Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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theology to biblical and historical studies, deemed the “best preparation against infidelity of the day.”79 George Fisher, who had been appointed in 1854 as College Pastor and Professor of Divinity, assumed the new Street Professorship of Church History.80 When Fisher retired in the early twentieth century, he was succeeded by Williston Walker, who had received his Ph.D. from Leipzig.81
The development of graduate education beyond ministerial training at the Yale Theological Department, as at other seminaries, came late—especially considering that the first Ph.D.s awarded in America were at Yale (1861).82 By 1876, graduate scholarships had been instituted to provide for a year of post-ministerial study at the Seminary or abroad. Professors, however, were unclear what role this extra year should play. That they still thought of these students as ministers rather than as future scholars is suggested by their questions: would churches wish their ministers to have a fourth year of education, and if so, who would pay for it?83
The awarding of doctorates in religion at Yale, as noted above, had a complex history. At some point, faculty from the Divinity School and the Graduate School began to offer the Ph.D. under the auspices of the Divinity School, but when a graduate program within the University Department of Religious Studies was established in 1963, M.A. and Ph.D. work was repositioned there.84
Union Theological Seminary
Union Theological Seminary, founded in 1836, offered a more liberal brand of Presbyterianism (New School) than Princeton’s.85 Less tied to a hardened Calvinism and willing to work with other Protestants, especially Congregationalists, for religious and social improvement in America and beyond, New School Presbyterians found their views supported in Union’s charters. The Seminary’s Plan and Constitution stated that it would be open to “all men of moderate views and feelings, who desire to live free from party strife, and to stand aloof from all extremes of doctrinal speculation, practical radicalism, and ecclesiastical domination.”86 Qualified men from “every denomination of evangelical Christians” were invited to attend.87 In the Seminary’s first year, 23 students enrolled; by its fourth year, enrollment had grown to 120.88
Although some critics deemed a large city an inappropriate location for a seminary,89 a plot of land was leased in what is now the area around New York University—“well uptown,” a contemporary commentator wrote, “quite on the outskirts of the city.”90 It was not a propitious moment to found a seminary in New York: the Great Fire of 1837 rendered would-be patrons unable to meet their financial commitments.91 Moreover, unlike Harvard and Yale, Union was not affiliated with a university.
New York City in the mid-nineteenth century was awash in social change. Not only had the population grown tenfold in the century’s first sixty years;92 “new money” had also arisen to challenge the hegemony of a homogeneous upper class who had previously imagined themselves the city’s cultural legislators. Union, Thomas Bender argues, set out to exploit the opportunities of a metropolis, capitalizing on the financial and intellectual life of the city.93 The Seminary profited from large gifts given by business entrepreneur James Roosevelt (father of Franklin D.) and from banker James Brown (of the family that would later merge businesses to become Brown Brothers Harriman), establishing chaired professorships in Theology, Hebrew and Cognate Languages, Sacred Literature, Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology, Church Polity, and Mission Work.94 As the Seminary grew, it sought larger quarters. With the financial assistance of New York’s wealthy, it moved progressively uptown: first, in 1884, to buildings on Park Avenue between Sixty-Ninth and Seventieth Streets, and then, in 1910, to its present location on Morningside Heights.95
Union’s professors, whose meager salaries—allegedly $2500 per year, but often less, or occasionally nothing96—distinguished them from the moneyed elite, nevertheless benefited from their relationships with businessmen and entrepreneurs. Seminary professors elsewhere joked that their colleagues in New York “lived among millionaires.”97 Despite their relative penury, the Seminary’s professors were considered sufficiently genteel to associate with the Dutch aristocrats of old New York (the Schuylers),98 and be financially assisted by capitalists (Charles Butler) and commercial publishers (Charles Scribner).99 Philip Schaff was so well connected that W. H. Vanderbilt’s son-in-law, Eliott Shepard, threw a party in 1882 at his new mansion on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street for members of the American Bible Revision Committee (of which Schaff was chair) and 300 or so “friends” to celebrate the Revision’s publication.100 Some Union faculty enjoyed membership in the Century Club, “headquarters for a clubbish, genteel culture.”101 They were invited to lunches that included thirteen artery-numbing courses102 and to dinners at Delmonico’s, the favored restaurant of New York elites.103 Even professors who lived in rented houses had spacious enough quarters to entertain 125 of the delegates to the Evangelical Alliance meeting in 1873.104 Intellectual and cultural capital, it appears, compensated for the professors’ lack of cash. Many wealthy New Yorkers were then invested in the relatively liberal brand of Protestantism that Union represented.
Unsupported by a university or a denomination, Union’s earliest years were ones of grave financial difficulty; in 1839–1840 the professors had for the most part gone unpaid. Financial agents were employed to drum up monies from various constituencies.105 New York ministers who favored the Union experiment (such as George Prentiss, later to join Union’s faculty) exhorted their congregations to give to Union—perhaps even to mortgage their church buildings.106 Prentiss sensed that potential patrons might deem the subjects studied at Union arcane: some, he rhetorically declaimed, will doubtless scoff, “What is the use of Hebrew roots, of Greek and Latin erudition … of the history of obsolete dogmas, and dead heresies, and extinct or corrupt churches, in our new and busy world of the Future? … ‘Let the dead bury their dead!’” Prentiss vigorously argued the necessity of these studies for fostering a strong pastorate. He compared nostalgia for a time before there were professors of “Sacred Philology and Ecclesiastical History and Exegesis” to that for an era before the invention of railroads and steamboats.107
The first three professorial appointments at Union were in theology, biblical literature, and pastoral theology and church government.108 There was no permanent professor in church history until 1850,109 when Henry Smith joined the faculty. Earlier, Samuel Cox, a prominent local pastor and father of Arthur Cleveland Coxe, covered the subject (badly, judging from student notes).110
In November 1849, Albert Barnes, who chaired a committee on faculty appointments, reported to Union’s Board of Directors that a permanent position in church history was much needed. Barnes conceded that often the subject was taught in a “repulsive” fashion. But this need not be the case if the professor included “the history of doctrine, the development of the Christian spirit and the religious life of the church.” The chair, in Barnes’s view, should be filled by a man with “ample learning, a philosophical mind, and a knowledge of German.”111
Henry Smith, selected for the new position, took up his post in the winter of 1850. He had not been especially trained in church history, although he had achieved some national renown in what we would today call philosophy of religion and philosophy of history.112 Having studied in Germany, Smith brought to Union the German organization of church history that incorporated historical theology and history of doctrine.113 Some worried that Smith’s German training might lead him astray; rumors circulated that he had “publicly testified his reverence for the name of Schleiermacher.” Indeed, he had: in a lecture delivered in 1849, before joining the Union faculty, Smith praised Schleiermacher for leading the return of German theology from cold rationalism to “the fervent and almost mystic love to Christ.”114 Although Union had waited fourteen years after its inception to establish a Professorship in Church History (albeit not endowed until 1855), Yale waited longer—and Harvard, over a quarter of a century longer.
Smith, however, held the Professorship in Church History for less than four years before assuming the Roosevelt Professorship of Theology.115 Upon Smith’s transfer, Roswell Hitchcock was awarded the post in church