Princeton Seminary Volume 1: Faith and Learning, 1812-1868

Theology Today, Jul 1996 by Hart, D G

Carlisle, Banner of Truth Trust, 1994. 495 pp. $35.95.

Princeton Seminary conjures up different images to its different constituencies. For instance, an anecdote that William K. Selden relates in his 1992 history of the seminary concerns the advice that Charles Hodge gave to the young Henry Van Dyke, Jr. about going to Germany for graduate studies. Hodge recommended that the student go overseas, drink lots of beer, and come back "big and round" around the middle. David B. Calhoun in the first volume of his sturdy and sympathetic history of Princeton, while including many personal matters that humanize the Old Princeton divines, chooses to leave out Hodge's advice to Van Dyke. And therein hangs a tale. One can only surmise that Selden's readers, the current constituency and recent alumni/ae of the seminary, find it easier to relate to Hodge and the Old Princeton knowing that its leading theologian was not a total abstainer, even though his dogged defense of Calvinism might seem reactionary by contemporary standards. But for Calhoun's readers, those experimental Calvinists who continue to purchase the writings of Puritan and Reformed authors kept in print by the Banner of Truth Trust, the suggestion that Hodge encouraged immoderate consumption of beverage alcohol is not a welcome image of one of America's greatest Calvinists. They prefer the Hodge who attacked Finney's new measures, Bushnell's romantic hermeneutic, and Taylor's theological inconsistencies, who propounded the theology of the Westminster divines, and who wept at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Thus, while Old Princeton is something of an annoyance for current Princeton, it continues to be a source of sustenance and edification to a sizable body of zealous Calvinists in North America and Great Britain.

That audience will not be disappointed by Calhoun's fairly massive account of Princeton Seminary from its founding in 1812 until the eve of the reunion of Northern Old and New School Presbyterians. (The second volume promises to go up to the 1929 reorganization of the seminary.) He begins before the founding with the legacy of the New Side Presbyterians who established the College of New Jersey and the difficulties that the Presbyterian Church faced in depending on the college for ministerial training. Thus, when the college under the presidency of Samuel Stanhope Smith appeared to be influenced more by Enlightenment philosophy than by Reformed theology, Presbyterian leaders proposed the founding of a separate institution dedicated exclusively to the education of ministers. Nevertheless, Calhoun traces the theological roots of both the college and the seminary to the Calvinistic revivalism of the First Great Awakening, an interpretation that tends to soften the sharper edges of Princeton's eventual stand with the Old School Presbyterian Church.

A good reason for stressing this continuity is the seminary's first professor, Archibald Alexander who grew up in the ethos of Virginia New Side Presbyterianism. Alexander taught at Princeton until his death in 1851. He taught by himself for one year, a remarkable feat no matter how few the students and unspecialized the theological disciplines. Alexander taught the entire curriculum until the arrival of Samuel Miller in 1813, who chiefly taught church history and Presbyterian polity. Charles Hodge joined Alexander and Miller in 1822 and while training more ministers than anyother theologian in nineteenth-century America, became the bridge from the first to later generations of seminary faculty.

The first three faculty members are the principal actors in Calhoun's narrative. Indeed, the book reads very much like the story of the individuals who made Princeton. And while Calhoun is clearly interested in these individuals' ideas, he also includes details from their private lives that make the Princetonians more than cardboard cutouts of dour and rigid Calvinists. The book also covers lesser-known faculty, such as Alexander's two sons, James Waddel and Joseph Addison, and Old Testament professor William Henry Green. In addition, Calhoun gives interesting descriptions of student life at the seminary and the effects of Presbyterian Church activities on Princeton. He even writes effectively about relations between the town and the seminary.

In providing such a readable and engaging history, Calhoun offers the chance for twentieth-century adherents of Old Princeton theology to relish the most important source of Reformed theology in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world. The hope is that this volume, as well as the one to follow, will prod someone, whether in the contemporary Princeton community or a disciple of Old Princeton, to undertake a critical and sympathetic study of a seminary that for much of its history stood very near the intersection of American religious, intellectual, and cultural life.