In his novel account of the rise of the modern research university and the cultivation of “academic charisma,” William Clark scrutinized the central components of academic material culture and their changes through the centuries. Attention to “little tools of knowledge,” from professorial recommendation letters to changing titles of traditional academic degrees, he argued, widens the picture of the history of scholarly life.Footnote 1 Among these, textbooks inhabit a fundamental place in shaping and reflecting the practices of students and disciplines.Footnote 2 To modify D. F. McKenzie's phrase, “the sociology of textbooks” cuts a wide interdisciplinary swath.Footnote 3 German textbooks, along with corresponding research methods and the universities in which they developed, exerted considerable influence in the modernization and refashioning of American higher education in the late nineteenth century, as is well attested. The “German model” of higher education and the methods of critical scholarship (Wissenschaft) attracted the attention of scholars and educational administrators across the American landscape.Footnote 4 German translations of all stripes (textbooks and other genres) helped pave the way, in Carl Diehl's words, for “the great migration of American students to German universities throughout the nineteenth century.”Footnote 5
Famously, two of America's most prominent nineteenth-century historians, George Bancroft and John Lothrop Motley, following George Ticknor and Edward Everett, traveled to Germany for doctoral work.Footnote 6 Inspired by these path-breaking early voyages, later American historians looked to Germany for a model befitting their profession. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) dominated the horizons of these history-book writers, functioning, in Peter Novick's felicitous idiom, as the “mythic hero of empirical science incarnate.”Footnote 7
But it was not only historians drawn to Ranke who looked to Germany—home of “that majestic phrase, wissenschaftliche Objectivität,” as Edward A. Ross styled it in 1936—to guide their system of disciplinary norms.Footnote 8 Less well known but similarly formative, young students of theology, in particular, peered across the Atlantic—not only to Europe but to the German-speaking regions specifically—in search for texts to stimulate the development of their discipline. “What has England to offer in comparison with the host of learned theologians who now fill the German chairs of instruction?” asked the American theologian and biblical critic Edward Robinson, who studied at the universities of Berlin, Göttingen, and Halle and married the German daughter of one of Halle's philosophy professors.Footnote 9 From Berlin, Bancroft told Harvard College's president, J. T. Kirkland, “I honour Schleiermacher above all the German scholars.”Footnote 10 “There we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight,” exclaimed another American theologian, with biblical allusions, of his impressions of German academic theology around 1835.Footnote 11 Time and again, American students who ventured to Germany returned home impressed with the “depth” (Tiefe) and “spirit” (Geist) of the theology encountered. Challenging stereotypes and some secularization theorists, the student abroad was also sometimes surprised at the piety of the learned temporary Doktorvater, even if the professor held widely divergent religious convictions.Footnote 12 In 1886, Lord Acton wrote, “every branch of knowledge has felt its [that is, Germany's] influence.”Footnote 13 The Unitarian minister L. P. Jacks even quipped that the period extending to World War I was “the age of German footnotes.”Footnote 14
Over 9,000 American students studied in the German states in the nineteenth century.Footnote 15 German university theology left an indelible footprint in the intellectual, institutional, and religious terrain of nineteenth-century American society. According to Diehl, between 1810 and 1870, 15.9% of all American students were enrolled in German faculties of theology, the largest percentage enrollment of the traditional three “higher faculties” of theology, law, and medicine.Footnote 16 As George Marsden noted, by the end of the century, “it would be rare to find either a university leader or a major scholar who had not spent some years studying in Germany.”Footnote 17
These transatlantic moves highlighted the perceived differences in the realm of theological instruction between the Old World and the New—and, subsequently, within the latter's own different and competing religious groups—among which textbooks occupied a central, and historiographically neglected, position.Footnote 18 In the field of church history, “lack of appropriate textbooks,” observed Elizabeth Clark, posed “an ongoing problem for the American professors” at places like Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary, and Yale, among other institutions spread across the United States. Owing to such deficiencies as well as the “great migration” abroad, German textbooks in English translation gained a wide audience, though they could hardly satisfy the needs and opinions of all. Summing up, Clark said, the “professors deemed no [German] textbook fully adequate for American Protestant students' use. Some texts by German authors were lacking in evangelical piety; almost all were too long for beginning students.”Footnote 19 Length, learning, and piety all played determinative roles as three of the varied selection criteria for German texts. Scholars of religion abroad, for their part, often dismissed the work of their American peers.Footnote 20
Giving voice to the problem, the church historian Philip Schaff (1819–1893) declared, “German ideas cannot take root in English, Scotch, or American soil unless they are freely reproduced in the English language and adapted to the practical wants of a free Church in a free state.”Footnote 21 Schaff himself was a vital cultural intermediary in the transatlantic religious milieu of the age, who routinely described himself as a “bridge maker”—Swiss by birth, German by education, American by adoption.Footnote 22 On the other side of the Atlantic, a lengthy work on recent emigration from Germany to America, Ideen über die Auswanderung nach Amerika (1827), reckoned, “we advise against the emigration of German booksellers to America, for a well educated class that would read or study German publications is just not to be found there.” Most Germans living in the United States “are by far so averse to the German language that they do not want to read let alone study it. Everyone who can and wants to read reaches for English books.”Footnote 23
Along these lines of transatlantic history and the history of the book, this article examines the reception in English translation of another Swiss-German church historian, Karl Rudolf Hagenbach (1801–1874), among a diverse group of nineteenth-century American figures.Footnote 24 Though virtually forgotten today, Hagenbach's numerous textbooks, based on his lectures and carefully positioned for student use, enjoyed a decidedly favorable and approving welcome. I concentrate on the reception of his History of Doctrines, History of the Church, and Theological Encyclopedia and Methodology, through a series of curious channels, placing that reception within the context of similar currents in American-German theological relations. These volumes, I shall argue, satisfied the longing for German scholarship (Wissenschaft), “learned piety,” and adaptability for use in seminars and survey courses for an unusually broad range of theologians and church historians, capturing the imagination of an academic community still establishing its disciplinary customs and throwing, in fits and starts, “preparatory labors into the shade.”Footnote 25 As viable and particularly popular options in the search for suitable theological textbooks, Hagenbach's works became important resources that helped shape the conventions and practices of the disciplines of church history, the history of doctrine, and the methods of the academic study of theology in America.
That Hagenbach's reception involved a rather heterogeneous lot dispersed across confessional and ecclesiastical lines, embracing conservative and liberal Presbyterians and Lutherans, Methodists, Unitarians, and Transcendentalists alike, sheds light on a number of important aspects of modern intellectual and religious history. By crossing ideological boundaries and unseating otherwise fixed antitheses, this shared response suggests a state of juste-milieu liberal-conservative academic practice in American Protestant education in the second half of the nineteenth century. Revising older views of the nineteenth century in Europe as the age of secularization, Olaf Blaschke and others have referred to the period as a “second confessional age” on account of lingering confessional prejudices and persisting Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant “milieus.”Footnote 26 An “Atlantic” perspective on these themes—often treated only in the context of a particular nation-state—offers new insights for our understanding of religion in the newly-founded modern academy, the movement and translation of theological ideas in an age of steamship travel, and, significantly, the surfacing of commonalities among ostensibly mismatched, if not outright conflicting, Protestant religious cultures during the era that Mark A. Noll has called “a new Christian Pluralism.”Footnote 27 To develop this interpretation, I explore some of the perceptions and images of Hagenbach's works arising in the American and English religious press, recover and examine in detail those primarily responsible for bringing his textbooks into English, and, finally, comment on the importance and lasting significance of this selection of his English corpus.Footnote 28
I. German and American Church History: An Insider and Outsider
A native of Basel, Switzerland, Hagenbach studied in Bonn and Berlin with some of the leading German theologians of the day, including Friedrich Lücke (1791–1855), J. K. L. Gieseler (1792–1854), August Neander (1789–1850), and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), before returning to his hometown in 1823. Almost immediately, he began to teach the church history course for the Basel Pädagogium, a newly established educational institution distinct to Basel that served as a two- or three-year post-Gymnasium preparatory college for the University of Basel, and as a “finishing school” for the sons of Basel's businessmen who would not be attending university but rather take up the family business—students similar to Thomas Buddenbrook in Thomas Mann's famous novel. While there he began to craft his pedagogical skills, which continually manifested themselves in his publications.Footnote 29 That same year, he received a call to join the biblical scholar and theologian W. M. L. de Wette (1780–1849) on Basel's theological faculty. In 1824, he became außerordentlicher Professor, and in 1829, ordentlicher Professor of Church History. Together, the pair acted to transform Switzerland's oldest university, founded by the humanist pope Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II) in 1460, into a leading center of rigorous, critical theological scholarship (Wissenschaft). He remained there until his death in 1874, teaching for more than five decades and producing numerous revised editions of his textbooks in order to keep pace with new literature and other advancements in each respective field.Footnote 30
Yet, at least for American theological students heading for Europe, the larger German universities—Halle (founded in 1694), Göttingen (1737), Berlin (1810), and Bonn (1818), chiefly—overshadowed Basel as sought-after destinations throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 31 Edward Robinson's entry on Basel in his survey, “A Concise View of the Universities, and of the State of Theological Education, in Germany,” described the Swiss-German outpost in typical terms, mentioning, in the span of a single paragraph, its once dominant Hebrew scholars of the early modern era, the names of de Wette and Hagenbach, and some rare book collections housed in the libraries.Footnote 32
Hagenbach possessed a unique identity as both an insider and outsider to the German system and its theological trends, in a sense mirroring the geographical position and disposition of Basel itself: located on the crossroads of three countries (das Dreiländereck); a member of the Old Swiss Confederation since 1501 but regarded by its inhabitants until late in the nineteenth century as a near autonomous city-republic operating within the Confederation; many citizens even spoke of “going to Switzerland” when departing for one of the other Swiss cantons.Footnote 33 As a Swiss church historian and prominent member of Basel's Reformed church, he held a deep interest in the peculiar cultural makeup of his Vaterstadt. Basel's well-known thinkers in the revolutionary century,Footnote 34 from philologist J. J. Bachofen and historian Jacob Burckhardt to theologian Franz Overbeck and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, famously cultivated an attitude of independence, aloofness, even occasionally derision, toward Berlin, Prussia, and the perceived German intellectual establishment. They comprised a notable “oppositional current.”Footnote 35 The origins of this collective “dissenting” tradition, traceable to Basel's long established conservative and pietist communities, made its vestigial appearance in Hagenbach's thought, too, even if he had a considerably greater sympathy and fondness for so-called “German” ideas. It would be a mistake to assign him wholesale to either sphere.
As a writer of church history, Hagenbach stepped into a crowded field. An 1888 librarian's guide to the Sage Library of New Jersey's New Brunswick Seminary noted that ecclesiastical history students preferred to read J. L. von Mosheim, Neander, Hagenbach, and Schaff.Footnote 36 Clark singled out Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, Karl von Hase's History of the Christian Church, Gieseler's Text-book of Church History, and Neander's numerous Histories as four primary offerings in the church history curriculums at the divinity schools of Harvard and Yale and the seminaries of Princeton and Union.Footnote 37 In late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American Protestantism, Göttingen's Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693–1755) unquestionably loomed large. Pennsylvania witnessed the creation of the von Mosheim Society in 1789, a literary circle and final plank of a comprehensive educational initiative devoted to “the perpetuation of German language and culture.” Though based in Philadelphia, the Society counted members up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Its founder, the German-American Lutheran Justus Christian Henry Helmuth, originally from Helmstedt, Germany—the town where Mosheim taught before moving to Göttingen—had long admired Mosheim as the unequalled Protestant historian of the eighteenth century for his sweeping textbook Institutionum historiae ecclesiasticae (1755).Footnote 38 For Helmuth, Mosheim appealed to both pietist and confessional sensibilities—an “orthodox but learned writer possessed of an elegant prose style in both German and Latin.”Footnote 39 Interested English readers soon reaped the benefits of Mosheim's labors in the form of multiple English translations appearing in abundance shortly after his death.Footnote 40
Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History thus became a standard work in the lecture halls of Princeton Seminary, Union Seminary, and Yale University, even if numerous professors, from Samuel Miller of Princeton, to George Fisher of Yale, to Schaff of Mercersburg and Union, sometimes viewed it with ambivalent eyes. Their criticisms of the work ranged from the dogmatic—“a coldblooded low Arminian,” muttered the Calvinist Miller, who used it simply as a default choice—to the dull—“clear, though mechanical and monotonous … freedom from passion, almost bordering on cool indifferentism,” judged Schaff. The fact that the work was by then over one-hundred years old, and even then the product of many earlier attempts and revisions by Mosheim, cast a blight upon it.Footnote 41 Gieseler, Hase, and Neander, as main alternatives, all received a similar mixed response, Clark noted, even if for different reasons.Footnote 42
II. Of “German-Fearers” and “Germany's Choicest Gift”: American and British Reviews
The first of Hagenbach's textbooks to appear in English was his Dogmengeschichte (History of Doctrines), translated by the German Carl W. Buch in 1846.Footnote 43 In terms of method and organization, the History of Doctrines divided the history of the Christian church into a series of relatively discrete periods, such as the “Apostolic Age to the Death of Origen, or from the Year 80 to the Year 254.” Under each period, it presented a “general history of thought,” highlighting the main figures, events, and ideas, followed by a “special history of doctrine.”Footnote 44 This “special history” resembled to some degree a traditional work of systematic theology—or a kind of dogmatics in the past tense, one might say—by discussing various theological loci in succession, from issues of prolegomena to eschatology, in terms of the dominant trends and thinkers of the timeframe under consideration. In this respect, the structure of the book mirrored similar patterns in widespread use across Germany.Footnote 45
Reflecting Hagenbach's conciliatory nature, Buch took pains to emphasize the work's utility for theological education by restating part of the original author's preface. “Respecting my theological views, I do not think it necessary to enter into any lengthened remarks,” Hagenbach had declared, “inasmuch as they will be clear from the work itself to such an extent as is allowable in a writing of a professedly historical character, in which the subjective opinions of the writer should neither be prominently brought forward at the expense of truth, nor wholly kept back at the expense of liberty.” Charting what was generally seen as an appropriately “objective” course with limited dogmatic opinion tendered on historical topics, the work's orientation, “compendiousness,” and “clearness,” Buch noted, marshaling testimony from others, all lent it well to the English-speaking student.Footnote 46 In theoretical terms, one discerns a restrained “dialectical” form of objectivity at work: the interaction of the knowing subject (Hagenbach) with the object of study (the specific themes and loci in the history of doctrines).Footnote 47 Without wearing its theory on its sleeves, as it were, Hagenbach's History of Doctrines, like other publications in the genre, still rested on this kind of subdued dialectical objectivity for much of its analysis.Footnote 48
Assessing Buch's edition, the British Quarterly Review, a periodical in competition with the Whig Edinburgh Review and Tory Quarterly Review intent on fostering a “critical spirit” among open-minded nonconformists and other Victorians, deemed it the vanguard of the genre.Footnote 49 “A history of the doctrines of Christianity has long been a desideratum in English, our divines having usually discussed dogmatic theology, not in its historic phases, but its scriptural aspect. It is, however, of considerable importance that the theologian should study the doctrines of the Bible in the light of history.” The reviewer contended that “history of doctrines” as a subject belonged properly under the auspices of ecclesiastical history, but “the Germans, . . . with their characteristic subdivisions of study, have exalted it into a distinct department of investigation. Hence they have been able to prosecute it with greater diligence and minuteness.” Though the Marburg theologian Wilhelm Münscher (1766–1814) had furnished one of the more prolix treatments of the field with his series Handbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte, the reviewer ventured, “the best compendium is that of Hagenbach.” In the final analysis, it concluded, “Professor Hagenbach,” though a moderate historicist, “is evangelical in sentiment, and therefore no German-fearing Christian need be alarmed.”Footnote 50
On its own, the conclusion that the text was “safe for German-fearers” is certainly striking. But it appears all the more so when set against the backdrop of the rest of the Review, if not broader undercurrents of anti-German attitudes in religion. In the section immediately preceding the book reviews, the journal carried a scathing article-length indictment of David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, recently published in English by George Eliot (Marian Evans), decrying it as a jumble of “unfair” and “preposterous” theories, supported with “glaring inconsistencies and parologisms,” “complacent assumptions,” and “torturous reasoning.” The net result was “such a fantastic system of speculation as that of Hegel,” equal in comparison “to nothing else than some ice-palace, vast, glittering, and strangely compacted, but cold, unsubstantial, baseless, and useless.”Footnote 51 Harangues and other negative reviews of Strauss's Life of Jesus abounded, of course, but the Review protested that it was symptomatic of the deficiencies seemingly inherent to German Protestant theology at large, not just to historical-critical investigations of the early Christian church or the biblical books themselves. “‘Learned Germany’ has been indulging itself in writing infidelity for the last half-century without altogether suspecting it,” the Review sardonically broadcast. “Dr. Strauß has done them [the theologians of “Learned Germany”] the benefit of showing them to themselves.”Footnote 52 To call Hagenbach level-headed and commend him to “German-fearers” consequently amounted to a highly meaningful verdict of approbation.
One example brings out this supposed contrast arising in the Review. Hagenbach's brief treatment of Strauss's thesis and the entangled questions of modern Christology took place in the last section in the History of Doctrines, ranging from 1720 to the time of Hagenbach's writing of the book, and described as “An Age of Criticism, of Speculation, and of Antithesis between Faith and Knowledge, Philosophy and Christianity, Reason and Revelation.”Footnote 53 After a few comments about the impact of the Enlightenment upon Christology, he noted that “adherents of speculative philosophy . . . exposed themselves to the danger of renouncing the historical appearance of Christ, or of converting his history into mere myth.” Synthesizing multiple trajectories, he continued: “the advocates of modern theology consider it their task to show, that the divine and the human natures of Christ (the ideal and the historical), are most intimately connected with each other. Though they differ from each other in reference to particular points, as well as regarding the modes of argumentation which they use, they all agree in admitting that the received ecclesiastical terms of person and nature are no longer sufficient to express the relation in which the two natures of Christ stand to each other.” Only with “more profound philosophical and historical investigations” might theologians convince contemporary skeptical audiences “of the idea of a God-man, who is separated from sinful men by his sinlessness, and . . . prove, with highest degree of historical evidence, its realization in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.”Footnote 54 Sustained references to and interactions with disputed views from the likes of J. G. Herder, Immanuel Kant, F. W. J. Schelling, Julius Wegscheider, Schleiermacher, and Strauss, among others, occurred almost entirely in endnotes.Footnote 55 In this way, the History of Doctrines diverted some attention from what was a contested topic, streamlining the presentation for students seeking a broad overview more than an elaborate treatise. Adhering to the craft of history, as Hagenbach concisely put it in the author's preface, directed this choice. “The author's opinions do not appear with much prominence,” the Review confirmed, “inasmuch as there was no reason for their special manifestation.”Footnote 56 While this approach found favor among Strauss's many critics, it was more a function of the method and organization of the History of Doctrines and the status of the work as a judicious survey textbook rather than a polemical piece.
In 1850, a contributor to The Princeton Review affirmed with admiration that Hagenbach had long been recognized as “a writer of comprehensive views and unusual sprightliness. This, rather than what the Germans love to call depth, is at the bottom of his popularity.” “Yet,” the column insisted, “he is a German.”Footnote 57 Fellow Swiss-German Schaff, then teaching in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, also remarked on Hagenbach's Swiss-German background, insisting that though Hagenbach spent all but a few years of his life in his native Basel, he was sufficiently “German by education” to merit the time and careful study of English-speaking readers—in either the Old World or the New—desiring to learn about the leading lights of German academic theology after Schleiermacher. Hagenbach's “style is remarkably clear, simple, easy, and fluent,” observed Schaff. “His tone and judgment is liberal, mild, amiable and well calculated to attract outsiders, and such as are prejudiced against more decided forms of orthodoxy . . . . He is also quite a respectable poet and a gentleman of fine taste and general culture.”Footnote 58 Finally, he said, Hagenbach's textbooks (Lehrbücher), “by their simple, clear vivacity, and freedom from technical pedantry, commend themselves even to English taste.”Footnote 59
Expressing widespread sentiments, the Bibliotheca Sacra commended Hagenbach's works to its readers, noting agreeably that he “is one of those Germans who combine some English traits with their national personality. His mode of thinking is lucid, and his style simple and transparent. His text-book [the History of Doctrines] is by far the best of any for English and American readers.” In canvassing “the whole field” of theology, “it is comprehensive and accurate. With respect to particular subjects, especially the difficult ones, it is as profound as it is possible for a manual to be.”Footnote 60 Reviews from The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review likewise applauded Hagenbach's “conciseness,” stating that in the domain of church history and history of doctrine, “perhaps no one has met with such general acceptance as Hagenbach,” whose textbooks “prove a valuable accession to the libraries of ministers and theological students.” In the wider panorama of German academic theology in the United States, ventured one reviewer, it “is rare that translations of German books are satisfactory . . . [but] in this volume, the public have a guaranty of such as is not often enjoyed.”Footnote 61
On the opposite end of the spectrum, leading theological liberals and Transcendentalists, such as the Unitarian Theodore Parker, endorsed Hagenbach's works. Though he thought the genre lacking in English books, Parker called Hagenbach's History of Doctrines “the best” of its kind.Footnote 62 The Methodist Review delivered a similar appraisal when it observed, “of all the recent publications of the German theological press, we know of none more eloquent in style or choice of material.”Footnote 63
Introducing an abridged translation of Hagenbach's lectures on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theology in Europe, the next work to appear in English after the History of Doctrines, the German-American Lutheran J. H. W. Stuckenberg and the Connecticut Congregationalist William Leonhard Gage heaped sterling plaudits on the academic texts penned by the Basel professor:
Prof. Hagenbach . . . is so well known to the theologians of Great Britain and America, through his widely circulated History of Doctrines, that the editors of this volume do not need to speak at any length of his learning, his candour, his piety, his soundness in doctrine, his thoroughness, and his graceful style. In Germany he is even more widely known than abroad. Though a professor in a Swiss University, his lectures are delivered in the German language . . . . All his works have passed through repeated editions, and in introducing this one, we are but putting the reader of English in possession of a volume which has long been a standard in Switzerland and Germany. The first book which Prof. Tholuck of Halle puts into the hand of a young man who wishes to become acquainted with the history, present condition, and future hopes of the cause of Christ in its relation to philosophy, scholarship, and poetry of Germany is this work of Hagenbach . . . . With these introductory remarks, we commit this volume to the readers of Great Britain and the United States, confident that it is one of the choicest gifts which Germany has yet bestowed upon the world, and trusting that the favour which has been shown to it in the country of its birth may be continued in the countries of its adoption.Footnote 64
When a revised version of the History of the Church in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries went to print in 1869, the authoritative quarterly The New Englander, under the editorial guidance of Yale's George Park Fisher (1827–1909)—eventual President of the American Historical Association in 1898, who had studied abroad at Halle in the 1850s—pronounced that it was “the best account . . . of the progress of theology, literature, and culture in Germany for the last century and a half.” Of his cardinal strengths, “Hagenbach is evangelical without being narrow,” a wellspring of knowledge, who “writes . . . without the stiffness and pedantry which are often characteristic of German treatises of this nature.”Footnote 65 For his part, Hagenbach said in 1863, “I had never expected to flatter myself with the thought that my works would attain so much honor (Ehre) abroad, [even] without my help, such as has already occurred in so many different directions.”Footnote 66
Such accolades echoed the familiar refrain, on seemingly all sides, of the important combination of brevity, liveliness, and rigor in textbooks. The lengths and ends to which the primary “transatlantic actors” went to bring these works from Hagenbach, of Germany's “choicest gifts”—as well as other tomes by other German authors, to be sure—into English, testifies to their appeal.
III. Smith, Shedd, and “Furnishing a Rubric”
At some point in the middle of the nineteenth century, August Tholuck (1799–1877) is reputed to have asked: “and what is this Maine, which produces men like these?” He had in mind Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877), the prominent New School Presbyterian, who spent a generous span of overworked years of ill health engaged with Hagenbach's books.Footnote 67 Born in 1815 in Portland, Maine, Smith was raised a Unitarian. In 1830, he entered Bowdoin College. During the winter of his senior year, the multifarious revival movement swelling up near the end of the Second Great Awakening made its way to Bowdoin, and Smith credited the newfound “special religious interest” for inciting his conversion to a more traditional “Trinitarian and Evangelical” position.Footnote 68 From there he began to pursue theological studies, first at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts—founded in 1807 in response to the rise of Unitarianism at Harvard College, an arrangement clearly stipulated in the institution's original statutes—and then, briefly, at Bangor Seminary in Maine.Footnote 69 He would go on to become the first full-time professor of church history at New York's Union Theological Seminary, where he also taught systematic theology for nearly twenty years.
Toward the end of 1837, Smith sailed across the intervening ocean for Paris, intent on furthering his theological training abroad. In the spring of 1838, he moved east, leaving France for Germany, attracted by the presence of the “Awakening” (Erweckungsbewegung) theologian Tholuck in Halle.Footnote 70 He richly chronicled his activities at Halle to a friend in a letter from November 24, 1838:
Shall I tell you how I live here? Take today as a specimen. Got up at seven, committed my verses, read a Psalm in Hebrew from eight to nine, heard a lecture on Psychology by Prof. Erdmann (one of the best lecturers in philosophy in Germany); nine to ten in Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre; ten to eleven, heard Tholuck on Christian Morals; eleven to twelve, walked with a student; twelve to one, read some in Schelling; one to two, heard Tholuck on Theological Encyclopedia; two to three, dinner; three to four, read Goethe's Torquato Tasso, with the young Englishman (Creak), who boards here; four to five, heard Ulrici on Religionsphilosophie; five to six, a delightful walk with Prof. Tholuck; six to half-past seven, concert of sacred music of Bach, Handel (from the Messiah), etc.; half-past seven to eight, went to see a student; eight to nine, tea; nine to ten, read Faust with Madame Ulrici, who explained all the hard places, and told me the words I didn't know—she is a capital lexicon;—and now I am writing, to you.Footnote 71
At year's end, Smith ventured from the “delightful” company in Halle to Wittenberg, and later, to Berlin. There he established close connections with Baron von Kottwitz; August Twesten, Schleiermacher's successor in dogmatics; the “brave as a lion” E. W. Hengstenberg, who, Smith said, “more than any other man . . . is like one of the prophets of the Old Testament”; and “the excellent, learned Neander, the father of a new era in church history.”Footnote 72 He heard the pioneering jurist Savigny speak on legal science (Rechtswissenschaft), attended Ranke's history lectures, met for discussion with Edward Robinson, then also studying in Berlin, and dined repeatedly with a cousin of Tholuck's wife—Marie von Tucher, the widow of Hegel.Footnote 73 In August, he wrote to New England, “My dear parents, I have decided to remain the next semester here in Berlin, instead of returning home . . . . The first question is, where can I study to the most advantage? and about this there can be but one opinion.”Footnote 74
Smith's early experiences captivated his imagination long after he eventually returned home. He again trained his gaze on German theological Wissenschaft when he undertook a revision of Gieseler's Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte in the 1850s. As he realized the goal, however, Smith found himself disappointed with Gieseler, surprising in light of the time he had spent reworking the multi-volume text. In spite of all the energy he had poured into it, Gieseler's Text-book remained “cold, but cautious; it is more rational than sympathetic.”Footnote 75 If the outcome left him lukewarm, it hardly portended the exuberance he displayed in his next major translation project. On another European excursion in 1859, Smith journeyed beyond Berlin and Halle to the Rhineland and the Swiss city of Basel, where he met Hagenbach.Footnote 76 Excited by the meeting and unswayed by his earlier dispiriting engagement with Gieseler, Smith conceived of an English translation of Hagenbach's Dogmengeschichte, to be published as a new History of Doctrines, updating the earlier translation by Carl Buch, which, by then, had already been issued in a second edition.Footnote 77
He began the task in the spring of 1860, at first comparing the Buch translation to the original German text. In order to “give it, to a great degree, the character of a new work,” as he put it, Smith incorporated ample additions, particularly on recent theological developments in the English-speaking world. The project subsumed all his other plans, and he devoted to it nearly all his time, even as he suffered from poor health and put off other pressing concerns. Finally seeking some relief, in the summer of 1860, he set out on a rehabilitating expedition “into the wilds of Maine,” before which he divulged, “I want to get out of this unnatural city life, to see how the woods, and trees, and hills look. But I have to work on and on. The second volume of Hagenbach will make me a great deal of work. He does not know anything about the English (to say nothing of the American) theological literature.”Footnote 78 The first volume of the History of Doctrines appeared in 1861.Footnote 79
The History received an immediate and near overwhelmingly positive response. In a letter to Smith, Bancroft expressed his initial reaction to Smith's choice to exchange the writing of original (and American) systematic theology, as well as Smith's apparent erstwhile aspirations for a historian's career, for a “life” of updating the textbooks of the Swiss-German Hagenbach, articulating a widespread view. “My dear Smith,” Bancroft wrote, “in these times one is reminded of the heathen philosopher, who, being asked after his country, pointed upwards. I used to regret your leaving history for dogmatics; but there is little trust to be put in anything but that which is eternal.” Bancroft noted that he delighted in the volume, applauded the “precision and exactness shown in . . . [its] editing,” and added, “what interests me most in this publication is the evidence it gives of the high character you are imparting to the rising generation of students. Such teachings will upset bigotry and scepticism.” Undoubtedly, he concluded, “you are doing the best service.”Footnote 80
Smith worked on the second Hagenbach volume throughout the summer of 1861, persisting in the excessive heat in his surroundings in New Hampshire and New York. On August 1, 1861, he wrote from New York to his wife, in Northampton, that he was “getting on, quite famously, in these quiet and hot times, with Hagenbach. This month, I think will see the end of the book for me.” Still, he said, “I wish I was there with you to drive round and enjoy this grand weather; but work seems to be part of my life. I often think I will haul up short, and not do so much, but then there comes something that must be done; and, after all, I'm a great deal more contented when I am doing something than when I am idling about.” A fortnight later he wrote in his diary: “August 15th.—Finished. A long, hard job done.” With resounding subtlety, his wife and biographer Elizabeth L. Smith reported that Henry “then gave a week to the seaside with his family, and went back to Hagenbach.” Indeed, she noted, he spent Christmas Eve of that year correcting the proof-sheets, at last capping his more than two-year long commitment to Hagenbach's History of Doctrines. Both holiday-season episodes readily evince Smith's keen interest in his colleague from the region of the upper Rhine (Oberrhein).Footnote 81
Years later, when asked why he had filled so much of his time with German academic theology in general, and translating Hagenbach in particular, at the outbreak of the American Civil War, Smith justified his actions by appealing to the quality of material. “The works of the Germans were then so immeasurably superior to anything that had been produced in this country.”Footnote 82 When Hagenbach queried him on his interest, Smith wrote, “I hope that this work may meet with your approval. I have devoted to it a good deal of care. Your various works are so highly esteemed by our American scholars.” Facing far from ideal external political conditions, “our present war makes the sale of theological works less active; but we are hoping for better times.” Bringing Hagenbach up to date on recent struggles in the United States, he added that “recent military [and] naval successes, [and] the wise policy of President Lincoln, give promise of a final victory over this unexampled and most wicked rebellion. Providence, I firmly believe, will not allow a Slave Republic to be established in the nineteenth century.”Footnote 83 After the War, he congratulated Hagenbach on the fact that his translated textbooks had acquired an “excellent” reputation, consistently “highly valued by scholars in this country.”Footnote 84
Where Smith brought Hagenbach's textbooks into English and employed them in his own courses, others related to the volumes implicitly. It is instructive to compare Smith's endeavors with those of another influential Presbyterian, William G. T. Shedd (1820–1894), concerning Hagenbach and the Halle theologian Ferdinand Guericke (1803–1878). Shedd taught English at the University of Vermont (1845–1852), theology at Auburn Theological Seminary (1852–1854), church history at Andover Theological Seminary (1854–1862), and sacred literature at Union Theological Seminary (1863–1874). In 1874, he succeeded Smith as professor of systematic theology at Union, a post which he held for the next sixteen years. Considered a powerful advocate of Old School Presbyterianism, despite his affections for Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the conservative Shedd at times even criticized the so-called “guardian of orthodoxy,” Charles Hodge, for adopting metaphysical ideas that he thought were too modern and irenic. This put Shedd on a different path than his predecessor, the more liberal and relatively more ecumenical Smith, who had been a major force in the 1869 reunion of the Old and New School Presbyterian churches.Footnote 85
Deviating slightly from the dominant pattern when it came to selecting German works of church history, Shedd preferred Guericke's handbook to such an extent that he issued a translation of it under the title, A Manual of Church History, in 1857.Footnote 86 A student of Shedd's recalled that Shedd “told his class that he believed that there had been no significant contribution to theology since the seventeenth century, and he certainly acted on that belief.”Footnote 87 Why, then, Guericke, or recent German textbooks at all? Shedd's influence on his numerous students, stretching well beyond the Northeast states, and his fondness, as a conservative Presbyterian, for certain flavors of nineteenth-century German academic theology, mark him out as noteworthy and warrant investigation.
Guericke's pull on Shedd rested on the former's circumstances in Germany. He had studied theology at Halle under some of its most famous rationalist thinkers, Julius Wegscheider and Wilhelm Gesenius, before a turnabout in his thought led him to the pietist and politically conservative Tholuck. He received a professorial appointment at Halle in 1829 through the influence of the Prussian Crown Prince, and thereafter cooperated with the overtures of Tholuck and Hengstenberg to oust Wegscheider and Gesenius from office.Footnote 88 Soon, he grew dissatisfied with the 1817 Prussian Union of Lutheran and Reformed congregations (Unionskirche). In 1833, he left the Prussian state church, siding with the Silesian Johann G. Scheibel (1783–1843) and the Old Lutherans, a group that rejected the Unionskirche for more traditional Lutheranism; two years later, he was dismissed from Halle's faculty on account of his decision, and was not reinstated for another five years.Footnote 89 All of these factors earned Guericke favor in Shedd's eyes.
Delineating four reasons for positive engagement with his Halle counterpart, Shedd first championed Guericke's confessional Protestant roots. Guericke's commitment to the Old Lutherans, for Shedd, himself a strong Calvinist, demonstrated Guericke's “hearty sympathy” with the shared Reformation tradition.Footnote 90 A “living interest” in the “cardinal doctrines of the Protestant Reformation as they throbbed in the heart of Luther” combined with “personal experience,” molded the Halle figure, and that alone, Shedd claimed, can “prepare the historian of the Christian Church to enter vividly into its whole varied career.” Guericke bore courageously the consequences of his “decided and frank orthodoxy” in his vocational troubles.Footnote 91
Second, as a combative Lutheran, Guericke evidenced a painstaking interest in the minutiae of religious controversies and doctrinal development, what Shedd termed the “internal history of the Church.” Contrary to many of his German peers, he believed the “inspired truth” of the scriptures, Shedd observed. Third, Shedd paid homage to the work's “slow and gradual formation, by a German student and professor, over a period of thirty years”—it was true to type “German” scholarship, he meant, in all the fullness (or problems) that such a descriptor revealed. The appearance of multiple editions of the Handbuch, “in a country distinguished for the fecundity of its authorship, and the fastidiousness of its scholarship,” could only inspire confidence. Finally, he praised the Handbuch for its care in attending to small, variegated details as well as big ideas, achieving a balance “between the full and flowing narration of history proper, and the mere meager synopsis or epitome,” the reference book and the classroom manual.Footnote 92
Guericke's Handbuch, for Shedd, represented a somewhat more confessional (if Lutheran) alternative to other less traditionally orthodox, German church histories, Hagenbach's included. Nevertheless, and despite a supposition of Shedd's suspicion toward Hagenbach's brand of mediating theology (Vermittlungstheologie)—the mid-nineteenth-century centrist position inclined to harmonize the differences between Protestant groups as well as the demands of modern science and traditional faith—interpreters have remarked on Shedd's extended reliance on Hagenbach's History of Doctrines.Footnote 93 The dependency is most clear, perhaps, in Shedd's A History of Christian Doctrine. In the preface, Shedd confessed his debt “to the dogmatic historians of Germany of the present century,” as well as “the great lights of the English Church in the preceding centuries,” drawing together Thomas Hooker (1586–1647), George Bull (1634–1710), Bishop of Chester John Pearson (1613–1686), and Daniel Waterland (1683–1740), with the towering German thinkers F. C. Baur (1792–1860) and Isaak Dorner (1809–1884). The Dogmengeschichte from Baumgarten-Crusius and from Hagenbach, he added with radical understatement, “have to some extent furnished the rubric under which the generalizations have been made, as well as considerable material itself.”Footnote 94 He might have applied to Hagenbach his positive statements on Guericke, save the Lutheran emphases. Though Hagenbach focused too narrowly on the European continent, Shedd admitted, his organization of material and periodization of history—always a hotly contested issue in the literature—remained unrivaled.Footnote 95 As Bradley and Muller expertly concluded, “Shedd's history could almost be composed out of Hagenbach's.”Footnote 96
If Smith, Shedd, and others complained that German theologians ignored the theological developments taking shape in the New World, and to a lesser extent, in Scotland and England, this was hardly the final word. In Shedd's case, his protestations masked his own appropriation of Hagenbach. The latter's textbooks continued to attract attention to a degree that translators and “adapters” like Buch, Gage, Stuckenberg, and Smith preferred to remedy this lack simply by adding references to English-language theological literature, and not, as one might suppose, by placing their efforts elsewhere, either in translating a different work that heeded, to a greater extent, American and British developments (which they perhaps would not have found) or abandoning such projects altogether. “You will see that I have made considerable additions to your work, on English [and] American Theology. This was needed for our use,” Smith notified Hagenbach.Footnote 97 Though they saw flaws in Hagenbach's volumes—most commonly, an understandable overemphasis on continental Europe—they labored intensively and excitedly nonetheless to present them to an American audience and shape the contours of their fields. Anthony Grafton has noted how textbooks can “offer models of correct comportment and practice,” and textbook writers can “not only inform the young, but . . . form them, at one and the same time.”Footnote 98 Reflecting this concern as they claimed Hagenbach's texts for use in their lecterns, pulpits, and public squares, the stories of these American figures suggest the possibilities of accord among juste-milieu partisans. Put differently, a shared narrative of reception, based on moderate notions of Wissenschaft, piety, and pedagogy, obtains among their distinct ecclesiastical and academic traditions.
IV. A Transatlantic “Guide to Hundreds”
Like his Histories, Hagenbach's textbook of theological encyclopedia became a model and norm in its respective genre in America.Footnote 99 First published in German in 1833, the Encyklopädie und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften was translated into English in 1884 by the Methodists John F. Hurst and George R. Crooks.Footnote 100 Such volumes were not encyclopedic in the sense of an alphabetically-organized reference book or series like Encyclopaedia Britannica, but rather as introductory guidebooks designed to introduce beginning students to the various branches of theology and the state of theological inquiry in each branch, frequently in required first-year university or seminary courses. The reception of Hagenbach's contribution to the genre began with the Edwardsean Congregationalist Edwards Amasa Park (1808–1900).
In 1839, Park, dubbed by Perry Miller as a “behemoth among the theologians,” comparable in stature to Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, who, “when he lifted up his head and trumpeted, American Protestantism listened with great rapture,” published a collection of sermons from contemporaneous German mediating theologians that ran to almost five hundred pages.Footnote 101 The introduction described the Germans as “purveyors of mind,” engaged in “the commerce of intellect”: while pragmatic Americans “are making ships, they [German theologians] are manufacturing theories.” Park's anthology was an attempt at “looking away from our own land” to see “phrases that truth assumes elsewhere.”Footnote 102 Fixed on Europe, Park made three trips to Germany. The first of 1842–1843 followed a similar path as Smith's, just two years prior. Schaff, then still in Europe, was one of two lecturers (Privatdozenten) hired to introduce Park to the theological and philosophical works of Schleiermacher, Hegel, Hagenbach, and others when Park visited Heidelberg in 1843.Footnote 103
Park also called on Neander and Hengstenberg in Berlin and Tholuck in Halle. Upon meeting Hengstenberg, Park blazoned: “I saw his library, in two large rooms, and it contains 21,000 volumes, only 2,000 less than our whole [Andover] Seminary Library. No wonder these men know something!”Footnote 104 When he returned home, he took over editorial duties of Bibliotheca Sacra, modeling it after the distinguished journal of mediating theology in German-speaking Europe, Theologische Studien und Kritiken. As editor, Park demonstrated a resolute commitment to discuss matters of foreign religious scholarship and culture in the journal.Footnote 105
In the first issue of Bibliotheca Sacra in 1844, writing for an unnamed group of New England academic theologians, Park compared the state of theological science and education in America with that in Germany.Footnote 106 He rhapsodized over American theology's practicality and good sense. “We give ourselves but little time to elaborate and publish splendid air-castles on any subject, and least of all on subjects of sacred science,” he claimed. “We received at our country's origin, a favorable impulse to the employment of our native good sense in theological investigation; for our forefathers made an open renunciation of all prescriptive systems, and took the Bible alone for their text-book.”Footnote 107 Lurking beneath the self-aggrandizing tone was a distant anticipation of some of the chief tenets of Frederick Jackson Turner's now famous “frontier thesis.” America's founding and geographical traits, Park intimated, had succored pragmatic religion. Yet, he lamented, “we have no treatise, which can serve the purpose of an encyclopedia, or general introduction to the science of theology; no comprehensive outline of the science, its various departments, its literature.”Footnote 108
The task of furnishing such an English-language “encyclopedia,” a guidebook introducing beginners to the academic study of theology, based on the German model, began through translation. Schleiermacher's Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811; 2nd ed., 1830) was translated into English by the English Congregationalist William Farrer in 1850, surprisingly antedating the English arrival of his foundational dogmatics (Glaubenslehre), The Christian Faith, by nearly eighty years. Both were products of Edinburgh's publishing firm, T&T Clark.Footnote 109 Park translated portions of Tholuck's lectures on the subject at Halle in 1842–1843 and published them in the inaugural 1844 issue of Bibliotheca Sacra.Footnote 110 Over the next four decades, only a handful of American works in the literature appeared, and two of the more significant, substantial forays were both culled from transcriptions of classroom lectures. In 1873, John T. Short circulated class lectures on theological encyclopedia from the recently deceased John M'Clintock (1814–1870), the first president of Drew Theological Seminary, the Methodist school in New Jersey.Footnote 111 Short admitted that M'Clintock's posthumous work was “scarcely more than a syllabus or outline” taken down from speeches occasionally extemporaneously delivered.Footnote 112 Nevertheless, M'Clintock had composed his notes and outlines with Hagenbach's text in view.Footnote 113 The other “homegrown” source was a compilation of notes from the Swedish Lutheran Revere Franklin Weidner, titled Theological Encyclopedia and Methodology: Based on Hagenbach and Krauth.Footnote 114
M'Clintock, like Smith and Park, toiled to subtend the Atlantic academic-theological divide. At midcentury, he helped establish the strategic Methodist Mission Institute in Bremen, Germany, an important breeding ground for new Methodist scholars. At the same time, he spearheaded the Methodist Quarterly Review. It was in these roles that he first came into contact with Hagenbach's textbooks.Footnote 115 The Bremen Institute assumed a crucial mantle in the transmission of German ideas to a burgeoning Methodist population. Of special importance here, in addition to M'Clintock, was another bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, John Fletcher Hurst (1834–1903).
Hurst had studied at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania before removing to the German universities of Halle and Heidelberg in the 1850s. Upon his return, he served various pastoral appointments, taught historical theology at Drew, served as Drew's third president from 1873 to 1880, and was elected the first chancellor of the Methodist American University in Washington, D.C., from 1891–1903. Following M'Clintock, Hurst taught at the Bremen Institute from 1866 to 1871, served a term as the Institute's director, and wrote, as well, as a foreign correspondent for the Methodist Quarterly Review.Footnote 116
In 1863, Hurst commenced, with another Methodist pastor and professor of church history at Drew, Bernard H. Nadal, on a translation of Hagenbach's lectures on the history of the Protestant church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 117 They postponed the work on account of the publication of William Gage's translation of the same lectures under the title German Rationalism (1865).Footnote 118 Hurst, Schaff, and Hagenbach himself all came to express some disappointment with Gage's edition, particularly the title of German Rationalism—“an utter misnomer.”Footnote 119 After some debate, Hurst proceeded with his own edition of Hagenbach's History, acquiring the explicit support of Hagenbach along the way.Footnote 120 As Smith had done, Hurst relayed his congratulations to Hagenbach for “the success of your books both at home and in our own country.” In the United States, they were all “received with much favor.”Footnote 121 The two-volume edition appeared in 1870.Footnote 122
In 1867, Hurst ventured on holiday to Switzerland. During the trip, he met Hagenbach while attending the latter's lecture on the Zurich Reformer Huldrych Zwingli at the University of Basel.Footnote 123 In conjunction with the Methodist series Library of Biblical and Theological Literature—a prominent organ for the translation and dissemination of German theological texts—Hurst worked with Crooks to bring Hagenbach's Encyklopädie into English and render it more directly useful for the intended American classroom, by providing English-language bibliographic resources and new sections on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American theology, particularly Wesleyanism—much as Smith had done with Hagenbach's History of Doctrines. Hurst's and Crooks's part translation, part redrafting came into print in 1884, and a second edition appeared ten years later, with both developed explicitly “on the basis of Hagenbach.” The opening line by Hurst and Crooks read:
Our American and English theology has been singularly destitute of a general introductory work to the theological sciences. The following Encyclopedia and Methodology is designed to supply this lack . . . . The volume on this subject by the Rev. Dr. Karl Hagenbach, who taught Historical Theology many years at Basel University, has been so highly esteemed that we have made it the basis of our work. We have endeavored, by utilizing the rich material of Hagenbach, to make a handbook for the theological student; a guide to show him the right path of inquiry; a plan or draft of the science, so that by the help here afforded he can see its exterior lines, the boundaries of its subdivisions, and can take the whole into the compass of a complete survey.Footnote 124
The Hurst-Crooks rendering garnered enthusiastic support. H. M. Scott, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, praised the work, while also pointing out the difficulty in identifying it as “simply” a translation, due to the bibliographical additions and periodic insertions on American religion. “The valuable and indispensable book of Hagenbach is not merely given to us in American address, but the additions and adaptations make it well-nigh an independent authority.” Hagenbach is the unparalleled “guide to hundreds desiring to investigate special fields of religious philosophy, history, and doctrine,” declared another reviewer.Footnote 125 Analysts as different as the editorial staff at Harper's Magazine and the conservative and confessional president of Princeton Seminary, Francis L. Patton (1843–1932), expressed the same conclusion.Footnote 126 “America has not yet produced an original work on the subject,” Schaff ruled near the end of the century, “but has [at least] made Hagenbach accessible to American students.”Footnote 127
Where Hurst and Crooks adapted Hagenbach's textbook, Schaff used it as a model for his own, reflecting his aims to “mediate” between German-speaking Europe and the New World. Schaff stands out as an intriguing complement to the transatlantic figures above, as he moved in the other direction, from Germany to America (and made fourteen trips back and forth over the years). In Germany; its Universities, Theology, and Religion (1857), Schaff reminisced that as a student in Germany, he and his classmates would “take down in short-hand every word that drop[ped] from the mouth of living wisdom [that is, the professor], thinking with the freshman in Goethe's Faust: ‘Denn was man schwarz auf weiss besitzt, Kann man getrost nach Hause tragen’” (For what one holds in black and white can confidently be carried home).Footnote 128 Attempting “to bring the German and American mind closer into union,” Schaff declaimed: “the German universities are regarded by competent judges as the first among the learned institutions of the world.” The “German theology of the last thirty or forty years,” moreover, “whatever its errors and defects, . . . is, upon the whole, the most learned, original, and progressive theology of the age, and no active branch of Protestantism can keep entirely aloof from its contact without injuring its own interests.”Footnote 129
Schaff had taught theological propaedeutics, the term he preferred over “encyclopedia,” since the 1860s, first at Mercersburg and then at Union, at a time when it was far from common to offer the course and potential accompanying readers remained rarer still. An anecdote illustrates the situation: “when I was appointed, in 1869, ‘Professor of Encyclopedia and Symbolic,’ in the Union Theological Seminary,” Schaff once remarked, “a doctor of divinity and editor of a leading religious periodical asked me, ‘Pray, tell me the name of your professorship.’ When I told him, he said with an expression of surprise, ‘As to Symbolic, I have never heard of it in all my life; and as to Encyclopedia, if you are a professor of that, they need no other professor!’” In 1893, Schaff published his class notes as Theological Propaedeutic: A General Introduction to the Study of Theology. “Propaedeutic is as yet a new study in this country,” he said, “but it should be taught in every institution.” He leaned heavily on Hagenbach throughout the entire work, a dependence he openly acknowledged. The Propaedeutic aspired “to answer the same purpose for English-speaking students as the well-known Encyklopädie und Methodologie of the late Dr. Hagenbach of Basel (whom I knew very well), has served and still serves for German students (who prize it as a useful Studentenbuch [a book for students, as opposed to a book solely for specialized scholars]).”Footnote 130 As Charles Torrey, writing in The Andover Review, opined at first with envy and then feelings of belated pride: “German and Swiss theological students since 1833 have had their Hagenbach's Encyklopädie, which has passed through a dozed or more editions.” After the Crook-Hurst translation and now Schaff's volume, Torrey beamed, “at last we have a text-book of Theological Encyclopedia that we can call our own.”Footnote 131 After Schaff's death, Charles Ripley Gillett, the librarian of Union Seminary, took over instruction of the course, “Theological Encyclopedia, Methodology, and Bibliography,” using Schaff's text, thereby giving extended life to Hagenbach's work.Footnote 132 Outside the halls of Union, others, like Smith, in colleges, seminaries, and divinity schools as diverse as Lane, New Brunswick, Chicago, Hartford, and a host of others, similarly borrowed from the German model.Footnote 133
V. Conclusion
The experiences of Smith, Park, M'Clintock, Hurst, Schaff, and additional figures in between, were decidedly not unique, but represent the many and sundry nineteenth-century transatlantic “trips”—literal and figurative—taken by American students, professors, and clergy to learn at the feet of German theologians and Doktorväter—a kind of nineteenth-century iteration of the transmission of knowledge during the Republic of Letters. Their efforts resulted in a series of influential German textbooks in English translation, contributing to the transatlantic and, indeed, as Jürgen Osterhammel has recently argued in his magisterial treatment of the nineteenth-century world, global impact of European “cultural exports” in education.Footnote 134 “Atlantic history,” Alison Games has underscored, “is a slice of world history.”Footnote 135
Finally, the American reception of Hagenbach suggests an intriguing line of inquiry to further understand nineteenth-century academic and religious interests in the rich cultural traffic across the Atlantic. Hagenbach's academic manuals and student handbooks presented a unique blend of German learning (Wissenschaft) still attentive, according to diverse leaders of Presbyterian, Transcendentalist, and Methodist circles, to the sensibilities of “evangelical piety.” As Hurst put it in 1870: “Hagenbach . . . is one of the most genial, attractive and fruitful theologians on the Continent. Though a Swiss citizen, so far as his language and literary labors are concerned he is essentially a German, for, ever since the latter part of the eighteenth century, the theology of German Switzerland has been identical with that of Germany itself. The frequent editions of his works treating the history of the Church, owing at once to their fascinating style, liberality, and fidelity to fact, prove him to be the most popular of all European writers in that department.”Footnote 136 These transatlantic textbooks wielded considerable force in the life of nineteenth-century American Protestantism, making regular appearances on university and seminary reading lists and shaping the evolution of the disciplines and genres of introductory church history and the history of doctrine.Footnote 137 In an already fissiparous academic and theological setting, the fact that so many theologians and church historians of such different views threw their weight behind Hagenbach's “genial” textbooks reveals an important example of the achievement of centrist points of commonality. In 1875, one year after his death, Hagenbach was hailed in America as “the most popular ecclesiastical historian . . . in the German language.”Footnote 138
