Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. By ELIZABETH A. CLARK.

Abstract

Nothing quite like this has been done before. Elizabeth Clark, herself a distinguished scholar of the early church, has undertaken to examine and present the scholarship of six key pioneers of church history in nineteenth-century America. Some of the results are surprising, others less so. Even more significant, in all probability, are the implicit but perennial questions this study raises about the whole scholarly enterprise and its outcomes. The American context is fundamental to the story, and Part I examines the institutions, the professors, and the infrastructure. For this reviewer, educated in the classical traditions of the United Kingdom, together with the legacy of the patristic scholarship of the Oxford Movement, it has always seemed that the scholarly and linguistic competence of nineteenth-century authors outshone most subsequent work on the Fathers, even if some nineteenth-century assumptions have been superseded and new discoveries have rendered the knowledge of available texts then less comprehensive than ours now. It has therefore been revealing to discover the limitations of the then-available material in American libraries, the uncritical style of the pedagogy, the narrowly Protestant interests of the six key figures studied, and the significant but ambiguous influence of contemporary German scholarship on the emerging study of the Fathers in America. Yet, as the book makes clear, the general context of higher education in America not only explains much of this, but also facilitates the identification of the major achievements of those who pioneered the study of church history in seminaries and Divinity Schools. They built a discipline against ‘daunting obstacles’ and developed ‘the closest approximation to graduate education in the Humanities that America could boast until late in the century’ (p. 343).