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A Plot of Possibilities: Elizabeth Clark's The Fathers Refounded
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2020
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Elizabeth A. Clark's immensely learned new book, The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America, which follows directly on her examination of the nineteenth century in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America, is a joy to read and from which to learn about the histories of our discipline, the history of Christianity. Chiefly, the book documents, through in-depth study of three fascinating figures, the severance of the field of “church history” from “theology” and, in particular, its pivotal moments within Protestant and Catholic “modernism.”
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23 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 6.
24 I am (not surprisingly) in line with the long-standing tradition at the University of Chicago that does not separate out New Testament from “Early Christian Literature” or early Christian studies, either on chronological or canonical grounds. Clark recognizes this tradition, writing: “At Chicago, ‘New Testament’ was not always siphoned off from ‘post-New Testament Christianity’ of the first three centuries” and “unlike many Protestant professors in the nineteenth century, Case did not treat New Testament texts as qualitatively different from those of the patristic era” (The Fathers Refounded, 249, 295). The relationship between the “New Testament” and the study of ancient Christianity is a fundamental issue for the definition of the field, design of research projects, and training of students. How and why the two are still so often separated (at the very least, a legacy of the Protestant roots of American higher education and the sociology of institutions training ministers in that tradition) is a subject for a study of its own. Ironically, this may come about more because of a decrease in funding for all humanistic fields in the corporatized American university than because of a principled decision made on intellectual or pedagogical grounds that these do not in fact constitute two separable bodies of material or disciplines.
25 Clark, History, Theory, Text, 158. The text continues: “These studies bypassed structuralism and other intellectual currents that were then informing scholarship pertaining to other ancient religions, the classics, and the New Testament.”
26 White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar. For Clark's assessment of Haden White, see Clark, “Narrative and History,” chap. 5 in History, Theory, Text, 86–129.
27 Hence the title of White's 1987 work, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
28 White, Metahistory, 9.
29 White, Metahistory, 9.
30 White, Metahistory, 9.
31 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 329.
32 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 327.
33 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 327.
34 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 329. See also Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 260: “Although he lacked both the theoretical sophistication and the deep knowledge of ancient Christianity that enabled the rebirth of the social history of early Christianity in the late twentieth century, he had taken a step in that direction.” One of the reasons is that “[Case's] attempt in middle age to remake himself from a New Testament scholar into a historian of late ancient Christianity was only partially successful: he lacked the deep knowledge of the texts and their contexts of McGiffert and LaPiana” (Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 329; interestingly, a similar complaint about McGiffert and LaPiana teaching very far outside their formal training or, in LaPiana's case, remaking himself as a scholar of Italian politics, is not made). Clark's chief critique about Case seems to be what she regards as the popularizing style and content of his publications (including a frustrating lack of footnotes for an archival historian to track down!), even when they do extend throughout the later patristic era and beyond.
35 Schubert, Paul, “Shirley Jackson Case, Historian of Early Christianity: An Appraisal,” Journal of Religion 29, no. 1 (January 1949): 30–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Clark effectively draws on this source in her analysis of Case.
36 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 288 appropriately cites Paul Schubert to this effect.
37 Schubert, “Shirley Jackson Case.”
38 Which seems also to be the verdict of Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 328: “Shirley Jackson Case, at first glance, seems the most radical of the three scholars in his attempt to modernize Christianity.”
39 Schubert, “Shirley Jackson Case,” 34.
40 White, Metahistory, 16: “History written in this [organicist] mode tends to be oriented toward the determination of the end or goal toward which all the processes found in the historical field are presumed to be trending.” In this instance, for Clark, Case presages the revival of social and cultural history in the 1970s and beyond.
41 White, Metahistory, 25. The sentence continues: “but they [liberals] project this utopian condition into the remote future, in such a way as to discourage any effort in the present to realize it precipitately by ‘radical’ means.”
42 White, Metahistory, 25.