(more precisely, on the lack of it) that attended the teaching of church history in nineteenth-century America.
CHAPTER 2
Infrastructure: Teaching, Textbooks,
Primary Sources, and Libraries
What professors actually told students, what students heard professors say (rarely the same thing!), what purposes professors believed their courses served, what methods they used to achieve these goals—the data bearing on such questions remain as pristine as if the archives were in Albania.
—James Turner (1982)
Teaching Church Historyin Nineteenth-Century America
Before exploring the professors’ theoretical approaches to and assumptions about history, I examine the (woefully inadequate) academic “infrastructure”—the material conditions of knowledge production and transmission—that attended the teaching of church history in early and mid-nineteenth-century America. Suitable textbooks seemed nonexistent, let alone anthologies of primary sources in translation. Libraries, conceived as book depositories for (shockingly) small collections, were open only a few hours a week. As the century progressed, new methods of teaching placed greater demands on professors: they could no longer simply listen to students recite from textbooks, but must prepare lectures and guide advanced students in seminars that required independent investigation.1 The challenges facing professors of church history in nineteenth-century America were daunting. In this chapter, I first examine assumptions about and practices of teaching, then turn to examine the textbooks the professors chose, the accessibility of primary sources, and the development of institutional and personal libraries.
Samuel Miller: The Theological Seminary at Princeton
Samuel Miller, coming of age before the development of theological seminaries in America, received one year of post-collegiate training via private study with an accomplished minister. When he assumed his professorship of church history at the newly established Theological Seminary at Princeton in 1813–1814, he had had no seminary experience. With no advanced education or access to textbooks he thought appropriate for Presbyterian students,2 Miller was responsible for developing the curriculum in church history at the new Presbyterian Seminary at Princeton.
At the Seminary’s inception, church history was taught only in the second year;3 later, in the first and third years as well. Some two decades after he began his Princeton career, Miller described his teaching regime: he met the senior class three times a week; middlers, twice; and juniors, once, on Saturday afternoons, each class running about 75 minutes.4 Miller’s teaching notes, even late in his career, give little attention to European scholarship. They also reveal that he never changed his method of teaching or approach to church history in his 36 years as professor. Miller, in any case, deemed church history of less importance than biblical studies and “didactic and polemick [sic] theology.”5
In 1813, the recitation method of instruction was still commonly used, supplemented by professors’ comments. Miller’s class notes, preserved in the Princeton Seminary archives, suggest that he examined his class on a few points at the beginning of the session, then turned to lecture.6 Relying on the lecture method alone, Miller thought, assumes that students are “an ear”; they hear the lecture only once and have no chance to review it. But recitation alone, on the other hand, does not “awaken and excite the mind.” A combination of both methods works best.7 Miller’s son reports that his father, who claimed that lectures alone make students too dependent on the professor, combined the two methods throughout his teaching career.8
The professor’s duty, Miller believed, was “to excite [students] to think,” to examine opinions on their own, and “to state leading facts, rather than the minuter items of history.”9 Thinking, to be sure, existed within a Presbyterian framework: it should not lead students to be “corrupted” by “philosophical unbelievers” such as Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Byron. In Miller’s view, “a rage for novelty, an ardent love of originality” are among the “most unhappy symptoms” that could afflict a prospective minister.10
A goodly sample of Miller’s lecture notes, running from 1814 to 1843, for his courses in ecclesiastical history and church government are extant. Dates on some notes indicate that Miller gave the same lecture up to six times. Miller responded to students’ questions in the following class session, allowing himself time to consult his books for appropriate answers:11 this practice suggests both his relative lack of expertise in church history and an admirable honesty in admitting this lack to his students.
During recitations, Miller asked questions, the correct answers to which he had written out in his notes. For example:
Question: “Whence did this superstition [of celibacy] arise?”
Answer: “From the Gnostic notions of the malignity of matter, and the best means of counteracting its influence.”12
Miller’s recommendation that students take notes on their reading and make abstracts of important points suggests that notetaking was not then a customary practice in colleges. Above all, he opposed “mere speculative and unsanctified learning”: remember that you must die, he warned his students.13
Henry Smith: Union Theological Seminary
Before Henry Smith arrived at Union in 1850 to teach church history, the subject was (minimally) covered by a local pastor, Samuel Cox. Cox lectured once a week on church history—while Hebrew grammar received five hours, and “Harmony of the Gospels,” three. In the 1840s, Edward Robinson, Union’s famous professor of biblical studies, also offered some lectures on church history in the first three (or perhaps five) centuries.14
From a letter Cox addressed to Smith before the latter joined the Union faculty, we get a taste of his style and approach. Cox sees himself as preparing the way for Smith, “by outline and generality, not ambiguity, respecting the grand vertebral column of history, its osteology and loca majora.” He continues:
They [the students] have been very attentive, and I have endeavored to affect them with a sense of the sine-qua-non importance to ministers of its thorough and scientific acquisition.… I go on the principle that premises must be before inductions, and hence that without knowing facts, dates, places, men, relations, and some circumstances, they are not prepared for philosophizing as historians. Hence, I teach them the elements, the what, where, when, who, why, how, and the connections, consequences, antecedents, and motives, as well as we can know them, in order [sic] to their masterly use of them in their subsequent lucubrations. But I prefer the grand to the minor relations and matters of history; suppose Church History to be in re so connected with secular history, since the Church and the world mutually affect and modify each other, that the former cannot be understood without the latter; and so endeavor to fix in consecutive order, in their minds, those great events, which, when well understood are seen to regulate the others, and at once to stimulate the student, and direct him, in his later researches.
Despite his grandiose tone and condescending assurance to Smith that he will counsel the Union community to make allowance for Smith’s inadequate preparation and greenness as a teacher, Cox himself (judging from student lecture notes) did not have a strong grasp of the subject.15
Smith served as Professor of Church History only until 1855, when he transferred to
