The saint's suitor: Crawford H. Toy - 1 - Critical Essay

Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr, 2003 by Dan Gentry Kent

If Baptists in southern America have a saint, it is certainly Lottie Moon, the missionary to China who became a virtual martyr to her convictions, suggested an annual offering for foreign missions, and gave her name to that offering. Her story is rather well known.

Less well known is the story of the man to whom Lottie Moon was engaged to be married, who became the center of Southern Baptists' first theological crisis (2) and first controversy over the Old Testament, Crawford Howell Toy. His story is fascinating and instructive.

C. A. Briggs said that Toy was "the first to suffer for Higher Criticism in the United States." (3) Yet,

   seldom has a "heretic" been more beloved by his opponents
   than this one.
   No one of those who voted against him denied his
   ability, piety, honor,
   integrity, and candor. Indeed, they professed their
   admiration and even
   their confidence in him. (4)

Who was this `beloved heretic," and what can we learn from his experience?

Toy's Early Life

Crawford Howell Toy was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in March 1836. (5) He attended a military school, the Norfolk Academy, and the University of Virginia when some of the professors could still remember the university's founder, Thomas Jefferson. (6) John A. Broadus was his beloved tutor in Greek for a brief time. Toy received his M.A. in 1856. (7)

Toy taught for three years in Charlottesville at the Albermarle Female Institute adjoining the university campus; he also served as assistant principal. The institute was organized in part through the efforts of Broadus, the pastor of the First Baptist Church, who was president of its trustees. Charlotte Diggs Moon became a student there in 1857. The girls were known to develop serious crushes on Toy. As it turned out, Moon "was undisputably the outstanding student in languages and a match for Toy's brilliance." (8) In June 1861, he called at her home and asked her to marry him. She refused at that time. (9)

Toy was a student in the first session of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1859. The faculty consisted of Broadus; James P. Boyce, who also served as president; Basil Manly Jr.; and William Williams. In one year, Toy finished about three-fourths of the three-year course. Broadus, who had baptized him in 1854, ordained him in June 1860. (10)

In 1860, Toy was considered orthodox enough to be appointed as a missionary to Japan. He spent that summer and fall visiting churches that had agreed to sponsor his work. However, the political situation forced the mission board not to send out new missionaries. (11) He spent the last part of the year as professor of Greek at Richmond College.

The Civil War began, and in October 1861, Toy, a devout supporter of the Confederacy, joined the Norfolk Light Artillery Blues. He eventually became an infantry chaplain in General Lee's army. He was in Longstreet's Corps at Gettysburg. During the retreat, he remained behind with the surgeons and was wounded and captured on July 4, 1863. He was imprisoned at Fort McHenry and participated in a prisoner exchange the following December. (12)

During an interval in the battle of Cold Harbor in 1864, he was seen lying on an oilcloth, occupying himself by studying Arabic. Another friend wrote that since Toy's Syriac books were back in Norfolk, he had to fall back on German for amusement. He also "tramped all the way from Seven Pines battlefield to Richmond to consult a Hebrew grammar." (13)

Crawford Toy served briefly as a professor at the University of Alabama, which was the military training school for the Confederacy. After the war he returned to the University of Virginia where, in 1865-66, he was "licentiate" in Greek. (14)

Toy was in Berlin 1866-68, where he studied theology, Sanskrit, and Semitics (but no Old Testament).

   It is difficult to assess the full impact of
   the years in Berlin on Toy's
   Intellectual religious development. It would
   appear that they did not greatly
   alter his religious orientation at the time,
   but they did serve to sharpen
   his intellectual tools, to put him in touch
   with the best theological
   scholarship, and to whet further his appetite for research. (15)

Upon his return, he was named professor of Greek at Furman, the mother institution of Southern Seminary. Furman's theological library and endowment, along with its young professor Boyce, had passed to the seminary when it was founded in 1859. Toy began his duties at Furman in January 1869. He also privately tutored seminary students. For at least some of time in Greenville, Toy boarded with Broadus. (16)

Early Southern Seminary Career

In May 1869, the seminary trustees invited Toy, who was thirty-three, to become professor of Old Testament interpretation and oriental languages. (17) He was the first addition to the original faculty. He was a first-rate scholar and teacher. His inaugural address was brilliant and completely orthodox. No one raised any question about it. In fact, it is only in relatively recent times that anyone at Southern Seminary has found any fault with it. (18) He argued that since Baptists rested their case completely on the Bible, it was therefore urgent that they undertake its proper interpretation. He pointed out principles by which this might be done. One of these principles was "that the Bible, its real assertations being known, is in every iota of its substance absolutely and infallibly true." (19)