by German education, philosophy, and theology. He represents a distinctive Princeton approach to theological studies, inflected by Scottish Common Sense philosophy. By an accident of professional longevity, Miller kept the teaching of church history at Princeton Seminary in an older style than might otherwise have been the case.
The Unitarian Ephraim Emerton of Harvard, on the other end—the only one of the six to earn a German Ph.D. in history entirely apart from seminary training—evinced little interest in theology or biblical studies per se, unlike the Union and Yale professors. His occupation of the Winn Professorship meant that a man with quite different historical interests from those of his Union and Yale counterparts would train students at Harvard.
The rapid growth of Union in particular from mid-century onward, however, ensured that a newer understanding of church history—evangelically pious, yet colored by German historiographical and philosophical assumptions—was offered to hundreds of prospective ministers and (even) a few scholars. By the time of Philip Schaff’s death in 1893, Union was well on the way to forging a theological persona that would mark American liberal Protestantism in the early twentieth century.
Samuel Miller (1769–1850)
Born in Delaware, Miller was educated at home in Greek and Latin by his father and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at nineteen as salutatorian. He then studied theology privately in 1791–1792 with Charles Nisbet, the first Principal of Dickinson College.131 From 1793 to 1813, Miller served as minister at the Presbyterian Church in Wall Street (New York), during which time he wrote his most famous work, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century.132 Miller’s placement in New York afforded him frequent opportunity for criticizing Episcopalians’ “immense wealth,” “arrogant claims and high-church principles.”133 As a professor of church history, his assaults on Episcopalians took the form of battles over the “original” church polity. Miller’s polemicizing against all groups except his own brand of Presbyterianism was not modified by any seeming acquaintance with German theology or philosophy.134
Although Miller’s training in church history was nearly nonexistent, during his years in New York he had been active in the New-York Historical Society, for which organization he collected information on the early history of New York State and its environs. His questions to correspondents manifest his interest in social, cultural, and technological developments. To one correspondent, Miller explained that although his questions seemed “trifling,” they might help to uncover information from documents “indirectly gathered … which they were not designed originally to convey.”135 His “nose” for historical investigation was perhaps better than his later deployment of patristic texts to rail against Episcopalians and other groups would suggest.
Miller agonized over leaving the active ministry to become a professor. At the time of his call to Princeton, he had already rejected the presidency of three colleges.136 He confessed to his New York congregation that the constant exertion of a New York City pastorate made him fear for his health: apparently he imagined that a professorship would be less demanding.137 His salary at Princeton was to be $1800 a year plus the use of a house.138
In 1813, Miller joined the new Presbyterian Seminary as its second professor, with an appointment in Ecclesiastical History and Church Government. This position he held for 36 years.139 Although he claimed to keep the two subjects of his professorship separate,140 his teaching of church history focused strongly on polity: he aimed to show that the Presbyterian form of church government was in place at Christianity’s inception.141 Miller’s slant on church history was suggested in his inaugural address, a “Sketch of the … Witnesses for the Truth During the Dark Ages.” These “witnesses”—Trinitarians, Calvinists, and Presbyterians, among others—prove that “doctrines of grace were the genuine doctrines of God’s Word.”142 Miller’s long tenure at Princeton set the tone for the teaching of church history in that institution. When Miller stepped down in 1850, he was not replaced with a professor of note.143
Although others praised Miller as exhibiting “a ripe scholarship, a minute acquaintance with the annals of the early Church, and a capacity to vindicate the primitive form of ecclesiastical government,”144 Miller himself was keenly aware of his inadequate preparation. Having accepted the Princeton position, he confessed in his diary that his heart sank when he contemplated the appointment. I do not have “the appropriate qualifications,” he wrote; “I have not the talents; I have not the varied furniture; especially I have not the mature spiritual wisdom and experience, which appear to be indispensable.”145 (Whether training in church history was among the missing “furniture” is not stated.146) His election, he mused, was by default, so lamentably scarce were Presbyterian ministers who had turned their attention to the study of church history. Years later, as an experienced professor, he acknowledged how “very raw, and very poorly prepared” he had been. Since he had not started his studies in church history until he was forty-four, he conceded that he would never be as qualified as those who had undertaken them in their youth.147
In the Seminary’s opening year, 1813, Miller and his colleague Archibald Alexander taught 24 pupils.148 Miller was responsible for organizing the curriculum in church history. That Miller was not enamored of patristics in general is suggested by his critique of the “addiction” of Episcopalians and “their Papal exemplars” to the “Fathers.”149 Nevertheless, he thought that budding Presbyterian ministers should know “the opinion and practice of our Fathers in all past ages.”150
An unidentified (and seemingly unsympathetic) reviewer of the junior Samuel Miller’s two-volume biography of his father describes the senior Miller as not brilliant, nor a man of “great powers,” but an enthusiastic plodder who by “constant and methodical working” became a prominent scholar in his denomination. Miller, the reviewer concedes, possessed a “much larger spirit” than did many Old School Presbyterians.151 Nevertheless, he like other “Princeton gentlemen” had succumbed to the pressures from “the extreme and anathematizing party … rather than lose their positions or abandon the old views.”152 The reviewer pokes fun at Miller’s now-dated condemnation of dancing, novel-reading, and the shocking “New Haven view” that the six days of creation were not strictly “days.”153 In addition to his famed Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century and numerous published articles and sermons, Miller wrote (among other books) Letters on Unitarianism (1821); Letters on Clerical Manners and Habits (1827); Letters Concerning the Constitution and Order to the Christian Ministry (1807, 1830); An Essay on the Warrant, Nature and Duties of the Office of the Ruling Elder (1831); and Presbyterianism: The Truly Primitive and Apostolical Constitution of the Church of Christ (1840).
Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877)
Henry Boynton Smith was the first full-time professor of church history at Union Theological Seminary.154 A native of Maine, Smith attended Bowdoin College, Andover Theological Seminary, and Bangor Seminary.155 In 1834, he converted from Unitarianism to Congregationalism.156 (His zeal as a convert is amply on display in the chapters that follow.) At Bangor, Smith was instilled with an enthusiasm for German literature by his teacher Leonard Woods, Jr., son of his Andover professor.157 In late 1837, he crossed the Atlantic, studying first in Paris. Arriving in Germany in spring 1838, three years after David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu had shaken the Christian world, he pursued work at the Universities of Halle and Berlin until 1840.158 An American fellow student at Halle later recalled their “anxious consultation” in which Smith worried whether “he could be a student or not.”159 Apparently he decided he could.
Smith’s German was strong enough to follow professors’ lectures, although the occasional sketchiness of his extant notes, now in the Union Seminary archives, suggests
