Founding the Fathers
DIVINATIONS: REREADING
LATE ANCIENT RELIGION
Series Editors:
Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
FOUNDING THE FATHERS
Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America
ELIZABETH A. CLARK
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA · OXFORD
Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-0-8122-4319-2
A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is Available from the Library of Congress
For Patricia Cox Miller who many years ago attempted to teach me about American history and who since then has taught me much else
To [the American of the year 2000] the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth,—equally childlike,—and he would only wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much.
—Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
CONTENTS
Introduction: Higher Education and Religion in Nineteenth-Century United States
PART I. THE SETTING: CONTEXTUALIZING THE STUDY OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA
1. The Institutions and the Professors
2. Infrastructure: Teaching, Textbooks, Primary Sources, and Libraries
PART II. HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
3. Defending the Faith: European Theories and American Professors
5. Development and Decline: Challenges to Historiographical Categories
PART III. TOPICS OF EARLY CHRISTIAN HISTORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ANALYSIS
8. Asceticism, Marriage, Women, and the Family
List of Abbreviations and Archival Sources
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,
