Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Elizabeth A. Clark of Duke University has long been a leading American scholar in the study of early, post–New Testament Christianity, a field also known variously as Christianity in late antiquity, patristics, or the time of the church fathers. She is a past president (1988–1989) of the North American Patristics Society (begun in 1970) and was an early editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies (founded in 1993). In Founding the Fathers, Clark has sought to present the very beginning of her field in America, and she identifies its origin in the work of six nineteenth-century seminary professors, Samuel Miller of Princeton University, Ephraim Emerton of Harvard University, George Fisher of Yale University, and three Union Theological Seminary instructors, Henry Smith, Roswell Hitchcock, and Philip Schaff. The book focuses as much on the American origins of the field of church history as upon its subset, patristics, for there was very little emphasis on the latter in the nineteenth century. As the author notes, “the Fathers were … assigned a humble place in the broader sweep of the study of Christianity's history” (p. 3). Clark's most prominent example of an American founding father of both church history in general and patristics in particular is the Swiss-German immigrant Philip Schaff. Schaff founded the American Society of Church History in 1888, and he edited the classic series A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church.