Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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This position he held for 36 years.139 Although he claimed to keep the two subjects of his professorship separate,140 his teaching of church history focused strongly on polity: he aimed to show that the Presbyterian form of church government was in place at Christianity’s inception.141 Miller’s slant on church history was suggested in his inaugural address, a “Sketch of the … Witnesses for the Truth During the Dark Ages.” These “witnesses”—Trinitarians, Calvinists, and Presbyterians, among others—prove that “doctrines of grace were the genuine doctrines of God’s Word.”142 Miller’s long tenure at Princeton set the tone for the teaching of church history in that institution. When Miller stepped down in 1850, he was not replaced with a professor of note.143
Although others praised Miller as exhibiting “a ripe scholarship, a minute acquaintance with the annals of the early Church, and a capacity to vindicate the primitive form of ecclesiastical government,”144 Miller himself was keenly aware of his inadequate preparation. Having accepted the Princeton position, he confessed in his diary that his heart sank when he contemplated the appointment. I do not have “the appropriate qualifications,” he wrote; “I have not the talents; I have not the varied furniture; especially I have not the mature spiritual wisdom and experience, which appear to be indispensable.”145 (Whether training in church history was among the missing “furniture” is not stated.146) His election, he mused, was by default, so lamentably scarce were Presbyterian ministers who had turned their attention to the study of church history. Years later, as an experienced professor, he acknowledged how “very raw, and very poorly prepared” he had been. Since he had not started his studies in church history until he was forty-four, he conceded that he would never be as qualified as those who had undertaken them in their youth.147
In the Seminary’s opening year, 1813, Miller and his colleague Archibald Alexander taught 24 pupils.148 Miller was responsible for organizing the curriculum in church history. That Miller was not enamored of patristics in general is suggested by his critique of the “addiction” of Episcopalians and “their Papal exemplars” to the “Fathers.”149 Nevertheless, he thought that budding Presbyterian ministers should know “the opinion and practice of our Fathers in all past ages.”150
An unidentified (and seemingly unsympathetic) reviewer of the junior Samuel Miller’s two-volume biography of his father describes the senior Miller as not brilliant, nor a man of “great powers,” but an enthusiastic plodder who by “constant and methodical working” became a prominent scholar in his denomination. Miller, the reviewer concedes, possessed a “much larger spirit” than did many Old School Presbyterians.151 Nevertheless, he like other “Princeton gentlemen” had succumbed to the pressures from “the extreme and anathematizing party … rather than lose their positions or abandon the old views.”152 The reviewer pokes fun at Miller’s now-dated condemnation of dancing, novel-reading, and the shocking “New Haven view” that the six days of creation were not strictly “days.”153 In addition to his famed Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century and numerous published articles and sermons, Miller wrote (among other books) Letters on Unitarianism (1821); Letters on Clerical Manners and Habits (1827); Letters Concerning the Constitution and Order to the Christian Ministry (1807, 1830); An Essay on the Warrant, Nature and Duties of the Office of the Ruling Elder (1831); and Presbyterianism: The Truly Primitive and Apostolical Constitution of the Church of Christ (1840).
Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877)
Henry Boynton Smith was the first full-time professor of church history at Union Theological Seminary.154 A native of Maine, Smith attended Bowdoin College, Andover Theological Seminary, and Bangor Seminary.155 In 1834, he converted from Unitarianism to Congregationalism.156 (His zeal as a convert is amply on display in the chapters that follow.) At Bangor, Smith was instilled with an enthusiasm for German literature by his teacher Leonard Woods, Jr., son of his Andover professor.157 In late 1837, he crossed the Atlantic, studying first in Paris. Arriving in Germany in spring 1838, three years after David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu had shaken the Christian world, he pursued work at the Universities of Halle and Berlin until 1840.158 An American fellow student at Halle later recalled their “anxious consultation” in which Smith worried whether “he could be a student or not.”159 Apparently he decided he could.
Smith’s German was strong enough to follow professors’ lectures, although the occasional sketchiness of his extant notes, now in the Union Seminary archives, suggests that he occasionally lost his way. These notes focus largely on lectures given by August Tholuck, who became a good friend—the only person in Germany who called him by his first name, “Henry,” Smith plaintively wrote to his parents.160
Smith’s letters from Germany also describe August Neander’s lectures on the “History of Christian Doctrines.”161 He styles the erudite Neander (exhibiting a “decidedly Jewish” face) a living source of Christianity, “the father of a new era in church history.” Neander, he reports, is considered “the best exegetical lecturer in Germany”; more auditors flock to him than to any other German theologian.162 In Berlin, Smith heard Leopold von Ranke’s lectures on the Calvinist Reformation and studied Hegel with Friedrich Trendelenberg.163 Later in his life, Smith made three return trips to Europe. On the last, he spent a year and a half in Germany, Italy, and “the lands of the Bible.”164
The German university experience shaped Smith’s life and work. He, like other American students, was warmly welcomed by several German professors.165 In Berlin, Smith was invited to dine with Neander and to meet with Hegel’s widow. At Halle, Tholuck explicated Hegel to him during their customary walks and took him along on a vacation trip.166 Professor of Philosophy Hermann Ulrici, in whose home Smith lived for a time, also developed a warm relationship with Smith.167 When Smith returned to America, he kept in touch with both Tholuck168 and Ulrici.169 Professor Isaak Dorner also praised Smith: “einen der ersten, wenn nicht als ersten Amerikanischen Theologen der Gegenwart angesehen; festgegründet … in philosophischen Geistes und für systematische Theologie ungewöhnlich begabt.”170 Smith had, it is clear, made a deep impression on German professors and their wives.
His German education in place, Smith returned to America but had difficulty finding a permanent post. He was turned down for a chair in literature at Bowdoin; at Dartmouth for a professorship of divinity; and even at a girls’ school—and so he became a pastor by default.171 Yet even then, Smith pursued German scholarship, translating ten German articles for Bibliotheca Sacra during these years.172 In 1847, Smith became Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Amherst College, where he taught Mill, Hume, Scottish and English philosophy, logic, and the Baconian method.173 The philosophy he had imbibed in Germany, it appears, had not yet secured a place in American college curricula.
In 1850, Smith was offered the Professorship of Church History at Union. He doubted the wisdom of accepting the appointment: he was not a historian by training, considered himself unsuited for a “theological institution,” and worried about Union’s viability. Pondering the offer, he wrote to a friend, “the literary character of the seminary is slight, its zeal in theological science is little, the need of a comprehensive range of theological studies and of books thereto has got to be created.”174 He accepted Union’s offer, but a few years later (1854/1855) transferred to the Chair in Theology.
Despite Smith’s preference for theology and philosophy over history, George Bancroft—then considered America’s premier historian—praised Smith’s “Oration on the Problem of Philosophy of History” (presumably his Phi Beta Kappa address at Yale College in 1853175). This excellent speech, Bancroft claimed, shows how the scholarly study of history can help uncover “the unity and harmony of all truth,” in which God is “always and everywhere” seen as present.176 After Smith’s death, Bancroft wrote to Elizabeth Smith, praising her late husband as “the best teacher we ever had of the philosophy of history.”177 Indeed, Bancroft earlier had lauded Smith: “In Church history,