Schaff, Philip b.January I, 1819; Chur, Switzerland d. October 20, 1893; New York City
German American church historian and ecumenical leader. After studying with several prominent theologians in the universities at Tubingen, Halle, and Berlin (including Isaak A.
Dorner, David F. Strauss, Ferdinand C. Baur, Frederick Augustus Gottreu Tholuck, and August Neander), he accepted an invitation in 1844 to serve as professor of a fledgling German Reformed seminary in south-central Pennsylvania. At Mercersburg, together with his colleague John Williamson Nevin, Schaff brought some of the ripe fruit of European theology and church history to bear on American Christianity. In so doing, he and Nevin emerged as the twin pillars of what became known as the Mercersburg Theology, a modest but influential theological movement characterized by a high view of the church and sacraments and a critique of populist, revivalistic evangelicalism. His influence was extended through his regular contributions to the Mercersburg Review and, perhaps more importantly, his founding of Der deutsche Kirchenfreund (The German Church Advocate), a monthly periodical to support the interests of German American Christianity. In 1853 and 1854 Schaff made the first of more than a dozen trips back to Europe, delivering an important series of lectures in Berlin that were published as Amerika. In the early 1860s he left the German Reformed enclave of Mercersburg for New York, where he worked with the New York Sabbath Committee and then, in 1870, joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary. From that prestigious post, Schaff considerably augmented his reputation for bridging European and American Christianity and theological scholarship. He carried on a lengthy correspondence with churchmen across America, in Britain, and on the continent.
Schaff’s achievements were considerable. The leading American promoter of the Euro-American Evangelical Alliance of the second half of the nineteenth century, his was perhaps the strongest voice for a Christian ecumenism that would not obliterate or ignore theological and confessional distinctiveness on the part of each denomination or tradition. Schaff was also the president from 1872 to 1884 of the American Committee for Bible Revision, responsible for organizing the American contribution to the 1881 revision of the King James Version of the Bible, commonly called the Revised Version.
He wrote a comprehensive multivolume history of the church, founded the American Society of Church History and helped to found the Society of Biblical Literature, and released an edition of the Creeds of Christendom (1877). Schaff actively sought to forge connections between European and American Protestants because he strongly believed that Christians on both sides of the Atlantic needed each other. He frequently pointed out the achievements of America’s pragmatist spirit in religious life, but he also noted how the more idealist and abstract tendencies of the German mind served as a corrective to pragmatist excess. Schaff was rare among American churchmen both in his appreciation for and his understanding of continental religious thought.R. Bryan Bademan
See also German Reformed Church
References and Further Reading
Graham, Stephen R. Cosmos in the Chaos: Philip Schaff’s Interpretation of NineteenthCentury American Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995.
Nichols, James Hastings. Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961.
Penzel, Klaus. Philip Schaff: Historian and Ambassador of the Universal Church. Macon, GA: Mercer University, 1991.