Charles A. Briggs

Originally ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church, the eminent Old Testament scholar Charles Briggs famously endured a series of heresy trials for his unabashed employment of historical-criticism and his purportedly pompous attitude in doing so. This ultimately led to his being ousted from the church, due to the well-known vote at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1893. For many the experience of Briggs merely adumbrated the larger struggle between traditional theological presuppositions and the challenge of the Enlightenment and its subsequent derivatives in the various scientific and theological disciplines. Briggs was later ordained into the priesthood of the Protestant Episcopal in 1899. Accordingly, when he composed his sermon series on the Incarnation in 1902 he was ostensibly in good standing with an American Protestant denomination. ~Deborah Forger