Phase 2: Whose Authority?

3

AUTHORITY: BIBLICAL, CONFESSIONAL, ECCLESIASTICAL

Presbyterianism has made provision for an ever-fresh resort to that fountain of truth. It does not require us to receive the Confession of Faith as infallible. It does not tie us up to those precise words and forms of expression; it does not require us to subscribe to every proposition contained in it, but only to receive it as containing, according to its true intents and original meaning, the system of doctrines taught in the Scriptures. There is no dispute now between the two parties (whatever there may have been once), in regard to that matter. True, it would be hard to find in the Confession any other than a pretty strong Calvinism; but Calvinism is not that iron thing which some have supposed it. None of us takes it as such; none of us preaches it as such. We mean to have all reasonable liberty. But, in the union or out of it, we mean to maintain and teach the doctrines of the Confession.

Jonathan F. Stearns (1870)⁽¹⁾

Rev. Stearns, a New School man, articulated the opinion of his wing of Presbyterianism: "Calvinism is not that iron thing which some have supposed it." Orthodox theology, Stearns implied, no longer possessed an ecclesiastical rod of iron to defend itself from its enemies. He represented the winning side at the beginning of a long retreat by the Old School. But in winning, he and his associates committed institutional suicide. They did so by swallowing repeated doses of a slow-acting poison. Their mortal enemies had deliberately re-labeled the bottle and had disguised its contents by adding an organic extract of their favorite flavor: experientialism. It took two generations for this poison to complete its work. The antidote was the Old School's judicial theology, but it tasted like castor oil to the New School. Rarely would they swallow it, and then only under extreme internal discomfort caused by an inadvertent overdose of the poison. When the source of their temporary discomfort was purged, they returned to their old habits.

The Civil War settled the ecclesiastical debate over the legitimacy of chattel slavery. It was that settlement on approximately 10,400 battlefields that sanctioned the reunification of the Northern Presbyterian Church. It took more than a century for the North-South division to be healed denominationally, and the healing balm was neo-orthodoxy.

The unification of the Presbyterian Church in 1869 settled another old issue: What constitutes the mark of a true Christian? The Old Side and Old School had answered: profession of faith and an outward life obedient to God's moral standards; nothing else. The New Side and New School had added: experience of salvation. Unification made it clear that the New School's definition could no longer be excluded from the Church by the Old School through the imposition of the sanction of wholesale removal (1837) or retail excommunication (one trial at a time).

The unification did not settle the other divisive issue: the structure of authority over missions, education, and other kingdom work. The Old School had demanded hierarchical control; the New School had defended what would today be called parachurch ministries. Judicially, it was this issue that led to the final phase of the Presbyterian conflict in 1933 to 1936. But in that case, the Old School had reversed its position and was defending the position of the New School in 1836.

Cosmic Personalism and Judicial Representation

The Bible teaches that all of history is personal. It is also representational. A sovereign God is represented by His people and His angels, and a non-sovereign Satan is represented by his people and his angels. Adam represented God to the creation and mankind before God. The serpent represented Satan to Adam and the serpent species before God. Adam's fall condemned mankind judicially. Jesus, the second Adam (I Cor. 15:45), represented God to humanity and His people before God. His triumph restored His people judicially. There is no escape from the doctrine of representation. All authority is necessarily hierarchical.⁽²⁾ All authority is necessarily personal.

More than any other theology in history, Calvinism is a theology of judicial representation. Calvin taught this clearly,⁽³⁾ but the Puritans made it the bedrock foundation of their theology. The Puritan system was called Federal Theology. It was based on the biblical concept of judicial representation: Adam representing fallen mankind in the covenant of works;⁽⁴⁾ Jesus Christ representing redeemed mankind in the covenant of grace.⁽⁵⁾ The doctrine of imputation⁽⁶⁾ was fundamental to original Presbyterianism's concept of soteriology (salvation): Adam's fallen humanity is imputed by God judicially to all men;⁽⁷⁾ Christ's perfect humanity is subsequently imputed judicially by God to the elect.⁽⁸⁾

The biblical doctrine of representation requires that a covenantal representative speak in the name of God: in Church, State, and family. The Church's representative is ordained by the Church to speak authoritatively. Having spoken, he must then be able to enforce this word. Church government is the means by which the representative's word is formally enforced, modified, or overturned by a higher representative. Sanctions--point four of the biblical covenant model--are brought to bear in specific cases in order to enforce the representative's word: point two.

The theological debates that shook the Northern Presbyterian Church from 1874 to 1900 centered on questions of authority. The primary issue was the authority of the Bible. This was the debate over higher criticism, as well as the non-debate over lower criticism. The secondary issue was derivative: What is the authority of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which proclaims "the infallible truth and divine authority" of the Bible in Chapter I, Section 3?

The Source of Authority

The source of law in any society is the god of that society.⁽⁹⁾ This god is said to be the source of law because it is said to be the source of origins. The battle between evolutionism and creationism is a battle over the question of law in every realm. It is equally true to say that the battle over law--revealed, natural, and social--is today a battle over evolutionism vs. creationism. Any study that deals with the twin ideas of law and origins independently of each other is misleading.

The battle over the integrity of the Bible is a battle over law, for it is a battle over the nature of God and His revelation of Himself in history. The two-part question is this: What is the source of law, and how do we gain knowledge of it? Point three of the biblical covenant model--law--points us backward to point two (authority) and forward to point four (judgment).

For over a century in the West, this deeply theological debate over authority, law, and judgment has been framed in terms of two related issues: (1) Darwinian evolutionary process and modern science vs. the Bible; (2) historical criticism of the Bible vs. inerrancy.⁽¹⁰⁾ The debate is over the source of authority and man's judgment in history: historical process or the Bible. Should men use history to judge (interpret) the Bible or should they use the Bible to judge (interpret) history? How should men interpret the facts of history: In terms of history or in terms of the Bible? How should men interpret the Bible: In terms of history or in terms of the Bible? The supreme authority is self-authenticating and self-judging: either history or the Bible. The debate is between historicism and biblical infallibility.

Chapter I of the Westminster Confession contained the following provisions:

IV. The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.

VIII. The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which, at the time of the writing of it, was most generally known among the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as, in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them.

The Confession set forth the Presbyterian Church's official position regarding the source of authority: the Bible. The Bible is the fundamental law of the Church. The authority of the Church rests on the authority of the Bible. To attack the authority of the Bible is to attack the authority of the Church.

The Revival of Idolatry

Man worships two kinds of idols: idols of nature and idols of history.⁽¹¹⁾ The nineteenth century saw a revival of both of these idols. The idol of nature had been worshipped furtively in the shadows of the mechanistic world of Newtonianism ever since the late seventeenth century. But mechanism has not been nearly so powerful a metaphor as organicism. Nisbet is correct: "There has never been a time in Western thought when the image of social change has not been predominantly biological in nature."⁽¹²⁾ Within half a century of Newton's death, the idol of nature was dressed up once again in its familiar organic wardrobe: Rousseau's naturalism.⁽¹³⁾ So attired, it was brought into the public square by the French Revolution. "The true priest of the Supreme Being," Robespierre declared in June of 1794, justifying the Festival of the Supreme Being, "is Nature itself; its temple is the universe; its religion virtue; its festivals the joy of a great people assembled under its eyes to tie the sweet knot of universal fraternity and to present before it [Nature] the homage of pure and feeling [sensible] hearts."⁽¹⁴⁾

The idol of history had been worshipped by the Enlightenment, both right wing and left wing. Adam Ferguson's social evolutionism and the Continental Enlightenment's faith in rational progress were equally devoted to the idol of history, although faith in natural law was never absent,⁽¹⁵⁾ especially in France.⁽¹⁶⁾ It was in Darwinism that the two idols were fused into a single, intellectually compelling cosmology. This cosmology remains the dominant intellectual alternative to Christianity in the West.

Historicism

In the worldview known as historicism, the laws of history are derived from history and change with history. Law becomes a function of history. There is no unchanging metaphysical order above history or outside of history that somehow provides structure to history. History and its laws are autonomous. Man is bounded by history, and only by history. There can be no legitimate appeal beyond history. Rushdoony is correct: such an outlook leads to tyranny. "Humanistic law, moreover, is inescapably totalitarian law. Humanism, as a logical development of evolutionary theory, holds fundamentally to a concept of an evolving universe. This is held to be an `open universe,' whereas Biblical Christianity, because of its faith in the triune God and His eternal decree, is said to be a faith in a `closed universe.' This terminology not only intends to prejudice the case; it reverses reality. The universe of evolutionism and humanism is a closed universe. There is no law, no appeal, no higher order, beyond and above the universe. Instead of an open window upwards, there is a closed cosmos. There is thus no ultimate law and decree beyond man and the universe. Man's law is therefore beyond criticism except by man. In practice, this means that the positive law of the state is absolute law. The state is the most powerful and most highly organized expression of humanistic man, and the state is the form and expression of humanistic law. Because there is no higher law of God as judge over the universe, over every human order, the law of the state is a closed system of law. There is no appeal beyond it. Man has no `right,' no realm of justice, no source of law beyond the state, to which man can appeal against the state. Humanism therefore imprisons man within the closed world of the state and the closed universe of the evolutionary scheme."⁽¹⁷⁾

Historicism as an ideal for understanding man can be found in Rousseau's writings: his timeless suggestion that no natural law order stands outside man, independent of the history of man's institutions.⁽¹⁸⁾ But its academic form is more closely associated with nineteenth-century German academia. Historicism was given tremendous new impetus by Darwinism, which views all of nature as evolving: the product of historical forces. In Darwinism, the category of static natural law disappears. Nature is defined in terms of evolutionary processes. Nature is thereby freed from all supernaturalism, i.e., anything beyond nature's domain. The wholly natural processes of the universe are understood to be closed to God, but they are open to man, who can understand these processes. Natural selection provides direction to life even though nature seeks no ends. Man, as the only form of life that can direct the impersonal forces of nature toward his own ends, becomes the sole source of meaning and teleology in nature, the source of cosmic personalism. Nature is governed by the laws of history, but only man can understand them--or at least certain specially trained or gifted men. Man becomes the source of progress in Darwinism--the only being capable of defining progress, discovering progress, and directing progress.

Historicism's faith in man's ability to discover the laws governing nature, including man, is a deeply flawed faith.⁽¹⁹⁾ It proclaims a source of understanding and perhaps even predictability--historical laws--that are themselves in constant flux. But the faithful believed that this obvious contradiction, as old as Hericlitus' flowing river of history, could be overcome by additional historical research and more attention to methodology--a characteristically Germanic academic faith. The historicist treated the laws of history as a chef without a recipe might explain the art of cooking stew: if the stew tastes odd, add more ingredients; it might just work out. This time, anyway. For the cook. And if someone else does not like how it tastes, he can add more ingredients from his pantry. "Everyman his own cook," but without a recipe that can be proven scientifically to be valid for longer than the tick of a clock.

The end result of historicism's relativism is today's politically correct academic methodology known as deconstruction: the affirmation of texts without context, i.e., texts only for me, here and now--a denial of the relevance of the past. But this existentialist dead-end was not foreseen by those enthusiastic pilgrims travelling down historicism's highway in the late nineteenth century. The road signs provided by the Bible and by the tradition of natural law--medieval and Newtonian--had not yet been blown down by the hurricane winds conjured up by historicism and its two lineal descendants, nationalism and Marxist revolution.

The Old School's Task

The historicist worldview became increasingly dominant in nineteenth-century intellectual circles.⁽²⁰⁾ This development offered a crucial challenge to Old School theologians. They had to explain the permanent authority of the Bible to a society that was increasingly ready to accept the theology of historicism, which rests on the presupposition that the only law is the law of change. If the Bible is bounded by time, how can it be immune from the temporal relativism of historical process? If it was written by men in one era, how can it be authoritative in another era or in any society outside of the one to which it was revealed? Here is a variation of the ancient debate between Parmenides and Heraclitus, which the Greeks never successfully answered: "If law is constant, what role can it play in a world in which everything is in flux? Where are the points of contact between unchanging law and ceaseless flux?" Liberal theologians asked: "Is the Bible such a point of contact? If so, how?"

The triumph of historicism in the late nineteenth century established the intellectual task for the Old School theologians: to refute the ethical relativism of organicism-historicism without relying on the static cosmic impersonalism of traditional mechanism-Newtonianism. The fate of the Presbyterian Church would be determined by the answers that its leaders would adopt and by their ability to persuade its voting and paying members. Old School Presbyterians were regarded as the best equipped Protestant theologians in this intellectual battle. This was the opinion of their supporters from outside Presbyterianism and also by the higher critics. If the Old School's handful of academic leaders--Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield--could be judicially isolated on this question, the higher critics would score a crucial victory. If they could not be isolated, then the Presbyterian higher critics would face a major problem: how to remain inside the denomination in order to carry on their work of evangelism for Darwinism.

The larger issue was the integrity of God's revelation of Himself in written form. A subordinate but important issue was Presbyterian law. The first and longest chapter in the Confession is On the Holy Scriptures. The Westminster Assembly placed the Church under the authority of the Bible. In legal terminology, the Bible served the Westminster Confession as fundamental law. The Confession itself was therefore the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church.⁽²¹⁾ Like the U.S. Constitution, which identifies the source of its authority--"We the People"--the Westminster Confession identifies the source of its authority: the written text of Scripture.

Confessional Authority and Historical Change

In order for this hierarchical legal relationship to be believable, it was mandatory for the Presbyterian Church to be willing to revise the Confession periodically. If it did not do so, then operationally the Confession would take on the character of fundamental law. But the Westminster Assembly stated categorically that no Church's testimony can be equal to the Bible's: "The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God" (I:4).

If the Confession remained static, then any new theological insights derived from the Bible would create problems for the Church. They would have to be ignored, actively suppressed, or unofficially adopted despite the Confession's statements to the contrary. Thus, to the extent that widespread belief within the Presbyterian Church deviated from the Confession, the integrity of the Confession would be undermined. It would no longer serve as Constitutional law, i.e., the legal basis of Church sanctions.

A theological confession is like a speed limit sign posted on a two-lane highway. As time goes on, the road may be widened to four lanes and then six lanes. Car design is improved, so cars can go faster without seriously reducing passenger safety. The old speed limit becomes outdated. Even careful drivers begin to ignore the sign. If the speed limit is not raised and the sign is not replaced, the incongruity between the new historical reality and the posted speed limit destroys the authority of traffic laws in general. The sign becomes a museum piece, a quaint reminder of horse-and-buggy days gone by. No jury will predictably convict a speeder who exceeds the sign's posted limit. To make sure that some speed limit is enforceable on the highway, the highway department will have to raise the speed limit. Otherwise, original sin being what it is, too many people will drive too fast to be safe. But exactly how fast is "safe"? Auto manufacturers will sometimes overestimate the safety of their products. So will highway engineers. The speed limit may be raised too high by the authorities. A lot of people will then be injured.

The modernists wanted no enforceable limit on any road. They wanted to limit Church authorities' sanctions to mere persuasion. Meanwhile, they were all test-driving new roadsters. A lot of innocent people were about to get run over, and a lot of deadly car crashes would soon take place. But the Confession still read "25" on certain six-lane highways.⁽²²⁾

Challenging the Old School

There is progress in history. This includes creedal progress. This is why Presbyterians affirmed that the Westminster Confession was superior to previous confessional statements. But belief in general is not the same as action in the present. The Old School did not seek Confessional revisions in a denomination dominated by New School members. The Old School therefore found itself in a dilemma: some of its beliefs had changed. The Confession says that only elect infants go to heaven (X:3). Old School theologians by the late nineteenth century believed that all infants are elect. This discrepancy between the strict language of the Confession and actual belief was used by modernists against the Old School and against the judicially binding authority of the Confession.

There was another way to undermine the judicial authority of the Confession: undermine the judicial authority of the Bible. The Westminster Assembly had declared that the texts of the Bible, "being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical" (I:8). How pure is pure? If there are errors in the existing texts, then this statement by the Confession regarding their preservation in history is called into question. At the very least, defining "pure" becomes mandatory. But if the historical texts were copied faithfully, and errors have nevertheless been found, this calls into question the meaning of "immediately inspired." Inspiration no longer means absolutely accurate, and without absolute accuracy, the judicial authority of the Bible is undermined. This moves the source of law away from the Bible as God's authoritative word to man and his authoritative word. This is where higher critics of the Bible want to move it.

The battle for the Bible was therefore a battle for the authority of the Westminster Confession. The Presbyterian higher critics had a two-fold goal: (1) undermine the judicial authority of the Bible as fundamental law; (2) undermine the judicial authority of the Westminster Confession as constitutional law. The Old School sought to affirm both positions. Both sides understood how high the stakes were: the future of the Presbyterian Church and, more broadly, the future of whatever traces remained of Christendom in American Protestant thought.

The Claims of Higher Criticism

The claims of Old Testament higher critics always begin with the supposed fact that Moses did not write the Pentateuch. Genesis 1, with its story of the six-day creation, must be jettisoned. So must Genesis 8: Noah's worldwide flood. It was a rejection of the higher critics' thesis of the later, multiple authorship of the Pentateuch that was at the heart of Old Princeton's view of inerrancy. This public battle began in 1881 in the pages of a newly established scholarly journal, The Presbyterian Review.

The Old School understood that the authority of the New Testament rests on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Jesus said: "For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death" (Mark 7:10). "Now that the dead are raised, even Moses shewed at the bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Luke 20:37). "And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). "And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me" (Luke 24:44).⁽²³⁾ To undermine the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is inevitably to undermine the authority of Jesus Christ. The American opponents of higher criticism recognized this threat, despite the repeated assurances of the critics that they were fully committed to Christ.⁽²⁴⁾ For those Christians who were committed to the New Testament's authoritative revelation of Jesus and His words, there would be grave problems with higher criticism.

Higher Criticism's Interpretation of the Bible

Traditional higher critics have been masters of grammar--too clever by half, as the English cleverly say. For example, they believe they have found two grammars (usages) in the book of Isaiah, so they conclude that there were two Isaiahs: one who wrote Isaiah 1-39, and another who wrote what followed. (These days, their computers find three Isaiahs.) They have used grammar as a way to undermine men's faith in the unity of the biblical text. (A later generation of higher critics has searched for literary unity in the texts, a remarkable reversal of methodology, but not of conclusions, i.e., the Bible is still not acceptable as the authoritative word of God.)

They have also used history to undermine men's faith. They rely on the historical documents of non-Hebrew societies, especially chronologically impaired Egypt,⁽²⁵⁾ to criticize the Bible's chronology. As a result, they have produced a convoluted, incoherent jumble of dates for biblical events and texts. On the basis of this monumental jumble, they conclude that this or that passage in this or that text of the Bible was written hundreds of years later than the author of the text claimed. Later authors must have added materials to old texts, or else they wrote forgeries that claimed to be old. (Note: a higher critic never uses the pejorative word forgery when describing what would, in any other setting, be called a forgery. There is a very good reason for his verbal reticence: he is a subversive. He is a Trojan horse--I can use imagery, too--not a battering ram. His goal is to steal the inheritance, not burn it down.) This later-author methodology is applied without exception to every passage in which the writer made a prediction that was clearly fulfilled--above all, the book of Daniel: prophecies regarding three future empires (Dan. 2:37-45; 8).

The higher critics are generally self-conscious evolutionists. They assume that social law changes as societies advance over time. They are ethical relativists with respect to time.⁽²⁶⁾ This is a fundamental tenet of their theology, for their number-one goal is to deny God's final judgment, hell, and the lake of fire. Therefore, they attack the Bible's revelation of a permanent judicial standard by which God will bring His wrath against covenant-breakers throughout eternity. Higher critics present God's law, and therefore biblical theology--the progress of God's revelation in the Bible--as an evolutionary process.

Finally, they appeal to biblical symbols. This is the academic discipline known as biblical theology. (Not symbolic theology: the nineteenth-century phrase "symbolic theology" referred to the formal study of Church creeds.)⁽²⁷⁾ The discipline of biblical theology in America was originally a subset of higher criticism. Charles A. Briggs gave his ill-fated 1891 Inaugural Address⁽²⁸⁾ on the occasion of his having been appointed to an endowed chair in biblical theology at New York's Union Seminary. Shailer Mathews in 1936 summarized the importance of the introduction of the modernists' version of the discipline of biblical theology: "This was really an introduction of historical relativity into theological thought."⁽²⁹⁾ Biblical theology for the higher critic was crucial: a means of undermining the unity of systematic theology--the theology established by examining specific theological texts of the Bible and comparing them with other texts. This method is dismissed by the higher critic as "proof-texting." The texts are assumed by the higher critic to have no unity because they were written by different men, just as they are assumed by the orthodox theologian to possess unity because they came from God. There is no way to reconcile these rival assumptions. No supposedly neutral methodology can unify them. The two operating methodological assumptions are irreconcilable.

Higher Criticism in the United States

The cauldron of higher criticism had been bubbling in Germany⁽³⁰⁾ for almost a century by the 1870's. Then it overflowed into Anglo-American churches. In the mid-1870's, several men on both sides of the Atlantic began to announce their views in public lectures and articles to academic audiences. The debate surfaced in a special way: a debate over Church sanctions.

The existence of a looming institutional conflict over higher criticism in Anglo-American churches began to surface between 1875 and 1880. The modernist leader, Washington Gladden, remarked in his 1909 Recollections that in 1875, Congregational ministers in Massachusetts were aware of higher criticism, and were both shaken and in agreement with it, but "there was still great timidity in admitting so much in the hearing of the public."⁽³¹⁾ The conflict over higher criticism appeared in Presbyterian circles in 1881, escalated for two decades, and then receded until 1922. It was almost like a naval campaign. A few submarine scouts put up their periscopes, 1875-76. They fired a few torpedoes and were fired upon, 1876-83. The surface ships' guns grew strangely silent, 1884-91. Then, provoked by a trio of subs, they sank two and chased away a third, 1893-1900. Then the war seemed to end. But a growing fleet of modernist Presbyterian subs remained submerged beneath the waves, 1900-22. The fleet's main center of production was Germany, but Union Seminary became the most prominent U.S. contractor.

A defensive intellectual campaign against German higher criticism had been intensifying in Northern Presbyterian circles since the 1830's. From 1800 to 1850, the targets were outside the denomination and generally outside the country. Between 1829 and 1850, Princeton Review published seventy articles against higher criticism, and the rate increased after 1850.⁽³²⁾ But it was a Baptist, C. H. Toy, who was the first American to be dismissed for his stand. The Baptist Theological School of Louisville accepted Toy's resignation in 1879.

The Toy Case

Toy had received his bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia had studied at the University of Berlin in the same period as Briggs had: the mid-1860's. (He shared both alma maters with Briggs.) He had begun to teach higher criticism, quietly, in his classes around 1877.⁽³³⁾ In 1869, he had told his students that he was a Darwinist. The seminary covered up for him, fearing to disturb donors.⁽³⁴⁾ Toy wrote an essay for the Sunday School Times in 1879 in which he claimed that two authors had written Isaiah. Immediately, a Reformed Church of America publication, The Christian Intelligencer, attacked the essay and the Sunday School Times. This is what first brought the problem to the attention of the Baptist public. Toy defended his beliefs as being consistent with the Fundamental Principles of the seminary, but he also submitted his resignation, which the Board of Trustees accepted. No formal sanctions had been applied. His public confession now matched his true faith.

A year later, he was hired by Harvard University as a professor of Hebrew. The president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, had originally invited W. Robertson Smith, a Scottish higher critic who was under attack by his denomination, to fill the position, but Smith decided to go to the English Cambridge instead of the American Cambridge. Toy's upward academic mobility was neither normal nor random for Southern Baptist professors. It indicated a commitment on the part of Harvard University's leaders to endorse publicly, as powerfully as possible, Harvard's challenge to Christian orthodoxy. At Harvard, he came clean. As soon as he arrived, he announced that he wished to be known as a theist, not a Christian. His charade ended when his funding changed.⁽³⁵⁾ Harvard was not alone. The Yale Divinity School began its visible drift into modernism in 1881, when newly appointed Professor Benjamin Bacon began promoting higher criticism. A former Congregationalist minister, Bacon rejected the literal account of the story of Jesus' feeding of the five thousand, using three different German critical scholars as support: Paulus, Strauss, and Bauer.⁽³⁶⁾ In 1886, he was joined by George Barker Stevens, who rejected the doctrine of Christ's substitutionary atonement.

Higher criticism surfaced in the United States almost overnight. It had simmered in New England⁽³⁷⁾ and off-shore since the turn of the century; German university-trained seminary professors brought it back with them. Between 1880 and 1900, it gained a foothold in the major universities and the mainline denominations' seminaries.⁽³⁸⁾ By 1929, it reigned supreme academically everywhere in the North except Princeton Seminary.

Lower Criticism and the Westminster Confession

The problem posed by the higher critics was also posed by the technical subdiscipline of lower criticism, which deals with the textual analysis of the Bible in contrast (supposedly) to historical or literary criticism of the texts. The question of textual accuracy was therefore basic to the Princetonians' discussion of what comprises the authoritative canon of Scripture. There were tens of thousands of variant texts. As early as 1713, the deist Anthony Collins had used John Mill's collection of 30,000 New Testament textual variants to argue for replacing Trinitarianism's revealed religion with natural religion.⁽³⁹⁾

The Revised Version of the English Bible appeared in 1881. This became the first major wedge of lower criticism into the American Church scene. Prior to this, lower criticism had been confined mainly to institutions of higher learning in the northeast.

Warfield and Lower Criticism

Warfield, the Old School's most distinguished theologian from the late nineteenth century until his death in 1921, was a defender of lower criticism. He did not accept as authoritative the textus receptus or received text on which the King James translators had based their work. He was the first Princetonian to break decisively with the textus receptus. This was the text which the Westminster Assembly had relied on.

The founder of Princeton, Virginia's Archibald Alexander, like Charles Hodge after him, followed Turretin by appealing to the judicial authority of extant copies. By Alexander's day, there were 60,000 textual variants.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Charles Hodge, unlike Alexander, studied in Paris and Germany (1826-28), leaving his wife and two children behind,⁽⁴¹⁾ but this experience did not shake his faith. He did not import German methods back to Princeton. Warfield studied in Germany in 1876.⁽⁴²⁾ Letis writes: "Warfield, on the other hand, was the first professor at Princeton to allow his Common-Sense Philosophy the role of reconstructing the text according to the canons of German criticism."⁽⁴³⁾ This meant that he accepted the fundamental presupposition of higher criticism: the legitimacy of treating a biblical text as if it were like any other human text, subject to the autonomous canons of textual criticism.⁽⁴⁴⁾ He was persuaded that the "facts" of Scripture will prove the Bible's infallibility to any neutral investigator.⁽⁴⁵⁾

Warfield in 1886 became the first American to write a textbook on German techniques of lower criticism.⁽⁴⁶⁾ In the meantime, he had published an article dismissing the last verses of the gospel of Mark.⁽⁴⁷⁾ This was the German higher critical view of Mark's text.⁽⁴⁸⁾ In 1881, he gave a favorable review to Wescott and Hort's critical Greek text, praising their "scientific method." This review appeared in The Presbyterian Review (1882), the academic journal that led to the undermining of the Old School's cause.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Union Seminary professor Philip Schaff, later to stand firm behind Briggs' higher critical views, invited Warfield to explain his views in Schaff's Companion to the Greek Testament and English Version.⁽⁵⁰⁾ By adopting Wescott and Hort's methodology, Warfield baptized the methodology of higher criticism: judging the accuracy of the existing biblical texts by means of independent critical-logical standards. Briggs, the co-editor of Presbyterian Review, immediately wrote Warfield a letter insisting that he and other higher critics such as W. Robertson Smith used the same methodology as that employed by Wescott and Hort.⁽⁵¹⁾

By adopting this common-ground textual methodology, Warfield had to admit that existing texts of the Bible contained errors. But the Westminster Confession had asserted God's unique providential maintenance of the texts through history. This, he concluded, meant that the efforts to restore the best texts by Wescott and Hort were part of this providential work of God. Such efforts were "instruments of providence in preserving the Scriptures pure for the use of God's people."⁽⁵²⁾ He was grasping at straws; lower criticism is simply not in conformity to the express language of the Westminster Confession. He had to admit that some members of the Assembly were defenders of the textus receptus.⁽⁵³⁾ He argued that the Assembly accepted the idea that some copies of the transmitted texts contained errors.⁽⁵⁴⁾ True enough, but this did not solve his strategic problem: their individual beliefs and the Confession's language did not support the common-ground methodology of modern lower criticism.

The question then became: On what Confessional basis could he and the Old School theologians who followed his leadership take a judicial stand against the higher critics? The answer is self-evident: they could not. They did not. They could not appeal to the Confession. They would have to appeal to standards not part of the Church's judicial tradition. The best they could do was to assert that their use of the same common-ground methodology was better than the higher critics' use of it. This moved the debate out of the courts and into the journals.

A generation later, Princeton's William P. Armstrong was still defending Wescott and Hort's theory of the text's history.⁽⁵⁵⁾ He tried to contrast lower criticism with higher criticism's historical and literary criticisms. He acknowledged that there can be no higher criticism apart from a priori presuppositions, "an ultimate theory of truth" and "an ultimate philosophy of history."⁽⁵⁶⁾ Having made this crucial methodological point, a few pages later he abandoned it. In what must be regarded as the terminal stage of academic verbal restraint run amok, he wrote this ponderous sentence regarding the separation of hypothesis from factual investigation in higher criticism: "It should, however, be possible to keep the two things separate or at least to recognize and discount the influence of principle in the phenomenal or factual sphere while freely admitting and indeed maintaining that this issue must be determining in the ultimate appreciation or evaluation of the facts, in their explanation and in the final estimate of their significance."⁽⁵⁷⁾ (Anyone who seeks to conduct a life-and-death intellectual battle with this sort of constipated academic rhetoric is going to lose the battle, as indeed Armstrong did. He remained behind at Princeton after the reorganization of 1929.) A loose English translation is this: "The assumption of the non-supernatural nature of the Bible's existing texts ought to be able to be separated from the otherwise productive techniques of higher criticism." Funny thing, though; they never are.

To argue as Armstrong did is to surrender the case for biblical supernaturalism. Supernaturalism must be assumed from the beginning and defended till the end, in the same way that naturalism is assumed and defended. To assume neutrality regarding supernaturalism as an operating initial hypothesis of any investigation is to surrender your methodology to covenant-breakers. Once surrendered, it cannot be reclaimed. Logically, you cannot go from the autonomous mind of man (neutral methodology) to the absolute sovereignty of the God of the Bible. The Princetonians, including Machen, never understood this. They were blinded by the Scottish common-sense, anti-supernatural methodological presuppositions.

Rival Presuppositions

The higher criticism of the Bible begins with a presupposition: the texts of the Bible must be examined with the same tools of analysis as any other text. Oxford's classical scholar Benjamin Jowett put it this way in 1860: ". . . the same rules apply to the Old and New Testaments as to other books."⁽⁵⁸⁾ Historian Forrest G. Wood has echoed Jowett: "Since I was obliged to observe the canons of scholarship I did not have the luxury of accepting on faith an inerrant Bible and thus was left only with the premise that Christianity itself, the Way and the Word, was man-centered--that man created God in his image. . . ."⁽⁵⁹⁾ The assumption of an inerrant Bible is not a matter of luxury; it is a matter of warfare: the conflict between covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers. The problem for Princeton was that lower criticism begins with the same presupposition that higher criticism does regarding a non-inerrant Bible: the assertion of a common methodology for interpreting all literature.

In stark contrast to Princeton's methodological presupposition of neutrality, Westminster Seminary's professor of apologetics Cornelius Van Til always began with the presupposition that the Bible is the word of God and therefore judges all rules. Its testimony to its own authority cannot be challenged, for there is no higher standard in history above the Bible. "The light of Scripture is that superior light which lightens every other light. It is also the final light."⁽⁶⁰⁾ Speaking of self-proclaimed autonomous man, he wrote: "But in whatever guise he may appear, the self-authenticating man assumes that he is to be the judge. The vision originates with him. In his eyes he is the judge and the supreme court. He alone knows what can or cannot be. . . . But where is the constitution by which even the chief judge of the supreme court must judge? The answer is that this constitution has to be written by the chief judge himself."⁽⁶¹⁾

Higher criticism and biblical presuppositionalism are mutually irreconcilable. There is no intellectual common ground on which a mutually agreed-upon settlement can be based. But if this is true, then what becomes of lower criticism? Can it be reformulated to make it conform to biblical presuppositionalism? So far, no one has tried in a systematic fashion. In any case, Warfield's version did not break with the liberals' presupposition of a common-ground methodology. In this sense, Warfield was in a weak position to deal with Charles Briggs.⁽⁶²⁾

Two Forms of Experientialism

In 1866, Charles Briggs (1841-1913) went to Germany to study, where he was taught the techniques of higher criticism. At the heart of higher criticism from the seventeenth century until today has been what higher critic Edgar Krentz has called methodical doubt.⁽⁶³⁾ But Briggs always defended his method as scientifically beyond doubt. Five months after arriving in Germany, in January, 1867, Briggs wrote home to his uncle, a Princeton Seminary graduate,⁽⁶⁴⁾ to tell him about a moving experience which his initiation into higher criticism had produced in him: "I cannot doubt but what I have been blessed with a new--divine light. I feel a different man from what I was five months ago. The Bible is lit up with a new light."⁽⁶⁵⁾ Formerly a defender of the Old School's view of the Bible, he now recognized that he had been "defending a lost cause."⁽⁶⁶⁾

In a way, Briggs' spiritual life encapsulates the transformation of the Presbyterian Church, 1858 to 1936. He always regarded his emotional experience in November, 1858, in his sophomore year at the University of Virginia, as a mark of conversion. This took place during what has sometimes been called the Third Great Awakening.⁽⁶⁷⁾ He had grown up under the instruction of an Old School mother. His father had never joined a local church and found Presbyterianism too formal, but he was an evangelical.⁽⁶⁸⁾

The son never repudiated his 1858 experience; it remained a formative factor throughout his career.

He did not return to the University of Virginia in the fall of 1860. He never graduated from there or anywhere else. He never again was willing to place himself under final academic sanctions. This is suspicious behavior for a man who challenged everyone throughout his career to answer his arguments, and then denied to his dying day that anyone ever had successfully done so. The General Assembly gave him an "F" in 1893; he kept insisting that he should have earned an "A."

After his equally experiential conversion to higher criticism in Germany, he was determined to persuade the Presbyterian Church that evangelicalism and higher criticism are reconcilable. Each methodology had produced an experiential conversion in his life. But in his academic writings, there is no trace of his experientialism. As he learned in his old age, his followers had never experienced what he had in 1858. They were uninterested in the evangelical Christianity of his youth. He failed utterly--perhaps monumentally--in his attempt to ram biblical criticism and historicism down the throats of New School Presbyterian experientialists, let alone Old School Calvinists. His writings produced only modernists. He was unsuccessful in persuading his liberal disciples of the need for experiential conversion--not unsurprising, given the fact that he never mentioned this necessity in his writings. To refer to him, as Massa does, as "an evangelical critical scholar" is misleading.⁽⁶⁹⁾ He was a scholar, and he was surely evangelical for biblical criticism, but he was in no sense an evangelical, i.e., a proponent of a judicially based gospel that categorically announces men's eternal damnation apart from saving faith.

In 1867, he saw Old School biblical interpretation as a lost cause. A man who announces that he had been defending a lost cause has already adopted a new cause. Briggs' illuminating experience, coupled with his new view of the Bible, led him to commit his life to this new cause: the subversion of the Old School tradition, which he dismissed as dogma. But dogma is an inescapable concept. It is never a question of dogma vs. no dogma. It is always a question of which dogma. When we read of a case in which "man bites dogma," it is always because he has adopted another dogma.

Princeton's Crucial Tactical Error

Upon his return from Germany, Briggs served for a few years as a pastor and in 1874 became a faculty member at Union, teaching Hebrew. (He is still known to seminary students as one of the triumvirate who wrote the standard Hebrew lexicon: Brown, Driver, and Briggs.) Briggs understood his crucial role within Presbyterianism. In 1900, he said that in Presbyterian circles, he had been the first to call for freedom of inquiry for higher critics, in his 1876 inaugural address as a professor of Hebrew. He said that his opinions first excited public attention in his article, "Right, Duty, and Limits of Biblical Criticism," published in the Presbyterian Review in 1881.⁽⁷⁰⁾ In short, he knew exactly what he was doing from 1876 forward.

He had taken the lead in establishing The Presbyterian Review⁽⁷¹⁾ in 1880, a cooperative effort supported by all six Northern Presbyterian seminaries.⁽⁷²⁾ He had originally encouraged Union Seminary's president, William Adams Brown, to suggest to Princeton's A. A. Hodge the creation of the journal.⁽⁷³⁾ Hodge became the co-editor. This seemingly innocuous venture in scholarly publishing would soon undermine the Old School's institutional defense of the Westminster Confession. It is not an exaggeration to say that this decision ultimately doomed the Old School. This is why Lefferts Loetscher devoted an entire chapter to The Presbyterian Review.⁽⁷⁴⁾ This is why Channing Jeschke began his 1966 doctoral dissertation on the Briggs case with a chapter on The Presbyterian Review. Massa argues that the publication of the first issue in January, 1880, "marked an important moment when the spiritual crisis of the Gilded Age entered the public (and published) arena."⁽⁷⁵⁾ The battle between Calvinism and historical criticism would be waged publicly in this journal. This created a strategic problem for the Princetonians.

The Strategic Problem: Ecumenical Methodology

The strategic problem for the Princetonians was the ecumenical character of the new journal, which was at odds with the Confessional exclusivism of the Old School. Briggs had requested and had received Princeton's surrender in advance. Hodge represented Princeton; Briggs represented Union. Each of the two managing editors could veto any article recommended by the other.⁽⁷⁶⁾ This meant that there had to be some sort of epistemological common ground between them, if the journal was ever to be published. One possible methodological framework was what Briggs believed in: historicism. Princeton's theologians also believed in common ground: common-sense empiricism. Briggs believed in the relevance of the testimony of the facts of history, while the Princetonians believed in the testimony of reason grounded in both historical and scientific facts. Both sides could appeal to fact and history on methodologically equal footing, or so it seemed. Each side believed it had the stronger case in terms of this common ground. But the historicism of the era was undermining the Princetonians, who still proclaimed an unchanging theology--a fixed "recipe" beyond time, yet somehow in time. Hodge and his successor as managing co-editor, Francis L. Patton, never seemed to suspect that their failure to veto Briggs' articles on higher criticism and on the Westminster Assembly, as well as articles recommended by Briggs, would transfer the Northern Presbyterian Church into the hands of the modernists half a century later. Only Warfield opposed the project from the beginning,⁽⁷⁷⁾ but he was not yet on Princeton's faculty.

According to Briggs' highly suspect testimony in 1891, the Princeton faculty had asked him his views regarding higher criticism. "I stated that I did not accept Verbal Inspiration and Inerrancy and that I was in accord with the movement of Higher Criticism. The Princeton faculty agreed to unite with the Union faculty in the enterprise. . . ."⁽⁷⁸⁾ For whatever reason, by consenting to work with Union and Briggs on this basis, the Princetonians cooperated in the baptism of higher criticism. From that time forth, they could never successfully challenge higher criticism as heretical, for orthodox men cannot defend cooperating in joint academic ventures with heretics. Conclusion institutionally: a joint venture cannot be heretical.

The "Equal Time" Doctrine

Briggs continued: "Toward the close of 1880 the Princeton representative stated that it was necessary that Scotland's W. Robertson Smith case should be discussed in the Review, and that the conservatives demanded the right to speak their minds on it. It was then resolved that both ideas should be heard on the Higher Criticism."⁽⁷⁹⁾ This was not even close to the truth.⁽⁸⁰⁾ Briggs had volunteered for the assignment through Brown. The Princetonians had hesitated, fearing it would give Briggs an opportunity to defend Smith's views.⁽⁸¹⁾ This is exactly what he did, yet the Princetonians allowed it to be published. Briggs ended the essay with a plea for toleration of "legitimate differences." This, of course, was a defense of Smith's right to teach his views without any threat of negative ecclesiastical sanctions and equal rights for Briggs.

The Princetonians wanted to reply. This request led to two years of published debates--eight articles--on higher criticism.⁽⁸²⁾ But the Princetonians had already dug their own grave: first by consenting to co-edit the journal; second, by accepting Briggs' request to write the Smith essay; third, by not vetoing it. Now they demanded "equal time." Briggs accepted the offer. And why not? The "equal time" doctrine always pleases any minority movement in the early stages of its subversion of an organization. The doctrine of pluralism and open debate is always invoked against the majority, which can impose negative sanctions. Only when the subverters are in the majority does "equal time" lose both its appeal and its authority in their eyes.

Briggs' second article in the series, "A Critical Study of the History of the Higher Criticism with Special Reference to the Pentateuch," published in January, 1883, defended Smith's methodology. Francis Patton replied in the following issue. Nothing had been settled, but this fact was now in full public view. Massa writes: "Thus had the Presbyterian Review, with the close of the `Robertson Smith debate' in the spring of 1883, both announced and abetted a conflict that would mark the history of American evangelicalism for the next half century. . . . Beneath those conflicts lay an ineffable but pervasive sense that the very possibility of divine communication with humankind was now deeply problematic, problematic in a way that had no precedent in the Christian tradition."⁽⁸³⁾

The Princeton Apologetic

Why had the Princetonians initiated this institutionally suicidal (because co-published) exchange of views? Because they were defenders of a particular method of apologetics, i.e., the philosophical defense of the faith. This method officially appealed only to the facts: empiricism, an appeal to pure factuality. They viewed truth as inductive, not deductive. Charles Hodge insisted that "in theology as in natural science, principles are derived from facts, and not impressed upon them."⁽⁸⁴⁾ This was Scottish common-sense rationalism, and it was basic to nineteenth-century conservative apologetics. This had been Princeton's approach from its founding.⁽⁸⁵⁾

Conservative Willis J. Beecher of Auburn Seminary presented a classic statement of this empiricist apologetic position: "That the critical inquiry into the nature of the Scriptures may be independent, it must reject all evidence which is based on the assumption that the Books are inspired, just as it rejects that which is based on the assumption that they are not inspired. While it is in progress it has nothing to do with inspiration."⁽⁸⁶⁾ This is the ever-popular cloak of academic neutrality. This methodology played into the hands of the higher critics from the beginning. If valid, this principle of neutral investigation meant that higher critics had the right--indeed, the moral obligation--before God to conduct their research apart from any assumption that they were dealing with unique texts in history: the verbally inspired word of God. They could ignore the Confession's doctrine of inspiration while conducting their research and publishing its results.

Hodge and Warfield had announced at the beginning of the debate, "Nevertheless we admit that the question between ourselves and the advocates of [modern criticism], is one of fact, to be decided only by an exhaustive and impartial examination of all the sources of evidence, i.e., the claims of the Scriptures themselves."⁽⁸⁷⁾ Problem: there are many potential sources of evidence in the world of "theologically neutral" scholarship that lie outside the Bible itself. The defenders of higher criticism would appeal to them extensively.⁽⁸⁸⁾

This approach to the Bible led the Princetonians to make at least two crucial compromises in the series: adjusting the genealogies of Genesis to accommodate an ancient age for the earth (William Henry Green); and interpreting Genesis as supporting (or at least not denying) a kind of theistic evolution (Warfield).⁽⁸⁹⁾ Surely, these were examples of quietly importing evidence from outside the Bible into the exegesis of biblical texts--the most dangerous evidence of all: Darwinian conclusions.

Too Little, Too Late

In 1884, Briggs wrote a Presbyterian Review article on the move in the Europe-based Alliance of Reformed Churches to revise their various confessions. This article brought the divisive issue of Confessional revision into American Presbyterianism.⁽⁹⁰⁾ A year later, his book, American Presbyterianism, offered a little-disguised justification for such a revision based on the Church's history.⁽⁹¹⁾ By the end of the decade, Briggs was leading the forces calling for a revision of the Westminster Confession. In 1888, he wrote "A Plea for an American Alliance of the Reformed Churches," his first public call for organic Church union. Presbyterian Review repeatedly served him as a highly useful tool for bringing his ideas before the Church.

Presbyterian Review carried on until October, 1889. Warfield, who became co-editor earlier that year, had thrown down the gauntlet by refusing to publish Briggs' summary of the 1889 General Assembly.⁽⁹²⁾ Warfield had always opposed the joint venture. It was now unlikely to survive. But it was Union Seminary's faculty--not Princeton's--that voted to discontinue it.⁽⁹³⁾ Union's faculty had achieved their goal: equal time for higher criticism.

In 1893, Princeton's William Henry Green in effect conceded much of Briggs' argument by writing a lengthy critique of Briggs' book, The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch (1892). Green had served as the Moderator of the 1891 General Assembly at which Briggs' new appointment at Union had been vetoed. He began his essay with a reference back to Briggs' 1883 Presbyterian Review essay, updated and reprinted in the new book. He surrendered the hermeneutical high ground in his second paragraph by accepting criticism as a legitimate procedure: "There is a distinction between the Higher Criticism de jure and the Higher Criticism de facto. Critical investigations may rightly be conducted and lead to correct conclusions; or they may be based on wrong principles, follow wrong methods, and lead to false conclusions." He accepted Briggs' statement in the 1881 Presbyterian Review that "Biblical criticism is represented by two antagonistic parties--evangelical critics and rationalistic critics."⁽⁹⁴⁾ On the next page, Green asked of Briggs' version of higher criticism: "Is it Biblical or anti-Biblical?" In so doing, Green publicly accepted the legitimacy of higher criticism as a method of inquiry: someone else's version might be biblical.

Briggs: The Point Man

In the infantry, the point man walks ahead of his platoon. If he draws fire from the enemy, or if he steps on a land mine, his fellow soldiers are warned of trouble ahead. Charles Briggs was the point man--the visible representative--in the Presbyterian modernists' strategy from 1876 to 1893. At each stage, he would press the issues, both theologically and rhetorically. But the radical nature of his theology always exceeded the combativeness of his rhetoric until 1891. He used his rhetoric to test the Old School's will to resist. Each time that he was successful, he would then increase the pressure both rhetorically and theologically. By the time his rhetoric undermined him, his theology was firmly in place in the denomination. When he was deposed in 1893, it was because of his rhetoric.

Thus, there were only three Presbyterian casualties--"identifiable hits"--among modernism's supporters during the 1890's: Briggs, H. P. Smith, and A. C. McGiffert. All three ended their careers on the payroll of Union Seminary. This was a small price for the modernists to pay for establishing a judicially unassailable beachhead in Northern Presbyterianism's seminaries. The confrontational rhetoric of the higher critics ended by 1900; so did the heresy trials. This was important for American Protestantism because the Presbyterian Church was the denomination in the North that had made the most determined effort to root out higher criticism through public trials. The Lutherans did not have to resort to trials, they were so conservative; the Baptists could not use them, since their polity was not hierarchical; and Episcopalians were tolerant. The Methodists also conducted a few trials, but did so quietly. It was the conservative Presbyterians who became the representatives of orthodoxy in the public arena.⁽⁹⁵⁾

Briggs' Strategy of Subversion

By 1876, Briggs had taken responsibility for introducing the program that would subvert the ultimate Calvinist standard, the Bible: higher criticism. Higher criticism in the nineteenth century promised to enhance the "true spirit" of the Bible by denying the authority of the letter of biblical texts. Briggs had escaped censure. He used The Presbyterian Review to begin the great debate series in 1881. Patton came on as co-editor, to be followed by Warfield in 1888. Briggs' strategy seemed letter-perfect. He remained the constant factor on the editorial board.

In Biblical Study (1883), Briggs presented a mild case for higher criticism as a legitimate methodology. This book marked the move of higher criticism out of the seminary classroom and into a wider American audience.⁽⁹⁶⁾ With Whither? (1889), he moved to the third and fourth stages of the strategy of subversion: a direct confrontation in the name of the spirit of the Confession (point three) against the denominational courts' right to enforce the letter of the Confession (point four). If his primarily rhetorical strategy proved successful, the institutional inheritance was assured (point five). It would be a replay of English Presbyterianism, which had abandoned the Westminster Confession in 1662 and went Unitarian in 1719.

Here was Briggs' strategy of Confessional subversion: to defend the Westminster Confession verbally, but then point to a few widely shared deviations from the Confession in his day. Then he identified the Princetonians as interlopers: "The Westminster system has been virtually displaced by the teachings of the dogmatic divines."⁽⁹⁷⁾ The Princetonians' orthodoxy was not Confessional, he said. In fact, no group completely accepts the Confession. "The Presbyterian Church is not orthodox, judged by its own standards. It has neither the old orthodoxy or the new orthodoxy."⁽⁹⁸⁾ In short, all contemporary orthodoxies are equally unorthodox, but some orthodoxies are worse than others: Princeton's.

This attack on the Westminster Confession in the name of the Confession paralleled the strategy of the higher critics: an attack on the document in the name of the document. First, point out a few errors in the existing texts. Then argue that these errors make no difference to "the fundamentals of the faith." Once accepted, this camel's nose of acceptable error soon resulted in a tent full of camel: the denial of the judicially binding nature of the document as a whole. Anyone who did not want to share his tent with this camel would have to leave, either voluntarily or involuntarily (in 1936).

Higher criticism, if accepted, would leave only tradition and experientialism as the foundations of the Church covenant. Traditionalism was highly suspect in a Protestant denomination. Experientialism, on the other hand, had always been regarded by New Side and New School churchmen as having at least equal status with the Confession. This was never formally stated in a revision of the Confession, but it was psychologically accepted and therefore institutionally defended. It had been the basis of both reunions: 1758 and 1869. This made it difficult for New School churchmen to challenge the modernists theologically; meanwhile, the dominance of New School churchmen within the courts made it difficult for Old School churchmen to challenge the modernists institutionally. The modernists, led by Briggs as their representative, felt ready by the late 1880's to test the coalition against them: the call for Confessional revision.

Rhetoric or Theology?

In Chapters 4 and 5, I show that it was not primarily Briggs' theology that led to his de-frocking. Rather, his rhetoric led to his de-frocking. Had he restrained his rhetoric, he would never have been brought to trial. His theology was the Church's legal justification for his trial; it was not the cause. This is what the Union Seminary faculty argued in 1891; for the most part, I agree. Briggs escalated his confrontations from 1876 to 1893. This process of escalation involved both theological deviation from the Confession and offensive rhetoric. It was his rhetoric that triggered the explosion. I need to add, however, that the gun's rhetorical hammer would have gone "click" had the chamber not been loaded with Briggs' heretical opinions. This was the heart of the crisis of Northern Presbyterianism after 1880: conservatives could not easily mobilize the Church's court system to remove betrayers of the faith. In order for them to be removed, they had to become flagrant betrayers of the faith: rhetorically offensive rather than merely theologically offensive.

The real threat to Presbyterianism was not Briggs' rhetoric; it was his theology, which was grounded in higher criticism. It was not his repeated misuse of logic for rhetorical purposes that constituted his primary transgression; it was his higher criticism, grounded in his rejection of biblical Christianity the name of Christianity. He insisted that he and his modernist peers could maintain Christianity while rejecting its theology. Higher critics and their intellectual predecessors for over three centuries have made the following claim: "Christianity can be maintained apart from a biblically integrated, biblically derived theology." This claim is a lie. It is a modern version of Satan's rhetorical question to Eve, "Hath God Said?", all dressed up in a black academic robe.

The question was: Who would become the Old School's point man? That task fell to Francis L. Patton.

"General" Patton's Battles

The most influential Old School leader in the Briggs era was Francis L. Patton. He was a theologian, but he was also a major participant in Presbyterian politics. He was the only Old School theologian in the Presbyterian conflict who had any experience in ecclesiastical mobilization.

The Swing Case

Patton, a young seminary professor at Northwest Seminary (later renamed McCormick Seminary), had been brought to Chicago in 1873 to become the editor of Interior, a weekly journal financed by Cyrus H. McCormick, the wealthy Calvinist inventor of the mechanical reaper.⁽⁹⁹⁾ From that position, he immediately began attacking modernist theologian Washington Gladden, a Congregationalist. In 1874, Patton began attacking a local Presbyterian pastor, David Swing.

Swing was a very popular preacher, with a congregation of several thousand members. He was popular with his New School-dominated presbytery. But he made a tactical error: he went into print. He repeatedly attacked the idea of the authority of theological creeds; he discussed them as culturally determined and therefore immersed in history.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ He contrasted spiritual religion with a religion of things and words; the former replaces the latter.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ "In our day the empire of words still lingers. The churches are still wedded to quantity more than to quality, but wedded by bonds that are growing weaker under the uprising of the `inner life' philosophy."⁽¹⁰²⁾ The implication was that the creeds are morally relative and judicially irrelevant. They have no judicial authority.

For a time, the creeds did prove to be judicially irrelevant; his presbytery did nothing to stop him. He then escalated his rhetoric. He announced confidently that heresy-hunting was a thing of the past. Heresy-hunters, he said, are "the most useless and forlorn men who have lived since the world began . . . living for a certain assemblage of words just as the miser lives for labeled bags of gold."⁽¹⁰³⁾

Patton, a recent arrival to the presbytery, formally brought charges against Swing for having deviated from the Westminster Confession. This was an important trial. It should have been easy to convict him if the presbytery was committed to creedalism, for Swing had made many public statements opposing the continuing authority of all creeds. Swing even defended himself at his trial by repeating his arguments that "A creed is only the highest wisdom of a particular time and place. Hence, as in States, there is always a quiet slipping away from the old laws without any waiting for a formal repeal." As if to prove Swing's point, the presbytery cleared him by a margin of three to one.

Patton was denounced during the trial as an outsider--the inevitable fate of those who challenge the previous decisions of any local bureaucracy. This ever-present potential accusation would henceforth inhibit all critics from outside any presbytery from bringing formal charges against someone inside, especially someone who, unlike Swing, had not gone into print. One defender of Swing, Dr. Arthur Swazey, reminded his fellow presbytery members that Swing had worked among them for years, and no one had found anything wrong. Then, he said, "a stranger comes in here, and for reasons that are largely partisan, invites us to denounce him."⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ Patton was not part of the club, the local old-boy network. It was therefore his job to keep quiet about one of the most successful of the old boys. This rejection of criticism from outside a presbytery was an important factor in the immunity of liberals, once ordained, from further prosecution.

Patton's charges against Swing were poorly conceived. There were 28 accusations when ten clear-cut violations, especially relating to Swing's view of creeds, if well argued, might conceivably have persuaded the presbytery.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ After the presbytery had closed ranks around Swing and voted him innocent, Patton announced that he would appeal to the General Assembly. Swing then resigned from the denomination. He did so, he said, "to secure to the Synod and to the Assembly that peace which can lead to a calm review and restatement of doctrine . . . without the stormy passions that gather around `accuser' and an `accused.'"⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ Notice the assumption: the peace of the Church is dependent on the absence of heresy trials. That is to say, the "true peace" of the Church is dependent on the creedalists' willingness to ordain as ministers and seminary professors--i.e., sanction positively--men who denied the judicial authority of the creeds. Put differently, the "true peace" of the Church is supposedly achievable only by ignoring institutionally the negative sanctions that are inescapably associated with a lawful covenantal oath. This call for "true peace" would become the modernists' battle cry in every denomination. They cried "peace, peace," and after 1900, there was peace. But it came at a price: the abandonment of Confessional orthodoxy.

The first heresy trial after the 1869 reunion had not been conclusively settled. The Swing trial, in Hutchison's words, had been "the first great controversy of the New Theology,"⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ but it was not to be the last. The national press had covered the trial in great detail.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ This, too, would be a characteristic feature of Presbyterian trials in the future, ending only after Machen's expulsion from the Church in 1936.

After 1874, Patton rose rapidly as a leader in the presbytery and the denomination. He was elected moderator of the General Assembly in 1878. It was at this General Assembly that William McCune saw his presbytery's "not guilty" declaration overturned by the General Assembly by a four-to-one vote.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ This is evidence that Swing's decision to resign was wise. He probably would have lost on Patton's appeal.

Patton at Princeton University

In 1888, at the time of his resignation as co-editor of Presbyterian Review, Patton became the president of the College of New Jersey, which was re-named Princeton University under his administration (1896).⁽¹¹⁰⁾ By the end of his career, he had become known as "the grand old man of Presbyterianism."⁽¹¹¹⁾ He could have made all the difference in the Presbyterian conflict, and far more than this: in the history of the world. He could have applied negative sanctions in a crucial incident, as we shall see, but he refused.

Patton succeeded the popular evangelical and theistic evolutionist James McCosh.⁽¹¹²⁾ Patton did nothing as president to stop the growth of modernism and humanism on the Princeton campus, let alone reverse it. He taught theology and ethics, but continued to teach McCosh's Scottish common-sense rationalist apologetics.⁽¹¹³⁾ Under Patton, Princeton's academic reputation lagged far behind Harvard, Yale, and other major universities, at least in the opinion of the Princeton faculty.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Any remaining traces of orthodox Christianity were understood by the academic community in general and on campus as inhibiting the academic reputation of the campus. So, despite Patton's failure to halt the drift toward secularism, the progressives engineered a revolt against him in 1902. He had not gone fast enough in the process of secularization to suit them.

This drift was part of the transformation of higher education in the United States: from Christianity to humanism.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ In 1876, Johns Hopkins University opened a graduate school based on the German model.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ This institution would soon become the model for the American university: secular, specialized, and pluralistic. The university model would subsequently re-shape seminary education in the United States The era of the self-taught seminary professor with an honorary doctorate would end within a generation.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ Each faculty member would soon be expected to run the humanist academic gauntlet. Some of the pluralistic ideals of that gauntlet would be imported into the seminary. That same year, 1876, was also the year of Briggs' first inaugural address, in which he first publicly defended higher criticism. Noll is correct: the two phenomena, higher criticism and the professionalization of academic life, were part of the same process. The new scholarship and the New Theology were parallel developments.⁽¹¹⁸⁾ Both were forms of evolutionary humanism, although Noll avoids calling them this. He makes another important point: theological seminaries, invented in the early decades of the nineteenth century, had been the only graduate schools in the United States until after the Civil War.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ After Johns Hopkins began to issue Ph.D. degrees, this changed rapidly. The Ph.D. degree would, over the next century, become the "union card" for admission to college faculties.⁽¹²⁰⁾ Patton fought this development; he wanted undergraduate education only. The faculty wanted a graduate school.⁽¹²¹⁾ He wanted a Christian college; the vocal members of the faculty wanted nonsectarianism, i.e., secular education.⁽¹²²⁾

Patton resigned as president in 1902, becoming the president of Princeton Seminary (not legally connected to the university), an office that carried very little executive authority in 1902.⁽¹²³⁾ He had been forced out by a circle of trustees who had persuaded--it had not taken much persuading--political science professor Woodrow Wilson to draw up plans for a new system of rule by executive committee. He had referred in a private meeting with two trustees as "the sinister influence" at Princeton.⁽¹²⁴⁾ Against Wilson's advice, Patton was then named by the Trustees as a member of the new Executive Committee, with former U.S. President Grover Cleveland (who lived in the town of Princeton) named as chairman.⁽¹²⁵⁾ Wilson had been hired under Patton's tenure (1890), had been praised publicly by Patton,⁽¹²⁶⁾ and had not been fired by Patton despite Wilson's frequent absences from campus throughout the decade due to his highly profitable off-campus speaking schedule.⁽¹²⁷⁾ Wilson showed no gratitude in 1902 for Patton's toleration of Wilson's behavior.⁽¹²⁸⁾

Patton not only refused to fight this coup, he actually named his successor to the presidency of the university: Wilson.⁽¹²⁹⁾ Two positive factors motivated him to leave: first, $31,500 in severance pay,⁽¹³⁰⁾ a huge sum in 1902; second, he was completely deceived by Wilson regarding Wilson's supposed commitment to conservative theology. Wilson's father had been the Stated Clerk of the Southern Presbyterian Church from 1865 to 1898, a man noted for his conservative views.⁽¹³¹⁾

As the new president, Wilson suspended Bible instruction from 1902 to 1905. This was a direct assault on Patton, who had used the money from a legacy to the college to endow a chair in English Bible for his own son.⁽¹³²⁾ Wilson was self-conscious in his humanism. The only trace of conservatism was his racism; he refused to allow any black to enroll at Princeton, even telling one applicant to apply to Brown University, since it was Baptist.⁽¹³³⁾ (Wilson was a friend of Thomas Dixon, author of the trilogy of novels defending the original Ku Klux Klan. Dixon called on him in 1915 to elicit his support in promoting Birth of a Nation, the D. W. Griffith movie based on The Clansman, the first book of his trilogy. Wilson was ecstatic after viewing a private showing. "It's like writing history with lightening, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.")⁽¹³⁴⁾

There had supposedly had been three rivals to Wilson for the presidency, but one, the best-selling literary figure and liberal Presbyterian clergyman Henry van Dyke, always insisted that he had no desire for the position.⁽¹³⁵⁾ In 1910, Wilson was elected Governor of New Jersey. In 1912, he was elected President of the United States. In 1919, he went to the Versailles peace conference as its supposed conscience. The terms of the Versailles Treaty led to World War II. Wilson had also been instrumental in the creation of the League of Nations, which became the model for the United Nations Organization. If Patton had fought Wilson's nomination, throwing his support to any of Wilson's rivals, Wilson would probably have lost. The world would be a very different place. As Macartney put it over five decades later, "Thus do great issues turn on the hinges of apparently small events."⁽¹³⁶⁾

Yet Patton, by far, was the most effective strategist the Old School produced after 1869. This indicates the magnitude of the Old School's problem. The Old School had no long-term strategy; their opponents did.⁽¹³⁷⁾

Two Years to Immunity

There was an aspect of the modernists' victory that has escaped attention by historians of the Presbyterian conflict. The modernists understood that history does not move backward. This means that judicial precedents are rarely reversed. One of these precedents is silence. Presbyterian law, like American civil law, operates on the premise that a person is innocent unless proven guilty. Silence can become an operational precedent even if it is not a legal precedent. This means that if any one of these modernist doctrines could be presented within the denomination and not be identified by the courts as heretical, this doctrine would remain as a permanent part of the denomination's acceptable range of theological opinion.

The modernists understood point two of the covenant: personal representation. They understood point four: sanctions. They understood point three: standards. If the representative who first articulated the new doctrine subsequently escaped negative sanctions, the doctrine entered the Church's pantheon of acceptable standards.

This meant that if the person who introduced the initially vulnerable doctrine was not brought under discipline in a short period of time after his confession became public, it would not matter if certain members of the denomination later identified the doctrine as heretical. The critics' opinions would then be judicially irrelevant--privately held opinions. This is how the New School regarded the distinctive ideas of the Old School: mere opinion. So, if an orthodox idea could be presented as being opposed to an Old School particular, the New School would probably not prosecute the person who introduced it. A fundamental strategy of the modernists was to present their ideas as challenges to Old School doctrines in the name of "true" Calvinism and "true" Presbyterianism.

Once the new idea was introduced, the Old School would have only a year or two to bring formal charges against the suspected heretic.⁽¹³⁸⁾ If the idea gained circulation without a formal protest, it became virtually unchallengeable in a Presbyterian Church court after two years, although the length of this provisional period was not known with any degree of certainty in 1876. This was the basis of the modernists' ratchet strategy. This strategy was to get the five points of modernism⁽¹³⁹⁾ into public debate, one by one, for a brief but unknown period of time. After that, only inflammatory rhetoric would produce a negative judicial response, and the response would have to be limited to the condemnation of one person's particular expression of the idea, not the idea itself. The debate would hinge on rhetoric, not theology.

What became clear only in retrospect is that members of the Old School did not understand the institutional limits under which they operated, especially the time constraints. They did not understand that they had approximately two years to make a formal complaint against an idea. If they limited their complaints to intellectual disputation, they would lose the war. Academic disputation apart from a formal protest in a Church court would doom the Old School's defense. An intellectual attack apart from formal negative sanctions was, judicially speaking, the implicit acceptance of the denominational legitimacy of the substance of the modernists' case: one opinion among many. But the Old School's leadership was almost entirely academic. The ecclesiastical dominance of theologians is a fundamental tradition of Presbyterianism. The Old School leaders had no strategy. Their ad hoc tactic, case by case, was to challenge their modernist enemies within the denomination, but only in academic journals. This tactic not only failed, it legitimized the modernist position as a privately held opinion, judicially immune: one opinion among many.

The Modernists' Theory of Church Sanctions

The covenantal issue of sanctions is the key to a correct understanding of the Presbyterian conflict. Theology is not sufficient to win an ecclesiastical struggle; there must also be sanctions. The Old School never offered a developed theology of oath-bound Church sanctions. This put them at a disadvantage.

Presbyterian modernists had to deal with sanctions. This required a theory of sanctions. This theory was applied ad hoc, and it seems to have been developed ad hoc. It was a three-stage position after the McCune trial (1878): (1) evade negative institutional sanctions (1878-1900); (2) seek positive institutional sanctions (1901-1933); (3) deploy negative institutional sanctions (1934-1936). The first stage required a public theology that invoked democratic pluralism: the illegitimacy of negative institutional sanctions against those holding the five points of modernism. The second stage involved the steady infiltration and capture of the highest offices of the denomination, especially academic positions in the seminaries. This required a public theology based on excellence in personal performance: above all, institutional teamwork. This is pluralism with a corollary: a principle of identification based on the inequality of commitment to the team effort. Its implicit slogan: "All theologies are equal, but some are more equal than others." Any theology that did not foster teamwork was said to be suspect. The final stage required a public theology that invoked bureaucratic authority: negative sanctions against those who would disrupt the team. "Disrupting the team" was defined operationally (though never publicly) as any attempt to impose negative sanctions against modernists.

Safe and Unsound

In 1892, Union Seminary withdrew from the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church. A year later, Briggs was de-frocked for heresy by the General Assembly. He nevertheless remained on the faculty at Union as its most prominent and internationally respected member, and in 1899 he was ordained by the Protestant Episcopal Church.⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ From that time on, he could write or say anything he pleased without fear of another heresy trial. In 1900, he offered this evaluation of his experience: the Presbyterian Church could not silence him. He retained his influence in the Church through his Union card.

The Presbytery of New York acquitted me of these charges, not on the ground that I did not hold these opinions, for I distinctly asserted these opinions, and gave ample proof of them in my Defense, but on the ground that these opinions did not conflict with Holy Scripture or the Westminster Confession. But the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America found me guilty of heresy in these two particulars, as well as in others. . . . The General Assembly went no further. There are other scholars who agree with Henry P. Smith and myself, and who remain unchallenged. The General Assembly could not prevent Professor Smith or myself from pursuing our researches, nor have they stayed the hands of other scholars.⁽¹⁴¹⁾

The General Assembly could not control what a pair of de-frocked seminary professors taught in a legally independent seminary, but it could have removed positive sanctions from any seminary that employed either of them or anyone else who espoused their views. The denomination required most candidates for the teaching eldership (ministers) to attend seminary. A teaching elder is the only Presbyterian Church officer who possesses the authority to administer the church's positive sanctions: the sacraments.⁽¹⁴²⁾ The seminaries possessed the authority to screen candidates for the teaching eldership: positive sanction ("pass") and negative sanction ("fail"). The General Assembly challenged this authority when it imposed a new rule, 1895 to 1897: no ordination of graduates of seminaries outside of the Church. The Assembly never actually enforced this policy, which was reversed in 1897.⁽¹⁴³⁾ The General Assembly had no authority in this area in its capacity as a legislative entity. Ordination is a presbytery's function. But the Church's leaders were as helpless before the ideology of academic freedom after 1869 as their Puritan predecessors had been since the days of Oliver Cromwell.⁽¹⁴⁴⁾

Higher Criticism in America, 1875 to 1900

In 1878, Julius Wellhausen's seminal book appeared in Germany: Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. It appeared in an English translation in 1885. He presented the now-familiar JEDP theory of multiple authorship of the manuscripts of the Pentateuch.⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ When this idea became prominent in the 1890's, the focus of concern on both sides of the debate was the Book of Genesis.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ This is understandable: the crucial theological issue, God's sovereignty, was being debated through a surrogate issue, creation vs. evolution. Darwin had preceded Wellhausen and his peers by a decade and a half. The comparative explosion of academic interest in higher criticism followed Darwin, although the presuppositions of higher criticism had begun during the Puritan revolution in England.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ Joseph S. Buckminster, a Congregationalist, had introduced biblical criticism to the United States early in the century, but there was only scattered interest in it until a decade and a half after Darwin's book appeared. Darwinism was the primary impetus.

In his survey of the early higher critics in America, Thomas Olbricht refers to a book by William Newton Clarke, Sixty Years with the Bible, published in 1917 by Charles Scribner's Sons, which published so many modernist authors. Clarke was a Northern Baptist and a professor of New Testament at Baptist Theological Seminary in Toronto (1883) and later a professor of theology at Colgate University (1890-1912). Like generations of young people reared in Christian homes, his crisis began through reading books devoted to uniformitarian geology. He remained a six-day creationist until he read Origin of Species. As he wrote in 1917, "my experience with it is interesting, and worth recording, because it was precisely the reproduction in miniature of the experience of the Christian world in those first years of evolutionary doctrine."⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ He became a higher critic only in the late 1880's: first Darwin, then higher criticism. That he defended the Bible as a "guide to Jesus" was irrelevant.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ The question was: Who is Jesus, and will He send to hell those who reject His substitutionary atonement?

Olbricht identifies The Presbyterian Review as the first journal associated with higher criticism.⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ The decision of the Princeton faculty to go ahead with the project was crucial, not just for the controversy within the Northern Presbyterian Church but for American Christianity generally.

The Popular Press

The notorious skeptic Robert Ingersoll gave a lecture, "Some Mistakes of Moses," and had it printed in 1879.⁽¹⁵¹⁾ In response, Brooklyn's popular Presbyterian pastor, T. DeWitt Talmage, gave lectures to large audiences in 1882.⁽¹⁵²⁾ Talmage began by surrendering the six-day creation.⁽¹⁵³⁾ These sermons were printed in 300 weekly newspapers. Ingersoll then replied with a book of almost 450 pages.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾

Ingersoll began his speech with an appeal to religious freedom. Next, he castigated Andover Seminary for requiring its faculty members affirm the statement of faith every five years. He described them as failed preachers who state "the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear." He called for a new ministry devoted to escaping the evils of this world rather than the next. Olbricht points out that the Social Gospel movement promoted just such a view of the ministry a few years later. Modernism agreed with Ingersoll's basic criticism of the seminary and the Bible. Olbricht adds: "A nascent movement begins slowly, winning a few at a time."⁽¹⁵⁵⁾

Olbricht identifies higher criticism's date of entry into the thinking of the American Church: 1875.⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ He does not mention Briggs' 1876 Inaugural Lecture. In the 1880's academic debate began, and by 1890, two rival positions could be seen. The debate spread into the popular press. By 1900, the lines had hardened between higher critics and their critics. "After the turn of the century, pulpit discussion of these critical matters once again became cursory and superficial. Neither side felt an obligation to communicate with the other, nor prolong the earlier disputes."⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ The rhetoric ended, but not the division.

Conclusion

The battle over the Bible was a battle over point two of the biblical covenant: authority. What stands as the Church's link between God and man: the unchanging Bible or the evolving word of man? The battle over the higher criticism of the Bible was an international phenomenon, but nowhere were the institutional stakes recognized more clearly than in the Presbyterian Church. The Princetonians did their best to stem the tide academically, but their chosen arena for waging this war--in a cooperatively edited denominational academic journal--was the operational means of their defeat. By allowing the debate to take place within a co-edited journal that allowed their representative to veto any article, they baptized higher criticism as an academically legitimate academic methodology.

Their rationalistic, inductionist methodology had made it difficult for them to resist Briggs' call for a fair and open discussion of the facts. But because of the near-monopolistic authority of seminaries to train candidates for the Presbyterian teaching eldership, a published debate over higher criticism became far more than a strictly academic debate among skilled professionals. It was a public admission that belief in the techniques of higher criticism was legitimate within the theological boundaries of the Church. Higher criticism became a matter of academic debate rather than Church sanctions. This was an admission by the Old School that the Westminster Confession's statements regarding the absolute ecclesiastical authority of the Bible were arguably incorrect. Once they became arguably incorrect, they were no longer automatically a matter of Church censure. The issue of Church sanctions then moved from theology to rhetoric.

Several factors undermined the Old School in this battle. First and foremost was its empiricism, i.e., its faith that a neutral study to hypothetical brute factuality can bring men to the knowledge of the truth. This belief led Warfield to embrace the methodological assumptions of higher criticism in his acceptance of the techniques lower criticism. Second, the tactical error of the Princetonians in cooperating in The Presbyterian Review allowed that journal to become an outlet for higher criticism as "one view among many." This presented an academic umbrella of open discussion for a view that would eventually transfer control over the denomination to the modernists. Third, the Old School refused to acknowledge that its leading theologian after 1890, Warfield, had departed from the plain language of Chapter I of the Westminster Confession: God's providential preservation of pure biblical texts. It also refused to acknowledge that its view of creationism was not Confessional, nor was its view of the universal salvation of infants dying in infancy. The Old School refused, therefore, to recognize that their resistance to Confessional revision made them vulnerable to the criticism that their defense of the Confession's standards as the basis of imposing Church sanctions was self-serving and judicially arbitrary. This appearance of judicial arbitrariness transferred the strategic initiative to the modernists.

The war over the Bible, the Westminster Confession, and the future of the Church was enjoined after 1875; there was no going back. Shailer Mathews summed it up in 1936: "To the orthodox, Christianity was based upon the Bible as authority."⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ To the modernists, Christianity was based upon man's evolving word as authority. Men could cry, "Peace, peace," but there would be no peace until one side expelled the other. The crucial issue was sanctions.

If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out. icetylertx@aol.com

Footnotes:

1. Stearns, "Historical Review of the Church (New School Branch)," Presbyterian Re-union Memorial Volume, 1837-1871 (New York: De Witt C. Lent & Co., 1870), p. 336.

2. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant, 2nd ed. (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 2.

3. See especially his comments on Romans 5:12-19. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, [1539] 1979), pp. 199-213.

4. Larger Catechism, A. 22.

5. Ibid., AA. 31, 32.

6. Theological Essays Reprinted from the Princeton Review (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846), chaps 6-8.

7. Westminster Confession of Faith, VI:3.

8. Ibid., XI:1; Larger Catechism, A. 71.

9. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 5.

10. See Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1871]), I, ch. 6: "Inspiration."

11. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, [1983] 1991), p. 11.

12. Robert A. Nisbet, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 274.

13. Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 3.

14. Cited in Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 831.

15. Louis I. Bredvold, Brave New World of the Enlightenment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), ch. 2.

16. Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), ch. 1.

17. R. J. Rushdoony, "Humanistic Law," introduction to E. L. Hebden Taylor, The New Legality (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1967), vi-vii. Rushdoony revised this statement slightly, and I reproduce here his final version.

18. Andrzej Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1987), Part 3; Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ch. 8.

19. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957).

20. This is the starting point of Mark Stephen Massa, S.J., Charles Augustus Briggs and the Crisis of Historical Criticism (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1990), ch. 1. Isaiah Berlin speaks of "a new historical vision" and its "dominant influence over much of the political and intellectual life of the West. . . ." Berlin, "Foreword" (1972) to Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Outlook (London: Herder & Herder, [1936] 1972), p. ix.

21. Technically, the American Church defined the Constitution as all of the subordinate standards: The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America: Being Its Standards Subordinate to the Word of God, Viz. The Confession of Faith, The Larger and Shorter Catechisms, The Form of Government, The Book of Discipline, and the Directory for the Worship of God, as Ratified by the Synod of New York and Philadelphia in the Year of Our Lord 1788 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1904).

22. For example, the Pope as the Antichrist. Hardly anyone in the Presbyterian Church paid attention to that sign by 1900.

23. I have taken these proof texts from O. T. Allis, The Five Books of Moses (1943). Allis was the most articulate defender of the Princeton apologetic against higher criticism. He served as assistant professor of Hebrew at Princeton from 1910 to 1929, and then served as professor at Westminster Seminary from 1929 until 1936.

24. This resistance was far less true of Christians in England in the late nineteenth century, who tended to accept higher criticism of the Old Testament but not of the New Testament. Mark A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 71.

25. Donovan A. Courville, "A Biblical Reconstruction of Egypt's Chronology," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, 2 (Summer 1975); Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), Appendix A: "The Reconstruction of Egypt's Chronology."

26. Gary North, The Hoax of Higher Criticism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), ch. 3.

27. When Briggs used the word "symbols" in his 1889 book, Whither?, he meant "creeds."

28. See Chapter 5, below.

29. Shailer Mathews, New Faith for Old: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 27.

30. Germany as a political entity appeared in 1871. I am using the term culturally.

31. Cited in William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 76. The pagination is the same in the Oxford University Press paperback edition.

32. Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 279.

33. Pope A. Duncan, "Crawford Howell Toy: Heresy at Louisville," in American Religious Heretics: Formal and Informal Trials, edited by George H. Shriver (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon, 1966), p. 64.

34. Ibid., p. 65.

35. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, [1992] 1994), pp. 181, 183.

36. Roland H. Bainton, Yale and the Ministry: A History of Education for the Christian Ministry at Yale from the Founding in 1701 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1957), pp. 214-15.

37. Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).

38. Ira V. Brown, "The Higher Criticism Comes to America, 1880-1900," Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society, 38 (Dec. 1960).

39. [Anthony Collins], Discourse of Free-Thinking. . . .; cited in Theodore P. Letis, "B. B. Warfield, Common-Sense Philosophy and Biblical Criticism," American Presbyterians, 69 (Fall 1991), p. 175.

40. Letis, ibid., p. 177.

41. A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge, Professor in the Theological Seminary Princeton N.J. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1880), ch. 6.

42. Letis, pp. 180-81.

43. Ibid., p. 176.

44. Ibid., pp. 176-77.

45. Ibid., p. 181. Letis quotes his 1878 inaugural lecture at Western Theological Seminary.

46. Warfield, Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, published first in England. Letis, pp. 180, 189.

47. Letis, ibid., p. 181. The essay was published in the Sunday School Times (Dec. 2, 1882).

48. Ibid.

49. See below: "Princeton's Crucial Tactical Error."

50. Ibid., p. 182.

51. Briggs to Warfield, 10 March 1882: ibid., p. 183.

52. Warfield's posthumously published, Critical Reviews (Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 36; cited in Letis, p. 184. Cf. Warfield, "The Doctrine of Holy Scripture" (1893), The Westminster Assembly and Its Work (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1931] 1991), p. 239.

53. Warfield, Westminster Assembly, p. 239.

54. Ibid., p. 240.

55. William P. Armstrong, "Gospel History and Criticism," Princeton Theological Review, 12 (1914), p. 432.

56. Ibid., p. 435.

57. Ibid., p. 442.

58. Jowett, "On the Interpretation of Scripture," in Essays and Reviews (London: John Parker & Sons, 1860), p. 337; cited in Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, p. 65.

59. Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. xx.

60. Van Til, "Nature and Scripture," in The Infallible Word (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1946), p. 257. This was a Westminster Seminary symposium.

61. Van Til, The Case for Calvinism (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1964), p. 135.

62. In researching the Briggs case, I relied on a multi-volume collection of articles on Briggs that Warfield assembled. This set resides in the rare book collection of the Speer Library at Princeton Seminary.

63. Edgar Krentz, The Historical-Critical Method (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), pp. 10-16.

64. Massa, Briggs, p. 28.

65. Ibid., p. 37. Also cited in Max Gray Rogers, "Charles Augustus Briggs: Heresy at Union," in American Religious Heretics, p. 90.

66. Briggs, The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892), p. 62; cited in ibid.

67. Cf. J. Edwin Orr, The Fervent Prayer: The Worldwide Impact of the Great Awakening of 1858 (Chicago: Moody, 1974).

68. Massa, Briggs, pp. 26-27.

69. Ibid., p. 158.

70. Charles Augustus Briggs, General Introduction to the Study of the Holy Scriptures (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, [1900] 1970), pp. 286-87.

71. A New School journal with the same name had ceased using the name in 1863 when it joined with the American Theological Review. Stearns, "Historical Review of the Church," Presbyterian Re-union Memorial Volume, p. 97.

72. Lefferts A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church: a study of theological issues in the presbyterian church since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), p. 30.

73. Massa, Briggs, p. 51.

74. Loetscher, Broadening Church, ch. 4.

75. Massa, Briggs, p. 53.

76. Channing Renwick Jeschke, The Briggs Case: The Focus of a Study in Nineteenth Century Presbyterian History (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1966), p. 8.

77. Ibid., p. 10.

78. Statement prepared for 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), pp. 328-29.

79. Ibid., p. 329.

80. Rogers was deceived by Briggs' misrepresentation, and says that the initiative to publish the essays on higher criticism came from the conservatives, not from Briggs. Rogers, "Briggs," American Religious Heretics, p. 92.

81. Massa, Briggs, p. 56-57.

82. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

83. Ibid., p. 67.

84. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I:13.

85. On Scottish common sense realism at Princeton Seminary, see Noll's "Introduction" in The Princeton Theology, 1812-1921: Scripture, Science, and Theological Method from Archibald Alexander to Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, edited by Mark A. Noll (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1983), pp. 30-33.

86. Beecher, "The Logical Methods of Professor Kuenen" Presbyterian Review, 3 (Oct. 1882), p. 704; cited in Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, p. 25.

87. Hodge and Warfield, "Inspiration," Presbyterian Review, 2 (1881), p. 247; cited in ibid, p. 18.

88. People sometimes ask Christian Reconstructionists: "Why are you so committed to the presuppositional apologetics of Cornelius Van Til?" The catastrophic failure of the Princetonian apologetic after 1883 is one answer. It made a successful offensive strategy impossible. The Princetonians were forced to respond to the agenda of the higher critics and then the modernists. What Briggs did or did not do (1889-93), what Fosdick did or did not do (1922-24), what Speer did or did not do (1932-36) determined the boundaries of the three major outbursts of the Presbyterian conflict.

89. Ibid., p. 24.

90. Massa, Briggs, pp. 71-72.

91. Ibid., p. 75.

92. Ibid., p. 81.

93. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 39.

94. William Henry Green, "Dr. Briggs' Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch Examined," Presbyterian and Reformed Review, 4 (1893), p. 34.

95. Walter F. Petersen, "American Protestantism and the Higher Criticism," Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, 50 (1961), p. 325.

96. Ibid., pp. 321-22.

97. Briggs, Whither? A Theological Question for the Times, 3rd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, [1889] 1890), p. 223.

98. Ibid., p. 224.

99. John Frederick Lyons, "Cyrus Hall McCormick, Presbyterian Layman," Journal of Presbyterian History, 39 (March 1961), p. 23.

100. William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 52-54, 57.

101. David Swing, "A Religion of Words" (1874); reprinted in American Protestant Thought in the Liberal Era, edited by William R. Hutchison (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1968), p. 47.

102. Ibid., p. 50.

103. Cited in Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, p. 54.

104. Cited in ibid., p. 66.

105. Ibid., p. 60.

106. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 14.

107. Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, p. 75.

108. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

109. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 17.

110. Henry Wilkinson Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967), p. 214.

111. "Patton, Francis Landey," Dictionary of American Religious Biography, edited by Henry Warden Bowden (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 357.

112. J. David Hoeveler, Jr., James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: from Glasgow to Princeton (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), chaps. 6, 8, and 9; Joseph E. Illick, III, "The Reception of Darwinism at the Theological Seminary and the College at Princeton, New Jersey, II," Journal of Presbyterian History, 38 (1960), pp. 234-43. See also McCosh's book, Development: What It Can Do and What It Cannot Do (1883); extract in The Presbyterian Enterprise: Sources of American Presbyterian History, edited by Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher, and Charles A. Anderson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), pp. 235-39.

113. Hardin Craig, Woodrow Wilson at Princeton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), p. 38.

114. Ibid., pp. 66-67. Craig is friendly towards Patton.

115. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Lawrence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

116. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, p. 12.

117. John M. Mulder and Lee A. Wyatt, "The Predicament of Pluralism: The Study of Theology in Presbyterian Seminaries Since the 1920s," in The Pluralistic Vision: Presbyterians and Mainstream Protestant Education and Leadership, edited by Milton J Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1992), p. 39.

118. Except for a handful of Hegelians, everyone on campus before 1900 claimed to be a defender of empiricism, i.e., inductive reasoning; everyone claimed that he was appealing only to the facts. The higher critics invoked German empiricism, while the conservatives invoked Scottish.

119. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, p. 14.

120. In 1969, the Ph.D. glut emerged, and then the union card in the social sciences entitled many of its holders to drive cabs for a living.

121. Paul C. Kemeny, "President Francis Landey Patton, Princeton University, and Faculty Ferment," American Presbyterians, 68 (Summer 1991), pp. 114-15.

122. Ibid., pp. 116-17.

123. Edwin H. Rian, The Presbyterian Conflict (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1940), p. 64.

124. Kemeny, "Patton," p. 111.

125. Bragdon, Wilson, p. 276.

126. Ibid., p. 205.

127. Ibid., p. 230.

128. Years later, Wilson remarked to Rev. Clarence E. Macartney that Patton was the best extemporaneous speaker he had ever heard. When Macartney related this to Patton, Patton replied: "That's the first time I ever heard Wilson say anything good of me." Clarence E. Macartney, The Making of a Minister (Great Neck, New York: Channel, 1961), p. 122.

129. Bragdon, Wilson, p. 207.

130. John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 156-57.

131. James H. Smylie, "Stated Clerks and Social Policy: American Presbyterians and Transforming American Culture," American Presbyterians, 67 (Fall 1989), pp. 192-93.

132. Kemeny, "Patton," p. 118.

133. Mulder, Wilson, pp. 174-75.

134. David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1965 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 26-27.

135. Tertius van Dyke, Henry van Dyke: A Biography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), pp. 222-27.

136. Macartney, Making of a Minister, p. 123.

137. See Chapter 13, below: section on "The Modernists' Five Steps to Victory."

138. A traditional one-year limit applied to the General Assembly's veto of a newly appointed seminary professor: the next General Assembly after the appointment.

139. See Chapter 1, above: section on "The Five Points of Modernism."

140. "Briggs, Charles Augustus," Dictionary of American Religious Biography, p. 67.

141. Briggs, General Introduction, pp. 288-89.

142. Westminster Confession of Faith, XXVII:4.

143. Loetscher, Broadening Church, p. 70.

144. The Puritans recognized that the rationalistic curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge was a threat to their worldview. They also recognized the power possessed by these universities: the power to train members of the clergy. Yet they could not dislodge the curriculum, 1649-1660. John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560-1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Conclusion. This, despite the fact that Cromwell became Chancellor of Oxford. Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: The Lord Protector (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 379-80, 455, 621-22.

145. The Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly forgers.

146. Thomas H. Olbricht, "Rhetoric in the Higher Criticism Controversy," in The Rhetoric of Protest and Reform, 1878-1898, edited by Paul H. Boase (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980), p. 267.

147. Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London: SCM Press, [1980] 1984), ch. 1.

148. Clarke, Sixty Years, p. 56; cited in Olbricht, p. 267.

149. Hart thinks that Clarke and other mild-mannered higher critics, including the consummate academic infiltrator in American higher education, Moses Coit Gilman, were not self-conscious underminers of the faith. Such naiveté this late in the battle is astonishing. Gilman did his work well. D. G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 40.

150. Olbricht, "Rhetoric," p. 269.

151. The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, 7 vols. (New York: Ingersoll League, 1933), VI:13-270.

152. Olbricht, "Rhetoric," p. 270.

153. Ibid., p. 273.

154. Six Interviews on Talmage (1882); Works, vol. 5.

155. Olbricht, "Rhetoric," p. 271.

156. Ibid., p. 285. The same year is identified by Petersen, "American Protestantism," p. 321.

157. Ibid., p. 286.

158. Mathews, New Faith for Old, p. 277.

TOP

Table of Contents