith and other early professors at Union were very poorly paid—sometimes payday brought “no pay”¹⁹⁴—and that he spent many Sundays preaching to supplement his income. Three boxes of Smith’s sermons (some quite erudite, on a par with his classroom lectures) are extant in Union’s archives; his marginal notes indicate that many were delivered multiple times. His active Sunday mornings doubtless testify to the state of his finances as well as to his piety.¹⁹⁵

Some two decades after Smith’s death, Yale historian George Park Fisher declared that no thinker in the “New England School” since the time of the elder Edwards had surpassed Smith in learning and philosophical ability.¹⁹⁶ Years later, those who had known Smith wished fervently that another like him could be appointed at Union after the retirement of the hard-line (and rather unsympathetic) Calvinist theologian W. G. T. Shedd in 1890.¹⁹⁷

Roswell Dwight Hitchcock (1817–1887)

With Smith’s transfer to the chair in theology at Union, the way was open to appoint a new church historian. This post fell to Roswell D. Hitchcock. Born in Maine in 1817, Hitchcock graduated from Amherst College in 1836 and Andover Theological Seminary in 1841, meanwhile serving as a tutor at Amherst. The next years he spent as a Congregationalist minister. In 1847–1848, Hitchcock studied at Halle and Berlin.¹⁹⁸ Of his student days, no records are extant.

After his stint as a pastor and three years as Collins Professor of Natural and Revealed Religion at Bowdoin College (1852–1855), Hitchcock assumed the Washburn Professorship of Church History at Union, a position that he held until his death.¹⁹⁹ At the time of his appointment, an anonymous referee wrote that Hitchcock had a “decided historical tendency,—much beyond what is usual in these days,” and that he possessed a “familiar and accurate acquaintance with the facts, the doctrines, and the great teachers, both of the earlier periods of the Christian Church and of the times of the Reformation.”²⁰⁰ When some members of the Board and faculty opposed his appointment, Hitchcock withdrew his candidacy, but in the end, all came around and Hitchcock assumed the position.²⁰¹ Indeed, Hitchcock became President of Union Seminary in 1880, a position that he occupied until his unexpected death in 1887.

Hitchcock became a life trustee of Amherst in 1869, and was elected President of the Palestine Exploration Society in 1871, a post he held for several years.²⁰² He received D.D. degrees from Bowdoin (1855) and the University of Edinburgh (1855), and L.L.D. degrees from Williams College (1873) and Harvard University (1886).²⁰³ He served as editor of the American Theological Review from 1863 to 1870, overlapping a few years with Henry Smith. During his time at Union, he made three return trips to Europe and the Middle East.²⁰⁴

Hitchcock was widely respected for his excellent teaching, as will be detailed below. He also had wide interests in social movements, advocating civil service reform²⁰⁵ and attacking the “Tweed ring.”²⁰⁶ During the Civil War, he used his “forcible and living oratory” in support of the Union cause.²⁰⁷ According to one memorialist, he had great influence on “some of the wealthiest and most beneficent Christian gentlemen of New York”—including, apparently, ex-governor Edwin D. Morgan, who during Hitchcock’s presidency contributed $100,000 toward the purchase of a new site for the Seminary on Park Avenue.²⁰⁸ On his death, Hitchcock left money to establish a prize to be awarded to a member of the senior class at Union for excellence in church history.²⁰⁹

The anonymous editor of Hitchcock’s sermons reports that Hitchcock destroyed the greater part of his manuscripts. Attempting to explain Hitchcock’s low scholarly production given his acknowledged brilliance, the editor wrote,

his mind was always so active, and he was so constantly giving out fresh thoughts to stimulate others, that he left himself little space to revise and elaborate for the press.… His intellect was so original and powerful that it could not be confined; and the store of knowledge which it absorbed, instead of being so much dead learning, only fed and stimulated its activity. He was always making new acquisitions.²¹⁰

Hitchcock was dedicated to Union. On the 48th anniversary of the Seminary, recalling some moments in its history, he expressed his pride in this “School of the Prophets.” Union had “began in poverty and weakness, praying almost day by day for its daily bread. The planting of it in this whirling metropolis of commerce, was against all our American traditions.”²¹¹ Yet the Seminary had not merely survived, but grown preeminent.

Apart from some articles on the patristic era, Hitchcock left no books on that topic except the edition and translation (with introduction and notes) of the Didache that he produced with his Union colleague Francis Brown.²¹² Among his other publications are book reviews of works on Zoroastrianism and Confucianism;²¹³ a book, Socialism; an “anthropological” treatment of race theory entitled Laws of Civilization; a Complete Analysis of the Holy Bible, or the Whole of the Old and New Testaments Arranged According to Subjects in Twenty-Seven Books; and a memorial volume he wrote with Henry Smith, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson.²¹⁴ In addition, a volume of his often scholarly sermons, Eternal Atonement, was published after his death.

Philip Schaff (1819–1893)

As nineteenth-century America’s most famous church historian and “public theologian,” Philip Schaff has been the subject of several biographies. The first, written by his son David and published in 1897,²¹⁵ has been joined in the twentieth century by those by George Shriver,²¹⁶ Gary K. Pranger,²¹⁷ and Stephen R. Graham.²¹⁸ In addition, Klaus Penzel has contributed a long biographical essay²¹⁹ and a monograph on the intellectual and religious climate of Schaff’s early years in Switzerland and Germany.²²⁰

Philip Schaff—founder of the American Society of Church History, founding member of the Society of Biblical Literature, editor of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, head of the American Committee for the Authorized Revision of the Bible, leader of the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance—was Union Theological Seminary’s most distinguished nineteenth-century professor of church history. As a reviewer of the sixth volume of Schaff’s monumental History of the Christian Church noted, if he had lived in the Middle Ages, he would have been called “Philip the Indefatigable.”²²¹ After Schaff’s death, a colleague claimed, “Work was his element, out of which he was as ill at ease as a fish out of water.”²²²

Schaff’s self-assessment was modest: “I am no genius, no investigator, no great scholar, and all the distinction I can aspire to is that of a faithful and, I trust, useful worker in biblical and historical theology.”²²³ He appropriated the title “pontifex,” “bridge-builder,” to suggest his role in bringing together German and more generally, European, scholarship with America’s fledgling endeavors in the field.²²⁴ Later in life, Schaff reflected that if he had stayed in Europe, he might have had “a more comfortable literary life and perhaps accomplished more in the line of mere scholarship”—but now he had become “an American by the call of Providence and by free choice.” America, he believed, “the land of freedom and the land of promise,” awaits the “brightest future.”²²⁵

Born in Switzerland in 1819 and educated at Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, Schaff was called to America in 1844 to serve as professor at the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.²²⁶ On the way to America, he spent six weeks in England, improving his English.²²⁷ In Pennsylvania, he soon found himself charged with heresy by his co-religionists for his alleged Romanizing tendencies, but emerged unscathed from these investigations. During the Civil War, the Mercersburg Seminary, near the Gettysburg battlefield, was transformed into a hospital for captured Confederate soldiers and temporarily suspended operations.²²⁸ Schaff and his family moved to New York, where he first worked as secretary for a committee attempting to enforce stricter Sabbath observance,²²⁹ before being invited to join the faculty of Union Seminary—named not, however, to the chair of church history, but (as detailed above) first to one in “Theological Encyclopedia and Christian Symbolics”; then to the chair in Hebrew; third, to the chair in Sacred Literature-New Testament Exegesis; and last, only upon Roswell Hitchcock’s death in 1887, to the Washburn Chair of Church History.²³⁰ This list affords an insight into the highly generalized approach to theological study in nineteenth-century America. As German historian Adolf Harnack remarked upon Schaff’s death in 1893, he was the last great “generalist” of church history.²³¹ Schaff himself modestly believed that the next generation of church historians would throw his own “preparatory labors into the shade.” He was confident that church history would be for them “the favorite branch of theological study.”²³²

In poor health the last years of his life, Schaff delivered his resignation letter in March 1893. In it he wrote:

Teaching has been my life for more than fifty years.… The growing importance of the department of Church history requires the undivided attention of a first-class scholar. The Seminary … must make satisfactory provision for the next years. The interests of an institution are far more important than those of any individual. The workmen will die, but the work must go on.²³³

Schaff received honorary degrees from the University of St. Andrews, Marshall College, the University of the City of New York, Amherst, and the University of Berlin. Schaff’s former pupil, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, was appointed to fill the Washburn Professorship of Church History in his place, to carry on the work when “the workmen die.”

Among Schaff’s voluminous publications are (to sample some of the most important): The Principle of Protestantism (1845); What Is Church History? (1846); History of the Apostolic Church (1854); America: A Sketch of the Political, Social, and Religious Character of the United States of North America (1855 [1854]); Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiae Universalis: The Creeds of Christendom (3 volumes, 1877); The Revision of the English Version of the Holy Scriptures (1873, 1877); Through Bible Lands (1878); The Person of Christ (1882); The (Schaff-Herzog) Religious Encyclopediae (3 vols., 1882–1884, 1887)²³⁴; A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version (1883); St. Augustine, Melanchthon, Neander (1886); History of the Christian Church (7 volumes, 1882–1892); and Theological Propaedeutic (2 parts, 1892). “The Reunion of Christendom” (1893) was delivered as Schaff’s last major public appearance at the World’s Parliament of Religions: Christian reunion had been a theme dear to his heart throughout his entire life.²³⁵ Schaff’s activities aside from teaching were so numerous that I here wish to highlight a few of the most important.

SCHAFF AND THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE

Schaff was active in both the American and international branches of the Evangelical Alliance.²³⁶ The Constitution of its American wing, dated 1870, declares that the aim of the Alliance was to promote evangelical union, “to counteract the influence of infidelity and superstition, especially in their organized forms”; to promote religious freedom everywhere and observance of the Lord’s day; to give supreme authority to the Bible; and to “correct immoral habits of society.”²³⁷ Although this statement does not target Roman Catholicism explicitly, it nevertheless makes clear the Alliance’s Protestant allegiance.²³⁸ Later, Schaff strongly denied that the Alliance was an “anti-popery society”; to the contrary, he claimed, it champions religious liberty wherever that is threatened.²³⁹

The records of the New York branch from November 1868 onward show that its organizers hoped to sponsor an international conference on American soil—the first such—as early as autumn 1869, but the Franco-Prussian War and other events precluded this date.²⁴⁰ With Schaff as organizer, the New York meeting was finally held from October 2 to 12, 1873. Schaff journeyed to Europe to solicit participation and ease Europeans’ anxiety about venturing across the ocean to the unknown wilds of America. On home soil, he took charge of most of the arrangements.²⁴¹ Schaff considered the conference the high point of his life.²⁴² Official delegates numbered 516, of whom 294 were from the United States.²⁴³ Fifteen thousand lay people and clergy attended various sessions. The conference was a major media event; even secular newspapers provided almost verbatim coverage.²⁴⁴ A large volume of conference papers, Evangelical Alliance Conference, 1873, edited by Schaff and S. Irenaeus Prime (former editor of the New-York Observer and co-organizer of the conference) was published in 1874.²⁴⁵

SCHAFF AND THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY

The American Society of Church History was founded on March 23, 1888 in Schaff’s home. He was elected the Society’s first President, serving until his death in 1893. Addressing the first general meeting of the Society on December 28, 1888, Schaff declared that ASCH was formed “for the purpose of cultivating church history as a science.” He hoped that the Society would be “catholic and irenical,” bringing together scholars who would aid “the cause of Christian union.”²⁴⁶ “The Society,” he wrote (prophetically) to his son after the meeting, “may become an important training school for rising historians.”²⁴⁷ On learning of the Society’s founding, Adolf von Harnack claimed that “America has put us in Europe to shame.”²⁴⁸ ASCH established a prize essay in Schaff’s honor (“The Schaff Prize in Church History”),²⁴⁹ and in December 1892 formally feted Schaff as the one to whom the Society owed its existence.²⁵⁰

An experimental union of ASCH in its early years with the American Historical Association was short-lived.²⁵¹ J. Franklin Jameson later explained one reason for the failed merger: the Smithsonian, linked to the AHA, feared that Congress would not publish the Annual Reports of the AHA (what would become the Journal of the American Historical Association) at government expense if Christian theological materials were included.²⁵² Church historians, one suspects, were too confessional for historians at colleges and universities who were struggling to establish their discipline in the academy as a science. In any event, the two societies broke official ties in 1906, and ASCH was reconstituted as an independent organization.²⁵³

SCHAFF AND THE NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS SERIES

In the 1880s, Schaff undertook to organize and edit two series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Schaff planned to bring out about twenty-five volumes with the Christian Literature Company of Buffalo, the company that had earlier published the Ante-Nicene Fathers series edited by Arthur Cleveland Coxe.²⁵⁴ Schaff hoped to use some translations from the Tractarians’ Oxford Library of the Fathers, although he also solicited many new translations. Schaff himself was actively involved in Series 2 of NPNF only through Volume 2.²⁵⁵

The object of the series, Schaff wrote, “is historical, without any sectarian or partisan aim”²⁵⁶—unlike the Oxford Library, which had “an apologetic and dogmatic purpose” (namely, “to furnish authentic proof for the supposed or real agreement of the Anglo-Catholic school with the faith and practice of the ancient church before the Greek schism”²⁵⁷). In the promotional advertisement for the series, Schaff stated that the volumes would sell for $3.00 apiece.²⁵⁸

In 1885, Schaff solicited British and American contributors²⁵⁹ and devised a “Preliminary Prospectus.” He asked potential contributors to declare which patristic texts they proposed to translate afresh or to rework from earlier translations. Schaff allowed five years for the contributors to complete their tasks, but hoped for an earlier publication date. With the “Prospectus,” he enclosed a letter from the Christian Literature Company stating financial arrangements for the contributors.²⁶⁰ The “Prospectus” reveals that several patristic writers that Schaff had intended to include never made the Series (e.g., Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus Confessor, and Photius).²⁶¹

Schaff originally hoped that (for example) Arthur Cleveland Coxe would take the Canons of the Ecumenical Councils and Vincent of Lerins’s Commonitorium; Benjamin B. Warfield would tackle Theodore of Mopsuestia; William Sanday, Hilary and Lucifer of Cagliari; and H. B. Swete, some of the Cappadocians’ treatises and John of Damascus’ On the Orthodox Faith.²⁶² Schaff asked John Henry Newman to revise and edit his translation of Athanasius for the American series; Newman responded that his failing eyesight would not permit his participation.²⁶³ In the end, new contributors had to be solicited, as some of those whom Schaff had originally approached either declined or failed to fulfill their obligations.

The first series, featuring works by Augustine and Chrysostom, appeared between late 1886 and 1889 in 14 volumes.²⁶⁴ Schaff himself wrote the “Prolegomena” to Augustine and to Chrysostom.²⁶⁵ Although he used some of the Oxford Library of the Fathers’ translations of Chrysostom’s writings,²⁶⁶ he solicited new translations of Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood, The Fallen Theodore, and Letters, Tracts, and Special Homilies.²⁶⁷ Schaff also paid his son Anselm, who apparently lacked other remunerative employment, to read proof in 1887—the “best work I can provide for him,” Schaff wrote to his more scholarly son, David.²⁶⁸

The second series followed, with Schaff’s pupil (and soon-to-be successor) Arthur Cushman McGiffert contributing the first volume on Eusebius.²⁶⁹ Schaff confided to McGiffert that he had taken on “this elephant” in part as a way “to give some of our most promising students useful work and a chance to build up a literary reputation and to get an historical professorship”²⁷⁰: Schaff here covertly signaled McGiffert himself.

On leave in Europe in 1890, Schaff kept abreast of publication details.²⁷¹ By 1892, he reported, the first series was now complete, and four volumes of the second series published.²⁷² In the end, the publisher would not let Schaff have the fifteen volumes he wanted for the second series, but only thirteen.²⁷³

Along the way, the project encountered financial problems. In 1888, Schaff feared that the publisher would “break down,” having spent “$100,000 with little prospect of a speedy return.”²⁷⁴ The next year saw Schaff asking colleagues to invest in the Christian Literature Company (his requests apparently produced few or no results).²⁷⁵ In June 1889, Schaff decided that he himself should “give pecuniary aid to the publisher to enable him at least to publish the Greek historians.”²⁷⁶ He contributed $5000 of his own money for the series—a large sum for a professor at that time—so as not to “disappoint or break faith with the contributors.”²⁷⁷ Whatever Schaff’s deficiencies as a creative scholar, his service to the field was remarkable.

Volumes of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series were widely hailed in the press. To give just one example: the reviewer for the Boston Zion’s Herald, commenting on the volume containing Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on I John, and the Soliloquies, wrote, “The American Church can never discharge its obligation to Philip Schaff for the work of authorship which he has wrought, inspired, and edited.” His erudition is especially valuable, the reviewer continued, in that “he has no tendency either to ecclesiastical narrowness or theological hobbies.”²⁷⁸

SCHAFF EULOGIZED

After Schaff’s death in 1893, George Park Fisher of Yale recalled his “unfailing vivacity, his amiable temper, his generous recognition of contemporary scholars in the same field with himself, and his loyal friendship.” Schaff was “a living, visible link, binding us to Germany, the land of scholars, the country which to many of us is an intellectual fatherland.” Fisher praised Schaff for his catholic spirit—and for remaining “an historian, not an antiquary.” Noting Schaff’s willingness to take on large projects even later in life (including the NPNF series), Fisher predicted that Schaff’s History of the Church would stand as “the most lasting monument of a scholar who served his generation in the use of remarkable powers and with unwearied industry.”²⁷⁹

Schaff’s Union colleague Marvin Vincent eulogized Schaff in a talk at the Century Club in New York—the locale itself an indicator of Schaff’s prestige among wealthy and influential New Yorkers. Vincent claimed that it was due to Schaff that “a broader learning and a bolder and more independent thinking are fast becoming at home amid conditions where they originally appeared as dangerous novelties, were eyed with suspicion, or fought with dogged persistence of ignorance.”

At the time of Schaff’s arrival in the United States, Vincent continued, the influence of the German school was scarcely felt here—but men like Schaff and Henry Smith, German-trained, kept “steady hands on the floodgates through which, a little later, the tide of German thought came pouring into the square enclosures of New England metaphysics and theology.”²⁸⁰ In other words, Schaff and Smith moderated the entrance of contemporary German thought into American intellectual life so as to preserve traditional Christian interests.²⁸¹

At the December 27, 1893 meeting of the American Society of Church History, representatives from various confessions (including the Roman Catholic²⁸²) praised Schaff’s accomplishments. Methodist Bishop John Fletcher Hurst compared Schaff’s efforts to unite Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon theology to Jerome’s linking of East and West and to Origen’s union of three continents (Schaff however, unlike Origen, mercifully had “no touch of Oriental fancy”). Schaff, Hurst proclaimed, will be remembered as “the first to bring to the Anglo-Saxon mind the treasures of the Fatherland.”²⁸³

George Park Fisher (1827–1909)

George Fisher—whom historian Roland Bainton describes as a “mellowed Puritan”²⁸⁴—was born in Massachusetts in 1827, graduating from Brown in 1847. At Brown he was introduced to historical studies by Professor William Gammell, under whose tutelage he wrote a paper on Roger Williams, based on manuscripts of Williams’s correspondence that had recently come to the Rhode Island Historical Society.²⁸⁵ After one year in the Yale Theological Department, he decamped to Andover Seminary, graduating in 1851. He then went to Germany, studying at Halle in 1852–1853. From Germany, he was called back to a position at Yale.²⁸⁶ His entire subsequent career was spent at New Haven.

Fisher kept a travel diary (now in the Yale Divinity School archives) detailing his year in Europe. Arriving in Halle in June 1852, he learned that the university had only recently “recovered” from the prevailing Rationalism of German universities. Earlier, anyone who showed a leaning toward Christianity, he was told, had been deemed a fanatic.²⁸⁷

Fisher began attending lectures at Halle a few days after his arrival. He confessed in his diary that he “understood precious little”—but within a week or so, he was able to catch an idea here or there.²⁸⁸ He steadily improved in the coming months, eventually translating German texts for American audiences. One example is his translation of an article by August Neander (“The Relation of the Grecian to Christian Ethics”), prefaced by a long introduction that Fisher offered as “a contribution to Christian evidences.”²⁸⁹ After Fisher assumed the chair of Ecclesiastical History at Yale, the number of books by German scholars that students in the Theological Department checked out from the library increased significantly.²⁹⁰

Many aspects of German university education—for example, the lack of examinations—required adjustment on Fisher’s part.²⁹¹ Several professors at Halle, however, befriended him and helped him to understand the German system. One of these, Heinrich Leo, liked to discuss all things American with him,²⁹² while August Tholuck, as was his custom with American students, went on walks during which he explained the mysteries of theological parties in Germany.²⁹³ In 1853, Tholuck gave Fisher letters of introduction to professors in Rome, Basel, Bern, Heidelberg, and Bonn.²⁹⁴ In Germany, Fisher, like other American evangelical students, developed a suspicion of “Pantheism” and the Tübingen School that remained with him in later years, as did a general distaste for radical biblical criticism.

In December 1853, President Theodore Dwight Woolsey of Yale invited Fisher to accept a position in theology. Woolsey bluntly admits that there had been a delay with the appointment because a few professors were “somewhat reluctant to call a man not a graduate of the College,” but all now seemed ready to concur. The post involved offering instruction in “Natural Theology and the Evidences”; in addition, Fisher would preach and serve as pastor of the university church, officiating at least once a week at prayers. He would receive $1300 annually—and salaries are soon to be raised to $1500 (“beyond a question,” Woolsey assures him). Woolsey claims the faculty’s agreement to Fisher’s appointment shows that Providence must be at work!²⁹⁵

Fisher’s appointment came over the objections of Noah Porter, who for two decades had taught courses in “Natural Theology and Evidences of Christianity” in the College. Porter reasoned that since Fisher had no particular philosophical training, he should not be allowed to teach theology.²⁹⁶ (Porter apparently suspected Fisher of wanting to teach philosophy—his own turf.²⁹⁷) Both appealed to President Woolsey. Fisher hotly rejected Porter’s implication that he was to be “merely like a city missionary or tractdistributor in college—prevented from guiding by thorough and careful discussions the religious opinions of the students—prevented from assailing ‘philosophical’ and all other unbelief.” It appears that Fisher won this dispute, as the catalogue for 1855–1856 lists him as teaching “Natural Theology and Evidences of Christianity” to the senior class.²⁹⁸ In 1858–1859, Fisher is listed as the Livingston Professor of Divinity,²⁹⁹ and in 1861 he was awarded the new Street chair in Ecclesiastical History.³⁰⁰ With this appointment, Fisher resigned his position as pastor of the university church, although he continued to preach throughout the difficult years of the Civil War.³⁰¹ In 1895, Fisher became Dean of the theological faculty (i.e., the Divinity School), a post he held for five years.³⁰²

Upon Fisher’s retirement in 1900–1901, the Yale Corporation noted that he had given Yale more years of service—forty-six—than any other professor (excepting the “elder Silliman”) since the College had been founded, and praised his “expansive learning,” “truly Catholic spirit,” and “temperate attitude as a Theologian.”³⁰³ He had taught (after his seven years in the College) in the Theological Department from 1861 to 1901.³⁰⁴ His writings, one commentator claims, “struck the theological and apologetic note, with which was combined the historical approach.”³⁰⁵ After Fisher’s death in December 1909,³⁰⁶ a memorial window was dedicated in his honor. At the dedication ceremony, he was described as neither a liberal nor a conservative, but a middle-of-the-roader.³⁰⁷ Indeed, compared with the other professors here described, he seems rather bland. Since there is no biography of him, we lack details of his life and work that would have sharpened our picture.

Fisher was esteemed outside Yale as well. In 1873, he was invited to become a member of the Philosophical Society of Great Britain.³⁰⁸ He received seven honorary degrees.³⁰⁹ (President Charles Eliot of Harvard himself wrote to convey Harvard’s wish to confer an honorary D.D. on him during its 250th anniversary celebration.³¹⁰) In 1897, Fisher served as President of the American Historical Association, delivering an address on “The Function of the Historian as a Judge of Historic Persons.”³¹¹

Fisher also was an editor of The New Englander, which advertised itself as disavowing “allegiance to any party in theology or politics.” Although the editors claimed that the journal would discuss issues of “public interest in literature, science, and philosophy” beyond the realm of theology, they also assured readers that it “will not be inattentive to the various assaults of rationalism against revealed religion, or to the position of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.”³¹² Several of Fisher’s essays were published in this journal.

Fisher wrote many lengthy serial articles, some of which, when combined, constitute book-length treatises. Of his published books, I here note the following: Essays on the Supernatural Origins of Christianity (1865);³¹³ The Beginnings of Christianity with A View of the State of the Roman World at the Birth of Christ (1877); Discussions in History and Theology (1880, a collection of his essays); The Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief (1883, another collection of essays); Outlines of Universal History (1885); History of the Christian Church (1887);³¹⁴ A Brief History of the Nations and of Their Place in Civilization (1896); and History of Christian Doctrine (1896). Several of his scholarly articles, more than his textbooks, show his interest in the Jewish streams of early Christianity and in combating modern German criticism; these essays shall be considered in the chapters that follow.

Colleagues elsewhere knew Fisher as a hard and rapid worker. James B. Angell, President of the University of Michigan, wrote to Fisher that his Outlines of Universal History (1885) has “work enough in it to break the back of a horse. Where under the sun do you find time to turn off books so fast? And when do you get the patience to accomplish such a job as this?”³¹⁵ Daniel Gilman of Johns Hopkins deemed Fisher’s History of Christian Doctrine his best book, and wondered how its author had found time to write it, since Fisher had other duties associated with “an important chair.”³¹⁶ Likewise, A. M. Fairburn of Mansfield College, Oxford wrote that the History of Christian Doctrine was “the best book in English on the subject, and for students altogether suitable”—adding his relief that Fisher had “departed from the bad example set by Harnack.”³¹⁷

Ephraim Emerton (1851–1935)

Ephraim Emerton, the son of a pharmicist,³¹⁸ was born in 1851 in Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College in 1871, and attended Harvard Law School. He served for a time as secretary to the mayor of Boston, Henry L. Pierce, and worked as a reporter for the Boston Advertiser to earn money for study in Germany. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1876. While in Germany, he attended the (senior) Droysen’s “practicecourse” (or seminar) in Berlin on historical method, in which, he later reported, students engaged in “unrestrained criticism” of each other’s papers “to the verge of savagery.”³¹⁹ Returning from Europe, he was made Instructor of German (1876–1878) and History (1878–1882) in Harvard College. Emerton’s specialization was early medieval history, not then a typical subject at American colleges. In 1882, he was plucked from his duties in the College by President Charles Eliot to be the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School, a post he held until his resignation in 1918.³²⁰

Emerton was a founding member of the American Historical Association; at its organizational meeting in 1884, he was one of only nine men present who held the rank of “Professor of History.”³²¹ A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Emerton also served as President of the American Society of Church History in 1921.³²² Since no biography remains of Emerton, many personal details of his life and teaching remain unknown.

Among Emerton’s writings are an interesting essay on “The Practical Method in Higher Historical Instruction” (1883); a textbook entitled An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (375–814) (1888, 1896); Medieval Europe (1893); Unitarian Thought (1911, a scathing reflection on evangelicals); and a book of essays recounting aspects of his life as a professor of history, Learning and Living: Academic Essays (1921). His medieval and early modern interests came more prominently to the fore in his mature years, with books entitled Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1899); Beginnings of Modern Europe (1250–1450) (1917); the Defensor Pacis of Marsiglio of Padua (1920); Humanism and Tyranny (1925); and an edition and translation of the Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII (1932)—works whose subjects indicate that even by the early twentieth century, scholarship on history was not yet strictly regulated by specialization. It is notable that Emerton is the only one of the professors here discussed who did not attend divinity school and who, as a Unitarian, stood outside the evangelical nexus of Presbyterians and Congregationalists.³²³

These six professors pioneered the teaching of church history in America. The problems they encountered in developing a field that was new to Americans and that lacked most of the supports that professors today take for granted are the subject of the next chapter, on the material “infrastructure” (more precisely, on the lack of it) that attended the teaching of church history in nineteenth-century America.