The Fathers Refounded

The dawn of the twentieth century brought the confluence of two phenomena, which together reshaped the study of Christian history in American institutions. As historical study became a professionalized academic discipline, many divinity schools sought to cultivate the rigorous study of early Christianity. There was simultaneously a new openness to the critical examination of tradition, as Catholic modernism briefly flourished and theological liberalism came to dominate mainline American Protestantism. At this key moment, influential scholars reinterpreted Christian history, challenging the idealization of various forms of historical Christianity, thereby countenancing a modern, continually evolving faith. In this exhaustively researched study, Elizabeth A. Clark examines three historians: Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary, George LaPiana of Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case of the University of Chicago Divinity School. “All three critiqued and corrected older views” of the first centuries of Christian history and instead offered “what they considered a more genuinely historical approach” to it (p. 2

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