Famous Heresy Trials and the Five Fundamentals

I.Famous Heresy Trials and the Five Fundamentals a.Questions concerning acceptable degrees of doctrinal latitude continued to plague the Presbyterian Church throughout the nineteenth century. i.Church trials, nevertheless, remained relatively rare because proceedings required concrete evidence. ii.The major valid evidence for any charges of theological liberalism had to come from the published literature of the accused, and, in most cases, the compositions in question could be interpreted in more than one sense. b.Such, for instance, was the defense of David Swing, in 183O, of Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church. i.Francis L. Patton (1843-1932), conservative professor at McCormick Theological Seminary, brought charges against Swing in 1874 for failure to adhere to his ordination vows 1.To him, there were no absolutes, and all things were in a state of flux.

2.    Biblical inerrancy was a doctrine only for simple and insecure souls who needed something tangible to worship.

3.    Patton, however, tried to prove that Swing was a Unitarian, which was more than he could demonstrate to a largely pro-liberal presbytery, and the defendant won his case.

4.Had Patton pursued the issue of inerrancy, which was the root issue, he could have presented a solid case. c.Most of the church trials that followed dealt with defendants who were theological professors rather than pastors. i.These trials raised the question of the relative authority of the presbytery against that of the General Assembly. ii.with the de-emphasis on the importance of doctrine, the liberals could be forced out of the church in the 1890s for heresy, but iii.by the 1930s the conservatives could be forced out for their efforts to maintain the purity of the church. d.The Briggs Case i.Charles Augustus Briggs (1841-1913), of Union Theological Seminary in New York, antagonized conservatives and consequently became a major target of their criticism. ii.Briggs viciously attacked the American Bible and Prophetic Conference held in New York in 1878. iii.In 1880, he led in the founding of the Presbyterian Review, “ which ran for a decade under the joint editorship of Briggs and, successively, A. A. Hodge, Francis L. Patton, and B. B. Warfield. iv.The articles appearing during these years indicate that a serious internal controversy over biblical inerrancy was developing and that Briggs was coming under suspicion for siding with higher biblical criticism. v.In 1891, Briggs assumed Union’s chair of biblical theology, and on the occasion of his inauguration, Adam’s Chapel was filled to capacity.

1.    The address, which Briggs titled The Authority of Holy Scripture, shocked even some of his own sympathizers by its blatant attacks on the Bible.

2.     He enumerated six “barriers” that allegedly impeded men in their Bible study: superstition (which he called bibliolatry), verbal inspiration, authenticity of Scripture, inerrancy, miracles, and predictive prophecy.

3.     He attacked belief in verbal inspiration, scorned the Bible’s authenticity and inerrancy, laughed at revealed miracles and Old Testament ethics, denied the orthodox view of original sin, and advocated a “progressive sanctification after death.”

4.    He claimed that men had found God through the church; and through reason; and that these experiences were just as genuine as that of Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892), who found God through the Scriptures.

5.    Understandably, conservatives immediately charged the professor with heresy.

6.    During the same year, the New York Presbytery, in the interest of “peace,” dismissed all charges against Briggs.

7.    the General Assembly, finally decided to hear the case.

8.    The Assembly convicted Briggs and suspended him from the Presbyterian ministry

9.Although Briggs soon received re-ordination into the Protestant Episcopal Church, he remained at Union Semi nary and continued to train clergymen for Presbyterian pulpits. e.The Smith Case i.In March 1891, Henry Preserved Smith (1847-1927)’ of Lane Seminary delivered an address to the ministerial association in Cincinnati. ii.He defended the same views that Briggs had expressed in his January inaugural. Smith’s address, later published under the title Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, denied the verbal inspiration of the Bible. iii.In December 1892, the Presbytery of Cincinnati found Smith guilty of false teaching and suspended him from the ministry. iv.The liberal Lane Seminary trustees would not accept Smith’s resignation until the 1893 General Assembly rebuked them. v.When Smith did resign, all but one of his Lane colleagues resigned with him to show their support. f.The MeGiffert Case i.Formerly a professor at Lane Seminary (1888-1893), his “History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age” appeared, and conservatives immediately took offense at the book’s treatment of the Bible.

1.In his book, McGiffert asserted that John the Baptist probably never even knew about Jesus at all, 2.his “Behold the Lamb of God,” recorded in the Gospel of John, was not historical.

3.    McGiffert further claimed that the disciples did not regard Jesus as deity;

4.    that Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles and that whoever penned them “had a very confused idea of the nature of the heresies which he denounces”;

5.    that Peter did not write the epistles that bear his name; that the Gospel of John gives an inaccurate picture of Jesus; and

6.    that whoever wrote the First Epistle of John was trying to combat some false teachers who had learned their heresies from Paul.

7.    The year following the book’s publication, the Pittsburgh Presbytery presented an overture (a call for the Assembly to perform a particular legislative or executive action) to the General Assembly to condemn the work as irreconcilable with the Scriptures and with the church’s standards.

8.The overture charged that McGiffert’s book treated the New Testament irreverently by attacking its verbal inspiration, inerrancy, authenticity, and authority. ii.The General Assembly urged McGiffert to reconsider his opinions and, if he could not conform his views to the standards of the church, to withdraw from the Presbyterian ministry. When McGiffert refused, ten presbyteries overtured the 1899 General Assembly to take clear and decisive action iii.To avoid any appeal and prolonged litigation, McGiffert simply withdrew from the Presbyterian ministry. iv.However, he continued training Presbyterian clergymen at Union Seminary until 1926, writing other liberal books and serving as Union’s president from 1917 to 1926.