Friday, October 20, 2023

It is the 20th of October, 2023. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. I’m Dan van Voorhis.

We all have our biases, and it’s fair to recognize them. Was the 99-01 Rams the greatest offense of all time? Of Course. Is the West Coast the best part of America? Yes, TV on East Coast time is weird. Does In N Out crush Whataburger every day of the week and twice on Sunday? Absolutely. Does Christopher Gillespie favor a lunar calendar? Yes, actually, he texted that for reals to me. And do I have favorites in church history? Yes. And they tend to be the historians like Eusebius and Bede. I favor those men and women who give their lives to the greatest of disciplines with the greatest of all topics. And in the annals of church history- imagine my surprise to find we had yet to do a show on one of the greatest of them all. He was Philip Schaff- by his own account, a “Swiss by birth, German by education, and American by choice.” He was born in 1819 and died on the 20th of October in 1893.  

He was born in the Swiss village of Chur. His father died in his first year he would benefit from local church members and mentors. He would attend the Boy's School at Kornath in Würtemberg in 1834- a school founded by Pietists where he would have the spiritual awakening that informed the rest of his life and work. He studied at Tübingen, Halle and Berlin. To do this in the mid-19th century is to be in touch with the vanguard (for better or worse) of modern theology. He would study under the likes of F.C. Baur (the founder of the Tübingen school, which would do unfortunate damage to the historical roots of the New Testament) he would study under David Strauss and his theories of the “historical Jesus” and most under their academic foes Julius Müller and J.A. Neander. The latter was an influential church historian who would be an impetus for Schaff’s later work.

After finishing at Berlin, he was called to the small Mercersburg Seminary in Pennsylvania. In 1844, he gave his inaugural address at the Seminary as the Principle of Protestantism.  In it, he defended his protestant heritage but argued for an eventual reunion with the Catholic Church. This incensed some in the German Reformed Church, but Schaff would be vindicated. This ecumenical approach to history would characterize his writing. For Schaff, the church and her theology went through a process of “annihilation, preservation, and exaltation.” Albeit somewhat Hegelian (if that doesn’t make sense, move forward; that’s me making a caveat for 2% of the listeners), his approach led him to look for kernels of truth in all Christian traditions. His last work, unfortunately never completed, was to be a history of American denominations.

His ecumenism wasn’t baseless. He wrote, “If Christians are ever to be united, they must be united in Christ, their living head and the source of their spiritual life.” And that the historical, resurrected Christ. He wrote: “Without His Resurrection, the death of Christ would be of no avail, and His grave would be the grave of all our hopes. A gospel of a dead Savior would be a miserable failure and delusion.”.

During the Civil War, when the seminary had to close, he would teach Church History at the Andover Theological Seminary and then at Union Theological Seminary until his death.  

He is rightly regarded as the father of modern Church history. He founded the American Society of Church History in 1888, and the award given by that society every year for the best work in church history bears his name. He translated 38 volumes of the Church Fathers edited and translated the Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge known today as the “New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia.” He wrote an 8-volume History of the Christian Church and a library of Religious Poetry. There is no Christian History Almanac without Schaff. He is a constant cross reference for me, and his love of and collection of poetry has often inspired this show. His belief was unshaken in the point of history being the first advent and culminating in the second advent, and he believed that the best historical methods available wouldn’t detract from this but rather allow the historian to best tell the Church’s story. So, you know, I’m a little biased. The grand dean of modern church history, Philip Schaff, died on this, the 20th of October in 1893. Born in 1819, he was 74 years old.

The last word for today is from Schaff’s collection of Poetry- this a poetic translation from the Song of Simeon by George Wither.

Grant now in peace (that by thy leave)

         I may depart, O Lord!

For thy salvation seen I have,

         according to thy word:

That which prepared was by thee,

         Before all people’s sight,

They Israel’s renown to be

         And to the Gentiles light

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 20th of October 2023, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who also informs me that using the metric system would assist people in making better coffee- (these not made up but in actual texts) Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who can’t stop singing the song from the commercial that goes, “I’ve got Type 2 Diabetes, but I manage it well, something something small pill with a big story to tell.” Ugh.  I’m Dan van Voorhis. 

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be OK.