Theology Applied
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 63, No. 1 – Fall 2020
Editor: David S. Dockery
By Mikeal C. Parsons. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2019, 384pp., $35.00
Scholars have largely ignored Crawford H. Toy (1836-1919), who was one of the most important figures in Southern Baptist history. He was the first professor dismissed from an American theological faculty for holding liberal theology. His dismissal in 1879, along with those of two missionary appointees in 1881, provoked extensive controversy over the doctrine of inspiration. James Boyce and John Broadus, professors at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, led Southern Baptists through this controversy and established a precedent that Southern Baptists have summoned repeatedly in denominational controversies ever since.
Mikeal C. Parsons, who holds the Macon Chair in Religion at Baylor University, has published the first scholarly biography of Crawford Toy. It is well researched and contributes significantly to Southern Baptist history and to American religious history generally.
Parsons tells the story of Toy’s life well. Toy attended the University of Virginia where he was converted in 1854 and joined the Charlottesville Baptist Church, where John Broadus was pastor. Through Broadus’s preaching, Toy felt a call to serve as a preacher of the gospel on the mission field and was appointed to Japan, but the Civil War wrecked his plans. Toy served in the Confederate army and after the war studied in Germany for two years. He taught Old Testament and Hebrew at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1869 until his dismissal in 1879. He taught at Harvard University from 1880 until his retirement in 1909.
Parsons also includes chapters on Toy’s wife, Nancy Saunders Toy, and Toy’s student and colleague, David Gordon Lyon, as well as an appendix disentangling the conflicting accounts of Toy’s courtship of Lottie Moon. Parsons’s extensive research uncovered details and facts that add to our knowledge of Toy’s life and correct some mistakes in the historiography.
The account of Toy’s dismissal and its causes will attract the most interest. When students and a few newspapers raised questions about Toy’s orthodoxy in the late 1870s, Boyce and Broadus began questioning and remonstrating with him. By late 1878 they supported his resignation. Toy defended his view of inspiration before seminary trustees in 1879, but after examining him, they voted 16-2 to dismiss him.
Parsons argues that Boyce and Broadus conspired discreditably to oust Toy. He contends that Boyce became jealous and hostile toward Toy, and that Broadus became fearful of his own position and so turned against Toy. The two then engaged in “character assassination” (p. 57) to get him fired, under the pretense that Toy’s continuation would provoke a public controversy that would destroy the seminary (pp. 55-7, 68-87).
Parsons suggests also that Toy’s views were sufficiently conservative to be acceptable at Southern Seminary. He bases this on the fact that trustees did not charge Toy with heresy, and on the insinuation that Toy’s colleagues Broadus and William H. Whitsitt shared Toy’s view of inspiration. Broadus, however, most certainly did not hold Toy’s view. Whitsitt, who joined the faculty in 1872 and who shared an apartment with Toy from 1877 to 1879, apparently did, but he kept it a secret hidden in his diary until 2009, when his diaries were opened to researchers.
Whitsitt claimed in diary entries in 1886 that Boyce and Broadus schemed maliciously and deceitfully to force Toy out. He claimed that Boyce was motivated by jealousy of Toy’s growing fame and suggested that Broadus was “led around by the nose” by Toy until Broadus became afraid of opposition and fell in with Boyce. It was their “animosity” that drove them to lay a trap into which Toy unwittingly fell.
In the diaries, Whitsitt regularly described his colleagues, Boyce, Broadus, and even Toy, in terms filled with contempt and patronizing pity. He secretly despised them. Whitsitt boasted that he was too intelligent to be trapped and destroyed the same way that Toy was, and so he disingenuously convinced Broadus that he rejected Toy’s views.
In his resignation letter and in articles through 1881, Toy defended his views as orthodox. He claimed that he still believed in the fact of inspiration in the Bible, but he redefined inspiration to involve the subjective element only. The Bible’s value, Toy held, was not in its uninformed and often erroneous literal teaching, but rather in the fact that its authors sensed spiritual reality and were able to communicate this spiritual sense through unreliable outward forms. The Bible was inspired, Toy held, because it inspired inward religious consciousness.
Parsons portrays Toy as holding broadly traditional views. Although Parsons discusses Toy’s 1874-75 Old Testament lectures, which are mostly traditional, he omits discussion of his 1877-78 lectures, which were thoroughly liberal. In these later lectures Toy taught that the Old Testament’s history was often false and that many prophecies were never fulfilled. The Old Testament’s portrayal of Israel’s history and of the origins of their religion, Toy said, was a fictional invention, for its ritual and ideas evolved slowly and did not coalesce until the era of the exile, when Ezra and his colleagues composed most of the Old Testament corpus from various pre-existing materials and imposed their ideas on the whole history as if God had given it all through Moses at Mount Sinai in the wilderness. The Old Testament passages interpreted as Messianic in the New Testament did not in fact teach anything about Jesus. Jesus could nevertheless be construed, Toy explained, as a spiritual fulfillment of the all the Old Testament teachings that God would bless the nation of Israel outwardly [H. C. Smith, Lecture Notes 1877-78, SBTS].
Toy’s views had changed dramatically. These were the conclusions of the antisupernaturalist historical criticism of the Bible. Toy embraced naturalism and rejected the objective truth of the Bible’s accounts of miracles, creation, and God’s activity generally. He held that Moses probably provided the germinal principles that evolved into monotheistic Judaism, just as Jesus provided the germinal principles that developed into Christianity.
Toy’s teaching of the historical-critical evolutionary reconstruction of the history of Israel showed that his new view of inspiration represented a substantial departure from orthodox interpretation of the Bible. Toy’s defection from traditional views had matured well before Boyce and Broadus asked him to resign. Toy himself agreed in 1893 with Broadus’s contention that Toy’s diverging views required his dismissal: “You are quite right in describing my withdrawal as a necessary result of important differences of opinion” (Toy to Broadus, 20 May 1893).
Parsons suggests also that Toy’s views remained rather conservative for over a decade at Harvard, and it was only in the late 1890s that he “evolved beyond traditional Christian doctrine” (p. 283). He appeals to the fact that Toy joined the Old Cambridge Baptist Church and attended there regularly until his marriage in 1888, after which the couple attended but did not join the Cambridge First Parish Unitarian Church. He argues that they gathered with the Unitarians chiefly to build their social network. Parsons suggests that this is evidence that Toy was not so radical. From any remotely evangelical or Baptist viewpoint, however, abandoning a Trinitarian communion for Unitarian worship would constitute apostasy.
Parsons seems to place little importance on Toy’s more radical views. Parsons gives no notice to such matters as Toy’s belief, published in 1891, that the Gospel of John was thoroughly unreliable, but that the other gospels show enough of the “spirit of his [Jesus’] instruction” to demonstrate that Christianity evolved from the “germinal principles” of Jesus’ teaching, or that Jesus claimed to be human only and in no sense divine, or that Jesus rejected any notion of being a sacrifice for sin, or that he was opposed to any notion of justification by faith, or that salvation was by obedience—“it is individual conduct that determines men’s destinies” [“The Relation of Jesus to Christianity,” 1891].
Parsons defends at some length Toy’s 1907 letter in which he affirmed William James’s pragmatic philosophy, and confessed that “I find myself ready to accept the doctrine that ‘truth’ is not a static and stagnant thing, but a thing that we are constantly creating for ourselves” (pp. 280-2).
And, in defense of Toy’s more radical views, Parsons argues that to the extent that Toy became radical, it wasn’t his fault. “Those most responsible for his ‘heresies,’” Parsons says, were Boyce and Broadus, for they are the ones who expelled him from the conservative milieu of Southern Seminary and forced him to take up residence and work amid Harvard’s rationalistic culture (pp. 275-6).
Whether or not readers agree with Parsons’s interpretations of Toy’s career, all will appreciate the significance of this scholarly biography of this influential figure.
