Theopedia

Philip Schaff

Overview

Philip Schaff (1819-1893) was a Swiss-born church historian and theologian who taught at the German Reformed Church’s seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, and later at Union Theological Seminary in New York.1 He produced two major reference works still cited in Reformed scholarship: the multivolume History of the Christian Church and Creeds of Christendom, a critical edition and history of the church’s confessional documents.2 As a protégé of John Williamson Nevin at Mercersburg, he became, alongside Nevin, a leading exponent of Mercersburg Theology, a mid-nineteenth-century movement that read church history through a German philosophical lens and drew sustained criticism from Charles Hodge.3 4

Life and Ministry

Schaff was born in Chur, Switzerland, in 1819 and educated at the gymnasium in Stuttgart before studying theology at the universities of Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, where his teachers included F. C. Baur, August Tholuck, E. W. Hengstenberg, and August Neander.3 1 He briefly served as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin before being called in 1843 to the German Reformed Theological Seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, then the denomination’s only seminary in America, as professor of church history and biblical literature.1 There he became the close colleague and protégé of Nevin, sharing Nevin’s conviction that Christ, not the individual believer’s religious experience, shaped the church, and that church history had to be read as an organic, developing whole rather than a set of static, timeless propositions.3

Schaff’s German-language inaugural address, published in English as The Principle of Protestantism, argued this developmental view of church history at length and provoked controversy within the German Reformed Church.1 Critics judged the address, and the wider Mercersburg Theology it represented, too sympathetic to Rome; Schaff himself was criticized by contemporaries for sympathizing with the Oxford Movement.3 The seminary’s operations were disrupted during the American Civil War, and in 1863 Schaff left Mercersburg to become secretary of the Sabbath Committee in New York City.1 In 1870 he was called to Union Theological Seminary, New York, where Archibald Alexander Hodge identifies him simply as “Dr. Philip Schaff of Union Theological Seminary, New York,” teaching there until his death in 1893.2 1

Theological Contribution

The Principle of Protestantism set out the historicist reading of Christianity that ran through Schaff’s later scholarship. Charles Hodge, reviewing the modern “theory of the organic development of the Church” in his Systematic Theology, quotes Schaff’s own account of the Hegelian and Schellingian philosophy of history behind it: this way of thinking, Schaff wrote, “has left an impression on German science that can never be effaced,” disclosing history as “the ever opening sense of eternal thoughts, an always advancing rational development of the idea of humanity, and its relations to God.”4 Hodge traces the theory to Schleiermacher, “from whom it has passed over to Dr. Schaff, as set forth in his work above quoted.”4 On this view, Hodge explains, “Christianity is not a form of doctrine objectively revealed in the Scriptures,” but “the interpretation of this inner life,” a living germ passed by natural development from Christ to the church, each stage of its growth entitled to views that would have been premature at an earlier stage.4

That same developmental instinct shaped Schaff’s stance toward Rome. Where American evangelicalism ran, in his judgment, toward an “unrestrained republican spirit” that fragmented the church into rival sects, Schaff argued that on “the free Republican and Puritanic soil of North America the Roman Catholic Church, with its medieval traditions, centralized priestly government, and extreme conservatism … is perhaps just on this account necessary and useful as a check and corrective for the extremes of Protestantism and religious radicalism.”3

Much of Schaff’s scholarly work took the form of major reference tools rather than a single systematic treatise. Of Creeds of Christendom, A. A. Hodge writes that “in the first volume he presents a history of the authorship and occasion of each Creed or Confession and a critical estimate of its contents and value,” while “in volumes second and third he gives the text of all the principal creeds in two languages,” commending it as “the admirable historical and critical work” on the subject.2 His History of the Christian Church continues to be cited in Reformed scholarship, including Matthew Barrett’s account of Augustine’s mature doctrine of grace.5 Schaff also edited, with Henry Wace, the English-language Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, which later works such as Samuel Parkison’s To Gaze upon God continue to cite when quoting the church fathers in translation.6

Historical Significance

Schaff’s organic-development historicism drew a direct confessional Reformed rebuttal from Charles Hodge, who laid out its logical consequence to show what it cost: on this view, Hodge wrote, “Christianity is not a form of doctrine objectively revealed in the Scriptures,” and “Christian theology is not the knowledge, or systematic exhibition of what the Bible teaches,” but instead “the interpretation of this inner life.”4 For Hodge, that made the theory incompatible with the Reformation’s own confession that Scripture alone, not an evolving corporate experience, is the church’s rule of faith. The exchange placed Schaff and Mercersburg’s German-influenced developmentalism on one side of a documented nineteenth-century dispute within American Reformed theology, with Princeton Seminary’s confessional biblicism, represented by Hodge, on the other.

Schaff’s own political and social judgments followed the same developmental, providentialist logic. He was not an abolitionist; he held that “slavery will gradually die out of itself” and favored the state and church working together toward “a gradual emancipation of the slaves, by training them to the rational use of freedom.”3 After a visit to Germany during the Civil War, he read the conflict as divine retribution on the United States for its long complicity in slavery.3 He nonetheless retained a qualified confidence in the American experiment, closing the American edition of his 1855 book on the United States with the maxim “No liberty without virtue; no virtue without religion; no religion without Christianity; Christianity, the safeguard of our republic and hope of the world.”3

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “Philip Schaff,” accessed September 15, 2026. No library-held source treats Schaff’s own biography as its subject; this article’s theological-content claims are sourced independently of Wikipedia throughout. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 112. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Obbie Tyler Todd, “What Republicanism Is This? An Introduction to Christian Republicanism (1776-1865),” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 125-27. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  4. Charles Hodge, “Chapter V. Roman Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Rule of Faith,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 118-19. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  5. Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87, citing Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 3. ↩

  6. Samuel G. Parkison, To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), chap. 1, “What Is the Beatific Vision?,” citing Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First and Second Series, 28 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956). ↩