Retrieving History: Memory and Identity Formation in the Early Church by Stefana Dan Laing (review)

Stefana Dan Laing's book on early Christian historical writing appears in a series called "Evangelical Ressourcement," intended to replicate for evangelical Christians something analogous to the "return to the sources" that animated preconciliar Catholic theology. She wishes to reconnect evangelicals to Christianity's ancient sources, which, she points out, cannot be limited to the Bible. She believes this is especially necessary in a time of historical "forgetfulness" for the sake of preserving and nurturing evangelical identity. Returning to the sources also helps compensate for evangelicalism's preference for the individual and the "vertical" with awareness of the place for the communal and the "horizontal."

"Historical writing" is broadly defined to include apologetic writing, heresiology, martyr acts, and hagiography, as well as "history" in the narrower sense of the chronicles and ecclesiastical histories written by Eusebius and his successors. An initial chapter on ancient historical writing in Greek and Latin literature is a very helpful introduction, with rich quotations from ancient historians and rhetoricians. There she introduces "four characteristic features" that will also typify Christian historiography: narration ( narratio/historia), remembrance ( memoria/anamnesis), imitation ( imitatio/mimesis), and causation ( aitia).

Her focus is thus literary genre more than philosophy or theology of history, though of course she recognizes the strongly providentialist cast of Christian historiography: "They [Christians] presented to the ancient world a totalizing definition of history as salvation history" (p. 55). In her discussions of "causation" as a historiographical feature, she rightly notes the contrast with pagan notions of Fate. However, she seems to avoid cliched appeals to "linear" views of history in Christianity versus "cyclical" views. Christian historians themselves did not have a uniform concept of where history is heading, or even whether it has a direction at all but is not in some type of stasis (she might have noted the work of Peter Van Nuffelen on this non-eschatological aspect of Socrates' and Sozomen's histories).

Because of her broad definition of "historical writing," relatively short shrift is given to the fourth- and fifth-century historians—only thirty pages of the whole, versus over eighty pages for martyrdom and hagiography, and even then it is only Eusebius and Theodoret who are really covered. She is a reliable reader of Eusebius, although I do not think he held the seven-age theory of history based on the six days of creation (p. 67).

The author writes clearly and skillfully for a non-academic audience and makes rich use of an impressively wide range of primary sources. Secondary literature is all in English and is better on some subjects than others (thin on apologetics but better on martyrdom, though Thomas Heffernan's massive commentary on The Passion of Perpetua and Felicityis not mentioned). Richard Burgess and Michael Kulikowski's Mosaics of Timeis the current best guide to chronicles as a genre. Current scholarship does not think that Julius Africanus' millenarian chronological scheme was intended for the purpose of predicting the end (p. 166).

Laing is to be complimented on her clear and careful use of genre analysis that subtly introduces a lay readership to questions whose technical character could quickly become deadly. Her rather rigid focus on the fourfold historiographical grid can lead to unnecessary repetition. Though her chronological limit is the fifth century, acknowledging the place of historiography in other eastern Christian traditions (Syriac and Armenian in particular) could have been eye-opening for her readership.

Recommended for undergraduate libraries, seminaries, and adult reading groups, though the orientation is very much to the evangelical tradition, as shown by sensitivity to subjects like relics (pp. 110–11), monasticism and asceticism (pp. 119-21), and episcopacy (barely mentioned, even when apostolic succession is the topic). In discussing motives for the devil's hostility to humanity as a cause of martyrdom, she says that...