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The Princeton Theology

One Source of Biblical Literalism in American Protestantism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Ernest R. Sandeen
Ernest R. Sandeen
Affiliation:
North Park College
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Extract

Although dependence upon a literally inspired Bible has been one of the most common beliefs among American Protestants, theological justifications for this doctrine of the Scripture have not been common. Eighteenth century infidelity from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine attacked the possibility of special revelation more than any particular form of revelation. In order to refute these adversaries, the great champions of orthodoxy, such as Timothy Dwight, never found it necessary to become specific about the nature of biblical inspiration. The growing influence of biblical criticism after the Civil War ended this period of Edenic innocence and compelled the churches to theologize about the nature of biblical authority. The results were not unanimous, and the ensuing controversy focused attention as never before upon the doctrine of inspiration. Only one of the conservative defenses of inspiration, the Princeton Theology, will be discussed in this paper, but there are good reasons for considering it the most influential theological support for biblical literalism in the twentieth century. J. Gresham Machen carried the Princeton Theology with him into his new denomination and seminary after 1929, and others in Bible institutes and seminaries not connected with the Presbyterian church have looked up to the Princeton professors as their great teachers and champions. In the Fundamentals series published just before World War I, six articles were devoted to the problem of inspiration, and three of these took much of their argument from the Princeton Theology. The history of the Princeton Theology is not well known nor its importance widely appreciated, but some good monograph and periodical literature has been written.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , September 1962 , pp. 307 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1962

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References

1 Cf. Timothy Dwight, A Discourse on the Genuineness and Authenticity of the New Testament (New York: George Bunce, 1794).

2 Most defenders of biblical literalism failed to recognize that this was not just another controversy over the authority of the Bible and felt that all the problems had been raised and answered long ago. This comment of James M. Gray is typical: “Our fathers discussed it [Inspiration], it was the great question once upon a time, it was sifted to the bottom, and a great storehouse of fact, and argument, and illustration has been left for us to draw upon in a day of need (“The Inspiration of the Bible,” The Fundamentals, III, 8).

3 Dispensationalism is another powerful defender of biblical literalism and forms, along with the conservative Calvinism described in this paper, the chief theological structure for Fundamentalism. Cf. Kraus, C. Norman, Dispensationalism in America (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1958)Google Scholar and Bass, Clarence B., Backgrounds to Dispensationalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960).Google Scholar

4 Ned. Stonehouse, B., J. Gresham Machen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954).Google Scholar

5 It is interesting to notice how much nineteenth-century Princeton writing is still being published. Works by Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. G. Machen have been reprinted since 1948.

6 Twenty-eight of the ninety articles in the twelve-volume Fundamentals series are related to the authority, accuracy, practicality, and sanctity of the Bible, but only six deal directly with the doctrine of inspiration. Munhall, L. W. (Vol. VII, “Inspiration”Google Scholar) and Gray, James M. (Vol. III, “The Inspiration of the Bible”Google Scholar) quote and refer directly to various Princeton figures, while Bishop, George S. (Vol. VII, “The Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves”)Google Scholar was educated at Princeton Seminary, and his arguments are only a bad summary of the much more carefully guarded position of Hodge and Warfield. Although no direct evidence of Princeton influence can be seen in the other three articles, all of the authors were Presbyterians. Pierson, A. T. (Vol. VII, “The Testimony of the Organic Unity of the Bible to Inspiration”)Google Scholar was trained at Union Seminary and served several Presbyterian churches before becoming more independent and dispensational. Wm. Moorhead, G. (Vol. III, “The Moral Glory of Jesus Christ a Proof of Inspiration”)Google Scholar, although a dispensationalist for a while at any rate, was the president of Xenia Seminary. Caven, William (Vol. IV, “The Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament”)Google Scholar is described as late principal of Knox College, Toronto.

7 The most important of these studies are John Nelson, Oliver, “The Rise of the Princeton Theology” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1935)Google Scholar, and Livingstone, William D., “The Princeton Apologetic as Exemplified by the Work of Benjamin B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1948).Google Scholar

8 Foster, Frank H., A Genetic History of the New England Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907), p. 543.Google Scholar

9 Loetscher, Lefferts A., The Broadening Church (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1957), p. 61.Google Scholar This study of the Presbyterian church from 1869 to the present can hardly be praised too highly. Sober, judicious, scholarly, the analysis of Prof. Loetscher reveals a great deal about late nineteenth-century Presbyterianism in general and the Princeton Theology in particular.

10 The idea that Fundamentalists were only orthodox Christians thrust too quickly into an industrialized, scientific century cannot be defended. Apparently the historians of the movement have not been well acquainted with the history of theology and have uncritically accepted the Fundamentalists' protestations of orthodoxy. See Furniss, Norman F., The Fundamentalist Controversy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 14Google Scholar, for a characteristic remark.

11 Alexander Pope, Epitaphs.

12 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1874), I, 1–103.

13 Warfield, Benjamin B., The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1948) pp. 112–3.Google Scholar

14 Sidney Ahlstrom has pointed out that the Scottish Common Sense and not Lockean philosophy was taught at Princeton after the days of John Witherspoon, who came to the presidency of the college from Scotland in 1768 ( “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church History, XXIV [1955]Google Scholar, 257 ff). The dualism of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy is not, however, noticeable in the Princeton Theology after the time of Archibald Alexander. The first words of his book Thoughts On Religious Experience begin, “There are two kinds of religious knowledge, which though intimately connected as cause and effect, may nevertheless be distinguished. These are the knowledge of the truth as it is revealed in the Holy Scriptures, and the impression which the truth makes on the human mind when rightly apprehended” (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1841). See also note 19 below.

15 Samuel Miller, second professor in Princeton seminary, was very critical of Kant in his Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1803); see also, for instance, Hodge, Systematic Theology, I, 202–3.

16 “The Princeton Apologetic,” p. 342.

17 Hodge, Systematic Theology, I, 18.

18 Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 56.Google Scholar

19 Lindsay, Thomas M. has noticed that alongside what he refers to as the “entire emphasis on the external evidence of canonicity and inspiration”Google Scholar in Charles Hodge's doctrine of the Scripture, there is an evangelical glow suggestive of a more personal faith (“The Doctrine of the Scripture: The Reformers and the Princeton School,” The Expositor, 5th series, Vol. I [1895], 293), This may seem true, but little of the personal element is allowed to creep into the argument as evidence, and with late Princeton theologians seems entirely absent.

20 Hodge, Systematic Theology, I, 153.

21 Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), III, 602–3.

22 This same preference for external validation can be seen in discussion of the canon (Hodge, Systematic Theology, I, 152–3).

23 Ibid., 166.

24 Livingstone shows this very clearly (“The Princeton Apologetic,” especially p. 344).

25 Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, p. 212.

26 Ibid., 214. Warfield's dependence upon external verification has been shown by Edward Dowey to be directly contradictory to Calvin's own doctrine of internal testimony. It was, in fact, “the very thing Calvin was trying to avoid” (Dowey, Edward A. Jr., The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology [New York: Columbia University Press, 1952] p. 115).Google Scholar

27 Inspiration and Authority, p. 209.

28 Ibid., 198–9.

29 James Hastings Nichols has shown that Charles Hodge also possessed an antihistorical mind. In connection with a debate between Hodge and J. W. Nevin, in which Hodge was completely outclassed, Prof. Nichols, shows that Hodge, “just lacked understanding of what history is. For him the past was an armory of theological tenets, and a man had a right to pick and choose as he would” (Romanticism in American Theology [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], p. 90).Google Scholar

30 Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, p. 112.

31 Hodge, Charles, Systematic Theology, I, 164.Google Scholar

32 “… in the narration of well-known facts, the writer did not need a continual suggestion of every idea, but only to be so superintended, as to be preserved from error; so in the use of language in recording such familar things, there existed no necessity that every word should be inspired; but there was the same need of a directing and superintending influence, as in regard to the things themselves” (Alexander, Archibald, Evidences of the Authenticity, Inspiration and Canonical Authority [Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, N. D.], p. 226–7).Google Scholar The whole chapter ought to be read, not only to see how far Charles Hodge moved from the rather liberal position of his teacher and colleague, but also to see how different Alexander's treatment of inspiration is from that of Turretin's, FrancisInstitution Theologiae ElencticaeGoogle Scholar, which was used as a text at the seminary until the publication of Hodge's, CharlesSystematic Theology.Google Scholar It may be that later Princeton figures, reading Turretin as students, were more influenced by him. Whatever the truth in that regard, it is quite clear to me, at any rate, that Alexander's originality has not been appreciated.

33 See, for example, the excellent discussion in Reid, John K. S., The Authority of Scripture (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 72ff.Google Scholar

34 Warfield's remark was, “The reformed churches have never held such a [mechanical dictation] theory: though dis-honest, careless, ignorant or overeager controverters of its doctrines have often brought the charge” (Inspiration and Authority, p. 421). See as well, Hodge, , Systematic Theology, I, 157.Google Scholar

35 See Packer, James I., ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), pp. 78–9.Google Scholar

36 Warfield, Inspiration and Authority, p. 420.

37 Hodge, , Systematic Theology, I, 164.Google Scholar In the hands of careless writers, the words become even more indefensible: “God wrote the Bible, the whole Bible, and the Bible as a whole. He wrote each word of it as truly as He wrote the Decalogue on the tables of stone” (Bishop, George S., “The Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves,” The Fundamentals, VII, 53).Google Scholar

38 The choice of words is not accidental—the Princeton vocabulary is precise. The word “plenary” was occasionally applied to inspiration, but the connotations were not exact enough to suit theologians. “Infallibility” was also used, occasionally as a synonym for “inerrant,” but most Princeton writers seem to feel the word to be too limited. “Inerrancy,” however, fitted the Princeton mind perfectly, resting as it did upon a rationalist definition of truth. They seem to believe that a Bible free of errors, contradictions, paradoxes, or inconsistencies would be a perfect revelation. That this involved a definition of the nature of God as well as truth Warfield made clear on one occasion, writing that the superintendence of the Holy Spirit in inspiration was of such a nature as to preserve the Scriptures from “everything inconsistent with a divine authorship” (Inspiration and Authority, p. 173).

39 Hodge, , Systematic Theology, I, 170.Google Scholar

40 Loetscher, The Broadening Church, p. 30.

41 Ibid., pp. 30 and 162, note 16.

42 A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, “Inspiration,” The Presbyterian Review, II (1881), 238.

43 Ibid., p. 245.

44 Inspiration and Authority, p. 211.

45 A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1860) and (2nd edition; New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), pp. 66, 75.

46 A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, Presbyterian Review, II, 226, 237, 238, 242, 245, 246.

47 R. E. Thompson, A History of the Presbyterian Churches in the United States, Vol. VI of the American Church History Series (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1895), p. 262.

48 Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, III, 604.

49 See, for instance, Inspiration and Authority, p. 217.

50 Presbyterian Review, II, 242.

51 I have not found any references to the original manuscripts in the writings of Warfield other than those already referred to in the Presbyterian Review; is it possible that he abandoned the distinction? Quite obviously, the followers of the Princeton Theology did not forget it. However, Warfield's definition of error had the same effect of removing the question of inspiration from the arena of discussion. An error could be admitted only if the evidence for it was stronger than that supporting the doctrine of inspiration. If the evidence was adjudged insufficient (which it always was), then the error became only a difficulty awaiting solution (Inspiration and Authority, p. 218 ff.).