138 - Charles Augustus Briggs and the Crisis of Historical Criticism

Charles Augustus Briggs and the Crisis of Historical Criticism
By Mark S. Massa
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1990. 220 pp. $16.95.

In this succinct volume, Mark Massa, Assistant Professor at Fordham University, argues that the career of Charles Briggs dramatically illustrates the impact of historicism on nineteenth-century American Protestant evangelicalism.

Having joined historicist methods with his evangelical convictions while a student in Germany, Briggs accepted a faculty position at New York's Union Theological Seminary in 1874. His higher critical views of the Bible led to his renowned 1893 heresy trial and suspension from the Presbyterian ministry. Briggs's conflicts

140 - Charles Augustus Briggs and the Crisis of Historical Criticism

in the Presbyterian Church notwithstanding, his historicist presuppositions undergirded a passionate commitment to church unity and inspired Briggs to aid the Catholic modernist cause. In pursuit of a theology that was truly scientific and truly Christian, he fought not merely those on his theological right but also opposed the claims of scholars who challenged the historicity of the virgin birth and bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Clearly written and tightly argued, this helpful work illuminates the issues that fueled religious controversy in the Gilded Age.

Bradley L Longlield,
Duke Divinity School,
Durham, N.C.