The Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum/Journal of Ancient Christianity (ZAC) is celebrating its fifteenth “birthday” this year. On this occasion, the editors have decided to dedicate the thematic issue not to a specific topic from Early Christianity but to a question pertaining to research history: “What did patristic research look like 100 years ago?” The issue focuses, above all, on the German context, given that patristics played a prominent, if not central, role in German academic life of the late Wilhelmine period. This perspective is complemented by observations on the situation in Belgium and the Netherlands, Armenia and Italy. These angles are, of course, paradigmatic, and the selection was made for pragmatic reasons. For research on France and the English-speaking area, let us refer to the conference proceedings edited by Jacques Fontaine et al. (Patristique et Antiquité Tardive en Allemagne et en France de 1870 à 1930, Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1993) and to recent studies published by Elizabeth A. Clark, respectively. The contribution looking at Armenia shall serve as an incentive to produce analogous research for other linguistic areas as well. The same goes for the entire Russian speaking area.
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A.W. Tozer & Wheaton College
2 hours ago
I see that anonymous comments disparaging the likes of Liz Clark are not allowed by this blog-owner. Strange. It's not as though it reflects poorly on the blog-owner for perfect strangers to suggest that Liz Clark is a jaundiced historian.
ReplyDeleteI'm not opposed to substantive criticism, but the previous comment didn't offer much of anything for readers to work with. Beyond being unhelpful, it offered something of an unsubstantiated personal slight... this is why it was deleted rather than simply ignored.
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome to criticize the legitimacy of ZAC's endorsement of Clark's work if you can offer us some interesting, if not compelling, justification for your views. Personal feelings unanchored to reasons fit for public consumption are less in the spirit of this blog.*
*Excepting, of course, garden-variety gestures of affirmation or assent, which tend to be rather vacuous in themselves but also don't bear any very significant burden of proof.
It's a blog, first of all; so I didn't feel like writing an essay to people I don't know. But even more, I didn't feel it needed justification: in the field there are certain things that are pretty obvious. I mean, it's not like many at NAPS think Elaine Pagels, for example, is operating at an objective or near-objective level any more. Same with Bart Ehrman. These are anti-Christian, or at least anti-ecclesiastical, writers. Their work is so drenched in the hermeneutics of suspicion as to render it well beyond worthy of charity. I just can't trust historians who distrust their sources BECAUSE those sources are Christian. I am suggesting Liz Clark, in her recent book, is headed down the same path. But she has been on that path since the beginning, really.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you may suggest that, in Christian scholarship, there are no scholars who are beyond the hermeneutics of charity, seeing as you went to Wheaton and probably have read Alan Jacobs or studied with him. But there comes a time when, in an academic guild, it is just to discredit, or at least roundly ignore, scholars who cannot be trusted. Self-loathing "church historians" like Liz Clark are just that sort of scholar.