Philip Schaff's Contentious Histories in Antebellum America: A Papist and a Pantheist

Abstract

Born in Switzerland and educated in Germany, Philip Schaff arrived in the United States in 1844 to be a professor at Mercersburg Theological Seminary. Evangelical Christianity dominated the American religious landscape at the time, but Schaff's histories of the Christian Church opposed the hegemony. His reviewers criticized him for being a papist and a pantheist because his un-American Christianity seemed dangerous to evangelicalism. Nevertheless, his works proved to be read widely across many denominations as well as among academic and non-academic readers.