Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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and the store of knowledge which it absorbed, instead of being so much dead learning, only fed and stimulated its activity. He was always making new acquisitions.210
Hitchcock was dedicated to Union. On the 48th anniversary of the Seminary, recalling some moments in its history, he expressed his pride in this “School of the Prophets.” Union had “began in poverty and weakness, praying almost day by day for its daily bread. The planting of it in this whirling metropolis of commerce, was against all our American traditions.”211 Yet the Seminary had not merely survived, but grown preeminent.
Apart from some articles on the patristic era, Hitchcock left no books on that topic except the edition and translation (with introduction and notes) of the Didache that he produced with his Union colleague Francis Brown.212 Among his other publications are book reviews of works on Zoroastrianism and Confucianism;213 a book, Socialism; an “anthropological” treatment of race theory entitled Laws of Civilization; a Complete Analysis of the Holy Bible, or the Whole of the Old and New Testaments Arranged According to Subjects in Twenty-Seven Books; and a memorial volume he wrote with Henry Smith, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson.214 In addition, a volume of his often scholarly sermons, Eternal Atonement, was published after his death.
Philip Schaff (1819–1893)
As nineteenth-century America’s most famous church historian and “public theologian,” Philip Schaff has been the subject of several biographies. The first, written by his son David and published in 1897,215 has been joined in the twentieth century by those by George Shriver,216 Gary K. Pranger,217 and Stephen R. Graham.218 In addition, Klaus Penzel has contributed a long biographical essay219 and a monograph on the intellectual and religious climate of Schaff’s early years in Switzerland and Germany.220
Philip Schaff—founder of the American Society of Church History, founding member of the Society of Biblical Literature, editor of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, head of the American Committee for the Authorized Revision of the Bible, leader of the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance—was Union Theological Seminary’s most distinguished nineteenth-century professor of church history. As a reviewer of the sixth volume of Schaff’s monumental History of the Christian Church noted, if he had lived in the Middle Ages, he would have been called “Philip the Indefatigable.”221 After Schaff’s death, a colleague claimed, “Work was his element, out of which he was as ill at ease as a fish out of water.”222
Schaff’s self-assessment was modest: “I am no genius, no investigator, no great scholar, and all the distinction I can aspire to is that of a faithful and, I trust, useful worker in biblical and historical theology.”223 He appropriated the title “pontifex,” “bridge-builder,” to suggest his role in bringing together German and more generally, European, scholarship with America’s fledgling endeavors in the field.224 Later in life, Schaff reflected that if he had stayed in Europe, he might have had “a more comfortable literary life and perhaps accomplished more in the line of mere scholarship”—but now he had become “an American by the call of Providence and by free choice.” America, he believed, “the land of freedom and the land of promise,” awaits the “brightest future.”225
Born in Switzerland in 1819 and educated at Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, Schaff was called to America in 1844 to serve as professor at the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.226 On the way to America, he spent six weeks in England, improving his English.227 In Pennsylvania, he soon found himself charged with heresy by his co-religionists for his alleged Romanizing tendencies, but emerged unscathed from these investigations. During the Civil War, the Mercersburg Seminary, near the Gettysburg battlefield, was transformed into a hospital for captured Confederate soldiers and temporarily suspended operations.228 Schaff and his family moved to New York, where he first worked as secretary for a committee attempting to enforce stricter Sabbath observance,229 before being invited to join the faculty of Union Seminary—named not, however, to the chair of church history, but (as detailed above) first to one in “Theological Encyclopedia and Christian Symbolics”; then to the chair in Hebrew; third, to the chair in Sacred Literature-New Testament Exegesis; and last, only upon Roswell Hitchcock’s death in 1887, to the Washburn Chair of Church History.230 This list affords an insight into the highly generalized approach to theological study in nineteenth-century America. As German historian Adolf Harnack remarked upon Schaff’s death in 1893, he was the last great “generalist” of church history.231 Schaff himself modestly believed that the next generation of church historians would throw his own “preparatory labors into the shade.” He was confident that church history would be for them “the favorite branch of theological study.”232
In poor health the last years of his life, Schaff delivered his resignation letter in March 1893. In it he wrote:
Teaching has been my life for more than fifty years.… The growing importance of the department of Church history requires the undivided attention of a first-class scholar. The Seminary … must make satisfactory provision for the next years. The interests of an institution are far more important than those of any individual. The workmen will die, but the work must go on.233
Schaff received honorary degrees from the University of St. Andrews, Marshall College, the University of the City of New York, Amherst, and the University of Berlin. Schaff’s former pupil, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, was appointed to fill the Washburn Professorship of Church History in his place, to carry on the work when “the workmen die.”
Among Schaff’s voluminous publications are (to sample some of the most important): The Principle of Protestantism (1845); What Is Church History? (1846); History of the Apostolic Church (1854); America: A Sketch of the Political, Social, and Religious Character of the United States of North America (1855 [1854]); Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiae Universalis: The Creeds of Christendom (3 volumes, 1877); The Revision of the English Version of the Holy Scriptures (1873, 1877); Through Bible Lands (1878); The Person of Christ (1882); The (Schaff-Herzog) Religious Encyclopediae (3 vols., 1882–1884, 1887)234; A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version (1883); St. Augustine, Melanchthon, Neander (1886); History of the Christian Church (7 volumes, 1882–1892); and Theological Propaedeutic (2 parts, 1892). “The Reunion of Christendom” (1893) was delivered as Schaff’s last major public appearance at the World’s Parliament of Religions: Christian reunion had been a theme dear to his heart throughout his entire life.235 Schaff’s activities aside from teaching were so numerous that I here wish to highlight a few of the most important.
SCHAFF AND THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE
Schaff was active in both the American and international branches of the Evangelical Alliance.236 The Constitution of its American wing, dated 1870, declares that the aim of the Alliance was to promote evangelical union, “to counteract the influence of infidelity and superstition, especially in their organized forms”; to promote religious freedom everywhere and observance of the Lord’s day; to give supreme authority to the Bible; and to “correct immoral habits of society.”237 Although this statement does not target Roman Catholicism explicitly, it nevertheless makes clear the Alliance’s Protestant allegiance.238 Later, Schaff strongly denied that the Alliance was an “anti-popery society”; to the contrary, he claimed, it champions religious liberty wherever that is threatened.239
The records of the New York branch from November 1868 onward show that its organizers hoped to sponsor an international conference on American soil—the first such—as early as autumn 1869, but the Franco-Prussian War and other events precluded this date.240 With Schaff as organizer, the New York meeting was finally held from October 2 to 12, 1873. Schaff journeyed to Europe to solicit participation and ease Europeans’ anxiety about venturing across the ocean to the unknown wilds of America. On home soil, he took charge of most of the arrangements.241 Schaff considered the conference the high point of his life.242