The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America by Elizabeth A. Clark (review)

The last decade has brought the swift contraction of Religious Studies and Classics departments across the United States, as well as the instability and collapse of so many progressive theological institutions. Not incidentally, this is occurring on a national landscape in which public discourse about religion is almost devastatingly poor, and religion remains a significant force shaping the very texture and terrain of national socio-political life. As a result, the study of ancient Christianity has hit a skid of existential self-questioning: will the discipline survive? If so, how? And in what form? Another way this worry has been voiced is: How can the study of ancient Christianity be more relevant? How can it be, shall we say, "of the moment?"

Appearing on the scene during this panic about survival, Elizabeth Clark's The Fathers Refounded recounts, with ample detail and narrative restraint, another phase of self-reckoning: in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a number of white Christian male intellectuals wondered if Christianity could be modern. What they imagined that to mean was whether Christianity could more explicitly engage the potent intellectual and cultural changes of the moment while still somehow retaining a sense of long-view coherence. It was a question that negotiated theological concerns and historical ones, as the three figures on which Clark concentrates her attention, Arthur Cushman McGiffert (of Union Theological Seminary), George LaPiana (of Harvard Divinity School), and Shirley Jackson Case (University of Chicago Divinity School), sought to deliver sketches of ancient Christianity that were both academically viable and still meaningful to public audiences, including and especially their students.

Methodically reconstructed out of elusive and muddled archives, Clark's depictions of these three figures in their intellectual, social, and institutional worlds present a pinball machine of ricocheting responses to the strange impressions that the experiences of modernity and modernism left. And so Clark's book is thoroughly, if not always explicitly, about the quandaries of time: where was faith to be found—or placed—in the tension between vaunted pasts and glittering human futures? Christianity's long march forward became not just a point of curiosity, but a source of inspiration, and in some cases, an intractable problem.

A few examples: McGiffert knocked the idea of a Harnackian essence to Christianity, as well as the nostalgic desire to return to the ostensible clarity of the early church, and thought any hope of returning to that time was a wish to return to a "second childhood" and a function of "the inanity of a decrepit old age." There were deviations from the teachings of Jesus all along, beginning with Paul, and we cannot "unlive our life," he writes soberly (98). But McGiffert nonetheless saw antiquity and modernity as comparable, operating in something of parallel universes. His temporality is therefore subtly frictive: trajectory and "maturity" competes with simultaneity.

LaPiana, arguing for a culturally unoriginal Christianity, found himself using the historical past to envision a future for the church. Christianity developed, and it was this change that can and should be the source of inspiration for church life—a living tradition. But in his own use of contemporary politics as historical corollaries (comparing, for example, migrants in Rome to Italian immigrants in the U.S. in his lengthy and well-known "Foreign Groups in Rome During the First Centuries of the Empire"), his history suggests not directional change as much as circularity. As Clark notes, despite LaPiana's critique of "one-man" forms of authority characteristic of both the Catholic Church and Italian fascism, contexts that strongly informed his work, LaPiana still saw the development of the papacy as inevitable for Christianity's growth (327).

Case, a lover of method and often writing for public audiences, deployed social history not only to refuse celebrations of the past, ones...