Between 1890 and 1910, American theological education experienced a major upheaval: In accordance with the latest German scholarship, the nation's leading seminaries shifted away from a claim that the Bible was historically trustworthy, and they embraced a new evolutionary view of Christianity that grounded the beliefs of modern Christians in something other than historic creeds. This led them to adopt a new approach to the earliest Christian writings. Calling themselves “modernists,” the liberal seminary professors at the turn of the twentieth century advocated a “scientific” approach that treated the New Testament and the works of the early church fathers not as religious creeds or prescriptions for living but as historical documents to be dissected and critiqued.

While numerous volumes have already traced the broad tenets of early twentieth-century American Protestant liberal theology, Elizabeth A. Clark's The Fathers Refounded examines a narrower question that has been understudied: How did the teaching of early church history change in the seminaries and divinity schools that adopted modernist theology in the 1890s or shortly thereafter? Picking up the story where her earlier work Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) left off, Clark focuses on three leading modernist professors of early church history whose careers spanned the half-century between 1890 and 1940: Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary, George LaPiana of Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Though all three men taught early church history from a modernist perspective, they had a few theological disagreements. McGiffert was a devotee of the late nineteenth-century German liberal theologians Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack, but Case thought these German scholars did not go far enough in their historical critique of the New Testament. McGiffert and Case were liberal Protestants, while LaPiana was a modernist Catholic at odds with his church. McGiffert had a soft spot for the Gnostics and other heretics while Case scorned them. But regardless of these minor differences, the three American modernist church historians Clark profiles were united by a commitment to historical criticism and a belief that the historical method, not theology, should guide scholars’ approaches to church history.

Before the 1890s, theology professors in the United States had often treated ancient Christian writings as proof-texts for the practices of a particular Christian tradition. Many Unitarians, for instance, used the earliest Christian writings as evidence that Trinitarian doctrine was a late development not rooted in original apostolic teaching. And among more conservative Protestants, arguments about church organization, mode of baptism, and other doctrinal controversies often involved appeals to the early church fathers for support. But the modernists of the early twentieth century rejected this use of ancient Christian texts, and they sought to understand early Christianity on its own terms, using only historical methodology as a guide. They argued that because the assumptions of ancient Christians were radically different from those of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century descendants, early Christian writings could not be used as a prescriptive guide for religious practices in the present. Instead, they should be studied and valued solely as historical artifacts; they offered a window into an ancient Christian past that was far less unified than previous church historians had assumed and that was filled with assumptions that modern Christians might reject.

The Fathers Refounded probably would have been stronger if it had supplemented its impressively detailed case studies with more discussion of their larger historical context and the influence of McGiffert, LaPiana, and Case beyond their own institutions. Clark devotes extensive space to a discussion of each of these scholars’ classroom teaching but says little about how their ideas about ancient Christianity affected the preaching of the aspiring ministers who took their courses. Nor does she say much about the institutions that resisted these ideas; one would hardly know from this book, for instance, that the nation's leading Presbyterian seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, rejected modernist theology for decades, as did many other seminaries and divinity schools.

From a contemporary standpoint, the blind spots of McGiffert, LaPiana, and Case are all too obvious. Like some of the leading German theologians of their day, they imagined an ancient Christianity stripped of its Jewish roots. The Hebrew Bible and the historical background of first-century Judaism held little interest for them, because they thought that Christianity had originated largely as a Greco-Roman mystery cult, not a Jewish sect. McGiffert even went so far as to posit that for first-century Christians, the worship of Christ developed before the worship of God the Father; worship of the Jewish God was tacked on as an afterthought, he believed. Similarly, McGiffert, LaPiana, and Case showed little interest in studying the role of women in the early church or examining ancient Christianity's effect on the social class relations of the earliest Christian adherents—subjects that have attracted a lot of scholarly attention in recent decades. Although they believed they could reach a new historical objectivity by jettisoning the credal commitments that had allegedly constrained earlier church historians, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is easy to see that they brought to their own work a new set of biases that may have been just as erroneous as the religious prejudices that constrained an earlier generation of scholars.

Yet, regardless of their faults, the critical historical scholars of the early twentieth century revolutionized the study of early Christianity. Their insistence that ancient Christianity was very different from any forms of Christianity that followed it—and that it must be studied on its own terms, without any attempt to make the primary sources of Christianity's earliest centuries match the theological concerns of a later era—continues to guide most historians of early Christianity today. Their insistence that historical study should be separated from theological influences also permanently changed the field of church history. McGiffert, LaPiana, and Case may not have been perfect exemplars of the scholarly objectivity they championed, but their commitment to the modern historical method left a lasting legacy.