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The Setting: Contextualizing the Study of Early Christianity in America
CHAPTER 1
The Institutions and the Professors
The American universities were not constructed from blueprints shipped over on the Hamburg line.
—Carl Diehl (1978)
And what is this Maine, which produces men like these?
—August Tholuck (1850s?)
The Institutions
For my study, I have selected four seminaries or “theological departments” founded in the first half of the nineteenth century that later developed into major centers of graduate education: those at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Union.1 These institutions’ importance in pioneering the study of Christian history in nineteenth-century America renders them central to my project. Each, we shall see, had its own denominational and doctrinal allegiances—allegiances that sometimes provoked clashes among them.
Theological study at Yale and Harvard began within their respective colleges and later moved into distinctive theological schools or “departments.” At Princeton, by contrast, the Theological Seminary was established as an independent institution in part to counter the allegedly deficient teaching of Christianity at Princeton College. Union also was founded as a free-standing seminary and had no original connection to any college or university.2 Some important early nineteenth-century seminaries, I readily admit, are absent from this book: despite their significance for ministerial training, they did not develop into major centers of graduate education in the twentieth century. Of these, three deserve special (albeit brief) mention.3
Andover, the second oldest seminary in America,4 was founded in 1808 to serve as a Congregationalist “Maginot line against Unitarianism.”5 Home to the renowned scholar Moses Stuart, Andover produced over a thousand graduates by 1860.6 As noted in the Introduction, the study of church history had a rocky start at Andover. Although James Murdoch was appointed to teach the subject in 1819, he was forced out in 1828 and the position was redefined as “Pastoral Theology and Ecclesiastical History.”7 Church history never received the favor at Andover that it did at Union. Although some of its graduates (including Roswell Hitchcock, later professor at Union, and George Fisher, later professor at Yale) pursued post-seminary study, by century’s end Andover’s pre-eminence had faded, its enrollment dwindling to 23 students.8
The General Theological Seminary, founded in 1817 and reorganized in the 1820s,9 continued the Anglican tradition’s devotion to patristics. (One of its graduates, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, later Bishop of Western New York, served as editor of the American version of the Ante-Nicene Fathers series: we shall encounter him later.10) Within two decades of its founding, the Seminary was deemed the bastion of high-church Episcopalianism,11 “the Oxford of American Anglicanism.”12 General Seminary established a Th.D. program in 1926 and has remained an important force in the Episcopal Church, but it did not become a major center for doctoral education.13
A third nineteenth-century seminary—that of the German Reformed Church at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania—was renowned more for its two controversial professors than for the numbers of its graduates. In 1844, Philip Schaff arrived in America to teach at Mercersburg, where he joined John Williamson Nevin in promoting a “high” ecclesiology sympathetic to early Christian history.14 Throughout his career at both Mercersburg and Union Seminaries (whose faculty he joined in 1870), Schaff emphasized Christianity’s grounding in the institutional church. Despite its signal importance in American theology, Mercersburg, given its small size, German-language orientation, and geographical location, did not grow into a doctoral-granting institution.15
Although the four institutions I have chosen for my study represent only a small slice of Protestantism in nineteenth-century America, their educational and intellectual importance in the early development of theological (and later, religious) studies in America remains unrivalled. That Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and (in New England) Unitarians were leaders in education more generally has often been noted. The professors at these schools were in discussion mainly among themselves, with leaders of their respective denominations, and (apart from Samuel Miller) with European, especially German, colleagues. Other, rapidly expanding sects and denominations made little or no mark on them or their seminaries. Indeed, many of the newer Protestant groups rejected the requirement of an educated ministry so essential to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians. As late as 1880, the lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School could sneer at his institution’s appointment of a Baptist—Crawford Howell Toy—whose denomination had “discarded” him for his liberal views on biblical criticism.16
In this chapter, I first sketch the institutions on which my study focuses and their provision for the teaching of early church history. Next, I offer more detailed accounts of the professors who taught the subject. Subsequent chapters probe the emphases of their teaching and writing.
The Theological Seminary at Princeton and Princeton University
The College of New Jersey (Princeton) was founded in 1746 by evangelical New Side Presbyterians who desired a more experiential, less doctrinally rigid, approach to Christianity. A Professorship in Divinity was established twenty-one years later.17 In 1812, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, seeking to upgrade the customary apprenticeship model of ministerial training, voted to establish a seminary at Princeton—a first for its denomination.18 The Seminary’s founders, Mark Noll claims, believed that they faced a multi-faceted crisis: a short supply of Presbyterian ministers, rampant “infidelity,” and “the unprecedented dissemination of deistic, immoral, and unsound speculation.” The Seminary, they hoped, would provide a stable bulwark in the face of religious, social, and political turmoil.19
Equally important, the Seminary’s founders doubted that true Christian principles were being taught at Princeton College. In particular they suspected the orthodoxy of its President, Samuel Stanhope Smith, whom they forced out of office in 1812.20 Noll argues that Samuel Miller and Ashbel Green (who would shortly replace Smith) had schemed since late 1808 to found an undergraduate “theological academy” that would render the College “entirely superfluous for the theological training of Presbyterians.”21 Instead of an undergraduate institution, however, Presbyterians opted for a seminary. The College’s administrators agreed not to hire a professor of theology as long as the Seminary remained in Princeton.22 This agreement perhaps delayed the creation of a separate Department of Religion within Princeton University, an event that did not occur until 1946.23
A Professorship of Ecclesiastical History, paired with Church Government, was slated as one of the first three appointments for the new Presbyterian seminary. In 1813, Samuel Miller, minister of the Wall Street Church in New York and a promoter of the Seminary, was appointed to fill this post.24 The Seminary, Miller claimed, was carrying on the work of early Christian scholars Pantaenus, Clement, and Origen in the Alexandrian “seminary” [the so-called “catechetical school”] that served as “a nursery of the church.” He exulted that American Presbyterians, at last awakened from their sleep, with “tardy” but “heaven-directed steps” were following not only these ancients, but also other denominations in America that had already founded seminaries.25 Miller was the professor of church history at the Seminary from 1813 to 1849. After he retired, a
