“Congeniality” Of Mind At Old Princeton Seminary: Warfieldians And Kuyperians Reconsidered

By Paul Kjoss Helseth

[Paul Kjoss Helseth is Professor of Christian Thought at the University of Northwestern, St. Paul in St. Paul, Minn.]

I. Introduction: The Collapse Of American Evangelical Academia

In a fascinating essay that attempts to account for “the collapse of American evangelical academia” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, George Marsden argues that American evangelicals were displaced from “the main currents of American academic life” because “they did not closely examine or challenge the speculative basis on which the modern scientific revolution was built.”[1] Evangelicals in Victorian America were remarkably confident “that objective scientific inquiry could only confirm Christian truth,” Marsden contends, but at the same time they were blissfully unaware that the understanding of science they had embraced was freighted with assumptions that were “potentially hostile to the Christian religion.”[2] The problem with American Evangelicalism’s “love affair” with Enlightenment science “was not any explicit commitment to the ‘Enlightenment’ as such,” Marsden makes clear in a related essay, “but rather a dedication to the general philosophical basis that had undergirded the empirically based rationality so confidently proclaimed by most eighteenth-century thinkers.”[3] According to Marsden, American Evangelicalism’s “implicit trust in empiricism” was not grounded in a faithful appropriation of the central assumptions of the Christian tradition, but in philosophical assumptions that encouraged American evangelicals to naïvely imagine that science is a “neutral” enterprise, and that “Christians and non-Christians stood on the same footing” in almost all areas of academic inquiry, including the study of theology.[4] Finding God-honoring truth wherever it may be found, they confidently yet credulously concluded, “was essentially an objective process of discovering the [relevant] facts,” and facts—according to the “Baconian principles of objectivity” they had embraced—would be interpreted in basically the same sense by all who were willing to take a careful look at the evidence.[5] In short, American evangelical academics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set themselves up for a “spectacular intellectual defeat”[6] because they presumed that the God-honoring conclusions of inductive scientific analysis are in principle available to all, regardless of the presuppositions, inclinations, or dispositions that particular investigators bring to their analysis of the world in which we live.

What evangelical academics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries typically failed to recognize, of course, is not only that there is no such thing as a “wholly neutral epistemology that can settle disputes over what areas of human knowledge are neutral and objective,” but also that there is no such thing as “pure scientific inquiry” that will always lead thoughtful investigators to precisely the same conclusion.[7] Scientific investigation has always been “riddled with subjectivity,” Marsden contends, and this accounts for why believing academics were “banished” to the margins of the modern academy in an age of increasing secularization in American culture.[8] While evangelical scholars could plausibly maintain that objective scientific inquiry substantiated key elements of the Christian worldview as long as Christian—or at least basically theistic—assumptions reigned supreme in the public square, when those assumptions were finally eclipsed by Darwinism as the reigning paradigm in American higher education, “the supposedly neutral scientific methodology” that American evangelicals had enthusiastically embraced “turned its forces directly against” essential elements of the worldview they were endeavoring to both defend and advance, and they were left without a defense because they “had conceded too much” to “the grand Enlightenment ideal for science.”[9] They had hitched their scientific wagon, in other words, to a “concept of objectivity” that naïvely assumed that there is always “a harmonious correspondence between our subjective perceptions and objective reality,” and as a consequence they could not effectively respond to the more “extravagant claims” of their Darwinian antagonists because they “had developed no effective critique of the first principles” on which the scientific conclusions of their critics rested.[10] In the end, American Evangelicalism’s “superficial accommodation to the modern scientific revolution”[11] proved to be an unmitigated disaster, Marsden concludes, because evangelical academics were among the most committed defenders of a scientific culture that, in ways that were tragically unbeknownst to them, “was undermining belief in the very truths of the Bible they held most dear.”[12]

II. The Problem: The Method Of Addition

Marsden’s incisive analysis is noteworthy for a number of reasons, the most significant of which is related to his penetrating critique of the “method of addition” that left evangelicals in Victorian America without a compelling response to the scientific conclusions of those who removed not just “the presumed intelligent design of nature,” but the “benevolent Designer” as well.[13] According to Marsden, the “method of addition” was “a modern version of the Thomistic synthesis of reason and faith”[14] that attempted to reconcile Christianity with modern science not by insisting that distinctively Christian assumptions should have a decisive bearing upon the substance of scientific investigation, but by simply adding what was believed to be true about the supernatural world through the study of special revelation to what was already presumed to be true about the natural world through the study of science.[15] The problem with this approach, and the reason it proved to be so disastrous to evangelical scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was that it betrayed an accommodation of a “two-tiered worldview, founded on an empiricist epistemology, with the laws of nature below, supporting supernatural belief above,”[16] and in so doing baptized the essentially secular notion that objective knowledge of this world is possible without reference to God and his revelation. It denied, in other words, that the eyes of faith and the spectacles of Scripture are essential to seeing this world more or less for what it objectively is, for its advocates presumed that knowing depended upon little more than simply “looking at the evidence” for one particular truth claim or another and not—as Abraham Kuyper and his colleagues in the Netherlands were at that time famously insisting—upon that series of “organic relationships among Creator, cosmos, and knowing subjects” that more or less determined how the evidence for one truth claim or another would be assessed.[17]

While Marsden’s trenchant critique of the “method of addition” is in most respects nothing short of brilliant, it falters in at least one sense that really matters, at least to those readers who have an enduring interest in the relationship of the Princeton Theology to contemporary discussions of the life of the believing mind.[18] Throughout his attempt to account for the collapse of American evangelical academia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Marsden contends that the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary were among the most conspicuous advocates of precisely those Enlightenment ideals that were largely responsible for the displacement of American evangelicals from the mainstream of the modern academy. He argues that unlike Abraham Kuyper, who recognized that “the dream of objectivity is obliterated by subjectivism and sin,” the Princeton theologians endeavored to encounter reality by starting with “a neutral objective epistemology that could be shared by all persons of common sense,” and in so doing overestimated “the prowess of the scientific method” while at the same time underestimating “the degree to which people’s thought is of a whole,” thus ignoring the extent to which “sinfully determined basic first beliefs and commitments can pervade the rest of one’s intellectual activity.”[19]

But were the Princeton theologians as oblivious to the relationship between first principles and the life of the believing mind as Marsden would have us believe? Were they really that naïve, in other words, about “the possibility of a bare approach to questions of fact,”[20] that is, about “the possibility of an objective scientific knowledge available to all intelligent humans,” even in matters having to do with the knowledge of God?[21] The central contention of this article is that although the Old Princetonians were certainly not as aware as contemporary scholars of the extent to which worldviews inform, as Mark Noll puts it, “the deeper social axioms that function like necessary hypotheses for the doing of science,”[22] nevertheless they did not embrace the “method of addition” in a naïve or credulous fashion because they agreed with Kuyper and classically Reformed thinkers more generally that “our understanding of something of the full range of human knowledge is in important ways derived from our belief in a Creator who communicates to his creatures both in nature and Scripture.”[23] They recognized, in other words, that a genuinely Christian epistemology “must frankly begin . . . not only with common sense but also with data derived from revelation,”[24] and for this reason their approach to Christian scholarship did not differ as radically from that of their colleagues in the Netherlands as most of their interpreters have hitherto imagined.

III. The Standard Assessment Reconsidered

Before we attempt to substantiate this claim it is important to note that Marsden associates the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary with those habits of mind that were largely responsible for the demise of American evangelical academia because his reading of their work is grounded in a sweeping endorsement of what is presently the standard assessment of the Princeton mind. According to this assessment, although the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary claimed to be faithful defenders of the Reformed tradition and the champions of Reformed orthodoxy in the context of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture, in fact they accommodated the assumptions of the age in which they lived and in so doing compromised essential commitments of the tradition they claimed to be defending. Indeed, their insistence upon the objective nature of religious truth, their endorsement of an inductive approach to the interpretation of Scripture and the life of the mind more generally, their spirited advocacy of the doctrine of inerrancy, and their commitment to an evidentialist approach to both the defense and the advancement of the faith were all grounded, advocates of this assessment contend, not in faithfulness to essential commitments of the Reformed tradition, but in an implicit—and at times even explicit—commitment to precisely that kind of Enlightenment philosophy that was largely responsible for the decline and fall of Calvinism as the dominant force not just in the American church, but in American culture as well. The problem, according to this assessment, was not that the Princeton theologians were explicitly opposed to essential commitments of the Reformed tradition. Rather, the problem was that their “love affair”[25] with the Scottish Enlightenment led them to subvert essential commitments of the Reformed tradition, and it did so by calling the sacramental or God-centered nature of the world in which we live into question, by denying that the quality of our knowledge is determined not by the power of our intellects alone but by the disposition, inclination, or moral character of our hearts, and by ignoring the noetic effects of sin and the corresponding necessity for the Spirit to enable fallen sinners to see, know, and act “rightly.” According to those who embrace this assessment, then, the best way to account for what they regard as the Old Princetonians’ unambiguous insistence that believing and unbelieving academics approach the world and conceive of the life of the mind in essentially the same fashion is by pointing to their enthusiastic endorsement of those philosophical principles that undergirded the “method of addition” and led its advocates to conclude that despite the very real differences between the regenerate and the unregenerate, all scholars are busily engaged in building the same “temple of truth,”[26] and they are doing so in basically the same sense.[27]

While this assessment of the Princeton mind is not entirely without merit,[28] nevertheless it does not offer the most compelling explanation for the commitments that informed Old Princeton’s understanding of the life of the believing mind because it mistakenly presumes that the epistemological assumptions of the Old Princetonians were grounded in a form of realism that simultaneously flattens reality and naïvely imagines “that our understanding of the world is not determined by subjective factors.”[29] It wrongly presupposes, in other words, that the Old Princetonians were naïve realists who embraced a distinctly modern understanding of the relationship between the knower and the thing being known and in so doing accommodated a form of rationalism that denied not only the central role that subjective and experiential factors play in our ability to know God and the truth that he has revealed, but even more fundamentally the sacramental or God-centered nature of the world in which we live. In “choosing” Scottish Realism as their philosophical starting point, interpreters like James Moorhead typically yet mistakenly insist, the Old Princetonians “seized upon a tradition born among Scottish Moderates . . . who were generally eager to construct an anthropocentric system diminishing mystery and vaunting the natural capacity of humans to grasp, analyze, and define ultimate reality.”[30] As a consequence, Moorhead and like-minded interpreters conclude, the Old Princetonians not only abandoned “the fervent theocentricity of Calvin,”[31] but they also fell prey to a conspicuously modern kind of epistemological hubris, for they came “to view knowledge—indeed, reality itself—” in an essentially one-dimensional, secular, or this-worldly sense, namely, “as tidy . . . unambiguous,”[32] accessible to all, and ultimately devoid of any larger, more spiritual or sacred significance.[33]

But if this assessment of the Princeton mind is mistaken and thus cannot account for the epistemological assumptions that informed Old Princeton’s understanding of the life of the believing mind, then what assessment can? In my estimation, the standard assessment of the Princeton mind leaves something to be desired because it cannot be reconciled with the more nuanced conclusions of recent attempts to reassess Old Princeton’s understanding of “right reason,” the aesthetic principle that at least some insist is evidence the Old Princetonians stood in the epistemological mainstream of the Reformed tradition.[34] According to this revisionist scholarship, which establishes that for the Old Princetonians regeneration is essential to knowing “rightly” because knowing “rightly” has to do with the moral—and not merely the rational—ability to see reality more or less for what it objectively is, namely glorious, the best way to account for the aesthetic sense that is at the heart of Old Princeton’s understanding of “right reason” is not by appealing to the epistemological entailments of a philosophical psychology that has a distinctly Scottish provenance,[35] but by appealing to the explicitly God-centered assumptions of a distinctively Reformed understanding of “congeniality.” The notion of congeniality surfaces from time to time in the writings of the Old Princetonians and it is relevant to our present purposes because it stands at the intersection of the crucial nexus between the knowing subject and the object being known. Far from embracing a naïvely modern understanding of the relationship between the knower and the object being known, the Old Princetonians were persuaded that given the sacramental or God-centered nature of the world in which we live, right knowledge of objective truth is grounded—and necessarily so—in Spirit-wrought “congeniality between the perceiver and the thing perceived.”[36] It is grounded, in other words, not in the natural ability of the mind to lay hold of the object being known with detached or disinterested objectivity, but in “a conformity of the [whole] soul to God,”[37] the kind of conformity that is produced by the Spirit of God and that alone makes right knowledge of the world in which we live possible. In short, despite what the standard assessment of the Princeton mind would have us believe, the Old Princetonians were simply not oblivious to the fact that “the mind . . . —and the varying states of the mind—have their parts to play” in our apprehension and construal of reality,[38] for they recognized that since every aspect of the world in which we live just is “a divine index, meant to point us to the invisible God” who just is glorious,[39] “No truth can be properly apprehended unless there is,” as Charles Hodge put it, “a [kind of Spirit-wrought] harmony between it and the mind to which it is presented.”[40]

The viability of this contention largely depends, of course, not just upon the coherence of the revisionist interpretation of “right reason” summarized above, but even more fundamentally upon the metaphysical commitments that ultimately ground and give unique meaning to that revisionist interpretation. Did the Old Princetonians really believe that we live in a world “in which particular things, while remaining entirely themselves, confront human beings with the reality [and glory] of God,”[41] and did they therefore insist that in order to have right or objective knowledge of the world in which we live particular individuals must have the aesthetic capacity to discern this glory in all things? Were they really persuaded, in other words, that there just is “a theological expression in the face of nature” because the world in which we live just is imbued with sacramental significance,[42] and did they therefore insist that this significance must be seen and valued and appreciated in order to have right or objective knowledge in the fullest—that is, the spiritual—sense of the term? Or, were the Old Princetonians in fact among the most committed advocates of the “method of addition” in Victorian America, and did they therefore presume that the world in which we live can be seen for what it objectively is without any reference to God and his glory whatsoever? Did they really imagine, in other words, that the essence of believing scholarship is found in first determining the way the world objectively is through empirical investigation that is presumed to be neutral, and then in adding to that determination the merely subjective yet biblically grounded contention that the substance of what is already thought to be true must also be glorious in some sense?

Two essays that point to a pronounced sacramental tendency in the writings of the Old Princetonians suggest compelling answers to this series of questions and at the same time lend credence to the revisionist historiography summarized above. The first essay was written by a graduate of Old Princeton Seminary and was published in the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review in 1852. In “Moral Aesthetics; or the Goodness of God in the Ornaments of the Universe,” Joseph Atkinson argues that those who have a “sanctified sensibility” and consider the works of God in light of the Word of God—which he insists is “the inspired interpreter of nature”—will see that the world in which we live is not a “common,” but “a sacred thing.”[43] They will discern, in other words, that the created order is not “a hard and barren thing . . . [but] is every where informed with spiritual meaning, and . . . was specifically designed, with its myriad voices and bright forms, to lead us insensibly up to the remembrance and love of an invisible, but personal and presiding God.”[44]

If Atkinson was persuaded that “an intelligent faith baptizes nature” by enabling believers to “taste” and see that there just is “a divine significance in this earth of ours” because it really is “shadowing forth his infinite and ineffable glories,”[45] the same can and must be said of Charles Hodge, the primary representative of the Princeton Theology throughout most of the nineteenth century. In an important yet largely ignored essay entitled “Beauty and the Princeton Piety,” Andrew Hoffecker argues that Hodge is representative of the best thinkers at Old Princeton Seminary in part because a “Platonic [or, as I would put it, an ‘Edwardsean’] motif” informs the theological vision that pervades his systematic, devotional, and scientific writings.[46] According to Hoffecker, Hodge recognized that since both the Word and works of God bear “the impress of his character,”[47] a kind of moral or spiritual beauty is inherent in “all that God has made or revealed, whether it be the majestic Alps, or the beauty of a carefully reasoned and explicated theology, or the beauty of a soul regenerated and enthralled by the glory of God.”[48] “All beauty,” Hodge forthrightly maintains, is not only “a peculiar form of the manifestation of God,” but it is also that attribute of some aspect of reality “which awakens a peculiar pleasure in the mind, which pleasure we are conscious of is not a sensation, and not . . . [merely] an approbation of the conscience, but aesthetical. This pleasure is a complacent delight in the object itself apart from its relation to us.”[49] For Hodge, then, when the faithful say that something is beautiful they are saying less about the way it makes them feel or about the way they merely perceive it to be than they are about the way it just is in itself; the thing being known just is beautiful whether anybody acknowledges it to be so or not, and it just is beautiful because in some sense it “really is”[50] reflecting the glory of the God who just is “the only, the infinite and inexhaustible fountain of all knowledge.”[51] Hoffecker summarizes the matter and highlights the relevance of the aesthetic sense to Old Princeton’s understanding of objective knowledge as follows: for Hodge and the Old Princetonians more generally,

everything which God has made reflects beauty. The world lies under sin, but it is a world which still reflects the beauty that resides in the being of God. One perceives the impress of the divine perfection in the works of nature, in the Scriptures, in doctrine, in the fine points of a theological discourse, in a carefully exposited sermon, in the religious affections, and ultimately in the holiness of Jesus Christ. Beauty is perceived because God not only has made [everything that is] . . . but because he [has] . . . implanted the sense of perception in the heart of the believer. While Hodge admitted that a kind of graded scale exists from the works of nature to the beauty of holiness, one does not begin with the natural and ascend by contemplation [to] . . . the pure form of beauty. Only the person illuminated by the Holy Spirit perceives the whole scale. The Christian alone has a view which encompasses all that is, and all that is reflects the beauty of holiness.[52]

IV. Conclusion: Warfieldians And Kuyperians Reconsidered

If Hoffecker and other recent interpreters are correct and the epistemological assumptions of the Old Princetonians are grounded in commitments that find their genesis not in the Scottish Enlightenment but in essential convictions of the Reformed worldview, then what are we to make of the conventional wisdom regarding the debate that continues to rage in the evangelical camp over how best to conceive of the life of the believing mind? Must we concede that so-called Warfieldians and so-called Kuyperians in fact conceive of the call to believing scholarship in senses that are fundamentally at odds, and must we grant that their conceptions are at odds because so-called Warfieldians have accommodated the assumptions that informed the Old Princetonians’ rather credulous endorsement of the “method of addition,” as interpreters like Marsden would have us believe?[53] I conclude this article by making two brief points that hopefully will stimulate further discussion of these and related matters.

First, while it is certainly true that many who would claim the mantle of the Old Princetonians in our day in fact are naïve realists and thus conceive of the call to believing scholarship in terms of the “method of addition”—or in terms of what is now more formulaically referred to as the “integration of faith and learning”[54]—it is also true that others conceive of this call in a fundamentally different sense, and they do so because they recognize that only those who have regenerated minds can see this world more or less for what it objectively is, namely glorious. Like the Old Princetonians before them, these interpreters recognize that because we live in a sacramental universe and all knowledge is therefore inherently theological, believing scholars ought to be “better” scholars than their unbelieving colleagues because Spirit-wrought congeniality really is essential to knowing anything about this world more or less “rightly.”[55] For these interpreters, then, believing scholars should not regard themselves as those who are called to engage in an academic form of special pleading, imagining that they are called merely to add what they contend are the “facts” of special revelation to the universally accessible and agreed upon “facts” of natural science.[56] Rather, they should regard themselves as academic ministers who recognize that because their work is grounded—by God’s grace—in a “sound metaphysic,”[57] they are called not just to do their academic work “with all the enthusiasm of the veriest humanist,” but they are to do so in order to “make the world subject to God,”[58] that is, “in order that Christ may rule,” as J. Gresham Machen put it, “not only in all nations, but in every department of human life.”[59]

The second point follows from the first and has to do with what has come to be known as the scandal of the evangelical mind. If there is anything to the revisionist historiography summarized above and the thesis of this article therefore has some merit, then it would seem that a plausible case could be made that the real scandal is not that there is no evangelical mind, nor that whatever evangelical mind there is has been corrupted by the form of “Enlightenment Biblicism” that more prominent interpreters insist was advanced by the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary.[60] Rather, if there indeed is something to the revisionist interpretation of “right reason” that seems to be gaining some traction in certain quarters of the evangelical camp,[61] then it could be the case that the real scandal has to do with the fact that many evangelicals in the past as well as in the present have abandoned the assumptions that informed the aesthetic sense that was at the heart of Old Princeton’s understanding of the life of the believing mind, and they have done so because they have accommodated metaphysical commitments that have distinctly deistic, perhaps even baldly secular, tendencies. Much more could certainly be said about this point, but for now it must suffice to suggest that if the evangelical mind in fact has fallen on hard times in recent years, it could be the case that despite what interpreters like Marsden would have us believe, it has fallen on hard times because many of its ostensible defenders have abandoned—rather than embraced—the distinctively Reformed and, in at least some important respects, strikingly Kuyperian assumptions of the Old Princetonians.[62]

Notes

1. George M. Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” in Reckoning With the Past: Historical Essays on American Evangelicalism from the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism (ed. D. G. Hart; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995), 223, 225.
2. Ibid., 225, 226.
3. George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 129.
4. Marsden, “Collapse,” 232, 234.
5. Ibid., 250, 237.
6. Marsden, Understanding, 145.
7. Marsden, “Collapse,” 254, 253.
8. Ibid., 258, 225.
9. Ibid., 254, 262; cf. 226.
10. Ibid., 257, 258, 253, 254.
11. Ibid., 247.
12. Marsden, Understanding, 126.
13. Marsden, “Collapse,” 250.
14. Marsden, Understanding, 131.
15. Cf. Marsden, “Collapse,” 225-26; Marsden, Understanding, 130-34.
16. Marsden, Understanding, 131.
17. Marsden, “Collapse,” 262, 261.
18. In the study of American church history, the phrase “the Princeton Theology” is used to describe the theology that was taught at Princeton Theological Seminary from the time of its founding in 1812 to its reorganization in 1929. Throughout this period of the seminary’s history, theologians such as Archibald Alexander and his sons, Charles Hodge and his sons, Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen championed the Reformed orthodoxy of the Westminster Confession of Faith while consistently opposing what they regarded as the advance of religious liberalism in their day. While the Princeton theologians were committed to the objective nature of religious truth, they were also convinced that orthodox doctrine must never be divorced from vital piety. Indeed, they sought to combine both Presbyterian confessionalism and evangelical pietism, and in so doing to steer a middle course between the extremes of dead orthodoxy on the one hand and a kind of unbridled religious enthusiasm on the other. The Old Princetonians are relevant to a number of discussions currently taking place in the evangelical camp because their work continues to be celebrated by some, even while it is thought by others to be responsible for a number of the more vexing problems that they insist attend more conservative formulations of “establishment evangelical theology” (Roger E. Olson, “Postconservative Evangelicalism: An Update after a Decade,” http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5209W.pdf [accessed February 15, 2014]; cf. Roger E. Olson, Reformed and Always Reforming: The Postconservative Approach to Evangelical Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007]).
19. Marsden, “Collapse,” 258, 253, 265.
20. Mark A. Noll, “Science, Theology, and Society: From Cotton Mather to William Jennings Bryan,” in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (ed. David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 110.
21. Marsden, “Collapse,” 257.
22. Noll, “Science, Theology, and Society,” 110.
23. Marsden, “Collapse,” 254.
24. Ibid.
25. Cf. George M. Marsden, “The Evangelical Love Affair with Enlightenment Science,” in Understanding, 122-52.
26. Cf. B. B. Warfield, “Heresy and Concession,” in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield (ed. John E. Meeter; 2 vols.; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2001), 2:674.
27. According to Marsden, when thoughtful evangelical scholars discuss what faithful scholarship ought to look like, such discussions typically center on the question: “Do evangelical Christian scholars pursue their science or discipline differently from the way secularists do?” (Marsden, Understanding, 151). Marsden argues that evangelicals who participate in such discussions are usually divided “into two camps, with some hybrids in between.” On the one hand are the “Warfieldians,” who believe “in one science or rationality on which all humanity ought to agree,” and on the other are the “Kuyperians,” who insist that “any discipline is built on starting assumptions and that Christians’ basic assumptions should have substantial effects on many of their theoretical conclusions in a discipline” (ibid.). While this characterization will certainly seem plausible to those who embrace the standard assessment of the Princeton mind, it will seem much less so to those who are persuaded that the standard assessment needs considerable tweaking.
28. For further discussion of this point, see Paul Kjoss Helseth, “‘Right Reason’ and the Science of Theology at Old Princeton Seminary: A New Perspective,” The Confessional Presbyterian 8 (2012): 75-79.
29. Harriet A. Harris, “Fundamentalism,” in The Routledge Companion to Modern Christian Thought (ed. Chad Meister and James Beilby; London: Routledge, 2013), 307. Harris argues that Old Princeton’s accommodation of Scottish Realism generated an “evidence-based conception of faith” that practically reduced faith to the mere assent of the understanding (Harriet A. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism [Oxford: Clarendon, 1998], 135). According to Harris, it was Old Princeton’s attempt to understand faith “in terms of rational assent to true propositions” that accounts for the pronounced intellectualism that was at the foundation of nearly all of what critics insist are the more troubling aspects of the Princeton Theology and its enduring legacy in the fundamentalist movement (Harris, “Fundamentalism,” 306; cf. Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 131-35).
30. James H. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 201.
31. Sydney Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” CH 24 (1955): 268.
32. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary, 95.
33. In addition to the sources already cited, just a few of the many works that endorse the standard assessment and are relevant to the substance of this essay include: Gary Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998); Paul C. Gutjahr, Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Andrew T. B. McGowan, The Divine Spiration of Scripture: Challenging Evangelical Perspectives (Nottingham: Apollos, 2007); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Stephen B. Sherman, Revitalizing Theological Epistemology: Holistic Evangelical Approaches to the Knowledge of God (Princeton Theological Monograph Series 83; Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2008); Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011).
34. A particularly striking example of this revisionist scholarship is found in Annette G. Aubert, The German Roots of Nineteenth-Century American Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). According to Aubert, “If Hodge’s theological method is analyzed . . . in terms of his views on the noetic effects of sin and regenerated use of reason (theologia regenitorum), it cannot be argued that Hodge based his theology primarily on Scottish philosophy or rationalism. His theology did not embrace the Pelagian and rationalistic anthropological views of Thomas Reid. Instead, his theological views on anthropology (inspired by Hengstenberg and Turretin) are in agreement with Calvinism and Reformed orthodoxy” (pp. 224-25). Recent contributions to this revisionist scholarship include the book by Aubert noted above as well as James M. Garretson, Princeton and Preaching: Archibald Alexander and the Christian Ministry (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2005); Bradley J. Gundlach, Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013); Paul Helm, Faith, Form, and Fashion: Classical Reformed Theology and Its Postmodern Critics (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2014); Paul Kjoss Helseth, “Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2010); W. Andrew Hoffecker, Charles Hodge: The Pride of Princeton (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2011); David P. Smith, B. B. Warfield’s Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2011); Gary Steward, Princeton Seminary (1812-1929): Its Leaders’ Lives and Works (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2014); Fred G. Zaspel, The Theology of B. B. Warfield: A Systematic Summary (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010); and Fred G. Zaspel, Warfield on the Christian Life: Living in Light of the Gospel (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012). Important contributions in the not so recent past include: David B. Calhoun, Princeton Seminary (2 vols.; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994, 1996); Peter Hicks, The Philosophy of Charles Hodge: A Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Approach to Reason, Knowledge and Truth (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1997); W. Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians: Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and Benjamin B. Warfield (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1981); and John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982).
35. For a brief discussion of the important difference between a philosophical psychology that is grounded in the faculty psychology of the Scottish Enlightenment and one that is grounded in the functionalist psychology of more traditional Reformed thinkers like Jonathan Edwards, see Helseth, “‘Right Reason’ and the Science of Theology,” 77-84.
36. Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians (1860; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 44.
37. Charles Hodge, The Way of Life: A Guide to Christian Belief and Experience (1841; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1978), 213.
38. B. B. Warfield, “On Faith in Its Psychological Aspects,” in Studies in Theology (vol. 9 of The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield; 1932; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 336. For more evidence of Warfield’s awareness that true knowledge is grounded in a kind of congeniality between the knower and the thing being known, see pp. 335-38. For evidence that Archibald Alexander also endorsed this basic point, see, e.g., “Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy: Their Connexion with Each Other, and Their Bearings on Doctrinal and Practical Christianity,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review (1848): 529-42; Archibald Alexander, “Lecture on Faith,” Box 10, File 2, in The Archibald Alexander Manuscript Collection, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.
39. Joseph M. Atkinson, “Moral Aesthetics; or the Goodness of God in the Ornaments of the Universe,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review (1852): 39.
40. Hodge, Way of Life, 12.
41. Peter Leithart, “Why Evangelicals Can’t Write,” Credenda Agenda 18, no. 2 (2006): 21.
42. Atkinson, “Moral Aesthetics,” 39.
43. Ibid., 50, 43.
44. Ibid., 43. See also Gardiner Spring, “God Himself the Ultimate End of All Things,” Biblical Repertory and Theological Review (1832): 94-115. Note that the best thinkers at Old Princeton Seminary were not merely affirming that we live in a teleological universe. Rather, they were persuaded that given the sacramental nature of the world in which we live, all knowledge—and therefore all science—is inherently theological. One of the clearest statements of this conviction—which is grounded in metaphysical commitments that are classically Reformed—is found in B. B. Warfield’s essay, “The Idea of Systematic Theology.” According to Warfield, “All science without God is mutilated science, and no account of a single branch of knowledge can ever be complete until it is pushed back to find its completion and ground in Him. In the eloquent words of Dr. Pusey: ‘God alone is in Himself, and is the Cause and Upholder of everything to which He has given being. Every faculty of the mind is some reflection of His; every truth has its being from Him; every law of nature has the impress of His hand; everything beautiful has caught its light from His eternal beauty; every principle of goodness has its foundation in His attributes. . . . Without Him, in the region of thought, everything is dead; as without Him everything which is, would at once cease to be. All things must speak of God, refer to God, or they are atheistic. . . .’ It is thus as true of sciences as it is of creatures,” Warfield continues, “that in Him they live and move and have their being. The science of Him and His relations is the necessary ground of all science. All speculation takes us back to Him; all inquiry presupposes Him; and every phase of science consciously or unconsciously rests at every step on the science that makes Him known. Theology, thus, as the science which treats of God, lies at the root of all sciences. It is true enough that each could exist without it, in a sense and in some degree; but through it alone can any one of them reach its true dignity” (B. B. Warfield, “The Idea of Systematic Theology,” in Studies in Theology, 70-71). For essential reading on the central place of theology in what Warfield calls the “circle of the sciences” (cf. ibid., 68-74), see Smith, B. B. Warfield’s Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship.
45. Atkinson, “Moral Aesthetics,” 43, 39, 43; cf. 44, 51.
46. Andrew Hoffecker, “Beauty and the Princeton Piety,” in Soli Deo Gloria: Essays in Reformed Theology (ed. R. C. Sproul; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1976), 129.
47. Hodge, Way of Life, 14.
48. Hoffecker, “Beauty and the Princeton Piety,” 129.
49. Charles Hodge, “Beauty of Holiness,” in Conference Papers (1879; Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 210, 211.
50. Charles Hodge, “Jesus Christ Whom Thou Hast Sent (John 17:3),” September 20, 1846; Box 20, File 35:1, in The Charles Hodge Manuscript Collection, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.
51. Charles Hodge, “God is Light,” Box 24, File 80:4, in The Charles Hodge Manuscript Collection. In his commentary on the book of Ephesians, Hodge notes that an important “principle” that is “nearly allied” to the principle that the soul is a “unity” is that which has to do with “the moral and spiritual excellence of truth. Truth,” he contends, “is not merely speculative, the object of cognition; it has moral [and spiritual] beauty” (Charles Hodge, A Commentary on Ephesians [1860; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1964], 180). Note that for Hodge and the Old Princetonians more generally, it is the organic or more than merely rational nature of truth that demands an organic or whole-souled epistemology.
52. Hoffecker, “Beauty and the Princeton Piety,” 131-32. It is interesting to note that while Marsden commends Hoffecker for pointing out “the essential importance that Hodge attached to religious feeling” and acknowledges that feelings play a “crucial” role in the Princeton Theology as a whole (cf. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1980], 260 n. 14), nevertheless, he does not explore either the metaphysical or the epistemological entailments of Hoffecker’s thesis for Hodge and the Old Princetonians more generally. Perhaps this oversight is explained by his endorsement of the standard assessment of the Princeton mind, according to which the soul is not a single unit but a collection of discrete faculties or powers, with religious feelings merely being added to what is already known objectively, but not essential to objective knowledge itself. If this is the case, then Marsden’s oversight is problematic for a number of reasons, the most basic of which is that it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding not only of the philosophical psychology that was embraced by the best thinkers at Old Princeton Seminary, but also of the organic epistemology that that psychology entails. For an example of Old Princeton’s emphasis upon the unitary operation of the soul and its relationship to knowledge, note what Hodge says about the knowledge of Christ in his Conference Papers: “In the Scriptures, knowledge is not mere intellectual apprehension. It includes that but more. It includes also the proper apprehension not only of the object, but of its qualities; and if those qualities be either esthetic or moral, it includes the due apprehension of them and the state of feeling which answers to them. . . . The knowledge of Christ, therefore, is not the apprehension of what he is, simply by the intellect, but also a due apprehension of his glory as a divine person arrayed in our nature, and involves not as its consequence merely, but as one of its elements, the corresponding feeling of adoration, delight, desire and complacency” (Charles Hodge, “The Excellency of the Knowledge of Christ Jesus Our Lord,” in Conference Papers, 214).
53. For Marsden’s description of the basic difference between “Warfieldians” and “Kuyperians,” see n. 27 above.
54. For an exploration of matters related to this point, see Paul Kjoss Helseth, “Carl F. H. Henry, Old Princeton, and the Right Use of Reason: Continuity or Discontinuity?,” WTJ 73 (2011): 293-302.
55. While Warfield recognizes that there “do exist . . . ‘two kinds of men’ in the world” who give us “two kinds of science,” he nonetheless insists that the difference between the science of the regenerate and that of the unregenerate is not “a difference in kind,” but in “perfection of performance” (B. B. Warfield, “Introduction to Francis R. Beattie’s Apologetics,” in Shorter Writings, 2:100-102). The science of the regenerate is of a higher quality than that of the unregenerate, he argues, not because the regenerate are producing an altogether “different kind of science,” but because the entrance of regeneration produces “the better scientific outlook” and thereby “prepares men to build [the temple of truth] better and ever more truly as the effects of regeneration increase intensively and extensively” (ibid.). For an exploration of the notion that believing scholars ought to be better scholars than their unbelieving colleagues, cf. Paul Kjoss Helseth, “Christ-Centered, Bible-Based, and Second-Rate? ‘Right Reason’ as the Aesthetic Foundation of Christian Education,” WTJ 69 (2007): 383-401.
56. For a persuasive critique of the notion that the integration of faith and learning is a project that believing scholars are called to pursue, see Ronald Hoch and David P. Smith, Old School, New Clothes: The Cultural Blindness of Christian Education (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2011). Hoch and Smith’s critique is particularly relevant because it is grounded in an endorsement of the revisionist interpretation of the Princeton mind summarized above.
57. J. Gresham Machen, “The Relation of Religion to Science and Philosophy,” The Princeton Theological Review 24 (1926): 60.
58. J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Culture,” in Selected Shorter Writings of J. Gresham Machen (ed. D. G. Hart; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2004), 402.
59. J. Gresham Machen, The Literature and History of New Testament Times, Teachers Manual (ed. John T. Faris; The Westminster Departmental Graded Series; Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1916), 278. Note how the pastoral nature of believing scholarship is essential to Warfield’s understanding of science, which itself is grounded in God-centered metaphysical commitments. According to Warfield, “as all nature, whether mental or material, owes its existence to God, every science which investigates nature and ascertains its laws, depends for its foundation upon that science which would make known what God is and what the relations are in which He stands to the work of His hands and in which they stand to Him; and must borrow from it those conceptions through which alone the material with which it deals can find its explanation or receive its proper significance” (Warfield, “Idea of Systematic Theology,” 69).
60. Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), ch. 4, esp. pp. 96-98.
61. See n. 34 above.
62. I would like to thank Professor Andrew Hoffecker for his helpful comments on the penultimate draft of this essay.