SCHAFF, PHILIP American theologian and church historian, was born at Chur, Switzerland, on Jan. 1, 1819. He was educated at the gymnasium of Stuttgart, and at the uni versities of Tlibingen, Halle and Berlin, where he became Privat dozent in 1842. In 1843 he became professor of church his tory and biblical literature in the German Reformed Theological seminary of Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. On his journey he stayed six months in England and met Pusey and other Tractarians. His inaugural address on The Principle of Protestantism, delivered in German at Reading (Pa.), in 1844, and published in German and in an English version by J. W. Nevin (1845), by its Neander-like view that Romanism and Protestantism were only stages in the divinely appointed development of the Christian Church, caused him to be tried for heresy. Schaff's broad views strongly in fluenced the German Reformed Church. His History of the Apostolic Church (in German, 1851; in English, 1853) and his History of the Christian Church (1858-92) were standard works. In 1870 he became a professor at the Union Theological seminary, holding successively several different chairs till his resignation in the spring of 1893. He died in New York city on Oct. 20, 1893.
The English Bible Revision committee in 187o requested him to form a co-operating American committee, of which he became president in 1871. He also was a founder of the American Society of Church History (1888) and president until his death. He strove earnestly to promote Christian unity and union; his last labours being in behalf of the Parliament of Religions held at the Chicago World's Fair. He remains one of the foremost of American theo logical scholars, both through the quality and the remarkable quantity of his work. He edited the American translation and revision of Lange's Bibelwerk (1864-8o), the great Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge (1884); the first 7 volumes of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers in English (1886 94) ; the International Illustrated Commentary on the New Testa ment (1879-82) and the International Revision Commentary (1881-84), as far as the Epistle to the Romans. His Bibliotheca symbolica ecclesiae universalis: the Creeds of Christendom (1877) was a pioneer work in English in the field of Symbolics. He was the author also of literary essays, biographies and other works.
See his Life (1897) by his son, David Schley Schaff.