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“Mediating Modernism”: Charles Briggs, Catholic Modernism, and an Ecumenical “Plot”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Mark S. Massa S.J.
Mark S. Massa S.J.
Affiliation:
Fordham University
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Extract

Historians of religion in America, as enamored of marking “watersheds” in our culture as other scholars, have long used the famous “Briggs Case” as an event for marking that cultural moment when American mainline Protestants, mostly kicking and screaming, began to confront officially the higher criticism of the Bible. Charles Augustus Briggs, as students of Gilded Age religion know well, was a professor of scripture at New York's Union Theological Seminary who, between 1891 and 1893, underwent a peripatetic heresy trial in various Presbyterian church courts—“the most notorious event in 19th century American church history,” as one of its chroniclers has described it—for advocating the application of modern historical-critical methods to the biblical record.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , October 1988 , pp. 413 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1988

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References

1 Brown, Ira, “The Higher Criticism Comes to America, 1880–1900,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 38 (1960) 193–212Google Scholar, 196. For standard treatments of Briggs and his famous trial(s), see Shriver, George, American Religious Heretics (Nashville: Abingdon, 1966) 89ff.Google Scholar; Hudson, Winthrop, Religion in America (3d ed.; New York: Scribner's, 1981) 281.Google Scholar

2 Loetscher, Lefferts, The Broadening Church: A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church Since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar chap. 6, “The Briggs Case.” On modernism as an immanental theological worldview, offering a historical, evolutionary understanding of revelation—over against the older “two-story” understanding of revelation—see Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) 2–4Google Scholar, 100–101. This article takes as axiomatic Hutchison's view that “immanentism” represented the central plank in the modernist theological platform.

3 For the “scramble,” see Schlesinger, Arthur, “A Critical Period in American Religion. 1875–1900,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 64 (1930–1932) 523–36Google Scholar; Carter, Paul, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture. 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981)Google Scholar; Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982).Google Scholar

4 Letter of Briggs to Potter, 11 November 1891 (Transcribed Ledger Books [hereafter TLB] 9. 268, Briggs Collection in the Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary [hereafter UTS], New York).

5 Briggs, Charles. “A Plea for an American Alliance of the Reformed Churches,” Presbyterian Review 9 (1888) 306–8Google Scholar; idem, “The Lambeth Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion,” Presbyterian Review 9 (1888) 657–59Google Scholar; idem, “The Historic Episcopate as a Basis of Reunion,” in idem, ed.. Church Reunion Discussed on the Basis of the Lambeth Propositions (New York: The Church Review Co., 1890) 48–49Google Scholar; “Professor Briggs on Christian Unity,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (5 February 1890).Google Scholar

6 Briggs, Charles, Biblical Study. Its Principles, Methods and History (New York: Scribner's. 1883) 306.Google Scholar For an application of Briggs's textual interests to the Christian past for the cause of ecumenical unity, see idem, “The Work of John Durie in Behalf of Christian Union in the Seventeenth Century,” Presbyterian Review 8 (1887) 297–309.Google Scholar

7 Briggs, Charles, American Presbyterianism. Its Origin and Early History (New York: Scribner's, 1885) xii–xiii.Google Scholar See also Feeney, John J., Jr., “Charles A. Briggs and the Organic Reunion of Christendom,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 47 (1978) 93–112.Google Scholar

8 “Christian Unity,” New York Times (12 May 1890)Google Scholar: “Professor Briggs on Christian Unity,” Christian Union (1 May 1890)Google Scholar; Briggs, Charles, “Church Reunion and Christian Unity,” Independent (11 December 1890).Google Scholar

9 Briggs, Charles, “The Advance Towards Church Unity,” Independent (1 January 1891) 1.Google Scholar

10 Ratté, John, Three Modernists: Loisy, Tyrrell and Sullivan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968) 3ff.Google Scholar; Vidler, Alec, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church: Its Origin and Outcome (New York: Gorden, 1976) xii.Google Scholar

11 Ratté, Three Modernists, 3; Readon, Bernard, Roman Catholic Modernism (London: A. & C. Black, 1970) 16–21Google Scholar; Vidler, Modernist Movement. 89ff.

12 Smyth, Newman, Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism (New York: Scribner's. 1908) 40–45Google Scholar, 108ff.; letters of 11 April 1898 (TLB 9. 415–16) and 29 January 1899 (TLB. 9. 426); Briggs, Charles, “Reform in the Roman Catholic Church,” North American Review 181 (1905) 80–90.Google Scholar

13 Kelly, James J., Baron Friedrich von Hügel's Philosophy of Religion (Leuven: University Press; Uitgeverij: Peeters, 1983) 2Google Scholar; Bedoyere, Michael de la, The Life of Baron von Hügel (London: Dent, 1951) 366ff.Google Scholar

14 Vidler, Alec, A Variety of Catholic Modernists (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress. 1970) 109–26Google Scholar; Heaney, John J., The Modernist Crisis: Von Hügel (Washington. DC: Corpus. 1969) 427ff.Google Scholar

15 Vidler, Variety, 113; Heaney, Von Hügel. 28–35.

16 Briggs, Charles, “Catholic—The Name and the Thing,” AJT 7 (1903) 417–42, 427.Google Scholar

17 Ibid.,441.

18 Letter of Charles to Emilie Briggs, 3 March 1905 (TLB. 9. 301). See also “Dr. Briggs Sees Pope,” New York Times (13 May 1905); letters of 30 December 1904 (TLB. 12. 279), 2 August 1905 (TLB. 12. 327); 20 December 1905 (TLB. 12. 354).

19 Letter of 3 March 1904 (TLB, 10. 301); “Dr. Briggs Sees Pope.”

20 Briggs, Charles, “Loisy and His Critics in the Roman Catholic Church,” London Expositor 6th series, 9 (1905) 241–56, 243–44.Google Scholar

21 Briggs, “Reform in the Roman Catholic Church,” 81.

22 Ibid., 82.

23 Ibid., 83, 89.

24 Barmen, Lawrence. Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Modernist Crisis in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) 132–35. Letters of 28 August 1906 (TLB, 10.384–87), 4 September 1906 (10.392), 14 September 1906 (10.394–95). 6 November 1906 (10.407). 22 November 1906(10.420).Google Scholar

25 Bedoyere, De la, Life of von Hügel, 185; letter of 28 August 1906 (TLB, 10.385–86).Google Scholar

26 Letter of 28 August 1906 (“Strictly Confidential”; TLB, 10. 392).

27 Letter of 4 September 1906 (TLB 10. 392).

28 Letter of 14 September 1906 (TLB, 10. 394–95).

29 Letter of 6 November 1906 (TLB, 10. 407). See also letter of 22 November 1906 (TLB, 10.420). Friedrich von Hügel and Briggs, Charles A., The Papal Commission and the Pentateuch (London: Longmans, Green, 1906) 7, 9.Google Scholar

30 Vidler, Modernist Movement, 217ff.

31 Ibid., 218–19.

32 Lettersof 14 July 1907 (TLB, 10. 487–88), 2 October 1907 (TLB, 12. 11–13).

33 Letter of 8 December 1907 (TLB, 12. 25–26).

34 Letter of 15 November 1907 (TLB, 12. 20).

35 Briggs, Charles, “The Great Obstacle in the Way of a Reunion of Christendom,” North American Review 186 (1907) 72–82, 73.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 77.

37 Briggs, Charles. “The Encyclical Against Modernism,” North American Review 187 (1908) 199–212, 206–7.Google Scholar

38 Briggs, Charles, “Modernism Mediating the Coming Catholicism,” North American Review 187 (1908) 877–89, 879–80.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., 881, 882.

40 Ibid., 888.