Chapter VIII: Part II: By Prof. Joseph Rodes Buchanan (4)

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."

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 condemn[11] 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.

[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.

[Transcriber's Note: A macron diacritical mark, a straight line above a letter, is found on several words in the original text. These letters are indicated here by the coding [=x] for a macron above any letter x. For example, the word "aionios" with a macron above the first letter "o" will appear as "ai[=o]nios" in the text.]