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Right Reason & The Princeton Mind
The Moral Context

by Paul K. Helseth

© 1999 The Presbyterian Historical Society

This article was published in the The Journal of Presbyterian History 77, 1 (Spring 1999): 13-28), and is not in the public domain. Use of this article was given by permission of the author. Dr. Helseth recieved his PhD from Marquette University.

Princeton Seminary was founded in 1812 in order to defend biblical Christianity against the perceived crisis of "modern infidelity."1 Its founders took their stand between the extremes of deism on the one hand and "mysticism" (or "enthusiasm") on the other, and resolved "to fit clergymen to meet the cultural crisis, to roll back what they perceived as tides of irreligion sweeping the country, and to provide a learned defense of Christianity generally and the Bible specifically."2 Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries theologians from Princeton Seminary proved to be the most articulate defenders of Reformed orthodoxy in America. Their apologetical efforts have come under intense critical scrutiny, however, because critics allege that these efforts were based upon an accommodation of theology to the "orthodox rationalism" that engulfed the churches and seminaries of antebellum America. The Princeton theologians were not immune, these critics insist, to the philosophical developments of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, their preoccupation with "science," "facts," and the primacy of the intellect in faith is incontrovertible proof that they heartily endorsed the accommodation of theology to these developments. Critics conclude, therefore, that the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary were not the champions of Reformed orthodoxy that they claimed to be. They were, rather, the purveyors of a theology that was bastardized by an "alien philosophy."3

What, then, are we to make of this conclusion? Were the Princeton theologians in fact "nineteenth-century positivists who did not reject theology"?4 Did they accommodate their theology, in other words, to philosophical assumptions that are diametrically opposed to those of the Reformed tradition? Most interpreters look at the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton as evidence that such a conclusion is justified. Old Princeton's preoccupation with "science," "facts," and the primacy of the intellect in faith is incompatible with the assumptions of the Reformed tradition, they reason, for such emphases manifest a profound indifference to the subjective and experiential components of religious epistemology. But can this line of argumentation stand the test of critical scrutiny? Is Old Princeton's "intellectualism," in other words, in fact evidence that the Princeton theologians were covert if not overt rationalists?5

This essay is motivated by the conviction that such a conclusion cannot be sustained simply because it misses the moral rather than the rational nature of the Princetonians' thought. When Old Princeton's "intellectualism" is interpreted within a context which affirms that the soul is a single unit that acts in all of its functions - its thinking, its feeling, and its willing - as a single substance, it becomes clear that the Princeton theologians were not cold, calculating rationalists whose confidence in the mind led them to ignore the import of the subjective and the centrality of experience in religious epistemology. They were, rather, Reformed scholars who consistently acknowledged that subjective and experiential concerns are of critical importance in any consideration of religious epistemology. Indeed, they recognized that the operation of the intellect involves the "whole soul" - mind, will and emotions - rather than the rational faculty alone, and as a consequence they insisted that the ability to reason "rightly" - i.e., the ability to see revealed truth for what it objectively is, namely glorious - presupposes the regenerating activity of the Holy Spirit on the "whole soul" of a moral agent.6

How, then, are we to approach the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton? Whereas the consensus of critical opinion would have us believe that the Princeton theologians were less than thoroughly Reformed because they bent their theology into conciliation with the most troubling components of orthodox rationalism - namely Scottish Common Sense Realism and Baconian inductivism - it is the contention of this essay that the Princetonians in fact were thoroughly Reformed because they stood in the epistemological mainstream of the Reformed camp. That this is the case will be clear after a brief examination of the place of Christian experience in the epistemologies of Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge, the foremost expositors of the Princeton Theology throughout most of the nineteenth century. After a brief examination of the primary components of orthodox rationalism, and following a cursory analysis of the problems posed by orthodox rationalism for all who wish to remain faithful to the assumptions of the Reformed tradition, we establish the legitimacy of this claim by shifting the focus of interpretation for Old Princeton's "intellectualism" from a perspective that locates it within the context of Scottish Common Sense Realism to a perspective that is compatible with the Reformed tradition. What we discover, in short, is that Old Princeton's "intellectualism" was compatible with the assumptions of the Reformed tradition because it sprang not from an accommodation of theology to the rationalistic assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy, but rather from an endorsement of the classical Reformed distinction between a merely speculative and a spiritual understanding of the gospel, i.e., from a context that is moral rather than merely rational.

I. Orthodox Rationalism: Epistemological Components and Theological Implications
E. Brooks Holifield has argued that "The most notable feature of American religious thought in the early nineteenth century was its rationality."7 Theologians of differing denominational stripes were all trying to demonstrate that rationality supported orthodoxy, he suggests, because they were convinced "that revealed theology . . . had the sanction of the 'understanding.'"8 But where did this conviction come from? The notion that rationality supported orthodoxy was not based upon a conception of singular origin, but rather upon a complex epistemological foundation that was comprised of two primary components. The first component, with historical roots in the writings of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosophers such as John Locke and Joseph Butler, is that which the Presbyterian historian A. C. McGiffert once referred to as "supernatural rationalism."9 "Like contemporary deists, supernatural rationalists were confident that careful observation of history and nature can lead to reliable knowledge of God's existence and attributes. Like pietists (and unlike deists), however, supernatural rationalists also believed that this natural knowledge of God is inadequate."10 They believed, in other words, that natural theology is insufficient for salvation, and that only the revelation given in Scripture, which "is above or beyond reason's ordinary range of discernment,"11 can meet the supernatural need of the sinful soul. While supernatural rationalists were more or less confident in human rational capacities, and thus more or less convinced of the extent to which special revelation is needed, they all shared the same governing assumption. They believed that Christian truth can be established with absolute certainty because the human mind is able to perceive revealed truth whether it is disclosed in history, nature, or Scripture.

The second component of orthodox rationalism is that component which came to be "the lingua franca of philosophical discourse of early nineteenth-century Protestant America,"12 namely the Scottish Common Sense Realism of Thomas Reid. Scottish Common Sense Realism served as the primary vehicle for the outworking of what Henry May refers to as the Didactic Enlightenment in America. According to May the Didactic Enlightenment was in part a counter-Enlightenment because it espoused "a variety of thought which was opposed both to skepticism and revolution, but tried to save from what it saw as the debacle of the Enlightenment the intelligible universe, clear and certain moral judgments, and progress."13 What, though, did the Didactic Enlightenment in general and Scottish Common Sense Realism in particular have to offer to Americans who were uncomfortable with some of the intellectual trajectories of the Age of Enlightenment? George Marsden suggests that Scottish Common Sense Realism was assimilated by many within the religious communities of antebellum America because it affirmed the existence "of both reality and morality," and thus supplied the philosophical justification for "both a popular intellectual defense of the faith and a clear rationale for moral reform."14 These affirmations were based upon the endorsement of three foundational convictions. The first pertained to a perceived defect in Locke's concept of "idea." Whereas Locke and his heirs insisted that the immediate object of every movement of the mind is an idea, the Common Sense philosophers maintained that perception is a dynamic activity in which the mind establishes contact with "the real empirical lineaments of the thing itself."15 The Scottish philosophers looked with scorn upon Locke's "theory of ideas," therefore, because they were convinced that it left the mind without access to objective reality and thus precluded the possibility of objective knowledge. "If the only possible objects of thought are possible objects of sense or introspective experience," the Scottish philosophers reasoned, "and if the objects of sense experience are ideas (counting 'impressions' as 'ideas'), then the world becomes at once exclusively my world, its history part of my biography, and I become what is introspectively discoverable in me."16

If the Scottish philosophers were convinced on the one hand that the empiricism of Locke must be rejected because it imprisons the mind "within its own sensations," they insisted on the other that objective reality is the immediate object of perception because the mind contains innate constitutive principles that make the perception of reality and morality a real possibility.17 Herein lies the second foundational conviction of Scottish Common Sense Realism. The Common Sense philosophers were convinced that the "organic complex" of perception is trustworthy because "direct intuitions," or, "first principles," are prior to and indeed are the regulators of all moral and cognitive experience. Since these intuitions are "prerational" and act as "the forms that organize thought and make experience meaningful,"18 the Common Sense philosophers insisted that the denial of these intuitions as well as of the self-evident truths manifest by them is "absurd."19 It is nonsensical, in other words, to deny the self-evident truths manifest by "the common sense of mankind," for whether the truths disclosed are moral or whether they relate to the perception of the external order, their truth is simply "forced upon us by 'the constitution of our nature.'"20 Indeed, the beliefs of common sense are not held on the basis of reasoning. "Rather, they are basic beliefs, beliefs not established by arguments, but caused immediately by 'common sense,' or the belief-producing faculties that underlie all reasoning."21

But if the Common Sense philosophers were convinced that objective reality can be known because objective reality is the immediate object of perception, and if they maintained that objective reality is the immediate object of perception because "direct intuitions" make such perception possible, then how did they arrive at what they considered to be a certain knowledge of objective truth? The answer to this question reveals the third foundational conviction of Scottish Common Sense Realism. The Common Sense philosophers insisted that errors of sense and reason could be avoided and certain knowledge of the truth attained only by "compelling the mind from [idealistic] conjecture to [objective] fact."22 How, then, did they compel the mind from idealistic conjecture to objective fact? Simply through the employment of the "Baconian Philosophy."23 The Common Sense philosophers were convinced that certain knowledge of the truth would be attained only when scientific investigation excluded the analysis of mere speculative hypotheses and focused instead upon the classification and analysis of the facts received by our senses. It is in this fashion, then, i.e., through the inductive analysis of objective data, that errors of sense and reason are avoided, knowledge of the truth is attained, and certainty is realized.

As E. Brooks Holifield and Theodore Dwight Bozeman have appropriately noted, the theological implications of orthodox rationalism were clear. In certifying the reality of objective truth and the reliability of knowledge, orthodox rationalism not only "supported a natural theology in which scientific investigation of the created order disclosed the existence and nature of the Creator,"24 but it also caused scientific investigation to be regarded as a "doxological" enterprise that "dealt in the hard currency of substantial, reliable, verifiable fact."25 Orthodox rationalism therefore offered a solution to the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture that allowed religious conservatives to stand in the intellectual current of the day without approving speculative approaches that would undermine their most basic theological commitments. Not only could they embrace orthodox rationalism for their defense of the faith, but they could do so with confidence because it seemed to substantiate everything that they already believed in.

II. The Alleged Problem: Scottish Common Sense Realism and Old Princeton's "Pelagian Confidence" in the Mind
Recent historiography suggests that the accommodation of orthodox rationalism in general and Scottish Common Sense Realism in particular is perhaps nowhere more clearly manifest than in the "evidentialist" or "intellectualistic" approach to apologetics employed by the Protestant apologists of the early nineteenth century.26 Not only did these apologists adapt Baconian inductivism "directly to the uses of biblical exegesis,"27 but they also insisted that "intuition or common sense provided certain unquestionable starting points from which good arguments could rise to rebut skepticism, defend the existence of God, and support the truthfulness of Scripture."28 Whereas the widespread endorsement of this approach is considered to be incontrovertible proof of how sweeping Scottish Common Sense Realism's conquest of antebellum America was, historians have long suspected that this conquest was perhaps nowhere as profound as it was among the Reformed scholars at Princeton Theological Seminary. Indeed, ever since Sydney Ahlstrom's seminal analysis of the relationship between "the Scottish Philosophy" and American theology was published in 1955, "it has become a commonplace to hold," as Mark Noll has appropriately noted, "that Old Princeton was heavily, even uniquely, indebted to this philosophy."29

But is there not "something ironic," critics ask, "about the fact that among the Americans to wed themselves most permanently to Common Sense were the staunch defenders of confessional Calvinism at Princeton Theological Seminary"?30 Interpreters who endorse Ahlstrom's analysis generally conclude that there is simply because they suppose that the anthropological and epistemological assumptions of Scottish Common Sense Realism are diametrically opposed to those of the Reformed tradition.31 Whereas scholars in the Reformed tradition typically insist that the human intellect has been hopelessly blinded by the Fall and that a saving apprehension of revealed truth thus necessitates that the eyes of the mind be opened by the regenerating activity of the Spirit of God, apologists influenced by "the optimism of the Scottish Renaissance" were allegedly convinced that the mind was essentially undisturbed by sin's influence, and that saving faith could be practically induced through the clear presentation and analysis of objective evidence.32

Because critics rightly reject such thinking, they insist that an evidentialist apologetic in general and the Princeton apologetic in particular must be condemned on two scores, both of which are related to what is perceived to be an almost "Pelagian confidence"33 in the mental competence of even the unregenerate mind. It must be condemned, they argue, not only because it presumes that there is no difference intellectually between the believer and the non-believer, but more importantly because this presumption is based upon a rationalistic indifference to the subjective and experiential components of religious epistemology. Critics like George Marsden suggest that the fundamental deficiency of the Princeton apologetic is to be found in its failure to acknowledge how much "basic first beliefs and commitments can pervade the rest of one's intellectual activity," thus precluding the "possibilities for objectivity."34 It is simply not true, Marsden maintains, that "By clearly definable scientific, rational, and objective procedures, one can simply eliminate subjective or culturally conditioned aspects of knowing,"35 for the "first principles" that regulate intellectual activity are themselves conditioned by the spiritual disposition of the mind. Interpreters who draw distinct lines of demarcation between the regenerate and the unregenerate hence insist that a valid approach to apologetics must take into account not only the objective components of religious faith, but the subjective and "superrational" components as well. Many thus advocate a presuppositional approach to apologetics, for such an approach is allegedly more compatible with the assumptions of the Reformed tradition than is an evidentialist apologetic.36

III. The "Intellectualism" of Old Princeton: The Epistemological Context
In spite of the fact that the Princeton theologians have come under heavy criticism from some quarters for their assimilation of the Scottish philosophy, it is altogether clear, as Terry Chrisope has incisively argued, that "they never became [the] mere tools of this philosophy."37 That Scottish Common Sense Realism had a marked impact upon the theological method of the Princeton theologians is unquestioned, even by their most uncompromising defenders.38 That acknowledged fact, however, cannot justify the misrepresentations of their views that have been proffered by a host of modern interpreters. This is the contention of Andrew Hoffecker in his groundbreaking study on the role of piety in the Princeton Theology. In response to interpreters who insist that subjective and experiential concerns played a relatively minor role in Old Princeton's otherwise intellectualistic treatment of the faith, Hoffecker demonstrates that not only did these concerns have an impact upon their thought, but more importantly he establishes that their thought will never be understood correctly if these concerns are ignored.39 In light of the seminal significance of Hoffecker's scholarship, the question that cries out for consideration has to do with the role of subjective and experiential concerns in Old Princeton's religious epistemology. Are these concerns related to Old Princeton's religious epistemology and if so, then how? Beginning with a brief examination of the classical Reformed distinction between a merely speculative and a spiritual understanding of the gospel and concluding with a cursory analysis of the place of Christian experience in the epistemologies of Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge, the remainder of this essay points to the context within which the answer to this question is found. It suggests, in short, that subjective and experiential concerns were of critical importance in Old Princeton's religious epistemology simply because Old Princeton's "intellectualism" was moral rather than merely rational. It involved, in other words, the "whole soul" - mind, will and emotions - rather than the rational faculty alone, and as a consequence it had little if anything to do with the ceding of ground to the forbidden fruits of Enlightenment thought.

Whereas historians like Ernest Sandeen virtually dismiss Old Princeton on the basis of the presumption that subjective and experiential concerns were of little or no consequence in Old Princeton's religious epistemology, a significant contingent of scholars insist that these concerns were of critical and indeed pivotal significance to Princeton's entire theological program despite its apparently rationalistic rigor.40 Those who support such a position do so because they recognize that the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton must be interpreted in the same manner as is the "intellectualism" of Calvin. According to Edward Dowey, there is in Calvin's thought an emphasis upon the primacy of the intellect in faith simply because Calvin realized that there can be no faith, and therefore no salvation, "without knowledge."41 But did Calvin believe that all rational agents have the ability to come to a saving knowledge of revealed truth? Did Calvin believe, in other words, that there is no more to a saving apprehension of the gospel than "a simple, natural perception of what God sets clearly before the mind of man"?42 While a comprehensive discussion of Calvin's doctrine of the knowledge of God is beyond the scope of this essay, we can safely assert that he did not simply because he recognized that knowledge is a function of the "whole soul" rather than of the rational faculty alone.43 Calvin insisted, in short, that without the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti the unregenerate are blind to the spiritual significance of what they can rationally perceive not because of "an intrinsic obscurity of revelation," but rather because the "subjective imperfection" of the sinful soul leaves the moral agent without the moral ability to discern the things of God.44 Heinrich Heppe concisely summarizes the nature of the case in the following statement. "The unconverted can at best appropriate only a theoretical and pure external knowledge of truths of faith. As an animal can quite see the body of a man but not his spirit because it has not one itself, even the unspiritual man may see and understand the letter but not the Spirit of the Scripture."45

What, then, does the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti entail, and how does it foster the capacity for discerning the spiritual or saving significance of what the unregenerate can only rationally perceive? The regenerating work of the Spirit - i.e., Christian experience, properly understood - accomplishes this end not by limiting the gift of grace to the bare bestowal of an understanding of God's truth, but rather by altering the moral disposition of the sinful heart and thereby enabling the regenerated sinner to see what the unregenerate cannot see, namely "the beauty and 'sweetness' of revealed truth."46 Just as "classic Reformed orthodoxy saw the noetic influence of sin not as direct through a totally depraved mind, but as indirect through the totally depraved heart,"47 so too the noetic work of the Spirit involves not a direct work on the rational faculty of a fallen agent, but rather an indirect work through the impartation of a new heart, or, "principle of nature."48 It is the new heart, Reformed scholars insist, that enables the elect to see revealed truth for what it objectively is, for it is the new heart that illumines the mind to the spiritual beauty and "sweetness" of the truth that comes to it "through the door of the understanding."49

Given the critical import of the Spirit's noetic activity, it follows that a spiritual or saving knowledge of the truth - i.e., the ability to see revealed truth for what it objectively is, namely glorious - is in classical Reformed thought neither the result of a merely academic analysis of objective evidence, nor the consequence of "a hasty, ill-considered capitulation of the mind or abandonment of reason."50 It is the result, rather, of the mind being enabled to reason "rightly" through the regenerating activity of the Spirit of God. Through the regenerating activity of the Holy Spirit the mind, which without the Spirit is enslaved to the blinding disposition of a sinful heart, "receives new keenness and a new taste for things it formerly did not relish."51 It is this taste for the divine, then, that compels the enlightened mind to acquiesce to the true significance of that which was previously only rationally perceived, for that which was previously only rationally perceived is now perceived in its true light, or as that which will meet the deepest needs and satisfy the deepest longings of the renewed soul. In light of the fact that the testimony of the Spirit moves beyond though not against reason to what Jonathan Edwards calls the "sense of the heart,"52 we must conclude that the knowledge of God that is communicated to the regenerated soul via the conjoint divine action of Word and Spirit is in classical Reformed thought "not something purely theoretical, but a practical experience, engaging the whole human personality, soliciting all the energies of the conscience and heart, putting in motion all the spiritual faculties."53 As such, neither speculative knowledge nor spiritual knowledge is intended in the doctrine [of Christian knowledge] exclusively of the other: but it is intended that we should seek the former in order to the latter. The latter, or the spiritual and practical, is of the greatest importance; for a speculative without a spiritual knowledge, is to no purpose, but to make our condemnation the greater. Yet a speculative knowledge is also of infinite importance in this respect, that without it we can have no spiritual or practical knowledge.54

IV. Princeton Theological Seminary and Old School Calvinism
It is the contention of this essay that the Princeton Theology in general and the Princeton apologetic in particular must be interpreted within the epistemological context articulated in the foregoing discussion. That this is the likely context within which Old Princeton's preoccupation with "science," "facts," and the primacy of the intellect in faith must be interpreted will be clear after a brief examination of the place of Christian experience in the epistemologies of Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge. Before moving on to this consideration, however, we must emphasize that shifting the focus of interpretation for Old Princeton's "intellectualism" from a perspective that locates it within the context of Scottish Common Sense Realism to a perspective that is moral rather than merely rational is warranted because the Princetonians stood squarely in the tradition of Old School Calvinism, particularly in matters having to do with Christian anthropology. That this is the case is clearly revealed in their repudiation of the sustained attempt to free evangelistic outreach from the strictures of the doctrine of "inability" throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century.55 Whereas New England theologians like Nathaniel W. Taylor fell prey to the Enlightenment humanism practically manifest in the rising tide of Evangelical revivalism because they severed the connection between moral character and moral activity and thereby eradicated the distinction between moral and natural ability,56 the Princetonians were essentially unscathed by this assault because they recognized that the soul is a single unit that acts in all of its functions as a single substance. Indeed, they recognized that "what we call the will is just the whole man willing, as what we call the intellect is the whole man thinking, and what we call the feelings is the whole man feeling," and like Jonathan Edwards before them they insisted that the activity of the soul is certainly determined by the character of the acting agent.57

This is historically significant for two reasons. To begin with, it is significant because it suggests that Old Princeton's employment of Scottish Common Sense Realism was qualified and conditioned by their Reformed commitments. We have already established that defenders of Old Princeton must concede that Scottish Common Sense Realism had a marked impact upon the theological method of the Princeton theologians. Defenders of Old Princeton need not concede, however, that this impact was so profound that it altered anything more than the "framework" of the Princetonians' theology.58 Indeed, as scholars like Mark Noll and David Wells have carefully argued, the Scottish Philosophy moved New England theologians like Nathaniel W. Taylor much further from Reformed orthodoxy than it did Old Princeton simply because Taylor and his associates endorsed "the estimate made of human nature by Scottish Common Sense Realism."59 They endorsed, in other words, the latent humanism of the Common Sense tradition, and as a consequence they passed on to their descendents a bastardized version of Calvinism that was, as Joseph Haroutunian has incisively noted, "not Calvinism. It was the faith of the fathers ruined by their children."60 To seriously suggest that the Princeton theologians were guilty of the same anthropological indiscretions as were their New England brethren is to do a terrible disservice to the Princeton Theology. It is to ignore, moreover, the historiographical key to understanding the tensions between Princeton and New England throughout most of the nineteenth century. Whereas Princeton was theocentric in that it had for its object "the vindication of the Divine supremacy and sovereignty in the salvation of men," New England was increasingly anthropocentric.61 It came to have for its "characteristic aim," in other words, "the assertion of the rights of human nature. It is specially solicitous that nothing should be held to be true, which cannot be philosophically reconciled with the liberty and ability of man."62

Old Princeton's stand within the anthropological tradition of Old School Calvinism is also significant because it neutralizes the assumption that is implicit in commentary that is critical of the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton. Commentary that is critical of the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton - be it the contention that the Princeton theologians had "unbounded confidence" in the mental competence of the rational faculty or the ancillary assertion that the Princetonians were indifferent to the subjective and experiential components of religious epistemology63 - is based upon the unspoken assumption that the theologians at Old Princeton Seminary fell prey to the assumptions of Enlightenment thought simply because they endorsed a faculty psychology.64 The Princeton theologians sacrificed anthropological and epistemological integrity to the assumptions of an essentially humanistic philosophy, it is tacitly assumed, because they failed to recognize that "our intellect, will and emotions are inseparably connected with our whole personality," and as such cannot operate independently one from the other.65 Whereas this assumption and the critiques that spring from it would be valid if the Princeton theologians in fact failed to recognize that the soul is a single unit that acts in all of its functions as a single substance, that it is not is clear not only from their repudiation of the revisionist tendencies of those who were driven by their zeal for revival to embrace what orthodox Calvinists regarded as abuses of revivalism,66 but also from their insistence that the ability to reason "rightly" presupposes the regenerating activity of the Holy Spirit on the "whole soul" of a moral agent. As the remainder of this essay makes clear, Old Princeton's emphasis upon "right reason" is neither the supreme manifestation of a loss of "Reformation bearings,"67 nor evidence of what Lefferts Loetscher referred to as Old Princeton's "startling confidence in the competence of human reasoning powers."68 It is evidence, rather, of Old Princeton's uncompromising attempt to retain a place for both the objective and the subjective components of Christian faith in an increasingly subjectivistic age.

V. Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge: The Moral Nature of "Right Reason"
Having established that shifting the focus of interpretation for Old Princeton's "intellectualism" from a perspective that locates it within the context of Scottish Common Sense Realism to a perspective that is moral rather than merely rational is warranted because the Princetonians stood squarely in the anthropological tradition of Old School Calvinism, we must now demonstrate that Old Princeton's "intellectualism" in fact had its origin in this context. We accomplish this end by turning our attention to the place of Christian experience in the epistemologies of Archibald Alexander, the progenitor of the Princeton Theology, and Charles Hodge, the most articulate defender of the Princeton Theology throughout most of the nineteenth century. When we examine the writings of Archibald Alexander we discover that genuine Christian experience - or that which fosters a spiritual and thus a saving apprehension of revealed truth - has two referents. On the one hand there is the objective basis of the experience that is to be believed in the act of saving faith, and on the other there is the experience itself, or that which makes the spiritual perception of objective truth possible. Genuine Christian experience is for Alexander, therefore, neither a purely cognitive, nor a purely subjective phenomenon. That is to say, it is not something that can be limited either to the exercise of the rational faculty alone, or to the inflammation of natural religious feelings through emotional experience. Genuine Christian experience is, rather, both cognitive and experiential - i.e., it involves both the head and the heart -- for it is "nothing but the impression of divine truth on the mind, by the energy of the Holy Spirit."69

While it is clear that Alexander's combination of head and heart rests upon an endorsement of the primacy of the intellect in faith, it is equally clear that the speculative apprehension that gives rise to the spiritual apprehension is itself based upon that which makes submission to the objective truth of the gospel a necessary or certain phenomenon, namely the subjective work of the Holy Spirit on the "whole soul" of a moral agent. Because he took the noetic effects of sin seriously, Alexander insisted that a spiritual and thus a saving apprehension of revealed truth cannot be attained by the unregenerate not because revealed truth lacks objective sufficiency, but rather because the depraved mind is "entirely destitute of any spark of true holiness," and as such is no more capable "of spiritual perception than a blind man is of a perception of colors."70 Whereas Alexander acknowledged that the unregenerate are able to understand and appropriate the "external evidence" for the truth of Christianity and as such are capable of exercising "a historical or merely speculative faith," he maintained that "a saving faith" is beyond their grasp simply because their minds are clouded by sin and thus unable to "know [the truth] aright."71 They are "unaffected with the truth known," in other words, because they are blind to the true significance of what they can rationally perceive, namely the "beauty, and glory, and sweetness . . . of divine things."72
How, then, do the unregenerate acquire the ability to "know [the truth] aright"? How are their minds "rendered susceptible," in other words, "of impression from divine truth"?73 Whereas interpreters like Lefferts Loetscher would have us believe that Alexander encountered difficulties at this point because his anthropology was corrupted by "a dualism of mind and heart," Alexander's unambiguous rejection of the faculty psychology and his clear endorsement of an Edwardsean epistemology drive us to a different conclusion.74 Alexander - fully cognizant of the fact that the operation of the intellect involves the "whole soul" rather than the rational faculty alone - insisted that the blindness of the mind can be removed "only . . . by an influence on the soul itself; that is, by the power of God creating 'a new heart,' to use the language of Scripture."75 It is the regenerating activity of the Holy Spirit that enables fallen sinners to see revealed truth for what it objectively is, Alexander argued, for it is the moral change wrought in the soul by the immediate activity of the Holy Spirit that brings the mind into a state in which it can perceive in the Word of God "that which it never saw before," namely "a beauty and excellence, of which it had no conception until now."76 Since he recognized that "The internal affections or desires are properly the springs of our action, and our wills are the executive power by which they are carried into effect,"77 it follows that it is this perception of the truth "in its true nature"78 that is at the basis of Alexander's understanding of saving faith, for it is this perception of the "internal evidence" - i.e., of the "moral fitness and beauty" of the truth79 - that "excites holy affections, which prompt [the soul] to good purposes," including the "good purpose" of faith.80 Like Jonathan Edwards before him, Alexander therefore concluded that this spiritual knowledge granted to the regenerated soul is nothing else but saving faith . . . for the faith of which I have spoken, at the same time contemplates the truth, and the beauty, excellency, and goodness of the object, and also its adaptedness to our necessities: all these things are comprehended in the views which the Holy Spirit gives to the mind. Therefore, though faith be a simple uncompounded act, a firm belief or persuasion, it comprehends the objects ascribed both to the understanding and the will.81

When we turn our attention to Charles Hodge we discover that subjective and experiential concerns play just as significant a role in his religious epistemology as they do in the epistemology of Archibald Alexander simply because Hodge was convinced that the soul is a single "unit" that acts in all of its functions - including cognition - as a single substance.82 Like Alexander and Edwards before him, Hodge maintained that a mind that is depraved by sin is incapable of moving the soul to embrace God precisely because a mind that is destitute of holiness cannot see and feel "aright" in relation to spiritual objects.83 It cannot yield a true and compelling perception of the things of God, in other words, because it can neither discern the beauty nor taste the sweetness of the truth that it can rationally perceive.84 But how can this be? Why, in other words, would an otherwise rational moral agent remain indifferent to the force of the truth that is presented to his/her understanding if the truth that is presented is objectively compelling? The answer to this question is to be found in Hodge's insistence that "No truth can be properly apprehended unless there is a harmony between it and the mind to which it is presented."85 While Hodge recognized that the unregenerate are able to perceive the "external evidence" for the integrity of the gospel and thus are capable of exercising speculative or historical faith, he nonetheless insisted that saving faith is beyond their grasp not because there is a physical defect in the constitution of their being, but rather because the depraved mind does not have the moral ability to present the truth "in its true colors" to the will.86 The last judgment of the depraved mind is incapable of determining the will to make the beauty of God's glory the focus of the affections, in other words, because a moral defect "in the organ of vision"87 prevents a "true" or "right" apprehension of the truth that is rationally perceived.88

If, then, the ultimate cause of unbelief is to be found in "the want of power rightly to discern spiritual things, and the consequent want of all right affections toward them,"89 how is a mind that is capable of discerning spiritual truth acquired? How can the ability to "discern" and "taste" spiritual truth be attained, in other words, when the mind of the fallen sinner is by nature spiritually dead and blind to the true significance of what it can rationally perceive?90 While Hodge acknowledged that the ability to see revealed truth for what it objectively is cannot be attained "unless the heart be right in the sight of God,"91 he nonetheless insisted that this "rightness" of heart is the necessary consequence of the immediate activity of the Holy Spirit in regeneration. In regeneration the Spirit changes "that inward immanent disposition or spiritual state which is back of all voluntary or conscious activity, and which, in the things of God, determines that activity."92 It is this "infusion of a new spiritual principle,"93 then, that enables the regenerate to see revealed truth for what it objectively is, for it is this "renovat[ion] of the corrupted nature of man"94 that manifests itself in the spiritual life of the moral agent, and thereby in the ability to "see and love the beauty of holiness."95 "Regeneration secures right knowledge as well as right feeling," Hodge argued, "and right feeling is not the effect of right knowledge, nor is right knowledge the effect of right feeling. The two are inseparable effects of a work which affects the whole soul."96

Having established that subjective and experiential concerns are of critical importance in Hodge's religious epistemology, we must conclude our analysis of Hodge by considering how the unitary operation of the soul is related to the saving faith of the regenerated agent. If it is indeed true that subjective and experiential concerns are of critical importance in Hodge's religious epistemology because he recognized that the soul is a single "unit" that acts in all of its functions as a single substance, then might we not legitimately expect that the inclinations that inform the perception of the mind will also "fit and dispose" the moral agent to "holy acts"?97 Might we not expect, in other words, that a "right" apprehension of revealed truth will certainly manifest itself in "holy acts," including the "holy act" of faith? Hodge was convinced that the foundation of saving faith is to be found in the new birth simply because it is the new birth that imparts not only spiritual light, but also a "new sense," a "taste," a "relish," and an "affection" for the moral beauty of revealed truth.98 It is this infused principle of spiritual life, then, that not only enables the regenerated agent to see revealed truth for what it objectively is - namely glorious - but it is also that which "leads the soul to embrace [revealed truth] with assurance and delight."99 It follows, therefore, that for Hodge the act of saving faith is both a human and a divine work without being a contemporary manifestation of semi-Pelagian synergism, for the "delight" that determines the will to act is itself "the necessary consequence of spiritual illumination; and with delight come satisfaction and peace, elevation above the world, or spiritual mindedness, and such a sense of the importance of the things not seen and eternal, that all the energies of the renewed soul are . . . devoted to securing them for ourselves and others."100

VI. Conclusion
If the foregoing analysis of the relationship between the objective and the subjective in the epistemologies of Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge articulates the epistemological context within which the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton must be interpreted, then two conclusions - both of which call for a reassessment of the consensus of critical opinion - are in order regarding how we should approach Old Princeton's emphasis upon "science," "facts," and the primacy of the intellect in faith. First, if it is indeed true that subjective and experiential concerns play a critical role in Old Princeton's religious epistemology simply because the soul is a single unit that acts in all of its functions as a single substance, then it would be a serious mistake to conclude that the Princeton Theology in general and the Princeton apologetic in particular are simply manifestations of a "rather bald rationalism."101 Indeed, if the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton has more to do with the unitary operation of the soul than with an accommodation of theology to the anthropological and epistemological assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy, then a reconsideration of Old Princeton's orthodox bearings is in order simply because its emphasis upon the objective rather than the subjective nature of religious truth is not "ipso facto evidence of an intellectualized faith."102

Second, given the plausibility of the claim that the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton was moral rather than merely rational, there is warrant for concluding that we have arrived at an answer to one of the most vexing questions in the historiography of the Princeton Theology. The primary question that confronts modern interpreters of the Princeton Theology is that which has to do with the role of the subjective in that theology. "The real question regarding the Princetonians," historian Terry Chrisope writes, "is not whether this element was present in their thought, but how it fit in with their other philosophical commitments."103 Shifting the focus of interpretation for Old Princeton's "intellectualism" from a perspective that locates it within the context of Scottish Common Sense Realism to a perspective that is moral rather than merely rational suggests, in short, that the Princeton Theology was driven by subjective rather than objective, theological rather than philosophical concerns. It suggests, in other words, that the Princeton theologians were neither indifferent to the subjective and experiential components of religious epistemology, nor overly sanguine about the cognitive powers of the fallen mind, but rather acutely aware of the fact that the unitary operation of the soul is determined by the character of the acting agent. The Princeton theologians ought not to be regarded, therefore, as theological hacks who passed on to their descendants a bastardized version of Calvinism. They ought to be regarded, rather, as consistently Reformed scholars who responded to the modern era's relocation of the divine-human nexus not only by insisting that the Christian religion is based upon the rational appropriation of objective truth, but also by reminding the Christian community that the ability to see this truth for what it objectively is presupposes the regenerating activity of the Holy Spirit on the "whole soul" of a moral agent.104

Notes
1 Mark Noll, "The Founding of Princeton Seminary," Westminster Theological Journal 42 (Fall 1979): 85.
2 Mark Noll, "The Princeton Theology," in The Princeton Theology, Reformed Theology in America, no. 1, ed. David Wells (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 24.
3 This is the general theme of John Vander Stelt's Philosophy and Scripture: A Study of Old Princeton and Westminster Theology (Marlton, NJ: Mack Publishing Co., 1978). The Dutch and Neo-Orthodox branches of the Reformed camp generally agree with this critique of Old Princeton. Contemporary interpreters who endorse this critique are indebted in one way or another to Sydney Ahlstrom, "The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology," Church History 24 (1955): 257-72. See, for example, Ernest Sandeen, "The Princeton Theology: One Source of Biblical Literalism in American Protestantism," Church History 31 (1962): 307-21; Samuel Pearson, "Enlightenment Influence on Protestant Thought in Early National America," Encounter 38 (Summer 1977): 193-212; and George Marsden, "The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia," in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: Notre Dame, 1983), 219-64. Older studies that are critical of the "intellectualism" of Old Princeton include Ralph Danhof, Charles Hodge as Dogmatician (Goes, The Netherlands: Oosterbaan and le Cointre, 1929); John O. Nelson, "The Rise of the Princeton Theology: A Generic History of American Presbyterianism Until 1850" (Ph.D. Yale University, 1935); William Livingstone, "The Princeton Apologetic as Exemplified by the Work of Benjamin B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen: A Study of American Theology, 1880-1930" (Ph.D. Yale University, 1948).
4 George Marsden, "Scotland and Philadelphia: Common Sense Philosophy from Jefferson to Westminster," Reformed Theological Journal 29 (1979): 11.
5 The word "rationalism" and its cognates are used in this essay to refer to a confidence in the mind that springs from indifference to the noetic effects of sin. This indifference, moreover, is supposed to have its origin in an accommodation of theology to the assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy.
6 What I am saying in this essay about "right reason" is similar to what Robert Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 64, 72, 111, says about reason in Augustine's thought. Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 202, summarize Hoopes' discussion of Augustine as follows: "For Augustine, only the righteous could rise to an understanding of truth. Right reason was reason that acknowledged the authority of God and which functioned for moral, not speculative ends." The Princetonians would endorse this sentence without reservation, I think, if the word "understanding" were qualified with the word "spiritual." On Hoopes' treatment of right reason, cf. Jack Rogers, Scripture in the Westminster Confession (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 82-5. Ironically, it is Old Princeton's imagined departure from Augustine's understanding of "right reason" that gets them into trouble with the likes of Rogers and McKim.
7 E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in the Southern Culture, 1795-1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978), 3.
8 Ibid., 71.
9 A. C. McGiffert, Protestant Thought before Kant (New York, 1912), 189, quoted in Conrad Wright, The Liberal Christians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 5.
10 Grant Wacker, Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 24-5.
11 Ibid., 25.
12 John Stewart, "The Tethered Theology: Biblical Criticism, Common Sense Philosophy, and the Princeton Theologians, 1812-1860" (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1990), 244.
13 Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), xvi.
14 George Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 48, 233.
15 Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 9.
16 S. A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 50-1.
17 Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians, 115, 63.
18 Wacker, Augustus H. Strong, 27.
19 Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense, 114.
20 Ibid., 108.
21 Marsden, "The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia," 226.
22 Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 7.
23 Ibid., 3.
24 Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians, 121.
25 Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 141.
26 An evidentialist apologetic is positive or constructive rather than defensive, for it seeks to constrain belief by establishing the truthfulness and trustworthiness of the facts with which systematic theology is concerned. This will seem like an outrageous enterprise unless one remembers that many evidentialists - e.g., the Princetonians - distinguish between "historical," or, "speculative" faith, and "spiritual," or, "saving" faith. At least for the Princetonians, attempting to constrain belief meant attempting to constrain "speculative" faith rather than "saving" faith, for not only did they recognize that only the Holy Spirit can constrain "saving" faith, but they were also aware of the fact that there can be no "saving" faith without first having "speculative" faith. On the difference between a merely "speculative" and a "spiritual" understanding of the gospel, see the forthcoming discussion entitled, "The 'Intellectualism' of Old Princeton: The Epistemological Context." On the distinction between an "apology," which is defensive, and "apologetics," which is positive and constructive, cf. B. B. Warfield, "Apologetics," Studies in Theology, vol. 9, The Works of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 3-4.
27 Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 131.
28 Mark Noll, The Princeton Theology, 1812-1921 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 34, 35.
29 Noll, "The Princeton Theology," 21. Elsewhere Noll, The Princeton Theology, 1812-1921, 62, correctly notes that "[M]any of the supposed distinctives of the Princeton Theology were simply the common intellectual affirmations of the day."
30 Marsden, "Scotland and Philadelphia," 9.
31 I say, "they suppose" because some scholars insist that there is nothing in Scottish Common Sense Realism that is inherently incompatible with the assumptions of Reformed orthodoxy. See, for example, Kim Riddlebarger, "The Lion of Princeton: Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield on Apologetics, Theological Method and Polemics" (Ph.D. Fuller Theological Seminary, 1997); Paul Helm, "Thomas Reid, Common Sense, and Calvinism," in Rationality in the Calvinian Tradition, ed. Hendrik Hart, Johan Van Der Hoeven, and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Lanham: University Press of America, 1983), 71-89.
32 Ahlstrom, "The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology," 266, 268. Ahlstrom argues that "the humanistic orientation of the Hutcheson-Reid tradition" is the necessary consequence of the loss of "the fervent theocentricity of Calvin." Cf. Marsden, "Scotland and Philadelphia," 10.
33 Rogers and McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 290.
34 Marsden, "The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia," 256-7.
35 George Marsden, "J. Gresham Machen, History, and truth," Westminster Theological Journal 42 (1979-1980): 169.
36 The dispute between evidentialists and presuppositionalists is a dispute within the Reformed camp centering largely on the following question: Do regenerate and unregenerate human beings know "essentially alike?" Whereas evidentialists argue that they do and that the chains of apologetical reasoning should therefore begin with an appeal to the mind rather than with an appeal to special revelation and faith, presuppositionalists argue that they do not simply because there is "an antithesis between Christian thought, the first principles of which recognize God's sovereignty over all creation, and non-Christian thought which [is] predicated on human autonomy." George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 115; see also idem, "The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia," 253. Because they are convinced that Christians think differently than non-Christians, presuppositionalists insist that Christians should do apologetics not by piling up evidences in the vain attempt to constrain belief. Rather, they should do apologetics by arguing at the level of presuppositions and worldviews. That is, they must convince the unregenerate that their worldview is absurd, and that the facts of human experience will ultimately make sense only with a Christian worldview. See, for example, Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1955).
37 Terry Chrisope, "The Bible and Historical Scholarship in the Early Life and Thought of J. Gresham Machen, 1881-1915" (Ph.D. Kansas State University, 1988), 98.
38 For example, John Gerstner, "The Contributions of Hodge, Warfield, and Machen to the Doctrine of Inspiration," in Challenges to Inerrancy, ed. Gordon Lewis and Bruce Demarest (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), 352. On how Old Princeton embraced induction yet rejected the "philosophy of science consistent with the secular scientific culture of its time," see Donald Fuller and Richard Gardiner, "Reformed Theology at Princeton and Amsterdam in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Reappraisal," Presbyterion 21, 2 (1995): 89-117.
39 Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed; and Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981).
40 Cf. Sandeen, "The Princeton Theology," 310; idem, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 119. See also R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley, Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984); Jonathan A. Gerstner, "Reason as Starting Point: The Rationality of Classical Apologetics," Modern Reformation 7, 1 (January/February 1998): 17-20.
41 Edward Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 172.
42 Ibid., 173.
43 Ibid., 3.
44 Ibid., 32.
45 Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson, foreword Karl Barth (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1950), 33.
46 Sproul, Classical Apologetics, 299.
47 Ibid., 243.
48 Jonathan Edwards, "A Divine and Supernatural Light," in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1992 [1834]), 2:12ff.
49 Jonathan Edwards, "Christian Knowledge," in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:158.
50 Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology, 111.
51 Ibid., 183.
52 Edwards, "A Divine and Supernatural Light," 17-8.
53 Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology, 25-6. The distinction between a merely speculative and a spiritual understanding of the gospel is based upon an understanding of Christian anthropology that insists that the soul is comprised of two rather than three "faculties" or "powers": the understanding, which takes precedence in all rational activity, and the will, which is broadly defined to include the emotions and volitions. While the will is a power of the mind, it is not a self-determining power, but rather a power that is necessarily or certainly determined by the motives of the mind. For an excellent analysis of the understanding of free agency that flows from this anthropology, see Paul Ramsey's introductory essay to Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), especially pages 38-40. For an excellent discussion of how the "faculties" or "powers" of understanding and will are related to each other, and for a particularly relevant discussion of "Augustinian voluntarism," see Norman Fiering, "Will and Intellect in the New England Mind," The William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 515-58, especially 529ff.
54 Edwards, "Christian Knowledge," 158. This statement gives some indication as to why many are convinced that Edwards was an evidentialist rather than a presuppositionalist. See, for example, Sproul, Classical Apologetics, 185, 297-8. Like Edwards, "Christian Knowledge," 158, evidentialists insist that "It is impossible that any one should see the truth or excellency of any doctrine of the gospel, who knows not what the doctrine is. A man cannot see the wonderful excellency and love of Christ in doing such and such things for sinners, unless his understanding be first informed how these things were done." Since evidentialists concur with Edwards that the fallen sinner "cannot have a taste of the sweetness and excellency of divine truth, unless he first have a notion that there is such a thing," and since they recognize with Edwards that the Spirit moves beyond though not against reason, evidentialists like Warfield, "Apologetics," Studies in Theology, 4, conclude that the primary function of the apologist involves satisfying "the fundamental needs of the human spirit. If it is incumbent upon the believer to be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is impossible for him to be a believer without a reason for the faith that is in him; and it is the task of the apologist to bring this reason clearly out in his consciousness, and make its validity plain."
55 On this attempt, see, for example, Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 9, 34; Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science, 33.
56 For an excellent analysis of the difference between revival and revivalism, see Iain H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750-1858 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994). On the decline and fall of Calvinism in the American Church, see Glenn Hewitt, Regeneration and Morality: A Study of Charles Finney, Charles Hodge, John Nevin, and Horace Bushnell, vol. 7, Chicago Studies in the History of American Religion, ed. Jerald Brauer and Martin Marty (New York: Carlson, 1991), 14; James Turner, Without God Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); William McLoughlin, "Introduction," in The American Evangelicals, 1800-1900, ed. William McLoughlin (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 1-27.
57 J. Gresham Machen, The Christian View of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1937; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 236. On the Christian anthropology that underlies this understanding of free agency, see note 53 above.
58 Mark Noll, "Jonathan Edwards and Nineteenth-Century Theology," in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, ed. Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 268.
59 David Wells, "Charles Hodge," in The Princeton Theology, 43; Mark Noll, "New Haven Theology," in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 763.
60 Joseph Haroutunian, Piety Versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York: Holt, 1932), 281. Haroutunian posits that Calvinism fell from its position of preeminence in the American Church because the Common Sense or Enlightenment humanism practically manifest in the rising tide of Evangelical revivalism subverted the theocentric piety of many in the Reformed camp shortly after the death of Jonathan Edwards. Recent revisionist scholarship has challenged this argument in two ways. First, revisionist scholars have discovered a diversity of theological opinion within the New England camp itself. As William Breitenbach notes, "Piety and Moralism: Edwards and the New Divinity," in Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, 178, "This discovery of diversity makes older assumptions about the inevitable organic evolution of a universally accepted Covenant theology into Arminian moralism seem too simplistic." Second, revisionist scholars have recognized that piety and moralism are not necessarily incompatible in Reformed thought. Historians have recognized, Breitenbach observes, 179, "that Reformed theology, even in its pristine formulations, did not set piety against moralism." For other examples of revisionist scholarship, see idem, "The Consistent Calvinism of the New Divinity Movement," The William and Mary Quarterly 41 (April 1984): 241-64; Joseph Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1981); Allen Guelzo, "Jonathan Edwards and the New Divinity, 1758-1858," in Pressing Towards the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, ed. Charles Dennison and Richard Gamble (Philadelphia: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986), 147-67. In response to this revisionist scholarship I would argue that although Haroutunian's critique may suffer from a lack of nuance, it nevertheless is compelling because it accurately describes - albeit in general terms - the impact that the optimism of the Scottish Philosophy had on evangelical theology in general and Reformed theology in particular in the nineteenth century.
61 Charles Hodge, "Remarks on the Princeton Review," The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 23 (1851): 309. (Hereafter the Biblical Repertory will be cited as BRPR.) I say "increasingly" simply to acknowledge that the early advocates of the New Divinity did not "sell Edwards and New England down the Connecticut River" like their New Haven descendants did. Guelzo, "Jonathan Edwards and the New Divinity," 148.
62 Hodge, "Remarks on the Princeton Review," 309. On the difference between the starting points of Princeton and New England, and on the implications of these starting points for the historiography of the nineteenth century, see Wells, "Charles Hodge," 44ff.
63 Rogers and McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 245.
64 On the faculty psychology see, for example, Lefferts Loetscher, Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism: Archibald Alexander and the Founding of Princeton Theological Seminary (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 168; Fiering, "Will and Intellect in the New England Mind," 515-58.
65 William Masselink, "Professor J. Gresham Machen: His Life and Defense of the Bible" (Th.D. Free University of Amsterdam, 1938), 153-5; see also Rogers and McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, 290.
66 On the revisionism occasioned by the rise of evangelical revivalism, cf. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind; Earl Pope, New England Calvinism and the Disruption of the Presbyterian Church (New York: Garland, 1987); H. Shelton Smith, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin: A Study in American Theology Since 1750 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955); Maurice Armstrong, Lefferts Loetscher, and Charles Anderson, The Presbyterian Experience: Sources of American Presbyterian History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956).
67 Ahlstrom, "The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology," 268.
68 Lefferts Loetscher, The Broadening Church: A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church Since 1869 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 70.
69 Archibald Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1989 [1844]), xviii.
70 Ibid., 17, 62.
71 Ibid., 66, 63. On external evidence, cf. Archibald Alexander, Evidences of the Authenticity, Inspiration, and Canonical Authority of the Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1836), chapters 6-12.
72 Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience, 63, 66.
73 Archibald Alexander, "Practical View of Regeneration," Biblical and Theological Review 8, 4 (1836), quoted in Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians, 18.
74 Loetscher, Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism, 168. Loetscher insists that although Alexander rejected "the old 'faculty psychology,'" he practically reinstated it by holding to the primacy of the intellect in faith. Loetscher goes on to say that "In his youthful sermons [Alexander] had at times reflected the fine blending of 'affections' and intellect seen in Jonathan Edwards's 'Treatise on Religious Affections,' but in more mature life he seems to have kept intellectual functions quite separate from the 'affections', a pattern more obviously suited to mathematics and to natural science than to religion or to relations between persons divine or human." In response to Loetscher I would argue that Alexander's endorsement of the speculative/spiritual distinction and his blending of the affections and intellect in Thoughts on Religious Experience - a mature work - undercut this assertion.
75 Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience, 61ff.
76 Ibid., 64.
77 Alexander, quoted in Loetscher, Facing the Enlightenment and Pietism, 186-7.
78 Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience, 63.
79 Alexander, Evidences, 189.
80 Alexander, "Practical View of Regeneration," quoted in Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians, 18-9.
81 Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience, 64-5. See Alexander's sympathetic treatment of Edwards's views on regeneration and conversion, 67-72.
82 On how the soul acts in all of its functions as a single "unit," cf. Charles Hodge, "The Nature of Man," BRPR 37 (January 1865): 111; Charles Hodge, "Free Agency," BRPR 29 (January 1857): 115; Charles Hodge, "My Son, Give Me Thy Heart," in Conference Papers (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879), 131; Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1872-1873; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 2:255.
83 Charles Hodge, "The Inability of Sinners," in Theological Essays: Reprinted from the Princeton Review (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 270.
84 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:261.
85 Charles Hodge, The Way of Life (Philadelphia: American Sunday School Union, 1841; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1978), 12. Emphasis added.
86 Hodge, "The Inability of Sinners," 269. See Hodge, The Way of Life, 11-20, for a discussion of the internal/moral evidence for the divine origin of the Scriptures.
87 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:51.
88 Hodge, The Way of Life, 15. Cf. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:234; Hodge, "The Inability of Sinners," 269-71; Charles Hodge, "The Necessity of the Spirit's Teaching in order to the Right Understanding of the Scriptures," in Conference Papers, 75-7.
89 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:261.
90 Charles Hodge, "Regeneration and the Manner of its Occurrence," BRPR 2 (1830): 280; cf. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:188.
91 Hodge, The Way of Life, 11.
92 Charles Hodge, "Evidences of Regeneration," in Conference Papers, 137-8.
93 Charles Hodge, "Regeneration," in Conference Papers, 136.
94 Charles Hodge, "The First and Second Adam," BRPR 32 (April 1860): 341.
95 Hodge, "Regeneration and the Manner of its Occurrence," 285.
96 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:36. For concise summaries of Hodge's views on regeneration, cf. ibid., 2:69-70; Hodge, "Regeneration," in Conference Papers, 136-8. We must note that for Hodge, "regeneration is not effected by mere moral suasion; that there is something more than the simple presentation of truth and urging of motives. The idea of Calvinists uniformly was, that the truth, however clearly presented or forcibly urged, would never produce its full effect without a special influence of the Holy Spirit." Hodge, "Regeneration and the Manner of its Occurrence," 261. On the relationship between regeneration and the embracing of truth by the soul, cf. 257.
97 Ibid., 267. See also Hodge's sympathetic treatment of Edwards's understanding of the relationship between regeneration and the spiritual sense that fosters holy acts, 268-9.
98 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:69.
99 Ibid., 2:71.
100 Ibid., 2:34; cf. Hodge, "Regeneration and the Manner of its Occurrence," 295; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:263; Hewitt, Regeneration and Morality, 57. On the delight that determines the soul to embrace the gospel, cf. Charles Hodge, "Delighting in the Law of God," in Conference Papers, 249-50; Charles Hodge, "Living by Faith," in Conference Papers, 152.
101 Livingstone, "The Princeton Apologetic," 186.
102 Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology, 3.
103 Chrisope, "The Bible and Historical Scholarship in the Early life and Thought of J. Gresham Machen," 99.
104 I would like to thank Professors Patrick Carey and Wynn Kenyon for their valuable comments on significant portions of this essay. For an assessment of how the issues addressed in this essay are related to the ongoing debate in the Reformed camp over apologetical method, see Paul Kjoss Helseth, "The Apologetical Tradition of the OPC: A Reconsideration," Westminster Theological Journal 60, 1 (Spring 1998): 109-29. A more comprehensive version of my WTJ essay can be found in Premise, the on-line journal of the Center for the Advancement of Paleo Orthodoxy. See Paul Kjoss Helseth, "J. Gresham Machen and 'True Science': Machen's Apologetical Continuity with Old Princeton's Right Use of Reason," Premise 5, 1 (1998): 3. URL http://capo.org/premise/98/FEB/p980203.html. For an extensive analysis of how "right reason" is related to the offensive mission of the Christian apologist, see Paul Kjoss Helseth, "B. B. Warfield's Apologetical Appeal to 'Right Reason': Evidence of a 'Rather Bald Rationalism'?" The Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 16, 2 (Autumn 1998): 156-77. My SBET essay is the revised edition of Paul Kjoss Helseth, "B. B. Warfield and the Princeton Apologetic: The Appeal to 'Right Reason,'" Premise 4, 4 (1997): 5. URL http://capo.org/premise/97/Dec/p971205.html. Finally, for an analysis of how "right reason" is related to the task of Christian scholarship, see Paul Kjoss Helseth, "B. B. Warfield on the Authority of Scripture and the Posture of Christian Scholarship," Premise 6, 1 (1999): 6. URL http://capo.org/premise/99/jan/p990106.html.