used were Johann L. Mosheim’s eighteenth-century Ecclesiastical History; Johann Gieseler’s Text-Book of Ecclesiastical [Church] History, written and revised several times in the 1820s and 1830s; Karl von Hase’s History of the Christian Church; and (sometimes) Augustus Neander’s volumes on the history of early Christianity.114
It is noteworthy that the American professors did not select books written by British or Scots authors. George Fisher, for example, faulted Milman’s History of Latin Christianity for the author’s lack of sympathy with figures whose piety exceeded the “limit of Anglican moderation,” especially any form of devotion that displayed extravagant “austerities.” This lack, Fisher charged, constitutes an “involuntary disrespect” and colors Milman’s entire portrait.115 Even Samuel Miller, who had not studied in Germany, chose a text (admittedly by default, we shall see) by a German author, Mosheim. For all of them, Germany represented the gold standard of scholarship.116
JOHANN MOSHEIM’S TEXTBOOK
Johann Mosheim’s ecclesiastical history, composed in Latin in the 1750s, was available in English translation by the early nineteenth century. Despite Mosheim’s general popularity in America—a “Von Mosheim Society” was founded in 1789 to perpetuate German language and culture117—his text was not favored by Protestant professors of a warmly evangelical stripe.
When Samuel Miller began teaching at the Theological Seminary at Princeton in 1813, only Mosheim’s Church History was available in translation. Miller was aware that students would prefer something smaller and of a “different character,” but he judged no other book to be “equally eligible.” Works that might be preferable were not available, whereas Miller could obtain copies of Mosheim for his students. Mosheim, he conceded, provides the “best skeleton of a course of Ecclesiastical History that is anywhere within our reach.” As for other historians who wrote church history books, “Dupin, Fleury, Baronius were all Catholics!” Miller exclaimed—apparently feeling no need to explain what would be wrong with consulting works by these authors. Miller confessed that he had not discovered any textbook of ecclesiastical history suitable for Calvinist and Presbyterian students.118
Miller, who used Mosheim throughout his teaching career,119 informed his “young gentlemen” that he would be stressing Mosheim’s faults: Mosheim entertains unsatisfactory notions of the true church, devotes too much time to politics, and is defective in “portrait painting.” Miller deemed Mosheim “a coldblooded low Arminian—an enemy to vital piety.”120 Mosheim’s history was not “religious,”121 exhibiting “very inadequate ideas of the true church” and concentrating on its “secular and political” manifestations. Moreover, Mosheim finds truth even among heretics, while scarcely noting the “pouring out of the spirit” in religious revivals. He gives too much attention to “the Romish church,” dwelling “unnecessarily and tediously on the Popes.” As a Lutheran, Mosheim was not friendly to Calvinism, the reigning theology at Princeton. The students can supplement the defects of Mosheim (whom Miller nevertheless considered a “learned German”) by comparing his work with that of other writers.122 Yet this was the textbook available for use.
Nor was Mosheim in good favor with the Union and Yale professors. Henry Smith, attempting to liven up the subject of church history, abandoned the use of Mosheim “and all that lumber.”123 Roswell Hitchcock faulted Mosheim’s division by “centuries” as untrue to the messier flow of events.124 George Fisher, while claiming that Mosheim had initiated a new “scientific spirit” in ecclesiastical historiography, criticized that author’s commonplace style, lack of “philosophical insight,” arrangement of material by “centuries,” and “sabbath school tone”—an interesting critique, given that others faulted Mosheim’s alleged rationalism. Mosheim’s text, in Fisher’s view, had been rendered obsolete by Neander, Gieseler, and Baur.125
Schaff too abandoned Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History (“dry and undigestable”) in favor of English translations of Neander’s and Gieseler’s books.126 Mosheim’s “freedom from passion,” in Schaff’s view, almost borders on “cool indifferentism.”127 At mid-century, he decried the fact that theological schools in England and America, including Princeton, had for a hundred years been content to use Mosheim,128 whose text had been “shelved” at least fifty years ago in Germany.129 Schaff imagined that the long-dead Mosheim would himself be displeased if he could know that in English and American seminaries, the study of church history had not gone a step beyond him in the whole intervening century, students still mechanically memorizing his textbook.130
Schaff believed that a good church history textbook, unlike Mosheim’s, “should unite in proper harmony a thorough use of original sources, clear apprehension, organic development, lively and interesting delineation, strong but liberal and universal church feeling, and fruitfulness in the way of practical edification.”131 The work must not be overly long: what student can get through the forty volumes of Baronius, Schaff asked, or even Henry Smith’s History of the Church of Christ in Chronological Tables, the pages of which are “too large for convenient use”?132 By Schaff’s time, English translations of other German Church Histories made better textbook options available.
JOHANN GIESELER’S TEXTBOOK
An alternative to Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History was Johann Gieseler’s Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte (1824ff.), the first English translation of which was published in 1836.133 In the mid-1850s, Henry Smith of Union Seminary, desiring an updated version,134 undertook a new translation based on the fourth German edition (1844–1857).135 That Smith, always in precarious health and overworked, judged it a good use of his time to translate this multivolume work suggests the desperate need for adequate textbooks.
The great virtue of Gieseler’s Text-Book was its inclusion of copious extracts from the primary sources. Moses Stuart of Andover Seminary, among others, praised the book for placing the reader “in a better condition to judge for himself,”136 while George Fisher styled it a “library of authorities.”137 Philip Schaff also praised the Text-Book’s inclusion of primary source extracts,138 and Roswell Hitchcock assigned it as “collateral reading.”139 In the absence of anthologies of primary sources, Gieseler’s work was highly valued.
Yet much was wrong with Gieseler’s text in the eyes of the American professors. Too synoptic, “history, it is not,” one reviewer complained.140 Even Henry Smith found it unsatisfactory and extremely “dry.”141 Smith praised Gieseler’s spirit of charity in assessing which groups might count as “Christian”142 and his copious citation of original sources “such as can nowhere else be found.” Yet he found the book “cold, but cautious … more rational than sympathetic; it has not the warmth of Neander’s incomparable work” nor “the vividness of Hase’s delineations.” Particularly to be faulted, in Smith’s view, was Gieseler’s sketchy and biased treatment of the first century; nevertheless, this omission can easily be remedied by students, since “the source for correcting [Gieseler’s] opinions is near at hand”143—namely, the New Testament. Moreover, Gieseler emphasized (to Smith’s discomfort) patristic writers’ distortion of truth through ignorance, credulity, party-spirit, or “even intentional dishonesty.”144
Philip Schaff likewise criticized Gieseler’s Text-Book for failing to “reach the inward life and spiritual marrow of the church of Christ,” scarcely rising above “jejeune rationalism”; Gieseler writes with the “indifference of an outside spectator.” Yet, in Schaff’s view, Gieseler had a better appreciation of history than did his Rationalistic predecessors. In the last year of his life, and with his own Histories behind him, Schaff generously claimed that Giesler and Neander
