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CHAPTER 3

Defending the Faith: European Theories

and American Professors

What a sequel and summing up of the history of Christianity would that be, to say that “God sent his Son into the world,” “that the world through him might be saved,” but the Tübingen School and British “Essays and Reviews” defeated that purpose, and it had to be abandoned?

—Frederic Hedge (1864)

Although nineteenth-century American seminary professors looked to Europe for scholarship, textbooks, and teaching methods, they recognized not only the differences between European universities and American colleges and seminaries, but also the dangers—most keenly felt by the professors at Union and Yale—to which American evangelical piety might be exposed by contact with them.¹ These perceived dangers centered on Infidelity (often linked to Pantheism, an offshoot of Hegelian philosophy) and Materialism (largely Comtian Positivism), as well as on a more radical biblical criticism than most American teachers could countenance.² Although Germany was the site from which the alleged dangers most notably emanated, Britain contributed its share by way of Essays and Reviews and Bishop J. W. Colenso’s books.³ The professors’ approach to early Christian history was decisively shaped by their reaction to these larger critical currents, attempting to appropriate what was “good” in them, while decisively rejecting aspects that might lead American Protestants astray.⁴

The professors stood at a crossroads: themselves educated under the assumptions of British empiricism and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy—as noted above, Smith taught these subjects—they now encountered German metaphysics and French social theory.⁵ Whereas (in E. Brooks Holifield’s words) “Scottish philosophy seemed tailor-made for a theology that would show the rationality of faith while preserving the necessity for revelation,”⁶ Continental approaches might pose more intellectual difficulties. Nineteenth-century evangelicals of an intellectual cast, George Marsden notes, seemed unaware that their theoretical assumptions, often unexamined, would soon be rendered dubious.⁷ Positioned between “Scotland” and “Germany,” in effect, the Union and Yale professors responded ambiguously both to philosophical challenges and to those regarding the authorship, dating, context, and significance of the New Testament and other early Christian writings. For them, the category of inspiration decisively separated the Church Fathers from the writers of the New Testament books.

In the next sections, I selectively cite examples from those professors who dealt most fully with these issues.

Infidelity, Pantheism, and Materialism

Henry Smith at Union and George Fisher at Yale, in particular, were wary that European Pantheism, Infidelity, and Materialism might undermine their students’ faith.⁸ Well known in America for his expertise in Continental philosophy, Smith had attended lectures in Germany given by Hegel’s noted expositor, Friedrich Trendelenberg. Smith’s articles in the New American Cyclopaedia on Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Pantheism impressed American colleagues.⁹ Indeed, the charge to Smith at his inauguration as Professor of Theology at Union explicitly cautioned him against displaying any favor to Skepticism, Radicalism, Romanism, Materialism, and Pantheism.¹⁰

In Smith’s view, modern Infidelity—covering both skepticism and unbelief—assumed three forms: in England, Rationalism; in France, Atheism; and in Germany, Pantheism. The subtle and persuasive “weapons” and “arts” of Infidelity, especially in its German guise, must be studied carefully by Christians who wish to mount a challenge:¹¹ mere denunciation, “the indiscriminate censure of all that is German,” will not suffice.¹² Labeling philosophies “German and transcendental” does not defeat them. Challengers must, Smith insisted, demonstrate that the ideas are “radically unsound” and “essentially unphilosophical.”¹³

Smith believed that Christianity in Germany was facing its “fiercest assault”: Pantheism had promoted “Revolutionary democratic opinions, and foul-mouthed blasphemy.”¹⁴ He worried that “applauded schemes of infidelity … assume that the age of theology is past.… They give what they call a philosophical sense to the Christian doctrines, turning realities into fictions, and destroying all in Christianity that has been the source of its life and power.”¹⁵

Ancient methods of apologetics, Smith insisted, were too feeble to answer modern philosophical problems. Students must not imagine that Butler’s Analogy—the text used in courses on Christian apologetics—could meet “the questions raised by Hegel and Bauer, by Darwin and Spencer.”¹⁶ Nor is the ancient orthodox Trinitarianism that condemned Arianism, Sabellianism, and tritheism sufficient to demolish the “humanitarian view” associated with Pantheism. Although Christianity is stronger now than ever, Smith claimed, its “assailants” are likewise more powerful.¹⁷

The conflict with Pantheism remained Smith’s special concern.¹⁸ Pantheism he defined as “that modification of religious belief, or philosophical speculation, which affirms that God is all; ‘all’ being here taken as the unity, which underlies, and is expressed in, individual, multiple existences.” Pantheism claims that there is “but one substance, or spirit, in the universe, which alone has real and permanent being.”¹⁹ Hegelian philosophy was the central culprit.²⁰ Smith cited Hegel’s claims that the highest problems of philosophy and theology are the same; that his system was merely biblical theology in a new guise; that to know God—“Absolute Spirit”—is to know Hegelian philosophy. Pantheism as the “absolute philosophy,” Smith objected, asserts that it contains the truth of Christianity—but all other truth as well.²¹

Despite Smith’s sometimes more generous reading of Hegel, he registered many criticisms of Hegel’s system. First, it has no true doctrine of creation. “Negation,” a moment in the dialectic, is not a productive force. It is incapable of showing how matter came to be. The creation of the “real world,” Smith insisted, requires “power-force.” Pantheism teaches emanation, not creation.²²

Second, Hegel discounts the uniqueness of Christianity and the Christian understanding of deity. For Hegel, Smith charged, Christianity becomes the mere “flower” that is developed out of all religions, not “a new and divine and supernatural order of things.” Pantheism concedes that Christianity is true only if it is taken philosophically. God is accorded no existence apart from the world, finding his “consciousness” only in man.²³ The Incarnation is not uniquely located in Jesus, but in the “generic unison of divinity and humanity, found in the race as a whole,” while the Trinity is the “rational process” of God’s development.²⁴ “It is atheism itself,” Smith claimed, “for it virtually denies the being, the power, the providence of God.”²⁵ Is God just “another name for the Absolute Unknown?”²⁶ As a system, he concluded, Pantheism is complete—and dangerous.²⁷

Pantheism’s consequences for ethics likewise troubled Smith. On the theoretical level, he claimed, it denies human freedom (“because all is development”), individual immortality (because only the race survives), and the reality of sin. On the practical level, Pantheism, in the company of materialistic and socialistic philosophy, teaches that this present life and the pursuit of happiness is all. Allegedly the “most ideal of systems,” Pantheism produces sensual men. In practice, it is a new form of Epicureanism. It encourages humans to aim for a “high social state,” rather than to concede that earthly life is simply “the portal to another world.”²⁸ Elsewhere, Smith more generously admitted that some “infidels” are moral and embrace “natural religion”—without acknowledging its source in the Bible, as they should.²⁹

Materialism, that is, Positivism, was also of grave concern to Smith.³⁰ In 1868, Union sponsored James McCosh’s (subsequently published) Ely Lectures on “Christianity and Positivism.”³¹ Smith had warned students and readers against Materialism (holding that “mind is a modification of matter”³²) even before McCosh’s lectures roused greater interest. As a philosophical theory, Smith claimed, Materialism is atheistic in its practical results. Identified with “the Compte [sic] school,” Materialism “asserts that all facts, events, and laws can be ultimately explained by matter and its modifications.” Spirit, in this view, is merely a “mode of matter.” The soul is conceived as a material entity that “comes and goes with the body.” For Materialists, Smith charged, sensation alone is the source of knowledge; the moral law, only a modification of natural phenomena; and God, simply the name for the ultimate unconscious power of nature.³³

Against these Materialist assumptions, Smith armed his students with Idealist rebuttals. Matter, the substratum of all phenomena, he told them, is “itself an idea of the mind,” the latter being the productive “powerforce” of creation. Materialism fails in that it cannot explain the phenomenon of life, of “living organism.” Christians, by contrast, reject the notion that the human soul and mind are simply modifications of matter.³⁴

George Fisher of Yale likewise warned students and readers against a Pantheism that “hypostatizes” the laws of nature “as if they were a selfactive being” and resolves history into “the movement of a great machine.”³⁵ Pantheism, he charged, obviates the notion of a personal God. It denies humanity’s distinctiveness (resolving “personal being into a … transient phase of an impersonal essence”) and the notion of mind as “a separate, substantial, undivided entity.” Pantheists and atheistic Rationalists rashly claim that they alone own science, assuming that the “supernatural is unhistorical.”³⁶ Moreover, Pantheism undermines morality by dissolving the “absolute antithesis between good and evil,” “the bonds of obligation.”³⁷ Fisher cautioned his audience against trying “to evolve the Christian religion out of consciousness,” as do German Pantheists: Christianity’s distinctive essence cannot be identified with “a process of thought.”³⁸

Philosophical Materialism had a stormy history at Yale. In the 1870s, President Noah Porter protested Professor William Graham Sumner’s teaching of Herbert Spencer and Comte; he specifically objected to Sumner’s use of Spencer’s Study of Sociology as a textbook.³⁹ Although Sumner was an ordained Episcopal priest, he deemed Spencer’s book, despite its religious implications, the best available for teaching the new subject of sociology. The controversy escalated in the public press and became a major moment in the struggle for professorial freedom.⁴⁰ Fisher apparently sided with the conservative Yale President. The best refutation of Materialism (“a gloomy and unnatural creed”), Fisher advised, simply attends to “the agency of mind” and registers human moral feelings of compassion, selfforgetfulness, obligation, conscience, guilt, and remorse, which, he claimed, cannot be accounted for on Materialist grounds.⁴¹ If Materialism were to prevail, then (as with Pantheism) sensual appetite and “earthly passions” could “gain an undisputed ascendancy, and overturn at last the social fabric.” Fisher charged that Comte, an “avowed Atheist,” deems religion a delusion stemming from humanity’s “childhood,” a faltering, primitive attempt to understand nature. Comte thus overlooks the deep power that religion has exerted in human history, its innate and ineradicable presence in human souls. Fisher, however, cautioned ministers against launching diatribes against “materialistic infidelity” that make Christianity seem in need of elaborate defense: Christianity can stand on its own. Knowledge of physical discoveries and speculation, he counseled, is “not indispensable” for a preacher.⁴² Arguing with Comtians is simply counter-productive.

With these charges, the American professors defended the unique status of Christianity: it did not evolve from “lower” religions nor can it be derived from mental processes. They merged traditional Christian notions of revelation and creation with an Idealist vision of human nature as spiritual and “mental,” against the claims of Materialism and Positivism. These views comprised one aspect of the professors’ “defense of the faith” that informed their teaching of history.⁴³

Biblical Scholarship

For the professors, an equally important danger posed by European scholarship lodged in the Higher Criticism of the Bible, especially that of the New Testament. Surveying biblical scholarship in nineteenth-century America, Mark Noll calls the early Protestant seminaries (Andover, Princeton, Yale) “centers of advanced study designed to de-fang criticism and to absorb the new facts into orthodoxy.”⁴⁴ Although Noll’s claim may overstate the motivation for the founding of those seminaries—to Samuel Miller of the Theological Seminary at Princeton, for example, “biblical criticism” was a seemingly unknown category⁴⁵—it perceptively describes how the nineteenth-century professors, “post-Miller,” operated.

While the American professors appropriated some few aspects of European criticism, they vigorously attacked points they found offensive to the evangelical sympathies still dominant in mid-nineteenth century America. Although they had gleaned the notion of historical development from German scholars, they shied from applying it to New Testament texts. Development, they believed, should be limited to the study of post-New Testament Christianity.⁴⁶

That the Gospels were not composed by eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life, that Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles, that the New Testament was to be studied not as a divine, incomparable revelation, but (merely) as a source for the history of the first and second centuries: these propositions were strongly rejected by professors in America. Although German criticism was the central offender, the British scholars who compiled Essays and Reviews and Bishop J. W. Colenso also troubled American sensibilities. While the larger public became more cognizant of changed approaches to the Bible only in the 1870s and 1880s,⁴⁷ the Union and Yale professors recognized the new critical treatment of the Bible earlier—even as they strove to fend off its most damaging effects.

German Universities and American Professors

The Union and Yale professors of church history spent much of their scholarly careers attempting to counter the alleged dangers and excesses of German biblical criticism. German was, of course, Philip Schaff’s native tongue,⁴⁸ yet the other professors, as students in Germany, soon became sufficiently fluent to translate, appropriate, and critique German scholarship.

Here we should recall the professors’ early encounters with Germany. Of the three on whom I shall here focus, Henry Smith studied at Halle and Berlin from 1838 to 1840;⁴⁹ Philip Schaff, at Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin from 1837–1842 (from 1842–1844, serving as a Privatdozent in Berlin);⁵⁰ and George Fisher, at Halle from 1852 to early 1854.⁵¹ There they encountered German biblical criticism (especially that of the Tübingen School) and theories of Christianity’s historical development.

At mid-century, of the German Protestant universities, Halle—where Smith, Schaff, and Fisher studied—boasted the largest number of theology students.⁵² Early in the century, Halle had renounced its Pietistic origins and embraced Rationalism; it was later alleged that only five out of 900 students in that era affirmed the divinity of Christ.⁵³ (As late as 1852, August Tholuck of Halle told George Fisher that if a decade earlier he had preached the sermon on the devil that he had just delivered, he would have been pelted.⁵⁴) Piety at Halle slowly revived, influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology and August Neander’s historical studies.⁵⁵ At mid-century, the newly pious atmosphere of Halle and its evangelically inclined professors—especially Tholuck—suited American students well.⁵⁶

Halle’s piety, however, was offset by the radical criticism emanating from Tübingen’s David Friedrich Strauss and Ferdinand Christian Baur, whose views were strongly opposed by the American professors.⁵⁷ Back in America, some years later, they also took up scholarly arms against Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus. Their conservative approach to the New Testament sat uncomfortably alongside their more sympathetic assessment, nurtured in Germany, of historical development in post-New Testament Christianity. The New Testament, they averred, was not to be subjected to the same critical scrutiny as other ancient texts, such as those of the patristic era. Only at century’s end would more critical treatments receive a friendlier reception in America. First, to the “radical” criticism.

Strauss, Baur, and Renan

In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu and in 1863, Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus shook traditional Christian approaches to the Gospels. Translations made these works available to the larger reading public: Strauss’s book was translated into English (by George Eliot) in 1846; Renan’s, in 1864.⁵⁸ F. C. Baur’s writings, however, tended to remain the purview of scholars, although the professors that I here consider introduced his theories to a wider audience.

DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS

Strauss’s Leben Jesu was one of the most-criticized books of the nineteenth century⁵⁹—indeed, it cost its author his position as a Privatdozent at Tübingen.⁶⁰ As Karl Barth comments, Leben Jesu made Strauss “at once and for many years to come the most famous theologian in Germany and ensured that he would never in his life be considered for any post in the church or in the academic world.”⁶¹

Adopting a Hegelian framework, Strauss acknowledged religion—especially Christianity—as a perception of truth, not in the form of Idea (as in philosophy), but in images.⁶² Supermundane beings and a heavenly afterlife are not religion’s true province, but present spiritual realities as moments in the eternally pulsating life of the Divine Spirit. The essence of the Christian faith, in his view, exists independently of biblical criticism and is not shaken by it; the miracles, for example, convey eternal truths, not historical facts.⁶³

Strauss’s “mythical” approach to the life of Jesus was influenced by studies on myth in various non-Christian religions. Myth, according to Strauss, relinquishes the historical reality of the Gospel narratives in order to preserve their inherent spirit and truth.⁶⁴ Albert Schweitzer explains Strauss’s concept:

It is nothing else than the clothing in historic form of religious ideas, shaped by the unconsciously inventive power of legend, and embodied in a historic personality.… we are almost compelled to assume that the historic Jesus will meet us in the garb of Old Testament Messianic ideas and primitive Christian expectations.⁶⁵

After listing various “negative” and “positive” factors that contribute to the mythic quality of a narrative, Strauss concluded that when several of these factors converge, the account is probably unhistorical.⁶⁶

In Leben Jesu, Strauss appropriated the Hegelian dialectic to map modern scholarship on the Gospels: the “thesis” of the supernaturalistic explanation met its “antithesis” in a naturalistic or rationalistic explanation, the two canceling each other out and making way for a new “synthesis,” the mythical.⁶⁷ Whereas Rationalist scholars such as H. E. G. Paulus had affirmed the historicity of the Gospel narratives but devised naturalistic explanations for them (a procedure, in Barth’s view, that rendered “things a trifle shabby”), Strauss questioned their historical reliability.⁶⁸ In addition, Strauss faulted Rationalist scholars’ depiction of Jesus: the Jesus who is (merely) a “distinguished man” is not the Christ in whom the church believes.⁶⁹ Strauss found Kant’s approach to Christianity as a system of morals—offering devotees only “obligation,” not “consolation”—deeply unsatisfying.⁷⁰

The Gospel writers, Strauss claimed, although not eyewitnesses to the events of Jesus’ life, should not be charged with fraudulent intent. They simply filled up historical gaps with imaginary circumstances.⁷¹ Strauss takes aim especially at Schleiermacher’s belief that John, the most important Gospel, was written by an eyewitness:⁷² for Strauss, the discourses assigned to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel are sheer fabrications. John’s inclusion of such unlikely scenes as the resurrection of Lazarus should convince readers of the Gospel’s “unauthenticity.”⁷³

Much myth in the Gospels, Strauss argued, stemmed from the Evangelists’ desire to make Jesus’ words and deeds echo, but surpass, heroes of the Hebrew Bible such as Moses and Elijah. Strauss sharply rebuked theologians (especially Schleiermacher) who divorced Jesus from his Jewish milieu.⁷⁴ The miracle stories, for example, should be understood as the Gospel writers’ need to depict Jesus as conforming to Old Testament types. Jesus himself, Strauss argued, did not give much weight to miracles: did he not declare, “no sign is to be given to this generation”? This claim, when coupled with the silence regarding Jesus’ miracles in Acts and Paul’s epistles, should cast doubt on the historicity of the miracle stories.⁷⁵

Likewise, Strauss argued against both the miraculous explanation of Jesus’ resurrection and the Rationalist claim that Jesus had not died, but merely returned after a few days’ disappearance. On Strauss’s reading, the story was devised to fulfill Isaiah’s notion of the Suffering Servant and such Old Testament verses as “God will not leave his soul in Hell [Sheol].” By “resurrection,” Jesus meant that his cause would continue after his death, but his disciples misunderstood his words to imply a corporeal resuscitation.⁷⁶ Although Strauss attributed a messianic consciousness to Jesus from the time of his baptism, he also claimed that divinity is instantiated in the human race as a whole, not in Jesus alone.⁷⁷

Horton Harris, historian of the Tübingen School, argues that Strauss’s Leben Jesu made possible that School’s development: the book changed Tübingen overnight “from a centre of orthodoxy into a centre of heresy.”⁷⁸ Tübingen, we shall see, stood as a blight on American piety.

FERDINAND CHRISTIAN BAUR AND THE TÜBINGEN SCHOOL

If Strauss’s mythical (and later, Renan’s novelistic) approach could be dismissed as deeply unhistorical, the arguments of Ferdinand Christian Baur and his followers more seriously disturbed American scholars. Tübingen studies of early Christianity were centered in Baur. The Tübingen School, Harris claims, was “the most important theological event in the whole history of theology from the Reformation to the present day,” in two decades changing the entire course of critical study of the New Testament. All nineteenth-century theologians, regardless of which stripe, lived under its shadow.⁷⁹

Baur posed an even more ominous threat than Strauss or Renan, given his more detailed scheme for relating the New Testament to the emerging Christian church. Already in 1831, Baur had startled readers with his initial investigations into the parties that had warred in the Corinthian church, their slide into opposing Pauline and “Jewish” factions, and their reconciliation in the developing Catholic church of the late second and early third centuries.⁸⁰ In the next years, Baur continued to ruffle traditional Christian scholars with his claims regarding the “tendencies” that divided the early Christian communities and his insistence that Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles.⁸¹ He investigated Gnosticism and Manicheanism, as well as the New Testament books (most of which he dated later than did traditional scholars) and developments in post-biblical Christian history.⁸² Baur shattered Christians’ assumptions regarding the harmony of the early Christian church and its narrators.

Although Baur’s Church History of the First Three Centuries (1853) was translated into English only in 1878, the American professors here considered were familiar with his writings on the New Testament and early Christianity long before.⁸³ Despite their denunciations, Baur set their agenda: in reaction, they defended traditional views of the dating and authorship of the New Testament books and the development of second-century Christianity. In fact, Schaff’s History of the Apostolic Church has been called “a conservative rebuttal to the Tübingen School’s rival interpretation of apostolic Christianity.”⁸⁴

Baur’s working assumptions were anathema to American evangelicals. In effect, he broke down the protective barrier cordoning off the study of church history from general history⁸⁵—and the New Testament from other early Christian literature. He assumed that for scholarly purposes, the New Testament and second-century literature should be examined together as a source for understanding Christianity’s early development. He explicitly contested the claim that second-century Christian texts differed qualitatively from the canonical books: the only people who could think this, he remarked, are “those who hold the most extravagant view of the inspiration of the whole canonical collection.”⁸⁶ (“Those,” it would appear, include the evangelical church historians here considered.) On Baur’s reading, the New Testament, from an academic perspective, was simply a source for the historical study of primitive Christianity.

A second assumption that disturbed the American professors was Baur’s insistence that a historical interpretation of the Bible should exclude all supernatural or miraculous elements.⁸⁷ To take Jesus’ birth and incarnation as miracle, Baur argued, is to step “outside all historical connection”: “miracle” is not a historical category. Jesus’ resurrection thus “lies outside the sphere of historical inquiry”—although Baur conceded that the disciples’ belief in his return was necessary for Christianity’s development.⁸⁸

Third, Baur posited a strong element of conflict in primitive Christianity. The earliest Jewish followers of Jesus, he argued, soon engaged in battle with Paulinists; only through concessions on each side were the two approaches reconciled in the Catholic Church in the late second century.⁸⁹ The Jewish element, in Baur’s view, remained dominant for a long time. Although the “mythico-historical” tradition from Acts through the first Christian centuries portrayed Peter and Paul as inseparable even in death, its picture was unconvincing, given the strong evidence for conflict between their respective parties.⁹⁰ Baur’s scheme of conflict and belated resolution read early Christianity through the lens of the Hegelian dialectic: thesis and antithesis were resolved in a higher synthesis.⁹¹

Baur’s narration of early Christian development played havoc with the traditional dating of New Testament books: aside from the four Pauline epistles that he considered genuine, the only other New Testament book composed before 70 c.e., he argued, was the Apocalypse.⁹² (Baur held that only Romans [minus the last two chapters], Galatians, and I and II Corinthians were genuinely Pauline,⁹³ exhibiting the signs of Jewish-Gentile conflict that he considered hallmarks of the earliest Christian communities.⁹⁴) Baur dated the Pastoral Epistles—which most Christians then ascribed to Paul—to the late second century, when Gnosticism and Marcionism were present dangers and church offices more fully developed.⁹⁵

The Gospels, Baur claimed, reflect the (later) period in which they were written, not the time of Jesus. Their “tendencies” assist in their dating.⁹⁶ Among the four canonical Gospels, Baur granted priority and general trustworthiness to Matthew, whose original Jewish version he placed at the end of the first century.⁹⁷ Mark is indebted to Matthew; Luke, imbued with Paulinism, cannot be regarded as an independent source.⁹⁸

Furthermore, Baur stood against the Protestant predilection for making the Gospel of John the key to the other three. Attempting to harmonize the Synoptics’ depiction of Jesus with John’s exalted representation requires abandoning “all historical treatment of gospel history.” John, he argued, is not historical even in the “limited sense in which the Synoptics can be called historical.” As for authorship, Baur held that the “John” of Revelation was a Jewish-oriented follower of Jesus, a “pillar-apostle” who opposed Paul and became influential in Asia Minor. The Gospel of John, by contrast, written in the later second century, shows evidences of Gnosticism, Montanism, Greek thought (e.g., in the Logos doctrine), and the controversy over Passover—and is “conciliatory” in the dispute between Pauline and Jewish Christianity.⁹⁹ This Gospel, in Baur’s view, expresses the Western, Roman church’s position that the Last Supper was not a Passover meal: here, the breach with Judaism is complete. Despite the Fourth Gospel’s lack of historicity, Baur (like many Protestants of his time) called it “the purest expression of that higher form of the Christian consciousness.”¹⁰⁰ Thus for Baur the “higher form” is far from the earliest and cannot be claimed as historical. Origins do not imply value.

Baur also challenged the reliability of the book of Acts as a historical source, except insofar as it shows the developing conflict between Jewish and Gentile versions of Christianity, signaled by the account of Stephen.¹⁰¹ Baur explained why the author of Acts passed over the split in parties after the Jerusalem Council: he could not reconcile the opposition between Peter and Paul with the harmonizing tendency that suffuses his book.¹⁰²

Reconciliation of these opposed parties came gradually, in Baur’s view. Pauline universalism at length overcame Jewish “particularism.” The first practice to give way in “the absolute power of Judaism” was circumcision, replaced by baptism. Baur paralleled the tendency toward universalism that developed in the Roman Empire with Christianity’s attempt to overcome “all religious particularism.” Not only external factors, such as Roman transportation routes, “prepared” for Christianity. There were more “intimate” connections: in the Empire, “the barriers raised by national sentiment had been broken down” both inwardly and outwardly. The universalism of Christianity enabled it to be considered (in Hegelian parlance) the “Absolute Religion,” “elevated above the defects and limitations, the one-sidedness and finiteness, which constitute the particularism of other forms of religion.”¹⁰³

Christianity, Baur noted, had neither the many gods of pagan polytheism, nor the “outward rites and ordinances” to which both paganism and Judaism gave great attention. Nor did Christianity “identify itself with the positive authority of a purely traditional religion,” namely, Judaism. (Judaism’s role in the larger scheme of things, Baur bluntly stated, was to “fill up an interval.”) Although all religions seek communion with the supernatural, Christianity differs in its “spirituality,” its freedom from “everything merely external, sensuous, or material.” Nevertheless, it was important for Christianity’s historical development, in Baur’s view, that its “spiritual contents” were “clothed in the concrete form” of Jewish Messianic ideas.¹⁰⁴ Baur’s scheme emphasizes the all-important role of Judaism in primitive Christianity, but holds that the true, spiritual, essence of Christianity transcends all Jewish particularity. Christianity could become the “absolute,” universal religion when the Pauline “tendency” overcame some features of Jewish Christianity, and both were raised in a higher synthesis of the Catholic Church.

Biblical books that appear neutral in the struggle between Jewish and Gentile factions (such as the Gospels of Mark and John, and the letters of Ignatius) must, in Baur’s view, be dated late in the second century, because no such conciliatory stance was possible until then.¹⁰⁵ The stages of reconciliation are shown in Hebrews and James (which represent a freer, more spiritual form of Jewish Christianity), while Ephesians and Colossians exhibit modifications from the Pauline side.¹⁰⁶ Conciliation in the form of Catholicism’s development, Baur claimed, came only when the church faced dangers from outside.¹⁰⁷

Baur on Early Christian Literature Outside the New Testament. The Pseudo-Clementine literature served as a centerpiece for Baur’s argument that in the second century, opposition still raged between Petrine (“Jewish”) and Pauline (“Gentile”) Christianity.¹⁰⁸ Baur claimed that the Clementine Homilies, written by an Ebionite author about 170 c.e., stood as an attack on the Pauline party, Paul being represented by the figure of Simon the Magician.¹⁰⁹

In addition, Baur maintained that the letters of Ignatius were later second-century productions, since they contain no traces of party conflict. Baur entered the dispute over the longer and shorter Greek and the Syriac recensions of the Ignatian letters.¹¹⁰ His book, Die ignatianischen Briefe (1848), argued that the historical data in the Ignatian letters did not represent circumstances at the turn to the second century. Among other points suggesting late authorship, in Baur’s view, are the letters’ seeming knowledge of Valentinian Gnosticism and their references to the episcopate, an institution that Baur believed developed only in the mid-second century. The three Ignatian letters found in Syriac (those to Polycarp, the Ephesians, and the Romans) that some scholars alleged were the only “genuine” ones were, in Baur’s opinion, just as “ungenuine” as the other four.¹¹¹

The second-century Quartodeciman controversy, another area of debate, centered on the Gospels’ discrepant dating of the Last Supper in relation to Passover,¹¹² and the proper timing for the celebration of Easter. Should other Christians, with the Quartodecimans, calculate the date of Easter in relation to the 14th of Nissan (Passover), regardless of the day of the week on which it might fall; or should Easter always be celebrated on a Sunday, the day of resurrection, without regard to the timing of Passover? For Baur, the Fourth Gospel’s silence regarding the Last Supper as a Passover meal was an implicit repudiation of Quartodeciman practice. Baur’s conclusion: the Gospel of John was not composed by Jesus’ disciple, but was a late second-century production.¹¹³

In other second-century literature as well, Baur argued, the Jewish-Christian and Gentile-Christian divisions play out, with the Epistle of Barnabas and the (pseudo-) Ignatian epistles representing the Jewish-Christian side, and I Clement and the Epistle of Polycarp, the Gentile-Christian. Mediating such divisions are the Shepherd of Hermas and Justin Martyr.¹¹⁴ With Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, and Origen the mediation seems complete. Rome now claims both Peter and Paul as its own: to the church at Rome, Baur argued, belongs the merit for first having made good “the essential condition of Catholicism,” namely, the representation of Peter and Paul in brotherly unity.¹¹⁵

Now, those who stubbornly clung to an older Jewish Christianity were branded “Ebionites,” heretics. Now, the Catholic Church stood poised to mediate between the extremes of a more “universalistic” Gnosticism and a more “Jewish” Montanism.¹¹⁶ The development of the episcopate, Baur claimed, alone rendered possible “the historical development of Christianity and prepared its way to a world-historical future.”¹¹⁷

The American Professors and Baur. The American professors protested many of Baur’s theses: that Jewish Christianity was the original form of the religion; that conflict was the motor driving early Christianity; that arguments from silence were admissible; that writings could be dated by ascertaining what signs of struggle (or lack of it) between Jewish and Gentile “tendencies” they exhibited. Moreover, Baur’s scheme implied that early Christian belief and practice remained highly unsettled until much later than these professors were prepared to accept.

In addition, the American professors sharply rejected Baur’s dating of many New Testament texts to the second century: they dated all New Testament books to the first century. For them, the Pastoral Epistles show the harmonious development of the church out of primitive Christianity. Moreover, their interest in (and alarm over) issues posed by the Clementine Homilies, the Ignatian letters, and the Quartodeciman controversy—about which they wrote in more detail and passion than we might expect—appear to have been fueled by Baur.

Despite their many criticisms, the Americans garnered two important points from Baur. The first, quite simply, was an appreciation for development in early Christianity—although in their eyes, Baur had let development run riot. Baur forced historians of early Christianity to ask, “How did it happen?”, a question that had been asked before, but with preconceived ideas that prevented its implications from being clearly understood.¹¹⁸ The Americans, as we shall see in Chapter 5, admitted development in church history from the second century onward—but only as guided by the providential hand of God.

Second, Baur’s praise for the alleged universalism and spirituality that developed in Catholic Christianity (despite his assertion of the Judaizing character of the primitive movement) was one to which the evangelical Americans could warm. To be sure, German Protestantism since the time of Luther had often stressed the inwardness and spirituality of true Christianity, as contrasted with the “externalism” of Roman Catholicism (and ancient Judaism). Baur gave striking expression to this view, in new form, for the nineteenth century.

ERNEST RENAN

Later in the century came Ernest Renan’s wildly popular Life of Jesus. Whereas, one commentator argued, “The German historian represents the early history of the Church as a succession of metaphysical and philosophical theories, and the world in which they are propounded also as a world of theories,” here at least was history as narrative.¹¹⁹ Evangelical scholars denounced Renan’s book as a piece of romantic—albeit dangerous—fluff. Some more positive critics claimed that Renan had rescued Christians from Strauss: he presented a historical, not a mythical, Jesus. But, objectors countered, it was not a Jesus who was God Incarnate. Appealing to “the whole cultured world,” Renan’s book went though eight editions in three months.¹²⁰

Renan styled the Gospels—which he considered in “flagrant contradiction” with each other—“legendary biographies.” Steeped in miracles and the supernatural, they resemble the “Legends of the Saints” or the “Life of Plotinus.”¹²¹ The discourses of Jesus in Matthew and Mark’s “collection of anecdotes and personal reminiscences” [of Peter] form the original core documents.¹²² Renan recognized the very different style of John, and bluntly wrote: “If Jesus spoke as Matthew represents, he could not have spoken as John relates.” And if the son of Zebedee did write Jesus’ speeches in the Fourth Gospel, he appears to have “forgotten the Lake of Gennesareth, and the charming discourses which he had heard upon its shores.”¹²³ Yet John’s Gospel seems necessary for composing the story of Jesus’ life, especially in its last months.¹²⁴ Despite proclaiming the four canonical Gospels, on the whole, “authentic,”¹²⁵ Renan nevertheless remained skeptical about their factuality and wary of harmonizing the Synoptics with John—yet harmonization seemed necessary for the complete story of Jesus.

Renan aimed to write an historical account of the human Jesus. His seeming exclusion of Jesus’ divine nature, as pronounced by the Council of Chalcedon and later Christians, unsurprisingly, incurred the wrath of the pious. Renan styled Jesus a “noble initiator,” in the “first rank” of those who “felt the Divine within themselves.” Jesus is divine, he conceded, insofar as he enabled humans to advance toward their own divinity.¹²⁶

Jesus, in Renan’s scheme, amid the beauties of the Galilean countryside (as well as of Nazarene females), grew up in happy “poetic ignorance” of the outside world—of Greek science, of the political events of his time.¹²⁷ His religion, based on feeling, was devoid of priests and external observances; it brought devotees into direct relation with God the Father and promoted purity of heart and human brotherhood.¹²⁸ In Renan’s anti-Jewish narrative, Jesus, representing a “rupture with the Jewish spirit,” recognized that the sway of Judaism was over, that the Law was to be abolished.¹²⁹

Renan believed that some aspects of Jesus’ teaching and practice, not wearing well over time, were to be cast off. For example, Jesus had appealed to the lower classes with a gospel of “pure Ebionism”; “the poor” alone were his concern. This “exaggerated taste for poverty,” in Renan’s view, could not last, nor could the apocalyptic vision of the end-time. “Let us pardon him his hope,” Renan condescendingly wrote.¹³⁰ In addition, the accounts of Jesus’ miracles—a violence perpetrated on him by the expectations of his era—were merely an accommodation to the masses’ avidity for spectacles: he either had to renounce his mission or become a thaumaturgus.¹³¹

As Jesus approached his end, his teaching grew darker; he forgot life’s pleasures and loves. (Renan suggested that Jesus’ mind might have become unbalanced.¹³²) Convinced that his death would save the world, Jesus gave himself up to it. On the cross, after moments of doubt, he recalled his mission. The disciples believed in Jesus’ resurrection because they loved their Master so deeply.¹³³ Albert Schweitzer pithily depicted Renan’s representation of the death scene:

He is dead. Renan, as though he stood in Pe`re Lachaise, commissioned to pronounce the final allocution over a member of the Academy, apostrophizes Him thus: “Rest now, amid Thy glory, noble pioneer. Thou conqueror of death, take the sceptre of Thy Kingdom, into which so many centuries of Thy worshippers shall follow Thee, by the highway which Thou hast opened up.”¹³⁴

Renan tellingly confessed his own religious position: to write about a religion, one must first have believed it, and then, believe it no longer.¹³⁵ That this claim expressed his own situation was patently clear to the evangelical professors—to whom “belief” was an all-important criterion for religious allegiance. Although some readers may have deemed Renan’s picture of Jesus as truly human more satisfactory than Strauss’s mythical Jesus, it hardly represented the divinely ordained Jesus of Christian belief.

American Professors and New Testament Scholarship

Without doubt, German criticism set much of the teaching and research agenda for the American professors. Although they appropriated some themes for their own narratives of early Christianity, their reactions remained largely negative.¹³⁶ Not until this conservative approach to the Bible was quietly (or sometimes, not so quietly) abandoned could views of historical development—also imbibed from Germany—be allowed to stretch back to the earliest days of the “Jesus movement.” Only then (at least in the classroom) did professors abandon the supernaturalistic approach that precluded studying the Bible as an ancient text like others.

Here, I shall focus on Henry Smith and Philip Schaff of Union and George Fisher of Yale as examples of the professors’ strategy.¹³⁷

HENRY SMITH

Henry Smith’s studies in Germany shaped his mental universe.¹³⁸ He advised Americans to be tolerant of German philosophy and theology: “orthodoxy can afford to be just, to be generous.”¹³⁹ He yearned for theology and church history to assimilate all that was good in German Wissenschaft.

In addition to his critique of Hegelian-inspired Pantheism, Smith attacked aspects of European biblical criticism.¹⁴⁰ Scholarship should not lead Christians to doubt the “genuineness” and “authenticity” of the New Testament, or prompt skepticism about Christianity’s historical foundations, as (Smith warned) the theses of Baur and the Tübingen School did. Baur’s detachment of the “Christian system” from the person of Christ himself subverts its historical basis and finds Christianity’s truth only in abstract principles. He charged the Tübingen School in effect with reviving Gnosticism, with implying that Jesus was “the greatest of imposters.”¹⁴¹

Smith attacked more radical European biblical criticism in a variety of venues. In a sermon delivered in 1855, “The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures,” Smith claimed to eschew “Bibliolatry,” rather seeking the Bible’s “spirit.” Decrying “rationalistic infidelity,” he declared that Protestants’ according supreme authority to the Bible “stands or falls with the evidence for its infallibility.” To avoid Straussian skepticism and to acknowledge God’s omnipotence, Christians must admit “the possibility of inspiration.”¹⁴²

In the first 1600 years of Christian history, Smith continued, even though no developed theory then existed, only a few—for example, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Abelard, and the fourth-century Anomoeans—rejected the plenary inspiration of Scripture. Now, however, German Rationalists’ claim that Scripture contains errors has “infected” modern German theology; even Neander and Tholuck admit there are mistakes (albeit limited to “trivial details”). Smith conceded that the Bible has “human elements,” but its truth is reinforced by modern archeology.¹⁴³ The chief proof of the Old Testament’s veracity comes from Jesus and the Apostles, who refer to these writings as Scripture.¹⁴⁴ What authority do Carlyle, Strauss, and Theodore Parker have compared to the heroes of the Bible, Smith pointedly asked?¹⁴⁵ Smith rehearsed such views not only in sermons before laymen innocent of recent biblical criticism. He also, as retiring Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA in May 1864, cautioned Presbyterian clergy against the Materialism and Pantheism manifest in the Essays and Reviews (to be discussed below) and the Colenso controversy in England, in Renan’s Life of Jesus, and in Strauss’s recent popularized version of the Life of Jesus.¹⁴⁶ Historical Christianity and the doctrines of faith are at stake, Smith warned. Is the Bible to be thought of the same way as other books?¹⁴⁷ These movements dissolve Christianity’s “facts into myths, … its doctrines into ideas, its God-man into a vague moral hero.” The contest against Infidelity in Biblical studies looms large, as does the contest against Romanism.¹⁴⁸

In print venues as well, Smith endorsed conservative principles of biblical criticism. In 1874, reviewing Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New, Smith downplayed the importance of the author’s earlier Leben Jesu (in any case, superseded by Tübingen School criticism). Strauss in this new book, composed in his old age, mocks American democratic institutions with his promonarchy and anti-republican views.¹⁴⁹ Yet Strauss’s book presents readers with a stark choice, an either/or: they must choose between Atheism and Christianity, or, what here seems the same to Smith, between Darwin and God.¹⁵⁰ Strauss’s “unhistoric” account, Smith claimed, is refuted by Christianity’s foundation on historic facts. In the last analysis, Strauss’s theory combines the theses of Feuerbach (religion is derived from human wishes) and Schleiermacher (religion amounts to a mere “feeling of dependence on the Universe”). Strauss’s views only further encourage the materialistic greed of American culture. If they prevail, nothing will remain sacred: institutions of church and state will be, if not destroyed, at least reshaped; and among the masses will emerge “a fierce struggle for wealth and power and pleasure, with the survival of the strongest.” Yet because religion is an essential element of human nature, it cannot ultimately be obliterated.¹⁵¹

Smith sharply critiqued Tübingen scholars’ claim that the church precedes the Bible and that New Testament books represent conflicting “tendencies” in Christianity’s development. Such Pantheistically inspired critics deny that “the higher” can stand first, not merely evolve through a process of development. Although Smith conceded that the Tübingen School had stimulated closer study of primitive Christian history, its influence, he assured readers, is declining.¹⁵²

Moreover, Tübingen scholars’ ascription of pseudonymous authorship and late dating to various New Testament books, and their emphasis on partisan strife (“Tendenz”) within early Christianity, were disturbing to the evangelical Smith. Ministers who endorse the views of Hegel and the “infidel” Baur, Smith claimed, should be relieved of their pulpits.¹⁵³ Smith’s earlier plea for a spirit of charity toward German scholarship appears to have vanished.

Infidelity also had marked French spiritual life, with Renan the villain. In his “Theological Intelligence” column, Smith noted whenever Renan’s Life of Jesus received “a good criticism”¹⁵⁴ and emphasized Renan’s antidemocratic, elitist theories.¹⁵⁵ He reported (with seeming pleasure) that although Renan had been nominated for a professorship at the Colle`ge de France, his lectures were suspended when he allegedly expressed skepticism regarding Jesus’ divinity.¹⁵⁶ In the classroom as well, Smith faulted Baur, Strauss, and Renan: the first two evince Pantheism, and Renan’s system, “as far as he has any,” is similarly derived from Hegel.¹⁵⁷

In January 1864, Smith reviewed Renan’s Life of Jesus, the seventh French edition of which had been translated in 1863. Renan, Smith charged, makes Jesus into a Romantic hero. Placing Renan’s book among the Apocryphal Gospels—as Smith first suggested—rates it too highly: at least the authors of those Gospels believed in God! Indulging in a “poetic pantheism,” Renan treats the “records of our faith” as if naturalism does not differ from supernaturalism, as if nothing changed when God became incarnate in history. If Christ’s life can be understood “on the basis of naturalism, … then the battle of infidelity is substantially gained,” Smith alleged.¹⁵⁸

Only “the low estate of Biblical criticism” in France, Smith charged, allowed Renan’s book to achieve such success there. A quarter-century behind, Renan exhibits no knowledge of German scholarship of the last thirty years.¹⁵⁹ Catholic clergy denounce the work, but have not the means to counter it. Renan’s approach, Smith concluded, makes the central event in human history “a mockery and a delusion,” offering only a “theology of despair.”¹⁶⁰

Smith on the New Testament and Earliest Christianity. In response to more radical European critics, Smith defended the authenticity and “genuineness” of the New Testament books—“genuine,” if written by those whose names they bear.¹⁶¹ As Christ’s “companions,” the Apostles had “ample opportunities to know the facts of his life.” The “common copies” we have of the New Testament, Smith insisted, contain “what was originally written.”¹⁶² He appears to register only two categories of assessment: the New Testament books are either “genuine” or “forgeries.”

Here, Smith’s view of the utility of patristic literature comes to the fore: the Church Fathers authenticate the “genuineness” of the New Testament books. Yet, even if we were to grant that the Fathers were inspired (which Smith did not), we would concede only that they offer “inspired testimony.” Appealing to the Fathers as “witnesses” who show which books were then received as carrying “divine warrant” differs from according them authority.¹⁶³ The Fathers may be considered a “sign-post” showing the way to a city, but are not the city itself.¹⁶⁴

What reliance, then, should Protestants place in the testimony of these uninspired Church Fathers? Smith’s answer: only so far as they give “credible witness” to which books Christ and the Apostles recognized, received, and issued as having divine authority.¹⁶⁵ The best Fathers (for example, Tertullian and Irenaeus) always made Scripture the final appeal; Polycarp, too, calls it the rule of faith.¹⁶⁶ The integrity of the New Testament sources is reinforced by the Fathers’ citation of the Scriptures as “genuine.”¹⁶⁷ The writings of Barnabas and Clement [of Rome¹⁶⁸], Smith claimed, “fellowlaborers with the Apostle Paul,” repeatedly refer to and quote from the Gospels as Scripture.¹⁶⁹ Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria refer to the Four Gospels, Acts, thirteen Pauline Epistles (including the Pastorals), I Peter, I John, and Revelation as “genuine.” (Although Revelation’s “genuineness” was contested, the book was received by Papias and Justin.) Some early Christian writers expanded the New Testament canon: Clement of Alexandria and Origen, for example, cite the Epistle of Barnabas, I Clement, and the Shepherd of Hermas as Scripture—but these works were later deemed not “genuine” (Smith referred students to Eusebius, Church History 3.12).¹⁷⁰ Tertullian’s writings, Smith posited, “probably contain more and longer quotations from the N[ew] Testament” than all the citations from Cicero in later classical sources. Smith told his audience,

In the third century we find numerous authors commenting upon the Scriptures; and still more in the fourth century, with catalogues of the number of Scripture books, translations made of them, harmonies, and commentaries published. So numerous were the citations, that from the Christian literature of that period, the whole, or nearly so of the N[ew] Testament could be recomposed from it.… Why then doubt the truth of God’s word?¹⁷¹

Moving to a later period, Smith cited Augustine’s statement that he would not have believed the Scriptures without the authority of the church. What did Augustine mean? Not that “the church gave authority to the Scriptures, but [rather] gave to Augustine his authority for receiving them.”¹⁷² This convoluted interpretation diminishes the role of the church’s authority in the matter and allows the Scriptures to stand on their own authority. For Smith, that the New Testament canon was largely agreed upon and its books abundantly cited by the Church Fathers guaranteed the truth of its contents.

Another source of verification for the Scriptures’ “genuineness” to which Smith alludes rests with pagan authors of the era: ancient historians (Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny) “confirm the fact of the genuineness of the Scriptures.” Even

the early enemies of Christianity, Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian, acknowledge the existence, and the genuineness of the Christian Scriptures; adverting to them in their writings, and quoting them for the purpose of controversy and ridicule. No person in his right mind has any doubt of Homer’s or Virgil’s works being theirs; by reason of the constant testimony of Greeks concerning the one, and of Latins concerning the other.¹⁷³

Our confidence in the “genuineness” of works by the pagan Homer and Virgil should prompt ready assent to that of the Christian Scriptures.

In contrast to “genuineness” stands “forgery.” To suppose that the Bible is a forgery, Smith argued, “implies a greater miracle than anything recorded in the Book itself.”¹⁷⁴ Although scribal errors may have entered in the transcription of manuscripts, even the most faulty manuscripts do not “pervert one article of our faith,” and early biblical manuscripts substantially agree with the received text. Smith found a different, and advantageous, meaning to the German critics’ claim that Christian parties warred against each other soon after Jesus’ death: namely, they kept a “jealous eye” on each other so that no group could alter the sacred text.¹⁷⁵

Smith nevertheless admitted that some period of time passed before the New Testament canon was established. Many early Christian writers, he alleged, quote more extensively from the Old Testament than from the New because the latter canon was “still somewhat disputed.” He conceded that only with the heretic Marcion do we find “the first trace of a collection” of New Testament books, namely, the Pauline Epistles and one Gospel.¹⁷⁶

Despite Smith’s criticisms of Hegel and the Tübingen School’s narrative of early Christianity, he appears to have adopted their approach on one point. He taught students that in early Christian history there is a movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis: a Jewish form of Christianity (represented by Peter, the Ebionites, the Nazarenes, and the Pseudo-Clementine literature) met a form influenced by Greco-Roman movements such as Gnosticism. The resolution of these currents in Catholic Christianity, according to Smith, came after the Constantinian settlement. Only then does the Catholic Church emerge, that is, “the Apostolic Church so unfolded as to meet the wants of the Greek and Roman world.”¹⁷⁷ Here, Smith sounded more “German.”

PHILIP SCHAFF

Although we identify Philip Schaff chiefly as a church historian, we should recall that he lectured on the Catholic Epistles and the Gospel of John at the University of Berlin,¹⁷⁸ taught Bible (as well as several other subjects) at Mercersburg, and held positions in Hebrew Bible and in New Testament at Union Seminary before assuming the Washburn Professorship of Church History.¹⁷⁹ His approach to biblical scholarship remained conservative throughout his life.¹⁸⁰ His work on the American Committee on Bible Revision (i.e., revision of the King James Version), however, was not the arena in which his conservatism most fully emerged.

Schaff and Biblical Revision. Schaff served as President of the American Committee on Bible Revision in the 1870s and 1880s.¹⁸¹ Joining British scholars, he and his colleagues labored for nearly a decade on this project. Schaff argued that a clear, dignified English translation would be a powerful check on “infidelity among the English-speaking nations.” Had the Roman Catholic Church allowed the Bible to circulate freely, Schaff claimed, it would now be “better fortified against the assaults of skepticism and infidelity.”¹⁸²

The Revisers assigned to the New Testament began their task in June 1870.¹⁸³ Schaff’s letters and diaries from the period detail numerous problems: difficult dealings with University Press officers in Britain; questions regarding copyright; strained relations with the British Committee; and, always, concerns about money (whereas the University Presses paid the expenses of the British revisers, the Americans enjoyed no such support). Schaff, as chief organizer of the American Committee, kept the Protestant reading public in America updated through speeches and newspaper articles.¹⁸⁴ In 1878, as his Diary charts, he traveled across America to drum up enthusiasm and funds for the project.

In May 1881, the Authorized Revised Version of the New Testament appeared, that of the Old Testament following four years later. Its publication was a media event: two days after the manuscript was received in America, newspapers in Chicago published the entire text that had been transmitted by telegraph from New York—the largest dispatch that had then ever been sent over the wires.¹⁸⁵ (The editors assured readers that “there is no change in the plot.”¹⁸⁶) On May 20 alone, 200,000 copies were sold in New York;¹⁸⁷ in all, almost three million.¹⁸⁸

Schaff deemed the Revision “the noblest monument of Christian union and co-operation in this nineteenth century.”¹⁸⁹ The American Committee had agreed not to publish for twenty years an American edition that would incorporate the textual changes rejected by their more conservative British colleagues. Schaff hoped (in vain) to live long enough to see the American edition.¹⁹⁰ His dedication to the Revision, however, did not lessen his conservative approach to New Testament criticism.

Schaff and Biblical Criticism. Schaff, like Smith, proposed only two categories for assessing biblical books: “genuine” and “fraudulent.”¹⁹¹ “Genuine” meant that the books were written by those whose names stand on them—for the Gospels, the immediate disciples of Jesus. To posit that the Gospels were composed later, by non-apostolic authors, would be to dismiss them as “frauds,” a willful deceit perpetrated on believers. For Schaff (again like Smith), patristic writers’ citation of or allusion to New Testament passages testifies to the “genuineness and integrity of the apostolical writings” and proves that the content of the books is trustworthy.¹⁹² Christianity’s “historical foundations” as given in the New Testament are “immovable.”¹⁹³

Schaff appealed to various factors to claim the Gospels’ “genuineness.” One rests on the claim that Jesus and his first followers knew Greek: hence there is no reason to doubt the apostolic authorship of the Gospels and the veracity of Jesus’ words therein.¹⁹⁴ Jesus, Schaff claimed, spoke Greek, “though not exclusively,” and the Apostles “wrote it with naturalness and ease.”¹⁹⁵ If Jesus’ disciples, “unlettered fishermen of Galilee,” knew Greek [because they wrote the Gospels], why should not Jesus?¹⁹⁶ Greek served the apostolic mission well—like French in our day, Schaff added. To be sure, the Greek of the New Testament was designed for the common people, but this lower style was supremely proper for a “universal religion.” No doubt is cast on the faith, Schaff insisted, because we lack writings by Jesus, although writing was not beneath his dignity: did not God himself write the Two Tables [the Ten Commandments]? “We do not crave a bookwriting Christ, but one of sympathy and love,” he concluded.¹⁹⁷ Thus Schaff sought to guarantee the “genuineness” of dominical and apostolic voices.

The “genuineness” of the New Testament books might also be called into question by the relative lateness of the manuscripts on which the received text was based. The oldest manuscripts, Schaff conceded, date only to the fourth century; we lack the Apostles’ “original writings.”¹⁹⁸ Schaff offered a piously ingenious explanation for why no “originals” remain: by divine arrangement, the New Testament books were first composed on papyrus (a material of short life-span) so that the loss of “the autographs of the apostles” would stimulate enquiry and prompt “a more thorough search for the spirit and reading of the text.”¹⁹⁹ On this explanation, “genuineness” is not cast in doubt.

Affirming all New Testament books as datable to the first century also helped to secure their “genuineness.” Schaff held that Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts (“the best as well as the first manual of church history”²⁰⁰), James, I Peter, Jude, the Pastorals and (other) epistles of Paul were composed before 70;²⁰¹ only Revelation and the Gospel and Epistles of John were composed after that date.²⁰² Dating most New Testament books this early allowed Schaff to link them tightly to the inspired apostolic era.²⁰³

Schaff considered the Gospels “the inspired biographical memoirs of Jesus Christ”; his disciples’ “reports” recounted “actual facts.”²⁰⁴ The Evangelists, as objective historians, he claimed, refrained from intruding their own views; they “modestly abstained from adding their own impressions to the record of the words and acts of the Master.”²⁰⁵

Yet Schaff admitted that the orthodox theory of verbal inspiration could not account for the discrepancies among the Gospels.²⁰⁶ These he explained as deriving from the Gospels’ status as not “full biographies,” but as “memoirs.” Each Evangelist had selected certain features of Jesus’ life and work “as best suited his purpose and the class of his readers.” John, for example, omits many points (such as an imminent eschatology) that the other Evangelists include: he did not need to, since these were already familiar.²⁰⁷ The four canonical Gospels thus present a harmonious picture of Jesus’ life and teachings.

Schaff also affirmed the unity of the Johannine corpus and its authorship by the disciple John. John wrote the Apocalypse first, then the epistles, and late in the first century, the Gospel (“God’s Love Letter to Man”); all share the same theology and Christology.²⁰⁸ Were it not for John’s writings, the period between 70 and 100 a.d. would be nearly blank. Some nineteenth-century critics, Schaff protested, have assailed the “citadel” (i.e., the disciple John’s authorship of the Fourth Gospel): this for Schaff is “a question of life and death between constructive and destructive criticism.” No second-century writer (such as Strauss and Baur had proposed) could have produced this “marvelous book,” he argued. Are we to imagine that for 1800 years, deluded Christians have mistaken “a Gnostic dream for the genuine history of the Saviour of mankind … drinking the water of life from the muddy source of fraud”?²⁰⁹ Such is unthinkable for Schaff.

Schaff, like most other Protestant colleagues of his day, downplayed the status of Jesus and the disciples as Jews. Schaff’s Jesus is distinctly non-Jewish: he had no “repugnant or exclusive” Jewish characteristics that would mar his proclamation of a universal religion.²¹⁰ Paul, for his part, led congregations away from “the darkness of heathen idolatry and Jewish bigotry to the light of Christian truth and freedom.”²¹¹ As Chapter 7 will document, Schaff and the other professors held that Judaism and Roman Catholicism shared various features—an “externality,” a reliance on ceremony and priesthood—that the spiritual, universal religion of Jesus displaced. Schaff’s anti-Jewish tone, however, is bested by that of George Fisher of Yale, as we shall shortly see.

Schaff: Faulting European Criticism. Schaff urged professors to fortify their students against “the attacks of the infidel and semi-infidel criticism of the age.”²¹² He faulted the reconstructions of primitive Christianity by Renan and Strauss as “imaginative”: early Christianity, he protested, was born into “a critical and philosophical age,” not one (like the nineteenth century) of “imagination.”²¹³

Schaff generously credited Baur with revolutionizing the history of apostolic and post-apostolic Christianity, despite his overvaluing “tendencies” and undervaluing “persons and facts.” Baur, in Schaff’s judgment, had reduced early Christianity’s “rich spiritual life” into conflicting tendencies of Petrinism and Paulinism, resolved in a Hegelian synthesis.²¹⁴ Baur and his followers, Schaff charged,

ignore the supernatural element of inspiration, lack spiritual sympathy with the faith of the apostles, overstrain his [Paul’s] antagonism to Judaism …, and confine the authentic sources to the four anti-Judaic Epistles to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians, although recognizing in the minor Epistles the “paulinische Grundlage.”²¹⁵

Unlike August Neander,²¹⁶ the Tübingen critics have no sense of a “living, practical Christianity.” Baur, Schaff concluded, is “too philosophical to be a true historian and too historical to be an original philosopher.” His school makes the history of doctrine nothing more than a dialectical process of thought that runs into Hegelian Pantheism, sundering early Christian thought from its “religious life-ground.”²¹⁷ In Schaff’s eyes, Baur made early Christianity seem merely like a form of Judaism.

Schaff objected particularly to Baur’s acknowledgment of only four genuine Pauline letters,²¹⁸ his claim that Acts misrepresents Paul, and his dating of John to the mid-second century.²¹⁹ Tübingen scholars, in Schaff’s opinion, “show great want of spiritual discernment in assigning so many N.T. writings, even the Gospel of John, to the borrowed moonlight of the postapostolic age.”²²⁰ Radical biblical critics (like Baur) could never get a chair in America, “not even in the Divinity School of Harvard University,” Schaff exclaimed—whereas they win professorships in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland.²²¹

Nevertheless, Schaff, like Smith, adopted (in modified form) the claim of both F. W. J. Schelling and the Tübingen School that Petrine and Pauline strains of Christianity were united in Johannine theology.²²² Schaff’s modification de-emphasized the motif of conflict and the notion of development within the New Testament books. Since Schaff believed that all New Testament books had been composed within about a thirty-five-year period, there was not much chronological room for development, in any event. Differences among New Testament authors do not reflect development, but only slightly varying viewpoints on the same historical given, the life and teachings of Jesus.

Both Smith and Schaff, however, extracted the Tübingen critics’ theme of historical development for the study of post-New Testament Christianity. Schaff later credited Baur (whose lectures on history of Christian doctrine and on symbolics he had attended as a student) for first stimulating his thinking about historical development. Despite Schaff’s rejection of Baur’s views on the New Testament, he judged him the most able modern opponent of traditional Christianity.²²³

GEORGE FISHER

George Fisher of Yale took a more generous view of acceptable approaches to the Bible than many Protestants of his time: those who espouse Christianity’s essential truths should not be “denied the title of Christian” on the grounds of their beliefs concerning biblical inspiration. Deviant opinions, however wrong or ill-founded, do not warrant expulsion from the fold of any who claim the name Christian.²²⁴

Rather surprisingly, Fisher argued that the Old Testament—“an earlier stage of revelation”—was not Christian Scripture. By accenting the “difference in times” between ancient Israel and the early Christian era, he avoided the need to explain, or explain away, what he considered the theological, ethical, and scientific “embarrassments” of the Old Testament²²⁵—but he hastened to add that he does not aim to detract from the dignity of the Old Testament. Revelation being progressive, Christians today can admit that the ancients had but limited knowledge. The New Testament remains “the touchstone”: “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,” Fisher concluded, citing John 1:17.²²⁶

Jesus’ first Jewish followers, like their ancestors, went astray on several points. They misguidedly looked for the Second Coming of Jesus²²⁷ and his establishment of an earthly Kingdom. Jewish notions of the Kingdom encompassed an “externality” that later believers were “destined to outgrow, and finally to shuffle off.”²²⁸ Only later could the Kingdom be correctly conceived as a “community … bound together by a moral and spiritual bond of union,” rooted in the human heart.²²⁹ Fisher worried that the growing popularity enjoyed by the study of comparative religions might mistakenly lead his contemporaries to place Christianity on “the level of the Jewish or even the ethnic systems.”²³⁰ All in all, Fisher’s downplaying of the Old Testament and “Jewish systems” seems in accord with his anti-Jewish remarks that will be detailed in Chapter 5: his notion of early Christianity’s decline was strongly linked to factors he associated with Jewishness. The negative characteristics he ascribed to ancient Jews remained stamped on their descendants in his own day.

Fisher on the New Testament. The Gospels for Fisher are truthful but incomplete “memoirs,” not “formal histories.”²³¹ Fisher’s approach to Jesus—one that seemingly owes much to Schleiermacher—appeals strongly to the subjective impression that Jesus made on believers over the centuries. The unity and harmony of his character convinces them that the Gospels’ image is “substantially faithful.”²³² That Jesus exhibited no consciousness of guilt, for example, prompts Christians to affirm that he was sinless, that he stood in a singular relationship to God.²³³ Fisher, unlike Schaff, did not here appeal so much to biblical “facts” as to the subjective impression that the Gospel accounts made, and still make, on the minds of receptive readers and hearers.

Like Smith, Fisher rested his case regarding the “genuineness” of the Gospels (especially the Synoptics) on their reception history: they were accorded exclusive authority in the church by the later second century, accepted as ancient and “genuine” by Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Papias, and the author of the Muratorian Canon.²³⁴ The similarities in the first three Gospels can be attributed to the Evangelists’ “interdependence,” and by acknowledging the priority of Mark. “German” views such as these are gaining ground even among the more conservative English, Fisher assured his readers.²³⁵ Hence some German scholarship does not obstruct the faith of Christians.

Of particular interest to Fisher are the New Testament miracles. This subject had commanded considerable attention in college courses on “Christian Evidences”: Jesus’ miracles supplied (so it was thought) proof of his divinity and of Christianity’s supernatural origin. Yet, as the treatment of miracles by Hume, later skeptics, and Rationalist New Testament critics became more widely registered, a more sophisticated defense was needed. Here, although Fisher joined his German-educated colleagues in calling for better “weapons,” he appealed more readily to strands of German theology influenced by Schleiermacher.

As a student in Germany, Fisher had translated for publication an article by August Neander, prefaced by his own introduction, conceived as “a contribution to Christian evidences.”²³⁶ Reflecting Schleiermacher’s more liberal approach to Jesus’ miracles,²³⁷ Fisher here posited that their chief value lies in calling attention to “the system of truth of which they are the heralds … confirming a belief which has been established by other sources of truth”: miracles, in other words, do not in themselves establish the truth of Christianity, but support other “evidences.” Indeed, Fisher claimed, few believers in any age were converted primarily on the basis of miracles; rather, they were first—and even now—won by the “person of Christ and the irresistible power of his presence.” Jesus’ miracles, “the natural and appropriate symbols” of his majestic doctrine, confirm belief arrived at by other means.²³⁸

Decades later, ensconced in his professorial chair at Yale, Fisher wrote several essays on this theme, including a four-part series for the Princeton Review on “The Historical Proofs of Christianity.”²³⁹ Fisher apparently wished to reformulate the teaching of “Christian Evidences,” still a curricular staple in many American colleges. Although now espousing more traditional views on miracles, and critiquing the disbelief of Renan, Strauss, and some of their predecessors,²⁴⁰ he continued to endorse themes from liberal German theology. The miracles, he here claimed, are of one piece with Jesus’ teaching; although not standing as proofs on their own, they complement the “internal evidence” for Christianity’s supernatural origin, namely, the consciousness of early believers.²⁴¹ The disciples’ trust in Jesus’ resurrection, he argued, cannot be explained in any other way than by an appeal to miracle: out of “the depths of despondency” they were transformed into “courageous heralds,” willing to risk their lives to proclaim what they had witnessed.²⁴²

In addition, Fisher continued to emphasize that historians of Christianity study not the events “as they actually happened,” but rather the subjective consciousness of the believer. Here, unlike Smith and Schaff, Fisher rejected attempts to argue for Christianity’s historicity by appeal to the “genuineness and credibility of the Gospels.” Rather, he claimed, whoever wrote the Gospels, we should look first to the effects of Jesus and his message, and second, to the internal cohesion of the details presented.²⁴³

Fisher acknowledged that although these arguments would not convince determined atheists, they might convince less implacable skeptics.²⁴⁴ On this point, at least, he had gone some way toward “Germany.” Yet he stalled in his treatment of European biblical criticism. Here, he appears as conservative as Smith, Schaff, and other colleagues.

Fisher and Modern Biblical Criticism. That Fisher was well schooled in what is now called “lower [i.e., textual] criticism” is evident from his 1881 essay, “How the New Testament Came Down to Us,” a popular piece published in Scribner’s Monthly. “Textual criticism has become a science,” he wrote. In the last three centuries, scholarship in this area has advanced as much as in astronomy and botany.²⁴⁵ With the forthcoming publication of the Authorized Revision of the New Testament in mind, Fisher explained to lay readers how the biblical text was assembled. He assured them that few textual changes—although some errors in transcription—entered after the late second century. Textual criticism leaves intact, indeed, supports, all the doctrines and precepts of Christianity. Fisher described Tischendorf’s contribution, passing over any discrediting explanation of how that scholar managed “to carry away the precious discovery [the Codex Sinaiticus] as a present to the Czar Alexander.”²⁴⁶ In this popular essay, Fisher apparently chose not to instruct his readers on the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible, as developed by 1881.

Fisher on Strauss and Renan. Seventeen years earlier, in four long articles in the New Englander (1864) grouped under the general title, “The Conflict with Skepticism and Unbelief,” Fisher had addressed the “Higher Criticism.” The date of 1864 for these essays is no accident: that year, the first English translation of Renan’s Life of Jesus appeared, as well as [in German] Strauss’s Life of Jesus for the German People, a popular account that was published in English in 1865. Fisher’s articles provided a basis for his book, Essays on the Supernatural Origin of Christianity, with Special Reference to the Theories of Renan, Strauss, and the Tübingen School (1866). He also rehearsed these themes in popular lectures at the Lowell Institute in 1876 that appeared the next year as The Beginnings of Christianity.²⁴⁷ Thus in both scholarly and popular formats, he drew attention to the dangers of European biblical criticism.

Like Smith and Schaff, Fisher defended the “genuineness” of the canonical Gospels against Strauss.²⁴⁸ Responding to Strauss’s claim that stories of Jesus’ miracles were myths arising from Jewish Messianic expectations, Fisher argued (somewhat inconsistently) that Jesus could not have been acknowledged as Messiah without them—but that insufficient time had elapsed between Jesus’ death and the composition of written Gospels for a cycle of myths to gain ground.²⁴⁹ Perhaps borrowing a point from Schaff, Fisher insisted that Jesus’ era was devoted to history, a devotion underscoring the Gospels’ credibility. Strauss’s theory, he charged, cannot explain the Apostles’ faith in Jesus’ resurrection, and hence the rise of Christianity.²⁵⁰

Unsurprisingly, Fisher also took aim at Renan’s Life of Jesus, which the reading public had devoured.²⁵¹ The “infidel” Renan, Fisher charged, makes Jesus a deceiver: “When the light coating of French varnish is rubbed off, it is a picture of degrading duplicity that is left.”²⁵² Renan treats the Gospel narratives as comparable to “the lives of Francis of Assisi and other mediaeval saints.” Conceding that Renan is “brilliant” and “not deficient in learning,” Fisher faulted his “imaginative” presentation, “torpidity” of moral feeling, and failure to sense “the holiness of the sacred authors and of the revealed system of religion.” Renan’s Saint Paul is similarly deemed “full of vivacity”—but abounds in “numerous unverified assertions and conjectures.”²⁵³

Renan, Fisher charged, skews the representation of Jesus and his teachings. He falsely claims that Jesus “enjoined”—not just “counseled”—poverty and celibacy. Fisher counter-argued: riches alone to do not condemn (Dives’s fault lay not in his wealth) and Matthew 19’s injunction to “become eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven” does not advise castration, but merely admits the lawfulness of celibacy when “spontaneously practiced” (Origen’s interpretation and alleged deed is a “revolting absurdity”). Like other nineteenth-century Protestant advocates of “domestic Christianity,” Fisher insisted that the Gospels uphold marriage and the family as “sacred.” To imagine Jesus commanding his disciples to forsake parents is “preposterous.”²⁵⁴ Renan, in Fisher’s eyes, has made Christianity’s message repugnant, not attractive.

Fisher on Baur and Tübingen. Against Baur and his followers, Fisher’s tone was sharp:

It is very doubtful whether the individuals of our Teutonic race who attack the Christian religion [presumably Strauss and Baur] would know their letters, or would be possessed of any vehicle for expressing their ideas except in an oral form, if it had not been for the heroic missionaries of that religion which is thought to be so deleterious in its influence.²⁵⁵

Against these “Teutons,” Fisher upheld traditional evangelical views on authorship and dating of New Testament books. The written accounts of Jesus’ life, Fisher claimed, existed within twenty or so years of his death.²⁵⁶ Downplaying differences among New Testament books and authors,²⁵⁷ he denied that James and Peter were steeped in Judaizing tendencies. He cited ancient historians’ (alleged) love of truth, the soul’s innate desire for God, and humans’ conviction of freedom and sin, as testimonies to the New Testament’s historical veracity.²⁵⁸

Fisher vigorously upheld Acts as a reliable historical source, rejecting Tübingen’s “strange, morbid suspicion” that discrepancies between Acts and other books reveal a conscious authorial design (“tendencies”). The strong moral spirit pervading the book of Acts, he claimed, supports the book’s historical accuracy.²⁵⁹ Tübingen scholars’ penchant for pitting Paul’s letters against Acts in order to question the latter’s veracity is “without foundation,” for Luke-Acts substantially accords with Galatians and other Pauline epistles. The Tübingen School’s appeal to “tendencies” and “theological bias,” Fisher declared, has now been rejected by critics of an “independent spirit,” who affirm the trustworthiness of Acts.²⁶⁰

Fisher also scored the Tübingen scholars for decoupling Jesus from a “universalizing” Paulinism. They represent Jesus’ teaching as so Jewish that it is scarcely distinguishable from Ebionitism.²⁶¹ Fisher countered that “Judaic Christianity” had been outgrown even by the time of John’s Gospel and Epistles: “the teachings of Jesus had broken the chain of bondage to the Old Testament system.”²⁶² Fisher also challenged Baur’s theory that the Judaizing party discredited Paul’s writings, which were rehabilitated only a century later. This scenario—derived, Fisher claimed, from an over-reliance on “the spurious Clementine Homilies”—could not have occurred without attracting the notice of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, all of whom appeal to an unbroken tradition of teaching.²⁶³

A third point of Fisher’s critique concerned Baur’s treatment of the Gospel of John. That Fisher deemed this topic worthy of special consideration is clear from his 1881 essay, “The Genuineness of the Gospel of John,” well over a hundred pages long.²⁶⁴ His interest in this Gospel is also exhibited in his later essay on the “obscure and insignificant” second-century sect, the Alogoi²⁶⁵—the only ancient group, he claimed, that rejected the Gospel of John.²⁶⁶ Fisher, like his Union colleagues, held that the apostle John wrote the book of Revelation twenty or thirty years earlier (68–70 a.d.) than he did the Gospel and First Epistle.²⁶⁷

Baur had dated the Gospel of John to the late second century and understood it as a testimony to the reconciliation of earlier Jewish and Gentile “tendencies.”²⁶⁸ Opposing this late dating that implied the Gospel’s “inauthenticity,” Fisher looked to patristic “witnesses” to assist his case. A key element is provided by Polycarp: if Polycarp knew John, and Irenaeus (“no dreamer”) knew Polycarp, then the chain of witnesses is assured.²⁶⁹ Even opponents of Christianity (Celsus, Marcion, Basilides, Valentinus²⁷⁰) testify to the Fourth Gospel, while the Gnostic Heracleon wrote a commentary on it. If they acknowledged the Gospel, how, Fisher rhetorically asked, can we doubt? If the Fourth Gospel was not written by John, it must be considered a “pious fraud.”²⁷¹ But the “sound ethical feeling” of that Gospel stands against this explanation. No post-apostolic text, Fisher claimed, can match John’s Gospel, which “fills up the gaps in the Synoptical tradition.” Its vigor and power, entirely lacking in the “languor” of the Apostolic Fathers or the feebleness of I Clement, shows that it dates to the first century.²⁷²

Fisher devoted much of his scholarly writing to the Judaizing parties (Ebionites and Nazarenes) in second-century Christianity. Baur’s reliance on the Clementine literature had led him to imagine that a Judaic, anti-Pauline theology was then prevalent. In Fisher’s view, Ebionitism—“an obsolescent system” that was struggling to maintain itself—had to be overcome, since it robbed Christianity of its “universal character and worldwide destination.”²⁷³ Since God’s plan extends to all humans of every age,²⁷⁴ a Jewish orientation had to be discarded. Baur’s representation of early Christianity, Fisher charged, is no “historical divination,” but an “arbitrary, artificial construction.”²⁷⁵

Although Continental, largely German, scholarship on early Christianity received the professors’ largest consideration, they also noted the major controversy that marked British theological discussion of their day: the controversy over Essays and Reviews.

Essays and Reviews

It was not only Continental scholars who incurred the wrath of traditional Christians. In March 1860, the publication of a volume of essays by seven British (mainly Oxonian) writers unleashed what has been called “the greatest religious crisis of the Victorian era.”²⁷⁶ Entitled—innocuously—Essays and Reviews,²⁷⁷ the book provoked hostile rejoinders and occasioned two well-publicized trials. Of the American professors, Henry Smith of Union Seminary was the most invested in the dispute: he responded with a lengthy essay, “The New Latitudinarians of England,”²⁷⁸ and often noted the book in the journal he edited, then titled the American Theological Review.

Published less than a year after Darwin’s Origin of Species and in reaction to the Oxford Movement, Essays and Reviews raised troubling questions about the Genesis accounts of creation. Those to whom Darwin’s tome remained impenetrable could understand the import of Essays and Reviews. The book also called for the established (i.e., Anglican) Church to loosen its grip on the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.²⁷⁹ Many readers of Essays and Reviews thought its authors had undermined the truth of Anglicanism from within its fold.²⁸⁰

The controversy was fueled in part by the prominent positions held by several essayists: Frederick Temple was Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen and Head Master of the Rugby School; Rowland Williams was Vice-Principal and Professor of Hebrew at St. David’s College, Lampeter; Baden Powell was Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford; Mark Pattison was Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford; and Benjamin Jowett was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. Six of the seven were clergymen of the Church of England. Although several bishops called to judge the work proclaimed their high regard for the book’s authors, the latter could not stand unchastised. Despite the writers’ claim that each was responsible only for his own essay,²⁸¹ reviewers and bishops alike deemed the book part of an insidious cabal against Christianity’s basic tenets. By early 1862, with many thousand copies in print, more than 8500 clergy petitioned Lambeth against the book, and by 1864, 11,000 had signed the protest; the Upper and Lower Houses of the Anglican Church met to judge the work and hand down condemnations.²⁸² The essayists, in the end, were saved by the Privy Council’s decision that there should be freedom of opinion on matters about which the Anglican Church had prescribed no rule. It was, in effect, the state that rescued the authors from the church.²⁸³

The essays were widely believed to introduce dangerous German ideas—near-atheism, Rationalism, and Hegelian Pantheism—into the bosom of English Christianity. In addition, the essayists also raised questions about the scientific and historical validity of Genesis, the doctrines of atonement and eternal punishment, and biblical infallibility more generally.²⁸⁴ Ieuan Ellis, historian of the controversy, argues that for many British readers, the novel aspect of the book was the centrality accorded to historical method: it was “a religious counterpart of those historically dominated studies (Buckle, Maine, etc.) which proposed to explain society and its institutions by their historical origins, an evolutionary process from lower to higher.” This historical treatment “put the traditional doctrine of revelation in a new and unflattering light.” Yet, Ellis notes, despite the essayists’ appeal to history and development, they remained curiously traditional in affirming notions of eternal, unchanging truths and a static human nature.²⁸⁵

Today, scholars of New Testament and early Christianity might deem the essays rather harmless and less “Germanizing.” For example, Temple claimed in his essay, “The Education of the World,” that since Christians had now reached “manhood,” they should decide for themselves the meaning and limits of biblical inspiration and the degree of authority to be ascribed to various books of the Bible. Temple also warned readers not to shy from the findings of geology, even if they implied that the opening chapters of Genesis could not be taken literally.²⁸⁶

The appeal to science also marked Baden Powell’s essay, “On the Study of Evidences of Christianity”—the only essayist who explicitly evoked Darwin’s Origin of Species. This author counseled Christians to divorce their understanding of truth from “physical things”: in centuries past, astronomy had jarred Christians’ understanding of the universe; more recently, geology; and now, theories of the antiquity of the human race and the development of the species. Modern Christians, Powell advised, might better abandon the scientific views of biblical writers, who did not rise above “the prepossessions and ignorance of their times.”²⁸⁷

A third essayist, Henry Bristow Wilson, argued that neither the Scriptures nor the earliest patristic writings contain the doctrines set forth in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. The Church of England, Wilson claimed, leaves its devotees free to interpret Scripture literally or allegorically, as poetry or as parable, and to decide for themselves how to understand stories in which serpents tempt or asses speak.²⁸⁸

Some critics deemed Benjamin Jowett’s essay, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” the most damaging. As a noted scholar of classical Greek, Jowett could authoritatively address New Testament philology. Yet he argued that textual problems (e.g., questions of variations) were not the troubling issue; more frequently, problems stem from interpreters’ deployment of the text as a “weapon” for their party’s view, or attempt to make the Bible speak according to modern critical standards.²⁸⁹ As for recent scientific and historical discoveries, Jowett pointedly remarked, “the same fact cannot be true in religion when seen by the light of faith, and untrue in science when looked at through the medium of evidence or experiment.” He counseled readers to abandon “a losing battle” over the creation of the world or human origins; they imperil religion by resting it on false geological or philological views. How, he bluntly asked, can religious truths, so important to human life, depend on “the mere accident of an archaeological discovery”? “Interpret the Scripture like any other book,” he advised, and distinguish interpretation, the province of the few, from application, which even the uneducated can appropriate. He urged that study of the Scripture, just as of the classics, should be part of a liberal education. Unfortunately, ministerial students are mainly schooled to reconcile discrepancies or (in a jab at Tractarians) to adopt the “fancies and conjectures” of the Fathers—an unprofitable exercise, in Jowett’s view.²⁹⁰

Critics were hostile: Essays and Reviews was deemed “a radical subversion of the faith of the Church of England,” “infidelity made easy.”²⁹¹ Critics veered precipitously between charging that the book’s ideas were “old” (so no cause for excitement) or “new” (thus very dangerous, especially to the young).²⁹² Most commentators, whatever their line, accused the authors of adopting German historical and biblical criticism.

For example, the staunchly High-Anglican scholar Edward Pusey charged the authors with “random dogmatic skepticism” stemming from “foreign sources of unbelief,” namely, “German unbelievers” of thirty years ago.²⁹³ An editor (or contributor), writing in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review and signing himself “S.,” claimed that Essays and Reviews, a “manifesto,” had alarmed Anglicans more than any book since Strauss’s Life of Jesus a quarter-century earlier. The essays are not “English,” “S.” complained. Hanging “like a portentous cloud over the Anglican church, blackening her whole horizon,” the essays represent “the destructive theology of Germany, and the Hegelian philosophy on which the former rests.” They are “tainted with the school of Tübingen, which may be called the Medusa head that threatens to turn Oxford into stone.”²⁹⁴ The essays cannot even be called “Christian,” for the theory of development they contain lies “outside the pale of Christianity.” “S.” accused the essayists of jettisoning the truth of Scripture in favor of a (Hegelian) “ideal,” of endorsing Pantheism (the human race, not Christ alone, is deemed divine), and of implying that the doctrine of the Trinity is not biblical. These “hollow and arrogant speculations of Hegelianism,” “S.” observed, were a reaction to the Tractarian movement’s exaltation of the early church and “hoar [sic] antiquity.”²⁹⁵ In this latter claim, at least, “S.” appears correct.

Henry Smith reviewed the book (in its second American edition) in his American Theological Review. Although Smith treats the essayists’ arguments more fully than does “S.,” his assumptions and major criticisms are largely the same. For Smith, Christianity, whatever internal developments have shaped it,

has always aimed to be a specific, divine revelation, supernatural in its origin, announced in prophecy, attested by miracles, recorded in inspired Scriptures, centering in the person and work of the Godman, and having for its object the redemption of the world from sin. It presupposes a personal God, and anticipates a future state of reward and punishment.²⁹⁶

Like “S.,” Smith linked the essayists with Hegelianism, German thought, Tübingen, and Pantheism; they repay “the debt which German rationalism owed to that English deism, from which it received its impulse.” Yet while the essayists don German garb, they err in not pressing further, so as either to accept the radical conclusions of certain German authors or to discover how other German scholars had already answered their questions. The essayists had not worked through to a “positive position.”²⁹⁷ They had not, in effect, passed from thesis and antithesis to synthesis.

The Christian system, Smith argued, “as a supernatural and historic revelation,” requires miracles.²⁹⁸ The “philosophic unbeliever” (presumably like the essayists), by contrast,

resolves revelation into intuition, miracles into the course of nature plus myths, inspiration into genius, prophecy into sagacious historic conjectures, redemption into the victory of mind over matter, the incarnation into an ideal union of humanity with divinity realized in no one person, the Trinity into a world-process, and immortal life into the perpetuity of spirit bereft of personal subsistence.²⁹⁹

Especially disturbing to Smith was the essayists’ claim that the Bible should be “interpreted just like any other book,” for example, a work of classical literature. Thus Jowett’s essay, which Smith deemed the most “ingenious and subtle,” is the most insidious: in the guise of rescuing Scripture “from arbitrary and dogmatic interpretations,” Jowett “equally undermines all positive faith, not only in creeds, but also in the inspired authority of the sacred Scriptures.”³⁰⁰ Other essays (those by Temple and Pattison in particular) aim to show

that the external evidences of Christianity are insufficient; that its sacred books are not specifically inspired; that the histories contained in these Books are to be judged as we would any other histories, and in many parts are incredible; and that the doctrines of historic Christianity are to be resolved into more general truths, into more philosophic and rational formulas.³⁰¹

Smith also emphasized the tendentious relation between the essayists and the Oxford Movement. This book, he (correctly) claimed, represents a different Oxford from that “most opposed to Protestantism and Rationalism,” that is, Tractarianism. Much of the “force and influence” of the essays “are found in their constant opposition to the revival of patristic, and even mediaeval authority in the teachings of this [Oxford] university.… Reason revenges itself for the degradation, which tradition would fain impose upon her.”³⁰² Smith concluded,

We must go forward with the church, or outside of it. We must press through the diversity to a higher unity.… For he who believes in a personal God cannot doubt the possibility of revelation, inspiration, incarnation and redemption, in their specific Christian import: he cannot believe that natural law is all, and that supernaturalism is a fiction.³⁰³

Smith’s American Theological Review printed assessments—largely negative—of the Essays and Reviews with seeming enthusiasm. First announcing the work in February 1860, Smith tracked the discussion over the next years.³⁰⁴ As his own lengthy review makes evident, his biblical conservatism could only minimally incorporate the Higher Criticism. Yet Smith cleverly turned Hegelian principles against the authors of Essays and Reviews: if they had pushed on through “negativity,” they could have reached a higher synthesis.

Conclusion

Despite the American professors’ own German educations and reading, they incorporated only limited aspects of European philosophy and biblical criticism into their teaching and writing. They remained biblically centered, evangelical Protestants. Considering their vigorous attack on much European criticism, it is notable (as later chapters will illustrate) that they accepted the Tübingen School’s argument that early Christianity developed—yet they limited that development to post-New Testament writings. For them, the New Testament remained a static and unchanging foil, an “undeveloping” text, against which development in patristic Christianity was charted;³⁰⁵ it occupied an entirely different category from that of the writings of the Church Fathers. The Fathers’ importance rather lay in their “witness” to the “authenticity” of the New Testament books.

Today, biblical scholars would scarcely claim that Strauss, Renan, and Baur were entirely “right” and the more confessional American professors, entirely “wrong.” It is prudent to remember that in their time these professors were regarded as progressive, even dangerous, church historians. The history of the patristic era, to be sure, awaited a better integration with studies of the “Jesus movement” and earliest Christianity.