Mark Noll once wrote, “On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a nation more thoroughly biblical than the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War.”⁴ His opening phrase, “On the face of it,” is instructive. The reigning attitude toward the Bible in American culture was not that it was the Truth, but that it was the Story that provided the backbone for the American story. Nevertheless, Noll makes the case that the Bible had a presumed prominence up to America’s War Between the States. Post-Civil War America is another story. This is the story of how the Bible, like that longtime employee, got sacked.

In the cold Boston winter months of 1891, Harvard professor Joseph Henry Thayer presented a lecture that would later be published under the title The Change of Attitude Towards the Bible. Thayer’s first line reveals that he is hesitant, and for good reason. He’s about to articulate what all of his colleagues are thinking, and he realizes that what he and they are thinking is dangerous.

By saying what he’s about to say, he risks “forfeiting” the “general approval of his fellow Christians.” To stem off the forfeiture, he pleads his bona fides as a Christian scholar and gentleman. Then he proceeds to say what he wants to say.

Thayer begins with the “Reformed or Calvinistic” view of Scripture, which is his not so veiled way of referring to Warfield and the Princetonians, a constellation of biblical scholars and theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary from the 1850s until the 1920s including Charles Hodge, his son A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen. The Princetonian view “has laid a disproportionate emphasis on the full and final character of the Scriptural teaching relative to the whole range of speculation and conduct, life and destiny.” This is Thayer’s way of expressing the view of verbal, plenary inspiration. This view, given full expression by Charles Hodge in 1857, contends that all (plenary means “full” or “entire”) of the words (verbal) of the Bible are from God. Thayer continues, observing that this view, held by “a certain class of rough and ready controversialists,” “furnishes” them “with a bludgeon which they are prone to mistake for the sword of the Lord.” Again, that “certain class” would indeed be Warfield and the Princetonians, caricatured as always trolling for a good fight. The Princetonian view, Thayer continues, was “comparatively harmless in bygone days.” Now it has “become a yoke.” Here’s why:

But by reason of improved methods of philological study, of progress in science and discovery, of accumulating results in archaeological and historic [sic] research, the theory has come to occasion restlessness and perplexity, at times not a little distress, in thoughtful souls. It has become a yoke which they—unlike their fathers—are unable to bear.⁵