Presbyterian Excommunication for Heresy as a Preface to Biblical Criticism (5/22/21)

Those who have read my blog posts here note that I am quite enamored of Professor James Kugel.  I have quoted from his book, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (Free Press 2007 ed.).  That book was about modern scholarship and traditional interpretations (including Christian interpretations) of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible / Old Testament; in this post I will call it the Hebrew Bible).  The book rocked my boat when I first read it (still does), bringing to the task of reading my past in the Christian tradition.

I was surprised that Professor Kugel opened the book (Chapter 1, titled "Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship") with a picture of Professor Charles Augustus Briggs. I had never heard of Briggs before but I turned the page anyway and quickly found out.  Briggs’ Wikipedia page starts off by saying that he was “American Presbyterian (and later Episcopalian) scholar and theologian.”  Kugel’s bookends the opening and closing of Chapter 1 with Briggs' story.  As a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Briggs gave a speech on his specialty, the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, laying out the best scholarship on the Hebrew Bible at the time (the 1890s).  For that, the Presbyterian Church excommunicated Briggs for heresy (although his scholarship in the speech has stood the test of time).  The excommunication came after a long and well-publicized trial in Washington D.C.  How many knew that the Presbyterians excommunicated?  I have asked a few Presbyterians and few knew about the episode.  I always thought excommunication was a Catholic thing.  (When I first read the book, I was a Baptist and, as such, just suspected that the Presbyterians had hung onto that vestige of Catholicism.)

I offer below the opening and closing related of Chapter 1 excerpts related to Charles Augustus Briggs (I put page numbers in brackets) (and for those wanting to know what is between the opening and closing (it’s great), please email me jack@tjtaxlaw.com.  I omit footnotes (mostly scholarly) and bold-face certain parts that might be of particular interest to WPC members:

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            On a warm May afternoon in 1893, a man stood on trial for heresy in Washington, D.C. This circumstance might in itself appear surprising. The defendant was being tried by the Presbyterian Church, which had always prided itself on its tradition of intellectualism and an educated clergy. While disagreements about church teachings were not rare in the denomination, going as far as putting a man on trial for his beliefs was certainly an extreme step. n1 Such a trial might also appear ill-suited to the end of the nineteenth century, a time of great openness to new ideas. Darwin's Origin of Species had been published a full three decades earlier, and Einstein's first writings on the theory of relativity were only twelve years away. America itself was a country of electric-powered machines and newfangled telephones, a rising economic and political center with its own burgeoning literary and intellectual avant-garde. Across the Atlantic, Sigmund Freud was working out his ideas on sexuality and the unconscious; Pablo Picasso was twelve years old, James Joyce was eleven, and D. H. Lawrence was eight. Heresy?

            Still more surprising was the man in the dock; Charles Augustus Briggs hardly seemed fitted to the role of heretic. In his youth, he had been an altogether traditional Presbyterian, distinguished only by the fervor of his belief. In his sophomore year at the University of Virginia, he presented himself for formal membership at the First Presbyterian Church of Charlottesville, and thereafter he became a committed evangelical Christian. n2 The tone of his faith in those early years is well captured by a letter he wrote to his sister Millie:

I trust you feel that you are a sinner. I trust that you know that Christ is your Savior, and I want to entreat you to go to him in prayer. I know by experience that Christ is precious, and that I would not give him up for the world... . Do you want to be separated from your brother and sister when they shall be with Jesus? Are you willing to be with the Devil in torment? You can decide the question in a moment. n3

            So great was Briggs's sense of calling that he soon abandoned plans to go into his father's highly prosperous business—Alanson Briggs, known as the "barrel king," owned and operated the largest barrel factory in the United States—in order to devote himself entirely to a life of Christian preaching and teaching.

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            Briggs proved to be a gifted student of biblical Hebrew and ancient history, and he was soon ordained a Presbyterian minister. After having served as pastor to a small congregation in New Jersey for a time, he accepted a teaching post at one of the mainline seminaries of his day, the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he lectured on Hebrew grammar and various biblical themes. He became, by all accounts, a highly respected scholar, acclaimed at a relatively young age as already belonging to "the foremost rank among the scholars of his day."  n4 Today, a century later, one of Briggs's books is still in print (a rare feat among academics!), a dictionary of biblical Hebrew that he coauthored with Francis Brown and S. R. Driver in 1906. Indeed, "BDB," as this dictionary is commonly known (for the initials of its three authors' last names), is still a required purchase for any graduate student undertaking serious work on the Hebrew Bible.

            What, then, was this son of the Establishment, an expert in Hebrew lexicography and biblical theology, doing on trial? It all had to do with a speech he had made two years earlier, on the occasion of his being named to a prestigious new chair at Union Seminary. Briggs's inaugural address, delivered on the evening of January 20, 1891, went on for well more than an hour. It began innocently enough; as required of all such appointees at Presbyterian seminaries, he opened with a public declaration of his faith in the Bible and the church's system of governance:

I believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice; and I do now, in the presence of God and the Directors of this Seminary, solemnly and sincerely receive and adopt the Westminster Confession of Faith [that is, the Presbyterian charter], as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures. I do also, in like manner, approve of the Presbyterian Form of Government; and I do solemnly promise that I will not teach or inculcate anything which shall appear to me to be subversive of the said system of doctrines, or of the principles of said Form of Government, so long as I shall continue to be a Professor in the Seminary.

            But as Briggs went on, he touched on some of the more controversial issues facing Presbyterians in his day, particularly those matters having to do with his specialty, the Hebrew Bible. What he had to say—new, disturbing ideas about how the Bible came to be written, and the nature of its authority, as well as its place in the life of the church—shocked some of his listeners. He said that, contrary to what was claimed by many of his coreligionists, the Bible was not verbally inspired—that is, there was no reason to think that each and every word of it came from God. In fact, he said, it was obvious that the Bible contained numerous errors. n5 What is more, he stated that it was now quite certain that the supposed authors of various books of the Bible—Moses and  [*4] David and Solomon and Ezra and the others—did not, in fact, write them; these books were the work of people whose true names would never be known. n6 He asserted that the things described as miracles in the Old and New Testaments could not actually have "violate[d] the laws of nature or disturb[ed] its harmonies"—thus they were not, at least in the usual sense, miracles at all. In particular, he suggested, the supposedly miraculous acts of healing recounted in the Old and New Testaments might merely have been the result of "mind cure, or hypnotism, or [some] other occult power." n7 Finally, he pointed out that while the Bible's prophets frequently announced what God was to do in the future, many of their predictions had failed to come true; in fact, he said (a most surprising assertion for a Christian), most of the things predicted in the Old Testament about the coming of a Messiah had "not only never been fulfilled, but cannot now be fulfilled, for the reason that [their] own time has passed forever." n8

            What happened to Charles A. Briggs to cause him to say such things? The short answer is: he had become acquainted with modern biblical scholarship. Following his initial calling to the ministry, Briggs began to study the Bible in earnest, first in the United States and later in Germany, which was then the very center of modern biblical science. Once back in the United States, he had continued the line of his teachers' research with his own; during his years as a professor and scholar, he had published widely on various topics connected with the Hebrew Bible and biblical theology. Many of the things Briggs proclaimed out loud in his inaugural address were thus not altogether new—they had been building up over decades of intensive research and publication.

            Still, that hardly made Briggs's assertions acceptable to everyone in the audience on that evening. Some of his listeners resented the confident, often aggressive tone of his remarks, and they liked even less his apparent endorsement of these new ideas. Despite the orthodox cast of his opening confession of faith, they found that most of his speech was anything but orthodox. Briggs seemed, they felt, out to undermine the Bible's place as the very heart of Protestant belief and practice.

            The evening ended with handshakes and congratulations, but as news of Briggs's speech spread throughout the Presbyterian Church, his conservative opponents felt called upon to take action. They instituted formal proceedings within the church to have him suspended as a minister and removed from the academic chair to which he had just been appointed. No one who said such things could be considered a proper teacher for future Presbyterian ministers! The ensuing deliberations were long and complicated, moving from one judicial instance to the next. At first Briggs had been hopeful, believing that he could count on support from within the liberal wing of American Presby- [5]  terians; but he had underestimated the strength and determination of his opponents. They pressed forward, and it was thus that Charles A. Briggs eventually found himself a defendant at the church's 1893 General Assembly in Washington, D.C., his future in the hands of the more than five hundred delegates gathered there.

            The heresy trial was headline news across the country, closely followed by Americans of all faiths. (Indeed, according to one press report, a clergyman visiting India in 1892 was greeted with the query, "What is the latest phase of the Briggs case?")  n9 Charles A. Briggs may have been the immediate defendant in the proceeding, but in a larger sense it was the Bible itself that stood accused. What was it, really? Was it a special book unlike any other, the very word of God? Or was it, as Briggs seemed to suggest, principally (though not exclusively) the product of human industry, indeed, the work of men who lived in a time and place far removed from our own? Are its stories really true? If they are, was not even questioning their accuracy a sacrilege—a heresy, as Briggs's accusers charged? Or was it perfectly proper for biblical scholars, like all other university-trained researchers, to pursue their theories untrammeled, looking deeply into every aspect of the Bible and letting the chips fall where they may?

            As the delegates rose one by one to cast their votes at the General Assembly, many of them must have felt that they were taking a stand on the Bible's own future. What are we to believe about it from now on? And how had it happened that this basically decent man, a professing Protestant deeply committed to his church, ended up espousing beliefs that so profoundly clashed with traditional faith? The two questions are actually intertwined and a useful point of introduction to this book, since a full answer to both must begin with a look back to the time of the Bible's own origins, more than three thousand years earlier.

[Kugel covers a number of topics, including the fact that the serious Bible scholarship was being done in Germany]

The Education of Charles Augustus Briggs

            To learn more about such theories, Charles A. Briggs, who had begun his studies at Union Theological Seminary with some of the leading American scholars of the day, sailed to Germany in the summer of 1866, accompanied by his young wife, Julie. The place he had selected for further study was the University of Berlin, the same institution at which his teacher and close advisor at Union, Henry Boynton Smith, had pursued his doctoral studies.

            At almost precisely the same moment, a young German divinity student, Julius Wellhausen, was beginning his studies at the University of Gottingen with one of the leading biblical scholars of the day, Heinrich Ewald (1802-75). Wellhausen and Briggs were thus close contemporaries (Briggs was three years older), and they were destined to play somewhat similar roles in their native lands. Both were eloquent spokesmen for the new, "historical" approach to understanding the Bible and its process of creation, and both succeeded in large measure in convincing their fellow scholars of the correctness of this approach (although neither managed to bring many of their conservative coreligionists to accept the new ideas). Both were also hailed as great scholars in their own right—indeed, in this respect, Julius Wellhausen was even more successful than Charles A. Briggs. Wellhausen is largely considered one of the founders—the founder, some would say—of contemporary biblical scholarship.

            Wellhausen's reputation rests largely on his wide-ranging study Prole-  [41]  gomena to the History of Israel (1883 ).  n71 Among the topics covered in this work was the puzzle of the Pentateuch. Building on the work of predecessors (notably K. H. Graf), Wellhausen put forward a fourfold Documentary Hypothesis to explain the authorship of the Pentateuch. According to his scheme, the Pentateuch had been composed in sequence. The priestly source (P), previously thought by some scholars to be the earliest source, was actually the latest, he said; before it came D, still earlier E, and before all of these, J. (The J source belonged, however, centuries after the time of the real Moses.) Wellhausen's claim was not only that these different sources existed, but that they in turn bore witness to the gradual evolution of Israel's religion. n72 At the time when the J texts were written, Wellhausen believed, Israel was still a naïve and unsophisticated people, not very different from its Canaanite neighbors. J thus demonstrates a rather "primitive," corporeal conception of God, and J's world is an altogether polytheistic (or even animistic) one. The E source, though also early, "breathes the air of the prophets" and bears witness to the first signs of a more advanced theology in Israel! n73 Nevertheless, the religion of both J and E is closely tied to the natural world and the agricultural cycle: to hear J and E tell it, the sole purpose of Israel's major festivals was to celebrate God's bounty at harvest time. Theirs is also an easygoing, spontaneous, and unencumbered faith; for example, there is as yet no fixed, hereditary priesthood. By the time D comes along, all this has changed. D's presentation of God is far more abstract, and his attention is turned from the natural world to that of law and history; the annual festivals have begun to be explained as celebrating events from Israel's past, and keeping God's more and more elaborate laws (including those of an established priesthood) becomes a central religious concern. Finally, in P, Israel's religion has become a thing of priestly ceremonies utterly divorced from the natural world and even from the common people, and the process of historicizing attested in D is far more pronounced.

            Wellhausen's scheme, apart from the detailed support its author marshaled from every part of the Bible, appealed to his readers because the very idea of development—that more complex things evolve out of simpler forms—was much in vogue in Europe at the time. Today, we tend to take this idea for granted, but it had become a moving force and model for understanding history only in the nineteenth century. It was particularly characteristic of the Romantic movement in literature n 74 and put its stamp on European thought particularly through the writings of the philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831). Israel's religious conceptions, in Wellhausen's view, could be shown to fit quite well with Hegel's ideas of historical development.

            But is any of this true? Today, more than a century after Wellhausen wrote, many people of traditional religious faith — Christians and Jews —  reject his claims and continue to maintain that Moses was the sole author of the Pentateuch. Any appearance of different documents or historical develop-  [42]  ment is an illusion, they say. Indeed, a glance at the history recited above, they would point out, will show just how speculative the whole thing is: the theories keep changing—P is early, P is late; there are three sources; no, four; no, five; no, more! Thus, on the Internet today are numerous sites devoted to arguing against the Documentary Hypothesis: Wellhausen's theories are just that, they say, theories for which no absolute, scientific proof can ever exist. Indeed, a number of trained university scholars have endorsed some version of this position over the past century. But today, it must be conceded, the majority of biblical scholars in American and European universities are convinced by the idea of the Pentateuch's multiple authorship. Even if no absolute proof exists, they say, some theory of different authors is the most logical and parsimonious n75 way to make sense of the evidence. As will be seen on the following pages, some elements of Wellhausen's approach have been modified over time, n76 and of late a serious challenge has been mounted to its chronological ordering of things, n77 but the basic idea of the Documentary Hypothesis has nonetheless survived the sustained scrutiny of scholars over the last century.

            The Documentary Hypothesis is only one issue among many in which current university scholarship is pitted against traditional religious belief. But at the end of the nineteenth century, it was a particularly emotional and symbolic one. Books and museums and Bibles themselves were full of pictures of the old, bearded Moses bringing God's sacred laws to the people of Israel. Could it be that this was all fiction, that in place of Moses stood four or more faceless figures who wrote at different times in Israel's history and whose overall ideas—about God as well as about the particulars of Israel's religion— were quite at odds with one another?

The Briggs Heresy

            In Berlin, Briggs studied the ideas of Wellhausen's immediate predecessors and teachers, and they had an electric effect on the young evangelist's faith. He did not reject them—on the contrary, they came to Briggs (who had long been studying the Bible in Hebrew and knew it well) with the force of divine revelation. Describing his first six months of study at Berlin, Briggs wrote to his uncle Marvin in January of 1867:

When a new light dawns from above, most men cling to the old and can't believe any new light possible. But the world needs new views of the truth. The old doctrines are good but insufficient. . . . Let us seek more light under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I cannot doubt but that I have been blessed with a new divine light. I feel a different man from what I was a few months ago. The Bible is lit up with a new light. n78

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Briggs followed that "new light" with the enthusiasm of a proselyte. Back in the United States, he soon began his professional life of teaching and writing and made it his personal mission to promote the new biblical scholarship to his colleagues and students, all the while contributing mightily to it in his own research. What he was out to discover was nothing less than the truth, "what really happened," as German scholars like to put it. n79 Surely there could be nothing bad about the truth. It might jostle some long-held notions, Briggs felt, but in the end it had to be beneficial; indeed, it would reveal the unadulterated, pristine basis of Christian faith.

            He did not pursue this mission unopposed; from the beginning, many of his coreligionists resisted the new ideas of German scholars and their American exponents. But when it came to these opponents—particularly old- guard ministers who were in the habit of using the Bible to support their own, dogmatic views—Briggs did not pull any punches:

The real reason these men are battling us is because their kind of Bible is being attacked. Destroy their kind of Bible and you destroy them. The Dogmaticians must therefore do battle with Higher Criticism [that is, the efforts of Wellhausen and others to discover how Scripture came to be] because Higher Criticism is taking away their very bread and butter. For it is destroying their prooftexts, which is the very stuff of their sermons. n80

            Such combativeness, along with the substance of Briggs's ideas, are what ultimately got him in trouble with his denomination. In his famous inaugural address, Briggs denounced the "dead wood, dry and brittle stubble, and noxious weeds" of current teaching. n81 The old ways of thinking needed to go, not just with regard to biblical interpretation, but with fundamental matters of church teachings and its day-to-day policies. "Criticism is at work with knife and fire," he said that night. "Let us cut down everything that is dead and harmful, every kind of dead orthodoxy."  n82

            In spite of his critics, Briggs forged ahead with his mission. Today, he is considered a hero of—and something of a martyr to—the cause of modern biblical scholarship. His trial did not turn out as he had hoped. When the votes were counted the next day in Washington, D.C., a hefty majority of the delegates were found to have voted against him. A formal statement was prepared following the vote, declaring that

this General Assembly finds that Charles A. Briggs has uttered, taught and propagated views, doctrines and teachings as set forth in the said charges contrary to the essential doctrine of Holy Scripture and the Standards, and in violation of his ordination vow.... Wherefore this General Assembly does hereby suspend Charles A. Briggs, the said appellee, from the office of minister in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.

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To be sure, unlike convicted heretics in an earlier age, Briggs was not burned at the stake. In fact, he was even able to stay on at Union Theological Seminary, which voted to sever its connection with the Presbyterian Church in order to keep Briggs in his new chair. (After a while, he also received a new ordination, this time as a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church.) But he was certainly jarred, and scarred, by the trial.

            Despite his tribulations, Briggs continued his mission to slash away the "dead wood" (a goal he pursued in connection with another of his longstanding causes, doctrinal reform and Christian unity). Indeed, in a particularly stirring passage from one of his later books, Briggs switched metaphors, comparing the modern scholar's work not to pruning and clearing an overgrown field but to the clearing done by a modern archaeologist digging down into an ancient site:

Ancient Jerusalem lies buried beneath the rubbish of more than eighteen centuries. It is covered over by the blood-stained dust of myriads of warriors, who have battled heroically under its walls and in its towers and streets. Its valleys are filled with the debris of palaces, churches, and temples. But the Holy Place of three great religions is still there, and thither countless multitudes turn in holy reverence and pious pilgrimage. In recent times this rubbish has in a measure been explored; and by digging to the rock-bed and the ancient foundations bearing the marks of the Phoenician workmen, the ancient city of the holy times has been recovered, and may now be constructed in our minds by the artist and the historian with essential accuracy.

            Just so the Holy Scripture, as given by divine inspiration to holy prophets, lies buried beneath the rubbish of centuries. It is covered over with the debris of the traditional interpretations of the multitudinous schools and sects. . . . The valleys of biblical truth have been filled up with the debris of human dogmas, ecclesiastical institutions, liturgical formulas, priestly ceremonies, and casuistic practices. Historical criticism is digging through this mass of rubbish. Historical criticism is searching for the rock- bed of the Divine word, in order to recover the real Bible. Historical criticism is sifting all this rubbish. It will gather out every precious stone. Nothing will escape its keen eye.

This passage might, in some respects, be seen as prophetic. Written almost exactly a hundred years ago, it foretells the twentieth century's concerted effort to uncover some of the Bible's deepest secrets, as will be documented in the chapters that follow. Briggs could only sense some of the changes that the new century would inaugurate: the flowering of archaeology as a science, bringing with it a new accuracy in the dating of ancient sites and a wealth of information about how biblical Israelites lived and even what they really  [45]  believed; the decipherment of literally thousands of ancient texts written by Israel's neighbors, which offer fresh insights into the history and culture of the ancient Near East; and a far more sophisticated understanding of the biblical text itself, shedding new light on the historical background of different biblical books as well as revealing the meaning of previously misunderstood words and verses and whole chapters. Yet along with its vision of the future, the above passage reveals Briggs's blind spot—one that he shared with the rest of his own and the next two or three generations of biblical critics. The "real Bible" he spoke of has proven to be a far more elusive item than he or they ever imagined. Indeed, as I hope to show, finding that real Bible may ultimately have something to do with all those traditional interpretations for which Briggs had only contempt—the "rubbish" or "debris" that he wished to sweep away in his search for the "rock-bed of the Divine word." The following chapters will attempt to tell that story too.