Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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which groups might count as “Christian”142 and his copious citation of original sources “such as can nowhere else be found.” Yet he found the book “cold, but cautious … more rational than sympathetic; it has not the warmth of Neander’s incomparable work” nor “the vividness of Hase’s delineations.” Particularly to be faulted, in Smith’s view, was Gieseler’s sketchy and biased treatment of the first century; nevertheless, this omission can easily be remedied by students, since “the source for correcting [Gieseler’s] opinions is near at hand”143—namely, the New Testament. Moreover, Gieseler emphasized (to Smith’s discomfort) patristic writers’ distortion of truth through ignorance, credulity, party-spirit, or “even intentional dishonesty.”144
Philip Schaff likewise criticized Gieseler’s Text-Book for failing to “reach the inward life and spiritual marrow of the church of Christ,” scarcely rising above “jejeune rationalism”; Gieseler writes with the “indifference of an outside spectator.” Yet, in Schaff’s view, Gieseler had a better appreciation of history than did his Rationalistic predecessors. In the last year of his life, and with his own Histories behind him, Schaff generously claimed that Giesler and Neander had not yet been superseded.145
KARL VON HASE’S TEXTBOOK
A third text sometimes used in church history classes was Karl von Hase’s History of the Christian Church, originally published in 1834 and translated into English in 1856.146 The great virtues of Hase’s text for class use were that the section on early Christianity was manageably short, under 200 pages—a virtue noted by Henry Smith147—and that Hase provided colorful depictions of the era’s leading figures.148
Hase aimed to present the “living freshness” of the original documents, even as he condensed their contexts. He confessed his regret that in his coverage of the patristic era, he had failed to prune unnecessary description of minor points, thus obscuring the “freshness” of the sources.149 Elsewhere, avoiding “useless verbiage,” he had endeavored to “let the facts of the narrative speak for themselves.” Conceiving his volume as a workable textbook, he encouraged instructors to enlarge on whichever points they chose.150
In his early teaching career at Mercersburg Seminary, Schaff claimed that of the available textbooks, Hase’s, with its fine “graphic miniature sketches,” was the best for American seminary students. Despite being “not altogether sound,” Hase’s text avoids Rationalism.151 In default of anything better, Hase’s text was at least short and comprehensible to students.152 Too sketchy to warrant much praise from the scholarly perspective, Hase’s Church History was admittedly useful in the classroom.
AUGUST NEANDER’S HISTORIES
A fourth possibility: the various histories by Augustus Neander. Neander, a Jew who converted to evangelical Protestantism in young adulthood,153 was acclaimed as the most distinguished German church historian of the midnineteenth century.154 Indeed, British historian Lord Acton called Neander “probably the best-read man living towards 1830.”155 Neander held the Professorship of Church History at Berlin during the period when Henry Smith, Roswell Hitchcock, and Philip Schaff were students in Germany. At the time of Neander’s death in 1850, memorial notices proclaimed him a “Father of the Church for the church of the nineteenth century” who combined exhaustive learning with “sound and sober criticism.”156
Neander’s historical perspective well suited the American Protestant professors, although they sometimes (as we shall see) disagreed on specific points and deemed his books too large and dense to serve as useful textbooks.157 In the early 1860s, Smith told students that he considered Neander’s “the greatest theological discussion of this century.”158 The American Theological Review, edited by Smith and others, remarked on Neander’s almost incredible (to them) achievement: he allegedly had read “every page of the ante-Nicene Fathers.”159
Although Hitchcock critiqued Neander’s failure to provide sufficient extra-ecclesial context, he nevertheless in 1858 assigned the senior class at Union “collateral reading” in Neander’s Church History—but complained that the students were unable to complete the assignment because they were so burdened with work outside of school to support themselves.160 An earnest student in Hitchcock’s class at Union in 1876–1877, Samuel Jackson, struggled for several months to read his copy—now in the Union library—of the first volume of Neander’s General History. He penned in at the end, “A great work. But on the whole very like the Sahara desert—mostly very dry, although here and there an oasis of interest.”161 That Jackson owned a copy of Neander shows that at least one student managed to do the “collateral reading” for Hitchcock’s courses.
Philip Schaff deemed Neander the most accomplished German church historian of the nineteenth century.162 He preferred texts by Neander and Gieseler for advanced students, but conceded that the best shorter manuals (presumably for less advanced students) were those by Hase and Kurtz. As the “father of modern church history,” Neander, in Schaff’s view, had rescued that subject “from the icy grasp of rationalism, infused into it the warm love of Christ.” Before Neander, church history “had been degraded by German Rationalism into a godless history of human errors and follies,” but Neander made the “dreary desert” of church history into “a garden of God.”163 The patristic period was the area of his greatest scholarly competence. His vision of church history as “a continuous revelation of Christ’s presence and power in humanity” suited Schaff well. Schaff liked to repeat Neander’s pietistic motto: “Pecus est quod theologum facit”: “It is the heart that makes a theologian.”164
Yet Union and Yale professors had many criticisms of Neander’s histories. Hitchcock, Schaff, and Fisher all charged Neander with indifference to the secular and political setting of church history (i.e., with failure to contextualize).165 Moreover, they criticized Neander’s writing for lack of dramatic power, as stylistically “diffuse and monotonous,” “colorless.”166 Although Hitchcock urged Americans to emulate Neander’s historical sympathy—he could bind himself to future Christian ages “because he joined himself so genially to all the Christian past”—he came to think that Neander exhibited too great a “catholicity,” verging on Latitudinarianism. More of a Christian than a Protestant, Neander, in Hitchcock’s view, found sainthood “wherever it was.”167 Yet compared to both Gibbon and “Ultra polemical Protestants,” Neander appeared to Hitchcock as an historian who “struck [a] medium.”168
For Schaff’s tastes, Neander was often too lenient toward “heretical aberrations.”169 Schaff also faulted Neander for conceding too much to modern biblical criticism, for doubting points of Gospel history and the “genuineness” of certain canonical books.170 Fisher, similarly, abhorred Neander’s tendency to treat the Gospels as books “to be criticized like any other histories.”171 In addition, Schaff faulted Neander’s somewhat antinomian, “spiritualized” view of Christianity as implying that the “church” must inhabit some realm different from, and almost opposing, “Christianity.” Schaff’s critique reveals his own more “churchly” orientation: there is no Christianity apart from the church. Although Schaff in 1889 conceded that Harnack—then only 38 years old—was the leading German scholar of early Christianity, with a fresh and bold approach, he confessed his preference for the older (and more piously evangelical) generation of Neander and Tholuck.172
At Yale, Fisher toward the end of his teaching career replaced Germanauthored textbooks by one that he himself had written. Schaff liked features of Fisher’s “manual” of church history (Fisher’s History of the Christian Church). In 1889, Schaff reviewed the book, claiming that up to now, Americans had been dependent on German works that were poorly translated and not improved as new editions appeared in German. Fisher’s book, he believed, met a need for coverage of English and American church history that the German-authored books failed adequately to provide. Schaff’s praise appears a bit muted—perhaps because Fisher had borrowed so much from Schaff’s