Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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that Christianity would be acknowledged as the only true religion and the Bible as divinely inspired.48
Distinctive approaches to religion in seminary, college, and university education unfolded gradually and somewhat uncertainly. From the early nineteenth century onward, theological education in the United States (unlike Germany and England) found its institutional home in the theological seminary.49 Many scholarly studies of graduate education in North America, however, focusing on the late nineteenth century and especially on the founding of Johns Hopkins University, fail to register seminaries’ pioneering role. “The scholarly elite of theologians has been so well hidden from the general study of American history,” Gary Pranger claims, “that it has often been thought not to exist.”50
To be sure, the “graduate” character of the early seminaries was dubious. Extremely limited in resources, they had few students and even fewer faculty. According to a report compiled in 1832, no Protestant seminary in America then employed more than four professors.51 By 1844, 39 such seminaries existed, each enrolling from fewer than ten to 150 students. By 1855, even the largest seminaries boasted only five professors, and the smaller, only two or three.52 By 1869, the 48 Protestant seminaries then in existence were competing with each other for denominational support, funds, and students. This proliferation of institutions, most with scanty resources, worked against educators’ desire to provide advanced training.53 A statistic cited in 1844 brings home the point: the combined libraries at the nine leading American seminaries of the era contained fewer than onequarter of the volumes available to theologians at Munich or Paris.54
Moreover, seminaries did not originally require a bachelor’s degree for entrance (Harvard Divinity School was the first, but only in the 1890s55) nor did students always remain in residence for three years.56 At mid-century, Union Seminary attempted to remedy this problem by requiring “non-collegiate students” soon after arrival to pass a Greek examination based on the first two books of Xenophon’s Anabasis.57 As the century progressed, college graduation as a prerequisite for seminary study was more often the norm.58 Professional schools in other fields, to be sure, were no stricter in this respect.59 These caveats registered, theological seminaries, as I shall argue, pioneered graduate education of the Humanities-type in the United States.
Only at century’s turn did universities begin to supplant seminaries as the main conduit of advanced scholarship in religion. Then, Bruce Kuklick claims, divinity schools “collapsed” as purveyors of graduate education,60 largely remaining content to steer students toward various university departments for further study.61 At the seminaries featured in this book, connections with a university would become increasingly important for the development of graduate programs in religion.
The Seminary Curriculum: Church History
In America’s early Protestant seminaries, academic emphasis lay squarely on the Bible, biblical languages, and systematic theology, not on historical studies of Christianity’s development. As late as 1889, Union’s Philip Schaff remarked that in America the serious study of church history had hardly begun. Some seminaries still have no professor of the subject, Schaff remarked ruefully, and others regard it merely as a supplement. Although some boast two or three professors of Bible, none employ more than one church historian. What a contrast with Germany, he bitterly exclaimed!62 Yet, since America is “destined to be the main theatre of the future history of the world and the church,”63 the study of church history, he prophesied, would eventually flourish on these shores. Schaff’s hopes accorded well with his colleagues’ belief in America’s “exceptional” status.64
Even with the development of seminaries in the United States, however, church history was deemed somewhat dangerous: confronting the diversity of beliefs, outright errors, and rancorous divisions of the Christian past could undermine a student’s faith. At Andover, generally conceded to be America’s first independent Protestant seminary, church history was postponed until late in the senior year, by which time students had presumably been fortified against the theological threat that might arise from confronting the vicious clash of opinions throughout Christian history.65
Yet seminary officials should have had little cause for fear: church history was readily corralled to prove the antiquity of one’s own denominational polity and to connect the founding moments of Christianity with later “Protestantizing” developments. The Church Fathers were deployed to batter down claims regarding doctrine and polity made by competing Christian groups. Debates over the “original” polity of the early church, for example, provided ammunition for the nineteenth century’s culture and religion wars. Here, the discovery of new manuscripts—Syriac versions of some of Ignatius’ letters, as well as the Philosophumena and the Didache—fueled Protestant professors’ zeal to claim their denomination’s governance as faithful to that of the apostolic era.66 The Fathers could also be cited to prove how soon in Christian history a “decline” had set in that led precipitously toward Roman Catholicism. The Bible, sacrosanct and “undeveloping,” remained the touchstone against which all subsequent ecclesiastical developments were judged.67 Augustine, Jerome, and the earlier Fathers, Robert Baird wrote at mid-century, “important in their places, are regarded as of small importance in comparison with the questions, What saith the Scripture? What did Christ and the Apostles teach?”68 In Protestant America, appropriating the Church Fathers was always a negotiation with what interpreters believed were the authentic words of a Jesus who could be cordoned off from subsequent Christian history.
Factors for Change in Higher Education:The Case of Religion
Specialization and Professionalization
What prompted the change in the study of religion? Increased specialization was one factor. Today, it is startling to realize that until the 1880s, research played almost no role in the lives of college and seminary teachers.69 Indeed, the professoriate began to be recognized as a distinct profession only circa 1840; earlier, college teaching had not been considered a “career.”70 The few faculty employed by any institution taught whatever was necessary—and since instruction (“not designed to promote inquiry”) was by recitation from a textbook, the teacher need not be expert in the subject.71 Tracing the development of the American college, George Marsden claims that before mid-century, most faculty were generalists who could “teach almost anything.”72 Moreover, “specialization” to some early nineteenth-century ears (such as those of historian George Bancroft) sounded “commercial”: young men were being trained to “sell” their Greek and Latin.73 Elitist notions that higher education ought to be economically useless—its purpose being to form the mind and character of select youths—worked against the development of specialization.
In Germany, by contrast, professors were expected to develop, and devote themselves to, a circumscribed field. There, the subject area (classics, for example) would be construed—as Carl Diehl puts it—less like “a public park in which anyone is free to wander as he wishes,” and more like “some kind of restricted collective farm, owned and intensively cultivated by a select group of inhabitants.”74 In America, proponents of the “restricted collective farm” model of the professoriate, such as President Charles Eliot at Harvard, waged an upward struggle against those who preferred a leisurely Sunday outing in the college park, available to all whose class background allowed them to dress and speak “decently.”
Professors at American theological seminaries fared only somewhat better than their counterparts at colleges. A telling example is provided by the career of Philip Schaff, unarguably nineteenth-century America’s most distinguished church historian. When Schaff arrived at Union Theological Seminary in 1870 after his tenure at Mercersburg Seminary in Pennsylvania, he was first given a chair in “Theological Encyclopedia and Christian Symbolics” (i.e., an introductory outline of the various theological subdisciplines, plus the study of Christian creeds). From there, he transferred to the chair in Hebrew; next, to the chair in New Testament Exegesis; and at last, in 1887, a few years before his death,