Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

After 1880 every one of these beliefs came under heated fire from the liberals. The most celebrated controversy erupted at Andover Seminary. The seminary had been established by New England Congregationalists in 1808 to counter the Unitarian tendencies of Harvard. Attempting to preserve Andover’s orthodoxy, the founders required faculty subscription to a creed summarizing their inherited Calvinism. By 1880, however, faculty members, under the influence of liberalism, found this requirement impossible and said so. The spark that lit the flames of controversy was a series of articles in the Andover Review. Egbert C. Smyth, William Jewett Tucker, and George Harris of the faculty argued that heathen who die without any knowledge of the gospel will have an opportunity in the future life either to accept or to reject the gospel before facing final judgment. Step by step in the debate that followed faculty members moved toward the public defense of liberal theology. The Board of Visitors, one of the ruling bodies of the seminary, finally brought charges against Smyth for his departure from the Creed: a kind of test case. After years of moves and counter-moves, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1892 voided the action of the Board of Visitors in dismissing Smyth. By that time almost every American denomination had on its hands its own celebrated case of heresy.