Reviewed by:

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

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 [End Page 458] 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...

审核人：

• 父亲重建：新教自由主义，罗马天主教现代主义和20世纪初美国伊丽莎白·克拉克（Elizabeth A. Clark）的古代基督教教义
• 玛雅·科特罗斯（Maia Kotrosits）

过去十年带来了美国宗教研究和经典系的迅速收缩，以及许多进步神学机构的不稳定性和崩溃。并非偶然，这是在一种国家景观上发生的，在该国景观中，关于宗教的公众话语几乎是毁灭性的，宗教仍然是塑造国家社会政治生活的质地和地形的重要力量。结果，对古代基督教的研究激起了存在主义自我质疑的脚步：该学科能否生存？如果是这样，怎么办？又以什么形式？这种担心已经表达了另一种方式是：古代基督教的研究如何能更相关？我们应该说，“现在如何？”

伊丽莎白·克拉克（Elizabeth Clark）的《父亲重建》（The Fathers Refound）在这场关于生存的恐慌中出现在现场在充裕的细节和叙事的约束下，自我反思的另一个阶段是：在二十世纪的前二十年中，许多白人基督教男性知识分子想知道基督教是否可以是现代的。他们想象的意思是，基督教是否可以更明确地参与当下的强大的思想和文化变革，同时仍然以某种方式保留长久的连贯感。这是一个在神学问题和历史问题上进行协商的问题，因为克拉克将注意力集中在这三个数字上：联合神学院的亚瑟·库什曼·麦吉夫特（Arthur Cushman McGiffert），哈佛大学神学院的乔治·拉皮亚娜（George LaPiana）和芝加哥大学的雪莉·杰克逊·凯斯（Shirley Jackson Case）神学院），

克拉克从难以捉摸和混乱的档案中有条不紊地进行了重建，克拉克在知识，社会和制度世界中对这三个人物的描绘呈现出弹跳式的反应，回应了现代性和现代主义经验留下的奇怪印象。因此，克拉克（Clark）的书彻底地，甚至不是总是很明确地讲述了时间的困惑：在自负的过去与光辉灿烂的人类未来之间的紧张关系中找到或放置了信仰吗？基督教的漫长前进不仅成为好奇心，而且是灵感的来源，在某些情况下甚至是棘手的问题。

举几个例子：麦吉夫特（McGiffert）敲响了哈纳克主义对基督教的精髓的想法，以及怀旧的渴望回到早期教会表面上清晰的想法，并认为回到那个时代的任何希望就是回到“第二次世界大战”的愿望。童年”和“衰老的荒废”的功能。他从保罗开始就一直与耶稣的教义背道而驰，我们不能“过着我们的生活”，他清醒地写道[End Page 458]（98）。但是，尽管如此，麦吉夫特仍然认为古代和现代性具有可比性，它们在平行的宇宙中运作。因此，他的暂时性是微妙的摩擦：轨迹和“成熟度”是同时竞争的。

拉皮亚娜（LaPiana）主张建立一种不具有文化特色的基督教，他发现自己利用历史的过去为教会的未来设想。基督教发展，正是这种改变可以并且应该成为教会生活的灵感之源，这是一种活泼的传统。但是他以当代政治作为历史推论（例如，比较罗马的移民与漫长而著名的“帝国一世纪的罗马外国团体”中的美国意大利移民），他的历史暗示方向变化不如圆度变化。正如克拉克所指出的那样，尽管拉皮亚纳对天主教和意大利法西斯主义的“一人制”权威形式提出了批评，但在上下文中强烈地支持了他的著作，拉皮亚纳仍然认为罗马教廷的发展是基督教成长的必然选择（327）。

凯斯（Case）是一位热爱方法的人，经常为公众听众写作，他运用社会历史不仅拒绝了过去的庆祝活动，而且还拒绝了...