I have finally finished reading Crawford Howell Toy: The Man, the Scholar, the Teacher (Mercer University Press, 2019), by Mikeal C. Parsons, the professor and Macon Chair in Religion at Baylor University. Toy (1836-1919) was Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1869 until he was forced to resign in 1879 for his liberal theological views. Toy then served as the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages at Harvard from 1880-1909. He eventually left the Baptists and became a Unitarian. The book is a both a fascinating and a captivating read. I only stopped reading it at times because of pressing writing commitments. If you are a Baptist
and are not familiar with Toy, then I recommend that you first read the first four chapters of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 1859-2009 (Oxford, 2009), by Gregory A. Wills, then read the biography of Toy, and then go back and finish the Wills book, which I highly recommend in its entirely. Toy’s downfall, like so many others, was his embrace of higher criticism when he studied in Germany.