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Introduction: Higher Education and Religion

in Nineteenth-Century United States

The question is, What is involved in the transformation of a field of studies into a discipline?

—Hayden White (1982)

Founding the Fathers explores how the study of early Christian history and theology became instantiated as a discipline in four nineteenth-century Protestant seminaries in the United States: Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary.¹ Although these four began in differing degrees as sectarian outposts—Princeton, Union, and Yale variously represented the Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) branch of Protestantism, while renegade Harvard “defected” from Congregationalism to Unitarianism early in the century—they functioned for most of this period as America’s closest equivalent to graduate schools in the Humanities.² I track their hesitant transition from institutions of ministerial training to distinguished centers of advanced education that pioneered scholarship on early Christianity.

Founding the Fathers is based on the documentary records and published writings of six nineteenth-century professors of church history: Samuel Miller of Princeton; Henry Smith, Roswell Hitchcock, and Philip Schaff of Union; George Fisher of Yale; and Ephraim Emerton of Harvard. Their and their students’ class notes, an underutilized resource, reveal the infrastructural and pedagogical difficulties they faced: inadequate textbooks and libraries, students untutored in history, few colleagues (from zero to four) with whom to organize a theological curriculum, and new methods of instruction that challenged their knowledge and their institutions’ resources. The creation of early Christian history as a scholarly discipline—then little known and even less appreciated—took place concomitantly with academic institution-building in the United States. When Samuel Miller began his teaching career at the Theological Seminary in Princeton in 1813, America had few colleges, a mere handful of seminaries, and nothing that could be called a university. Moreover, “religion” was not an academic subject. During the decades covered in this book, vast changes at all levels of American education were to take place.

Protestant professors in America used the term “patristics” (if they used it at all) in a much looser sense than did their Roman Catholic or Anglican counterparts in Europe: there, “patristics” denoted a theologically oriented discipline centered on those designated as “Church Fathers,” who wrote from the second to the sixth centuries. It also suggested a heavy respect for ancient ecclesiastical tradition. In America, this book argues, the Fathers’ writings were not cordoned off as a separate discipline, but were incorporated into a broader study that took its bearings from the historical, rather than from the strictly theological, arena. Borrowing much from the striking development of church history as a subject in the Protestant universities of nineteenth-century Germany, the professors in the four institutions I survey incorporated the writings of the Fathers into a historically oriented curriculum. Scholars in North America today who have witnessed changes in late twentieth-century nomenclature—from “Patristics” to “Early (or “Late Ancient”) Christian Studies”—may find surprising the relatively little emphasis these nineteenth-century Protestant forerunners placed on theology per se. The latter instead stressed institutional developments, early Christianity’s relations with Judaism and various forms of Greco-Roman religion and philosophy, and what we might label “social history,” as evidenced by their discussions of marriage, slavery, wealth and poverty, and ethnicity.³ The nineteenth-century professors, all of whom belonged to denominations deriving from Calvinism, rued early liturgical developments that savored of “high church” practices of their own time. They displayed relatively little interest in Trinitarian theology after the Council of Nicaea or in the Christological controversies; the New Testament, containing all the truth Christians needed, required only minimal theological elaboration through the centuries. “Patristics” in the European sense, some might argue, never did become established as a separate discipline in the very seminaries that would soon be at the forefront of promoting the study of post-New Testament early Christianity. Nevertheless, the Fathers were founded in America insofar as they were assigned a humble place in the broader sweep of the study of Christianity’s history. Like those other, eighteenth-century “founders” whom American schoolchildren are taught to revere, the nineteenth-century professors I here discuss created from the materials offered by the Old World something peculiarly American. Perhaps we cannot assert, without considerable nuance and elaboration, that it was entirely “Bye, Bye Patristics,” as Charles Kannengiesser ruefully put it.⁴

In nineteenth-century America, to be sure, the study of early Christian history and theology was not pursued as an end in itself. Appeal to the Church Fathers assumed a highly ideological cast: they were enlisted as allies or opponents in contemporary denominational battles over religious belief and practice and in the culture wars of the day. With time, the study of early Christian history shed enough (although by no means all) of its sectarian biases to take its place in departments of Religious Studies in colleges and universities. The early stages of the dismantling are signaled in this book. Only when this process had made substantial headway, Conrad Cherry argues, could a new academic discipline—Religion—be born from the old “womb of theological studies.”⁵ Along the way, expectations regarding professorial roles and duties changed, as did understandings of what constituted scholarship. Founding the Fathers moves from a broader consideration of how the study of Christian history developed in these four pioneering institutions, through the infrastructural difficulties and intellectual challenges the professors faced, to specific topics of early Christian history that intersected with various religious, social, and cultural issues in an America that was becoming less “Protestant.”

In this narrative, Germany plays a double leading role, as tutor and as villain. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, bright young American males who desired (and could afford) post-collegiate education were shipped abroad, largely to Germany.⁶ (“What,” Edward Robinson asked in 1831, “has England to offer in comparison with the host of learned theologians who now fill the German chairs of instruction?”⁷) To place the arrival of the “German” model of graduate education on American shores only with the founding of John Hopkins University in 1876 overlooks the large number of American theological students in Germany during the early and middle decades of the century—students who returned home to teach and to preach.⁸

Between 1815 and 1914, nearly ten thousand Americans studied in Germany; before 1850, about one-quarter of them were in Protestant theology faculties.⁹ In the decades between 1830 and 1860, 30 percent of all university students in Germany pursued theology—a figure that dropped rapidly as medicine, the sciences, and the humanities rose to prominence.¹⁰ For evangelically inclined American theological students making their way to Germany, the University of Halle was the institution of choice, whose Pietistic emphases countered the radical scholarship of Tübingen.¹¹ Only toward the turn to the twentieth century did Germany’s appeal begin to wane, as Americans developed their own graduate schools. While not all American professors were enamored of German university education,¹² five of the six surveyed in this book were strongly marked by their own studies in Germany and by German scholarship.

These five not only studied in Germany, but also continued to engage German scholarship throughout their careers. The Union and Yale professors in particular struggled to tame troubling German criticism—biblical and philosophical—to fit American evangelical convictions.¹³ The disturbing depictions of earliest Christianity offered by David Friedrich Strauss, Ernest Renan, and Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Tübingen School, so foreign to the confessional, precritical approaches of American evangelical churchgoers, demanded serious scholarly response. At stake was the understanding of Jesus’ role in Christianity’s formation—indeed, the reconstruction of the first two Christian centuries.

The Princeton, Union, and Yale professors understood the Gospels to provide eyewitness accounts of the Savior, who had founded a spiritual Kingdom that reached to the present. They believed that the New Testament books—all written within the first century and many authored by Paul—exhibited no disharmonies. For these professors, the Church Fathers stood on the far side of a great divide that separated “inspired” from “uninspired” books. European scholarship, insofar as it ignored that divide, must be refuted or at least be rendered palatable for American evangelical Protestants. In addition, forms of Hegelianism emanating from Germany had to be carefully monitored so as to forestall a deadly Pantheism that gave no privilege to Christianity’s uniqueness, or an equally unchristian Materialism that downplayed the role of mental and spiritual factors in historical interpretation. Such movements betokened “Infidelity,” against which the Professors warned. As we shall see, of the six professors here considered, Samuel Miller alone, who died in 1850, remained oblivious to these challenges. Later in the century, the Unitarian Ephraim Emerton manifested little interest in the doctrinal and philosophical issues in the fight against German “radicalism” that so absorbed the four Union and Yale professors. Miller and Emerton remain the outliers who frame my book.

Germany, whatever its alleged dangers, nevertheless offered the professors new notions of historical development that derived from Romanticism and Idealism. These notions would, in time, prompt two changes to the study of early Christianity. First, professors—gradually and often reluctantly—came to concede that as historians, they could not privilege the New Testament as a static and untouchable divine revelation, exempt from scrutiny by the historical-critical methods applied to other ancient literatures. Only then could New Testament and patristic literature be linked as sources for the development of early Christianity.

Second, the traditional Protestant assumption that the early church had suffered grievous decline between the apostolic and the Reformation eras collided with theories of historical development that encouraged a more sympathetic assessment of early and medieval Christianity and a cautious celebration of difference among ethnic groups.¹⁴ While championing Christianity’s historical development was necessary for according signal importance to the Protestant Reformation, exhibiting sympathy with Christianity’s distant past, however, became ever more difficult for American Protestant professors in an era of increasing Roman Catholic presence, one that saw the promulgation of Vatican decrees on the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854), the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and Papal Infallibility (1870)—and unprecedented Catholic immigration to American shores. Steering an uneasy course between “decline” and “development,” these professors provided a (limited) counterbalance to American Protestants’ hostility to Roman Catholicism in the present and to periods of history perceived as “Catholic,” the patristic era in particular.¹⁵ The professors’ attempts at tolerant understanding, however strained, coupled with their knowledge of German scholarship and interest in new methodologies of historical practice, distinguished them from many evangelical Protestants of their time.

In particular, the rise of asceticism in early Christianity and its persistence into the present presented a major conceptual stumbling block to the professors’ sympathetic assessment of Roman Catholicism. The professors argued that since Jesus had gloriously raised women, marriage, and family from their allegedly demoralized status in ancient paganism and Judaism, proponents of asceticism grievously misinterpreted his intentions. Yet in pitting the Protestant idealization of family against the Roman Catholic promotion of celibacy, the professors confronted a new challenge: advocates of women’s rights who demanded—often with an appeal to New Testament teachings—equal opportunities in church and society. Ancient and modern ascetic devotees, on the one side, and American supporters of women’s suffrage, on the other, posed intellectual and social challenges to the Protestant professors’ reconstruction of early Christianity and its authority for the present.

Last, I suggest how these professors accorded Protestants’ favorite Church Father—Augustine—surprisingly rough treatment, even as they mined his writings for their own purposes. For Union and Yale professors, a more mellow form of Calvinism was in the making, one that mitigated the harsher implications of Augustine’s theory of original sin. Unbaptized babies were not to be automatically consigned to hell, and adult Christians, however “innately depraved,” were still deemed capable of righteous living. Moreover, the professors argued that Augustine’s collusion with state authorities in the persecution of Donatists laid the foundation for later religious repression—from which America, so “exceptional” in its (alleged) separation of church and state, had struggled free. Yet, on the side of appropriation, these same scholars borrowed Augustine’s explication of the early chapters of Genesis that detailed the development of human “races” to construct a “Christian” racial theory.

As students of American religion will readily observe, this book does not explore religion in nineteenth-century America, nor even nineteenthcentury Protestantism. There is scarcely a Baptist or a Methodist in sight on these pages.¹⁶ Jews (except as biblical characters) and women (except as mothers, wives, and daughters) are likewise absent.¹⁷ Contemporary Roman Catholics are cast largely, although not exclusively, in the role of antagonists. “Others,” such as “Hindoos” or “Mohammedans,” are variously the objects of anthropological curiosity, of Protestant derision, or of missionizing concern.

This limitation is unsurprising, considering the identity of the figures under consideration. The professors at two of the schools, Union and Yale, called themselves evangelicals, but this designation must be distinguished from its present customary usage.¹⁸ By “evangelical,” these professors selfidentify as proponents of theologies derived from the Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) branch of Protestantism, softened by influences stemming from German Pietism, from latter-day proponents of Jonathan Edwards’s theology, and from American religious enthusiasm of a more decorous variety.¹⁹ Manifesting little association with the more celebrated revivalist emphases of their time,²⁰ they can be styled (in Curtis D. Johnson’s classification) “Formalists”: their notion of “orderly faith” required “consistent doctrine, decorum in worship, and biblical interpretation through a well-educated ministry.”²¹ Unlike their Princeton colleagues, however, the Union and Yale professors largely discarded Scottish Common Sense philosophy in favor of approaches touched by German Idealism and Romanticism.²² Yet also unlike the Unitarians at Harvard, they staunchly upheld doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and a high view of biblical accuracy, which (so they claimed) conformed comfortably to scientific discoveries.²³

Colleges and the Study of Religion

Religion and history, the two disciplines that today frame the study of ancient church history, had an uncertain start in the American academy. In early American colleges, religion was considered a “frame of reference,” not “a subject for scientific study”²⁴: religion was assumed, not taught. The lack of instruction in subjects pertaining to religion may puzzle, since American colleges founded before, and well into, the nineteenth century were largely religious in nature,²⁵ often functioning as “the intellectual arm of American Protestantism.”²⁶

The lack of academic coursework in religion, to be sure, did not leave students religion-less. In the eighteenth century, undergraduates—those at Yale, for instance—devoted some hours on Friday and Saturday to “divinity.”²⁷ Until the late nineteenth century, college seniors, even at the newer, state-supported public institutions,²⁸ customarily took a required course entitled “Evidences of Christianity” (“natural theology” or “mental and moral philosophy”), often taught by the president of the college.²⁹ This course, James Turner argues, “the chief curricular fallout” from Scottish Common Sense philosophy, was “a hodgepodge of intellectual flotsam and jetsam … from political economy to the origin of language to animals’ rights.”³⁰ “Evidences” was usually students’ only actual course on religion. In the early 1870s, however, “Evidences” began to lose favor: Columbia discontinued it in 1871,³¹ Harvard in 1872.³² Other institutions followed.

Historians note the dramatic change in American higher education—an explosion in breadth, depth, and numbers—between 1860 and 1900.³³ Writing at the turn to the twentieth century, Henry Adams observed: “America had made so vast a stride to empire that the world of 1860 stood already on a distant horizon somewhere on the same plane with the republic of Brutus and Cato, while school-boys read of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius Caesar.”³⁴ The academic study of religion likewise experienced unprecedented change and growth during this period, as evidenced not only in seminaries, but also in colleges. As late as 1885, Yale College offered only three courses related to religion, but fifteen years later, more than fifty. By the early twentieth century, new fields such as comparative religion and psychology of religion had found their way into university curricula. At the University of California-Berkeley, for example, two courses in Asian religions were added in 1900, and in 1904, a course entitled “The Religious Practices and Beliefs of Non-literary Peoples.”³⁵ In sum, something approaching Religious Studies was in the making.³⁶

Even “Biblical Literature” was not a common collegiate offering until the late nineteenth century.³⁷ William Rainey Harper (shortly to become founding President of the University of Chicago) introduced the study of the English Bible at Yale College in 1886. The trend soon spread.³⁸ Indeed, “Bible” remained the staple of many college Religion Departments into the mid-twentieth century. The American Academy of Religion was originally named the “National Association of Biblical Instructors” and continued under that rubric as late as 1964.³⁹ That the emphasis on “Bible” was not merely Christian, but resolutely Protestant, is a fact not always fully registered.⁴⁰

From Harper’s time onward, professors of a liberal stripe could treat the English Bible, and more broadly, religion, less as a “deposit of revelation” than as an aspect of culture. As such, its study was gathered into the new division of Humanities that had arisen to fill the void left by the declining emphasis on Greek and Latin.⁴¹ Humanities, Jon Roberts and James Turner argue, assured university leaders (and doubtless, parents) that “the essence of religion could survive the loss of an explicitly Christian framework of knowledge.”⁴² Yet, with some exceptions, only in the late 1920s and thereafter were Departments of Religion established in private colleges and universities⁴³—and a half-century more would pass before organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies recognized religion as a distinctive academic subject.⁴⁴

Universities, Seminaries, and the Study of Religion

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, as much as Amherst and Bowdoin, remained “colleges” for the greater part of the nineteenth century: the United States had no universities on the European model until late in the century.⁴⁵ Midcentury critics of American education, such as Henry Tappan, incoming President of the University of Michigan, complained that America lacked even the basic necessities—adequate libraries and sufficient professors—for establishing a university. American colleges, Tappan alleged, were at present merely elementary preparatory schools.⁴⁶ He pleaded for the development of at least one great university, preferably in New York, that could vie with European institutions.⁴⁷ Although Tappan believed that a university should be free from ecclesiastical control and “sectarian partialities,” he nevertheless assumed that Christianity would be acknowledged as the only true religion and the Bible as divinely inspired.⁴⁸

Distinctive approaches to religion in seminary, college, and university education unfolded gradually and somewhat uncertainly. From the early nineteenth century onward, theological education in the United States (unlike Germany and England) found its institutional home in the theological seminary.⁴⁹ Many scholarly studies of graduate education in North America, however, focusing on the late nineteenth century and especially on the founding of Johns Hopkins University, fail to register seminaries’ pioneering role. “The scholarly elite of theologians has been so well hidden from the general study of American history,” Gary Pranger claims, “that it has often been thought not to exist.”⁵⁰

To be sure, the “graduate” character of the early seminaries was dubious. Extremely limited in resources, they had few students and even fewer faculty. According to a report compiled in 1832, no Protestant seminary in America then employed more than four professors.⁵¹ By 1844, 39 such seminaries existed, each enrolling from fewer than ten to 150 students. By 1855, even the largest seminaries boasted only five professors, and the smaller, only two or three.⁵² By 1869, the 48 Protestant seminaries then in existence were competing with each other for denominational support, funds, and students. This proliferation of institutions, most with scanty resources, worked against educators’ desire to provide advanced training.⁵³ A statistic cited in 1844 brings home the point: the combined libraries at the nine leading American seminaries of the era contained fewer than onequarter of the volumes available to theologians at Munich or Paris.⁵⁴

Moreover, seminaries did not originally require a bachelor’s degree for entrance (Harvard Divinity School was the first, but only in the 1890s⁵⁵) nor did students always remain in residence for three years.⁵⁶ At mid-century, Union Seminary attempted to remedy this problem by requiring “non-collegiate students” soon after arrival to pass a Greek examination based on the first two books of Xenophon’s Anabasis.⁵⁷ As the century progressed, college graduation as a prerequisite for seminary study was more often the norm.⁵⁸ Professional schools in other fields, to be sure, were no stricter in this respect.⁵⁹ These caveats registered, theological seminaries, as I shall argue, pioneered graduate education of the Humanities-type in the United States.

Only at century’s turn did universities begin to supplant seminaries as the main conduit of advanced scholarship in religion. Then, Bruce Kuklick claims, divinity schools “collapsed” as purveyors of graduate education,⁶⁰ largely remaining content to steer students toward various university departments for further study.⁶¹ At the seminaries featured in this book, connections with a university would become increasingly important for the development of graduate programs in religion.

The Seminary Curriculum: Church History

In America’s early Protestant seminaries, academic emphasis lay squarely on the Bible, biblical languages, and systematic theology, not on historical studies of Christianity’s development. As late as 1889, Union’s Philip Schaff remarked that in America the serious study of church history had hardly begun. Some seminaries still have no professor of the subject, Schaff remarked ruefully, and others regard it merely as a supplement. Although some boast two or three professors of Bible, none employ more than one church historian. What a contrast with Germany, he bitterly exclaimed!⁶² Yet, since America is “destined to be the main theatre of the future history of the world and the church,”⁶³ the study of church history, he prophesied, would eventually flourish on these shores. Schaff’s hopes accorded well with his colleagues’ belief in America’s “exceptional” status.⁶⁴

Even with the development of seminaries in the United States, however, church history was deemed somewhat dangerous: confronting the diversity of beliefs, outright errors, and rancorous divisions of the Christian past could undermine a student’s faith. At Andover, generally conceded to be America’s first independent Protestant seminary, church history was postponed until late in the senior year, by which time students had presumably been fortified against the theological threat that might arise from confronting the vicious clash of opinions throughout Christian history.⁶⁵

Yet seminary officials should have had little cause for fear: church history was readily corralled to prove the antiquity of one’s own denominational polity and to connect the founding moments of Christianity with later “Protestantizing” developments. The Church Fathers were deployed to batter down claims regarding doctrine and polity made by competing Christian groups. Debates over the “original” polity of the early church, for example, provided ammunition for the nineteenth century’s culture and religion wars. Here, the discovery of new manuscripts—Syriac versions of some of Ignatius’ letters, as well as the Philosophumena and the Didache—fueled Protestant professors’ zeal to claim their denomination’s governance as faithful to that of the apostolic era.⁶⁶ The Fathers could also be cited to prove how soon in Christian history a “decline” had set in that led precipitously toward Roman Catholicism. The Bible, sacrosanct and “undeveloping,” remained the touchstone against which all subsequent ecclesiastical developments were judged.⁶⁷ Augustine, Jerome, and the earlier Fathers, Robert Baird wrote at mid-century, “important in their places, are regarded as of small importance in comparison with the questions, What saith the Scripture? What did Christ and the Apostles teach?”⁶⁸ In Protestant America, appropriating the Church Fathers was always a negotiation with what interpreters believed were the authentic words of a Jesus who could be cordoned off from subsequent Christian history.

Factors for Change in Higher Education:The Case of Religion

Specialization and Professionalization

What prompted the change in the study of religion? Increased specialization was one factor. Today, it is startling to realize that until the 1880s, research played almost no role in the lives of college and seminary teachers.⁶⁹ Indeed, the professoriate began to be recognized as a distinct profession only circa 1840; earlier, college teaching had not been considered a “career.”⁷⁰ The few faculty employed by any institution taught whatever was necessary—and since instruction (“not designed to promote inquiry”) was by recitation from a textbook, the teacher need not be expert in the subject.⁷¹ Tracing the development of the American college, George Marsden claims that before mid-century, most faculty were generalists who could “teach almost anything.”⁷² Moreover, “specialization” to some early nineteenth-century ears (such as those of historian George Bancroft) sounded “commercial”: young men were being trained to “sell” their Greek and Latin.⁷³ Elitist notions that higher education ought to be economically useless—its purpose being to form the mind and character of select youths—worked against the development of specialization.

In Germany, by contrast, professors were expected to develop, and devote themselves to, a circumscribed field. There, the subject area (classics, for example) would be construed—as Carl Diehl puts it—less like “a public park in which anyone is free to wander as he wishes,” and more like “some kind of restricted collective farm, owned and intensively cultivated by a select group of inhabitants.”⁷⁴ In America, proponents of the “restricted collective farm” model of the professoriate, such as President Charles Eliot at Harvard, waged an upward struggle against those who preferred a leisurely Sunday outing in the college park, available to all whose class background allowed them to dress and speak “decently.”

Professors at American theological seminaries fared only somewhat better than their counterparts at colleges. A telling example is provided by the career of Philip Schaff, unarguably nineteenth-century America’s most distinguished church historian. When Schaff arrived at Union Theological Seminary in 1870 after his tenure at Mercersburg Seminary in Pennsylvania, he was first given a chair in “Theological Encyclopedia and Christian Symbolics” (i.e., an introductory outline of the various theological subdisciplines, plus the study of Christian creeds). From there, he transferred to the chair in Hebrew; next, to the chair in New Testament Exegesis; and at last, in 1887, a few years before his death, to the chair of Church History. This example illustrates how fungible were the categories of theological teaching—and how central the study of the Bible remained. In addition, the fact that Union, like other seminaries, employed only one professor of church history suggests how wide that professor’s chronological reach would need to be.

A second step toward specialization is signaled by the creation in the 1890s of departments as organizational units within colleges and universities: here, the University of Chicago provided the model. Previously, the cluster of instructors in any subject was insufficient to constitute a department. Until 1870–1871, the Harvard College catalogue listed course offerings by which classes of students (first-year, second-year, and so on) enrolled in them, not by the departments offering them.⁷⁵ Only in 1891, for example, were there enough history teachers at Harvard to constitute an official History Department.⁷⁶ With professors grouped with (allegedly) likeminded colleagues, the self-identification of the professoriate by discipline could not but become stronger.

The rise of professional societies at the end of the nineteenth century is a third indicator of increased academic specialization.⁷⁷ Although the American Philosophical Association was founded in 1743, most professional societies in the Humanities were products of the nineteenth century: the American Oriental Society was founded in 1842; the American Philological Association, in 1869; the Modern Language Association, in 1883; the American Historical Association, in 1884.⁷⁸ The Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, the first professional society devoted to a specialized area of religious studies, dates to 1880,⁷⁹ and the American Society of Church History (to be discussed in Chapter 1), to 1888. The new professional associations, Jurgen Herbst argues, worked to “weaken the claim of a college as the locus of professional identity, and to give the scholar a new persona as a practitioner of his discipline. Thus he began to think of himself less as a teacher, and more as a historian, a biologist, or an anthropologist.”⁸⁰

Only from the 1880s onward did professionalization enable historians in America to distinguish themselves from lay amateurs and become (as Gabriele Lingelbach puts it) “self-referential.” Now, a man—I use the term advisedly—might strive for prestige and recognition within his own disciplinary community through research and publication.⁸¹ Research was increasingly imagined as producing knowledge, as posing and attempting to answer questions, not merely passing down commentary on older texts.⁸²

Likewise, the founding of university presses (Johns Hopkins boasted the first, in 1891⁸³) and field-specific journals prompted greater professional specialization.⁸⁴ In 1825, Charles Hodge of the Theological Seminary at Princeton founded the Biblical Repertory⁸⁵; this journal, along with Andover’s Bibliotheca Sacra, established in 1843, served as important conduits for theological scholarship in mid-nineteenth century America.⁸⁶ The New Englander (later to become the Yale Review), founded in 1843, disseminated the “New Haven Theology,” while the Mercersburg Review (established in 1849 and managed by Philip Schaff and John W. Nevin) served as the conduit for the “Mercersburg Theology.”⁸⁷ The American Theological Review, which began publication in 1851 and whose editors often included Union Seminary professors, went through several name-changes as it furthered the views of the New School wing of the Presbyterian Church. Later in the century (1881) appeared the first issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature.⁸⁸ William Rainey Harper, as President of the University of Chicago, encouraged each department to publish a field-specific journal. In the first year of the University’s operations (1892), Biblical World and the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures were established, and in 1897, the American Journal of Theology, which later combined with Biblical World to form the Journal of Religion.⁸⁹ These journals, from earliest to latest, were important stimuli to creating a sense of a discipline (albeit broadly defined) and of their readers as “professionals.”

Growth in faculty numbers and in specialized publication spurred the enlargement of seminary and university libraries, which nevertheless developed much more slowly than professors desired: seminary boards of directors frequently underestimated the cost of providing an ever-increasing supply of books and journals, most of which were produced in Europe.⁹⁰ The difficulties of establishing adequate seminary libraries will be detailed in Chapter 2.

Still another sign of specialization was the institution of sabbatical leaves, initiated at Harvard in 1880: the shrewd President Charles Eliot hoped that offering sabbaticals might lure outstanding professors from other institutions to Cambridge.⁹¹ Yet even earlier, we may note, seminaries were granting professors time away from teaching duties, with financial assistance for travel and study, as is evidenced by the careers of the Union Seminary professors in particular. These points will be illustrated in the chapters that follow.

The Elective System and the Seminar Method

Two other developments within American colleges and universities in the mid-to-late nineteenth century also contributed to more advanced study in all fields, including religion: the elective system and the seminar method.

For much of the century, all students took the same prescribed curriculum throughout their college careers. Introducing a curriculum in which students were given at least some choice in their courses—the elective system—was hotly contested. Electives, promoted by President Eliot of Harvard in 1869,⁹² allowed for greater specialization than had the prescribed curriculum. In Eliot’s view, they made “scholarship possible,” for not all subjects would be taught at the elementary level.⁹³ The elective principle, in effect, allowed colleges to become universities.⁹⁴

Detractors of the elective system, however, argued that American youth entering college were not sufficiently prepared to make an elective system feasible.⁹⁵ Admitting that American education was not yet equal to its German or British counterparts, President James McCosh of Princeton claimed that forcing a European model on America would only worsen the situation.⁹⁶ Electives, some feared, might encourage students to abandon rigorous work in languages and mathematics.⁹⁷ McCosh charged that the elective system allowed students to slack off, choosing easy courses and professors. (As examples of such at Harvard, McCosh singled out music, art, French plays and novels.⁹⁸) Students, he insisted, need discipline to keep them from going to ruin.⁹⁹ If we cannot prevent the evils of the elective system at Harvard, he exhorted, “we may arrest it in the other colleges of the country.”¹⁰⁰ Yet McCosh conceded that some few undergraduate students with strong preparation might benefit from elective work in specialized subjects, such as Sanskrit.¹⁰¹ By the 1890s, however, enthusiasts of the new order deemed a regimen of required courses a remnant of “mediaeval” times, whose partisans, to be consistent (one writer claimed) should “only ride in stage coaches and read by tallow drips.”¹⁰²

The introduction of the seminar method—developed first in classical philology in Germany and passing to History—similarly afforded opportunities for more advanced instruction in a field.¹⁰³ The customary methods (student recitation of textbook material, or professors’ lectures) had not encouraged student initiative or research. The historical seminar was introduced to America in 1869 by Charles Kendall Adams at the University of Michigan and was adopted by Henry Adams at Harvard in 1871.¹⁰⁴ Thereafter, the seminar became especially associated with the Johns Hopkins University.¹⁰⁵ Entrepreneurial historian Herbert Baxter Adams traced the evolution of the modern seminar from scholastic methods, elaborating its growth “from a nursery of dogma into a laboratory of scientific truth.”¹⁰⁶ Praising seminar arrangements at German universities, Baxter Adams was afire with a “scientific” vision of history: he likened seminars to laboratories and books to mineralogical specimens.¹⁰⁷ By this standard, teaching by textbook and class recitation seemed hopelessly antiquated.¹⁰⁸ The introduction of seminar teaching in church history will be discussed in Chapter 2.

Graduate Education and the Ph.D.

Still another marker of increasing academic specialization was the creation of the graduate school.¹⁰⁹ Instituting graduate studies in America had been a topic of discussion since the 1830s, with no positive results.¹¹⁰ The college retained its place as the distinctive institution of American education.

Of key importance for the development of graduate education in America was the creation of fellowships to fund advanced study, the impetus for which was spurred by the British university system. A great impact was apparently made by Charles Astor Bristed’s book of 1852, Five Years in an English University. Bristed claimed that advanced study at Cambridge and Oxford had been enabled by the fellowships those universities offered.¹¹¹ In the early 1870s, Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard began to encourage and subsidize foreign study for their especially promising graduates; Johns Hopkins would make such study systematic.¹¹²

Here again, seminaries appear in the forefront: American seminaries, Natalie Naylor argues, pioneered the provision of financial aid for postcollegiate study.¹¹³ Providing students with financial assistance for seminary education constituted a first step toward a system of graduate fellowships.¹¹⁴ As for post-seminary education, Yale by 1876 was offering graduate scholarships for further study at its seminary or in Europe or Palestine.¹¹⁵ In 1877, Union Seminary established two “Prize Fellowships” enabling some graduates to continue their studies in Germany. The first recipient was Francis Brown, later to serve as Professor and then as President at Union.¹¹⁶ Other notable recipients of Union’s “Prize Fellowships” included Edward Caldwell Moore (a student notetaker in Roswell Hitchcock’s classes), who won the award in 1884, spent two years in Germany, and eventually became a professor at Harvard Divinity School; and Arthur Cushman McGiffert, who received the fellowship in 1885 for doctoral work with Adolf von Harnack in Marburg, and who succeeded Philip Schaff as Professor of Church History at Union.¹¹⁷

Newly minted theology professors returning from Germany began to organize seminars, urge the study of primary sources, and assign research papers—all considered novel moves. As early as 1850–1851, Henry Smith at Union Seminary reported that the seniors in his church history class had been assigned “two or three subjects for special investigation”; in 1852, “each student had prepared three dissertations upon assigned topics.”¹¹⁸ Although these “dissertations” were surely not very advanced, they constituted a step toward the research model.¹¹⁹ Some decades later, the church historian at Harvard, Ephraim Emerton, listed paper topics from which his students might choose; his approach, and his students’ efforts, are detailed in Chapter 2.

The first Ph.D.s in any subject awarded in America were at Yale in 1861.¹²⁰ The Yale doctorate required candidates to pursue two extra years of study beyond the completion of the Bachelor’s degree, with high attainment in two different fields.¹²¹ Twenty years later, Johns Hopkins raised the bar by requiring at least three years of post-collegiate study for the doctorate.¹²² Between 1870 and 1900, the number of students in American graduate programs increased from 50 to about 6000.¹²³ This dramatic statistic illustrates in the academic arena Henry Adams’s claim that these decades largely changed the face of American life. It is nevertheless sobering to note that as late as 1884, only 19 members of Harvard’s entire faculty of 189 held the Ph.D.¹²⁴

Doctoral programs in religion or theology in the United States, however, were products largely of the twentieth century. Seminaries were slower than universities in offering doctoral work under their own auspices—although the titles of some early university dissertations suggest that students wrote theses on topics pertaining to religion under the supervision of other departments.¹²⁵ At Yale, for example, such students received their degrees through the Departments of Semitics or Philosophy.¹²⁶ Of the schools featured in this study, Harvard Divinity School began to grant a Th.D. in 1914 or 1915, Union Theological Seminary in 1917 (no degree was actually awarded until 1924), and Princeton Theological Seminary in 1940.¹²⁷

Yale’s situation was complex. Unlike some other seminaries, the Divinity School at Yale never offered a Th.D. At some point the Divinity School began to award the Ph.D., administered by faculty holding rank in the Divinity School and the Graduate School.¹²⁸ In the 1920s, a Department of Religion within the University was established, a move apparently linked with the Yale Corporation’s decision no longer to require compulsory chapel.¹²⁹ When a graduate program within the Department of Religion was established in 1963, M.A. and Ph.D. work was repositioned under the auspices of the (renamed) Department of Religious Studies.¹³⁰

University Ph.D. programs in religion at Princeton date to 1955, and at Columbia, to 1946.¹³¹ Of schools I hope to consider in a further study, the University of Chicago inaugurated a Ph.D. in religion in 1892, and the Catholic University of America, founded as a research university, offered a S.T.D. in 1889 and a Ph.D. in 1940.¹³²

By 1971, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) study Graduate Education in Religion, commonly known as the “Welch Report,” counted 52 Ph.D. programs in religion in the United States and Canada, of which 20 had been established since the 1960s. The decline of the divinity school as a center of graduate education was evident: by 1970, 41 percent of Ph.D. students in religion held no professional degree.¹³³ The seminary was losing its preeminence as the conduit to the Ph.D.

Seminaries, despite their obvious defects, were the first purveyors in the United States of post-collegiate education in any Humanities-oriented subjects.¹³⁴ Amid lack of funds, buildings, faculty, books, and libraries; with programs that scarcely differentiated elementary from advanced work; with poorly prepared students; and with denominational leaders aggressively seeking to control educational programs and oversee the rectitude of faculty and students, seminary professors forged ahead.¹³⁵ Their effort to found the discipline of early church history on American shores is the subject of the chapters that follow.