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,
