357 - Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism: Archibald Alexander and the Founding of Princeton Theological Seminary

Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism: Archibald
Alexander and the Founding of Princeton
Theological Seminary
By Lefferts A. Loetscher
Contributions to the Study of Religion, No. 8.Westport, Conn.
Greenwood Press, 1983. 303 pp. $35.00.

Charles Hodge once said that Archibald Alexander "as a general rule never drank wine; but when the use of wine came to be pronounced sinful, he would sometimes, in company, take a glass for conscience sake." Alexander's refusal to bow to the current religious trends aptly characterizes the typical stance of the old Princeton theologians. They always made a point, even a principle, of not quite fitting in with the times.

According to conventional wisdom, such refusal to stay current might spell disaster for a theology. Nonetheless, the old Princeton theology has far outlived most of its contemporaries. Today, a half century after it lost its dominance at Princeton Seminary itself, it continues to have a major impact on a number of America's largest evangelical and reformed seminaries.

The late Lefferts A. Loetscher, long a professor of American church history at Princeton Seminary and the contributor of some of the best research in Presbyterian history, displays a greater affection for Archibald Alexander and the founding of the Seminary than he does for the Princeton theology itself. The son of another Princeton historian, Frederick W. Loetscher, and himself a Princeton Seminary graduate of the 1920s, Lefferts Loetscher experienced firsthand the struggles to oust the old theology from its fortress. Moderate and fundamentally generous in his sympathies, the younger Loetscher clearly viewed the broadening of the seminary and the Presbyterian Church with approbation. It is not surprising, then, that, while he admired Alexander for his intellectual rigor and for his work in establishing the seminary, he portrays Alexander's theology as a burden that could have been borne only by assuming the most awkward stances.

Loetscher perceptively sees that the great challenge to Alexander and

358 - Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism: Archibald Alexander and the Founding of Princeton Theological Seminary

his generation was to fend off the excesses of both the Enlightenment and pietism. More broadly, this has been a major challenge for most of the Reformation traditions that came to America. How does one preserve both intellect and piety? Piety seems to abound in American Protestantism. Respect for intellect is scarce. Loetscher shows that the founding of Princeton Seminary was an important move in this ongoing struggle. The direction of American theological education, he shows in particularly helpful analysis, was far from fixed in the early national period. The founding of Princeton Seminary was an important step in defining the professional character of the ministry in America.

Archibald Alexander, the first professor chosen for the seminary at its founding in 1812, personally embodied the efforts to steer a course between the excesses of the dual threats of Enlightenment skepticism and pietist enthusiasm. Alexander, a Virginian and always a southerner in outlook, was deeply influenced by the Edwardsean piety of the latter stages of the southern Great Awakening. Loetscher points out, however, that despite his continuing piety, Alexander's own spiritual struggles had led him to reject the growing American pietist tendency to seek constant psychological confirmations of faith. Alexander, consistent with the Presbyterian scholastic tradition, emphasized that, while true faith must be grounded in direct spiritual knowledge of divine things, it can nonetheless be confirmed on intellectual grounds. (Cf. Loetscher's The Broadening Church, 1954.) As a Philadelphia pastor in the early 1800s, Alexander became even more firmly committed to Presbyterian traditionalism. He never left behind, however, his love for simple piety.

Loetscher, unhappy with Alexander's intellectual and theological stance, carries on a steady dialogue with the old Princeton tradition. Alexander and the tradition, he argues, never adequately reconciled the pietistic-intuitive aspects of their position with their intellectualisticrationalistic emphases. He dismisses the whole Scottish Common Sense philosophical tradition as hopelessly inconsistent on this score. In fact, however, the tradition and its theological progeny were well aware of this tension. They resolved it by arguing that intuitively based knowledge was wholly rational, since no rational person could do without it. One did not have to rely on reasoning, therefore, to be following the dictates of "reason." This distinction has eluded many interpreters of the Common Sense tradition.

Where Loetscher is correct, is in sensing that the Princetonians overestimated the possibility of achieving objectivity by their reasoning. Their answer to pluralism, which was the most comprehensive challenge of the day, was to rely on objective scientific method applied to the Bible and to theology. A single orthodoxy could be preserved if careful scientific method could indeed settle all disputes concerning interpretation. Lacking a sense of history as development, Loetscher emphasizes, they assumed that human knowledge of theological truth could be settled once and for all by proper scientific method.

Why has such a static and intellectualistic tradition remained such a

359 - Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism: Archibald Alexander and the Founding of Princeton Theological Seminary

powerful influence in American theology when so many of its emphases seem distinctly un-American? Part of the answer is that, as Loetscher's thoroughly documented account shows, Alexander and his colleagues at Princeton Seminary early took a firm stance against the dominant German philosophical and theological trends. The old Princeton remained therefore philosophically closer to popular American outlooks then did its more progressive contemporaries. Moreover, its absolute dedication to Christian truth as it understood it, combined with intellectual rigor, left it as one of the few substantial American theological traditions in the field for twentieth-century conservative evangelicals.

Furthermore, the old Princeton tradition flourished in part because it insisted on doing what it did with the utmost care and integrity. Lefferts Loetscher's career was an admirable illustration of the survival of those valuable Christian standards. More recently, Princeton Seminary has reflected perhaps as much as the old Princeton the determination of Alexander and his associates that "unless the friends of learning and true piety exert themselves to the utmost of their powers, in a few years our country will become a mere hot-bed of enthusiasm."

George M. Marsden
Calvin College
Grand Rapids, Michigan