A Contribution to the Historiography of Roman Catholic Modernism

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 Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America Elizabeth A. Clark Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 440. ISBN: 978-0812250718 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...

Modernists and Modernisms: Three Views - 1.Alec R. Vidler: A Variety of Catholic Modernists. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1970. Pp. 232. $8.50.) - 2.Michele Ranchetti: The Catholic Modernists: A Study of the Religious Reform Movement, 1864–1907. Translated from the Italian by Isabel Quigley. (London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Pp. x, 230. $6.25.) - 3.Roman Catholic Modernism. Edited and introduced by

The turn of the twentieth century represents an incisive moment in religious thought and theological education. Scholars across Europe and North America were wrestling with the twin influences of Protestant Liberalism and Roman Catholic Modernism, the questions they raised for how to conceive of the origins of Christianity, and how to make them palatable to a rapidly changing world. In her most recent monograph, The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America, Elizabeth A. Clark explores these questions in the lives and work of three of the era's most influential figures. Her work stands at the center of this forum, with four distinguished scholars considering its implications.

As a Catholic lay person Friedrich von Hügel developed a spirituality which sought to integrate scholarship, including the critical study of religion, with a full religious life, one which holds the institutional, the intellectual, and the mystical elements in a creative tension. He did this during and after the period known as “Roman Catholic Modernism,” a difficult time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church as it responded to perceived threats with severe restrictions. This essay explores how von Hiigel's spirituality was one of empowerment by considering him as advocate and networker, writer, and spiritual director. He not only developed a lay approach to spirituality but a spirituality of scholarship which can still inspire contemporary Christians.

With the 1901 publication of his Les Mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse, the French Catholic scholar Alfred Loisy examined carefully parallels between Babylonian literature and the Book of Genesis. In German scholarship, this had been a growing fascination since at least the 1895 publication of Hermann Gunkel’s Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit. Loisy’s use of the concept of “Myth” provides an important window into the appropriation of German scholarship on religion and the Bible into the French scholarly world. Through Loisy’s work, what had been primarily a German Protestant academic discussion became one of the matchsticks that ignited what would become known as the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis. This present article situates Loisy’s appropriation of “Myth” from the German scholarship he mastered within the proximate cultural, historical, and religious context that became Roman Catholic Modernism

Modernism, in short, can be regarded as a religious position that involves believing, belonging, and adapting. Adaptation, closely associated with pleas for reform and a reformulation of traditional creeds and dogmas, determined the modernist view on the relation between the Church and contemporary culture. Now there are many definitions of modernism , stemming from both the nineteenth century itself and from later decades. Much has been written about the issue of defining modernism , a complicated matter. This chapter mentions the seminal study on Roman Catholic modernism by Alec Vidler, who pointed out that the writings of the modernists represent independent attempts to adapt the received system to the exigencies of modern knowledge and culture. Other prominent historians of modernism share this view, for instance William R. Hutchison, who states that adaptation is the first and major characteristic of American Protestant modernism. Keywords: adapting; believing; belonging; Church; contemporary culture; Roman Catholic modernism

Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context. Edited by Darrell Jodock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv + 345 pp. $69.95 cloth. - Volume 71 Issue 1

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

Review Notices : Roman Catholic Modernism. Edited by M. G. B. Reardon (Library of Modern Religious Thought). London: Adam and Charles Black. Also Stanford University Press, U.S.A. 1970.251 pp. £2.25

This chapter assesses Congar's contribution to ressourcement in the context of that movement's complex relationship with the nouvelle théologie. By reflecting on his ecumenism and pneumatology, it shows that his contribution in these fields, effectively spanning his entire career, would not have been possible without a return to the sources. The essay traces the origins of the programme of reform and renewal that was at the heart of the ressourcement to certain elements in Roman Catholic Modernism. It locates Congar's transformative and original contribution to ecumenism and pneumatology in the return to the sources. In conclusion, this essay points to the continued relevance of ressourcement for academic theology and, perhaps more fundamentally, in the apostolic, pastoral life of the Christian churches.

Father Tyrrell is one of the foremost exponents of Roman Catholic Modernism, the attempt to reconcile Roman Catholicism and modern culture. Roman Catholic Modernism is not a system, a coherent whole proceeding from a philosophical foundation, not a body of doctrine, but rather an “orientation,” a “method.” It does not form a school, but rather consists “of a number of individual attempts to set forward a revision of traditional orthodoxy.” Such attempt is made by Laberthonnière, LeRoy, Loisy in France, by Murri, Fogazzaro in Italy, and von Hügel and Tyrrell in England.

My thanks to Maria Doerfler for organizing a session at the January 2020 meeting of the American Society of Church History on my book The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America, to the editors of Church History for suggesting that the (revised) papers from the session could find a home in print, and, especially, to the panelists for their insightful comments.

The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America

Liberal Protestantism and Roman Catholic Modernism

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