theology, pastoral theology and homiletics. During the 1880’s, innovations began to reflect the new Biblical criticism and the interpretations of leading scholars both within and outside the Baptist denomination. There was renewed stress on the languages of the Bible by Professor Burnham, a specialist in Old Testament Hebrew, and by Professor Nathaniel Schmidt, also an expert in Biblical Greek and the Semitic languages, who joined the faculty in 1888. A native-born Swede, he had attended Stockholm University and in 1884-87 he studied at the Seminary where Dr. Dodge’s liberal attitudes had profoundly shaped his own views.
Professor Burnham, a Bowdoin graduate in 1862, had studied at Heidelberg, Gottingen, and Leipzig. He had also been a pastor and was closely associated with William Rainey Harper in the field of Old Testament scholarship. One student remembered that “His raven locks and beard, his large features, his vigor of body, mind and spirit, made him a veritable Elijah as he stood before his classes.”
By the middle ’80’s he seems to have arrived at the position of constructive criticism of the orthodox view. In less than a decade, however, he was to take the role of the conservative in a bitter dispute with his younger associate, Professor Schmidt.
The advances of science were not overlooked in the Seminary. In 1887-88 Dr. Brooks gave a series of lectures on the relations of science and religion and after his death, his widow maintained the series in his memory until 1900. Dr. Alexander Winchell, eminent geologist of the University of Michigan who had been expelled from Vanderbilt University some years previously for his liberal views, lectured in 1889 and in 1890; his topics included: “The Place of Man in Creation”
and “The Theistic Interpretation of Evolution.”
So great an impression did he make that the Seminary faculty in 1891, on learning of his death, extended condolences to the President of the University of Michigan and noted his passing as “a most serious loss to the cause of religion & science.”
A sign in the direction of liberalization is to be found in a statement which first appeared in 1885 in a Seminary Catalogue that the object of instruction “has been, not to impress a common stamp upon the minds of its students, but to secure the best development of individual power consecrated to Christ.” The Trustees of the Baptist Education