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.

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