Thursday, May 19, 2005
(3:14 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Histories of Christian Thought
I have a receptionist job right now, where I am allowed to use the Internet and read between phone calls. As a result, my project of reading through the early church fathers is proceeding much more quickly than it otherwise would. As I read, I thought back to the presentations of the two historians of Christian thought whose works I have read: Justo Gonzalez and Jaroslav Pelikan.In the section relevant to my reading today, Gonzalez seems to be making excuses for the extreme boredom that the reading of Irenaeus invetiably produces, which fits in well with his overall scheme of offering us a "history of major figures in Christian thought." Such a scheme is, in my opinion, confusing and potentially even misleading. Pelikan, on the other hand, deals with major topics in given eras and brings in thinkers based on what and how much they contributed to each debate. The result was a more coherent storyline and, I think, a much better understanding of the arguments at stake. Ironically, though, Pelikan refers much more frequently to primary texts, often at great detail, while Gonzalez litters his work with footnotes on secondary works (including works not available in English), mixing together a history of the scholarship on the particular Hero of Christian Doctrine and a history of what he actually did -- this is inappropriate for a survey text, particularly given that most of those who read multi-volume surveys of the history of Christian thought don't have a deep acquaintance with the topic or any particular stake in the scholarly infighting surrounding Justin Martyr. I read Gonzalez for a class after already having read Pelikan, so I had a decent background and was able to follow it, but I could imagine nothing but befuddlement for my less experienced classmates.
In short, I recommend that if you are looking to read a multi-volume survey of the history of Christian thought, go for Pelikan, not Gonzalez. I say this only after having sold two out of three of my Gonzalez books on Amazon. I have just now decided that I'm going to earmark some of those massive profits for the purpose of assembling a full collection of Pelikan, of whose work I sadly own only one volume (and that only because that particular volume was on reserve in the library during the semester when I was reading the others, and I didn't want to sit and read it in the library only).
