Schaff, PHILIP, a learned Presbyterian theologian, was born at Coire in Switzerland, January 1, 1819, studied at Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, and was already a privat-docent in the last university, when in 1843 he was called, on the recommendation of Neander, Tholuck, and Julius Müller, to be professor in the theological seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, of the United States German Reformed Church. Here he lectured for twenty years; and during the war he lectured at Andover, Hartford, and New York. In 1869 he was called to be professor in the Union Theological Seminary, New York, and lectured there successively on Christian Symbolics, Hebrew, and Sacred Literature. One of the founders of the American branch of the Evangelical Alliance, he went as a delegate to its General Conferences at Basel in 1879 and Copenhagen in 1884. He attended as delegate also the meetings in London in 1875, out of which grew the Alliance of the Reformed Churches, the first General Council of which met at Edinburgh in 1877, the second at Philadelphia in 1880. He was president of the American Old Testament Revision Committee. He died 22d October 1893.
Of his many books the most important are a History of the Christian Church, in its enlarged form (12 vols. in the Edinburgh edition; 1882-94); The Creeds of Christendom (3 vols. 1877); The Person of Christ (1865); a Bible Dictionary (Phila. 1880); Popular Commentary on the New Testament, to which he himself contributed 'Matthew' and 'Galatians' (4 vols. 1878-83); and an enlarged edition of Lange's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (25 vols. 1864-80). Besides these he edited the 'Philosophical and Theological Library,' including Ueberweg's Hist. of Philos., Van Oosterzee's Christian Dogmatics, &c.; The Religious Encyclopedia, based on Herzog (3 vols. 1884), and (with Rev. S. M. Jackson) the supplementary Encyclopædia of Living Divines (1887); and 'A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers' (25 vols. New York, 1st series, 3 vols. 1886-89; 2d series, vols. i. and ii. 1890-91).