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How Liberal Protestant Church Historians Helped Turn “Christianity” into a Good White Protestant American Religion in the Twentieth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2020
Extract
From the three historians of early Christianity whose lives and careers Elizabeth Clark discusses in The Fathers Refounded—Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary in New York, George LaPiana at Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case from the University of Chicago Divinity School—there breathes a palpable air of white, upper-middle-class liberal Protestant complacency and intellectual superiority. Modernists all, they know they are on the winning side of truth because they are confident that they are on the winning side of time. Summarizing McGiffert's distinction between ancient and contemporary Christianity, Clark writes: “Only in modernity, when God's immanence was championed, was the dualism between human and divine in Christ overcome.” “Christ, if he was human,” McGiffert believed, “must be divine, as all men are.” McGiffert's historiography shimmers with Emersonian confidence and ebullience. In his assumption—his assertion—of “only in,” we hear the ringing sound of modernity's triumphant temporality.
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- Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Church History
References
3 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 136.
4 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 73.
5 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 161.
6 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 163.
7 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 265.
8 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 183.
9 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 112.
10 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 174.
11 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 262, 271.
12 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 229.
13 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 234.
14 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 112.
15 This bit of alternative history was inspired by Williams, Reggie L., Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. On Boas, see King, Charles, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (New York: Doubleday, 2019)Google Scholar; and also the trenchant critique of Boas in Muhammad, Kahlil Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019)Google Scholar.
16 Clark, The Fathers Refounded, 271.