4

TESTING ORTHODOXY'S WILL TO RESIST

The Christian Church ever contains the body of truth. At times, when God wishes to lead them into higher truth, he reveals the truth to certain men chosen of him. They being called in a special sense & occupying a higher & more advanced position than the Church, may be rejected; but God's particular people will rally around the called of God. . . . I now stand firm on all the received doctrines of the Church, & I defy any man to show that I do not. In the Church I will remain & teach the doctrines of the Church, & call upon men to advance to the higher life of sanctification. I have no reason to believe that the Church will not receive me. I shall remain in & with the Church until it takes the sin upon itself of casting me out, which God grant may never happen. I feel assured that the world needs this light.

Charles A. Briggs (1867)⁽¹⁾

From his days as a student in Berlin, when he wrote this letter to his uncle, Charles Augustus Briggs had a sense of destiny about his career--far more "Augustus" than "Charlie" or "Chuck." His attitude could be described as bordering on the messianic. It is clear why he was willing to adopt the strategy that made him famous and led to his de-frocking in 1893, i.e., his escalating rhetoric. He was more concerned about transforming the Presbyterian Church in terms of the processes of evolutionary growth--he called this process sanctification--than about the threat of Church sanctions.

He gained a great advantage, beginning in 1874: his employment by Union Seminary. Union had provided men with shelter from the rigors of Old School orthodoxy from its founding. The minutes of its founding meeting for January, 11, 1836, announced: "It is the design of the Founders to provide a Theological Seminary in the midst of the greatest, and most growing community in America, around which all men, of moderate views and feelings, who desire to live free from party strife, and to stand aloof from all extremes of doctrinal speculation, practical radicalism, and ecclesiastical domination, may cordially, and affectionately rally."⁽²⁾ This was the hope of the Arminian New School moderates--such as Albert Barnes, who served as a Director for thirty years⁽³⁾--in 1837. The result within 50 years was the opposite: Union became the center of controversy in the Presbyterian Church and the nation because of the radical, extreme, doctrinal speculations of its faculty.

Beyond Negative Sanctions

Sheltered by Union, Briggs' number-one tactic was to demand freedom of inquiry. This tactic remained the central feature of the modernists' strategy in every denomination until they gained control of the seminaries and the courts. Freedom of inquiry meant both academic freedom and pulpit freedom. First and foremost, it meant the freedom to write or teach higher criticism without fear of Church sanctions. In a footnote regarding his 1876 address,⁽⁴⁾ Briggs in 1900 referred the reader back to an earlier passage in his book, where we read: "Let us not be so presumptuous, so irreverent to the Word of God, so unbelieving with reference to the inherent power of convincing and assuring seekers for the truth, as to condemn any sincere and candid inquirer as a heretic or a rationalist, because he may differ from us on such questions as these!"⁽⁵⁾ His terminology regarding potential critics was both fervent and religious: "presumptuous," "irreverent to the Word of God." There must be no negative institutional sanctions; all objections must be limited to persuasion. We must trust "the inherent power of convincing." In other words, to exclude from a seminary faculty anyone who teaches that the word of God is fallible is itself an act of irreverence against the word of God.

True orthodoxy is here defined as the toleration of ideas that undermine orthodoxy. Briggs would adopt this same rhetorical ploy in his 1889 book, Whither? What is clearly illogical--the possibility of orthodoxy (straight speaking) without sanctions (straight shooting)--he defended with what appeared to be the rhetoric of orthodoxy. This did not save him, but it provided cover for those who shared his opinions and who were willing to abandon his frontal assault tactics.

Briggs was calling for the destruction of Confessional Presbyterianism. The whole point of requiring a subscription to a creed is to invoke sanctions. There can be no valid covenantal oath without the threat of negative sanctions for the violation of its stipulations. A covenantal oath is the invocation of negative sanctions on the one who breaks the oath: a self-maledictory oath. Ordination to the ministry is by covenantal oath. While the Adopting Act of 1729 allowed a man to express disagreement with the Confessional standards of the denomination, it did not authorize such a personal confession without the threat of sanctions. A presbytery had the right and the responsibility before God to screen out all those candidates whose confessional deviation its members regarded as too radical. What Briggs wanted was different: confessional immunity. He wanted to be able to violate the stipulations of his original oath as a Presbyterian minister, but without fear of negative sanctions. This was the thesis and theme of his 1885 book, American Presbyterianism, in which he called for a Church that contained both conservative and progressive forces. Such an inclusivist Church would be "vastly higher than any of the elements of which it is composed. . . ."⁽⁶⁾

He wanted theological innovation without negative sanctions. In this regard, he had a lot in common with Adam. He also had a lot in common with modernists in every American Protestant denomination. As Hutchison has pointed out, what the modernists wanted was a series of "reasonably complete victories unaccompanied by controversy or unpleasantness. . . ."⁽⁷⁾ From 1879 to about 1883, this is generally what they experienced. From 1883 to 1891, however, religious journals became more guarded.⁽⁸⁾ The modernists had to adjust their strategy and their rhetoric. "Others besides Briggs became, during the 1880s, conscious of battle lines and in some measure willing to form ranks behind them."⁽⁹⁾ Briggs had become the point man for the whole movement. It was his self-appointed task to test the opposition by drawing the fire of the most theologically skilled conservatives in Protestantism.

Briggs understood the risks of becoming a theological pioneer, which in his era meant becoming a theological commando. He noted in 1900 that "It is only within recent years that any general interest in the matters of Higher Criticism has been shown in Great Britain and America. This interest has been due chiefly to the labors of a few pioneers, who have suffered in the interest of biblical science."⁽¹⁰⁾ He singled out Samuel Davidson, who was dismissed from his position as professor of Biblical Literature at the Lancashire Independent College at Manchester. The reason? He had been on the faculty since 1842, but he had at last gone into print with his views in 1856, in Horne's Introduction to Scripture. "This stayed the progress of criticism in Great Britain for some years."⁽¹¹⁾ Briggs understood: negative sanctions work.

Another "late bloomer" was W. Robertson Smith, who had taught Hebrew at the Free Church College of Aberdeen. In the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he went into print with his views. The particular volumes appeared in 1875 and 1880. Then, in 1881, he published The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, which for the first time popularized the phrase "higher criticism."⁽¹²⁾ That same year, he was removed from his post, but acquitted of heresy--the outcome of a series of judicial procedures that had begun in that remarkable year, 1876.⁽¹³⁾ His dismissal was for the sake of harmony.⁽¹⁴⁾ This contest, Briggs said, "gained liberty of opinion in Great Britain." Smith was immediately hired to teach at Cambridge University.⁽¹⁵⁾ Smith's teacher, A. B. Davidson, held the same views, but was left undisturbed by the University of Edinburgh. One year later, in 1882, the General Assembly of the Free Church chose another known higher critic, George Adam Smith, to succeed as Principal of Glasgow a man who had opposed Robertson Smith.⁽¹⁶⁾ (There were a lot of higher critics named Smith, which was appropriate, for they forged a new worldview.) There was no question which way the theological wind was blowing. The weather vane of institutional sanctions was pointing positive for higher critics. There were more higher critics than heresy trials to remove them. The sanctions did not set precedents. Confrontational rhetoric, as always, could prove risky, but the underlying modernist theology was increasingly safe.

In 1881, Briggs began what became a crucial series on higher criticism in Presbyterian Review. The next year, the General Assembly warned against the appearance of higher criticism in the seminaries. These methods "tend to unsettle faith in doctrine and divine origin and plenary inspiration of the Scriptures," the Assembly said.⁽¹⁷⁾ It repeated this warning in 1883 upon receipt of complaints from five presbyteries, but it took no judicial action and threatened no sanctions. It reminded the presbyteries that this was their responsibility.⁽¹⁸⁾ Initiative remained at the local level.

Escalating Rhetoric: 1883-1909

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Those who suggest a new interpretation of the past or a new way of interpreting the present must use rhetoric if they are to gain converts. In a suggestive essay, Leland M. Griffin has proposed a three-stage theory of rhetoric in a movement. First, there is the early period when men are becoming dissatisfied with prevailing interpretations. Second, there is a crisis period in which the outcome of the confrontation is unclear. Third, there is the consummation stage where one side or the other wins support of the targeted audience.⁽¹⁹⁾ The three stages are doubt, institutional crisis and confrontation, and consolidation. A decade after this essay was published, Thomas Kuhn introduced a similar thesis regarding the history of science: the concept of the paradigm shift.⁽²⁰⁾ Briggs' career offers a classic example of the function of rhetoric, as well as its limits.

In 1883, Briggs' Biblical Study appeared. It was a 500-page introduction to higher criticism.⁽²¹⁾ It was rhetorically subdued. The chapter on higher criticism was mainly historical. Briggs was laudatory regarding higher criticism. "No one need fear criticism, save those who are uncertain in their knowledge, for criticism leads to certitude."⁽²²⁾

The book used conservative language, but the reader waited in vain for any reference to the doctrine of salvation as a judicial declaration of God, i.e., the doctrine of imputation, of Christ's mediatorial sacrifice as a legal substitute. On inspiration, Briggs wrote: "The Inspiration of the Word of God is a highly important doctrine, but it must not be so greatly emphasized as to lead us to neglect other and still more important aspects of the Bible."⁽²³⁾ "The Scriptures are indeed means, not ends. They are to bring us to God, to assimilate us to Christ, to unite us in organic union with Him."⁽²⁴⁾ What was he getting at? His concluding paragraph hints at his goal: "The Word of God does not cease to be the Word of God when wrapped in other than Scripture language. Hence it is that the Christian becomes a living epistle (2 Cor. iii.3), and the Church, as a body of such epistles, a means of grace, conveying divine grace in another form to the world."⁽²⁵⁾ This, in a chapter titled, "The Scripture as a Means of Grace." His language seemed to raise men and the institutional Church to the status of divine revelation. That is to say, this language lowered the written word to the status of men. And that, in the final analysis, is what higher criticism is all about.

Biblical Study was well received by the American religious press. The review in Presbyterian Review was critical: Briggs had gone too far. The review in Unitarian Review was also critical: Briggs had not gone far enough. The other reviews were generally favorable.⁽²⁶⁾

In 1885, Briggs laid another foundation stone in his strategy of subversion. He published American Presbyterianism, which argued that the Old Side tradition in colonial America represented a deviation from the true Presbyterian tradition. He called them Protestant scholastics, just as he called the Princetonians. This book tested the degree of resistance on the part of the Old School, and it also was designed to gain at least private acceptance by New School churchmen. Briggs understood who the one enemy was that could offer serious resistance to him and his modernist peers: the Old School. If he could silence them, the New School experientialists would be far less equipped--creedally, psychologically, or judicially--to resist the modernists, let alone expel them from the denomination. The book did not lead to his censure. He was then ready for the next test: Whither? (1889). No institutional response was forthcoming. After that came his Inaugural Address of 1891. That led to his de-frocking in 1893.

Sixteen years after this setback, he felt free to write: "The modern mind cannot accept any such absolute infallibility, either in the Bible, the Church or the Reason, as the older authorities maintained."⁽²⁷⁾ Then where must we seek the infallible truth? Within ourselves. "The only religious experience that is authoritative and infallible is that which the conscience and the religious feeling give us, in innate, a priori, immediate decisions, the voice of God Himself within us, where doubt and uncertainty are impossible."⁽²⁸⁾ The only infallibility, then, is in the religious experience of the individual. Here alone does God speak to man infallibly. But He does not speak in words, creeds, and catechisms. The modernist transfers authority from God and His Bible to the individual and his "immediate decisions." An existentialist god speaks only through a non-cognitive encounter with existentialist man. Karl Barth was to extend this theology of non-cognitive encounter in 1919 in his commentary on Paul's epistle to the Romans, but the worldview of theistic existentialism was already widespread within modernism before Barth began to write.

Did Briggs reject reason? No more than he rejected mysticism. He elevated the authority of reason to the status of equality with the Bible and the Church. Reason, he said, is as effective as the other two authorities in producing the non-cognitive encounter with the god of existentialism. "The historian recognizes that men have found God in the Bible, the Church and the Reason. . . . It is the opinion of Christian scholars that Socrates and pure-minded heathen have ever found God in the forms of the Reason. Why should any deny that modern Rationalists, and seekers after God among the people, who are fenced off from Bible and Church by the exactions of priest and ecclesiastic, find God enthroned in their own hearts."⁽²⁹⁾ Notice that the culprits are "priest and ecclesiastic," who "fence off" the "seekers after truth." These culprits place judicial boundaries around the Church, which is an affront to modernism. Judicial boundaries, not man's original sin, are what keep pagans from coming to God, Briggs insisted.

This was not Paul's message at Mars Hill (Acts 17), but Briggs rejected Paul's theology. Too great a reliance on Paul was a weakness of the Westminster Confession of Faith, he said. He found that 667 proof texts of the Confession were from Paul's epistles and the epistle to the Hebrews, whereas only 248 were from the gospels and 247 from other New Testament writers. "Thus the Confession is built on the words of Paul rather than the words of the Lord Jesus. It is Pauline rather than comprehensively Christian."⁽³⁰⁾ It was this commonly held modernist heresy--placing Paul in opposition to Jesus--that Machen challenged in his 1921 lectures and book, The Origin of Paul's Religion. Machen saw exactly what the affront of Paul was and is: its exclusivism. "The oriental religions were tolerant of other faiths; the religion of Paul, like the ancient religion of Israel, demanded and absolutely exclusive devotion. . . . Amid the prevailing syncretism of the Greco-Roman world, the religion of Paul, with the religion of Israel, stands absolutely alone."⁽³¹⁾

Briggs was heretical to the core. He had been heretical from his days as a student in Germany. But it took until 1909 for his public confession to match his private confession. He had guarded his words with the rhetoric of deception prior to 1891, although not so carefully that a denomination truly committed to the Westminster standards would not have de-frocked him before 1891. Outside of the Presbyterian Church, his ideas were being received favorably.⁽³²⁾ Inside the Church, he had not been threatened with sanctions. In 1899, he decided to escalate his rhetoric and his theological challenge.

 

Briggs' Articulation of Modernist Theology

Men confess their true religion. Over time, progressive confession is normal. As men work out the implications of their faith, their lives become more consistent with their presuppositions. Cornelius Van Til called this process epistemological self-consciousness, but what his theology really taught was ethical self-consciousness.⁽³³⁾ This process of progressive confession applies both to individuals and collective groups, especially the two ethically divided groups: the saved and the lost, covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers.

I have already presented the five points of modernism: a denial of God's absolute sovereignty; an affirmation of the legitimacy of higher criticism; the acceptance of evolution; the denial of God's negative sanctions, beginning with the doctrine of hell; and ecumenism. In Whither? (1889), Briggs presented a fully developed version of this theology, but in the name of historic Calvinism. He got away with this judicially. That he got away with it in 1889 indicates the magnitude of Machen's problem in 1923.

Briggs wrote the book, he said, because the 1889 General Assembly had called for a discussion at the presbytery level of the possibility of revising the Confession.⁽³⁴⁾ This pressure had come in 1888 from the Nassau Presbytery on Long Island, New York.⁽³⁵⁾ Briggs wanted revision.⁽³⁶⁾ So did many New School members, including James McCosh.⁽³⁷⁾ Briggs' colleague at Union, Philip Schaff, regarded the move toward creedal revision as a sign that the Old Calvinism was dying out; another sign was the move toward ecumenism.⁽³⁸⁾ Schaff announced that he knew of no Presbyterian minister who believed in limited atonement (particular redemption), one of the five points of Calvinism.⁽³⁹⁾ He called for revision. The Old School's leaders did not.⁽⁴⁰⁾ But the revision that Briggs wanted dwarfed anything ever proposed in the history of American Presbyterianism, even as late as 1967. Whither? was his manifesto. Overnight, it became a best-seller.⁽⁴¹⁾

Those favoring Confessional revision suggested numerous minor revisions. No revisions received a sufficient number of votes from the presbyteries. The revision movement went into hibernation for almost a decade after 1893, the year of Briggs' de-frocking. But Whither? remains the classic statement of Presbyterian modernism during that crucial era in Presbyterian history. For this reason, we need to examine it in detail.

Readers are about to be introduced to more information about Charles Briggs' theology than any normal person would want to know. I cite his words in great detail for three reasons. First, Briggs was a representative modernist theologian of his era, and unquestionably he was the representative de-frocked Protestant modernist of his era. He had a national audience. A major book publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, published volume after volume of his writings. What he said was important because he was a representative figure.

Second, and far more important, readers need to understand that modernism is a consistent theological system, one which offers a mirror image of biblical orthodoxy. Modernism is not just a series of seemingly random attacks on the details of traditional Christianity. By citing Briggs extensively, I can show from the details of his theology that we are dealing with a coherent system of covenant theology, not just a series of unconnected criticisms of orthodoxy. The details of his system would not have been that important, had there been no underlying theological system; his overall theology itself was very important. So was his use of rhetoric. Prior to 1891, each time Briggs escalated his rhetoric, he was left undisturbed by the courts of the Presbyterian Church. The Church did not acknowledge judicially--the only acknowledgment that truly mattered--the threat posed by Briggs' theology until Briggs presented a flagrant rhetorical challenge in 1891.

Third, in order to defend my thesis--that Briggs' rhetoric was the cause of his de-frocking far more than his theology--I need to show how flagrantly heretical his published theology was in 1889. The best way to show this is to quote him verbatim. But I must do more than quote numerous passages. I must show that he presented a rival theology of the covenant. Modernism is a perverse covenant theology. This is what the Presbyterian Church, like mainline Protestantism in general, failed to understand and respond to judicially in time to save itself.

1. The Not-So-Sovereign God

Calvinism, more than any other Christian theology, affirms the absolute sovereignty of God. Briggs came in the name of Calvinism. He therefore had a problem. He had to disguise his attack on God's sovereignty. He did this brilliantly. It was a two-level attack. The first level was rhetorical: a rhetoric of deception rather than a rhetoric of confrontation. The second stage was part deceptive rhetoric and part philosophy: a defense of dialectical humanist philosophy in the name of Christian freedom.

1. The Attack on "Protestant Scholasticism"

This was a continuation of his thesis in American Presbyterianism. Briggs drew a distinction between the Calvinism of John Calvin and the Westminster Confession on one side, and the Calvinism of his opponents at Princeton Seminary on the other. He called the Princetonian version scholastic Calvinism.

This was a rhetorical argument. By equating the Westminster Confession with Calvin's theology, and by equating Princeton's theology with medieval scholasticism, Briggs sought to prejudice the case against Princeton's theology: to make it appear to be in conflict with Calvin. This was a debating ploy. In the mid-1960's, however, Briggs' liberal heirs in the Presbyterian Church abandoned Briggs' rhetorical subterfuge regarding the Westminster standards, substituting a subterfuge of their own. The Church in 1967 published other Calvinist confessions, as well as the German Evangelical Church's Barth-inspired Theological Declaration of Barmen (1934), in a Book of Confessions. It also revised the Westminster Confession to make it conform to neo-orthodoxy, and it abandoned the Larger Catechism altogether--where the Westminster Assembly's judicial theology had been spelled out in greatest detail.⁽⁴²⁾ All of this was the result of a 1956 overture from the Amarillo Presbytery suggesting a revision of the archaic language of the Shorter Catechism.⁽⁴³⁾ As it turned out, the Shorter Catechism was the one 1647 document left untouched by the 1967 revision. The man most responsible for the 1967 revision, Princeton Seminary professor Edward Downey, announced in 1964: "While Westminster is thus a post-Reformation statement, it is by no means a modern one. It derives from an age of scholastic theology, of preoccupation with authority and law, of churchly and political absolutism."⁽⁴⁴⁾ Whenever a liberal Presbyterian theologian wants to evade some aspect of Anglo-American Calvinism's judicial theology, he chants Briggs' mantra: "Scholasticism, scholasticism, scholasticism. . . ."

Briggs' criticism of Princeton's theology was not entirely rhetorical, however, i.e., effective but logically spurious. From the days of the founding of Princeton Seminary in 1812, Archibald Alexander and his successors had assigned Francis Turretin's massive Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1674) to all students.⁽⁴⁵⁾ It was available only in Latin.⁽⁴⁶⁾ This screened out candidates for the Presbyterian ministry who were not fluent in Latin and also able to survive the rigors of a systematic theology that had been self-consciously modeled along the lines of Roman Catholic scholasticism. Charles Hodge modeled his three-volume Systematic Theology (1871-73) after Turretin's work, which was adopted at Princeton because too few college graduates in 1870 could read Latin. (Testifying to the reality of Presbyterian pride in the formally educated ministry, the requirement that every minister be able to read and write in Latin at one stage in his career--early--was not removed from the Form of Government. It had been there since the Westminster Assembly's non-binding Form of Church-Government [1645].⁽⁴⁷⁾ Every candidate had to present "A Latin exegesis on some common head in divinity."⁽⁴⁸⁾ This remained in the list of requirements despite the fact that almost no one could do it and presbyteries could not enforce it. Only in 1911 did a majority of presbyteries vote to eliminate this requirement and substitute a bachelor's degree or master's degree.⁽⁴⁹⁾)

There is no doubt that Turretin was committed to a doctrine of the word-for-word inspiration of the Bible. What Briggs and his successors⁽⁵⁰⁾ have tried to do is link the scholastic method of logic--held in disrepute by most Protestants in 1889--with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. His successors have even adopted his pejorative phrase: Reformed scholasticism.⁽⁵¹⁾ Modernists wanted both to sink together. Briggs announced his strategy in the Preface: "This book is polemical. It is necessary to overcome that false orthodoxy which has obtruded itself in the place of the Westminster orthodoxy. I regret, on many accounts, that it has been necessary for me to attack so often the elder and younger Hodge, divines for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration."⁽⁵²⁾ He also announced: "This book is irenical."⁽⁵³⁾ It wasn't, and saying it was did not make it so, except in the minds of his theological allies, then and now. "Irenical" means low-key language, a spirit of calm discourse. It may be an appropriate style when you are conducting a frontal assault on an enemy who has the votes. It is also an appropriate rhetorical smoke screen to announce your irenical disposition when you are about to toss a verbal stink bomb at your enemies, which is exactly what Whither? did.

Briggs maintained the rhetoric of toleration: the myth of judicial neutrality. He assured everyone: "The author does not wish to exclude from the Church those theologians whom he attacks for their errors. He is a broad churchman. . . . He rejoices in all earnest efforts for Christian unity, not only in Presbyterians and Reformed circles, but in the entire Christian world."⁽⁵⁴⁾ This became the official battle cry--irenic, of course--of the modernists within Northern Presbyterianism . . . until they had the votes to isolate the orthodox party. At that point, if the orthodox men protested, or worse, threatened to withhold their tithes and offerings, they were thrown out. Irenically, of course.

2. A Philosophical Substitution: Dialecticism

Briggs refused to discuss predestination in Whither? Nevertheless, the doctrine of predestination undergirds the other four points of the biblical covenant: the inerrancy of Scripture (the voice of authority that represents God in history), the comprehensive law of God, God's absolutely just final judgment, and the perseverance of the saints in history. Briggs' goal was to substitute four other doctrines: higher criticism for biblical inerrancy, evolution for biblical law, a second-chance theory of the "intermediate state" for final judgment, and minimal-creed ecumenism for the expansion of the kingdom of God in history.

To accomplish this, he had to undermine the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty over creation and history. He could not successfully appeal to the traditional language of Arminianism, i.e., "free will." This would have alerted every reader to his break with Calvinism. Instead, he turned to the categories of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Instead of invoking the familiar Arminian argument regarding the conflict between God's predestination and man's free will, he spoke of a conflict between mechanism and personalism. These are the categories of Immanuel Kant: phenomenal vs. noumenal, science vs. freedom.⁽⁵⁵⁾ But in Kant's system these are dialectical categories; we do not choose one or the other. Both exist together in unresolved tension. Briggs, however, asked his readers to de-emphasize "mechanism" in favor of "personalism."

Again and again, Briggs contrasted objective truth with subjective truth. He favored the subjective. As Alan Pontier has written of Briggs' theology, "Doctrine is placed against religious vitality; evidences for verbal inspiration are placed against the witness of the Holy Spirit; and the `orthodoxism' of nineteenth century conservatives is placed against the mysticism in Germany."⁽⁵⁶⁾ Pontier cites Biblical Study: "It is the mystic element that needs above all things to be revived in the British and American churches. It brings people face to face with the Bible and with the Divine Spirit working in and with it, so that they need no mediating priesthood of theologians, no help of apologetics or of Biblical polemics to convince them of the authority of the Bible and enable them to maintain it against all cavilling."⁽⁵⁷⁾ The intense rationalism of the techniques of higher criticism was balanced in Briggs' theology by the intense irrationalism of mysticism; his was a dialectical theology. This emphasis on the irrational was to culminate a generation later in the humanist, Kantian, dialectical theology known as neo-orthodoxy. This theology captured Princeton Seminary within a few years after Machen and his colleagues resigned in protest in 1929.⁽⁵⁸⁾

Briggs began by dismissing A. A. Hodge's doctrine of God. He wrote of Hodge's conception: "The doctrine of the living God is passed over altogether. This neglect of the doctrine of the living God has resulted in making the God of most dogmaticians an abstraction, a bundle of attributes, and in external and mechanical conceptions of His decrees and their execution. The immutability of God has been elaborated at the expense of His activity, His sovereignty at the cost of His deity."⁽⁵⁹⁾ He made no attempt to explain why God's sovereignty is necessarily antithetical to His deity; he simply asserted that this is the case, and then went on. He had scrapped Calvinism and had substituted . . . what? Existentialism? A precursor of neo-orthodoxy? He did not elaborate. But whatever it was, he called his system orthodoxy.⁽⁶⁰⁾

He then quoted from an earlier article of his in Presbyterian Review, in which he had argued that the translation of Jahveh as Lord is a mistake. In all English translations and in Jewish rabbinical theology, Jahveh "has been associated with an undue stress upon the sovereignty of God. The Old Testament revelation in its use of Jahveh emphasized rather the activity of the ever living personal God of revelation."⁽⁶¹⁾ His rhetorical strategy is visible: his use of such pejorative words as "mechanical" and "Rabbinical theology."

He did not say what the sovereignty of God is, only what it is not: whatever A. A. Hodge said it is. All Briggs said was this: "The doctrine of God needs to be enriched at the present time by the enthronement of the idea of the living God to its supreme place in Biblical theology, and the dethronement of the idea of divine sovereignty from its usurped position in dogmatic theology."⁽⁶²⁾ He then insisted that "The Westminster divines state this doctrine in its true fundamental position, but the later dogmaticians have changed the Westminster doctrine."⁽⁶³⁾ For obvious documentary reasons--the absence of evidence--he did not attempt to show exactly how or where the Westminster divines had enthroned God's living acts and dethroned the doctrine of God's sovereignty. Yet he expected to get away with this astounding theological assertion, which he did.

Briggs' rhetorical strategy has been used ever since: contrasting the Bible's predestinating God and His unbreakable decrees with a living, "personal" God. Almost seventy years after Whither?, G. Ernest Wright and Reginald Fuller adopted it in their higher critical study of what was purported to be the God of the Bible: The Book of the Acts of God (1957).⁽⁶⁴⁾ The modernists' Kantian god in his historically bounded but purely free acts is contrasted with the biblical God and His sovereign decree over history. The acts of this Kantian god are always discussed within the framework of man's social evolution, not the biblical God's sovereign decree. The acts of this noumenal, non-historical god are not sovereign acts governed by his decree over creation; rather, they are acts that can only be interpreted by men in terms of their knowledge and perception. Man's evolving word replaces God's definitive written word as the voice of authority in history.

Yet even Briggs eventually had to confront the theological reality of Presbyterianism: the Westminster Confession. He wrote: "The most difficult doctrine in the Westminster standards is the doctrine of the `divine decree.'"⁽⁶⁵⁾ Difficult in what sense? Difficult for Briggs: the threat of negative sanctions. The Confession's doctrine of the divine decree made things strategically difficult for a heretical theology professor in an ostensibly Calvinist seminary. As it turned out, he got away with it. He was never brought to trial for his Kantian doctrine of god, nor was anyone else.

The Westminster divines were Calvinists, not Arminians, he had to admit. They were fighting the Arminians, so the categories of the Confession are "sharp, hard, polemical, and exclusive; . . ." Their polemics had led them into error: "At the same time it is my opinion that in this respect the Westminster divines went too far in their polemics." This really is a shame, he insisted, for their polemical definitions "have kept multitudes from uniting with the Presbyterian Church."⁽⁶⁶⁾ At this point, Briggs had reduced the Calvinist theology of the Westminster standards to mere polemics, and therefore not essential as a test of faith. Yet a few pages earlier, he had elevated his own polemics to the state of theology: presenting the Westminster divines as proto-existentialists, lovers of contingent freedom. This back-and-forth strategy between theology and rhetoric--his rhetoric of deception--could be used, and has been used, by other modernists to confuse their critics.⁽⁶⁷⁾ The bottom line was always the same: ecumenism, a growing Church without a fixed theology or negative sanctions against heretics. Trinitarian theology had to be scrapped in order to attain this.

Briggs preached the Fatherhood of God, as do all ecumenists: "The Fatherhood of God is one of the most precious doctrines of the Scriptures, . . . the people have been deprived of its comfort, until recent times, by the neglect of it in the teachings of so-called orthodox divines."⁽⁶⁸⁾ First, notice his use of the pejorative phrase, so-called. This was dual rhetoric: confrontation and deception. His rivals, this rhetoric implied, were not truly orthodox. Second, what the modernist refuses to accept, or even suggest, is that the biblical doctrine of the Fatherhood of God has a crucial judicial aspect to it: His disinheritance of His first son, Adam, and all those born to Adam except those adopted covenantally by His second Son, Jesus Christ. The Fatherhood of God for the modernist is the doctrine of "universal Fatherhood,"⁽⁶⁹⁾ not sovereign Adoptionhood. The modernist refuses to accept the doctrine of man's original disinheritance, and therefore he rejects the doctrine of spiritual adoption solely by grace. The disinheriting God of the Bible is as foreign to modernism as the Creator God of the Bible is.

The modernist has a doctrine of god. His god is not the sovereign God of the Bible, the Creator and Sustainer of everything there is. His god is the god of Kant: hidden in the noumenal realm--the realm of mystical, non-rational encounter between god and man--and never revealing himself as the master of history. He is a god who does not bring final judgment, either, for he is not sovereign. He is not the predestinating God of John Calvin and Martin Luther.⁽⁷⁰⁾

2. The Not-So-Authoritative Bible

Having considered Briggs' view of sovereignty, we come to the question of authority. The Bible is the sole source of final authority in history, the Reformers had insisted: sola Scriptura. Briggs' task in Whither? was to prove that his view of the Bible was consistent with the Reformers' view and with the Westminster Confession. He did not cite the Reformers or the Confession on the question of the infallible authority of the Bible. Had he done so, he might have forfeited his illegitimate authority as a Calvinist theologian. He did cite Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, and Warfield to prove that they had not discovered a source of authority for the canon of Scripture. He concluded: "The inspiration, the canonicity, and the authority of the Bible depends, therefore, upon the results of the Higher Criticism."⁽⁷¹⁾

Briggs on the Reformation

The heart of higher criticism's thesis is that men wrote the Bible: fallible men. The heart of Princeton's defense was the insistence that these men were not fallible in their capacity as God's living vessels when writing the texts of Scripture. Briggs did not challenge the Princeton view directly in Whither?; instead, he deflected any consideration of the Princetonians' argument by referring to the Reformers. He assured his readers that the Reformers were not anxious about the fact of human authorship.⁽⁷²⁾ "The great Reformers found no difficulty in recognizing anonymous and pseudonymous writings in the canon of Scripture."⁽⁷³⁾

He provided no evidence for this statement except for a footnote reference to another book by Briggs published in 1883, Biblical Study.⁽⁷⁴⁾ In that book, he had written: "How the reformers would have met these questions [regarding higher criticism] we may infer from their freedom with regard to traditional views in the few cases in which they expressed themselves."⁽⁷⁵⁾ He cited Luther's rejection of the Epistle of James--not an example to persuade Calvinists.⁽⁷⁶⁾ He cited Calvin's denial of Paul's authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews⁽⁷⁷⁾--not an earth-shaking discovery, since the epistle does not say who wrote it. He cited Calvin's belief that someone besides David edited Psalms. "These questions of authorship and date troubled the reformers but little; . . ."⁽⁷⁸⁾ He then moved to the Westminster Confession. "The Confession does not define the human authors and dates of the various writings."⁽⁷⁹⁾ This should not come as a shock, since the Westminster Confession merely lists the canonical books by name without comment (I:2). There is nothing else in Biblical Study on the subject of the Reformers' view of higher criticism, yet this is what Briggs presumably expected his readers to accept as evidence of the legitimacy of higher criticism. This was a thin thread to hang from, rather like the spider in Jonathan Edwards' sermon.

The Reformers did not have to deal with higher criticism. The Westminster Assembly was not aware of such speculation, either. So, whatever they thought about the human authorship of the Bible, they did not assume that the texts were fallible. But because the Confession did not specifically deny the fundamental thesis of higher criticism--deny it in advance of its academic development--Briggs felt safe in saying that the Confession does not challenge higher criticism. The silence of the Confession regarding higher criticism was, in Briggs' logic, the judicial equivalent of its acceptance of higher criticism.

Not only did Briggs offer comparatively few examples of the Reformers' supposed acceptance of fallible portions of the Bible, the evidence was completely against him. But nobody called his bluff on this point during his lifetime. Reu's comprehensive book, Luther and the Scripture, did not appear until 1944. Woodbridge's detailed refutation of Rogers and McKim--and, by extension, of Briggs--did not appear until 1982. The historical evidence leaves no room for honest doubt: the Princetonians' defense of biblical inerrancy was no new doctrine, but an extension of what the Church had held from the beginning. Briggs and his successors were unwilling to admit what in fact was the case, namely, that by virtually all the historical evidence, their position on higher criticism had been opposed throughout the history of the Church.⁽⁸⁰⁾ They have refused to say forthrightly what the historical evidence reveals: they are, at the very least, heretical. They have never been confident enough to announce, as representatives of Queer Nation have announced: "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it." They have been closet heretics (or worse) seeking tenure or its equivalent.

The Original Texts

The defenders of biblical inerrancy had to appeal to the original texts of Scripture because all existing texts are copies, and faithful copies have retained errors that had been introduced by earlier copyists. The originals were called autographs by the Princetonians. Princetonians defended the perfection of these missing texts.⁽⁸¹⁾ Contrary to Briggs, Sandeen, Rogers, and McKim, the strategy of the Princetonians was not unique to them; others had taken the same position earlier in nineteenth-century America.⁽⁸²⁾ The Princetonians could hardly appeal to the continuing infallibility of copyists--infallibility equal to the original word of God given to the prophets. Infallibility was a one-time event per text. There were also practical considerations. As Noll says, "If the Bible contained errors of fact in history, science, or the accounts of its literary origins, it could not be relied upon to describe the relationships between God and humanity, or the way of salvation, or the finality of divine law."⁽⁸³⁾

The higher critics scoff at all this: the only texts that we have are copies. We cannot improve on them. We must use them. We must defend them. The modernists adopted a rhetorical device: identifying the conservatives' appeal to missing texts as an assault on the Bible, our Bible, the Bible filled with errors. Their conclusion: men no longer need to take literally the Bible's presentation of the relationships between God and humanity, the way of salvation, or the finality of divine law.

In this regard, Briggs adopted another tactic that was basic to the Presbyterian modernists' strategy: strict adherence to the language of the Confession, whenever convenient. He argued that the Westminster Confession does not contain a specific statement defending the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible, i.e., inerrancy of the original manuscripts (the autographs). The Confession speaks of inspiration, but not verbal inspiration. It does not mention inerrancy.⁽⁸⁴⁾ Such ideas are "extra-confessional, substituting false doctrines for the real faith of the Church. . . ."⁽⁸⁵⁾

We do not have the originals, he said, and we never will.⁽⁸⁶⁾ We know that the existing texts contain errors. "The presumption, therefore, in regard to errors in the best texts, is that they were also in the original documents. It is sheer assumption to claim that the original documents were inerrant."⁽⁸⁷⁾ The Reformers "did not hold to the inerrancy of the original autographs."⁽⁸⁸⁾ He cited Samuel Rutherford, but the citation says only that the documents we now have are imperfect.⁽⁸⁹⁾ He cited Richard Baxter, and the citation does indicate that Baxter temporized: "The Scripture is like a man's body, where some parts are but for the preservation of the rest, and may be maimed without death: . . ."⁽⁹⁰⁾ But one analogy from one seventeenth-century Puritan who did not attend the Westminster Assembly and who later served as Charles II's chaplain, is surely not proof.

Briggs' Judicial Strategy

What Briggs' appeal to the Confession's silence proves is that confessions do need periodic revisions in order to meet new battles that earlier generations did not recognize. Briggs also proved that by imposing the strict terms of the Confession, courts could not prove categorically that the Confession taught the Princetonians' concept of inerrancy. The judges would have to determine, as Briggs said they should determine, what is consistent with the underlying theology of the Confession, and what is not.

Briggs' judicial strategy throughout Whither? was to argue that any change in doctrine since 1647 constitutes a formal breaking of the Presbyterian Church's Constitution. Had the argument been accepted by the denomination, it would have opened the door for every shade of opinion, closing the door to all heresy trials prior to a full-scale revision of the Confession--in all likelihood, a political impossibility. Here was the primary institutional goal of Whither?: to remove the threat of heresy trials. Briggs did not succeed in his own case, but after 1900, there were no more heresy trials conducted by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.

He then went on the offensive, as if to scare away any critic, namely, any theologian at Princeton. His contempt was visible: "If he find any comfort in verbal inspiration and the inerrancy of the Scriptures, we have no desire to disturb him, provided he hold these errors as private opinions and do not seek to impose them upon others. But fidelity to the truth requires that we should state that they are not only extra-confessional, but that they are contrary to truth and fact, and that they are broken reeds that will surely fail any one who leans upon them, and that they are therefore positively dangerous to the faith of ministry and people."⁽⁹¹⁾ In short, there is no legitimate basis for imposing negative ecclesiastical sanctions against higher critics. Anyone who would attempt to do this is a person spreading ideas that are "positively dangerous to the faith of ministry and people." These theologians have mixed "wood hay, straw, and stubble with the fine gold, as the standard of orthodoxy, and have presumed to set it up as a bulwark against the vast and profound discoveries of modern science."⁽⁹²⁾ "They are the true successors of the Pharisees. . . . Such pretended orthodoxy is real heterodoxy."⁽⁹³⁾ If this is irenic, then Mein Kampf is an etiquette manual.

So, once again, we are confronted with the reality of Briggs' confession. He was claiming to be a representative of the orthodox wing in the denomination; the Princetonians were the true heretics. He did not use the dreaded H word: heresy. He used heterodoxy instead. But Briggs' polemics make it clear in retrospect: orthodoxy is an inescapable concept. It is never a question of orthodoxy vs. no orthodoxy. There is only the question: Whose orthodoxy? What was orthodoxy for Briggs? "It is meek, lowly, and reverent. It is full of charity and love."⁽⁹⁴⁾ And anyone who disagreed with this was obviously full of wood, hay, straw, and stubble, irenically speaking.

3. Evolution

The modern evolutionist teaches that there are two areas governed by the processes of evolution: natural (impersonal) and historical (personal). These correspond to the two idols of man: nature and history. Nature evolves, we are assured, and man's institutions also evolve. Therefore, human law evolves. This means ethics. Here is the underlying message of all evolutionist philosophies: the denial of God's immutable law. The covenant-breaker seeks to break the chains of God's immutable, Bible-revealed law. If this cannot be done, the covenant-breaker faces God's eternal negative sanctions. Escaping God's final judgment is the number-one goal--rarely admitted--of every evolutionist system, whether humanistic or theistic.

Briggs was an evolutionist. He adopted a two-part strategy to prove his case: first, defend the idea of evolution in nature by an appeal to science; second, apply evolution to human thought and institutions, meaning law. For the first 104 pages of Whither?, Briggs presented himself as a defender of the Westminster standards. On page 105, he dropped his mask. He came to the foundational doctrine of his religion: the doctrine of origins. From pages 105 to 107, he dealt with the doctrine of creation. He refused to compromise in any way. He did not mince words. He did not guard his rhetoric. He openly rejected the Confession's teaching. "The doctrine of creation has changed greatly since the Confession was composed. All the profound discoveries of modern science in geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and archaeology, have opened up new problems that were not in the minds of the Westminster divines. Accordingly, there are many different views on this subject now existing in the Presbyterian Church."⁽⁹⁵⁾

He was correct on all points. Only one theologian, Charles Hodge, had publicly rejected Darwinism as atheism, in his book, What Is Darwinism? (1874), published 15 years after Origin of Species and three years after Descent of Man.⁽⁹⁶⁾ No other major Presbyterian theologian had joined him. None of that generation ever did.

Rev. James McCosh, president of the College of New Jersey (1868-88), was a theistic evolutionist. Yet Charles Hodge was the senior trustee at the College when it hired him; he preached the welcoming sermon.⁽⁹⁷⁾ Francis Patton agreed with McCosh on this point. He succeeded McCosh as president (1888-1902), and became president of Princeton Seminary in 1902. Also in the McCosh camp were Warfield, A. A. Hodge, and W. G. T. Shedd, who taught systematic theology at Union.⁽⁹⁸⁾ Princeton had capitulated on the crucial doctrine of origins.⁽⁹⁹⁾ Darwin's extended time scale met little resistance from American evangelicals.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

McCosh had greatly influenced Henry van Dyke, Class of 1872, who went on to become the incarnation of the liberal movement in the Presbyterian Church. He was convinced that McCosh's evolutionary outlook could become the basis for a new philosophical defense of the faith.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ He was correct, but the faith so defended was no longer that of the Westminster Confession, or even the Apostles' Creed. This is why he became a loyal defender of Briggs and an advocate of Confessional revision.

Briggs had to challenge the Confession, for on this point, it is not silent. It specifies a six-day creation (IV:1). He felt safe, however. The six days of creation specified by the Confession are no longer subscribed to by most Presbyterian scholars, he said. "The doctrine of development has the field. . . ."⁽¹⁰²⁾ On this point, Briggs was confident that he would not be challenged by the Princetonians. Briggs then escalated his argument. A higher authority than the Confession has spoken: modern science. "Modern science takes exception to the `six days' and `made of nothing' in their connections in this definition and in their historical interpretation."⁽¹⁰³⁾ He moved from the discarded authority of the Confession to a new source of authority, modern science. No matter what the Princetonians said, had it not been for modern science--not just Darwinism--Christians would still side with Augustine, rejecting as ridiculous any suggestion that the world is much over 6,000 years old.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ Briggs knew it, and they probably did, too.

He correctly linked two doctrines: the six-day creation and creatio ex nihilo. He wanted to destroy men's faith in both doctrines. He believed that if the conclusion of nineteenth-century science (and Aristotle's science)⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ were ever accepted by Christianity--that there was never a time when emptiness preceded matter--then the Confession's doctrine of God's creation of the world out of nothing (III:1) would end. Briggs correctly observed, regarding the eternality of matter, that "the Confession leaves no room for this opinion. . . ."⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ Furthermore, "It is now conceded by many Biblical scholars"--he named none--"that the Old Testament does not teach creation out of nothing, and that the Westminster divines misinterpreted the first chapter of Genesis when they found that doctrine there."⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ The logic of his argument is clear: the Confession is wrong regarding creation--not just the six-day creation, but creation out of nothing.

How could Briggs evade the charge of having abandoned Presbyterianism? Two ways: (1) nobody in a position of influence in the orthodox camp believed in the Confession's statement on six-day creation; (2) the link between the doctrine of the six-day creation and the doctrine of creation out of nothing. Anyone who refused to affirm the first doctrine was in no position to affirm the second. It is illogical to cite the Confession's authority on one issue while rejecting its authority on the other. Briggs was safe.

He did not write all this explicitly. Instead, he relied on rhetoric to defend his theology. This time, it was two-stage rhetoric: the rhetoric of a personal challenge and his familiar rhetoric of deception. His rhetorical device was to leave two things unsaid but implied. First, an implied challenge: since the Princetonians had given up the six-day creation, they could say nothing about Briggs' failure to accept the Confession's standard. He was therefore willing to risk taking the second rhetorical step, although he never expressly stated what he was arguing: he implicitly tied the six-day creation (abandoned by Princeton) to the doctrine of creation out of nothing (still the linchpin of the Princetonian's view of the absolute sovereignty of God and His providential decree). He rejected the second doctrine by rejecting the first. Who would challenge him in a denominational court? Since no Princeton theologian except Charles Hodge had publicly attacked Darwin, and Hodge was dead, who would be willing and able to challenge Briggs' rejection of creatio ex nihilo? Briggs threw down this challenge: "It is impossible at present to hold Presbyterian ministers and professors to the exact statements of this Westminster definition."⁽¹⁰⁸⁾

2. The Evolution of Man

His section on "The Doctrine of Man" follows "creation," as well it should. He rejected the Westminster Confession's statement on original sin. "The Westminster divines did not sufficiently appreciate the ethical development of mankind . . . they left little room for the doctrine of the development of sin."⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ This sounds safe: he was not denying original sin exactly; he was accentuating progressive sin, the covenant-breaker's equivalent of the covenant-keeper's doctrine of progressive sanctification. But by appealing to progressive evil, Briggs was implicitly dropping two correlative doctrines: man's original (definitive) sin and God's final judgment of sin.

Bear in mind: the ultimate objective of evolutionist systems is to refute the existence of God's immutable law, thereby negating the threat of final judgment. On the next page, Briggs wrote: "It is not so easy as it used to be to think that for any act of sin, however small its importance, relatively speaking, the sinner must suffer hell-fire forever, unless redeemed by the grace of God."⁽¹¹⁰⁾ He was careful not to mention James 2:10: "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." So, he concluded, "The Westminster Standards leave this field of the doctrine of sin entirely unworked. Modern German theology has made great progress in this direction, but this progress has not been shared in by British and American dogmaticians."⁽¹¹¹⁾ (It must have been comforting in 1889 to know how much progress German theology had made in explaining away original sin. It was less comforting from 1933 to 1945.)

Without a doctrine of creation out of nothing, there can be no Christian concept of permanently binding revealed law. Without a sovereign Creator God to establish and reveal permanent laws, all laws become subject to change. As he insisted, "The doctrine of development has the field. . . ."⁽¹¹²⁾ Process theology replaces judicial theology. Briggs struck decisively at what was unquestionably the soft underbelly of Princeton's theology: its abandonment of the Confession's doctrine of the six-day creation, without which it becomes very difficult--I would say impossible--to defend the Confession's doctrine of creation out of nothing except on a modern, post-Heisenberg basis.⁽¹¹³⁾ This left the process god of modernism as the manager of nature, not the Bible's sovereign Creator and Sustainer.

Modernism reduces all law to process. In modernist theology, man no longer faces a sovereign Creator who lays down the law. He faces instead a merciful co-worker in the creative process. Side by side, they battle the realm of nature--mechanistic, yet somehow organic; mathematically constrained, yet evolving--in order to establish their mutual freedom. Together they can develop situation ethics. The only final judgment, if any, is the mutually experienced heat death of the universe.⁽¹¹⁴⁾

4. Escaping Final Negative Sanctions

Toward the end of Whither?, Briggs revealed his deep repugnance to the Bible's doctrine of hell. Protestantism, he said, "has so pressed the awfulness of the doctrine of the eternal damnation of the heathen world, exceeding the Christian world by hundreds of millions, that the older doctrine of the damnation of all heathen has been abandoned, and efforts have been made to find some mode of relief by which some or many of the heathen may be saved by the grace of God."⁽¹¹⁵⁾ He adopted the passive voice as a rhetorical device. The older doctrine of hell has been abandoned. By whom? Efforts have been made to find some mode of relief. By whom? What is obvious from his single sentence is this: he and other Presbyterian modernists had already abandoned the doctrine of final judgment. They had not yet come up with a Confessionally acceptable justification for their switch.

Why such concern by modernists over the details of Presbyterian theology? If the modernists had already abandoned the doctrine of hell, why didn't they just leave the Presbyterian Church and join the Unitarians? Because they wanted the vast benefits of Presbyterian Church membership and seminary leadership. They wanted the inheritance, despite their confessional status as the disowned sons of God. They were concerned about the Westminster Confession's theology only to the extent that they were concerned about Church discipline and God's final discipline. Briggs had already made up his mind about hell. What he needed was a way to sell the conservatives on a creedally acceptable rejection of hell, so that he and his colleagues could remain in the denomination, converting others to the old heresy of universal salvation, or near-universalism.

The Damnation of Infants

The longest section of Whither? that deals with the Westminster Confession discusses one of the most obscure doctrines of the Confession. Briggs' section is titled, "Damnation of Infants." He devoted over 16 pages to this topic. There was a reason for his allocation of space.

The Confession teaches that elect infants go to heaven. This appears in Chapter X, Effectual Calling (Sec. 3). The Assembly believed that the infants born to non-Christians are damned from birth unless specially regenerated. If they die as infants, they perish eternally. One commissioner, Anthony Burgess, had written a book in which he stated that "many thousand thousands of pagan-infants are damned. . . ."⁽¹¹⁶⁾ The third committee reporting to the Assembly had originally selected the phrase "elect of infants," not "elect infants."⁽¹¹⁷⁾ Briggs reprinted lengthy passages from the Westminster Assembly's commissioners to prove that they believed this doctrine (pp. 122-32).

Why bother? Because Briggs had spotted a weakness in the Princetonians' position, from Archibald Alexander to his own day. The Princetonians had succumbed to popular opinion: all infants go to heaven. Therefore, to make this opinion fit the Confession, they had to conclude that all infants are elect. In 1869, A. A Hodge wrote: "It is not intended to suggest that there are any infants not elect. . . . [W]e have good reason to believe that all infants are elected."⁽¹¹⁸⁾ He did not offer this "good reason"; he surely did not refer to Esau in the womb, condemned by God as hated. The Bible says that some unborn infants are hated by God, while others are loved by God. The examples are Jacob and Esau, both in the same womb (Rom. 9:10-13). God hated Esau from the beginning, before Esau had done good or evil.⁽¹¹⁹⁾

Briggs quoted several passages from their writings to this effect. Then he responded: "The Presbyterian churches have departed from their standards on this question, and it is simple honesty to acknowledge it."⁽¹²⁰⁾ He was quite correct on both scores: the Presbyterian Church had departed, and the Princetonians should have acknowledged it. But if they were to acknowledge this now, Briggs imagined, he would have them trapped again.

The fact is, if Christians believe that God has surely elected all infants, then their only "guaranteed effective" evangelism programs would be abortion and infanticide (prior to a hypothetical and indeterminate "age of accountability"). This would get every slain infant into heaven, something no theologian or Christian--even the most radical postmillennialist--ever expects to happen with every adult. So, if the chief goal of the Church is to get people saved--the standard view of the modern, pietistic, man-centered Church--then infanticide and abortion are the most appropriate methods of attaining this goal, if all infants are saved by grace. It was this very argument that undermined the position of Union Seminary's professor Shedd. He adopted the view that all infants are elect; only at some later age do they become accountable. One of his students asked him in the classroom if that made Herod one of the great benefactors of his day, since he killed so many small children, guaranteeing their salvation. According to Shedd's successor, liberal theologian William Adams Brown, this question divided the class. The smaller group followed Shedd's "uncompromising Calvinism, while the majority made up their minds that theology was an impossible subject and turned eagerly to the studies which were offered them in other classrooms."⁽¹²¹⁾ (This, of course, is pure rhetoric; seminary students, like all students, rarely turn eagerly to studies in any classroom.) On the other hand, if all infants go to hell, what becomes of covenantal promises to Christians regarding their children? Does infant baptism promise only negative sanctions? What a grim doctrine that would be!⁽¹²²⁾

Briggs had a method to his madness. The Confession also includes in the "elect infant" category "all other elect persons who are uncapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word" (X:3). This seems a covenantally reasonable conclusion from the "elect infants" premise: the God of grace in history makes certain allowances. His grace is, after all, free grace. But these unique and specified exceptions were vital to Briggs' theory of final judgment. He wanted to include virtually everyone else in history and beyond history. Many pages later, he got to the point: "If the divine grace may be applied to the millions of infants dying daily, why not millions of adult heathen?"⁽¹²³⁾ He left it as a question, but he added that it "must be answered before there can be any comfort or stability in modern theology."⁽¹²⁴⁾

The Middle [Intermediate] State

There is another important question: What about life after death? What about the so-called "middle state"? Can adult heathens be converted to saving faith in Jesus Christ after their individual deaths? To get the question answered, Briggs insisted--no, demanded--that the Church should guarantee liberals a kind of safe-passage certificate: "The middle state must be opened up in the discussions that are in progress. There must be the fullest liberty in this debate."⁽¹²⁵⁾ After all, the conservatives had already abandoned the Confession's unstated implication that non-elect infants go straight to hell. "Those who claim to be conservatives in their departures from the Confession have no right to censure those who recognize themselves as progressives."⁽¹²⁶⁾ Then he decided to drive home his point as offensively as possible: "In some respects the conservatives are the greater sinners."⁽¹²⁷⁾ Here it is again: "All theologians are equally sinful, but some are more sinful than others: the conservatives."

He argued that beyond the grave, covenant-breakers get to reassess the claims of the gospel. Only at the final judgment will they run out of time to reassess and be saved. He took this theological approach: affirming the doctrine of the Christian's progressive sanctification, he extended it to heathen who die as heathens. "Sanctification is a work that is carried on by God in a gradual process until perfect holiness has been attained by man."⁽¹²⁸⁾ This process applies to covenant-breakers, too, he insisted, for the Confession "does not say that man is made perfect at the moment of death. The progress in sanctification goes on after death in the middle state, until it is perfected there, and man is prepared for the final judgment."⁽¹²⁹⁾

What does the Larger Catechism say? "They who, having never heard the gospel, know not Jesus Christ, and believe him not, cannot be saved, be they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature, or the laws of that religion which they profess; neither is their salvation in any other, but in Christ alone, who is the Saviour only of his body the church" (Answer 60). Is there hope for those who die out of God's covenant? The Larger Catechism says: "Whereas the souls of the wicked are at their death cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, and their bodies kept in their graves, as in their prisons, till the resurrection and judgment of the great day" (Answer 86b).

Briggs expected the denomination to allow him and his fellow-universalists to debate this openly without threat of the negative sanction of de-frocking. Well, why not? Since he had abandoned the Bible's doctrine of hell in the name of Presbyterian orthodoxy, why should he be punished in a Church court? If God will not bring negative sanctions against heathens after their death, why should the Presbyterian Church bring negative sanctions against liberals on seminary faculties?

One year after the third edition of the book was published, in the aftermath of his 1891 Inaugural Address, Briggs was asked by Union Seminary's Board to defend himself regarding his view of the intermediate state. The Board asked: "Do you believe that the issues of this life are final and that a man who dies impenitent will have no further opportunity of salvation?" Briggs answered: "Yes."⁽¹³⁰⁾ That is to say, Briggs lied. This was the problem with Briggs. When he was caught, he lied. It did not matter what he had written; a lie might get him off the hook, so he lied. Situation ethics was Briggs' ethics; he was an evolutionist. He was determined to remain in good standing with the denomination in order to continue its subversion. Union Seminary cooperated with him. Even after he was de-frocked in 1893, he remained on the Union faculty.

The problem with the conservatives and even the Old School was that they thought the best of Briggs' motives. When it came to heresy in general, they were ready to do battle, but when it came to individuals, they decided to guard their tongues. It would have been regarded as slanderous for them to say that Briggs was a liar. He was a wolf in sheep's clothing, but the Old School could not or would not say this. They were trapped by standards of etiquette and also by the fact that they had jointly published his essays. In a critical review in Warfield's scholarly journal, Talbot W. Chalmers insisted: "But he [Briggs] has said nothing that has not been said before, only in previous cases it was said by those who were outside the evangelical pale."⁽¹³¹⁾ The Old School's problem was that Briggs had said much of it first in Presbyterian Review. The Princeton co-editors had refused to veto any of Briggs' essays until Warfield did in 1889.

Chalmers also praised Briggs' good faith: "No one who has any personal acquaintance with the author of this Inaugural Address will for one moment doubt his entire sincerity and good faith."⁽¹³²⁾ On the contrary, Briggs was sincerely attached to bad faith, which matched his bad theology.⁽¹³³⁾

Schaff: Defender of Briggs' Views

Also on the Union faculty was Philip Schaff, who four decades earlier had taught the same doctrine of the intermediate state that had trapped Briggs, forcing Briggs to lie. Like Briggs, Schaff also renounced this view when he was tried in 1846 by his denomination, the German Reformed Church. He renounced it on the grounds that the Bible does not tell us enough about the intermediate state to make a sure judgment one way or the other.⁽¹³⁴⁾ In other words, he retracted his view on the grounds that no one can say what happens to a sinner's soul immediately after he dies, especially those conservatives who believe in hell. Schaff insisted that "the whole subject of the Middle State of the heathen, and of infants universally is involved in great obscurity, nor can ever be made properly the subject of doctrinal and symbolical teaching."⁽¹³⁵⁾ With this theologically feeble defense, he was able to escape conviction, but he was still speculating in the classroom about the intermediate state in 1859-60.⁽¹³⁶⁾ By then, such speculation was safe; after 1847, there was never again a heresy trial in that denomination.⁽¹³⁷⁾

Schaff formally resigned from the faculty at Mercersberg in 1865.⁽¹³⁸⁾ He joined the Union faculty in 1870.⁽¹³⁹⁾ He literally sat at Briggs' side throughout the trials.⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ He defended Briggs with the same argument that Briggs had used to defended his views in Whither?: on the grounds that Briggs was in fact more orthodox that his critics.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ He had called for creedal revision in 1890. "The old Calvinism is fast dying out," he had announced. "We need a theology and a confession that will . . . prepare the way for the great work of the future--the reunion of Christendom in the Creed of Christ."⁽¹⁴²⁾ Schaff did not defend Briggs because he had become senile or merely because he believed in academic freedom; he defended Briggs because Briggs was an ecumenist.

Schaff rejected heresy trials in the name of Constitutional pluralism, both ecclesiastical and civil: "Heresy trials seem to be an anachronism in our age and country which allow the largest religious liberty consistent with public order and peace."⁽¹⁴³⁾ He cited the trial of Albert Barnes half a century earlier, who was cleared.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ Conclusion in 1892: "This is not an opportune time to stop the legitimate progress of theological investigation and science." The Presbyterian Church "is orthodox and conservative enough, and can afford to be tolerant and liberal without running any risk."⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ In short, no further negative sanctions.

As for the doctrines of inerrancy and the original autographs of the Bible, "These are human fictions contradicted by undoubted facts, and make it impossible to defend the Bible against the objections of critics, historians, and scientists." Then he added the familiar phrase of every humanist-trained Christian academic who finds himself squirming as a certified professional under the pressure of biblical revelation: "It is not a manual of geology, or biology, or astronomy, or chronology, or history, or science."⁽¹⁴⁶⁾

Schaff died in October, 1893. The circumstances of his death were like Machen's: on the road to defend his faith. "As if to illustrate the priority of ecumenism, he attended the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, against medical advice, and spoke one last time about the reunion of Christendom which had shaped so many of his pursuits."⁽¹⁴⁷⁾

5. Ecumenism

Here we come to the institutional bottom line. Here is the institutional heart, mind, and soul of modernism. (The theological heart, mind, and soul is the denial of hell; this is what gives modernists their confidence in pursuing the rest of their program. They share this theology of no eternal sanctions with humanists everywhere.) Briggs was above all an ecumenist. This idea had dominated his thought from the very beginning of his career.⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ His impulse had manifested itself publicly in 1884 with his call for all Presbyterian and Reformed denominations to unite in their foreign missions activities.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ This theme--the need for ecumenical foreign missions--became the starting point for many discussions of ecumenism in the 1890's and beyond: ecumenism's wedge. In the case of the Rockefeller-sponsored Laymen's Inquiry of 1932 and its controversial report, Re-Thinking Missions, a battle over this thesis led to the final battle in the Presbyterian conflict.

Chapter 9 of Whither? is "Barriers." Barriers to what? Church union. These barriers were: the divine right of Church government,⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ subscription to elaborate creeds,⁽¹⁵¹⁾ uniformity of worship,⁽¹⁵²⁾ and traditionalism.⁽¹⁵³⁾

Briggs rejected the Presbyterian hierarchy that possessed sanctions: "The first great barrier to Christian union is the theory of submission to a central ecclesiastical authority claiming divine right of government."⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ Translated into his immediate concerns, he resented a General Assembly that could penetrate the protective judicial boundary of the New York Presbytery. But he could not very well say this. Instead, he used the rhetoric of deception to deflect his readers' focus: "This is the great sin of the Roman Catholic Church, . . ." What he wanted was congregationalism, for the pastor is the sole common denominator: "All Christian churches have pastors, and they cannot work without them. Here is the basis for union."⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ A pastor must be ordained by a bishop.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ This is all the government the Church needs. Yet on the very next page, he abandoned the bishop. Not all churches accept bishops. All churches accept pastors. "Apart from this single church officer there is no agreement whatever."⁽¹⁵⁷⁾

Then exactly where is the Church's judicial unity lodged? Briggs did not say. Not in this book. Not while he was still officially a Presbyterian. He was sure of only this: "The power of the General Assembly ought to be confined to a very few matters, and those of general interest, such as the Constitution of the church and its general work."⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ What about its role as the supreme court of the denomination? What about trying accused heretics? Silence. Rhetorical silence.

What about creeds? They are a hindrance. The "great verities of Protestantism" are "vastly more important than those particular doctrines that distinguish the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Arminian systems."⁽¹⁵⁹⁾ But on what judicial or creedal basis should we limit ourselves to Protestantism? What about Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy? With Rome, he said, there should at least be an alliance. "On all these practical questions of Christianity it is of the highest importance that the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Churches should make an alliance."⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ He did not use the word "union."

Judicially, there was no question about his long-term vision: "The work of Christian Union"--notice that "Union" is capitalized--"is a work which begins in every family, and which rises in greater and greater sweeps of influence until it covers the nation and the Christian world and is absorbed in the innumerable company about the throne of God and the Lamb."⁽¹⁶¹⁾

The Rhetoric of Deception

In Chapter 10, "Thither," he spelled out his vision. His vision was worldwide ecumenism. To palm this off as Presbyterian orthodoxy, he returned to his rhetorical strategy of deception. First, he affirmed his commitment to an undefined something that he called "original Protestantism." Second, he rejected "Protestant scholasticism," meaning Presbyterian orthodoxy. "We have seen that there is a drift in modern Christianity away from the Standards of the Reformation and the Symbols of the 16th and 17th centuries; . . . We have also seen that the barriers between the denominations, erected chiefly in the 17th century, have been broken through, and to a large extent, broken down, and that the great spirit of Christian unity is moving over the troubled waters to bring peace and order out of the confusion and chaos of sects."⁽¹⁶²⁾ This rhetorical strategy rested on a deliberate misrepresentation: the identification of denominationalism--of "sectarianism"--with the seventeenth century ("Protestant scholasticism") rather than the era of the Reformation.

This he knew was a lie. Not to have known that the Reformation split the unity of Christendom and then produced the original break-up of Protestantism--Calvinist, Lutheran, and Anabaptist wings--well before 1535 would have made him an ignoramus. He knew also that his peers knew it was a lie. He had already admitted that the sixteenth century had been a century of creedal revision and extension when he adopted the traditional usage of theologians and spoke of the creeds as symbols.⁽¹⁶³⁾ "These symbols are the Apostles' Creed and the Creeds of the Ecumenical Councils. There was no symbolical advance during the Middle Ages. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were centuries of great symbolical progress."⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ Then why did he resort to this obvious lie? Because this lie was basic to his strategy of subversion. It was a convenient lie, rhetorically speaking. If he could escape Church censures by means of this blatant misrepresentation of the past, this could then become the acknowledged precedent for the modernist takeover of the Presbyterian Church.

Briggs was confident about the ecclesiastical future. There will eventually be ecumenical union. This is guaranteed by the progress of science and reason. "The chief reasons of difference are imperfect knowledge and an indisposition to follow the truth sincerely and wholly without regard to consequences. A higher knowledge will remove the differences."⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ What we have to understand, he said, is that creeds do not define churches. "The symbols of the Churches do not define them. . . ."⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ Neither do majorities in Church courts define churches. "The faith of the church cannot be determined by majorities in ecclesiastical courts or by the dictation of ecclesiastical demagogues or of these little popes in different denominations."⁽¹⁶⁷⁾

Briggs' rhetoric of deception was the irenical aspect of his frontal assault on the Old School and his end-run around the New School. He denied creedalism. He denied the legitimacy of Church courts. He therefore denied the legitimacy of negative Church sanctions. This was fundamental to the Presbyterian modernists' pre-1931 strategy. He had defended in print all five points of modernism. If he could get away with this kind of challenge to authority, then seemingly nothing would stand in the way of the modernists in their strategy of subversion. He did get away with it. But as Solomon warned, pride goeth before destruction. Briggs, as we shall see, did not take Solomon seriously.

"What Will It Take to Provoke Them?"

Machen's critics in the 1920's and 1930's--as well as those liberal critics who have subsequently reviewed his role in the Presbyterian conflict--refer to his sharp rhetoric and uncharitable spirit. Yet Machen rarely named names or called specific opponents to account. Briggs did. Again and again, he identified and dismissed his opponents as not being true Presbyterians. Referring to Warfield and A. A. Hodge's views on the Bible's inspiration, he added: "Other scholars, wiser and greater than they, deny it and do not affirm it."⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ They are walking down "a path of error."⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ He dismissed "Dr. Hodge's private opinion" which "is not Presbyterian doctrine."⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Hodge "changes the order of salvation in an Antinomian direction."⁽¹⁷¹⁾ Here was a man whose theology constituted one long repudiation of the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession, especially its doctrine of final judgment, yet he saw fit to label his opponents as non-Confessional. And in 1889 and 1890, he got away with it.

Because of its confrontational rhetoric, as Christensen has argued, Whither? became an immediate best-seller, going through three printings in a year.⁽¹⁷²⁾ What was the response of the Presbyterian Church to Whither? A collective yawn. A theological and rhetorical frontal assault of this magnitude did not create a firestorm of protest, contrary to another recent observer.⁽¹⁷³⁾ Briggs, understandably, grew more confident. He was willing to take another step to escalate the confrontation. He would test the Old School once again.

A New Professorship

The opportunity for the next test came with his elevation at Union to a new professorship, an endowed chair in biblical theology, in 1890. He stated his views on the Bible once again in his Inaugural Address of January 20, 1891. The address was titled, "The Authority of Holy Scripture." In it, he presented his views regarding the higher criticism of the Bible.

The oddest thing about this address was that he had not originally intended to deliver it. He had intended to speak on biblical geography, but he was pressured to speak about higher criticism by the president of the Board of Directors, Charles Butler, who had donated the enormous sum of $100,000 to endow the new chair.⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ Butler was one of the original founders of the seminary in 1836, as well as a founder of New York University (50 years on its Council), and he was chairman of both boards until he died in 1897.⁽¹⁷⁵⁾ Briggs complied with his request. As he said later, Butler had told him that "under the circumstances forced upon us at this time, it was necessary to select a theme that would vindicate the seminary and myself in the matters under debate."⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ To speak of Union as being forced to do anything was hyperbole; Union was doing all of the forcing, and had been doing it for over a decade.

The Seminary's leaders may nevertheless have seen themselves as the victims of some growing though institutionally silent conspiracy; conspirators sometimes view themselves as victims. Jeschke writes: "A sense of crisis had been growing for some years among those responsible for the administration of the Seminary's affairs. For the most part, it was the result of the aggressive liberalism of Briggs's writings, and to a lesser degree of [Francis] Brown's, and the mounting feeling in the Church was that these men were dangerous." This was a strange feeling, given the fact that Briggs had yet to receive any meaningful opposition institutionally. Opposition was confined to book reviews in denominational magazines, where there were supporters as well as detractors. Jeschke continues: "The processes of change at Union had been accelerated during the decade of the 1880's under the same influences that were at work in other areas of American life affecting a general cultural revolution."⁽¹⁷⁷⁾ Butler seems to have wanted Briggs to get it all into the open. Briggs was ready to do exactly that.

A New Level of Rhetoric

This time Briggs pulled no punches. His evolutionary premises were forthright. His rhetoric was masterful. This time, it was the rhetoric of direct confrontation: no more irenicism. No more Professor Nice Guy. He at last crossed over the boundaries of acceptable Presbyterian discourse. It had taken him since 1876 to do this, for the theological boundaries on all sides had kept moving outward.

One of the more rhetorically memorable passages in his address was his identification of the patriarchs as a bunch of felons. "The ancient worthies, Noah and Abraham, Jacob and Judah, David and Solomon, were in a low stage of moral advancement. Doubtless it is true, that we would not receive such men into our families, if they lived among us and did such things now as they did then. We might be obliged to send them to prison, lest they should defile the community with their example."⁽¹⁷⁸⁾

He also spelled out in graphic detail the implications of the higher criticism of the Bible. His conservative critics could hardly misread his position this time.

It may be regarded as the certain result of the science of the Higher Criticism that Moses did not write the Pentateuch or Job; Ezra did not write the Chronicles, Ezra, or Nehemiah; Jeremiah did not write the Kings or Lamentations; David did not write the Psalter, but only a few of the Psalms; Solomon did not write the Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes, and only a portion of the Proverbs; Isaiah did not write half of the book that bears his name. The great mass of the Old Testament was written by authors whose names or connection with their writings are lost in oblivion. If this is destroying the Bible, the Bible is destroyed already. But who tells us that these traditional names were the authors of the Bible? The Bible itself? The creeds of the Church? Any reliable historical testimony? None of these! Pure, conjectural tradition! Nothing more! We are not prepared to build our faith for time and eternity upon such uncertainties as these. We desire to know whether the Bible came from God, and it is not of any great importance that we should know the names of those worthies chosen by God to mediate His revelation. It is possible that there is a providential purpose in the withholding of these names, in order that men might have no excuse for building on human authority, and so should be forced to resort to divine authority. It will ere long become clear to the Christian people that the Higher Criticism has rendered an inestimable service to this generation and to the generations to come. What has been destroyed has been the fallacies and conceits of theologians; the obstructions that have barred the way of literary men from the Bible. Higher Criticism has forced its way into the Bible itself and brought us face to face with the holy contents, so that we may see and know whether they are divine or not. Higher Criticism has not contravened any decision of any Christian council, or any creed of any Church, or any statement of Scripture itself.⁽¹⁷⁹⁾

He continued: "I shall venture to affirm that, as far as I can see, there are errors in the Scripture that no one has been able to explain away; and the theory that they were not in the original text is sheer assumption, upon which no mind can rest with certainty." He rejected the doctrine of inerrancy. "It is a ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children."⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ To compare the orthodox party's concern over the critics' assertion of errors in the Bible with youthful fears of the bogeyman was rhetorically clever; it was also risky.

Then he went on the verbal offensive against traditionalists in the denomination. He invoked military imagery. "We have undermined the breastworks of traditionalism; let us blow them to atoms."⁽¹⁸¹⁾ The battle has begun, he said. It is a battle over inheritance. At stake are "the most sacred things of our religion. . . ." The "defenders of traditionalism" now confront "the critics, a victorious army, determined to capture all its sacred treasures and to enjoy its heavenly glories."⁽¹⁸²⁾

What of creeds and theology? They are nothing compared to the love of God. "The love of God to the world is more important than all the systems devised by men. It will shine forever as the central sun of the universe, when all the creeds and theologies have been buried in the oblivion of the eternities."⁽¹⁸³⁾ In short, there are no fixed theological standards (point three of modernism's covenant theology), including the Westminster Confession. There will come a day, and now is (he thought), without negative sanctions (point four) against those ordained officers who reject the confessions of this world. "The old methods of building on selected texts and isolated passages, which you will find in all the creeds and in all the dogmatic systems, is about to pass away."⁽¹⁸⁴⁾ This sweeping rejection of proof texts obviously included the 1647 proof texts of the Westminster Confession.

He returned once again to his beloved doctrine of the Middle State: the period that each person will experience between his death and the final resurrection. He knew this sounded like the doctrine of purgatory, and he did not shrink from saying: "The Roman Catholic Church is firmer here. . . ."⁽¹⁸⁵⁾ He then dismissed the traditional Church doctrine that each man suffers God's judgment immediately after his death: a "bugbear."⁽¹⁸⁶⁾

He went on: "Most of the ethical provisions of the Pentateuchal codes were of local and temporal validity. . . ."⁽¹⁸⁷⁾ On this point, there were many conservatives who agreed with him, although their rhetoric on this point was more subdued. But he would soon alienate even them with a defense of rationalism. "I rejoice at the age of Rationalism, with all its wonderful achievements in philosophy."⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ He ended his lecture with a ringing call to action: "Criticism is at work with knife and fire. Let us cut down everything that is dead and harmful, every kind of dead orthodoxy, every species of effete ecclesiasticism, all merely formal morality, all those dry and brittle fences that constitute denominationalism, and are the barriers to Church Unity."⁽¹⁸⁹⁾

At long last, Briggs' rhetoric had caught up with his theology. The burning fire came, but it was not the fire of higher criticism. It was a firestorm of outrage inside the Presbyterian Church. He had finally awakened the conservatives.

Conclusion

What was remarkable about Briggs' career up until 1891 was his immunity from serious criticism. No matter how radical his language in his rejection of the Westminster standards, no one in the Presbyterian Church demanded a retraction. His forthright heretical statements were regarded as judicially inoffensive: "one man's views among many." He had long been persuaded that the Church in the broadest sense needed to abandon the judicial authority of its creeds and confessions, thereby jettisoning almost two millennia of theological and creedal development. In the name of growth, of sanctification, Briggs was ready to substitute a Darwinian evolutionary worldview for Church tradition. This frontal assault on the theological integrity of the Presbyterian Church received only academic responses, and not many of them. Nevertheless, in the year Briggs died, Henry Preserved Smith went so far as to herald Briggs as a conservative,⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ and as late as 1987, a Dallas Seminary Th.D. dissertation described him as "broadly orthodox, affirming the historically fundamental doctrines of the faith against the onslaughts of liberalism."⁽¹⁹¹⁾ This echoed the assessment of Smith, Handy, and Loetscher, who argued in 1963 that Briggs was "remarkably conservative" but had a "caustic style" which caused the reaction.⁽¹⁹²⁾ Briggs is still immune to serious criticism.

Charles Augustus Briggs, more than any Christian intellectual in American history, deserves to be called "underminer of the faith." He was the point man for modernism who devoted his entire career to persuading Christians that the Bible is untrustworthy and has always been untrustworthy, and that modern science is eminently trustworthy. He was the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing, yet historians still see him as a wounded lamb even after he devoured half the flock. The only vaguely redeeming feature of his life of active, defiant subversion is that he later had serious doubts regarding the orthodoxy of those who served with him on Union's faculty after 1895. The convicted heretic was concerned over the public confessions of the unconvicted heretics he had trained.

Every member of Union's faculty was required to sign the following pledge regarding the Westminster Confession: "I do solemnly promise that I will not teach or inculcate anything which shall appear to me to be subversive of said system of doctrines, or the principles of said Form of Government, so long as I shall continue to be a Professor in the Seminary."⁽¹⁹³⁾ In 1904, the Seminary eliminated this requirement.⁽¹⁹⁴⁾ Its confession caught up with its practice. By 1890, Union Seminary was clearly involved in a sham: broken vows, crossed fingers, and subversion. But the denomination seemed powerless to do anything about it.

Briggs' career demonstrates that the Old School had become a spent force judicially by 1890. Its national leaders did not publicly demand a heresy trial for Briggs. Any such suggestion would have to come from others within the denomination. What this meant was that the Old School, short of an unexpected change within the Church, had lost its judicial salt. It could no longer serve as a barrier to the spread of heresy outside the Princeton Seminary campus. Its members could no longer persuade the New School that a serious threat was posed by any given scholar or cleric. Such persuasion would have to come from outside the Old School. The initiator's rhetoric of confrontation--theological arguments clearly would not be sufficient--would have to trigger any organized resistance. Such rhetoric would have to be on an unprecedented scale, given Briggs' existing degree of immunity in 1890. So, he escalated his rhetoric once again. In 1891, he at last met a wall of resistance. It had taken a decade and a half. His rhetoric had finally roused the sleeping giant. The twin questions now would be: How roused and for how long? Would the Church impose sanctions? The crucial issue was sanctions.

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Footnotes:

1. C. A. Briggs to Marvin Briggs, 8 Jan. 1867; cited in Channing Renwick Jeschke, The Briggs Case: The Focus of a Study in Nineteenth Century Presbyterian History (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1966), p. 139.

2. Ibid., p. 128.

3. Ibid., p. 127.

4. Charles Augustus Briggs, General Introduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1900] 1970), p. 287n.

5. Ibid., p. 26.

6. Briggs, American Presbyterianism: Its Origin and Early History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1885), p. 373.

7. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 105.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 106.

10. Briggs, General Introduction, p. 285.

11. Ibid., p. 286.

12. Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 278.

13. Mark A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 16.

14. Briggs, General Introduction, p. 286.

15. Iain Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, [1978] 1986), p. 141. This was a replay of C. H. Toy's experience two years earlier: from a Baptist college to Harvard University in one jump. The magnitude of the jump, however, was less in Smith's case.

16. Briggs, General Introduction, p. 286.

17. Cited in Rogers & McKim, Authority and Interpretation, p. 351.

18. Ibid., p. 352.

19. Leland M. Griffin, "The Rhetoric of Historical Movements," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 38 (April 1952).

20. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

21. Briggs, Biblical Study: Its Principles Methods and History 3rd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1883] 1890).

22. Ibid., p. 81.

23. Ibid., p. 411.

24. Ibid., p. 426.

25. Ibid., p. 428.

26. Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, pp. 106-107.

27. Briggs, Church Unity: Studies of Its Most Important Problems (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), p. 243.

28. Ibid., p. 226.

29. Ibid., p. 322.

30. Ibid., p. 311.

31. Machen, The Origin of Paul's Religion (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1921] 1947), p. 9.

32. Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, p. 109.

33. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), pp. 103-106.

34. Briggs, Whither? A Theological Question for the Times, 3rd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1889] 1890), p. ix.

35. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 41.

36. Briggs, "Revision of the Westminster Confession," Andover Review, 13 (Jan. 1890).

37. James McCosh, Whither? O Whither? Tell Me Where (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889), p. 18. McCosh identified himself as a New Light man (p. 17).

38. Schaff, Creed Revision in the Presbyterian Churches (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), p. 1.

39. Ibid., pp. 13-14.

40. Francis L. Patton, The Revision of the Confession of Faith (1889?). This booklet does not identify its publisher or date of publication.

41. Mark Stephen Massa, S.J., Charles Augustus Briggs and the Crisis of Historical Criticism (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1990), pp. 79-80.

42. It was reintroduced with the 1983 merger with the Southern Presbyterians.

43. Jack Rogers, Presbyterian Creeds: A Guide to The Book of Confessions (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), p. 209.

44. Cited in ibid., p. 211.

45. On the influence of Turretin at Princeton, see Rogers & McKim, Authority and Interpretation, ch. 5: "The Development of Reformed Scholasticism in America." On Turretin's method, see ibid., pp. 172-84. For a critique of their thesis with respect to the supposed uniqueness of the Princetonians' theory of inspiration, see John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1982), chaps, 7, 8.

46. Only in 1992 did the first of four volumes appear in English.

47. The Form of Church-Government, in The Confession of Faith (Inverness: Publications Committee of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, 1966), p. 413.

48. The Form of Government, XIV:iv:1. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904), p. 373.

49. Minutes of the General Assembly, 1911, pp. 197-98.

50. Such as Rogers & McKim: Authority and Interpretation, pp. 348-61. I would also add Ernest Sandeen: "The Princeton Theology: One Source of Biblical Literalism in American Protestantism," Church History, 31 (Sept. 1962).

51. Rogers & McKim, Authority and Interpretation, Part II: "Contemporary Response: Reformed Scholasticism in America and the Recovery of Alternatives in the Reformation Tradition." These Reformation "alternatives" are entirely spurious--an invention of deliberately rigged scholarship--as Woodbridge's refutation proves. I do not remember ever reading a line-by-line critique of a rival scholar's book that is more complete, more utterly devastating than Woodbridge's Biblical Authority. He is polite. He never uses such phrases as "fraud," "faked evidence," and "morally corrupt pseudo-scholarship." He merely provides evidence that seems to lead to such conclusions.

52. Briggs, Whither?, p. ix.

53. Ibid., p. x.

54. Ibid.

55. Richard Kroner, Kant's Weltanschauung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1914] 1956).

56. Alan Ross Pontier, A Survey of American Criticism of Inerrancy During the Last Century, master's thesis, Covenant Theological Seminary (1983), p. 9.

57. Briggs, Biblical Study, p. 123; cited in ibid., p. 120.

58. See Chapter 10, below: section on "The New Princeton."

59. Briggs, Whither?, p. 93.

60. Ibid., ch. 2: "Orthodoxy."

61. Ibid., p. 93.

62. Ibid., pp. 93-94. By biblical theology, he had in mind that theology which teaches that God's revelation progressed in history, meaning changed in theological form and content. Before Geerhardus Vos came to Princeton in 1893, biblical theology meant the presupposition of higher criticism: historically bounded, evolving revelation.

63. Ibid., p. 94.

64. I discuss this book in The Hoax of Higher Criticism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 2: "The Techniques of Higher Criticism."

65. Briggs, Whither?, p. 97.

66. Ibid.

67. See my comments on Wright and Fuller in Hoax, ch. 2.

68. Briggs, Whither?, p. 143.

69. Ibid., p. 145.

70. Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, translated by J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (London: James Clarke, [1525] 1957).

71. Briggs, Whither?, p. 84.

72. Ibid., p. 87.

73. Ibid., p. 88.

74. Ibid.

75. Briggs, Biblical Study, p. 165.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid., p. 166.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid., p. 167.

80. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority, op. cit.

81. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1871]), I:151-82. Patton wrote a defense of the position in the year of the reunion: The Inspiration of the Scriptures (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1869).

82. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority, pp. 122-28.

83. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, p. 23.

84. Briggs, Whither?, pp. 63-64.

85. Ibid., p. 64.

86. Ibid., p. 68.

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid., p. 69.

89. Ibid., p. 70.

90. Ibid., p. 71. The citation is from The Catechising of Families (1683), p. 36.

91. Briggs, Whither?, p. 90.

92. Ibid., p. 14.

93. Ibid., p. 15.

94. Ibid., p. 7.

95. Ibid., p. 105.

96. See Joseph E. Illick, III, "The Reception of Darwinism at the Theological Seminary and the College at Princeton, New Jersey, I," Journal of Presbyterian History, 38 (1960), pp. 152-65.

97. J. David Hoeveler, Jr., James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: from Glasgow to Princeton (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 230.

98. Gary Scott Smith, The Seeds of Secularization: Calvinism, Culture, and Pluralism in America, 1870-1915 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Christian University Press, a subsidiary of William B. Eerdmans, 1985), p. 98.

99. Deryl F. Johnson, The Attitudes of the Princeton Theologians toward Darwinism and Evolution from 1859-1929 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1968).

100. David N. Livingstone, "B. B. Warfield, the Theory of Evolution and Early Fundamentalism," Evangelical Quarterly, 58 (Jan. 1986); Livingstone, Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1987).

101. Tertius van Dyke, Henry van Dyke: A Biography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), p. 37.

102. Briggs, Whither?, p. 105.

103. Ibid.

104. Augustine, The City of God, XVIII:40.

105. Aristotle, Physics, VIII.

106. Briggs, Whither?, p. 106.

107. Ibid.

108. Ibid.

109. Ibid., p. 108.

110. Ibid., p. 109.

111. Ibid.

112. Ibid., p. 105.

113. I have in mind physicist Alan Guth's "inflation" theory of the Big Bang: the possibility of random creation out of nothing. See Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988), p. 22.

114. Ibid., ch. 2.

115. Briggs, Whither?, p. 286.

116. Ibid., p. 122.

117. Ibid.

118. A. A. Hodge, The Confession of Faith (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, [1869], 1992), pp. 174-75.

119. This amazes modern man, including most modern Christians. But the astounding theological fact is that God loved Jacob from the beginning, despite original sin.

120. Briggs, Whither?, p. 135.

121. William Adams Brown, A Teacher and His Times: A Story of Two Worlds (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940), p. 77.

122. The Church formally adopted the "all infants are elect" view in the revision of 1903 (X:3).

123. Briggs, Whither?, p. 221.

124. Ibid.

125. Ibid., p. 222.

126. Ibid.

127. Ibid.

128. Ibid., p. 147.

129. Ibid.

130. Max Gray Rogers, "Charles Augustus Briggs: Heresy at Union," in American Religious Heretics: Formal and Informal Trials, edited by George H. Shriver (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1966), p. 102. See also G. L. Prentiss, The Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York: Its Design and another Decade of its History (Asbury Park, New Jersey: Pennypacker, 1899), p. 544.

131. Talbot W. Chalmers, "The Inaugural Address of Professor Briggs," Presbyterian and Reformed Review, 2 (1891), p. 498.

132. Ibid.

133. Yes, I know: my saying such a thing in print is considered bad form in academic circles, which is one reason why Christianity's orthodox academic representatives always seem to lose their battles: we are not allowed to call a spade a spade. Our opponents hold us to tight rhetorical standards when they review our books; then they indulge in slander and rhetorical misrepresentation when they write about us. As an example, consider Westminster Seminary graduate and theological defector Edward J. Carnell's description of fundamentalism: "Fundamentalism is orthodoxy gone cultic." Carnell, The Case for Orthodox Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959), p. 113. Or this, regarding fundamentalism's ideological thinking. "Ideological thinking is rigid, intolerant, and doctrinaire; it sees principles everywhere, and all principles come in clear tones of white and black; it exempts itself from the limits that original sin places on history. . ." (p. 114). This book was published by the publishing arm of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. Carnell's words were quoted as sociologically authoritative in a doctoral dissertation written to show that Machen and his colleagues were given to rhetorical excess. Delwyn G. Nykamp, A Presbyterian Power Struggle: A Critical History of Communication Strategies in the Struggle for Control of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., 1922-1926 (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1974), p. 73.

134. George H. Shriver, "Philip Schaff: Heresy at Mercersberg," Rogers, American Religious Heretics, p. 44.

135. Cited in ibid., p. 45.

136. Ibid., p. 46.

137. Ibid., p. 47.

138. Ibid., p. 49.

139. Ibid., p. 50.

140. Ibid.

141. Ibid.

142. Schaff, Creed Revision in the Presbyterian Churches (1890), cited in Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 42.

143. Schaff, "Other Heresy Trials and the Briggs Case," Forum (Jan. 1892), p. 621.

144. Ibid., pp. 623-24.

145. Ibid., p. 633.

146. Ibid.

147. "Schaff, Philip," Dictionary of American Religious Biography, edited by Henry Warden Bowden (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 394.

148. Richard L. Christensen, "Charles Augustus Briggs: Critical Scholarship and the Unity of the Church," American Presbyterians, 69 (Fall 1991). Cf. Christensen, The Ecumenical Orthodoxy of Charles Augustus Briggs: Critical Scholarship in the Service of Church Unity (unpublished Th.D. dissertation, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, 1992).

149. Christensen, American Presbyterians, p. 154.

150. Briggs, Whither?, p. 226.

151. Ibid., p. 239.

152. Ibid., p. 248.

153. Ibid., p. 258.

154. Ibid., p. 226.

155. Ibid., p. 230.

156. Ibid.

157. Ibid., p. 231.

158. Ibid., p. 233.

159. Ibid., p. 240.

160. Ibid., p. 272.

161. Ibid., p. 265.

162. Ibid., p. 266.

163. On the use of the term "symbol," see "Symbol" and "Symbolical Books" in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, edited by John M'Clintock and James Strong, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1879), X:65-68.

164. Briggs, Whither?, p. 19.

165. Ibid., p. 276.

166. Ibid.

167. Ibid.

168. Ibid., pp. 64-65.

169. Ibid., p. 86.

170. Ibid., p. 95.

171. Ibid., p. 139.

172. Christensen, "Briggs," American Presbyterians, op. cit., p. 158.

173. Donald G. Dawe, "Whither?" ibid., 66 (Winter 1988), p. 284.

174. "Statement of Dr. Briggs," Prentiss, Union, p. 332. On the size of the donation, see Jeschke, Briggs Trial, p. 291. He cites the original published version of the Address: The Edward Robinson Chair of Biblical Theology in the Union Theological Seminary, New York (Union Theological Seminary, 1891), pp. 1-3.

175. Prentiss, "Biography of Charles Butler," ibid., p. 502.

176. Ibid., p. 332.

177. Jeschke, Briggs Trial, p. 292.

178. Briggs, The Authority of Holy Scripture: An Inaugural Address, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891); reproduced in Briggs, Inaugural Address and Defense, 1891/1893 (New York: Arno Press, 1972), p. 56.

179. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

180. Ibid., p. 35.

181. Ibid., p. 41.

182. Ibid.

183. Ibid., p. 49.

184. Ibid., p. 62.

185. Ibid., p. 54.

186. Ibid.

187. Ibid., p. 58.

188. Ibid., p. 66.

189. Ibid., p. 67.

190. H. P. Smith, "Charles Augustus Briggs," American Journal of Theology, 17 (Oct. 1913), p. 497.

191. M. James Sawyer, Jr., Charles Augustus Briggs and the tensions in late nineteenth century American theology (Th.D. dissertation, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1987), Abstract, concluding words.

192. H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher, eds., American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), II:276.

193. Cited in Robert T. Handy, "Union Theological Seminary in New York and American Presbyterianism, 1836-1904," American Presbyterians, 66 (Summer 1988), p. 116.

194. Ibid., p. 121.

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