B. A. GERRISH

The month of December 1816 found Schleiermacher thinking about too many things at once and not at all in the best of health. To his friend Gass, who seemed to have no trouble combining scholarship with administration, he sent a plea for help:

I have long been bent upon making just some superficial patristic and scholastic studies, in order to gather a few handy quotations for my dogmatics; and I never got around to it. I would be very much obliged if you would write me somewhat more exactly how you have gone about it and on what [passages] you have chiefly relied. ¹

This does not sound like the request of a man who, in Newman's phrase, is "deep in history"; and Newman, at least, would not have expected anything better from a Protestant theologian -- "To be deep in history," he said, "is to cease to be a Protestant." ² On closer inspection, however, Schleiermacher turns out to have been a strongly historical thinker, who even made some notable contributions to historical inquiry, not least to inquiry in the field of church history. In fact, he reflected profoundly on a problem that we have come to associate with the name of John Henry Newman: the development of Christian doctrine.

His direct contributions to historical learning are surprisingly varied and extensive if we place together all his work on ancient Greek philosophy, the New Testament, and the history of the Christian church and its doctrines. Included must be two distinguished studies in historical theology, one of which, despite the unpromising letter to Gass, is on a patristic theme: the doctrine of the Trinity in Sabellius and Athanasius. Indeed, it has been

This presidential address was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, 28 December 1979. Because in the subject of this address, as in most other aspects of historical theology, he has been there before me, I would like these reflections to be understood as a tribute to my teacher, Wilhelm Pauck, as he approaches the celebration of his eightieth birthday. An expanded version, with fuller discussion of the sources and secondary literature, will appear in my forthcoming book, The Old Protestantism and the New, and for this reason I have confined my footnotes here to references for direct quotations. Unless otherwise stated, translations are mine.

Mr. Gerrish is professor of historical theology in the Divinity School, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

-147-