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.

James H. Moorhead. Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 548 pp. $60.00.

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.”

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