Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Martin Marty, the
Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the History of
Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, begins his
projected four-volume history of modern American religion with the
following sentence: “The theological modernists
were male members of
the privileged subculture, almost all of them Protestant.” The rest,
as they say, is coda.

Actually, the introduction should have been warning enough. It
tells us that the theme of the first volume, which covers the years
from 1893 to 1919, will be “irony,” which seems to be the reigning
category of postmodern thought. According to Professor Marty, an
ironic situation “occurs when the consequences of an act are
diametrically opposed to the original intention” and the
“fundamental cause of the disparity lies in the actor himself, and
his original purpose.” Now, right up front, I will admit that, in
another life, I have been known to use irony as a historical theme
myself. But, after being bludgeoned with irony by Professor Marty
for 319 pages of text—from the book’s subtitle “The Irony of It
All” all the way to “Conclusion: On Ironic Interpretation”—I
promise not to do it ever again. By the way, in case you’re curious,
the theme of the second volume, which covers 1919 to 1941, is
“conflict.” Really?

In fact, the two volumes now in print were originally published
about five years apart, the first in 1986 and the second in 1991.
The University of Chicago