Dorrien covers the biography of Brigg's with a 34 pages discussion. Interesting, Dorrien wants to make Briggs a moderate liberal because he was attacked by Presbyterian inerrantists and Briggs defended historical criticism. Yet the data ultimately shows that Briggs was working with different categories than the dichotomy/dialectic with which Dorrien tells his story.

Briggs suffered a heresy trial at the hands of proto-fundamentalist Presbyterians who cast "orthodoxy" in terms of the utter inerrancy of Scriptures. "The first round of formal heresy accusations against Briggs began in April 1891, when the Presbytery of New York appointed a committee to determine if disciplinary action should be taken against its most prominent biblical scholar. . . . .The original accusation against Briggs, as formulated by an appointed committee of the Presbytery of New York, was that he had equated the divine authority of scripture, the church, and reason; rejected the doctrine of biblical inerrancy; and claimed that the notion of progressive sanctification was a biblical and church doctrine" (p. 361). Here is an attack by "fundamentalist" forces that ultimately succeeded, mistaking fundamentalism and the historic Christian faith in its biblicist foundationalist Protestantism. He survived the first trial, but was defrocked during an appeal. Such actions render fear of "fundamentalist" ahistorical orthodoxy that caricaturizes in a modernist direction making the absolute inerrancy of Scripture the touchstone of orthodoxy, rather than the confession of Jesus as fully God, fully human in one person.

Briggs saw this. "He later reflected: 'The Presbyterian Church was deliberately thrown into a panic about the Bible in order to defeat the revision movement and to discredit Union Seminary. I was only an incident in this warfare. Circumstances made me the convenient target on which to concentrate the attack. In all respects this conspiracy was successful. The revision movement was defeated; Union Seminary was discredited; and I was suspended from the mimnistry of the Presbyterian Church" (p. 366). One can find such a strategy, for instance, in the "Concerned Nazarenes". They detect something amiss, but merely invert the problem.

Brigg's opponents did see something happening in these "revisionists" but, in their fundamentalism, misplaced their stroke. Brigg's himself became disconcerted with the inverse liberal modernism that his faculty colleagues at Union went. Dorrien writes, "Briggs also witnessed the seminary's outright liberalization. He appreciated that Arthur McGiffert made his later career at Union ecclesiastically tolerable, but relations between them soured nonetheless. McGiffert was schooled in a later generation of German criticism than Briggs; his idea of an exemplary theological scholars was Harnack . . . He took it for granted that the gospel message - which Harnack called the dispensable 'husk' of the gospel 'kernel'--was not off-limits to historical-critical deconstruction. This generational assumption offended Briggs deeply . . . . He chafed at colleagues who did not share his high Christology . . . . By the end of his career at Union, he had acquired several such colleagues, a trend that was alarming to him. It made him fear that modern Protestantism had a self-destructive impulse. Near the end of his career, Briggs decided that he couldn't retire without issuing a formal protest to Union's board of directors. He told Francis Brown that he was going to press heresy charges against McGiffert. Fortunately for McGiffert and Union, Brown, who had become the seminary's seventh president in 1908, took his longtime friend aside and noted the absurdity of the situation. . . .Briggs back down and kept his resentment off the record. He could see where liberal Protestantism was going; he wanted to protest that McGiffert had already gone too far; he did protest that historical critics overstepped their bounds whenever they negated Christian dogmas" (pp. 369-370).

By framing the issue originally as "fundamentalist," Union became an example of liberal Protestantism's institutional self-destructive impulse: "The liberalization of Union Theological Semiary was important both in its own right and as an example of a trend. Under the leadership of McGiffert and William Adams Brown, Union Seminary became the flagship institution of a broadly Ritschlian, social-gospel-oriented movement for progressive Christianity. Liberal theology overcame its belated march through the institutions in the 1890s; upon getting through the door at Union and the keystone Congregationalist seminaries--Andover Seminary, Bangor Theological Seminary, and Yale Divinity School--it took barely a decade for McGiffert's generation to build a new theological establishment. . . . The transformation of Union Seminary was significant as an example of the liberal theology movement's penetration into denominations beyond its Congregational base, a development vital to the movement's ascendancy at the end of the century" (p. 369-370). Union, which moved back towards historical orthodoxy in the 1930s (though still never repudiating its underlying liberal commitments), today has lost its library, having sold much of it to Columbia. However, good news -- Union's dining room chef made it to the quarter finals of a "Chopped" contest on the Food Network!

Brigg's represented a movement of Ressourcement that was already at work in some aspects of late nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic Protestantism. I think that H. Orton Wiley participated in this same trajectory in his training -- beginning where Brigg's ended. In the end, Brigg's, I think, at least framed the issue correctly. "His last book, edited by his daughter in 1913, collected his lectures on symbolic. In it, Briggs proposed that there were three main options in theology. The first was the strategy of reaction, which imposed fossilized dogmatics of the seventeenth century on modern churches at the cost of perpetual theological warfare. The second was the radical strategy, increasingly prominent in Germany, which swept away all creedal statements and constructed syncretistic theologies out of a comparative story of religions, usually in the form of a speculative philosophy. The third way, infinitely better, was the 'wholesome Irenic" approach that sought to reunite the various Christian churches 'on the basis of the fundamental principles of Historical Christianity." The fundamental principles of faith are explicated in the creeds of the ancient church, he instructed. All 'legitimate decendants [sic] of Historical Christianity' adhered to the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds. The way forward in genuinely Christian theology was to employ modern critical understanding to interpret the unitive meaning of the church's authoritative creeds" (p. 370).

Academically, it seems to me that the modernist reaction has no real institutional freight today, though it remains a live cultural force that its inverse, theological liberalism, can invoke it to legitimate its own position and exclude the "way forward in genuinely Christian theology." Yet as we have seen, this "fundamentalist scare" is a trope deeply embedded within the legitimating rhetoric of Protestant liberalism despite the historical record of the institutional demise that comes with the liberal agenda. Perhaps Brigg's was right -- maybe Protestantism does have an institutional self-destruction impulse in the United States. Of course, this is exactly what I've argued in chapter 2 of "Telling God's Story" and in my chapter in "Conflicting Allegiances." Maybe that's why I couldn't sleep Sunday night after reading finishing Dorrien's book.