1
January 1819 A.D. Philip Schaff Born—German Reformed
Church
Editors.
“Philip Schaff.” Encyclopedia Britannica. N.d. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/527005/Philip-Schaff. Accessed 26 Jun 2014.
Philip Schaff, (born
Jan. 1, 1819, Chur, Switz.—died Oct. 20, 1893, New
York, N.Y., U.S.), Swiss-born American ecumenical leader
and theologian whose works, especially the Creeds
of Christendom (1877), helped set standards in the United States for scholarship in church history.
Schaff was educated
at the universities of Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin and was made a lecturer in
1842 at Berlin, where his interest in church history was aroused by the famed
church historian Johann Neander. Schaff emigrated to the United States in 1844
and in the same year became professor of church history and biblical literature
at the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church at Mercersburg, Pa.
On his installation he delivered a controversial address, published as The
Principle of Protestantism, in which he expressed his view that the
positive values of both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism would eventually be blended in an
ecumenical, evangelical Catholicism. The address provoked criticism and charges
of heresy, but Schaff was exonerated by the Eastern Synod of his
church in 1845.
The so-called Mercersburg Theology, formulated by Schaff and his
theological colleague John W. Nevin (1803–86), implemented some of the themes
and principles elucidated in his speech at Mercersburg and generated equal
controversy. It resisted revivalist theology, which stressed the life of the individual, in favour of an affirmation of
the institutional church. In 1864 Schaff was made secretary of the New York
Sabbath Committee, which opposed the commercialization of Sunday. The following
year he resigned his position at Mercersburg and moved to New York City, where in 1870 he became a professor
at Union Theological Seminary and changed his church affiliation to the
Presbyterian denomination.
In addition to his
seven-volume History of the
Christian Church (1858–92), Schaff’s works include his edition of
the translation and revision of Johann Peter Lange’s Commentary (1864–80) and a
revised, condensed version of Johann Jakob Herzog’s 22-volume religious
encyclopaedia (published in English as The
Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge, 1884). Schaff
participated in the preparation of the Revised Version of the Bible and in 1888 founded the American Society of Church History, which he
served as its first president.
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