Crawford Howell Toy - Controversy

Controversy

While Professor Toy was a professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, he was embroiled in one of the earliest theological controversies of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845. Influenced by European higher criticism of the Bible and advances in science, Toy began intellectual pursuits that would ultimately cost him his tenure at Southern. Toy began to see Darwin's theories as truth revealed by God "in the form proper to his time." Shaped by the "history of religions" approach to the Old Testament popularized in Europe by Julius Wellhausen, Toy came to believe that the writers of the New Testament—using a rabbinical hermeneutic of their day—misunderstood the original meaning of several Old Testament passages (e.g., Psalm 16:10, Isaiah 53) when they placed a christological emphasis on them.

The founding president of Southern, Dr. James P. Boyce, asked Toy to refrain from teaching contrary to the school's Abstract of Principles on the doctrine of biblical inspiration. Toy, however, insisted on answering questions by students pertinent to his modernist understanding of the Old Testament. It was an April 1879 article in The Sunday School Times on his views of Isaiah 53:1-12 that would lead to his forced resignation in May of the same year.

Soon after Toy went to be the professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at Harvard, he broke his ties with Southern Baptists and became a practicing Unitarian. The effects of Toy's dismissal continued to rumble through Southern Baptist life. Two young missionaries appointed by the Foreign Mission Board (SBC) were ultimately dismissed because of holding views similar to those of Professor Toy's.