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, students untutored in history, few colleagues (from zero to four) with whom to organize a theological curriculum, and new methods of instruction that challenged their knowledge and their institutions’ resources. The creation of early Christian history as a scholarly discipline—then little known and even less appreciated—took place concomitantly with academic institution-building in the United States. When Samuel Miller began his teaching career at the Theological Seminary in Princeton in 1813, America had few colleges, a mere handful of seminaries, and nothing that could be called a university. Moreover, “religion” was not an academic subject. During the decades covered in this book, vast changes at all levels of American education were to take place.

      Protestant professors in America used the term “patristics” (if they used it at all) in a much looser sense than did their Roman Catholic or Anglican counterparts in Europe: there, “patristics” denoted a theologically oriented discipline centered on those designated as “Church Fathers,” who wrote from the second to the sixth centuries. It also suggested a heavy respect for ancient ecclesiastical tradition. In America, this book argues,