Last week, we explored the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age as America expanded westward. We saw how the Presbyterian church grew alongside the country during this period. Today, we continue our journey through the late 19th century, but we’re also beginning to shift our focus. As we approach Christmas, this class will increasingly center on the history of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), which was founded in 1936, rather than surveying all the different churches of the 20th century.

The events we’ll discuss today set the stage for major controversies that would eventually lead to the formation of the OPC. We’ll examine two key figures whose influence shaped Presbyterian history in opposite directions: Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield and Charles Briggs.

The Legacy of Charles Hodge and the Rise of B.B. Warfield

Charles Hodge’s Death and Influence

In 1878, Charles Hodge died after an extraordinary 58-year tenure as professor at Princeton Seminary (1820-1878). During this period, he taught more Presbyterian theological students than any other professor of his era. His lasting contribution remains his three-volume Systematic Theology, which replaced Francis Turretin’s Latin theology as the standard text at Princeton Seminary.

B.B. Warfield’s Remarkable Background

Among Hodge’s finest students was Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, who had begun studying under him in 1873. Warfield came from a family of extraordinary prominence and wealth. Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1851, he belonged to the distinguished Breckinridge family on his mother’s side.

The Breckinridge family’s influence in American history was remarkable. His great-grandfather John served as attorney general under Thomas Jefferson. His grandfather Robert was a leader in the old school Presbyterian church and later became president of Danville Theological Seminary (now Louisville Theological Seminary). Two of Robert’s sons, Warfield’s uncles, fought on opposite sides of the Civil War, literally embodying the phrase “brother against brother.” One uncle became vice president under James Buchanan and later served as Jefferson Davis’s final secretary of war, ultimately encouraging Davis to surrender to the North.

Early Life and Education

The Warfield children received careful education at home. As his brother Ethelbert later wrote, “youthful objects had little effect in a household where the shorter catechism was ordinarily completed in the sixth year.” By age six or seven, the children had memorized not only the Shorter Catechism with Scripture proofs, but also the Larger Catechism.

Interestingly, young Warfield’s early interests were strongly scientific. He collected bird’s eggs, butterflies, and geological specimens, studied local flora and fauna, and read Darwin’s newly published works with enthusiasm. He was so certain of pursuing a scientific career that he “strenuously objected to studying Greek.”

After graduating from Princeton University at age 19 with highest honors in science and mathematics, Warfield spent two years exploring Europe. Surprisingly, during this time he decided to enter the ministry, catching his family completely off guard.

Ministry and Tragedy

Following seminary at Princeton, where he studied under Charles Hodge, Warfield pastored briefly in Dayton, Ohio and Baltimore. In 1876, he married Annie and took an extended honeymoon to Europe. During this trip, a traumatic experience in a thunderstorm left Annie so troubled that she became essentially homebound for the rest of her life. Warfield cared for her throughout their 39-year marriage, which meant he rarely traveled for speaking engagements or even attended General Assembly.

Academic Career

In 1878, at just 26 years old, Warfield became professor of New Testament literature and exegesis at Western Theological Seminary (now Pittsburgh Theological Seminary). When A.A. Hodge died in 1887, Warfield was called to Princeton Seminary to fill the chair of didactic and polemic theology that had been held by both Charles Hodge and his son.

Warfield taught at Princeton from 1887 until his death in 1921, becoming an ardent defender of the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. His prolific writings defended Scripture against the higher criticism emerging from Germany, which was beginning to influence American theological education.

Warfield’s Influence on the Future

One of Warfield’s most significant students was J. Gresham Machen, who would later become one of the founders of the OPC. When Warfield died in 1921, Machen observed: “Dr. Warfield’s funeral took place yesterday afternoon at First Church of Princeton. It seemed to me that old Princeton, a great institution it was, died when Dr. Warfield was carried out.”

This was eight years before the formation of Westminster Seminary. There’s a strong case to be made that the OPC wouldn’t exist today without Dr. Warfield’s influence on Machen and others of that generation.

Charles Briggs and the Challenge to Orthodox Faith

Early Life and Conversion

While Warfield represented orthodox scholarship, Charles Briggs embodied the growing liberal challenge to traditional Presbyterian faith. Born in 1841 in New York City, Briggs went south to study at the University of Virginia in 1859, just before the Civil War. During his second year at UVA, he was converted and joined a Presbyterian church in Charlottesville.

As war approached, Briggs left the South and returned to New York City. He served briefly in the Union Army, helping defend Washington, D.C. from Confederate troops at the beginning of the war.

Theological Education and German Influence

Briggs enrolled at Union Seminary in New York City, founded in 1836. After graduation, he went to Berlin to study, following a common pattern among Americans interested in theology. Germany had become the center of leading biblical scholarship, but it was also where higher criticism originated, bringing “great distrust of scripture and the authority of scripture.”

While exposure to German scholarship didn’t corrupt everyone (both Warfield and Machen also studied in Germany), it seemed to have a significant influence on Briggs.

The Push for Church Union

In 1874, Briggs became professor of Hebrew at Union Seminary. During his tenure, he became a strong advocate for church union, both Presbyterian and otherwise. This touched on one of the great ongoing tensions in Presbyterianism: How big should the tent be? How far should we go in efforts for union? What theological issues are we willing to compromise on for the sake of unity?

In 1887, Briggs declared that “the great barrier to reunion in Christendom is subscription to elaborate creeds.” This returned to a fundamental issue that had plagued American Presbyterianism since the early 1700s: What is the proper place of creeds and subscription to creeds, particularly for church officers?

The Controversial Book: “Whither?”

In 1889, Briggs published a book titled Whither? A Theological Question for the Times. In it, he defended the Westminster Confession from what he saw as its misguided supporters. He charged that American Presbyterianism had “departed from the Westminster standards and substituted a false orthodoxy in its place.”

This false teaching, which he labeled “orthodoxism,” was coming from Princeton Seminary, particularly the Hodge-Warfield formulation of inerrancy. Briggs wrote:

“Orthodoxism assumes to know the truth and is unwilling to learn. It is haughty and arrogant. Assuming the divine prerogatives of infallibility and inerrancy, it hates the truth that is unfamiliar to it and prosecutes it to the uttermost.”

In contrast, he claimed his position represented true orthodoxy:

“Orthodoxy loves the truth. It is ever anxious to learn. For it knows how greatly the truth of God transcends human knowledge. It is meek, lowly, and reverent. It is full of charity and love. It does not recognize an infallible pope. It does not bow to an infallible theologian.”

Briggs believed that “progress in religion, in doctrine, and in life is demanded of our age of the world more than any other age.” Rather than returning to the Confession as one might expect, his solution was to change it.

The Authority of Scripture Controversy

The Inaugural Lecture

In 1891, Briggs was promoted to Chair of Biblical Studies at Union Seminary, requiring him to re-subscribe to the Westminster Confession. Immediately after doing so, he delivered his inaugural lecture titled “The Authority of Scripture.”

From the beginning, Briggs declared: “I shall venture to affirm that as far as I can see, there are errors in the Bible that no one has been able to explain away. And the theory that they are not in the original text is a sheer assumption.”

The lecture taught several controversial points:

• Reason and the church are both foundations of divine authority apart from Scripture
• Errors may have existed in the original text of Scripture
• Old Testament predictions have been reversed by history
• Messianic predictions cannot be fulfilled
• Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch
• Isaiah didn’t write the second half of his book
• The process of redemption extends to the world to come, implying continued sin in heaven

Church Response

Sixty-three presbyteries immediately sent overtures to the General Assembly asking them to act against Briggs. The Assembly’s first action was to veto Briggs’ appointment to the seminary.

That same year, meeting in Portland, Oregon, the Northern Church adopted what became known as the Portland Deliverance, asserting that all ministers must accept the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture. Remarkably, this was the same church that would later become so liberal that the OPC would separate from it in 1936.

When Union Seminary’s board didn’t appreciate being told they couldn’t have Briggs as their professor, they renounced the authority of the General Assembly and became an independent seminary. Two years later, the Assembly found Briggs guilty of heresy and suspended him from ministry in the PCUSA.

The Path of Liberalism

Union Seminary still exists today in New York City. Four years ago, they posted on Twitter a picture of students “confessing to plants” in chapel, “offering grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt, and sorrow to the beings who sustain us.” This illustrates the tragic path that liberalism and distrust of the Bible leads to.

In 1899, ten years after his suspension, Briggs was ordained as an Episcopal priest and continued teaching at Union Seminary, having simply walked away from everything Presbyterian.

The Movement for Confessional Revision

The Committee of Fifty

Despite Briggs’ departure, the idea of confessional revision continued gaining momentum in the Northern Church. In 1900, the General Assembly appointed a committee of 50 to study confessional revision and bring proposals for changes.

Warfield was asked to serve on this committee but expressed his grief: “It is an inexpressible grief to me to see the church spending its energies in a vain attempt to lower its testimony to suit the ever-changing sentiment of the world about it.” The committee even included Benjamin Harrison, former President of the United States, as a ruling elder from First Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis.

The 1903 Changes

In 1903, the Northern Church adopted two new chapters to the Westminster Confession: “The Holy Spirit” and “The Love of God and Missions.” These additions were criticized for softening the confession and making it more open to Arminianism.

More troubling was the revision of Chapter 16, which had stated that the works of the unregenerate are sinful and cannot please God. The revision changed “sinful” to “praiseworthy,” representing a substantial theological shift.

Other changes included removing the statement that the Pope is the Antichrist and adding a declaratory statement that softened the doctrine of election. When the OPC was formed in 1936, it chose not to adopt the two new chapters but did keep the changes about the Pope and some minor adjustments about oaths.

The Cumberland Presbyterian Merger

These changes opened the door for the Northern Presbyterian Church to merge in 1906 with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The Cumberland Presbyterians, formed in Kentucky around 1805, had become Arminian and had less stringent educational requirements for ministers. Many argued that the confessional changes made this merger possible by softening the Calvinism of the Westminster standards.

Notably, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church had already been ordaining women, which is likely how the PCUSA received its first female ministers.

The Rise of Dispensationalism and Premillennialism

The Movements That Would Divide the Early OPC

Three related but distinct movements developed during this era that would become crucial issues in the early days of the OPC: dispensationalism, premillennialism, and fundamentalism. These are important because just two years after the OPC’s founding in 1936, the denomination split in 1938 over whether OPC ministers could be dispensational or premillennial, along with questions about alcohol consumption. This split led to the formation of the Bible Presbyterian Church.

John Nelson Darby and Modern Dispensationalism

In the 1830s, John Nelson Darby, an English minister, became the founder of modern dispensationalism and the Plymouth Brethren church movement. Darby divided the history of Scripture and mankind into multiple dispensations.

While the Westminster Confession itself mentions dispensations, saying there are “not two different covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations,” Darby’s system was fundamentally different. Rather than seeing history unified under the covenant of grace, dispensationalists divide history into different periods where God deals with people in entirely different ways.

The early dispensationalists drew a hard distinction between Israel and the church, seeing salvation as operating differently in the age of Israel versus the church age. Some called the church age a mere “parenthesis” in God’s primary work with Israel.

Presbyterian Attraction to Dispensationalism

Despite theological differences, many Presbyterians were attracted to dispensationalism because dispensationalists strongly supported the inerrancy of Scripture. When liberals like Charles Briggs were questioning Scripture, the dispensationalists’ high view of Scripture appealed to many Presbyterian conservatives.

James Hall Brooks, born in 1830, was a Presbyterian minister and premillennial dispensationalist who pastored in Ohio and St. Louis for 43 years. Warfield actually admired Brooks greatly, describing him as having “the voice of a lion and the vehemence of Elijah.”

Brooks formed the Niagara Bible Conference, which met annually near Niagara Falls for 20 years in the late 1800s, helping spread dispensationalism across America.

C.I. Scofield and Lasting Influence

In the 1880s, Brooks mentored a young minister in St. Louis named C.I. Scofield, who had a troubled past as a Confederate deserter, corrupt politician, and alcoholic before his conversion in the 1870s. Despite this background, Scofield learned dispensationalism from Brooks and eventually joined the Southern Presbyterian Church.

In 1909, Scofield published the Scofield Reference Bible, teaching seven dispensations of God’s working with mankind. This Bible had an enormous influence on American evangelicalism, spreading dispensationalism particularly in Baptist churches but also in other denominations, including some Presbyterian churches.

Conclusion

The events surrounding Charles Briggs and confessional revision represent one of the first major conflicts over the nature of Scripture and the place of confessions that would explode after World War I in the 1920s. These controversies, combined with the growing influence of dispensationalism and fundamentalism, set the stage for the Presbyterian controversy that would ultimately lead to the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.

Next week, we’ll explore how these conflicts developed further, particularly examining the fundamentalist movement and the events that directly preceded the founding of the OPC.