Princeton Seminary Research Articles

What to Do after the Emancipation Proclamation? A Princeton Seminary Alumnus’s Views on Racial Issues and Slavery in Brazil and the United States (1852–1867)

Abstract This article reflects on how the concept of race and views on African Americans and Afro-Brazilians permeated the American Presbyterian missions that operated in the Brazilian empire in the nineteenth century. This analysis considers the writing and reading of Ashbel Green Simonton (1833–1867), a Princeton Seminary alum sent to Brazil as a missionary by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA). In his missionary activity, Simonton founded the first Presbyterian Church and the first evangelical periodical in Brazil. Considering the intercessions between the racial theories stemming from natural history and nineteenth-century theological anthropologies, as well as the missionary’s interactions with the racial and slavery issues that permeated the American Civil War (1861–1865), this article analyzes Simonton’s journal (1852–1867), the books requested by Simonton at Princeton Theological Seminary (1856–1858), and the periodical Imprensa Evangélica (Evangelical Press, 1864–1867).

Introductory Essay: Multiple Belongings in Transpacific Christianities

This short article serves as an introduction to a special issue of the International Bulletin of Mission Research on the topic of multiple belongings in transpacific Christianities, focused on Asian migration to the United States. It summarizes the collection of articles included and their context within the work of the Center for Asian American Christianity and the Overseas Ministries Study Center, both based at Princeton Seminary.

Homiletical Peonage: The Pedagogical Dilemma Whiteness Creates

This article revisits a key theme in retired Princeton Seminary homiletics professor James F. Kay’s work, preaching as a promissory-kerygmatic saving event. Kay calls for a disciplinary turn in theoretical focus in homiletics, lamenting homiletics’ over-reliance on theories of rhetoric to account for its distinctiveness and argues that theological analysis of preaching leads us to a better understanding of preaching’s essential core and function as Christian proclamation. After briefly summarizing Kay’s proposal on this topic, I bring to bear upon it a central criterion of Black preaching theory and praxis: groundedness in the concrete experience and ongoing legacies of racial injustice. This article’s fundamental question is, “In view of its European developmental origins, does promissory kerygmatics offer a theological theorization of preaching adequate to the demands of Black preaching pedagogy and praxis today?”

Not an “Ordinary Man”: J. Gresham Machen and the Un-Queering of Evangelical Theology

ABSTRACTIn the 1920s, Princeton Seminary professor J. Gresham Machen was the leading fundamentalist intellectual of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. His Calvinist theology, commitment to biblical inerrancy, and opposition to liberalism were passed on to and spread by his influential students including Carl McIntire, Harold Ockenga, and Francis Schaeffer. But in the early days of 1906, the young man who would go on to indelibly shape evangelical theology wrote home from Germany where he was a graduate student that he could never go into Christian ministry because of his “moral fault” that no “ordinary man” could understand. This article analyzes the coded language of J. Gresham Machen's letters during his pivotal personal crisis in the context of changing German understandings of “homosexuality” and Machen's lifelong homosocial tendencies. Moreover, it connects Machen's confrontation with his sexuality with his simultaneous confrontation with German liberal theology. In the fall of 1905, Machen found himself drawn to the more experiential and pluralistic Christianity of Wilhelm Herrmann. However, in facing his own perceived immorality, Machen found “Calvinism a very comforting doctrine indeed.” He rejected modernism and spent his life defending a rigid orthodoxy against the theologies that would come to accommodate and embrace queerness. The results of his personal crisis echoed through the history of twentieth-century American evangelicalism. This article analyzes the historical process of “un-queering” theology that emanated from that crisis and demonstrates that resistance to queerness was woven into the ideological fabric of evangelicalism far earlier than scholars have yet recognized.

Guest Editorial: Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, 1851–1921

This Year 2021 Marks The Centenary Of The Death Of The Theologian Benjamin B.Warfield. He Was A Son Of The Southern Presbyterian Church. John Meeter Summarizes Warfield’s Life As Follows: Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield Was Born Into A Godly Presbyterian Home At “Grasmere,” Near Lexington, Kentucky, November 5th, 1851. When Only Nineteen Years Of Age He Was Graduated From What Is Now Princeton University, With The Highest Honor Of His Class. After Two Years Of Further Study And Travel Abroad He Entered Princeton Seminary, Graduating In The Class Of 1876. In 1878 He Was Appointed Instructor, And In 1879 Installed As Professor Of New Testament Exegesis And Literature At Western Theological Seminary, Allegheny. In 1887 He Received And Accepted, The Appointment To The Charles Hodge Chair Of Didactic And Polemic Theology At Princeton Seminary; And For Thirty-three Years, From 1887 To The Time Of His Death In 1921, He Served Princeton Seminary And The Presbyterian Church U. S. A. In The Chair Made Famous By The Alexander-Hodge Succession. KEYWORDS:

Advancing the Evangelical Mind: Melvin Grove Kyle, J. Gresham Machen, and the League of Evangelical Students

This article seeks to analyze Melvin Grove Kyle and the growth of the League of Evangelical Students (LES) founded by J. Gresham Machen and Princeton Seminary students in 1925. Both Kyle and Machen were scholarly leaders in the LES and served on the organization’s board together. This paper will establish the importance of Melvin Grove Kyle as a leading evangelical scholar and biblical archaeologist. It will also explain the origins and growth of the LES and how various Presbyterians influenced the organization and sought to advance a broader evangelical Protestant intellectual life in the difficult period of the 1920s and 1930s. Machen’s role will be highlighted, and the thinking of various evangelical scholars associated with the LES will be analyzed. This study is important because it helps us grasp how evangelical Protestantism rehabilitated and advanced itself intellectually in a period when the movement faced educational marginalization in the wider culture.

Beyond the Campus

A keynote address at the “Legacy and Mission: Theological Education and the History of Slavery” conference held at Princeton Seminary, April 8–9, 2019.

Seminaries and Slavery

A theological response to the three university case studies on slavery audits from William & Mary, Georgetown, and Princeton. Taylor argues that the Princeton Seminary report reflects a reconciliatory transaction paradigm and, as valuable as it is, should be consciously developed within another paradigm: the Abolition Struggle Paradigm.

A failure of theological imagination: Beginning to deal with the legacy of Princeton Seminary on matters of slavery and race

Princeton Theological Seminary has an ambiguous legacy around issues of slavery and race. From its founding in 1812 through at least the period of Reconstruction, the seminary’s faculty espoused African colonization as the only viable response to the problems caused by slavery in the United States. In their enthusiastic support for the colonization effort, the seminary’s faculty manifested a profound failure of theological imagination in that their efforts along these lines were premised upon an inability to conceive of a society in which Black and White could live together as equals before God. This article signals the beginning of an effort by current faculty to research the history of the seminary’s ambiguous legacy around matters or slavery and race with an eye toward developing a constructive way forward in the present and for the future.

James H. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 570. $60.00 (hbk).

James H. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 570. $60.00 (hbk).

Zombie Alleluias: Learning to Live in the Space Between Worlds

This essay was delivered as the Baer Seminar on Pastoral Care at an alumni/ae reunion of Princeton Theological Seminary on October 22, 2013, and at a Princeton Seminary alumni/ae gathering at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas, on February 10, 2014. It considers an increasing fascination with zombies in recent American cultural life as a means by which individuals attempt to cope with anxieties related to the rise of political and religious extremism in the post-9/11 landscape. Building on Freud’s recognition of fundamentalist tendencies within the human psyche and his sense that modern persons are living psychologically “beyond their means,” it calls for an empathic embrace of the complexities of what Donald Capps deems the “ecumenical self” as a path toward engaging personal threats within and without.

Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture. By James H. Moorhead. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012. xxii + 554 pp. $60.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture . By James H. Moorhead . Grand Rapids, Mich. : Eerdmans , 2012. xxii + 554 pp. $60.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesCrafting the institutional history of a college or seminary presents manifold challenges. Often one succumbs to the temptation to emphasize a bricks and mortar story, noting how the physical presence of a school expanded over time. Or one chronicles an uncritical, triumphalist tale, glossing over issues that might tarnish an idealized image, diminishing the value of the book as a fundraising tool. Another common pitfall is to focus on the grand achievements of distinguished graduates, presuming that they owe their success only to the school.Moorhead rejects these approaches, opting instead to locate this bicentennial account of Princeton Theological Seminary, his alma mater and professional home for three decades, in the broader, but rich intellectual and cultural context of American religious history. He succeeds remarkably well, especially in his presentation of the old Princeton, the seminary that flourished from 1812 until it was drawn into the fundamentalist-modernist upheaval of the 1920s. His account provides a prism through which to refract many major currents of American Protestant life, particularly that wing shaped by the Reformed tradition. Princeton Seminary's story thus becomes the story of Reformed America, from contention over revivals and challenges to Calvinist orthodoxy in the quarter century after the seminary's founding to the debates over Darwinian theory, biblical inerrancy, and the use of historical-critical method of biblical interpretation in the quarter century leading to the seminary's 1912 centennial.In Moorhead's telling, one central theme propels the seminary's leaders such as Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge and dominates its ethos from its founding until the internal contention of the 1920s. That theme is a passion for good order integral to Calvin's theological system. Hence when Old School and New School divisions ruptured American Presbyterianism in the 1837, the seminary sought to avoid identifying with either so as to maintain order and the stability it represented. However, when faced with the inevitable, Princeton identified with the Old School as being more resonant with the Reformed heritage.Once Princeton aligned with the Old School, its identity became entwined with assuring that it, too, remained committed to good order. In time, as Moorhead demonstrates, that became an unyielding insistence on doctrinal purity embodied in the Old School understanding of the Westminster Confession. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the so-called Princeton Theology of Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield held sway, the seminary stood as a bastion of orthodoxy to resist new theological currents, from those associated with Horace Bushnell to liberal approaches emanating from German thinkers like Adolf von Harnack and Albrecht Ritschl. Yet Princeton professors were well versed in the thought they opposed. Moorhead repeatedly reminds readers that Princeton Seminary faculty were second to none in their breadth of knowledge and familiarity with every theological impulse.In time, other forces within the larger religious culture meant that internal contention threatened Princeton Seminary. By the 1920s, contention undermined the good order that had sustained old Princeton, with a minority of faculty voices offering fresh ways to be faithful to Calvinist orthodoxy while embracing new theoretical and methodological ways of understanding. …

Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture

Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture

Book Review: Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture

Book Review: Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture

Slavery, Race, and Gender at Princeton Seminary: The Pre-Civil War Era

The pre-Civil War leaders of Princeton Seminary desired social reform and progress, but these had to come gradually and non-disruptively. Thus while Charles Hodge and his colleagues looked for an end to slavery at some indefinite time in the future, they supported in the meantime the colonization of free blacks in Africa and fought immediate emancipation. They likewise opposed full equality for women. A properly ordered society, they believed, involved “social subordination”—of humanity to God, woman to man, children to parents, slaves to masters, and the morally unfit and uneducated to the best and brightest.

George S. Hendry: Bicentennial Reflections on His Theological Legacy

George S. Hendry was the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary from 1949 to 1973. Author of five books and numerous articles in Theology Today, Princeton Seminary Bulletin, and other journals, his outstanding lectures and solid scholarship were anchored in the faith and life of the Church. This article recalls his central emphases in theological method, the authority of Scripture, christology, pneumatology, and eschatology.

In the Beginning Male and Female, Then She Came to Seminary: A History of Women at Princeton Theological Seminary

A history of women at Princeton Theological Seminary covers briefly the scope of women’s participation in the life of Princeton Theological Seminary from the early years to the present, while concentrating on the expanding presence and influence of women faculty and women students from the 1930s through the early 1980s. The article describes the effects of an influx of women M.A. students with the arrival of the Tennent School of Christian education on the Princeton Seminary campus in 1944. Women students’ initiatives in the 1970s for the founding of the Women’s Center and a child care center are summarized. Anecdotes about the experiences of early women students, including the first woman B.D. graduate, Muriel Van Orden Jennings, as well as the experiences of early women faculty members Freda Gardner and Katharine Sakenfeld, reveal the changing attitudes of male students, faculty, and presidents toward the presence of women on the Princeton Seminary campus. This article was originally presented as the Seminary’s 2011–12 Frederick Neumann Lecture and as part of the Seminary’s 2011–12 Bicentennial Celebration.

Inquiring into Empire: Princeton Seminary’s Society of Inquiry on Missions, the British Empire, and the Opium Trade, Ca. 1830‐1850

AbstractPrinceton Seminary was intimately involved in the North American foreign missions movement in the nineteenth century. One remarkable dimension of this involvement came through the student-led Society of Inquiry on Missions, which sought to gather information about the global state of the Christian mission enterprise. This paper examines the Society’s correspondence with Protestant missionaries in China regarding their attitudes to the British Empire in the years 1830‐1850. It argues that the theological notion of providence informed Princetonians’ perceptions of the world, which consequently dissociated the Christian missionary task with any particular nation or empire. An examination of the Society of Inquiry’s correspondence during the mid-nineteenth century reveals much about Protestant missionaries and their interactions with the opium trade and the results of the First Opium War (1839‐1842). Princetonians’ responses to the opium trade and the First Opium War led ultimately to a significant critique of western commercial influence in East Asia. In conclusion, this paper questions the extent to which commerce, empire, and Christian missions were inherently associated in nineteenth century American Protestant missionary activity.

Is Situationism All Bad News?

Situationist experiments such as the Milgram experiment and the Princeton Seminary experiment have prompted philosophers to warn us against succumbing to fear of embarrassment and sliding down slippery slopes. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that situationism is all bad news for moral agents. Fear of embarrassment can often motivate right actions, and slippery slopes can slide us away from wrongdoing. The reason that philosophers have seen situationism as bringing all bad news is that they have focused on the very demanding moral goals of virtuous and autonomous action, while ignoring important moral goals that are less demanding. Fear of embarrassment does undermine virtuous and autonomous action, but that very same fear can help us to act resolutely and rightly, and allows us to manipulate would-be wrongdoers into doing the right thing. This is good news.

Reflections: Doing American History in a World of Subcultures

ReflectionsDoing American History in a World of Subcultures George Marsden (bio) Like most historians I took up the subject in part because I was simply fascinated by the past; but in settling on history as my vocation, more important was that I had a lot of questions about why my worlds were shaped the way they were. I grew up in a Pennsylvania town in a spacious family house that went back five generations and bore the marks of faded Victorian respectability. The town itself had several subcultures, two of which I knew well: that of the modest refinement of small-town elites like my maternal grandmother, with whom my family lived; and the small town/rural working-class culture of most of my friends. In addition, in the 1940s and 1950s, another ubiquitous sort of culture came in on the airwaves from Hollywood and New York, representing far more cosmopolitan outlooks that also influenced everyone. In our town, Ozzie and Harriet seemed like sophisticates, and the juxtaposition of these several subcultures could be fascinating. For instance, even if it was not quite the Northern counterpart to Yoknapatawpha County, the town had a sense of the past; and the Civil War was a vivid, if indirect, memory. To stretch the point only slightly, when my grandmother was watching our new TV, it was a bit like Mary Chestnut meets "The Honeymooners." Intriguing as were these cultural contrasts, the motive that became a passion to study American history was my desire to understand two other subcultures in which I found myself deeply immersed by my later teens: that of my religious heritage and that of mainstream academia. Each of these was intellectually formidable and was attractive to me personally. I grew up in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, in which my father was a pastor and then an executive. The OPC prided itself on preserving intact the Calvinism of the Old School Presbyterian and Old Princeton Seminary tradition. Orthodox Presbyterians were now cultural outsiders, including in my hometown. Yet they also had a mainstream educational heritage that had something to do with my father's decision that I should attend Haverford College. Haverford had been shaped by broad Quaker principles of a Philadelphia elite and in the 1950s was an impressively humane center for mainstream liberal learning. At Haverford my Biblicist and strictly Presbyterian religious outlook seemed as quaintly out of [End Page 303] date as did the "thee" and "thou" spoken by an ancient Quaker gentleman who still resided on campus. I loved the humane learning and I loved my religious heritage. My historical question was: how did it happen that in the world in which I found myself, the Old School Presbyterian outlook, which only generations earlier had been at least eminently respectable, had come to look so hopelessly out of date? In trying to answer such questions I came to be particularly intrigued with the cultural factors that help shape the way people come to their various beliefs and practices. How do fundamental beliefs, assumptions, moral values, codes of practice and the like get passed from one generation to the next and what forces shape the changes in what gets passed on? Especially fascinating to me have been questions regarding American pluralism in this regard. How do American subcommunities, particularly religiously based subcommunities, relate to the larger common culture? How do they pass on from generation to generation the assumptions, beliefs, values and the like that are peculiar to their own heritage at the same time that they are constantly being shaped by and are responding to more common cultural outlooks and to the forces that shape those outlooks? This was still the early 1960s and supposed to be the era of "consensus history," but my peculiar religious heritage made me question claims that the culture ought to be moving toward a consensus. In addition to stellar graduate training in American Studies at Yale (my teachers included Sydney Ahlstrom, Edmund S. Morgan, David Potter, John Blum, C. Vann Woodward, and R. W. B. Lewis), I studied at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, which helped me in formulating a distinct theoretical basis for my approach. Theologically and in its...