Schaff and Nevin, Colleagues at Mercersburg: The Church Question

1992 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
John B. Payne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Mercersburg Theology ◽  
The Church

For both Schaff and Nevin, while they were colleagues at Mercersburg, the issue of issues in mid-nineteenth century America as well as in Continental Europe and in England, was “the church question.” This subject has already been provided a seminal treatment by James H. Nichols to which all later students of Mercersburg Theology are deeply indebted. The purpose of this article is to attempt to shed new light on this question by focusing upon what was for both of them a critical ecclesiological issue, one upon which they in part agreed and in part disagreed—namely, the question of historical development. It is this issue which I believe especially provoked Nevin's theological crisis. This essay will also seek to describe Schaff's role in this crisis.

American Business Philanthropy and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century

1983 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Wren
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Corporate Philanthropy ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
American Business ◽  
State Colleges ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Special Groups ◽  
Practical Education ◽  
The Church

Nineteenth century America witnessed the expansion of business enterprise as well as the extension of a system of higher education. Business philanthropy played a substantial role in higher education by filling the gap between the church-supported colleges of the colonial period and the state colleges and universities of later years. The philanthropy of American business leaders provided for scientific and polytechnical schools, opened colleges for women, extended new opportunities for black “freedmen,” and created the first undergraduate and graduate schools of business. Although nineteenth century law prohibited corporate philanthropy and offered no tax incentives, business leaders gave because they thought that they were stewards of wealth, they saw a need for practical education, they wished to create memorials for loved ones, and they desired to meet the needs of special groups of individuals.

Henry Boynton Smith and Church History in Nineteenth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 302-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette G. Aubert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church History ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
German Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Doctrine ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Church

Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877) was one of the few nineteenth-century American scholars committed to disseminating German methods of ecclesiastical historiography to a country known for its anti-historical tendencies. However, modern scholars have generally overlooked his significant contributions in this area. Hence exploring his scholarly reception and specifically his History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables will fill a niche in the historiography of church history.Philip Schaff (1819–1893), the renowned church historian and founder of the American Society of Church History, was one of the few contemporaries of Smith who understood that Smith's scholarship was on a par with that being produced in Germany. Schaff specifically praised Smith's chronological tables—evidence of Smith's German education among some of the best German historians of the period, including Leopold von Ranke and August Neander. This essay reviews Smith's History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables in the context of the newly emerging scientific history and describes his contribution to nineteenth-century American scholarship. Smith is worthy of attention for establishing a central position for the history of doctrine and for promoting the field of church history and the use of chronological tables in nineteenth-century America.

The Whore of Babylon and the Abomination of Abominations: Nineteenth-Century Catholic and Mormon Mutual Perceptions and Religious Identity

2004 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Grow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Church ◽  
Proper Authority ◽  
Spiritual Quests

In 1846, Oran Brownson, the older brother of the famed Catholic convert Orestes A. Brownson, penned a letter to his brother recounting a dream Orestes had shared with him much earlier. In the dream, Orestes, Oran, and a third brother, Daniel, were “traveling a road together.” “You first left the road then myself and it remains to be seen whether Daniel will turn out of the road (change his opinion),” Oran wrote. At approximately the same period in which Orestes converted to Catholicism “because no other church possessed proper authority,” Oran joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because he believed that “proper authority rests among the Mormons.” Indeed, in an era characterized by denominational proliferation, democratization, and competition, Catholic and Mormon claims to divine authority proved appealing to some Americans, like the Brownsons, wearied by the diversity and disunity of the Protestant world. Oran cautioned Orestes to not trust polemical literature against Mormonism, but to “get your information from friends and not enemies.” Orestes could have repeated the same warning about Catholicism, given the number and intensity of nineteenth-century attacks on both Catholics and Mormons. Leaving mainstream Christianity to join the most despised religions in nineteenth-century America, the Brownson brothers embarked on spiritual quests that few contemporary Americans would have understood, much less approved.

Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

1985 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Taves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Holy Water ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

A French visitor to a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic parish in the United States described the scene as follows: Behold them, when the sanctuary bell announces the moment of consecration; they raise their hands, they extend their arms in the form of a cross, they pray and sigh aloud; at times some leave their pew and prostrate themselves in the aisle, in order to assume a more suppliant and adoring attitude. … If you wait until the end of mass, you will be further edified. You will see them approach as near as possible to the high altar, before which they bow profoundly, making several genuflections, and frequently remain for a moment almost prostrate to the ground. From here they go to kneel at the altar of the Blessed Virgin, then before that of St. Joseph. Then follows a last and touching station before the body of the dead Christ which the Italians call the pietá; they pray here for a few moments, and respectfully press their lips to the five wounds of the Saviour. At the door of the church they take holy water, sign themselves with it repeatedly, and sprinkle their faces with it; then turning to the tabernacle they make a last genuflection, as if to bid farewell to our Lord, and finally withdraw.

The Township, the Pregnant Girl and the Church: Community Dynamics, Gender and Social Control in Early Nineteenth-century Scotland

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-67
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Community Dynamics ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Community ◽  
The Church ◽  
Unmarried Girl

In 1814 in a small Highland township an unmarried girl, ostracised by her neighbours, gave birth. The baby died. The legal precognition permits a forensic, gendered examination of the internal dynamics of rural communities and how they responded to threats to social cohesion. In the Scottish ‘parish state’ disciplining sexual offences was a matter for church discipline. This case is situated in the early nineteenth-century Gàidhealtachd where and when church institutions were less powerful than in the post-Reformation Lowlands, the focus of most previous research. The article shows that the formal social control of kirk discipline was only part of a complex of behavioural controls, most of which were deployed within and by communities. Indeed, Scottish communities and churches were deeply entwined in terms of personnel; shared sexual prohibitions; and in the use of shaming as a primary method of social control. While there was something of a ‘female community’, this was not unconditionally supportive of all women nor was it ranged against men or patriarchal structures.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

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