Schaff, Philip
This Swiss-born American theologian (from Chur, Graubünden ) helped set the standards for scholarship in church history in the United States. Educated at the universities of Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, he lectured for a short while in Berlin (1842-43), then emigrated to the United States in 1844, soon becoming professor of church history and biblical literature at the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania.
At his installation as professor, Schaff delivered a controversial address on The Principle of Protestantism, in which he expressed his view that the positive values of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism would eventually be blended within an ecumenical, evangelical Catholicism. He resisted the revivalist tendency, which stressed only the individual, in favour of a strong affirmation of the institutional church. In 1870 Schaff accepted a professorship at Union Theological Seminary, New York, and changed his church affiliation to Presbyterian.
In addition to his History of the Christian Church (1858-92), his works include a revised, condensed version of Herzog's 22-volume religious encyclopaedia (published in English as The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge, 1884). In 1888 he founded the American Society of Church History, of which he became the first president.