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
