This handsomely produced book by the well-known American patristics scholar, Elizabeth A. Clark, tells the story of how the discipline of early Christian history came into being in four nineteenth-century American Protestant seminaries (Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Union) through the efforts of six different scholars, all of whom were Protestants of a kind (Samuel Miller, Henry Boynton Smith, Roswell Dwight Hitchcock, Philipp Schaff, George Patrick Fisher and Ephraim Emerton). After introducing us to the institutions and their histories and sketching brief biographies of the scholars concerned, Clark goes on to discuss the difficult circumstances in which the latter functioned – libraries were not well-stocked either with primary or secondary literature; helpful textbooks did not generally exist; seminars and electives only gradually came into existence. Those, therefore, who sought to teach church history were, at least in the beginning, working in something of a vacuum. All except Miller had, however, studied in Germany (a tradition which flourished amongst Protestants in the United States from a relatively early period), and Schaff, the most accomplished scholar of the six, was himself a product of the German theological education system; and it was in part knowledge of German approaches to church history which influenced their collective development of the subject in the United States. The relationship was, of course, complex. German theology was often viewed with suspicion by these individuals, all of whom were Protestants of a broadly conservative hue, and they were keen, in various ways, to attack what they took to be, for instance, the pantheistic thrust of some of its practitioners. On the other hand, as Clark shows, having been students of German theologians of a more conservative character, such as Tholuck of Halle, they were able to benefit from many of the insights of such individuals not only in developing a more rigorously historical approach to their material, but also in exploiting such ideas as development in Christian history, which had been put forward by, amongst others, the mediating theologian, August Neander. This was important because, as Clark shows, many of the six scholars whom she discusses had generally been nourished on a typically Protestant account of church history in which much of the patristic (and medieval) era was conceived as a time of decline after the pristine period of New Testament truth. While Clark argues that in different ways, and to different degrees, these scholars remained wedded to such a view of decline, she also shows how the adoption of the idea of development, often conceived conservatively as development under God's providence, and one which was applied to post-New Testament, and not New Testament times (here to be distinguished from F. C. Baur's more obviously secular account of development in early church history which included, notoriously, the history of the Church from its very beginnings) enabled them, not least Schaff, to look upon facets of later church history more positively, as preserving some essence of the original Gospel message as they conceived it. This point is well made in a number of chapters devoted to the discussion of the six scholars’ engagement with different subjects in church history, including polity and practice, Roman Catholicism, asceticism and the uses of Augustine. In these chapters Clark shows how the context in which each scholar was working affected the way in which they discussed their subject. So, for instance, she argues that while at the beginning of the period under discussion, roughly the 1830s, we can see that these Presbyterian authors often had Episcopalians in their sights when critiquing the development of Christian polity and practice, from the 1860s onwards, as more Catholics entered the US and the Vatican became bolder in its utterances, not least on papal infallibility, so Roman Catholics came in for more criticism. Indeed Clark is clear that these church historians, who were forging a new discipline in the US, often used their historical studies to engage in a tendentious form of history writing in which contemporary issues entered all too easily into the discussion of their subject. ‘Readers today’, she writes in her conclusion, ‘may with reason doubt whether the professors here discussed deserve the title “historian” … they often appealed to early Christian writers less for their historical interest than for their provision of weapons with which to trounce “deviant” versions of Christianity in the professors’ own era’ (p. 343). In spite of their interest in ideas of development, such judgements often involved a broadly negative view of the church Fathers. But Clark, whose researches extend to much manuscript material, including notes of the scholars concerned and those taken by their students, and who is keen to give each scholar his own distinctive voice, is reluctant to finish with such a judgement. Their approach to history might have been ‘apologetic, confessional, and moralising’, but, in straitened circumstances, the education that they provided was, for a while, the closest thing that Americans could find to graduate study, and at an institutional and disciplinary level they achieved much, devising curricula, founding and editing journals, developing libraries and contributing money and books for prizes so as to encourage young scholars. In manner and tone they appeared very different from those who succeeded them towards the end of the nineteenth and into the new century but their achievements should not be underestimated. In the words of Henry Adams, quoted by Clark at the beginning and the end of the book (and paraphrased here), while the nineteenth century might appear ‘child-like’, we should wonder that those who inhabited it, knowing so little, ‘should have done so much’.

This is a clearly written and thoughtful book which illuminates a little-commented upon subject in American religious and intellectual history, and does so sympathetically but critically. Clark is clear that what she writes is circumscribed, and cannot in any way be viewed as an exploration of religion in the United States in the nineteenth century, though it is a snapshot of a form (or forms) of Protestant religion at that time. It would, however, have been good to have had more comment on how individuals from a range of religious backgrounds in the States reacted to such work. In this context Clark is keener on exposition of the six scholars’ positions, as well as explaining their social, religious and political origins, than on examining reactions, though the assumption of her work is that these men had considerable influence on what she terms ‘the instantiation of church history as discipline’ in the United States. Related to this point is the fact that the scholars whose works she presents, with possibly the exception of Schaff, appear to be generally reactive rather than creative, seeking to absorb work done principally in Germany and take account of it in their providentialist view of Christian history (even seeking, in the words of Mark Noll, to ‘de-fang’ it). Few of these scholars’ works, I imagine, influenced scholarship beyond the shores of the United States, although again Clark does not comment explicitly on that subject. On these lines, it might have been good to have engaged in more comparative work, showing the extent to which the US situation on the study of church history reflected that in Britain, where again scholars were largely reacting to a situation forced upon them by aspects of German scholarship, and seeking, with a few notable exceptions, to take broadly conservative stock of the new historical approaches to Christian history, and where theological education remained weak for some time (Oxford and Cambridge only introduced a theological degree in the early 1870s). Some British scholars, notably J. B. Lightfoot, and controversies (the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860, for instance) are referred to but no detailed comparative observations are made.

These are possibly unfair criticisms of an important book which, one hopes, will elicit more interest in the historiography of American historical-theological writing.