The framework that sets the stage and defines the personnel for this lengthy study incorporates the work of six professors in four institutions that provided ministerial education in nineteenth century America. This meticulous work surveys the ideas of Samuel Miller at Princeton Theological Seminary, George Park Fisher at Yale Divinity School, Henry Boynton Smith, Roswell Dwight Hitchcock, Philip Schaff at Union Theological Seminary, and Ephraim Emerton at Harvard Divinity School. The author labors within this framework to discern regnant standards applied to church history, especially patristics. This taxonomy allows readers to demarcate the later emergence of Religious Studies departments as major centers of graduate education in the twentieth century.

The fundamental pattern within which these integrated elements are compiled is one of transition from the way church history was treated years ago to a greater approximation of the more critical, objective ways it is regarded today. Beginning with material contexts, the author describes the lamentable working conditions professors had to face, including meager libraries, a paucity of useful textbooks, and few primary sources, usually available in translation only. Most pedagogues thought this kind of support was good enough for historical information which they regarded as a poor cousin in the curriculum, something of no more than secondary importance. The author has exerted a tremendous amount of effort to depict these American templates as hampered by denominational biases and concomitant methodological shortcomings. Those who lectured within this context acknowledged the priority of biblical studies, and they used the past to validate inherited polities and to vindicate theological formulations. The documentation provided here to display this historical mind-set is replete, not to say a bit tedious: 346 pages of text backed by 205 pages of references, with 305 notes in one forty-page section alone.

But this sort of painstaking work is worthwhile because it demonstrates with fair judgment how far modern scholarship has moved away from parochial standards to more independent approaches and assumptions. The protagonists in this gradual shift were almost always wary of new viewpoints, especially ideas about conceptual contexts and methodological procedures pioneered in Germany and Great Britain. They resisted inferences drawn from positivist philosophies (Comte, Spencer), textual criticism (Strauss, Renan, Baur), developmental theory (Tholuck, Neander), and cultural determinants drawn from the ancient Greco-Roman world. Additionally, their personal convictions led them to find fault with any Roman Catholic claims and to deny that papal primacy, Mariology, or asceticism had any historical validity, past or present. American professors were thus “denominationally constructed” and found it difficult to accommodate textual finds such as the Didache, Philosophumena, and letters by Ignatius. They had similar trouble dealing with revisionist views on Augustine that challenged their view of him as the only trustworthy theologian between St. Paul and the Reformation. All these variegated displays demonstrate how and why such antiquated ideas prevented a smooth transition to historiographical ideas in vogue during our own generation. The exhibits served up here are like insects caught in amber, and yet the author holds that such pedagogical models are useful as a way of charting “the uncertain path by which early church history entered the Protestant academy in nineteenth-century America,” showing how they “provided the closest approximation to graduate study in Humanities in their era” (343,45).

This volume presumes that we moderns share different (and preferable) assumptions about institutional development, natural causation, and environmental conditioning. By contrast we learn a great deal about the ways in which doctrine and polity dominated professorial viewpoints a century ago. But we are left wondering about the how and why any transition took place. The process of change implied here can function only as one of static attrition rather than dynamic progress. We know that sectarian biases faded from use as critical studies in religion became accepted within academic disciplines, but such reformative changes seem to have come from imitation, not pioneering. It is difficult to detect how this book's protagonists helped advance any perspective or procedure in the practice of church history. They improved libraries, established journals, and offered prizes for scholarship, but readers will wonder if they did anything else directly to further the cause of open-ended inquiry. Judging from what this book discloses, one can only surmise that such ideas were adopted from European sources by later practitioners who tried to measure up to selectively borrowed standards. Despite the fulsome display within its restricted scope this work will probably not appeal to general readers. Within a narrower circle, graduate students and denominational specialists can profit by learning what to avoid in these object lessons as they develop their own historiographical viewpoints. To that limited extent these pages may prove to be of some use.