Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture

Noted historian James Moorhead has added to the growing literature on Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) with a chronicle of his school’s history in a sweeping account, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture. It’s been more than 40 years since Ernest Sandeen precipitated academic interest in PTS with his provocative The Roots of Fundamentalism (1970). Sandeen put fundamentalism on the scholarly radar by associating it with the hallowed halls of American Presbyterianism’s first seminary. Evangelical interest in “Old Princeton” inevitably followed because he liberated from sociological categories academia’s interpretation of fundamentalism as an unsophisticated anti-intellectualism. Sandeen gave fundamentalism status as a bona fide theological position by virtue of Princeton’s role in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.

Until Moorhead’s volume, the only extended history of PTS was David Calhoun’s two-volume Princeton Seminary (1996). However, Calhoun’s superb work only covered Old Princeton, from its founding in 1812 until its reorganization in 1929. Moorhead’s work fills the gap by offering a history of the seminary in its entirety. His excellently researched volume has much to admire—organization, perceptive analyses of complex theological positions, and a comprehensive account accessible to specialist and non-specialist alike.

Tale of Two Seminaries

Although Moorhead doesn’t explicitly portray Princeton’s story as a tale of two seminaries, clearly such is the case. Several times he refers to “Old Princeton” and, although he never uses the term “New Princeton,” the division of the text into two roughly equal parts and repeated references to “continuities” and “discontinuities” after the seminary’s theological broadening attest to its being so. The preface hints at a trajectory in which the seminary’s initial vision for theological education would change. Moorhead rhetorically asks whether Princeton’s commitments would hold up in ensuing history or, “like the design of a kaleidoscope,” the seminary’s theological vision would morph “into different patterns.”

Moorhead appropriately devotes roughly half the book to each century of the seminary’s existence. Chapters 1 to 10 cover Old Princeton. He notes the seminary’s aim of preparing pastor-scholars. The pastorate was a calling from God, and Presbyterian ministers would be grounded in Reformed theology, conversant with the Scripture in its original languages, and competent in church history and apologetics.

Founding professor Archibald Alexander adopted Reformed scholastic Francis Turretin’s Theologiae Elenctiae and established Sunday afternoon conferences to encourage a distinctively warm piety. Moorhead sets the tone for his subsequent treatment of Charles Hodge and his successors, however, by repeating the common charge that Princetonians heavy-handedly adopted Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Alexander made “audacious claims, at least for a Calvinist,” Moorhead writes, “about the unaided power of the conscience.”

This charge has become axiomatic when analyzing Old Princeton. Paul Helseth, however, in ‘Right Reason’ and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (2012) counters that, rather than being “bald rationalists,” the Princetonians stood squarely within the tradition of Augustine and Calvin. They didn’t merely repeat Enlightenment epistemologies but proposed a humanism that was “antihumanistic” in affirming a humanism of “the broken heart” and acknowledging “the consciousness of sin.” Instead of assuming a pagan confidence in human rationality, the Princetonians demanded “regeneration of the whole soul” as the prerequisite of “right reason.”

Readers also learn of other early professors, such as the precocious Joseph Addison Alexander, who mastered 20 languages. An appropriately detailed section explores church history professor Samuel Miller’s two-volume Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1805). Miller’s survey of the physical sciences, art, philosophy, literature, and history reflected Princeton’s expansive interest in topics far beyond the theological disciplines.

Further, Moorhead’s treatment of Charles Hodge reflects his longstanding interest in the central figure of Old Princeton. He previously co-edited with John Stewart Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work (2002). Moorhead is to be applauded for characterizing Hodge’s Old School views as moderate on the schism of 1837, his subscription to the Westminster Confession, Christian nurture, and the spirituality of the church. He goes out of his way to nuance Hodge’s famous tagline: “I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this Seminary.” Assessments of Hodge’s positions in controversies with John Williamson Nevin over the Lord’s Supper and Horace Bushnell and Edwards Amasa Park over religious language are detailed and fair. Moreover, Moorhead rightly criticizes Hodge and his colleagues’ reticence to oppose slavery more vigorously.

Transition Marker

Chapters 11 and 12 function as a hinge marking the transition from Old to New Princeton, introducing “hints of change and missionary vision” that would eventually broaden Princeton’s theological perspective. Moorhead cites appreciative views of non-Christian cultures and a social Christianity in which the church as church would become involved in social transformation.

More substantial changes appear in chapter 12, “Curriculum, Conflict and the Seminary’s Mission.” A new model of theological education—Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Berlin model—developed, an innovation Hodge witnessed in its early stages during his 1826-28 European sojourn. Schleiermacher viewed the ministry as a profession in which pastors serve a sociological function, and Princeton added elective courses such as field work, administration, and sociology. These additions guaranteed that the ministry as a vocation—a spiritual calling in pastors modeled biblical living and interpreted God’s Word that parishioners might do likewise—would give way to a profession by which ministers would facilitate social change.

Conservatives under the leadership of J. Gresham Machen lost influence both in the seminary and also the denomination as missions trumped theology, new forms of ministry eclipsed traditional ministerial tasks, and “peace and work” gained greater prominence. Moorhead’s narration of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy parallels Bradley Longfield’s The Presbyterian Controversy (1993), but with an important caveat. Longfield grants that Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism (1923) constituted a persuasive argument for the legitimacy of conservative views and even garnered grudging kudos from secular writers. Moorhead, on the other hand, identifies with Lefferts Loetscher’s The Broadening Church (1954) and favors the 1924 Auburn Affirmation’s provision of a theological “big tent” for Presbyterianism to Machen’s “exclusivism.” The Westminster Confession’s doctrines must be capable of a variety of interpretations permitting tolerance and freedom, in contrast to Machen and B. B. Warfield’s refusal to reinterpret them.

New Direction

John A. McKay emerges as the key figure for implanting “Continuity and New Direction”—the New Princeton. Moorhead champions the resulting theological pluralism and diversity that has characterized Princeton since 1936, citing Neo-Orthodoxy and professor Bernard Anderson’s Understanding the Old Testament (1957) as examples. Anderson’s introduction remains one of the most popular texts adopted in universities and seminaries. Despite its strengths as an introductory text, however, Langdon Gilkey’s critique (“Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language,” Journal of Religion 41 [1961]: 195-204) demonstrates the inherent weakness of the biblical instruction characterizing not only the New Princeton but also other mainline seminaries.

Neo-Orthodoxy gained a favorable reputation for its rejection of 19th-century liberalism. Gilkey contends, however, that Neo-Orthodoxy exhibits a divided mind—it’s half modern (liberal) and half biblical. Like liberalism, it adopts a cosmology that denies the doctrine of special revelation (such as miracles) yet continues to use traditional biblical language (for example, “God acted in the Exodus event”). Gilkey proposes that if one were to ask John Calvin—or, for that matter, any Old Princeton professor—what God actually did in the exodus, they’d simply reply: “Look at the book of Exodus and see what it says God did.” Anderson, by contrast, pays little attention to the question of what God accomplished: “The Hebrews knew no miracles.” The rescue of the Hebrews, he surmises, resulted “from an East wind blowing over the Reed Sea”—a view that effectively rejects any ontological concreteness to the event and its inescapably unique nature. Gilkey poses the inevitable question: “Why could not the Hebrews have come to believe in a god of the East Wind, or a benevolent Fate?” The point is clear: without a clear delineation between ordinary events and actual acts of God, what remains is equivocal language. The result is a theology that “remains empty, abstract and self-contradictory. . . . Biblical theology is left with a set of theological abstractions, more abstract than the dogmas of scholasticism, for these are concepts with no known concreteness.”

Moorhead’s kaleidoscope metaphor has become a reality. But his “tale of two seminaries”—Old and New Princeton—ends with a stark irony. Critics of Old Princeton insisted that the seminary enter the 20th century. By demanding propositional revelation and a pre-critical approach to biblical studies, Old Princeton had come to embody outmoded, dogmatic scholasticism. Advocates of change argued that the 1929 reorganization of the seminary would facilitate a broadening tolerance and a sure-to-be-welcomed pluralism that would bring fresh, innovative curricular and programmatic changes. If Gilkey is correct in his analysis of one of New Princeton’s prominent disciplines, however, one form of dogmatic scholasticism has simply replaced another. Both Princetons—Old and New—propounded a dogmatism. What’s ironic is that the new dogmatism borrows from—all the while rendering equivocal—the language of the old.