The Arena. Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ANCIENT AND MODERN THOUGHT IN THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

The vote of the New York Presbytery on the twelfth of May, to present the case of Prof. Charles A. Briggs10 before the synod will probably prove one of the most momentous moves made in recent years in the theological world. It is a positive challenge thrown before Presbyterians who hold views popularly termed “Higher Criticism.” It is a declaration of war to the knife on the part of those who oppose the revision of the Westminster Confession, and who cherish ancient thought. Nor is the opposition led by Dr. Briggs disposed to yield what is believed to be the only truth consistent with an intelligent conception of a just, loving, and wise God. The immediate cause of this determined conflict is found in Professor Briggs’ recent address on the authority of the Holy Scriptures, delivered at his inaugural as Professor of Biblical Theology in the Union Theological Seminary of New York. In this notable address he maintained that there were three great fountains of divine authority, the Bible, the Church, and Reason, any one of which was capable of leading persons to God. He instanced the following cases: Cardinal Newman was led to God through the Church of Rome; Spurgeon, through the Bible, and the philosopher Martineau through Reason. He further asserted “that no one could get at the Bible unless he forced his way through human obstacles, which he tabulated as follows: (1) Superstitious reverence for the book itself. (2) The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. (3) The authenticity of the Scriptures. Traditions from the dead church assign authors to all the books of the Bible, but higher criticism pronounces these traditions fallacies and follies. (4) The doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. Historical criticism again pronounces that there are errors in the Bible, but they are in circumstantials, not in essentials. (5) The miracles are in violation of the laws of nature, and keep men away from the Bible. (6) The failure of minute prophecy.” Dr. Briggs further expressed belief in the ultimate salvation of mankind, declaring that redemption was not limited to this world, but continued through the vast period of time preceding the resurrection.

On page 55 of his revised address, he observes:

The Biblical redemption is a redemption of our race and of universal nature. As the ancient Jews limited redemption to Israel and overlooked the nations, so the Church limited redemption to those who were baptized, and excluded the heathen and unbaptized. The Presbyterians have too often limited redemption by their doctrine of election; the Bible knows no such limitation. The Bible teaches election, but an election of love. Loving only the elect, is earthly, human teaching. Electing men to salvation by the touch of Divine love—that is heavenly doctrine. The salvation of the world can only mean the world as a whole, compared with which the unredeemed will be so few and insignificant and evidently beyond the reach of redemption by their own act of rejecting it and hardening themselves against it, and by descending into such depths of demoniacal depravity that they will vanish from sight.

In the appendix to his address, published about the middle of May, in speaking of inerrancy, Dr. Briggs further observes:—

It is agreed that there are a large number of errors in the best MSS. of the Bible; it is the theory of modern dogmaticians, that they were not in the original MSS. We can never have them, and it is idle to speculate as to their contents. When the Lower or Textual Criticism has done its best, and secured the best possible text, dogmaticians discredit the best text when they speculate as to what was in the original text. If the reactionary dogmaticians may speculate to remove errors from the text, the rationalistic critics may also speculate with regard to the original text in a way that would make havoc with scholastic theology. Even Mohammed was willing to accept the original text of the Law and the Gospel, which he claimed had been falsified by Jews and Christians.

I said, “It is not a pleasant task to point out errors in the Sacred Scriptures.” In “Biblical Study,” and “Whither?” I limited myself to two errors of citation. I have not taken a brief to prove the errancy of Scripture. Conservative men should hesitate before they force the critics in self-defence to make a catalogue of errors in the Bible. The errors are in the only texts we have, and every one is forced to recognize them.

It is well known that the great reformers, Calvin and Luther, recognized errors in the Scriptures, that Baxter and Rutherford of the second Reformation were not disturbed by them, and that the choicest spirits of modern times—such as Van Oosterzee, Tholuck, Neander, Stier, Lange, and Dorner—have not hesitated to point out numerous errors in Holy Scripture. This view is maintained by Sanday, Driver, Cheyne, Davidson, Bruce, Gore, Marcus Dods, Blaikie, and numerous others in Great Britain; by Fisher, Thayer, Smythe, Evans, H. B. Smith, W. R. Harper, and hosts of others in this country.”

One can easily see how dangerously heretical such bold declarations would sound to patriarchs of conservatism like Rev. Dr. Shedd, the well-known author of Dogmatic Theology, which embraces thirteen hundred pages, but in the index of which one looks in vain for “forgiveness of sin” or “pardon of sin.” A work which devotes eighty-six pages to hell and only four to heaven. Dr. Briggs, however, claims that theologians like Dr. Shedd, whose teachings have been chiefly on the damnation of men not competent to judge him, and gauged by our present civilization he is doubtless correct, but by the standard of the theologians who framed the Westminster Confession, I have less confidence in his accuracy. It must be remembered, however, that Professor Briggs has exhaustively studied the lives and teachings of the framers of the Confession, and he may have been able at times to catch them at their best, when in moments of spiritual exaltation they have uttered grand prophetic and divinely loving utterances which were foreign to their usual habits of thought or the religious conviction of the age in which they lived. And in that event he may be able to maintain his position when his case is called before the synod, even against the popular impression as to the real meaning of the Confession. Failing in this, the only alternative will be recantation or withdrawal from the Presbyterian Communion. From the stand already taken it is impossible to imagine the professor stultifying himself and teaching what he does not believe; while his withdrawal will unquestionably mean the greatest schism that Presbyterianism has yet suffered. I think it highly probable that the majority of his brother ministers to-day will condemn11 the bold, brave man whom his communion in the near future will revere as a man who, prophet-like, saw beyond the sect to which he belonged; whose noble, loving, and holy nature drew him into intimate relationship with the Divine life, which is the essence of Love.

1

Translated by G. H. A. Meyer and J. Henry Wiggin, from the manuscript of Camille Flammarion.

2

Thousands of the women toiling in the cities on starving wages, might be given in the Southern States pleasant employment in fruit culture, and other light agricultural labors.

3

A year after this was written, the following advanced sentiment was uttered by Rabbi Schindler: “Have the dead the right of imposing laws upon the living, of making contracts of which future generations ought to bear the burden?”

4

It is necessary to illustrate this by a few decisive facts which have not been made familiar to the majority of readers, as farmers’ interests have received very little consideration in the East. The financial policy of the general government ever controlled by capital against labor, has been the most gigantic imposition by financial jugglery that history has recorded, and has been effected chiefly by manipulation and contraction of the currency to make debts more oppressive, and during the war by depreciating the people’s money. After the war when $500,000,000 were needed to compensate the destruction of confederate money, a criminal contraction of $500,000,000 dealt a crushing blow to the South, and to the whole country. Let us look at it from the standpoint of the largest body of laborers, the farmers. A very intelligent Illinois farmer, Bert Stewart, presents the case as follows, and if his data are all correct, he has demonstrated a wholesale robbery: The national debt at the end of the war was about $2,800,000,000. What would it then have cost the farmers to pay this debt? He estimates that it could have been paid by 996,000,000 bushels of wheat; or 1,380,000,000 bushels of corn; or 10,000,000 bales of cotton. But financial legislation has increased the value of money (magnifying the debt), and decreased the value of the products of labor, so that practically, the debt has been increasing faster than it has been paid; and, after paying nearly $2,000,000,000 of the principal, and over $2,000,000,000 of interest, it will cost more to pay the remaining third of the debt than to have paid the whole at first. It would require to-day, instead of 1,380,000,000, over 4,000,000,000 bushels of corn to pay the remaining third. This being the case, it would seem that the payment of about four thousand millions during the last twenty-six years, leaving the debt substantially unpaid, was virtually a robbery of the commonwealth by corrupt or ignorant legislation. Mr. Stewart mentions also, that in one year the binding twine trust, by raising prices, drew $21,000,000 “from the farmers of the West to the sharpers of the East.” The reports of the State Board of Agriculture of Illinois show (what is a fair statement for the whole country) that during the last thirty years the corn crops of Illinois have for more than half the time brought less than the cost of their production; and taking the entire thirty years together, the losses so nearly balanced the profits that the average net profit of the thirty years has not exceeded seventeen cents an acre for each year, in the cultivation of over six millions of acres of corn. In the official report of Iowa also, it is stated “the general range of farm products have sold below cost of production, since 1885.” The official “Farm Statistics of Michigan,” just issued, tell the same sad story. It shows that the wheat crop of 1889 cost more than it sold for, the loss being $1,471,515. The entire loss on wheat, corn, and oats amounted to $9,226,510. Thus is agricultural labor crushed that millionnaires may grow. Hence it is that farmers are sinking under their burdens of mortgage indebtedness, paying seven per cent. or more, losing their farms, and often compelled to mortgage crops, tools, and stock. In the single year, 1887, 35,334 farm mortgages were recorded in Illinois, amounting to $37,040,770, and “nine million mortgaged homes” is the war-cry of the Farmers’ Alliance.

Thus the independent farmer is disappearing, and although there was scarcely a tenant farmer in Illinois in 1840, there are more than 110,000 tenant farmers now; and we have a vast increase of large farms. But while the farmer sinks into poverty, those who handle his products grow rich. The Chicago Stock Yard that was started with a million of capital has grown so prosperously that its stock now amounts to $23,000,000. The monetary interests control all things, and Mr. Stewart forcibly says: “The time has come, gentlemen, when the government must run the railroads, or the railroads will run the government. In Pennsylvania to-day two roads own the State, its legislature, its governor, its courts, its people, own them body and soul, and stole the money from the people to buy them with. You elect men to positions and pay them salaries, and then the railroads buy them and make you pay for bribing your own officers, in the freight rates they charge you. The net income of the railroads of the United States is three times that of the entire revenue of the government.”

5

Parker Pillsbury mentions a Governor of Maine, who owns in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and Canada, 691,000 acres.

6

As a single specimen of this, I would mention that those eminent politicians, John C. New, and Wm. H. English, of Indiana, under the laws engineered by cunning and accepted by ignorance, invested $200,000 in a national bank scheme when greenbacks had been knocked down to forty cents, and in thirteen years from 1864 to 1877 they made a clear profit of $2,133,000—more than ten for one of their investment. But this is very moderate in comparison with land speculation. The Elyton Land Company at Birmingham, Alabama, with a cash capital of $100,000, has declared in five years, ending in 1888, dividends amounting to $5,570,000, and is believed to own property still that will amount to $5,000,000, a return of more than a hundred dollars for every one invested—a clear profit absorbed of over ten millions—the gift of law to monopoly. Will this ever return to the commonwealth? The robbery of the commonwealth goes on in every direction. Shall we continue the present system under which, while the nation is losing its inheritance daily, one man in Chicago tied up the wheat crop of the United States, and one man also tied up or cornered pork, and both levied millions on the people?

7

To save the nation we must reform and stop the production of 60,000 boy tramps and the half million of paupers and criminals which our horrible system has produced, which at the present rate of increase will, in fifty years, be a million and a quarter, and in a hundred years will probably exceed four millions. I see no measures but those I propose that will save us from this terrible condition. They will not be adopted in time to prevent civil war, but they must be adopted afterwards.

8

Succession and income taxes are now beginning to be considered. Two very feeble propositions have been brought forward. The Massachusetts Legislative Committee, on probate, reported a bill well adapted to be worthless—to discourage benevolence and keep property in the family by imposing a tax of five per cent. on property left by will, except when going to relatives or connections. Congressman Hall, of Minnesota, introduced a bill in the last Congress for an income tax, a fourth of one per cent. on incomes between two and three thousand rising gradually to one per cent. on incomes over $10,000. This very small business is not what was demanded by “The Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union” in the Ocala convention, which demanded the abolition of national banks and “the passage of a graduated income tax law.” These demands were reiterated by the last legislature of Missouri, in a resolution calling upon Congress to act upon them, and pledging the legislature to enforce the farmers’ demand as far as in their power. North Carolina, too, has adopted the Alliance principles. The income tax will probably be a growing one—one per cent. will not be its maximum. The British income tax under Mr. Gladstone in 1885 was three and a third per cent. But this is mere child’s play, being about equivalent to a property tax of one seventh of one per cent. When seriously considered, the question will be between five, ten, twenty, and thirty per cent.

9

The United Presbyterian in a recent issue says, “It appears that Dr. Briggs does not stand alone in the theological seminaries of the Presbyterian Church as a teacher of dangerous views of inspiration. Four of the professors of Lane Seminary have declared themselves as equally radical.” The Interior says, “The paper of Prof. Smith, of Lane, published in a pamphlet with that of Prof. Evans, goes much beyond anything that has appeared on the subject from Presbyterian authorship in this country.”

At the meeting of the Alumni of the Union Theological Seminary, on the eighteenth of May, the newly elected professor of systematic theology, the brilliant Rev. Henry J. Van Dyke, D. D. (since deceased) made the following bold remark while defending Dr. Briggs: “If we cannot have orthodoxy and liberty, let orthodoxy go and let us have liberty. Liberty has always produced progress.”

In his sermon on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It smells of roasting flesh.

On the same Sunday the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, of New York, quoted the ringing words given above by Dr. Van Dyke, with his cordial indorsement. He continued to thus severely arraign the Orthodox brethren in the Presbyterian Church:

“This question of inerrancy is not new. Calvin, Luther, and many others did not believe in the Bible’s inerrancy. If this is not according to the confession of faith—I don’t know whether it is or not—we had better square the confession with the truth rather than the truth with the confession. Let those who would prove that there are no mistakes in the Bible produce a cud-chewing coney, and then we will consider the question of inerrancy.

If the Church is to go on in the way that some are trying to persuade us it ought to go, the sooner it gives up the ghost the better, to save the medical expense.”

10

Dr. Philip Schaff, than whom there is no abler or more renowned biblical scholar in the New World, has in a recent paper in the New York Herald defended Dr. Briggs. That journal aptly says: In his paper, he defines in the most trenchant language, the apparent inconsistency of the New York Presbytery in practically avowing, eighteen months ago, the same principle for which Dr. Briggs, it declares, must now stand trial. He declares that the American Presbyterian Church has herself materially changed the Westminster Confession of a hundred years ago, and that this spirit of revision pervades the whole Christian world. Finally, he asserts that, as the theory of verbal inspiration of the Scriptures is not in the Westminster Confession of Faith, it cannot be demanded from any Presbyterian minister or professor, and warns churchmen that any attempt by the General Assembly to enforce an extra Scriptural and extra Confessional theory upon the Church will create a split worse than that of 1837. The Herald observes that:—

“Dr. Schaff’s international fame as a church historian and theologian will compel the greatest respect from not alone the ministers of the Presbyterian church, but also from the clergy of all Christian churches.

As early as 1845, he was tried for heresy in this country, and acquitted. In 1854, he represented the American German churches at the Ecclesiastical Diet at Frankfort, and received the degree of D. D. from the University at Berlin. In 1870, he accepted the chair of sacred literature in the Union Theological Seminary of this city. He is a member of the Leipsic Historical, the Netherland, and other historical and literary societies in this country and in Europe, and is one of the founders and honorary secretary of the American Branch of the Evangelical Alliance. In 1871, he was one of the Alliance delegates to the Emperor of Russia to plead for the religious liberty of his subjects in the Baltic Provinces.

He was president of the American Bible Revision Committee, which was appointed in 1871 at the request of the English committee, and in 1875 was sent to England to arrange for the co-operation and publication of the Anglo-American edition. The same year he attended officially the conferences of the Old Catholics, Greeks and Protestants at Bonn, to promote Christian unity.

Dr. Schaff was first president of the American Society of Church History, and is the author of a great number of historical and exegetical works, both in English and German, the latter having been translated into English.”

11

Since writing the above the Assembly at Detroit has voted against the confirmation of Dr. Briggs by 440 against 59; thus, from a numerical point of view, Dr. Briggs is in the minority. This is by no means surprising, and I regard it greatly to the credit of the Assembly that, while they hold to the severe doctrines popularly known as Calvinism, they repudiate all the great liberal scholars who refuse to believe and teach conceptions of God which were unquestioningly accepted in a former age, but which the enlightenment of the present century shrinks from with unutterable horror. Unless Dr. Briggs proves a dishonest man and recants he must leave Union Theological Seminary, if that institution remains in the Presbyterian fellowship.