synthesis.
The Christian system, Smith argued, “as a supernatural and historic revelation,” requires miracles.298 The “philosophic unbeliever” (presumably like the essayists), by contrast,
resolves revelation into intuition, miracles into the course of nature plus myths, inspiration into genius, prophecy into sagacious historic conjectures, redemption into the victory of mind over matter, the incarnation into an ideal union of humanity with divinity realized in no one person, the Trinity into a world-process, and immortal life into the perpetuity of spirit bereft of personal subsistence.299
Especially disturbing to Smith was the essayists’ claim that the Bible should be “interpreted just like any other book,” for example, a work of classical literature. Thus Jowett’s essay, which Smith deemed the most “ingenious and subtle,” is the most insidious: in the guise of rescuing Scripture “from arbitrary and dogmatic interpretations,” Jowett “equally undermines all positive faith, not only in creeds, but also in the inspired authority of the sacred Scriptures.”300 Other essays (those by Temple and Pattison in particular) aim to show
that the external evidences of Christianity are insufficient; that its sacred books are not specifically inspired; that the histories contained in these Books are to be judged as we would any other histories, and in many parts are incredible; and that the doctrines of historic Christianity are to be resolved into more general truths, into more philosophic and rational formulas.301
Smith also emphasized the tendentious relation between the essayists and the Oxford Movement. This book, he (correctly) claimed, represents a different Oxford from that “most opposed to Protestantism and Rationalism,” that is, Tractarianism. Much of the “force and influence” of the essays “are found in their constant opposition to the revival of patristic, and even mediaeval authority in the teachings of this [Oxford] university.… Reason revenges itself for the degradation, which tradition would fain impose upon her.”302 Smith concluded,
We must go forward with the church, or outside of it. We must press through the diversity to a higher unity.… For he who believes in a personal God cannot doubt the possibility of revelation, inspiration, incarnation and redemption, in their specific Christian import: he cannot believe that natural law is all, and that supernaturalism is a fiction.303
Smith’s American Theological Review printed assessments—largely negative—of the Essays and Reviews with seeming enthusiasm. First announcing the work in February 1860, Smith tracked the discussion over the next years.304 As his own lengthy review makes evident, his biblical conservatism could only minimally incorporate the Higher Criticism. Yet Smith cleverly turned Hegelian principles against the authors of Essays and Reviews: if they had pushed on through “negativity,” they could have reached a higher synthesis.
Conclusion
Despite the American professors’ own German educations and reading, they incorporated only limited aspects of European philosophy and biblical criticism into their teaching and writing. They remained biblically centered, evangelical Protestants. Considering their vigorous attack on much European criticism, it is notable (as later chapters will illustrate) that they accepted the Tübingen School’s argument that early Christianity developed—yet they limited that development to post-New Testament writings. For them, the New Testament remained a static and unchanging foil, an “undeveloping” text, against which development in patristic Christianity was charted;305 it occupied an entirely different category from that of the writings of the Church Fathers. The Fathers’ importance rather lay in their “witness” to the “authenticity” of the New Testament books.
Today, biblical scholars would scarcely claim that Strauss, Renan, and Baur were entirely “right” and the more confessional American professors, entirely “wrong.” It is prudent to remember that in their time these professors were regarded as progressive, even dangerous, church historians. The history of the patristic era, to be sure, awaited a better integration with studies of the “Jesus movement” and earliest Christianity.
CHAPTER 4
History and Church History
It is sometimes said, that of all historical studies that of Ecclesiastical History is the most repulsive.
—Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1862)
The winning of ecclesiastical history for science by Protestant scholarship has been one of the triumphs of the nineteenth century.
—G. P. Gooch (1913)
Historical Studiesin Nineteenth-Century America
History as a distinctive academic subject, we shall shortly see, had a slow and uncertain entry to American academia.1 Hence it is not surprising that its incorporation into the seminary curriculum was similarly halting. The spirit of evangelical piety that so colored its teaching renders dubious the above claim that “science”—in the German sense of Wissenschaft—had “triumphed.” Although most of the American professors here considered had imbibed some newer, “German” (largely Romantic and Hegelian) approaches to history, these they interpreted through the lens of God’s providential design. Moreover, older assumptions lingered on: that history contributed to the formation of character and good citizenship, that it provided useful warnings against possible future missteps.
In this chapter, I first detail the development of historical instruction in the American academy and seminary,2 then turn to discuss how German approaches to history inflected the teaching of early church history in the United States. In the next chapter, I elaborate how the contrasting themes of historical decline and development co-inhabited—somewhat uneasily—the professors’ historical imaginaries. The professors, we shall see, straddled older and newer approaches to church history in ways that often appear quite contradictory.
History in the Academy
History as a subject was largely nonexistent in American college curricula until the later nineteenth century. Often relegated to an hour or so on Saturdays, instruction in history was organized around recitation from a textbook.3 No advanced training was required: any teacher (indeed, any “cultivated gentleman”4) might listen to students recite.5 As late as the 1880s, some college teachers considered a professorship in history a wasteful luxury; the subject, they argued, could easily be handled by an instructor in another field, such as classics.6
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