Rev. John MacLeod
A review article on Princeton Seminary: Volume 1 (1812-1868) – Faith and Learning by David B Calhoun. Published by the Banner of Truth Trust. Hardback, 304 pages, and available from The Free Presbyterian Bookroom, 133 Woodlands Road, Glasgow G3 6LE at the discount price of £12.95.
THIS book is the carefully-researched chronicle of the history of the Princeton Theological Seminary from 1812 to 1868. History it may be, but what particularly enhances its value and makes the reading of it so absorbing is the wealth of biographical information contained within its covers.
Princeton, the author tells us, was, above all, the place of a remarkable group of people who shared a common vision — a seminary dedicated equally to “piety of the heart” and “solid learning”. Most of us will already be familiar with the names of Archibald Alexander, Samuel Miller, Charles Hodge, Joseph Addison Alexander, James Waddel Alexander, and Archibald Alexander Hodge — and these are but a few of the eminent men who made Princeton what it was.
Founded in 1812, the Seminary soon came to be regarded as the centre of American evangelicalism, and with the passage of time it also became famous world-wide as “an intellectual and theological school of great importance”. In 1846, for instance, a collection of Theological Essays from the Biblical Repertory (the theological journal published by the Seminary) was reprinted in Scotland and Patrick Fairbairn, Professor of divinity in the Aberdeen Free Church College, and no mean judge, had this to say of the writers: “For an exact and discriminating knowledge of the peculiar doctrines of Calvinism, of the fundamental grounds on which they rest, of the false admixtures on the one side, and the dangerous concessions on the other, with which at successive periods they have been associated, and of the relations in which they stand to a true and a false philosophy, the Essays under consideration could not easily be surpassed. And it adds materially to their value that they are not dry vindications of a theoretical and systematic orthodoxy, but the profound and earnest reasonings of men, who felt that, in contending for Calvinism, they were contending for the great interests of truth and righteousness — of men, of whom it is scarcely too much to say, that on them, the mantle, not merely of Edwards, but of Calvin himself, seems peculiarly to have fallen.” Calhoun, however, concedes that “they were not always right in everything they taught or wrote” and we must remember that the Westminster Confession was amended by the American Church, in 1788, to bring it into line with their views on Church Establishment and the place of the civil magistrate in relation to the Church.
It is, nevertheless, not surprising that Fairbairn should pronounce such a high eulogy on the Princeton theologians and that we should find him to be so much in harmony with their theological views. It was, after all, Scotland and the ministerial ranks of its Church that provided the man who was to play the most important and significant part in the establishing of Princeton College as a centre of learning. His name was John Witherspoon. “His going to the New World”, Principal John MacLeod wrote, “linked Presbytery at an early stage in the States of America, or, as they were when he went, the American colonies, with Presbyterianism in its old home in the English-speaking world. His influence on and connection with the Orthodox Westminster teaching, that came afterwards in the early days of the Princeton Seminary to be called Princeton Theology, show the importance of the part which he played in the exposition and defence of the Reformed Faith. In his days before the Seminary was set up, Theology was taught in the Princeton College. Witherspoon also introduced to the American public the Scottish Apologetic Philosophy of Common Sense. Though so much of his mature work or that of his later years was done in the land of his adoption to which he rendered such conspicuous service, yet Scotland will not give up her hold on one of the best gifts she bestowed on the New World.” The link with Scotland was underscored in 1843 when the Disruption Free Church sent William Cunningham to Princeton with a view to obtaining spiritual and temporal help from the American brethren. Needless to say, that help was ungrudgingly given. Another Scotsman, Thomas Halyburton, was set before the Princeton students as the “ideal of piety”. His autobiography, reprinted by the Seminary, was declared to be unsurpassed “as an exhibition of Christian experience, simple, unaffected, scriptural, and richly instructive.”
Archibald Alexander was the Seminary’s first professor, being appointed by the General Assembly in 1812. The Seminary’s desired goal was defined as follows: In order to receive the seminary’s certificate, the student must be able to demonstrate in an oral exam that he had “laid the foundation for becoming” an effective minister. He must be “a sound biblical critic,” with skill in the original languages of the Bible and knowledge of Bible content, history and geography. He must be “a defender of the Christian faith,” with knowledge especially of the issues relating to deism. He must support the doctrines of the Confession of Faith and Catechisms by “a ready, pertinent, and abundant quotation of Scripture texts.” He must, by his study of theology and church history, become “an able and sound divine.” He must have read “a considerable number of the best practical writers on the subject of religion.” He must be skilled in sermon preparation and know the duties of pastoral care in order to become “a useful preacher and a faithful pastor.” He must study the Form of Government of the Presbyterian Church so that he would be “qualified to exercise discipline and to take part in the government of the Church.”
The great and erudite professor was of humble origins and the sidelights cast on his early life are full of interest. Born in a log house, he was wont in his old age to tell of how it had been his lot “to draw the first breath of life at the foot of a lofty mountain, and on the bank of a roaring torrent; where the reveille was often the hideous howling of hungry wolves.” On his eleventh birthday we are told that he received his first rifle! Notwithstanding isolation, “by the time he was five he was reading the New Testament, and by seven years of age he had learned the Westminster Shorter Catechism and was working on the Larger.” The “university” that Archibald Alexander went to was “a hewed log-house, twenty-eight feet by twenty-four, one storey and a half high” and there he was taught Greek, Latin, science and philosophy. The main theological textbook was Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology in Latin. Assisting the principal teacher, we are told, was “the remarkable James Priestly, who had the school classics so completely memorised that he never used a book when hearing his classes recite Ovid, Virgil, Horace or Homer.” At the age of nineteen Alexander was licensed and for three years he was to be an itinerant preacher travelling from place to place on horseback, with his saddlebags full of tracts and Bibles, and composing his sermons en route. In the process he learned to preach effectively without notes. Calhoun tells us that early on in his ministry a puff of wind blew his notes into the congregation and there and then he determined “to take no more paper into the pulpit.” Archibald Alexander died in 1851, in his eightieth year. Among the last visitors to his deathbed was Charles Hodge who afterwards said that “he never saw and never imagined a deathbed where there was so little of death.” A A Hodge recalled seeing his father standing in the study weeping and exclaiming, “It is all past, the glory of our Seminary has departed.”
Charles Hodge’s writings are well known: his Systematic Theology, for instance; also, his Commentaries, that on Romans being described by Archibald Alexander as a book that would “do more to confirm the orthodox faith of our church than any book which has been published for a century.” There was, however, a difference of view between Alexander and Hodge on the place which was to be assigned to the emotional phenomena which accompanied revivals. Charles Hodge may have been no more affected by “German rationalists and sceptics” than Addison Alexander, that is, no more,” than the eagle is affected by the dew on his plumage as he soars nearer the sun” as Hodge himself put it, but one wonders if his spirituality and discernment were blunted over the course of his two years’ study in Europe. Aware of the dangers, it was with reluctance that his senior colleagues agreed to grant him leave of absence in the first place, and Alexander’s concern was expressed in letters written to him at the time: “Remember that you breathe a poisoned atmosphere. If you lose the lively and deep impression of divine truth — if you fall into skepticism or even into coldness, you will lose more than you gain from all the German professors and libraries.” In Berlin, we are told, he “met regularly for fellowship and discussion with a group of men and women of different churches, including Roman Catholic.” Back in America he was to defend the proposition that the Church of Rome is a branch of the Christian Church and, in opposition to Thornwell and the vast majority of the membership of the General Assembly of his own Church, he upheld the view that Romish baptism was not invalid. It strikes us also as strange that Hodge and the Princeton fraternity generally should make use, as they did, of hymns of human composition in the public worship of God. Witherspoon surely did not import that practice!
But in expounding the cardinal doctrines of the Reformed faith these men were, in their day, peerless, and the fact that we still use their books as textbooks speaks for itself. Some of us will, for instance, be familiar with the name of William Henry Green and his books on the Canon and Text of the Old Testament. Of him it was said that on becoming a student at Princeton “he took to Greek as if he had been born in Athens; he took to Hebrew as if he had been the son of a rabbi in Jerusalem.” Joseph Addison Alexander, son of Princeton’s first professor was, by all accounts, the most accomplished scholar of them all. Charles Hodge spoke of him as “incomparably the greatest man I ever knew.” Calhoun leaves on record that by the age of ten “he had mastered the rudiments of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew” and that, having found an old copy of an Arabic grammar on the top shelf of his father’s library, he was soon reading the Koran! At the age of fifteen he entered the Junior Class at Princeton College and Calhoun tells us that “some of his fellow students believed that he was superior in learning to most of the College’s instructors”! In 1834, at twenty-five years of age he was appointed Charles Hodge’s assistant. His death at the age of fifty was a stunning blow to the institution. The following Sabbath, we are informed, Charles Hodge broke down while attempting to read the words, “Let not your hearts be troubled” and had to pass the Bible to a colleague. Thornwell wrote to Hodge inter alia: “I was proud of him as a product of the Presbyterian Church in America, and he had not a friend on earth who felt a heartier satisfaction in the growing brilliancy of his name. His commentaries on Acts and Mark I regarded as models, as nearly perfection in their kind as human skill could make them, and I have been in the habit, not only of recommending them, but of insisting on my classes procuring and studying them. Then his modesty was equal to his worth. So free from vanity, from ostentation, from parade and pretensions. But my dear brother, God reigns. Let us rejoice that we have had this bright and beautiful light among us. It was given in grace, and it was removed not without wisdom and mercy.” In writing his famous commentary on Isaiah, it is of interest that J A Alexander treated the book “as the work of both God and man, a divine revelation and a human composition, the contents of which are never dealt with in a manner inconsistent either with the supposition of its inspiration or with that of its real human origin.” J W Alexander predeceased his brother by five months. He was also a prolific writer; one who was heard saying that “the only trouble he found in writing was turning the leaves.”
This is a book which, once taken up, is difficult to put down! The author has thoroughly researched his subject and the result is that a mine of information has been placed at the disposal of the reader. Digging therein is a pleasant and rewarding activity.